HANSON: Middle Of Nowhere

 

(#574: 21 June 1997, 1 week)

 

Track listing: Thinking Of You/MMMBop/Weird/Speechless/Where's The Love/Yearbook/Look At You/Lucy/I Will Come To You/A Minute Without You/Madeline/With You In Your Dreams/Man From Milwaukee

 

(Author's Note: "Man From Milwaukee" appears on CD editions only)

 

I can’t improve on the description Rob Sheffield – or, more precisely, his friend Stephanie - gives of Hanson in Love Is A Mix Tape, namely “Tony DeFranco for an Ani DiFranco world,” so I will content myself by saying that “MMMBop” was the smartest junior UK number one single since “Pass The Dutchie.” Unlike future British boy bands whom I could but won't (yet) mention, Hanson did what they said on their self-reliant label; they wrote their own songs, played their own instruments, were their own young men. But “MMMBop” also owes its success to the skilful and gleeful marshalling of its producers’ resources; Stephen Lironi brings the same slightly aggressive edge to its rhythmic ambling as he had done to Black Grape, while mixers the Dust Brothers make the beats and scratches tickle each other, and the group themselves, like the feathers of a purple pillow fight on a hot August morning.

“MMMBop” is also one of the first non-British number ones to take the Spice Girls on board as a direct philosophical influence; like “Wannabe,” the song is about the importance of holding on to proper and permanent relationships from the word go and not forsaking them for transient overnight stops. If it seems unusual for a boy band to be singing on their first hit about growing old and losing one’s hair, then maybe it was overdue for someone to do so – “So hold on to the ones who really care/In the end they’ll be the only ones there.” True enough. And there isn’t the need to underline the irony of “you turn your back and they’re gone so fast” coinciding with “MMMBop” being (along with Missy Elliott’s “The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly)”) the first pop song which Sheffield couldn’t share with his late wife, nor to think that the then seven-year-old Taylor Swift would have had that song subliminally in her mind when she came to write and record "22," with its very similar musical structure and lyrical subject matter, fifteen years later.

But musically “MMMBop” is the antithesis of mournful; Taylor Hanson's firestorming lead vocal - to a point; his voice was breaking at the time, so the producers had to do a little sneaky varispeeding to make sure that high note stayed hit - makes Michael Jackson seem twenty billion times more alive than on that blooded dancefloor, while Lironi and the Dust men make the song sparkle and crack open into the clearest blue in anyone’s air, also proving that live scratching in 1997 was not a late stage backwards glance but a very welcome return to NOW. Fantastic, danceable and charming, without any cynicism, “MMMBop” provided yet further evidence that bubblegum, let alone New Pop, was still breathing and vibrantly alive; dancing in its comic book chimes of freedom reminds me of why bubblegum and free jazz overlap in my mind, expressing as they do in their own ways exhilaration, liberation and spelling out LIFE in huge, pink capital letters across aquamarine skies of wonder and promise.

 

And that's just the single. Hanson have been unfairly and inaccurately labelled as one-hit wonders (or even a one-song wonder) and reviews of their third and most successful album - their first on a major; the previous two had come out independently - offered either condescending well-done pat-on-the-head reviews or scathing dismissals of their not being a "proper" junior pop group (whatever that means). Yes, they needed help from the grown-up pros to give their songs - which were entirely, at root, the work of the three teenage Hanson brothers - a leg-up. Sorry to disappoint purists, but that is the history of pop music since forever, and the fact that writers of the calibre of Barry Mann, Cynthia Weil, Desmond Child and Ellen Shipley were attracted to Hanson's work should stand as a compliment.

 

Indeed, Desmond Child has said how deeply he empathises with the song "Weird" - a somewhat forlorn ballad powered by the clanking beat of what sounds like the rusting legs of a robot - in that he himself grew up as a gay Latino, hence felt rejected and ostracised. In the context of Middle Of Nowhere it is probably the most thought-provoking and quietly disturbing of these songs, and for what it does works more subtly, and therefore better, than more garlanded things like Radiohead's "Creep," as well as giving a clear pointer to the band's imminent "maturity."

