1,2,3, Red Light

Their second album, with one of their most lasting songs – the title cut, of course, a pop gem that Welsh indie gang Pooh Sticks cottoned onto, covering it in an amphetamine rush as part of their 1988 singles box set – and a bunch of other chips off the same old block. Producer-svengalis Kasenetz and Katz certainly knew how to milk a thing for all it was worth, but when the source material’s this joyously good, it doesn’t really matter: indeed, the churn of the bubblegum machine is what gives these albums their aesthetic backbone. It might take a leap to think of it as conceptual art, but the intertextuality of the album is one of its charms – “1, 2, 3 Red Light” reappears as a game in “The Song Song” (how meta can you get), and moments later “Yummy Yummy Yummy” gets name-checked; a few songs later, “9, 10, Let’s Do It Again” stumbles into view, but only after a charmingly direct cover of Dylan’s song for Manfred Mann, “The Mighty Quinn.”