The SPICE GIRLS: Spice

 

(#560: 16 November 1996, 1 week; 7 December 1996, 8 weeks; 8 March 1997, 1 week; 22 March 1997, 4 weeks; 17 May 1997, 1 week)

Track listing: Wannabe/Say You'll Be There/2 Become 1/Love Thing/Last Time Lover/Mama/Who Do You Think You Are/Something Kinda Funny/Naked/If U Can't Dance

Bonus tracks (Punctum's Version): Take Me Home/Feed Your Love/One Of These Girls/Bumper To Bumper/Spice Chat 2: "Shall We Say 'Goodbye' Then?"

I remember the Wednesday afternoon I bought the CD single of “Wannabe” as a new release; Wednesday 26 June 1996, to be pinprickingly exact. I was in the Virgin Megastore on Tottenham Court Road and added it to the rest of that day’s purchases, which included a two-CD recording of Steve Reich and Beryl Corot’s opera The Cave - "who for you is Abraham?" - and the compilation Artcore 4 - The Art Of Drum & Bass (chief pick, although all twelve tracks are extremely fine: "Find Me" by Skanna).

 

 

The gentleman behind the counter refused to believe that I was sincere in my purchasing the single since – to his eyes – it jarred so outrageously with, or against, the other contents of my basket. Unbeknown to me, the Spice Girls - who, confusingly, were signed to the Virgin record label - had done a personal appearance in the shop just a couple of hours beforehand, and my server was convinced that I was a Virgin PR man trying to buy the single into the charts. Even after I, with characteristically benign cheer, attempted to put him aright in polite, long-form terms, he did not quite believe that I was not the late Robert Sandall.

I was rather put in mind of another cheerfully open-minded musical theorist, John Stevens, the then-recently departed drummer who from the mid-sixties onward had been responsible for putting together the Spontaneous Music Ensemble (SME), a purportedly ego-free unit whose members all worked equally towards a common musical good, regardless of genre or gender. On two SME pieces – namely 1968’s “Oliv, Part One,” and 1971’s live 21-piece big band tribute “Let’s Sing For Him (A March For [the then-recently deceased] Albert Ayler)” – Stevens deploys a chorus of improvised (but directed) female singers. On “Oliv, Part One” they furnish lengthy sustained drones (together with Trevor Watts' soprano saxophone) as a backdrop for the piece’s main featured players (Kenny Wheeler and Derek Bailey - pianist Peter Lemer acts as a sort of midpoint between the two settings), while on “Let’s Sing For Him” they sing the titular chant over and over until they begin to modify it and improvise within it, finally breaking out into celebratory/commemorative atonal freeform cackles and screeches.

 

The five singers who appear on "Let's Sing For Him" are Maggie Nicols and her sister Carolann (the latter reappeared on record several decades later as Caroline Jackman), Julie Tippetts (the Face of '68 formerly known as Julie Driscoll), Norma Winstone and Pepi Lemer, and if on “Let’s Sing For Him” especially (in which all five participate) the notion that they sound as though they are giving birth to the Spice Girls seems farfetched, it should be noted that the last named of these women, Pepi Lemer (wife of the abovementioned Peter, who also contributes limpid Fender Rhodes to the swirlingly abstract middle section of "Let's Sing For Him"), went on to become the Spice Girls’ principal vocal tutor, teaching them many of the techniques which she (in conjunction with Stevens and Maggie Nicols) had deployed in the SME a generation previously (details of the exercises in question can be located in Stevens' important manual Search And Reflect: A Music Workshop Handbook).

It would appear from the admittedly limited capacities of searching Google that the Spice Girls are still held in some critical derision; bland, phoney puppets and so forth and no fifth. This of course has a lot to do with the misogyny which remains inherent within the British music establishment, the kind which confines women to either of the dual permitted roles of feisty, independent rocker or trembling, victimised waif. Hence when girl groups succeed in pop – in other words, when women have the temerity to compete with their male peers on equal showbusiness terms, to access the same level of opportunity – they are routinely denounced. Thus Riot Grrl’s concept of Girl Power (and subsequent brokering of same into the mainstream by Shampoo, aided and abetted by, of all unlikely pop stars, Lawrence of Felt, Denim etc.) is lauded whereas the Spice Girls’ simple modification of Girl Power is damned, at least in the blinkered eyes of those who don’t realise that “Her Jazz” and “Wannabe” – both sung and largely performed by women, but both co-written and produced by men - are two sides of the same coin of advancement.

 

Furthermore, most of the aesthetic concept behind the Spice Girls came from the Spice Girls; Richard Stannard and Matt Rowe wrote and produced most of their music but the words were those of the Spices (and, on a seemingly too obvious parallel note, whither Bacharach and David’s Dionne Warwick, or Shadow Morton’s Shangri-Las, or Spector’s anyone?). Simon Fuller acted as their second would-be ringmaster but, as he quickly found out, he was not an indispensable male glue to the girls’ bonding; as were not the father and son team Bob and Chris Herbert of Heart Management who in 1994 had advertised for singers in the hope of creating a female equivalent to Take That and East 17, or indeed Michelle Stephenson, who made it to the initial five-piece group and may well have been technically their best singer, but either jumped or was pushed, depending on whom you talk to, for reasons of incompatibility and/or family/personal problems.

Seeking a replacement for Stephenson, the Herberts looked to Pepi Lemer, who recommended a girl whom she had recently been tutoring separately and individually, one Emma Bunton. She bonded with the other four immediately. They then sang, danced, rehearsed, rehearsed and rehearsed. The group was initially named Touch; the Herberts' ambition seemed to be to create a British equivalent of TLC (or perhaps a slightly cooler modification of Eternal, whose song "Stay" all four hundred or so applicants had to sing and dance their way through in the initial auditions for the group in March 1994).

From those auditions, Melanie Brown (Mel C), Victoria Adams (as she was then still known), Stephenson and one Melanie Coloma were selected, with eight others, to proceed to a second set of auditions. Melanie Chisholm (Mel C) had been unable to attend that second audition because of tonsilitis, but when Coloma was found wanting, the Herberts called Mel C back anyway after Geri Halliwell had encouraged them to do so.

 

Ah yes, Geri Halliwell. She had not turned up to the first set of auditions at all and had given various dubious excuses for her absence - yes, oh definitely yes she would have come, wouldn't have missed it for the world, but she had contracted laryngitis or had burned her face in a skiing accident and I'm so SO sorry Chris, please forgive me, please let me audition, pretty please, I'll turn up this time I promise!

Chris Herbert was eventually persuaded to let Geri into the second set of auditions; when she burst through the door, he was so impressed by her cheekiness, campness and confidence that he knew she'd be the perfect fit for the group, even though her singing capacities were, let's say, slightly limited. Not that this bothered anybody in particular - Mel C called her "a self-confessed bullshitter" but in an admiring rather than admonitory tone. Her bullshit fit the disparate cast of characters that the Herberts were intent on assembling. I'll get back to her contributions later.

The group spent a lot of time in the three-bedroom house at Maidenhead which Heart had provided for them and in nearly recording studios, practising and performing songs (as well as perfecting associated dance routines) which were aimed at a very young (under-tens) female audience, none of which appears to have survived, as well as painstakingly learning how to write or co-write songs themselves. One of the latter was entitled "Sugar And Spice," which encouraged the group to change its name from Touch to Spice.

By the end of 1994, Spice were growing uneasy and restless with what Heart Management wanted from them, as opposed to what they, yes, really, really wanted (it's corny, I know). An industry showcase performance was set up in December of that year at Nomis Studios in Sinclair Road, Brook Green, meeting an extremely positive reaction, not least from Richard Stannard, who was in attendance; his songwriting partner Matt Rowe also became subsequently involved.

Encouraged by all of this, Heart Management prepared what would have most likely been a severely binding contract with the group, which, after due discussion with several outside parties (including Victoria Adams' father), they declined to sign. In March 1995 they split from Heart - absconding with the mastertapes of their compositions while doing so - and set about preparing demos with some of the people they'd met at Nomis. Simon Fuller, then of 19 Management, heard and was impressed by the demos and the group were happy to sign a contract with him.

Interest in Spice escalated, and following a bidding war Virgin signed them in July 1995. Fuller then took the group to Los Angeles to meet up and make contact with various important industry figures. Since there was a rapper already using the name "Spice" it was decided to lengthen the group's name to the Spice Girls, in part as a reaction to how they had been sneeringly described by some members of the music business ("oh yeah, those Spice girls, hyuk hyuk").

The group then prepared to record songs for their first album, but their way was blocked by needless and finally rather flimsy obstacles. Nobody seemed to want "Wannabe" as their first single. The industry wanted a straightforward R&B "banger." Much encouraging noise was made about launching the group's career with "Say You'll Be There" instead. But the contract they had signed stipulated that they would have the final say about single releases, and they were insistent that "Wannabe" needed to be a game-changing or possibly even (Britpop/Loaded laddism) game-closing declaration of principle, up there with (or preferably a lot better than) "Anarchy In The U.K." - "I'll tell you what I want, what I really, really want" could be interpreted as a direct, demolishing response to Lydon's "Don't know what I want, but I know how to get it." They knew the song had to matter, needed to represent so much more than what it seemed to offer; Geri referred to it as a "strange family member."