 

Middle Of Nowhere hasn't been left with a great reputation, which is unfair, because it is an absolutely smashing pop album, the kind that British boy bands of the time seem to have been too scared or reserved to make (although it must surely have been a subsequent influence in respect of McFly, Busted and One Direction). It hooks you straightaway from the rather glorious rush of "Thinking Of You" - the banjo-mimicking piano towards song's end reminds you that the Hansons are from Tulsa, Oklahoma - through wonderful shiny songs such as "Speechless" (written with Lironi's help, which is why it sounds a bit like something Quad90 could do) and the furious, rash-scratching rush of "Where's The Love," as powerful as any "rock" band of the period.

 

"Look At You" is really quite an astonishing performance; I don't know about a Michael Jackson influence, either at the "ABC" or Blood On The Dance Floor level, but this is paranoid angst straight out of Soundgarden - and Taylor's voice does share many characteristics with that of Eddie Vedder. This is thunderous rock which should shame any adults, "Look At You" ends with ecstatic yapping and shrieking, as if to say, can't we go any further, e.g. over the edge of the world (what do you mean, it's round)?

 

"Lucy" is a rather sweet Beatles derivé ("Here, There And Everywhere" via Lennon's "Woman") where Zac gets his turn in the vocal spotlight. Of the ballads, "Yearbook," done with Shipley's assistance, is a standard what-became-of-Johnny mystery, and although the song is set at Scooby-Doo mystery levels, Taylor's vocal, especially towards the end, is really hurting - he is bursting to find out what became of the boy, whether or not he's still alive. As with Cliff Richard's "Carrie," it remains a mystery, and the band seem to be in favour of keeping it that way.

 

Meanwhile, the Mann/Weill hook-up "I Will Come To You" is a terrific hand-waving/candle-lighting singalong ballad, and you do realise that this record, as a whole, is what we so desperately wanted Gary Barlow to come up with - some adventure, some humour and above all some actual "anthems" (but we'll have to wait for young Robbie - he played the long game with his first album and it took its time to reach the top, but get there it eventually did; see entry #586 - before we reach any of those qualities here). This was the big post-Take That comeback many had been anticipating - but disappointed Barlow followers opted to follow angels instead. Splendid pop and it should have given Hanson a second number one single.

 

Otherwise it's terrific power pop all the way concerning matters teenage; there's something very endearing about "A Minute Without You"'s reliance on that quaint pre-internet contraption, the telephone. "Madeline" is also tremendously catchy, and "With You In Your Dreams" is a very moving elegy to the boys' late grandmother, all the more affecting because they sing and perform it with honest emotion but steer clear of cloying sentimentality. We will all carry on.

 

That is how most versions of the album end, but the CD leaps through a few blank phantom tracks before alighting upon "Man From Milwaukee," straight-up thrashy guitar indie worthy of Hanson's earlier days (an embryonic demo of "MMMBop," done at about three-quarters of the hit version's speed, is moderately intriguing but primarily of historical interest) with its references to yellow walkie-talkies and cut-ups of garbled speech - "this is like Beck for juniors!" we agreed (and with the Dust Brothers co-producing and David Campbell providing string arrangements here and there, we'd be absolutely right!).

 

Overall Middle Of Nowhere is a really terrific pop album - if it had been the Fountains Of Wayne or Weezer you'd all be calling it a classic - full of the vim and vigour pitifully absent from most of its British late nineties equivalents (at least the male ones - the Spice Girls were about to encounter some competition). And although Hanson have never rescaled those commercial heights, they have kept going and remain active with an utterly loyal following. Good for them. Oh, and Zac played the drums and Isaac the guitar. And they still do.

WU-TANG CLAN: Wu-Tang Forever

 

(#573: 14 June 1997, 1 week)

 

Track listing: Wu-Revolution/Reunited/For Heavens Sake/Cash Still Rules-Scary Moves (Still Don't Nothing Move But The Money)/Visionz/As High As Wu-Tang Get/Severe Punishment/Older Gods/Maria/A Better Tomorrow/It's Yourz/Intro/Triumph/Impossible/Little Ghetto Boys/Deadly Melody/The City/The Projects/Bells Of War/The M.G.M./Dog Shit/Duck Seazon/Hellz Wind Staff/Heaterz/Black Shampoo/Second Coming/The Closing

 

"Rappers have been telling us for decades that they are not on the side of good guys and now we surprised at Snoop and Nelly. They've been inching towards Trump for so long that if you namecheck for Trump references in rap songs it will take you the whole weekend. From I was 15 I've had to come to terms with the fact that as much as I love hiphop, hiphop was never going to love me back. That's a long time to be in an abusive relationship, yo."

