Saturday, 7 December 2024

REEF: Glow

Glow (Reef album) - Wikipedia

 

(#563: 8 February 1997, 1 week)

 

Track listing: Place Your Hands/I Would Have Left You/Summer’s In Bloom/Lately Stomping/Consideration/Don’t You Like It?/Come Back Brighter/Higher Vibration/I’m Not Scared/Robot Riff/Yer Old/Lullaby

 

I wonder if Glow might now be viewed as a nineties classic if Primal Scream had recorded it. As things happened, Primal Scream (with Andrew Weatherall) were racing towards other places at the time and re-emerged later in 1997 with the compelling Vanishing Point.

 

Glastonbury band Reef named themselves as such because they found it was an anagram of Free (the group). All back to 1973, then, or so it was thought, thanks to the era’s vocal espousers of laddism and in great part to a novelty tag on a Chris Evans television programme.

 

Many felt that the surge of Britpop reopened the drawbridge to the pitchfork-wielding vanguard of know-our-place conservatism (John Major was still Prime Minister at this point), weakly masked by alleged irony. But I don’t think there’s anything remotely ironic about Reef; they want to rock and generally scream about doing so.

 

Glow was Reef’s second album and opens with their most famous (and perhaps most misleading) song. “Place Your Hands” is the one everyone remembers, with Gary Stringer’s unquestionably individualistic vocal stylings. A bit like Ocean Colour Scene’s Simon Fowler having recently and accidentally placed his left thumb in a hot toaster, some cynics might crow, or Ozzy Osbourne receiving an unexpected tax bill.

 

“Place Your Hands” is absolutely and unapologetically traditional, as though 1975 hadn’t really happened, and irritatingly it’s as catchy as fuck. I can picture fifteen-year-old mid-nineties lads busy waving their fists and shrivelling up their already narrow shoulders. Oh, and Mr Stringer is singing “Place your hands on my hope,” not whatever fifteen-year-old you thought he might have been singing.

 

But the song doesn’t really usher us towards a drizzly motorcade of trad rock. Stringer’s artful mangling of Jagger and Plant on “I Would Have Left You” is knowingly retro, “weird” instrumental middle section included. I’m not saying I would ever willingly listen to it again, but it’s cleverer than you might have thought. The band are clearly striving for Black Crowes authority – down to hiring George Drakoulias as producer – and their artistic range is focused (if slightly narrowly so).

 

“Summer’s In Bloom” is ostensibly ridiculous, with Stringer evidently having fun rolling all those “r”s, but I can’t bring myself to dislike it; there’s a spirit at work here. On big ballads like “Consideration” – probably Glow’s best song – he touches James Dean Bradfield territory. “Come Back Brighter” is really rather catchy with its bouncy electro undertow and subtle guitar dissonances which bring, in that order, Denim and Elastica’s “Car Song” to mind.

 

By the time we reach “I’m Not Scared” – I prefer the Eighth Wonder/Pet Shop Boys and Ladytron ones myself, but anyway… - one realises that, yes, Stringer’s voice can be wallpaper razor annoying and the musical moves relatively traditional. But for the fifteen-year-olds who didn’t necessarily know about the older stuff – especially in what were still, to all intents and purposes, pre-internet days – but who felt frustrated about I don’t know what, all they heard was this huge, confident rocking sound and an angry guy yelling at them, and that turned out to be precisely what they wanted.

 

“Robot Riff” is an extended jam – not that far removed from Neu! or even Stereolab, with its circular bassline – which sees the band tentatively venturing into freeform territory (full credit due to guitarist Kenwyn House). Meanwhile, “Yer Old” is Reef’s perfect fuck-you riposte to ageing people like me who would pick holes in their valour. I note that in places, Stringer sounds remarkably like James Murphy of/a.k.a. LCD Soundsystem, and the song could act as a pre-emptive answer to “Losing My Edge” (i.e. “we’re more relevant to the kids than all the ageing fuckers you know”).

 

Overall, while Glow is not my particular cup of musical Roobios, it would be an imperfect launching pad for a diatribe against laddism and Britishness. They rock and people of our age will almost certainly find them intolerable. That is perhaps their chief point. If this was your first chance to hear guitar rock of any kind, then you weren’t going to be worried about whether it lived up to the good old days of A Nod’s As Good As A Wink… or Fire And Water. You were young and pissed off, and Gary Stringer sounded exactly as pissed off as you. Reef have continued, albeit with a different line-up these days, and the singer, who has long since sworn off both liquor and drugs, seems these days to be an amiable fellow. Another equivocal review, then, but I almost certainly wasn’t the right person to review it. If anything, Glow points the way to the unabashed 21st-century rock revivalism of the likes of Kings Of Leon, but with a much more inventive template. And I would much rather listen to Reef’s “Lullaby” than to the one by The Cure.