Nor were Smash Hits particularly interested in them at the time, although they cheerfully invaded publishing offices, radio stations and nightclubs, dancing around and shoving the future in the tired faces of jaded employees. The then-editor of Smash Hits seemed marooned in Britpop; her idea of cover stars in 1996 was the Bluetones. However, the editor of the BBC's Top Of The Pops Magazine, Peter Loraine, spotted the wind of change that was about to start blowing - unlike Ms Thornton, he did not stay in his office when the Spice Girls paid a visit to the premises - and realised that the magazine really had to get on their case, and quickly; so much so that Loraine and his team came up with the nicknames - Scary, Sporty, Baby, Ginger and Posh Spice - which stuck with everybody who was sick to death of grey, stony cod-indie and desired the return of primary colours and brightness.

The most obvious point which male critics (and they are nearly always male) choose to miss is that the Spice Girls’ intended audience was girls, and that regardless of the mechanics of their construct, the old adage of what the consumer gets out of the music and the musicians being the key factor was what vitally mattered; beyond question they were role models for young girls, growing up and not quite sure of their place in the world. Note how “Wannabe” places the emphasis on female friendship over quick male fixes (“If you wanna be my lover/You gotta get with my friends/Make it last forever/Friendship never ends” – in other words, the latter comes first) and the easy sharing out of the lead vocal between four out of the five girls; Mel C offering authority, Emma innocence, Geri knowingness and Mel B utterable mischief.

Moreover, the group's image was principally tailored towards (as in welcoming) girls, if “tailored” is the right term; in conventional boy perspective terms they were not especially sexy, but neither were they a robotic construct – there is something deeply marvellous about their dance routines not quite gelling together (echoes of Bananarama), their voices not always in perfect pitch (Geri’s “If you really bug me” for instance), their outfits clashing loudly rather than blending politely. Like Bananarama, they looked like the product of half an hour’s frenetic improvising at the dressing table, making do but mending pop in the process.

In the video for “Wannabe,” which everybody in The Business hated at the time (their original intention was for a glamorous, glossy video to be made in Barcelona), they cavort through the Midland Hotel in St Pancras with such shameless glee that they make New Kids On The Block look like the Four Freshmen with baseball caps that they always basically were – thus they take on the characteristics of the boy band and outdo them (Mel C’s somersault!) in one continuous Touch Of Evil-style tracking shot. They look like the happiest and luckiest girls on the planet, and much of that radiates through the record itself, from its introductory puffing and panting up the stairs to be met with a derisory – or conspiratorial? – roar of laughter before the track itself kicks in with Mel B’s immediate stranglehold of “I’ll tell you what I want what I really really want,” the “HA!”s slashing like newly-sharpened kitchen knives before coming down to land in the warm pool of “Zigazig-ah!” – the latter the greatest expression invented in pop since “Awopbopaloobopalopbam-boom!” and (according to Mel C) meaning pretty much the same thing.

All the elements which make girl groups great, and the greatest pop Goddess-like, come into audacious play throughout “Wannabe”; the close-miked harmonies against wah-wah funk guitars recall the Supremes of “Stoned Love,” the harsh but cuddly consonants revive the Shangri-Las, the ice cold Coke can bursting open of the drums/piano relationship reminding us of that forgotten girl group, the Jackson 5 (Motown goes androgynous!), the general sharp bustle descending from the preparatory examples of Neneh Cherry and Betty Boo (the double entendre of “We got G like MC who likes it on her…” abruptly cut off by Emma dreaming about “Easy V”), the “zigazig-ah!” itself and the climactic “slam your body down and wind it all around” deriving from ska flowing into reggae and betrothing “Uptown Top Ranking.” Beyond all that, Stannard and Rowe’s production and arrangement are near-perfect with lots of teasing touches of punctum; the sly rhythmic segue into the second verse (“Whatcha think about that?”) the music dropout on the first line of the second chorus, the spiral staircase of Mel B’s defining “You gotta, you gotta, you gotta, you gotta” landing on an emphatic, euphoric “SLAM!,” the final lasciviously descending “Slam your body down and zigazig-ah.”

It sounded like nothing else on the airwaves in the summer of ’96, and even then I thought it the greatest bubblegum debut since “I’m A Believer” (strictly speaking “Last Train To Clarksville” came first, but the real story, as with this particular story, begins with “Believer”) as well as the saviour of pop as pop; at a time when both opposing poles defined by Oasis and Take That were growing grey and ponderous, “Wannabe” smacks in at an efficient 2:52. It went to number one everywhere; in Britain it had the year’s longest run at the top (seven weeks), sold a million and a half copies (in the year-end sales rankings it came a very narrow second to the Fugees' “Killing Me Softly”) and made not only veterans believe in pop again, but also encouraged millions of people to believe in pop – and the wider message the song conveyed – for the first time. And for those benighted Virgin Megastore assistants who continue to fail to grasp the story from A to Zee, it may be worth reprinting the following reminiscence which originally appeared in a 2003 obituary:

“One of my fondest memories…was the time spent on another of his madcap ideas. He came up with a concept called SubRosa, who were to be an all-women band. They had to be ‘modern, empowered, talented and sexy.’ I thought this was just a ruse to meet women, which made him laugh hysterically. He would write all their songs, control their image, write their press hand-outs, produce the whole thing and generally be the Phil Spector character. We duly advertised in the Melody Maker, auditioned some girls and chose the band. Of course, they were very suspicious of this svengali character and immediately rebelled, having recorded the album, made a video, and done a performance at the Piper Club in Rome. Five years later, The Spice Girls became quite successful…”

The obituarist was Phil Manzanera, and the “svengali character” was Ian MacDonald. If only he had been aged between 14 and 30 when “Wannabe” came out; as it was, stiflingly golden rock history stood no chance against the friendly but firm female insistence upon nowness and fun…and life.

 

 

The difference between "Say You'll Be There" and its predecessor at number one in the British singles chart is roughly the same as the difference between life and death. Coming out of the grey, stolidly worthy gruel of five boys being forced to dress, act and sing like fifty-year-olds and into the shockingly blue 3D colour of five happy girls taking turns to pull faces at the camera in an evidently blazingly hot Mojave Desert and giving themselves daft aliases (Katrina Highkick! Trixie Firecracker! Blazin’ Bad Zula! Enid Blyton remixed by Russ Meyer!) is akin to being pulled out of the grave. Where Boyzone touch the hem of the Bee Gees’ garment and miss their substance entirely, the Spice Girls’ feeling about “retro” is summed up with admirable succinctness in the intro to their second chart topper, one of the first to use the needle-to-the-scratched-groove simulacrum; a fifties cocktail hubbub of voices, electric piano and vibes is rapidly zipped up into a luxuriously squelchy stride through an “Atomic Dog” rhythm, over which the audibly smiling Spices pledge “I’m giving you everything” and actually sound as though they are.

Once again the writer’s head can only bow in the wonderfully pluralist architecture of the record; Emma’s confidential purr (swim in the riveting rapids of her “tell me” in the first verse – is she familiar with Olivia Newton-John’s old treadmill?) balanced out by Geri’s pitch-imperfect and wobbly but thoroughly enterprising vocals (and who needs robotic perfection here when we are celebrating all that is great about imperfect human beings?).

 

Alhough the song on its surface is a slightly impatient request to an indecisive would-be lover to make up his mind and commit, it comes across more as a confirmation of renewed female solidarity and mutual trust (“And all that I want from you,” they sing to each other in the chorus, “is a promise you will be there” – and note how the chorus itself admits the existence of doubt and poignancy with the minor key dip in its third and seventh bars).

 

"Say You''ll Be There" cunningly combines old memes and new – the traditional harmonies of the bridge after the second verse are immediately succeeded by a collective shriek of a rap (led by Mel B) – “Yeah, I want you!” – after which a harmonica solo from Judd Lander (his first number one since “Karma Chameleon” and another touch of arranging genius; a harmonica in the middle of an utterly 1996 pop record!) leads into an even more frantic cheerleading yell of the first two lines of the chorus which wouldn’t have been out of place on a Fuzzbox or Kenickie (or, more pertinently, a Shangri-La’s) record, before all climaxes at the final chorus with the dramatic high entry of Mel C, leading the promise, beseeching the blessing. A brilliant piece of teamwork by the group, in tandem with writers Jonathan Buck and Eliot Kennedy and dance production team Absolute, “Say You’ll Be There” confirmed to all bar the wilfully deaf that New Pop was still at that supposedly late stage continuing to find unexpected ways in which to renew itself.

