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.

Michael JACKSON: Blood On The Dance Floor: HIStory In The Mix

 

(#571: 24 May 1997, 2 weeks)

 

Track listing: Blood On The Dance Floor/Morphine/Superfly Sister/Ghosts/Is It Scary/Scream Louder (ft  Janet Jackson; Flyte Time Remix)/Money (Fire Island Radio Edit)/2 Bad (ft John Forté & Wyclef Jean; Refugee Camp Mix)/Stranger In Moscow (Tee’s In-House Club Mix)/This Time Around (D.M. Radio Mix)/Earth’s Song (Hani’s Club Experience)/You Are Not Alone (Classic Club Mix)/HIStory (Tony Moran’s HIStory Lesson)

 

I have written about this album before. Specifically, in a posthumous and almost wholly male-authored anthology of essays about Michael Jackson published in 2009, I cursorily dismissed Blood On The Dance Floor as an “intermittently interesting but mostly wan remix album.” This was on the background of a glorified blog post which I wrote in about twenty minutes, approximately one hour after learning of Jackson’s death. I had other things to think about at the time (and still, over fifteen years later, have not been paid for writing the ”essay”). I’m abysmal at on-the-spot writing so it’s just as well I didn’t train as a journalist when I had the chance.

 

Then, after a decade and a half of not thinking about the album, I glanced warily at the mint CD copy which I had bought some years earlier for 50p from the Cancer Research shop in Carshalton for Then Play Long purposes (in those pre-streaming days) and inserted it into our player, with headphones on to ensure that I didn’t miss anything.

 

Well, that will teach me to come to snap judgements, and once again demonstrates why I can’t update this blog more often. I’ve now revised my opinion radically. Blood On The Dance Floor is one of the best albums Michael Jackson ever released. It might even be his best since Off The Wall. I can’t believe how good the record is, and how sorely, and sourly, it was underrated, sidelined or even damned by a lot of ageing men who truly ought to have known better.

 

The anthology is now mostly unreadable. Certainly its more “academic” analyses were incomprehensible even in 2009. But there resides in those pages so much bitterness and spite about what Jackson did or allowed to be done to himself after Thriller, together with collegiate sneering about his absence of a “soul.” Were they all deaf or stupid or, as I suspect, both? “Morphine,” “Is It Scary” and “Stranger In Moscow” were some of the most soulful and heartfelt songs he ever wrote and/or recorded.

 

The later Jackson songs are, of course, all about suffering, and specifically his own suffering, a gesture which seems perfectly acceptable to music writers when made by Ian Curtis or Kurt Cobain or Richey Edwards, or other white people. Black artists apparently aren’t allowed to suffer, other than in the standard racism/drug habit sense; they’re supposed to present a stalwart role model to mostly white music critics and must never exceed those boundaries or woe betide our whip of whim! John Lennon screaming about his mother is OK, Michael Jackson howling about the injustices that the world, from family on down, have deposited on him is out of order, not cricket.

 

What Jackson did learn from Lennon, apart from the odd indirect “Come Together” reference here and there, was how to structure his music as an extension of his life. What musician doesn’t, you may justifiably inquire, but I mean in the sense that, like Lennon, he saw his songs, or recordings, not so much as complete things in themselves but more as outliers of his self - the pop song as blog post, if you must, to which aim Lennon had been heading ever since “Glass Onion.”

 

While Jackson stopped short of conjuring up Two Virgins-type enterprises with Lisa-Marie Presley, enclosing cream envelopes filled with surplus sawdust from the floors of Neverland, he nonetheless wanted to make his music inseparable from his essence, or absence of same. If anything, the song “Blood On The Dance Floor” sees him positively welcome his assassin, maybe as a relief from having to think about his self any more – there is a terrible concealed ecstasy in Jackson’s triple-locked vocal assays as he anticipates the knife, metaphorical or otherwise, a closeted joy echoed in the slurring blips of electronica with which Teddy Riley punctuates the ending of every line and beat. I further note the song’s nod to the descending chord sequence of the Yardbirds’ “For Your Love” (“There'll be days that will excite/They'll make you dream of me at night” – that sums a lot of Jackson up) and the album’s possibly unintentional leitmotif of Hammond organ, recalling Jimmy Smith on “Bad.”