(Marlon James, Facebook, 1 February 2025)

 

"The systems we oppose are systems of oppression, and thus inherently systems of cowardice. They work best in the dark, their essence tucked away and as unexamined as the great American pastime was once to me. But then a writer told me a story and I saw something essential and terrible about the world. All our conversations of technique, of rhythm and metaphor, ultimately come down to this - to the stories we tell, to the need to haunt, which is to say to make people feel all that is now at stake."

(Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message. New York: One World, 2024. Part I: "Journalism Is Not A Luxury," pp 19-20)

 

The two most important tracks to listen to on Wu-Tang Forever are its first and last. "Wu-Revolution" features only two mentors of the Clan, Poppa Wu and Uncle Pete, and no members of the Clan itself, and as with the opening minutes of The Manchurian Candidate and Vertigo, if you miss it you might as well not bother with the rest. The two gentlemen outline in detail the moral mission behind the Clan, and may well be doing so to the collective itself. "I can't even see no more," Poppa Wu gasps at the beginning, "I'm calling my Black woman a bitch." And so, over howling Mandela, King and Malcolm namechecks, they explain that "Heaven and Hell exist within/Heaven is what you make it and Hell is what you go through." Candi "Blue Raspberry" Lindsey's backing vocals move the music into bitonality as they tell their audience that the Biblical notion of God is a rich White lie, designed to keep the "lesser" (a.k.a. the real rulers of the Earth) embedded in the mud. At the same time they counsel strongly that those qualities erroneously valued by too many are helping to bury the valuers - "Leave all the cigarettes and guns, the alcohol and everything," "To all you fake-ass n****s who think you gonna survive out here without your Black woman, you're wrong - they have attraction powers on this planet."

 

The final track is a speech by Raekwon in which he states "Cause don't think we doing this just for anybody. We doing this for certain n****s, kid. Certain people, rather...certain, certain fans, certain supporters, certain delegators...word." They may even have done this for themselves, but do not think that this is music for "everybody," least of all wan, ageing liberal observers like me - and that applies to the 61-year-old me now as strongly and unambiguously as it did to the 33-year-old me who bought the second Wu-Tang Clan album from Harrods on the Monday of its release.

 

The triumph of Forever had evidently been long-awaited. Enter The Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) may have been an album that changed everything in hip hop - or, probably more accurately, changed it all back - but Britain, or at least the Britain most loudly trumpeted by the media, was largely bemused by it. Arriving here some six months after its American release, good words were said about it in Melody Maker - as ever, it was down to the late Neil Kulkarni to explain exactly why Enter The Wu-Tang was such a revolutionary record - but it was conspicuously absent from the NME's 1994 end-of-year albums list in favour of such Ian Indie-placating cultural giants as These Animal Men, Senser and Dodgy (although N****mortis by Gravediggaz, in part produced by RZA, did make an appearance at #22). The album appeared in our charts for a fortnight, peaking at a hesitant #83 (although it was unlikely ever to be stocked in Woolworths).

 

Was Ian Indie afraid because he found the slums of Staten Island - Park Hill, Grymes Hill, Clifton, Rosebank - less relatable than, say, Burnage? What the Wu-Tang were not, for better or worse (I'm ambiguous, as were, in the end, themselves), were rubbed-down jazz or roughed-up R&B. Enter The Wu-Tang was neither Midnite Marauders (my most played and beloved album of the nineties, but I'm the last person who should be asked about this type of thing) nor The Chronic. As Kulkarni said, it set rap's stopwatch back to zero, presented the most coherent collective in hip hop since Public Enemy and, thanks to RZA, reshaped rap's building blocks in ways that had not been dreamed of, let alone attempted, before.