The release of the "2 Become 1" single was delayed by one week in order to allow the Dunblane charity record "Knockin' On Heaven's Door/Throw These Guns Away" to reach number one just before Christmas 1996. One does shudder at how easily Thomas Hamilton’s face could have fitted onto the cover of the Prodigy's “Firestarter.” Since it was a year when the girls took the lead in pop over the boys, however, there really was no other way to end 1996 than with the group which had restored lightness to both the music and its attendant, or integrated, spectacle.

 

Again, comparisons with Boyzone cannot be evaded; here was the Spices’ third number one, the third of three completely different and utterly fresh approaches to different facets of the pop song, and their first ballad. Where the Irish boys strove to make their ballads Portentous Yet Epic Statements (look how big ours is, as it might have been), the Spices relax, float and let newness seek its way in like unspoiled rays of nascent yellow.

 

Craig Armstrong’s string arrangement underlines the extremely subtle inroad which Massive Attack’s tactics had made into mainstream pop. But there are other, more important pointers to “2 Become 1”’s final triumph. Remember how 1996 started; with a desolate, bereaved survivor of the original New Pop (or, more properly, its immediate aftermath) grasping for indicators in his lover’s dying smile, trying to touch the vanished loved one in the coldest of nights, numbed but not yet ready to stop breathing himself. “2 Become 1” is the many-faceted voice of the saviour, the lover who comes to visit him at night except, now that his tears are dried and his eyes clear, he sees that it is a new lover entirely.

 

The video was shot against a blue screen of stop-motion  footage filmed in Times Square (the blue screen, and therefore also the video itself, was actually in a studio in London); the girls, huddling in long, colourful coats, drift spectrally in pairs and trios while life blurs at indefinable speeds around them. The song too is not quite anchored; voices, such welcoming voices, swim through its pools of hope. Where Boyzone belch bravado, the Spices persuade; they make no attempt at Soul, Passion or Honesty, rightly believing that if the art and emotion are sufficiently strong then such qualities will be inherent, rather than having to be drawn out with stern Stax pliers – the only deviation from the contours of the song comes with Mel B’s gorgeously selfless trisyllablic hiccup of “one” before the second chorus.

 

It may be an exaggeration (though not a sizeable one) to claim that most great pop ballads of the last twenty years have some connection, however tenuous or ethical, with “Moments In Love,” but “2 Become 1” certainly oozes like a final, belated justification of ZTT’s silver phials of newly romantic punctum; she wants it, he’s a little nervous, but she’s not going to force him to come or sneer at him if he doesn’t, or can’t…both know that it will all come in good time, although the record's most radical element might be Emma's “Be a little wiser baby, put it on, put it on” in the song's final bridge - slush was expected, but instead at the song's centre there's a message about contraception, and how many minds did that touch? - Finally, they sweetly sing a lullaby of fulfilment: “Set your spirit free…it’s the only way to be” over a three-part harmonic twist which trembles with a 1967 Dusty shiver, and which Armstrong extends in the coda to become a near-raga. With harmonies of dignified beauty and essences of apparent near nothingness which reveal a totality of perfect spiritual and carnal union, “2 Become 1” sees the Spice Girls become virtually untouchable, and the perfect resolution to the grief expressed at the year’s opposing end; 1 has somehow become 2 again (in order to become truly 1), the future of life is restored, and they walk off hand in hand down the same unspecified international avenue of peace. Or, given its open refusal to let New Pop die, you could consider the journey from “Jesus To A Child” to “2 Become 1” to represent the transference of a candle from one spirit to another, the flame renewed. Bodhisattva.

Much of the rest of Spice suggests a standoff; repeated musical attempts to place the band in the Eternal/internationally-successful girl group category – the straightforward Newish Jill Swing of “Love Thing,” the Mary Jane Girls variation of “Last Time Love” – are systematically blockaded and diverted by the girls themselves, as though TLC had now consisted of three Lisa “Left Eye” Lopeses; witness the ambiguous “Ow!” of Mel C which introduces “Love Thing” or the snarky playground yells of “DREAMING” in each chorus of the same song, as though they are singing along to New Kids On The Block at the back of the bus.

 

More important, however, is the subversion of those compromised musical environments by rebuffing The Man’s attempts to get with any or all of The Girls; in “Love Thing” they make it perfectly clear that the Mr Loverman/macho bloke approach isn’t going to get him anywhere – “I’m not afraid of your love” they repeatedly insist, because their bond matters infinitely more than his pushing or shoving. Geri and Mel B nudge the point home by quoting the final two lines of the song “Sisters,” written by Irving Berlin for the 1954 film White Christmas and sung by Rosemary Clooney and Vera-Ellen – thereby reminding us not only of the girls’ younger days watching seasonal television, but also of their subtle umbilical attachment to the world of British Light Entertainment (which they are absolutely intent on inverting inside out).

 

The seduction offered – up to a point – in “Last Time Lover” (the song was initially called “First Time Lover” but it was felt that went a little too far carnally) is part genuine, part sardonic, as though the would-be lover is being mocked as gently as he is being guided. Geri’s rap section is performed as though she’s stopping herself from laughing, or yelling. They are intent on him being their last lover, though raise a collective eyebrow at the prospect that Mr Assured Loverman might really be Mr Awkward Newbie (“Could it be your first time, maybe?”).

 

The next two songs seem to point a decade away in opposing directions. “Mama” uses the acoustic guitar/compressed string section/hip hop lite beats recipe which has in subsequent decades been charmed to death by several operatives yet to appear in this tale, and is a pleasant enough but rather bland ode to motherhood in general; worlds away from the Shangri-La's' “I Can Never Go Home Anymore,” the girls acknowledge with warmed-up rationalism that “she used to be my only enemy and never let me be free” but now know that “all that you did was love.” And we get the inevitable gospel choir at the end though they do not get too Soulful – whereas in mother-fixated pop songs (Lennon for an instantly karmic instance) some degree of hysteria does tend to work; see for example, Barry Ryan’s hysteria/tonality-redefining “My Mama” from 1969, the missing link between Al Jolson and Scott Walker's “Jolson And Jones”).

 

 

Whereas “Who Do You Think You Are?” energetically revisits the eighties – and in great part 1987-period Bananarama – with smiling slaps of funk, dazzling expanses of sustain (under and over the first extended “Whoooooo” leading to the chorus) and confident, but not cocky, assurance (the juicy interplay between “trust it”s, “use it”s, “prove it”s and “groove it”s) suggesting that the recent past might be preferable to the imminent future. But then the Spices were at this stage all-rounding with enviable efficiency, striving to appeal to doting grandmothers and tyro rebels alike in the knowledge that the latter will inevitably end up as the former. As yet their expansion was not concomitant with overreaching.

 

 

Of Spice’s remaining songs, “Something Kinda Funny” is fairly routine R&B-lite filler, while the closing “If U Can’t Dance” – the midrange staccato voicings in its choruses put me in mind of ABBA – is entertaining but curiously inconclusive. Into a moneyed desert of abandoned-future samples – The Jimmy Castor Bunch’s “It’s Just Begun” and Digital Underground’s “The Humpty Dance” are recognisable, if the song’s overall feeling has more in common with “Connected” by The Stereo MCs – burst decidedly yet deliciously impolite irruptions; Mel B’s broad Leeds rap (is this suddenly The Three Joans?) and Geri’s snappy Spanish spoken interlude. Indie-dance? The Spice Girls had that market cornered too. As an album closer, however, it leaves several key questions dangling in the spangled air.

 

One of these questions, and perhaps the profoundest of them, is raised by the song which comes between those two – “Naked,” the Spice Girls’ greatest and most neglected achievement. Unlike any of the record’s other nine songs, and making little fuss of its singularity, the slowly-undulating tripping-hopped undercurrent of “Naked” is the most plaintive pair of eyes to pierce the hollow glamour that listeners might think is otherwise being offered. It sees right through all of your shit.

 

The song’s main protagonist we can safely take to be Emma, with Geri as her harsh conscience (“She knows exactly what to do with men like you”). She is with an unspecified Him, maybe wanting to do something, more likely trying to avoid doing anything. It is no longer a question of two becoming one but of one striving not to split in half.

 

Because she harbours a secret, and like the average protagonist of an Eley Williams short story, she’s not about to tell you anything frankly, out loud. To an extent you have to intuit her subconscious, place the pieces together. The other girls wander in and out of the song’s undusted cloisters in the manner of a strolling Greek chorus.

 

The song’s mood is nocturnal and evanescent, although this is not the peaceful night of “2 Become 1” but rather a restless and possibly ominous one, when you imagine that the clock’s been put back by two hours and it’s always going to be 3 a.m. (Eternal). It bears words about the child being deprived of goodness – though not of strength (“Past encounters have made her strong/Strong enough to carry on…and on”).

 

At the heart of “Naked” are two voices. One – and it is the album’s single most disturbing moment – is Emma, speaking over the telephone, audibly shattered and exhausted, possibly talking to Him, clumsily trying to apologise for…well, what (“I’d rather be hated than pitied”)? Her voice sounds drained, empty, scared, angry. “Maybe I should have left it to your imagination – I just want to be me.”

