This Week's Forgotten Gem of the '80s - Platinum Blonde's "Somebody Somewhere"

Canadian band Platinum Blonde may have looked as much like Poison as Howard Jones, but the group spent much of its understated '80s career cavorting in the expansive but sparsely populated musical territory directly between glam-inspired pop metal and New Romantic-styled, keyboard-heavy pop/rock. If for no other reason than the band's willingness to draw equally from early alternative rock and the guitar-based foundations of arena rock, Platinum Blonde probably should have received far more attention and support in the States than ever surfaced.

This particular track, a latter-day effort from 1986 that became the group's only entry on the Billboard Hot 100, actually sounds far more like Echo & the Bunnymen than Europe, which impresses me as a bold, even defiant move considering how easily it would have been for Platinum Blonde to parlay its flashy look into a pure pop metal overhaul. After all, even a hardcore punk if similarly eclectic, keyboard-favoring band like TSOL eventually took a stab at a form of commercial hard rock dangerously close to hair metal during the late-'80s saturation of that style. So score one for a band that refused to allow the fumes of all its hair spray to squelch its sense of creative daring.