 

Some argue that the nine main Clan rappers knew each other from childhood; others say that they were recruited from various oppositional Staten Island (a.k.a. for their own sakes Shaolin) gangs, then made to get along and look how good and strong you all are together (RZA said that). Nevertheless, following Enter The Wu-Tang's initial impact, all of the Clan went on to make names for themselves as individual rappers, and so there followed a swarm of other album releases - Method Man's Tical, Ghostface Killah's Fishscale, Genius/GZA's Liquid Swords (in its way as encyclopaedically inclusive and stylish in delivery as Sonny Rollins), most profoundly Raekwon's Only Built 4 Cuban Linx and, most played in this house and never guiltily so, Ol' Dirty Bastard's Return To The 36 Chambers: The Dirty Nation, an uproarious slapstick hospital nightmare of a record.

 

Their reputation suitably built up, expectations of Forever became immense and perhaps unrealistic. There was the argument that they only got together again for a second album because they needed the money, but all parties involved have angrily denied that - the gradual build-up had been deliberate, and wouldn't you just love to hear them all at once, if not quite as they had been in 1993, nine men stood practically shoulder to shoulder in a tiny studio, awaiting their verses.

Indeed RZA and the Clan had a lot more money and resources to expand the ideas initiated on Enter. What degree of motivation remained was another question. Since Forever seemed to have been taking, well, forever to put together, RZA elected to relocate the crew to Los Angeles, away from easy temptations and diversions, and well over half of the album's songs were partially or wholly recorded there. Was G-funk too tempting a spectacle?...hence the moves away from obvious samples (other than Saturday afternoon television martial arts movie reruns).

 

In addition, RZA, the closest thing to a Sun Ra authority in this particular Arkestra, felt that his own reputation and power were slowly eroding or being eroded by the increased profiles of the other Clan members. He might have felt tired, and farmed some of Forever's productions out to Inspectah Deck and protégés 4th Disciples and True Master. Interviewed by the British writer Angus Batey in 2004, he admitted that, for him, the quality of the Clan's music declined the more "democracy" superseded his own "dictatorship" (which, in the early days, apparently also involved either giving or receiving "physical threats"). Now it was as if Parker, Davis, Coltrane, Rollins, Dolphy, Shepp, Sanders, Ayler and Shorter were all blowing at once.

 

Nonetheless, Forever is for about two-thirds of its self-allotted time an absolutely terrific album - at least, musically. The one-two knockout of "Reunited" and "For Heavens Sake" instantly made most other 1997 music seem arthritic and prosaic. Karen Briggs' violin playing on the former is every much the equal, and in places plainly exceeds, that of Scarlet Rivera on Dylan's Desire; the latter plays with timing and tonality in ways which made its contemporaries sound stiflingly conservative. "Cash Still Rules," essentially a rejig of the first album's "C.R.E.A.M.," buries Skeeter Davis' "End Of The World" in its green avalanche.  "A Better Tomorrow," which quite fantastically utilises elements of the titular John Woo film and a piano/harp loop reminiscent of a ribcage being gently reconstructed, preaches strongly against indulgent and destructive ways - whatever you're hearing from people, including some of us, DON'T follow, or the circle of anger and pain will remain unbroken.

 

The lyrical ingenuity and cultural inclusivity gets in everyone from Frankie Avalon through the Sex Pistols to Raphael Saddiq. Note how the first CD concludes with cheers and applause in imminent danger of transfiguring into a "Ghost Town" howling wind of nothingness, before the second CD sweeps away any doubts with the self-explanatory "Triumph," where all nine core Clan members solo, one after each other, and the unassuming Inspectah Deck proves the man of this match ("Ultraviolet shine blind forensics" - who cares what it means; it WORKS!). This is succeeded by the album's most stark and sober cut, "Impossible" in which, after two verses of gnomic polemic, Ghostface Killah pours cold, angry and scared water on the proceedings and narrates the simple but piercing story of watching his shot friend Jamie die. His verse is the record's most profound. The "Little Ghetto Boys" are tormented by the nightmare-induced, speeded-up and electronically-treated ghost of Donny Hathaway ("What you gonna do when you grow up and have to face responsibility?" That could be Forever's central question, to both its listeners and itself).