 

Upon which erupts Mel C’s scream of rage, the second of these voices: “THIS ANGEL’S DIRTY FACE IS SOFT!” It is clear that the girl was abused, in some way or another, as a child – see, this is where your rock’s rich tapestry of little girls and sweet sixteens gets them – and is perhaps even being abused right now, but is too confused or frightened to call Him out on it. She wanders in perpetual half-light because the actual light was snatched away from her at a point in her life where darkness was not desired.

 

The spell which “Naked” casts throws the rest of Spice’s songs into a darker light; in this context you can see why the defiance and cheek are needed, the fun and colour to cancel out or conceal the anger and darkness. You fucked us up as girls, now we’re going to fuck you about as women – that is their central message, their real manifesto. Cutting up your loaded laddism, your pusillanimous guitars, your canon of the permitted, rendering you as lesser beings. It’s been a long time coming. Shuffle along, you redundant grey ghosts of geezers.

 

But it still doesn’t conclude the album, even though the song sums up its central ethos with stark beauty. I didn’t feel that we could leave things with “If U Can’t Dance” back then and still don’t. I have therefore taken the liberty of preparing a “special edition” of Spice with bonus tracks of my choosing (link to playlist in the track listing at the top).

 

Firstly, I had to include “Take Me Home,” which at the time was consigned to the B-side of “Say You’ll Be There” but remains one of the Spice Girls’ most remarkable works. Here are the young girls, sitting in a white room and dreaming of a misleading notion of paradise, only and eventually to realise that it isn’t what they want; hence the plaintive echoes of the song’s title in the choruses, accompanied by a snatched alto saxophone lament of a sample. Its further venture into the world of trip-hop is amplified by intermittent gnarled, throaty drawls – you could scarcely term it “rapping” -  from Geri which sounds like nothing and no one less than…Tricky!

 

I could only follow that meditation with “Feed Your Love,” a song excluded from Spice at the time because its dissection of sexual fulfilment was considered perhaps too near the knuckle for an intended audience of sub-teen girls. Perhaps the group also thought it too close, stylistically, to “2 Become 1” and felt that the record needed more “bangers.”

 

In any event, the song did not appear in public until its inclusion on the 25^th Anniversary Deluxe edition of Spice, and it’s a shame (though understandable) that it wasn’t on the original album since it answers many of the questions some of the record’s other songs ask and finds the Spice Girls – happy and fulfilled. It is also maybe their most sheerly beautiful song, five very patient minutes of gradually-unfolding keyboards and beats – a direct descendant of the Art Of Noise’s “Moments In Love” really - which finds its ultimate release in the blissful silence into which the end of the track recedes, like a setting yet satisfied sun (“I really wanna share my secrets with you”).

 

I felt that it was then time to turn the temperature and rhythm up, so the next song I selected was “One Of These Girls,” a B-side to the single of “2 Become 1” which more or less lays out the template for Xenomania and Girls Aloud, in which the girls merrily flirt with that fourth wall – “Do you think they’ve got it?/Well, I’ve got it!/I’ve always had it/No way; they won’t get it,” “CAN’T YOU SEE WE’RE ALL PLAYIN’ A GAME?” This is a concept of which Kathleen Hanna or Liz Phair would have been mightily proud.

 

The last song, as such, on “Punctum’s Version” of Spice does not appear on the 25th Anniversary Deluxe edition of the album and indeed has not appeared on any Spice Girls album at all; it has remained the B-side of “Wannabe,” the single which I bought from the Virgin Megastore just as the summer of 1996 commenced.

 

But “Bumper To Bumper,” perhaps perversely, is one of my favourite uptempo Spice Girls songs and, although the group have obviously viewed it in a dim light, I think it would have furnished a splendid sticking-tongue-out coda to Spice. Written in conjunction with Cathy Dennis – not a name one normally sees in this company – the song is cheeky, saucy and all those other loathsome adjectives which the unthinking application of camp has debased over the last twenty years. The sexual metaphors are unconcealed and the girls are audibly having a lot of fun with the song, voicing the title a dozen different ways before settling for Mel B and Geri’s climactic femipunk screech of “BUMPAH-TOO-BUMPAAAAH!!”

 

I chose to end my version of the album with a 48-second segment of the girls cheerily and hoarsely saying and yelling goodbye to their fans and listeners, everyone keen to get in the last word, or at any rate the last farewell. The concept works – everything pop does is gonna be female from now on, we’ve taken over from the boys and welcome all of you to our significantly improved world.

 

Spice is one of the most sheerly welcoming of number one albums since Please Please Me. To me it stands as both a fabulous pop record in itself and an incisive commentary on what we ought to expect from pop music, which isn’t quite what some might have imagined.

 

And, again and again, I am drawn on this record towards Geri Halliwell and the absolute necessity of her being A Spice Girl. What does she do? It is abundantly clear from listening to both Spice, and the albums which came after it, that she is the group’s agent of punctum. Over and over she disrupts songs, unsettles expectations of how A Girl Group would handle pop, puts a bug into the serene system. Maybe the Phil Manzanera comment at the head of this piece isn’t too far from signifying what Geri represents – as an earnest but flashy, if courtly, “non-musician” whose main function seems to have been to feed ideas and philosophies into the Spice Girls’ music – which is that she is the group’s Brian Eno; and yet, as she also acted as the main focus and de facto leader of the Spice Girls, she also manages to become the group’s Bryan Ferry. I wonder if Ian MacDonald saw that coming.

 

“BECAUSE we must take over the means of production in order to create our own meanings.

 

BECAUSE viewing our work as being connected to our girlfriends-politics-real lives is essential if we are gonna figure out how we are doing impacts, reflects, perpetuates, or DISRUPTS the status quo.

 

BECAUSE we recognize fantasies of Instant Macho Gun Revolution as impractical lies meant to keep us simply dreaming instead of becoming our dreams AND THUS seek to create revolution in our own lives every single day by envisioning and creating alternatives to the bullshit christian capitalist way of doing things.

 

BECAUSE we are unwilling to let our real and valid anger be diffused and/or turned against us via the internalization of sexism as witnessed in girl/girl jealousism and self defeating girltype behaviors.

 

BECAUSE I believe with my wholeheartmindbody that girls constitute a revolutionary soul force that can, and will change the world for real.”

(Excerpted from Riot Grrrl Manifesto, BIKINI KILL ZINE 2, 1991)

 

“Assemble some of the elements in a group and treat the group.

 

Feed the recording back out of the medium.

 

Listen to the quiet voice.

 

Not building a wall but making a brick.

 

Don’t be frightened of clichés.

 

Think of the radio.

 

Change nothing and continue with immaculate consistency.

 

What would your closest friend do?

 

What wouldn’t you do?”

(Excerpted from Oblique Strategies by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt, 1975)

 

BOYZONE: A Different Beat

 

(#559: 9 November 1996, 1 week)

 

Track listing: Paradise/A Different Beat/Melting Pot/Ben/Don’t Stop Looking For Love/Isn’t It A Wonder/Words/It’s Time/Games Of Love/Strong Enough/Heaven Knows/Crying In The Night/Give A Little/She Moves Through The Fair

 

(Author’s note: later international editions of this album added “Picture Of You” as its lead track, which is logical, but since it’s also the lead track on entry #591, I will adjourn discussion of the song until then.)

 

By now, Take That were gone – for now – and Louis Walsh must have glimpsed the gap in that market. Hence it was no longer sufficient for Boyzone to be The Irish Take That; they were instead expected to take on the world and become “international.” This may explain the rather portentous opening seven-and-three-quarter minutes of their second album. It really wasn’t a wonder that overseas markets subsequently elected to frontload the record with “Picture Of You,” possibly just to wake listeners up. “Paradise” is slow, ponderous and self-consciously epic, as though auditioning for the Lion King musical – although despite the song’s characteristically cautious banality, I recognise that Ronan Keating’s vocal stylings are not a million miles away from those of Paul Heaton, and wonder what The Beautiful South would have made out of the same semi-cooked material.

 

The title song, which fans automatically sent to number one as a single – the second chart-topper from this album – was evidently intended to stand as Boyzone’s “Back For Good,” their big crossover moment. Unlike “Back For Good,” however, the music and words for which I have remembered for almost thirty years, I forgot how the song “A Different Beat” went even as I was listening to it. Nevertheless, and paradoxically, one knows exactly what it is going to sound like before you even hear it - perhaps syntactically baffling lyrics such as "Let unity become/Life on Earth be one" provide an easy clue.

 

And sure enough, the tick sheet is fully inscribed; there be the ersatz tribal chanting and drumming, the dawn over Kilimanjaro slow motion synth and piano, the forlorn Celtic pipes, and yea e'en unto the humpbacked whale samples. "A Different Beat" was Boyzone's answer to "Earth Song"; it was their first "self-composed" number one, although additional composer credits to producer Ray Hedges and arranger Martin Brannigan probably indicate who did the real donkey work here (a Peruvian donkey, mark you; Keating doesn't claim to have seen the sun rise over Maccu Picchu but has experienced rain in Africa, presumably in the footsteps of Toto, snow in Alaska and mist in Niagara so he knows what it's all about), and replaces Jackson's anguish and rage with pseudo-benign hands across the table we-are-all-one off-the-peg reassurance ("people," sometimes in rhetorical triplicate, are duly encouraged to "look around us" and "take a stand," though for or against what or whom remains non-specific; while "face" submits to being rhymed with "grace" for the millionth time).