 

My 2009 assumptions were most likely based on residual disappointment with the album’s lead single, i.e. the abovementioned title track. I looked up some notes I had written on the song years before and discovered dreary observations on the 1997 General Election and what I did that Thursday and Friday, with the song itself scarcely mentioned. “Blood On The Dance Floor” may have been trying too hard to be like Janet (especially those muttered grunts), and certainly didn’t begin to measure up to the ransacked glories of The Velvet Rope, but it was disappointing only in the way that other Jackson album lead singles such as “The Girl Is Mine,” “I Just Can’t Stop Loving You” and “Black Or White” were disappointing. I had to learn that lesson over and over again.

 

Get past that song, however, and Blood is, well, bloody incredible. Eight remixes of songs from HIStory and five new songs, not in that order. As though to punish us for underestimating the record, Jackson immediately unleashed its most “extreme” moment. I don’t know that “Morphine” has much to do with Nine Inch Nails, even less with Morphine the band. Sonically and rhythmically it hits as hard as – well, “Rhythm Nation,” but in a lot of Lennon-y ways it takes us right back to the gestures of “No Bed For Beatle John” with its distantly echoing hospital nightmares of medical chatter, some of which derives from the film of The Elephant Man - If you know, you know (and I’m leaving the David Lynch commemorations to others).

 

Meanwhile, the song crunches on the glass of Slash’s lead guitar, and you’d trust Jackson’s “put all your trust in me” as firmly as you would have done Kaa the Jungle Book snake. That is until it abruptly re-presents as an orchestral interlude, as though Jackson has been in the “real world” all the time, although vague walkie-talkie voices attempt to penetrate the cushion of strings. The man looks at himself in the mirror and is baffled, if not astounded (“oh GOD he’s taking DEMEROL!”) – flashback to me on the ward eleven weeks ago (or near enough) after my anaesthetic block had worn off and my left shoulder and arm became intolerably painful (memories of hearing some godawful Susan Calman travelogue thing on Channel 5); I called out for, er, morphine over and over, but to little effect until the night nurse at one in the morning said I should really try dihydrocodeine and paracetamol instead as these would be much more helpful. So I did, and the pain…diminished! I was taking the “wrong” painkiller, but when you’re so desperate you require pethidine then you’ve voyaged somewhere outside of “right” and “wrong.”

 

If anything, this moment puts me more in mind of Sonny Bono’s dubiously-intentioned and finally absurd “Pammie’s On A Bummer” from 1967, a would-be anti-drug epic that begins with some rudimentary modal-bordering-on-free improvising (involving, amongst others, Mac Rebennack, hence it resembles some of the less outré elements of Dr John’s Babylon) before resolving in a godawful sub-sub-sub-sub-sub-Dylan plonking with appalling rhymes and worse singing which would be sufficient to set anyone on drugs for life (there barely exists a recognisable melody). My hospital experiences in 2018 were enough to put me OFF drugs for life. But Jackson manages to avoid the pseudo-morality trap – at least on this song – and with a decisive “OOOOOH!” which could express either hurt or triumph, he returns to “Morphine” improper, subverting “The Way You Make Me Feel” as he does so (“Go on, baby!,” “DO IT!”). He cares so passionately about not needing to care about anything anymore.

 

We do not really divert from such emotional extremism. “Superfly Sister” revisits this mysterious woman – not Billie Jean, but clearly derived from her – “Suzie” who appears determined to undermine and kill Michael Jackson (she is also the subject of the title track). Perhaps it’s short for “suicide.” In any event there’s no faulting the excellent production, over which MJ hiccups and hisses the Jehovah Witnesses’ handbook in defiance of this tawdry and unworthy thing called sex, and which Bryan Loren nicely underscores with a nagging four-note low-pitched synthesiser hook, pinches of eighties 808 settings and sampled saxophone burps like impatient car horns.