 

The album then moves through a relatively barren farrow, highlighted only by the crossword puzzle acoustic guitar and violin of "Bells Of War," Raekwon's outraged "...the FUCK?" after attempting to speak to God at the beginning of "The Projects," and the trip hop backdrop to the (again Raekwon-dominant) "Duck Seazon." Oh, and ODB's "Dog Shit" which is either inexcusable or hilarious (it could be both but then he never got to grow up or face responsibility).

 

Because something is needed to counteract the homophobia of "Duck Seazon" and the misogyny of "Maria." It is entirely possible that, like the sad moneyed man of Geordie Greep''s "Holy Holy," these are portraits of personas we really ought not to emulate, and that this is indeed what much of the rest of the album frowns down upon. And yet we have Ghostface Killah's final and fairly direct verse to "Bells Of War." This is what occurs, fellow white liberal fence-sitters, when we fancy adopting a culture like it was a tameable pet, only to find that the culture is never going to be our friend - this is the unexpurgated dirt, and both the Clan and its mentors are fully and palpably aware of it.

 

Still, "Hellz Wind Staff"'s occasionally otiose nature is nicely and swiftly undermined by the martial arts sound-effects and tinfoil rhythms, and the sampled orchestral maximalism helps "Heaterz" churn along agreeably - at least until the concluding dialogue. "Black Shampoo" is a mostly spellbinding post-Barry White sex fantasia borne along by rogue state elements - melodica, eighties 808 conga settings, backwards Fender Rhodes and sideways-sloping strings - which even the silly coda cannot defuse. Finally, "Second Coming" suggests that the Wu-Tang Clan might represent the return of the sons of the true (African) man, although its paraphrasing of "Macarthur Park," set with the defunctioning toy train keyboards and percussion, imply a soul newly drained.

 

Wu-Tang Forever isn't necessarily for you or me. Neither is its predecessor, nor the four collective Wu-Tang albums of variable quality which succeed it. It renders most of what Then Play Long has dealt with so far in 1997...timid. It is supremely knowledgeable and insanely idiotic - yes, it's coming - sometimes at the same time. But it isn't meant for "us" in the way that it's really meant for everybody. Here is a world - you might even call it the world - where its shit and diamonds are in equally plain sight. How "we" assess it doesn't matter. What the certain people for whom the record was meant - people who are on their own side, and take that as you must - intend to make of it is a far more thorough and honest quest. Ta Nehisi-Coates again (ibid.):

 

"...we are plagued by dead language and dead stories that serve people whose aim is nothing short of a dead world...soon enough you will find yourself confronting not just their myths, not just their stories, but your own. This is difficult, if only because so much of our myth-making was done in service of liberation, in doing whatever we could to dig our way out of the pit into which we were cast. And above us stand the very people who did the casting, jeering, tossing soil into our eyes and yelling down at us, 'You're doing it wrong.' But we are not them...and are charged wirh examining the stories we have been told, and how they undergird the politics we have accepted, and then telling new stories ourselves (italics mine)."

Gary BARLOW: Open Road

 

(#572: 7 June 1997, 1 week)

 

Track listing: Love Won't Wait/So Help Me Girl/My Commitment/Hang On In There Baby/Are You Ready Now/Everything I Ever Wanted/I Fall So Deep/Lay Down For Love/Forever Love/Never Know/Open Road/Always

 

(Author's Note 1: The above represents the track listing of the UK edition of Open Road. The American edition altered the order of songs quite drastically, and replaced "Are You Ready Now" and "Always" with a Max Martin song called "Superhero" and a solo live version of "Back For Good."

 

Author's Note 2: This piece was written by Lena and edited by me. It is published under my name for reasons of administrative convenience only - M.C.)

THE GETTING OF WISDOM PART 2:  SAVING THE BEST FOR, OH, THERE'S NO LAST

 

In case you need reminding, dear reader, this is a continuation of my hapless story of being courted, or not courted, or whatever was happening. I can’t relate all of it to you, but, well, yeah….