 

The song barely exists, with no discernible tune or chorus apart from the equally obligatory "Ee-yay-oh" chant, and is even more ludicrously bombastic than you might expect, although there is a minute puzzlement at the record's end; according to the lyric sheet, "rain does not fall on one roof alone" forms the words of the closing climax, but Keating's exclamation of "one roof alone" sounds awfully close to "one rule for all" and is promptly followed by a brief bout of military tattoo drumming. Was he trying to tell us something subversive there?

 

The remainder of the album is well-behaved, sometimes irritatingly so. The old Blue Mink one-world ancestor of “A Different Beat,” “Melting Pot,” duly turns up with Madeline Bell herself dropping by and doing her skilful, tactful best not to let you think that she is effortlessly upstaging the rest of the group (in case you wondered, the problematic line about Chinese people has been modified to a not entirely convincing “Oriental sexy”). Stephen Gately turns Michael Jackson’s rat ode “Ben” into what we now know was a coded gay love song – his solo features throughout A Different Beat sound as though his voice has been tweaked and varispeeded upwards, offering the impression of androgyny; although, on his “Ben” in particular, his excited vibrati sound like a direct parent of Olly Alexander.

 

The covers, though, illustrate a fundamental problem with Boyzone and the protégés who would follow them; the disquieting harmonies of “Ben” – the unexpected dovetailing into the minor key at the beginning of its second verse, for example - are simplified and ironed out. And I’m not sure that Boyzone or Walsh – or possibly even the Gibb brothers themselves, who presumably sanctioned the cover – really get what “Words” is meant to be about; in its original form it is a small, hesitant, timid song with occasional and relatively shocking explosions of something in the suburbs of frustration – Barry Gibb vocally sounds like he’s aiming for a suburban Aaron Neville – all the better to outline the gulf between what the hopeful lover is able to say, as set against what he feels but dare not express (see also The Beautiful South’s “Blackbird On The Wire”).

 

Yet both boy band and their arrangers/producers overkill the song with glutinous Formica – worried that their fans might be scared of silence, they instead fill all spaces with heaps of nothing. Fatally the key line (“You think that I don’t even mean a single word I say!”) is delivered in Ralph Reader Gang Show sub-barbershop harmonies. Strings sweep when they should remain silent. Not that any of it mattered; all the fans heard was a simple, or simplified, love song onto which they could project their own fantasies. It’s just too bad that those fantasies seemed to be identical to those of their parents, or perhaps I fail to grasp something very basic about the behaviour of humans.

 

Actually, it's worth going into this in a little more detail. Just as Take That Mk I had their last number one with a Bee Gees cover version, so there was something of a deliberate symmetry about Boyzone having their first number one with a Bee Gees cover version. “Words” is a minefield of a Gibb Brothers song to cover, since it is all about suggestion and implication rather than overt emotionalism. Released as a single at the beginning of 1968, but recorded in October 1967, the Bee Gees original works as an extremely subtle essay in metapop; Barry Gibb sings tremulously, not of a love affair needing rekindling, but as the hopeful artist trying to convince the undecided listener (“A smile can bring you near to me”), wanting the listener’s undying devotion (“Talk in everlasting words/And dedicate them all to me”), varying his vocal towards the desperate in the axiomatic line “You think that I don’t even mean a single word I say,” but dropping it again to an immediate whisper, not confirming or denying that he means what he is singing, but simply saying, plaintively, “It’s only words…and words are all I have to take your heart away.” The production is relatively simple, with a mildly distorted piano – psychedelia seeped everywhere – and Bill Shepherd’s very delicate strings, harp and French horn arrangement providing the main backdrop to Gibb’s metamusings. At the end the music is more or less taken away entirely apart from a curious electric guitar which seems to be coming from a hundred miles away so that Gibb can crouch towards the listener and quaver in his best Aaron Neville quaver: “And words are all I have…to take your heart away,” that last “away” wavering like Charybdis.

Unsurprisingly Boyzone – in tandem with, or in submission to, their producers and arrangers – ignore the original’s subtlety and even its basic architecture; as soon as the gloopy piano, dentist’s drill high-pitched string synthesiser and Linn tympani make their bombastic entrance (at around two seconds into the track), Keating initially adopts a Gibb-type vibrato but soon bends towards bombast and overemoting. It all plods along on the same grey department store level of fake sophistication, but much, much worse is the feed of the “This world has lost its glory” declaration directly into the chorus, which not only sounds hopelessly awkward but destroys the methodical, slow build-up of the song as it was written in that it loses the emotionally crucial “Right now, there’ll be no other time” section. To rub acid into the wounds, the mess is reiterated at record’s end, and by the time the muffled Thus Spake Zarathustra timps thump their way out of the song we are left with no notion of what words might or might not mean, since Barry Gibb of course realises that it’s not just about words, but also the way in which you sing them. But the record certainly did help to “start a brand new story”; one of obedient talent show contestants, neutralised niche mass marketing and bland pseudo-global broths in which words were perhaps the least essential component.

 

The songs on A Different Beat do not tend to be “bad,” as such – the only blatant misfire appears to be the tacky New Jack Swing (or, more likely, MN8) photocopy of “Strong Enough” – but neither are they particularly inspiring, and never are they funny or outrageous. Yes, Carlin, you just want Boyzone to be The Beatles. Maybe Boyzone did too.

 

“Isn’t It A Wonder” and “Crying In The Night” are efficient and forgettable variations on the old aw-little-kid-you’ve-got-so-much-to-learn “Father And Son” theme (although the pause and key change heard towards the close of the former give an early indication of how Boyzone's anointed successors will successfully jerk a lot of knees). There are hints of inventiveness elsewhere on the record, for instance the pleasing bumps in the harmonic road throughout the choruses of “Don’t Stop Looking For Love” and the verses of “Games Of Love.” “Give A Little” is actually quite good in an Everything Changes-filler manner. Set against that are the transient piano descents punctuating “It’s Time” – did they sample a Russ Conway record? – although the arrangement is overall far too jovial for what is fundamentally a break-up song.

 

The essential problem with A Different Beat is summed up by its final track, a reading of that ancient Celtic warhorse “She Moved Through The Fair.” Few could hope to surpass the supreme interpretation by Van Morrison and The Chieftains, as heard on 1988’s Irish Heartbeat, where they convert the song into a free-form drone, somewhere just outside of tempo and reason – it would segue very naturally into the opening of the third side of Frames by Keith Tippett’s Ark – although Julianne Regan didn’t do a bad job at all with her slightly straighter rendition on the first All About Eve album from the same year.

 

Boyzone hired Phil Coulter, no less, to arrange and produce their version. But Coulter, an honourable man in numerous ways, really ought to have known better; here the song is ensconced in proto-Lord Of The Rings soundtrack bombast, all echoing “LET THIS BE THE HOUR WHEN WE DRAW SWORDS TOGETHER!” drums, winsome Celtic piping and Gandalfian gulfs of space. The mission seemed to be to nullify any strangeness in the history of music and render it palatable – i.e. neutralise it – to gain the biggest potential audience. Outside the United Kingdom, the Republic of Ireland and (unexpectedly) Taiwan, A Different Beat did not make the top ten so the international gambit didn’t particularly pay off. But Boyzone’s “She Moved Through The Fair” seems to me as well-meaningly absurd as The Bachelors tackling “The Sound Of Silence.” The final drum rattle sounds like the door of the tomb being closed on the record’s ambitions.

The BEAUTIFUL SOUTH: Blue Is The Colour

 

(#558: 2 November 1996, 1 week)

 

Track listing: Don’t Marry Her/Little Blue/Mirror/Blackbird On The Wire/The Sound Of North America/Have Fun/Liars’ Bar/Rotterdam (Or Anywhere)/Foundations/Artificial Flowers/One God/Alone

 

From guilty but solvent middle-class streets, we travel to innocent but ceaselessly-punished working-class terraces, or get marooned in some gaudily polite halfway house. Why The Beautiful South’s affable rancour hits when Simply Red’s angry consolation can do little more than tickle might have its roots in a shadier but more defiant defensiveness against those who strive to hide or minimise what they see as smug assaults on “their” music.

 

Dave Hemingway spells it out in the sourly-melancholic anti-capitalist tirade “The Sound Of North America”; it is all about keeping those countenances, whatever their personal cost to personal happiness, remaining in strict line with unwritten but understood societal contracts. You can be as “wacky” as you wish, but as the song indicates, God help you if you sing out of key or fail to follow the script – and that goes for everyone, even if you happen to have been Presley, Garbo or Ali.

