I recently watched the oddly nostalgic gross-out comedy Hot Tub Time Machine. The film stars John Cusack (and Clark Duke, Rob Corddry, Craig Robinson, Lizzie Caplan, Chevy Chase) as he and his old pals travel back in time to the late 1980s via a ski resort hot tub. Yup. There they are their same old selves, trapped in their ’80s bodies, reliving a trip they took when life was still full of promise and not made terrible life choices. Antics ensue, as expected.
Also as you might expect, the film employs an array of classic and cliched period hits of the 1980s: the hair, the legwarmers, the jackets, the big hair. But also the music. A lot of it was expected, but buried beneath some of that was this song:
The song is “Save It For Later,” by a band called The Beat, or here in the U.S. were better known as The English Beat. I had never heard of them, nor heard this song. But I sorta fell in love with that very typically British sound: the brightly strummed guitars, the XTC-esque singing, the great chorus. So yeah, who knew that a weird buddy comedy would be a place to discover an ’80s band I probably should’ve known about. Go figure.