HANOI ROCKS
Hanoi Rocks was a Finnish rock band formed in 1979. They were the first Finnish band to chart in the UK, and they were also popular in Japan. Although musically closer to traditional rock n’ roll and punk, the band have been cited as a major influence in the glam metal genre for bands such as Guns N’ Roses, Skid Row and Poison. According to Finnish radio and TV personality Jone Nikula, who was the band’s tour manager in the 2000s, Hanoi Rocks’s albums have sold between 780,000 and 1,000,000 copies around the world, but mostly in Scandinavia and Japan. (More from Wikipedia)
The name “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” has a long history in music and elsewhere. According to Wikipedia, there have been six previous uses of the phrase as a song or album name by everyone from David Cassidy to Smokie to Hanoi Rocks, beginning with a 1930’s standard called “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” – in all, there are 14 items listed on the phrase’s “disambiguation” page. Green Day created a combined rock video for “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” and “Holiday”; as mentioned in Wikipedia: “MTV’s Green Day Makes a Video described ‘Holiday’ as a party, and ‘Boulevard of Broken Dreams’ as the subsequent hangover.”
(June 2017)