 

It is the international system of capitalism which determines the totality of anti-life on the dulled planet of Blue Is The Colour, The Beautiful South’s fifth and darkest studio album (cf. Paddy Chayefsky via Ned Beatty). Blue as in sad, blue as in the Conservative Party who at this point were barely clinging onto power, blue as in a post-Derek Jarman haze which refuses to dissipate.

 

Blue Is The Colour, much like Scott 3 had done for a wider cast of characters half a lifetime previously, focuses principally upon one unhappy couple stuck in one of those terraces. He is a chronic alcoholic, she has been frustrated into dullness. They both want something better but lack the capacity or courage to do anything about it, other than self-destruct in unwitnessed defence.

 

Where The Beautiful South score over Simply Red is that you cannot really avoid or avert yourself from what some might perceive as ugliness. If the voices of Paul Heaton and Jacqui Abbott sound ostensibly “unattractive” (although they certainly do not sound as such to me) then in many ways that is the music’s point. They have unattractive things to say about the kind of situation you’d dive into the Pacific to avoid (San Francisco Bay?). Those charmed or cumulatively bored by the relatively harmless radio version of “Don’t Marry Her” may have been startled on the recorded version to hear Abbott casually toss “fuck me” onto the song’s central hook as though darning another needle (“Those blackbirds look like knitting needles”; cue an atonal onomatopoeic piano descent), as though it were a big deal; just do it, the song seems to demand.

 

The subject matter of “Don’t Marry Her” is identical to that of the Specials’ “Too Much, Too Young,” but Abbott’s brashly amiable insistence trumps Terry Hall’s grumpy mouth-foaming. The sentiments sound so much more convincing coming from the woman’s point of view. Here, she says, don’t settle for boredom and premature, wilting death, let’s have fun instead…

 

Cut to the song “Have Fun,” which Heaton reckons is the saddest song he ever wrote, and which he and Abbott perform as a duo, with its closely-miked acoustic pickings reminiscent of…blackbirds pecking. The song pitilessly documents a mock-relationship built on mutual loathing; he is literally too drunk to fuck (“I’ve had a life of booze, but that’s all I’ve ever had”) and in both of their minds lurks a ghost, of someone who actually has possession of their hearts – and this could be a Sliding Doors scenario where the man does run off and fuck her…but then they discover, too late, that fucking is all they will ever have in common.

 

Over and over this album talks of “graves” and “whores” in ways which aren’t that far away from (but work considerably more effectively than) Nick Cave’s contemporaneous Murder Ballads. Abbott even sings “Mirror” cast as a prostitute, wanting more than this rotten world is ever prepared or even programmed to offer to her – the chorus of “So imagine a mirror bigger than the room it was placed in/Imagine my wish for a future that cannot hold my wish” is one of the most tragic lyrical passages in all of the group’s catalogue. A victim who may well be repeatedly visited by the travelling salesman (or is he just a glorified wino?) of “Liars’ Bar” or the pissed-off pisshead of “Rotterdam (Or Anywhere).”

 

These two latter songs form both sides of the same coin. As a regular, Walkman-bearing commuter between London and Oxford at the time, I associate the opulent emptiness of “Rotterdam” with the point past the huge open tunnel of chalkface cliffs, just before the Lewknor turnoff, where London, or the notion of London, decisively ends and Oxfordshire begins. The eerie one-note high-C string line piercing each chorus like the most courteous of lances, or the most poisonous of cocktail cherries, encapsulates the song’s essence of irreparable, icy isolation, as Abbott sings Heaton’s words about an alcoholic wreck stumbling into a bar, only to be angrily told that he/she can’t just have a drink and be done with it, and silently scolded for not blending in with the anonymously international clientele. Heaton used to escape on the ferry from Hull to the Netherlands whenever he felt bored – although, as “Alone” direly points out, loneliness and boredom can in certain circumstances prove interchangeable – and “Rotterdam” is actually a calm diatribe against the international capitalist standardising of things, and humans. Everybody everywhere the same…the whole world as The Village.

 

Whereas “Liars’ Bar,” ostensibly a funny, extended Tom Waits pastiche, could be talking about the same person several glasses or bottles down the line. Actually it stops being funny about halfway through and patiently mutates into something a lot more sinister – Heaton’s growl is too harsh and leonine to mimic that of Waits and when he slurs and machine-guns lines like “He's missed a hell of a lot of buses for a man who wants to roam” he starts to scare. The use of the Glaswegian term “pish” suggests a sozzled Patrick Doyle, the self-destroying anti-hero of Kelman’s A Disaffection; his next logical step from weaving in and out of traffic islands, hiccupping and joking to no laughs.

 

The personal and political aspects of Blue Is The Colour reluctantly coexist in simmering parallels. “Foundations,” sung by Hemingway with an entertaining horn section/organ introduction which sounds quite like…The Foundations…knows that capitalism is going to destroy everything but warns in Heaton’s pet lyrical trick of piled-up similes, that trying to do anything about it (implication: that does not involve blood and violence) will frankly be akin to farting against thunder. Meanwhile, in “One God,” Heaton cautions, in words worthy of Richey Edwards (“Well, if Peter is a prostitute, then what does that make me?”), that the world has been shrunken to global Disney plastic.

 

As far as looks of love are concerned, “Little Blue” (sung by Hemingway) is a canny “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’” variant, exhausted by pretence – they might seem happy to the outside world, but her eyes roll with different clouds of thunder. But “Blackbird On The Wire,” as sung by Heaton – and we do not really hear directly from him at all on this record until its fourth song – is the album’s masterpiece, a vast canyon of electronic melancholy fully worthy of Older (and George Michael may for all I know have kicked himself moderately hard for not having thought of the song first). It is as if he sees this other woman – you know, the one who urges him not to marry her (1) but fuck her (2) instead (or does the whole of “Don’t Marry Her” only happen on the inside of Heaton’s head?) – and…he doesn’t know what to do. He knows, or anyway thinks, that she’ll be able to take him away from all of this domestic hell.

 

But he’s not going to do anything about it. The song bears an underlying bitterness – do “the people” who “actually come and ask me how I feel” (the “actually” accented to imply the prefix “they have the nerve to…”) really have a “tongue built from quicksilver and the character of steel” (the latter phrase gives rise to Heaton’s most outwardly angry vocal phrasing on the record), or by “the people” does he mean the one person that he’s with? Yet he knows himself only too well…no, he will sacrifice his own happiness, he will not be one of the “thousand other guys who'd say they loved you with all the rest of their lies” (cf. The Association), he will play it cool and inelegantly walk away (as Matt Monro had already done in the pop charts when Heaton was still only two years old); his tears, much like Matt’s protagonist, will “fall unnoticed…down below,” and the emphasis Heaton places on the phrase “down below” leaves no doubt as to what he means by it. Who knows – as with the object of Eddie Kendricks’ affection in “Just My Imagination,” she might not even be aware that he exists. But putting others above oneself with salvageable dignity. That’s socialism.

 

Thus Heaton is left unhappy and the album ends with the deceptively harrowing Heaton/Abbott duet “Alone.” Deceptive, because…well, a lot of the time with the scenarios of Beautiful South songs I think not quite so much Gilbert O’Sullivan or Jake Thackeray as I do of…Victoria Wood, or Mike Leigh. Or, keeping it in the should-be-beautiful North, Alan Bennett. Christgau approvingly considers Heaton’s art as that of the music hall entertainer, singing to and for the economically disadvantaged, and makes the excellent point that, as Ray Davies does, Heaton scrupulously avoids the slightest hint of sentimentality in his observations (“Alone” works in part because it comes packaged as a jaunty jazz ballad or vaudeville lament, rather like Davies’ double-edged sword of “Sunny Afternoon” and “Dead End Street” - perceptions of how the poor live versus how the poor are actually forced to live).

 

And then there is The Beautiful South’s interpretation of “Artificial Flowers.” The song was written for the 1960 Broadway musical Tenderloin, which was set in the red-light district of Manhattan at the end of the nineteenth century. A worthy clerical social reformer determines to “clean up” this district and its Spanish practices. The latter constantly hinder his efforts, but a scandal sheet hack gets intrigued by the affair and decides to infiltrate the Reverend Brock (for that is the worthy clerical social reformer’s name)’s church.

 

This he does by coming up with and performing a song called “Artificial Flowers” which he intends as a deliberate send-up of weepy, melodramatic Victorian-era parlour ballads with an improbable lyrical scenario (girl loses parents aged nine, has to make artificial flowers for “ladies of fashion” in her cold, squalid tenement room, is discovered frozen to death). The song was probably interpreted most famously in August 1960 by Bobby Darin, who treats it like an uptempo Rat Pack stomper in the “Mack The Knife” vein, presumably steering a steamroller of irony while doing so.

 

There is no irony in Paul Heaton’s reading of the same song. Here the personal and political are indivisible. He grasps the essence of what “Artificial Flowers” really is about – cheap and nasty child labour – much as Alex Harvey understood the essentially squalid nature of the song “Delilah.” It’s the fucking system that killed her, he seems to imply, the same self-satisfied fashionable system from which you, guilty middle-class streets who buy my records and never listen to the words, profit so wonderfully. Cue Anne Reid’s monologue about the one-pound T-shirt in Years And Years. If red is ever to be the colour, simply or otherwise, it might have to make itself apparent in the form of blood.