 

I can’t really remember Christmas of ’96, if anything happened. However my birthday is in the middle of January, and he took me to a place that was such a hit we went there again, both times having the goat's cheese pizza, so good I kept some of mine to take home to my mom, who of course liked it. Did I mention it was *his* birthday as well as mine? And that was about that.

 

Valentine’s Day was…oh dear…I am truly blanking out on what food, if any, was consumed. Afterwards we went into the depths of the Royal York Hotel to see the Glenn Miller Big Band/Orchestra whatever it was, which meant sitting down (no dancing) surrounded by people who were older, staring fixedly at the table with its red shiny confetti of hearts and cherubs. He just looked at me in a way that meant he was enjoying himself, wasn’t I enjoying myself?

 

No gifts, no cards or chocolate or stuffed animals, no pronouncements of any sorts. I still had nothing to go on about anything and felt like I was floating in a kind of limbo. Part of me was relieved, as getting anything from him would be even more awkward, because then I would be even more obliged than I already was. And I was beginning to realize I didn't want to be obliged at all. Maybe he would notice and end it. But no....

 

THERE'S ME, THERE'S ANOTHER ME AND A FUTURE ME TOO

 

Then spring came, and we went out to Oakville, so he could at least see where I grew up (and shop for records - he of course got a Bert Kaempfert one for himself and continued to be amused for my search for Lovelife by Lush* on tape, let alone Oomalama by Eugenius). We ended up at a British shop, full of food for expatriates, and I got some Penguin biscuits as their illustrations were so funny, including one with a penguin looking with some mild interest at a fizzing black bomb…

 

Then, it happened – one Wednesday in late May. Late May is, for whatever reason, a special time for me** and I stayed up to watch a movie, which I hardly ever do. My mom tried to watch it but was tired and fell asleep; I kept right on, sensing that something very important was happening and applied directly to me.  The Double Life of Veronique is not an ordinary movie (I don’t want to sum it up in case you haven’t seen it) but the women at the heart of it I understood immediately. There is this famous scene, of course, but the scene where any semblance of distance between me and the main character collapsed comes later on, when Veronique looks through her photos and sees….

 

I cried and cried. Something was very wrong, and it had to be put right. I did not know the term "bad faith" at this time, but I knew there were two versions of me – one when I was by myself, and one with him. I had to stop things but had no idea how.

 

WHEN FOOD ISN' T THE FOOD OF LOVE, IT'S JUST...FOOD

 

The next day I woke up – or at least it feels as if it was the next day – to hear the news about Jeff Buckley. Next time I was with him – in his car I think, going up from my house to his parents’ house (he lived with them while working on his Ph.D. in History) I started going on about his death and met a wall of….not hostility…but indifference. He showed utterly no interest whatsoever in my distress, no curiosity about Buckley, his music, why I was so upset. I did something I rarely do. I apologized for going on about him. That I remember.

 

The end eventually came at his place. The TV was on, showing the old BBC '80s version of Northanger Abbey which always struck me as being somehow uncomfortable. It was warm, humid, the very beginning of summer. At some point he mentioned making food and then, well... It was how he did it; it was the lack of any sort of idea of ‘making nice food for someone in the hopes that they will like you more’.

 

Frozen ravioli, defrosted I guess; tomato sauce, ditto. A Pyrex glass measuring cup full of tomato sauce defrosted in the microwave. The cup then put on the table, no ceremony, bowl of ravioli in front of me.

 

It was baffling, but when you are at someone's place, you eat what you are given; there is no point in protesting 'why are you doing it that way, no one else is using the kitchen'. I said nothing. But it was like this, as Rebecca Harrington puts it in Penelope:  "Oh, I didn't think it was really serious or anything,' said Penelope, who suddenly had a feeling in her stomach that occurs when you realize that your time enjoying composure is rapidly coming to a close."

 

Any equilibrium I had left was lost when, after this meal, he put a book of T.S. Eliot's poems on the table in front of me, requesting that I read from it. I don't know which one he wanted me to read aloud; I had a sudden feeling I was being set up. Once you read poetry out loud to a man, all bets are off. He had not mentioned before that he would like me to do this - it came out of nowhere. I felt reduced to some kind of object, and I reacted the only way I could. I said no, not just 'no' but also ended this 'relationship' or whatever it was. I was vehement and absolute.

