Digging Your Scene: The Best of The Blow Monkeys is a double greatest hits album, released on 4 February 2008 by British pop rock / new wave / funky / Dance band The Blow Monkeys. Led by singer, guitarist, piano and keyboard player Dr. Robert, the group formed in the early 1980s and disbanded in 1990. After that, Dr. Robert went on to pursue a solo career. The Blow Monkeys recently reformed, with the aim of touring and releasing a brand new album.
The 36 tracks included on this double compilation were originally featured on the band's fifth studio albums, and most of them were also released as singles, the most successful ones including "It Doesn't Have to Be This Way" (which reached Number 5 in the UK Singles Chart in 1987, their highest position ever), and "Digging Your Scene" (climbing to Number 12 in 1986, this song represented their first British, American and worldwide hit, also making it to Number 14 in the U.S. Billboard Hot 100, Number 7 in the U.S. Hot Dance Club Play, and Number 25 in Germany).
Another Top Ten track was the smash hit "Wait", a duet which got to Number 7, and was only credited to the leader Dr. Robert, as Robert Howard (his real name), and Chicago house diva Kym Mazelle, though it was actually played by the whole group and featured on their fourth studio album Whoops! There Goes the Neighbourhood.
Five more duets are contained in the 2008 double greatest hits album, including the politically censored "Celebrate (The Day After You)", sung with Curtis Mayfield (it came out at the time of 1987 re-election, when then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was being attacked by many British musical acts, including The Blow Monkeys), "Be Not Afraid", a heartfelt interpretation of Robert with Arabian singer Cheb Khaled (the description of how this song actually came into being is one of the few things Howard wrote in the booklet to a less recent double compilation), "Choice?", a house stomper played by the band with young vocalist Sylvia Tella (one of their last hits, before splitting up in the early 1990s), who also co-performed "Slaves No More", a less successful single which also features here, and, last but not least, "Sweet Murder", one of the band's earlier interpretations, realized with toaster Eek-A-Mouse (never released as a single, this popular album track was contained in their second long playing work, namely Animal Magic, which also included their first hit "Digging Your Scene").
This greatest hits collection comprises many other stand-out tracks which were never taken out their respective albums, among which the fifth LP's title track "Springtime for the World", the instrumental medley "Vibe Alive/Reflections '89", "Squaresville", and many more.
Famous quotes containing the words digging, the, blow and/or monkeys:
“You know, many people believe that we archaeologists are just a collection of old fogies digging around in the ruins after old dried up skulls and bones.”
—Griffin Jay, and Harold Young. Stephen Banning (Dick Foran)
“When they are not at war they do a little hunting, but spend most of their time in idleness, sleeping and eating. The strongest and most warlike do nothing. They vegetate, while the care of hearth and home and fields is left to the women, the old and the weak. Strange inconsistency of temperament, which makes the same men lovers of sloth and haters of tranquility.”
—Tacitus (c. 55–c. 120)
“The sea’s vast depths lie open to the fish;
Wherever the breezes blow the bird may fly;
So to the brave man every land’s a home.”
—Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso)
“The way in which men cling to old institutions after the life has departed out of them, and out of themselves, reminds me of those monkeys which cling by their tails—aye, whose tails contract about the limbs, even the dead limbs, of the forest, and they hang suspended beyond the hunter’s reach long after they are dead. It is of no use to argue with such men. They have not an apprehensive intellect, but merely, as it were a prehensile tail.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)