I'm celebrating, and I feel it now

Thursday music corner: Teenage sensations the Screaming Meemees burst forth from the vibrant Auckland music scene to score New Zealand’s first chart-topping indie single. The Four Rosmini College students on Auckland’s North Shore achieved considerable early success with punk-pop single releases, and toured with label-mates Blam Blam Blam and the Newmatics. Despite little airplay on notoriously conservative New Zealand commercial radio, the band scored a number one single in August 1981 with See Me Go, which was the first New Zealand song to go straight into the charts in the top position. Follow-up single Sunday Boys also reached number 11 later in the same year. 

The frenetic Stars In My Eyes was the band’s final single, reaching number 18 in the New Zealand charts in February 1983. Despite headlining the 1983 Sweetwaters music festival, the band split and their final performances together occurred in August 1983. At the time, music magazine Rip It Up reported, perhaps facetiously, that guitarist Michael O’Neill had left the band ‘after work on the Stars In My Eyes video clashed with watching [the blockbuster James Clavell Japanese mini-series] Shogun on television’. O’Neill went on to form the group These Wilding Ways in the late 1980s. For more on the Screaming Meemees, particularly great archive photos, see Audioculture's band profile from 2014.

Screaming Meemees – Stars In My Eyes (1983)