Saturday, 30 November 2024

ORIGINAL CAST RECORDING: Evita: The Complete Motion Picture Soundtrack

Evita (soundtrack) - Wikipedia

 

(#562: 1 February 1997, 1 week)

 

Track listing: A Cinema in Buenos Aires, July 26, 1952/Requiem for Evita/Oh What a Circus/On This Night of a Thousand Stars/Eva and Magaldi-Eva, Beware of the City/Buenos Aires/Another Suitcase in Another Hall/Goodnight and Thank You/The Lady’s Got Potential/Charity Concert-The Art of the Possible/I’d Be Surprisingly Good for You/Hello and Goodbye/Peron’s Latest Flame/A New Argentina/On the Balcony of the Casa Rosata (Part 1)/Don’t Cry for Me Argentina/On the Balcony of the Casa Rosata (Part 2)/High Flying, Adored/Rainbow High/Rainbow Tour/The Actress Hasn’t Learned the Lines (You’d Like to Hear)/And the Money Kept Rolling In (and Out)/Partido Feminista/She Is a Diamond/Santa Evita/Waltz for Eva and Che/Your Little Body’s Slowly Breaking Down/You Must Love Me/Eva’s Final Broadcast/Latin Chant/Lament

 

(Author’s Note: This review is based on the complete two-CD soundtrack recording; a single-disc seventy-seven-minute-long compilation of highlights was released as Evita: Music From The Motion Picture)

 

It would have been about 8:35 on the evening of Thursday 13 September 1973 when Tim Rice, driving to a dinner party for which he was already late, switched on his car radio to hear the last ten minutes or so of the fifth episode of a six-part documentary series on BBC Radio 4 entitled The Spellbinders.

 

This episode, which was written by Gillian Freeman, perhaps best remembered as the author of the 1961 gay biker novel The Leather Boys (which she published under the pseudonym of Eliot George; the novel was filmed three years later, and the movie is directly referenced in at least three songs by The Smiths), concerned Eva Peron, a name hitherto largely unknown to Rice, except that he remembered her appearing on a stamp – as a boy his principal hobby was stamp collecting.

 

The other five episodes of what the Radio Times billed as “Six studies in 20th-century magnetism” focused on Aimee Semple McPherson, David Lloyd George, Malcolm X, Dr Goebbels – and James Dean, whose 1955 passing Rice recalled from the period he spent in Japan at the time. As that list of names may suggest, there are two sides to the magnetism coin, good and evil. Who falls under which category is largely a subjective decision.

 

Yet Rice was stimulated by the story of another larger-than-life figure who died too early sufficiently to take the idea of a musical about Eva Peron further. He proposed the idea to Andrew Lloyd Webber as a possible follow-up to Jesus Christ Superstar. But Webber was dubious about writing another musical about an icon who died in their early thirties. He demurred and went off to write the musical Jeeves with Alan Ayckbourn. Ironically, Rice and Lloyd Webber had begun composing such a musical, but Rice pulled out because he was worried that his lyrics were nowhere near as witty as the words of Wodehouse. Jeeves premiered in the West End in April 1975 and lasted barely a month; its 1920s dance band arrangements proved unattractive to a mid-seventies audience reared on rock (however, Lloyd Webber and Ayckbourn revisited the idea twenty-one years later, rewriting the show almost entirely under the new name of By Jeeves, and it did eventually become a great success).

 

A wounded, melancholy Lloyd Webber returned to Rice and agreed to work on the Eva Peron idea. As with Jesus Christ Superstar, the pair decided to road-test the show as a double concept album in order to see whether anybody might be interested in staging it. Rice in particular had already done some preparatory research; he travelled to Argentina and interviewed various interested parties – many of Eva’s contemporaries were still alive and well in 1974, and he had to conduct pretty much all of that research under careful cover – as well as watching, on at least twenty separate occasions and by arrangement with the director, Carlos Pasini Hansen’s 1972 ITV documentary film Queen Of Hearts, narrated by Diana Rigg, which laid out the broad lines for the musical’s characterisation of Eva – not a huge amount of time was spent analysing the political undertow of Peronism; the film seemed more interested in Eva as a quasi-saintly phenomenon (a pre-Diana Diana?). So impressed was Rice by Eva’s story that he even named his first daughter after her.

 

What Rice says he did not do, at the time, was read Mary Main’s The Woman with the Whip, a profoundly unsympathetic and perhaps biased and incomplete portrait of Eva. What he almost certainly read was a 1969 collection of essays by the historian Richard Bourne under the umbrella title of Political Leaders of Latin America. I know this work well because my father borrowed it at the time from Motherwell Library. The subjects of Bourne’s studies included both Eva Peron and fellow Argentinian Che Guevara.

 

Rice was tickled by the thought of getting two icons into one show – even though the original character of “Che” is only Guevara by implication, and did not explicitly become Che Guevara until Harold Prince insisted that he do so. Much like Judas in Superstar, he is a rather cynical narrator who remains present for virtually the whole musical to offer his contrary observations on Eva’s rise and fall. Like Superstar, Lloyd Webber and Rice originally wanted their Judas, Murray Head, to take the role, but a few demos convinced them that maybe he wasn’t going to repeat the magic. Instead they turned to the performer then currently playing Judas in the West End, one C.T. Wilkinson – who subsequently became a huge musical star (and a Canadian) as Colm Wilkinson – and knew he was the Che they really wanted. He does an excellently gruff job, by the way, his voice midway between Rod Stewart and Phil Minton.