 

“Ghosts” (apparently written for the film Ghost; does anybody remember it actually being in there?) materialises with floats of synthesised choirs into which a harsh Vocoder endeavours to barge. Lena thought the harmonic background to the endless “And who gave you the right…?” accusations reminiscent of another “Ghosts,” the one composed by David Sylvian and recorded by Japan (and there’s no reason why MJ wouldn’t have heard Tin Drum at some point in his life), but I’m not so sure; the weighty melancholy of the harmonies do make me think of something else, but exactly what it reminds me of has thus far eluded me (suggestions are welcome – “Bird’s Lament” by Moondog, perhaps?). Anyway, Jackson howls about harassment and jealousy before realising that the ghost tormenting him is…himself. It plays like what turns out to be one of two sequels this album has to “Thriller”; at the end he sucks in his own breath, and the lid of (presumably) his coffin is shut very firmly indeed.

 

Even this doesn’t really prepare you for the draining epic that is “Am I Scary” (no question mark; it’s assumed), prepared for the singer by Jam and Lewis. It begins with a James Bond-type introduction before Jackson’s whoop more and more comes to resemble a hacking cough. The song’s early bow-tied solemnity carries hints of early ABC. A quite unexpected Picardy third comes to rest restlessly, then a swirling piano that is immediately reminiscent of Thom Bell’s orchestration for “Back Stabbers.” This in turn is succeeded by Jackson’s demand to “Let them all materialise!” which is answered by repeated hammering that leads us into a howling wind of a chorus – scarcely has Jackson sounded angrier – before settling back down to quiet piano, strings and oboe which are almost instantly subverted by electrical interference. Jackson’s fury is unabated and if anything escalates: “Am I the beast you visualised?” he nearly cackles in triumph. He is his own evil, you are the evil, he scares himself probably more than whatever is supposed to be scaring him scares him…

 

…and again and again the man meets with the mirror and finally collides with it, falling right through the KEY CHANGE and the TUBULAR BELLS, screaming “I don’t want to talk about it!” (immediately buried in an avalanche of confused and conflicting mutters), “You know, you’re scaring me too!” The song totters back down to a funereal piano finale – “Could It Be Black Magic?” and what is anyone to make of that adjective?

 

These are Blood On The Dance Floor’s five new songs, the most emotionally extreme songs Jackson ever dreamed up, performed with a naked intensity that might make In Utero seem like a tea party with Mr Rogers in comparison. And don’t talk to me about “soul” – Jackson’s vocals on “Morphine” and “Am I Scary” are as soulful as anything he ever recorded. Just not the reassuring soul that tends to be required by the smugly moneyed.

 

Now it’s time to dance. “THE BEST DANCE ALBUM IN HISTORY!” the cover cleverly bet-hedges, and we are presented with an octet of variations of HIStory songs as though they are being reflected back onto the world which its singer secretly hoped to have created some idle afternoon. Or something.

 

And what a dance album this is. If Michael Jackson had come back with this album in 1991 we’d have long been showering it in praise. Suddenly (and, I presume, eagerly), the man is thrust into a present-tense world of music and is abruptly, and quite unexpectedly, bang up-to-date. Jam and Lewis themselves helm the rebooting of “Scream”; they don’t need to change that much other than make the song more percussively buoyant but the quiet introduction (“West End Girls”) leading into a deafening slam, a pummelling rhythm and the whine of drone helicopters lead very nicely out of “Am I Scary”’s pendulous pit. Janet is still there, trying to convince her brother that he can’t beat Rhythm Nation (can anybody?).

 

Pete Heller and Terry Farley give “Money” a calming underhaul, with Dust Brothers/Beck-style simmering electric piano and a purposeful low-grade groove (purposely shadowing “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’” to my ear) that includes another reference to “back stabbers” and a growl of “Get dirty” worthy of Lisa-Marie’s father. The Fugees crew do their typical thing on “2 Bad” with nuclear siren alerts and a finely filthy punch (“back to where I wanna be…doin’ wrong,” “You are disgusting me”). Jackson’s rhythmic nous is here is fully that of the second half of Off The Wall’s first side; he divebombs the funk and lands headlong into the world of...Big Beat! Who would've funk it?