SIMPLY RED: Greatest Hits

 

(#557: 19 October 1996, 2 weeks)

Track listing: Holding Back The Years/Money's Too Tight (To Mention)/The Right Thing/It's Only Love/A New Flame/You've Got It/If You Don't Know Me By Now/Stars/Something Got Me Started/Thrill Me/Your Mirror/For Your Babies/So Beautiful/Angel/Fairground

"You'll never see me walking down a guilty middle-class street/I'm frequently appalled by them pretending to be poor men." Those aren't the thoughts of Morrissey, but of a fellow audience member at that Free Trade Hall Sex Pistols gig. I wonder if Mick Hucknall has frequently pondered the paradox that guilty middle-class streets house the vast majority of people who have liked and bought his music for getting on forty years now.

That couplet comes from his song "I Won't Feel Bad," which appears on the second Simply Red album, 1987's Men And Women. It is a fiercely and admirably unapologetic lyric which challenges his critics to sneer at his imminent wealth and associated power; look, quit picking on me, look at the gangsters who are really raking in the money, away from all of us.

It is a pity that Men And Women is only represented on this end-of-imperial-phase best-of by its one big hit, the satyric and equally unapologetic "The Right Thing," since it contains some of Hucknall's most intriguing songs and performances - "Infidelity," which does Costello's "The Only Flame In Town" better and in which Hucknall refuses to be sorry for sleeping around, the inscrutable "Lady Godiva's Room" (originally a single B-side, then incorporated into deluxe editions of the album) and a rather moving "Ev'ry Time We Say Goodbye" which seems to owe its poignancy to the inadvertent memory of the great ghost that haunted British New Pop of the eighties, Ian Curtis.

Still, Hucknall has been haunted by the need to get his messages into those places which might otherwise sneer at and reject them, all the time doubtless worrying about whether his audience has ever "got it." The blue-eyed Soul, Passion and Honesty smokescreen conceals the likelihood that the nearest equivalent to his voice is, of all reluctant Englishmen, Leo Sayer; "Holding Back The Years" best demonstrates the two singers' identical just-accidentally-sat-on-a-cockatoo yarragh.

At the time Simply Red's Greatest Hits appeared like a blockbuster newly gone missing, although the compilation very quietly went on to go six times platinum. Its cover is unassuming, Hucknall's mind clearly elsewhere. The collection gives the public what it wanted; most of the "recognisable" hits, one or two curveballs - "So Beautiful" if anything sounds more convincing in this setting - and a token new recording, a somewhat perfunctory take on Aretha's "Angel."

The album confirms the story of a thoroughly sincere fellow who unequivocally means what he sings, whether it's about politics or sex or anything else. Picture Book worked - to a point - because Hucknall was only on the way to becoming famous and determined not to exhibit pre-emptive arrogance. He does the Valentine Brothers' masterpiece - a song which didn't get a proper British release precisely when it was needed - and uses it to escort Face/NME hipsterdom into the uncomprehending faces of the wider public, which is something a lot of New Pop artists didn't really achieve.

On Men And Women, Hucknall let all of his other tendencies - particularly the post-Tom Jones lurve man persona (in an unfortunate coincidence, not long before Jones himself essayed a full-scale comeback) - run freely, but where did that leave him save in a cul-de-sac? A New Flame buried its nuggets of angry wisdom beneath pastel shades of apologetic blandness. On Stars, he got the balance absolutely correct; he learned to slow down, reflect and, to a degree ("Thrill Me") zip up. With Life, however, Hucknall found himself back at the same paradoxical roundabout.

This is a very nice record of songs, if niceness is all you want and/or need. It may well be that Hucknall is singing and playing to...the suspicious people, the reasonably well-off types who don't view themselves as a central cause of society's problems, who do not consider themselves to be "fighting" or on a "mission" because, by escaping from the horror of the world so eagerly, they think themselves their own heroes, in control of their own historical fantasy. They see their passions and misdemeanours as part of a drama, view themselves as participants in an epic poem. Their lives exist as channels for light entertainment. They do not possess the capacity or imagination to consider just how passively receptive and actively complacent they might really be.

Yet these are the people for whom (they believe) Hucknall is speaking, and by some odd combination of chance and dogged perseverance his music is able to reach out to them. It's perhaps not his fault if their reception is faulty. In that sense, his nearest American equivalent is not Michael Bolton, but Garth Brooks. I said something above about "the suspicious people," suspicious because, much as the hardcore country addicts who resist any attempts at crossover being imposed because they are defensive of the music's perceived "commonness," the guilty middle-class streets are filled with Jerry Leadbetter types who really only want to crash out on their expensive sofa with a glass of wine and an Engelbert Humperdinck record but will rise up to the ramparts in order to defend what they view as an assault on the culture they like, again because it is thought common and lowbrow - "it" in this case being middle-of-the-road (a.k.a. centrist) pop (easy listening, if you must). The people, if you insist, with the real cash. I am not sure Mick Hucknall would disagree with that theory, if only because he reaches that audience with relative (musical, but not necessarily lyrical - nobody listens to the words in pop, not really) clarity and directness. And, like Brooks, he is proud and confident enough not even to consider changing his spots midstream.

The downside to that access is that only the surface of Simply Red's music prevails, and nothing genuinely changes. Thirty years ago, in the course of my day job, I befriended one of the clinic nurses - or, more properly, she befriended me. We began talking about music and ended up compiling C90 mixtapes for each other. Don't get the wrong idea - we were both spoken for and it was purely friends-only. One tape I made for her included a mix of then-contemporary music and things which were older but still reasonably hip. Side two, track two, was "Sweet Surrender," one of many priapic epics on Tim Buckley's Greetings From L.A. She commented to me that, although she really, really liked the tape, she couldn't understand why I'd put Simply Red near the beginning of side two.

I was quite tickled by her confusion. I had already heard the singer's Buckley aspirations towards the end of "Holding Back The Years" but really she was right; emotionally there was little substantive difference between the two voices and what their owners did with them. And it may be that it is the emotionalism which never vacates Hucknall's singing is what counts with his band's music and accounts for his immense popularity. At this (1996) point I was also busy picking up CD reissues of classic dub on Hucknall's Blood And Fire imprint. He did, and presumably still does, nothing but good. Not long thereafter my nursing colleague left for another job elsewhere and I never saw or heard from her again. That's the way life goes. I hope hers - if she's still out there - has gone and is going well.

Peter ANDRE: Natural

 

(#556: 12 October 1996, 1 week)

 

Track listing: Flava (ft Cee)/Natural (C&J Street Mix)/Mysterious Girl (ft Bubbler Ranx)/I Feel You/You Are (Part Two)/All I Ever Wanted/Show U Somethin’/To The Top/Tell Me When/Only One/Message To My Girl/Turn It Up (ft Ollie J)/Get Down On It (ft Past To Present)

 

I wonder whether this album could more aptly be called Younger. Most of it sounds as though it might have emerged from 1989 with its Old Jack Swing moves and post-Michael Jackson balladeering – and New Jack Swing at least six years past its sell-by date sounds to some inexplicable extent more dated than Kula Shaker’s 1969 or Jamiroquai’s 1973 tributes – but the likes of “Flava” and “Turn It Up” chunder along like fresher paradigms for “Fastlove,” before things got “spoiled.”

 

And maybe that’s being kind to Peter Andre’s music. Not Andre the man himself, who tends to come across in the media as something of an amiable dork but who I think is cannily self-aware of this underlying dorkness and uses it to his advantage, but his music. He became famous on the Australian version of the talent show New Faces by basically doing Bobby Brown – hopefully not in the manner of his rather unfortunate video for “Get Down On It,” which is present on my cassette edition of Natural (10p from downstairs at Notting Hill Music and Video Exchange) but absent from the Spotify edition.

 

While Andre’s early Australian hits such as “Funky Junky” are not tunes I am exactly rushing to hear, his beach bum hunkdom, muscles rippling like a fence of the purest corrugated iron and his physical resemblance to as near a white Michael Jackson as anyone could get (with the possible exception of Michael Jackson) eventually exported their way back to Britain. Beyond the fact that he gets guest rapper Cee to comment “I wanna rock with you just like Bobby Brown” – so at least he’s honest about it, albeit at one remove – “Flava” is essentially fluffily white swingbeat with its baby-faced cod-Babyface beats, its central keyboard riff borrowed from Montell Jordan’s “This Is How We Do It,” its nod to Mark Morrison (“The mac’s back”) and Andre’s own pale vocal which appears to have been varispeeded to sound even weedier.

 

Nevertheless, Natural eventually yielded no fewer than three number one singles. The second of those, “I Feel You” – nothing whatsoever to do with Depeche Mode – is actually, and slightly surprisingly, not the worst of chart-toppers. The continued 65 rpm varispeeding of Andre’s voice works better in this context than it did when he tried to be Mr Brown; on “I Feel You” he is clearly going for the Michael Jackson ballad market and it isn’t a shameful effort.