 

He had to drive me home; awkward, sure, but as upset as he was, we did not argue. Once he was back home, he called to make sure that I hadn't suddenly changed my mind. Nope. What happened next was telling - in a few days he sent some notes that he had been making (yes, he had been making notes all this time, like I was a PROJECT or something) and they were all cryptic and ugly. Once in the summer I was with our social circle and he had to leave as he could not bear to be in the same room as me. I remember people clapping after he had left. Then I was politely asked not to attend the usual circle meetings, just the 'afterparties' and thus was liberated again. I finally felt more myself - more mayhem was to follow in the very late '90s, but for now I was happy.

 

My reward for this was to come later in the year, but first, Gary Barlow.

 

WHAT IF GABRIEL OAK HAD A YAMAHA KEYBOARD AND A DREAM

 

Now, I read Justin Lewis’ very fine biography of Gary Barlow in order to prepare for this: his modest beginnings, his urge to make music at an early age (neither of his parents were musical but they did at least own records), his incredibly industrious teenage years as a keyboardist/singer in the workingmen’s clubs in Northwest England…and his ambition to grow out of this to be a solo star. He wrote songs (learning from all the many songs he had to learn and then perform) and started to push himself in the music business, only to be told at 20 he was far too young and would you like to be in a boyband instead?

 

Well, it was a break from the workingmen’s club circuit, a chance to really push himself to perform and yes, write some songs for said band. Done and done, and so Take That were constructed around Gary Barlow. He was the squarest of the bunch, a bit stolid but this is not always a bad thing. He had to learn to dance (never as well Howard or Jason, alas) and maybe be a bit more frisky, though Robbie owned that, just as Mark owned a genial kind of oddness. Together they conquered the UK and did well elsewhere too and even had a hit in the U.S., “Back For Good.” It could well be when they broke up (inevitable, really, once Robbie quit to spend even more time with Oasis et al) the record companies looked and saw Gary Barlow as a free man, an easy sell, a star-in-the-making who could break America all by himself. Cough.

 

I have listened to Open Road and what I get most from it is the sound of money being spent. No expense was spared to make this a HIT ALBUM acceptable everywhere, with eight producers (including Trevor Horn, who suggested the cover of "Hang On In There Baby" which Barlow sings in a bland way as if the song isn't about anything) and more than a few songwriters of note being brought in, but….

 

…a few weeks ago I had a medical procedure (you well may be eating right now, dear reader, so I will spare you the details) and had to wait and wait in a big area with huge windows overlooking the Thames.  On the wall was a flat-screen TV tuned into Smooth Radio (I am told this is NHS standard procedure). I was anxious, but here was music to soothe me, or attempt to put me into something of a passive trance. How I wish that this was the case. Too much ‘nice’ music makes me nervous, I guess. And Open Road is nothing if not ‘nice’. I grew increasingly anxious listening to it, willing something, anything, to happen.

 

But as a disciple of Elton John and Barry Manilow, Gary Barlow never strays past the middle, the absolute middle of the road. The safe place; the place of Goldilocks contentment and security; a place that can, in the right handling, be a springboard for surprising and moving things if the singer/songwriter/producer wants it to be. But there must be a genuine feeling put across, if not a leap into unfamiliar territory.*** Barlow knew very well this could be done, but unfortunately the album became a product of Clive Davis, executive producer, and all those he brought in, so the songs all seem to be ‘and guest starring Gary Barlow’ the whole way through. By the time his own song, the title track, comes by, I was exhausted and kept looking at the cover wondering, who approved of that? The photo is of a stolid, earnest man, determined to be…determined.

 

Because Barlow was the nice one all the mums liked, this of course was going to be a hit record; he makes all the sounds and noises he ever did in Take That, after all. To quote Lewis, "It felt a long way away from the original plan, for Gary to simply make an album with Chris Porter in a studio and then release it." However, once you declare that you want "to sell 10 million albums and I know that, to do it, I need to crack it in America." That simple plan is thrown by the wayside and The Industry will have you in New York City in no time, brought into an office with men in suits dancing to a remix of a song of yours you didn't write, which you have never even heard before. Barlow found himself as hapless as could be...