 

But Todd Terry’s reshaping of “Stranger In Moscow” is just stupendously brilliant. No wonder the Pet Shop Boys liked the original, since this is exactly how Neil and Chris would have tackled it – the lament double-tempoed into a rave. The sublime Bacharachian harmonic transitions are more sharply accentuated by Terry’s beats, which boast the same mischievous poignancy that drew me to him back in the days of Royal House, Black Riot and To The Batmobile (in 1988 it was akin to listening to somebody who had just figured out how to dance and, to his surprise as much as anyone else’s, found that he was rather good at it – did somebody mention “Long Tall Glasses” in the background?). Terry’s achievement is to render what was already one of pop’s loneliest songs into an ironically graver meditation; the “icon” finding himself surrounded by tourists, living, laughing, loving, having fun (but now he’s all alone in MOSCOW LAND HIS ONLY HOME!) and realising that he is unutterably, and beyond any hope of redemption or indeed hope itself, sealed off from that world, probably forever.

 

Entombed in your own life-defying/denying body and everybody is having fun around you.

 

(Conversely, however, to those who continuously moan about why Jackson never did nice songs like "I Can't Help It" any more; well, not only did he still sing them, but he also wrote them. You simply chose not to bother listening.)

 

David Morales puts “This Time Around” through a loop and finds lots of workable things to do with it (his ten-minute “Mad Club Mix,” available on the 2-LP set of Blood On The Dance Floor, renders the workable wacky); Michael Jackson As Dave Pearce Dance Anthem has a winning sheen as a reinvention; it suits him.

 

As does the 3am (eternal) Michael Jackson of Hani’s reimagined “Earth Song,” which works fairly effectively as a late night/early morning ambient lounge chillout floor-dropper; there’s MJ at the bar in Ibiza, half the dancefloor’s gone home and he’s mumbling semi-coherently to himself about the end of the world as the remainder of the world swims right by him. The mood is something like “The Sun Setting” and there is no big choral climax; it’s just the thought of it being the end of something, chiefly Jackson himself – aren’t all the songs on HIStory really monologues, directed only at the singer?

 

But Frankie Knuckles’ take on “You Are Not Alone.” Now that is an act of past-camp genius. To take, assess and rework maybe the most problematic song in Jackson’s oeuvre (chiefly because of the now-imprisoned creep who wrote it) and convert it into a work of lustrous art is something only the true greats are able to manage (then again, what does MJ say towards the climax of “Morphine” – “Don’t worry, I won’t convert you”?).

 

As Madonna did with the Miami Mix of “Don’t Cry For Me Argentina,” Knuckles (with Satoshie Tomeii) flings all the self-pity out of the pram and replaces it with a fuck-you-I’m-ME celebration of being alive. Yes, Badiou is not alone, and his burgers are the best (so much for “The Fascism Of The Potato”). Yet Knuckles turns the tune into a showstopping, high-kicking light entertainment classic with those lovely descending, diminished piano chords (and, again, that un-“Bad” organ, rematerializing as a beacon leading towards the light) you wish the song had always possessed. “You Are Not Alone” gets transferred to the type of ditty Bruce Forsyth or Marti Caine or even Val Doonican might have crooned of a Saturday televisual evening.

 

And its final triumph (of Jackson’s will) comes as the singer ecstatically yells, over and over, “GOTTA STOP LIVIN’ ALONE!” – well, of course, he was always singing that song to himself. Wrested back to the right (Gene! Grace!) Kelly. He realises the tomb can be irrupted.

 

The record peaks and closes with Tony Moran’s over(re)view of “HIStory,” as bots of Michael stutter “New force of a…” and “YOU ARE THE KINGDOM!” Moran leads Jackson into the wondrous land of…Faithless! and SASH!! (“I CAN’T! GET TO SLEEP!”) and the man in the mirror is now the mirrorballed man, in the heart of THE CLUB, still fighting with himself (“Can’t stop me/STOP me!,” “Keep movin’/DON’T keep movin’”). There’s a big campfire singalong about how we’ve all got to work together to keep everything going complete with a SAVE THE WORLD KEY CHANGE climax, some ceaseless and distant electronic burbles which made Lena think of Stereolab's "Fluorescences," and a real flag-waving euphoric finale to an album where the Worried Man works up the courage to fight off his ghosts, stare the mirror out and realises he was only made for dancing. It’s a remix of his life.