 

The singer is alone at home, pacing the floors, wondering where she’s gone, knowing deep down that she’s not coming back (“oh I wonder if you’re coming home tonight”), tearing himself apart over what he might or might not have done, aching for her presence (“’Cos it’s cold when we’re apart”). He doesn’t achieve catharsis but it’s a perfectly decent Britsoul song, skilfully handled and delicately produced (with a nice puff-of-smoke vanish of an ending); had it been performed by Loose Ends it might have been hailed as a classic, but if anything Andre's varispeed voice is tweaked up a little too enthusiastically, his “well well well”s do not threaten Terry Callier, his attempts at male assertion (“I’m thinking about the things that I want to do to you/Soon as you get home!”) are unbecoming and unconvincing, and overall the performance is scarcely in the same universe as Vandross’ “The Other Side Of The World” or O’Neal’s “If You Were Here Tonight” or Gaye’s “Just To Keep You Satisfied” – but it’s hardly a disgrace either.

 

The album possesses other moments. “Show U Somethin’” – oh yeah, Pete, what might that be exactly; your Etch-A-Sketch Gold? – would work better as Middle-Aged Jack Swing if the rhythm track did not sound as though it were provided by a freshly-emptied box of staples. “To The Top” would be routine were it not for producers Ashley Cadell and Mark Forrester’s slightly distended background, akin to The Magic Roundabout theme’s barrel organ having taken the wrong pills by mistake.

 

Andre’s forte does indeed appear to be The Ballad. Two of those on Natural were composed by him alone. “Tell Me When” is modestly engaging but “You Are (Part Two)” is something more than that. “Part One” was the same song performed as acapella doo-wop (and is present on the original Australian edition of Natural, which was heavily reordered and rejigged for international ears) but “Part Two” finds Andre’s voice alone with only a piano to accompany him and is a very brief but quite strikingly magnificent piece of work.

 

And, possibly to everybody’s surprise, Andre brings Natural towards its climax – behave at the back - by covering a song composed by…Neil Finn. “Message To My Girl,” from the penultimate album by Split Enz, 1983’s Conflicting Emotions; a song which Finn subsequently dedicated to his wife Sharon on stage in 2006 (clearly an Antipodean salute). Suddenly, everything blooms into colour, and finding a song that is genuinely charged-up, both harmonically and emotionally, is a discovery which audibly pleases Andre, who gives a fine interpretation.

 

Ah yes, you say, but what about the man’s most famous song?

 

Well, times got rather tough for Mr Andre after his first - and most at the time thought only - wave of success; I'm not saying that he was reduced to sweating in a Hofmeister Bear costume and forced to wander around Kettering town centre scattering leaflets on a wet Friday (it was Leominster) but when you're appearing on nineties revival bills and it's still 1998 you know there's something amiss.

 

So I daresay that 2004’s invitation to the I’m A Celebrity… jungle was more than welcome, since by accepting it he met Katie Price, to their mutual benefit - when you have to hack your way through Australian bushes and eat crocodile testicles to get your career back I'd say it was a pretty serious endeavour - and on this renewed wave of goodwill, blended with politely aghast nineties nostalgia, "Mysterious Girl" got its third chance, largely due to the pound sterling efforts of then-top Radio 1 DJ Chris Moyles, another in the long line of music broadcasters anxious to prove that as long as you have broadcasting skills, a love of or interest in music comes a distant second, if it comes anywhere at all.

 

The resuscitation of “Mysterious Girl” in 2004 symbolised the third coming of a decent enough but fundamentally average pop-reggae tune – the song struggled to #53 on its initial 1995 release, and then a year later peaked in second place, behind the Fugees' "Killing Me Softly" - which lopes along reasonably agreeably despite appalling lyrics ("No doubt I'm the only man who can love you like I can") though dips rather flatulently when Bubbler Ranx isn't involved. Nonetheless, it did the trick – and along with the enhanced rebirth of phenomena like “Amarillo” and “Let’s Get Ready To Rhumble,” might indicate a profound rejection of then-contemporary pop (see entry #744 for further thoughts on this matter) - and the man has subsequently survived and to a small extent has even continued to thrive. I once found myself in a lift with both Andre and Price at the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital one Wednesday lunchtime and they seemed like perfectly fine, down-to-earth people, happily chatting with nurses and giving autographs to kids. Let’s leave the picture that way.

KULA SHAKER: K

 

(#555: 28 September 1996, 2 weeks)

 

Track listing: Hey Dude/Night On The Town/Temple Of Everlasting Light/Govinda/Smart Dogs/Magic Theatre/Into The Deep/Sleeping Jiva/Tattva/Grateful When You’re Dead-Jerry Was There/303/Start All Over/Hollow Man (Parts 1 & 2)

 

There to fill a gap in the market rather than create a new one, Kula Shaker were briefly in public favour in the mid-nineties. They evolved from a psych-Mod revival band called The Kays and frontman Crispian Mills was (is) the son of Hayley and the grandson of Sir John. They became popular with boys who don’t care to think too much and K – as Alan Bennett has noted, “the angriest of letters” – probably would have gone nowhere near number one, let alone spend a fortnight there, at any other moment.

 

K is mostly an enterprising but finally dull affair. On the back of a few catchy singles we find not very much, other than standard, gruel-heavy rock workouts which could have come from a below-par Charlatans album. Nor are the singles themselves, generally, of much merit. “Hey Dude” – incredibly, a number two hit – sounds like the boyfriends of The Last Dinner Party having a go at being Black Grape, though ends with the decidedly non-Ryderian protest that “But you treat me like a woman when I feel like a man!” Mills is neither Joe Elliott nor Shania Twain.

 

Similarly, the devotional mock-ragas of “Govinda” and “Tattva,” however heartfelt their content, plod unexcitingly with none of the natural fizz of Cornershop’s "6am Jullandar Shere" (from an album entitled, pointedly, Woman’s Gotta Have It). Alonza Bevan is, it has to be said, an excellent bass player, and there are times when the band do show a modest degree of adventure – the abandoned television theme instrumental “Magic Theatre,” and the later moments of “Into The Deep” where the band do make something of an effort – not nearly enough of an effort, but at least it’s something - to escape their Stone Roses backdrop. The way Mills just about manages to get through the line “Think I'll grow myself a big ol' hairy moustache” without corpsing in “303” demonstrates an admirable and humorous sense of self-awareness. On the other hand, the portentously-titled “Hollow Man (Parts 1 & 2)” constitutes tedious sub-Pink Floyd noodling; if they were thinking of recapturing the uncanny magic of Gilmour’s three-part “The Narrow Way” from Ummagumma, then they were some considerable distance away from doing so.

 

Where Kula Shaker unexpectedly thrive is when they drop the spiritual pretensions and bullet-point philosophy and simply concentrate on being a rock band. The problem for me, and for those of you expecting a full-on demolition of this band and record, is that “Grateful When You’re Dead” is beyond question a fantastic and dynamic pop single which would have worked at any time between 1966 and 2006. It does its business in about two minutes fifty and even its album segue into yet more tiresome ambient bollocks cannot mar its undeniable power. On it, Mills sounds as though he’s been suddenly snapped awake.

 

Perhaps the band’s best moment, which got grudgingly added to later editions of the album, was their 1997 number two smash hit single reading of “Hush,” the old Joe South/Deep Purple warhorse and a performance which to my ears is far more reminiscent of The Prisoners than The Charlatans; it strips out all the extraneous luggage (no solos), Mills assaults the song with genuine zest and, again, it takes just two minutes and 58 seconds to make its point. They treat the song as colourful Archies bubblegum, something Tommy James and the Shondells could have done (and there is nothing on K to approach “Crystal Blue Persuasion”).

 

But it didn’t last. Mills made some hazily naïve comments about reclaiming the swastika from the Nazis and returning the symbol to its Hindu origins – the term “swastika” in Sanskrit means “conductive to wellbeing” and first appeared in print in Pāṇini’s Aṣṭādhyāyī, serving as explanation of a grammatical point – and was summarily pilloried and rendered unmutual. It then transpired that Mills’ previous-but-one band, Objects Of Desire, deployed the slogan “England will rise again” – which might have worked on a European Cup level in 1996 but not at all in 1993 – and also performed at a Wembley conference of conspiracy theorists entitled “Global Deception”; one of the chief speakers at the latter, William Cooper – the term “illuminati” tells you all that you need to know about him (except that he was shot dead in a gun battle with the Arizona police in November 2001) – is thanked in the credits of K.

 

Kula Shaker did not really recover from any of this. The controversy – which Mills later publicly decried – torpedoed the prospects for their then-imminent second album, Peasants, Pigs & Astronauts, and the band split in September 1999. They reformed in 2004 and have subsequently continued to perform and record; this year’s Natural Magick album even restored them to the top thirty. But their moment was perhaps always fated to be brief.