 

That this album was not at all a success in the US, where it was supposed to be one, shows how little regard The Industry has for what can work, and what can't. Open Road was worked on for almost a year, but as 1996 became 1997, it just became more dated and boringly beige and 'professional' whereas the good music around already was anticipating what was to come or perfecting a kind of modernism. This blog will be returning to Gary Barlow as a solo artist, though not any time soon. Barlow knows his niche, or groove, and resolutely stays in it, for better or for worse. Open Road, in other circumstances, could have been a good Take That album. But ambition took it elsewhere.

 

ALBUMS I WOULD RATHER HAVE LISTENED TO

 

WEAKERTHANS Fallow (John K. Samson, enough said)

 

THRUSH HERMIT – Sweet Homewrecker  (“North Dakota” lives rent-free in my head)

 

AUTOUR DE LUCIE – Immobile (has the disquiet and lack of obedience that Barlow needed)

 

IVY – Apartment Life (a classic album, I feel)

 

DAFT PUNK – Homework (the future starts here)

 

THE JULIANA HATFIELD THREE – God's Foot (never released, though it is on YouTube)

 

MARY J BLIGE – Share My World (yeah, I actually do need to hear this)

 

RONI SIZE & REPRAZENT - New Forms (the actual UK sound of 1997)

 

And, while I’m at it, I’d also track down the unreleased songs recorded for John Cale’s Helen of Troy album because one of them is “God Only Knows” and my only response to that is ding-ding-DING come ON ALREADY ISLAND GET ON THIS (I just found out about this, hence its inclusion)

 

HAS ANYONE HERE HEARD OF STEREOLAB?

 

The summer of my freedom eventually led me to hearing something I hadn't known I was waiting for, which is always a joy.

 

If there was one thing I wasn't expecting, it was to be finally introduced to Stereolab via a car commercial, but this was the result of being at home more often - I saw these things. My reaction was as immediate as it was to The Double Life of Veronique, in that I was magnetized and somehow understood things better, it was practically telling me the future world I was living in was going to be a better place because Stereolab would be part of it, and include other people who knew who they were (When I showed up at an afterparty, a big one, and asked the room if anyone had ever heard of Stereolab, no one had. I felt suddenly cold, as if I didn’t really belong anymore.  Which in a way, I didn’t).

 

Now, when I hear anything from Dots And Loops I fall into a kind of slightly painful how-did-I-not-know feeling then replaced by a happy kind of light melancholy. No one else knew about them, no one cared, I truly was on my own here, enjoying things by myself. I was what they said I was supposed to do - individuate - and if that meant listening to the rhumbas and bleeps and what sounded like lounge music but done right (I was not about to tell HIM about Stereolab; he had his own lounge music, after all). And for me, anyway, what I consider to be 'the late '90s' began when I saw that commercial. It was very much my thing, and after having endured over a year of not-really-my-thing-why-am-I-here on so many levels, I can only say Dots And Loops was and is the fabled happy ending. I am as uncritical of it as a cool breeze on a hot and humid day.

 

Next up:  something, as they say, completely and utterly different.

 

*Yes the one with "Ladykiller" and "Single Girl" - not that he would have known about these songs, or cared.

 

**Two years earlier, not that I can really talk about it (for reasons, please see The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James) I had a mystical experience. I wasn’t really sure what was happening at the time, so I ascribed it to the saint for that day, Bede, and trusted he was looking after me. Then I found the James book and understood…

 

***You can still have passion, humor, signification and still be very MoR. “Could It Be Magic” by Barry Manilow is…typical at first, but by the end he is yelling COME, COME ON, COME and practically willing this magic to happen. He wrote the song, sure, but he is truly putting his full emotion into his singing. On the other hand, there is one of the most laidback MoR standards of all time, the Commodores’ “Easy.” It is a complex song that has Lionel Richie singing “Why in the world would anybody put chains on me, yeah?” in such an offhand way you have to remind yourself about where he’s from. Poor Gary Barlow doesn’t really have that passion or that ability to just casually drop in a reference to oppression, so he is dependent almost entirely on how good a song he has to sing.