 

For Eva, they had been impressed by the television series Rock Follies, and persuaded one of its stars, Julie Covington, to portray the role on record (they also hired a few of the Rock Follies backing band as musicians, including Ray Russell, Tony Stevens and Peter van Hooke). Paul Jones, one of several sixties Britpop idols to appear on the album, agreed to play Juan Peron. For the role of the tango singer Agustin Magaldi who, in the show, if possibly not in real life, took the young Eva under his wing and to Buenos Aires, Lloyd Webber travelled one evening to the cabaret nightspot Bunny’s Place in Cleethorpes to witness Tony Christie in concert; although his first run of hits had mostly dried up by 1975, Christie remained a huge and popular live attraction. Impressed by his performance, Lloyd Webber invited Christie to participate.

 

The recording of the Evita album took place between April and September of 1976. Many distinguished performers took part, including Hank Marvin (who plays a very characteristic guitar solo on “Buenos Aires”), Neil Hubbard and then-Wings guitarist Henry McCullough (both formerly of The Grease Band, the original backing group on the Superstar album) as well as session veteran Joe Moretti on guitars, drummer Barry Morgan and keyboardist Ann Odell of Blue Mink, principal drummer Simon Phillips (then principally a member of the Brian Eno/Phil Manzanera art-rock supergroup 801) and stalwarts Mike Moran on keyboards and David Snell’s rather acidic harp (note its discordance on “Buenos Aires” and “Goodnight and Thank You,” as well as its unmoored interlude three-quarters of the way through “I’d Be Surprisingly Good for You”). There are blink-and-miss-them vocal cameos from the Dave Clark Five’s Mike Smith, Mike d’Abo – who succeeded Paul Jones as Manfred Mann’s lead singer – and a not very recognisable (possibly for contractual reasons?) Roy Wood (not to mention from Rice himself, as one of the stuffy officers on “Rainbow Tour”). One of the backing singers is Stephanie de Sykes.

 

The double album of Evita was released in November 1976, as was a taster single of Covington’s “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina.” Originally recorded under the none-too-persuasive title of “It’s Only Your Lover Returning,” Rice borrowed a phrase from earlier on in the show, and it sounded infinitely more convincing.

 

Even if Eva’s job on that song is only to convince her audience that spurious bullshit is true. Here is an edited and frankly reworked version of what I wrote about Covington’s single on the Popular website back in May 2008. You can, however, imagine it as coming from a never-to-be-written book entitled Was Michael Powell Right?: High Tory Principles As Applied To Art.

 

For a pair of writers who were at the time Conservative (with a capital C) in both background and instinct, you could easily mistake Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice for a couple of severely disillusioned Marxists. Jesus Christ Superstar seems for most of its duration to be an unyielding attack on unregulated capitalism and the imperialism to which it gives deliberate birth, as well as the occupational hazard of the destruction of visionaries which is one of its most characteristic by-products.

 

But Lloyd Webber and Rice were primarily fascinated with the spectacle (are we proceeding down the equally inevitable road to Roland Barthes here?) and consequences of how people and things looked. Looks and appearances, and the judgements made on their primary basis, are the backbone of their fascination; the conjecture that the fate of the world can turn on the hue of Joseph’s coat, or the wiriness of Christ’s hands, or the hips of Eva Peron; what these are all trying to project, even if they’re projecting nothing. Perhaps this is to where humanity descends, in the end; the strength of belief and faith being entirely dependent upon how good a spiel their would-be saviour can weave. If the message is bright and loud enough, believers will gladly overlook the lack of actual content, the fatal avoidance of commitment, the shades behind the smile. As has recently been demonstrated (I have added and italicised that final sentence now).

 

Evita is an examination of a bright, possibly naïve and certainly corrupted mind; it doesn’t bother itself overmuch with the inherent corruption in post-war Argentinian politics, and how the subsequent bloody military history of Argentina fit in so astutely with the irony that the individual primarily responsible for dismantling their junta roundabout, via the Falklands war, was Margaret Thatcher (who as Leader of the Opposition in mid-1978 was profoundly impressed by the West End production of Evita, which may have helped to inspire her subsequent perspective on things). The whole musical might represent a dream in which “Eva Peron” is only an imagined existence – yet that existence was real, and its side-effects reverberated for decades as a result.

 

“Don’t Cry For Me, Argentina” is a request, or possibly a plea, for redemption in the resentful eyes of the people out of whom she rose; she has done too many bad things, turned too many backs, is centimetres away from tossing them fragments of semi-swallowed cake. But its pleading is the special kind reserved for the dock; not a genuine cry to be touched, but the cornered, faintly embarrassed confession of someone who’s been caught in the act. Or possibly her big chance to win the gullible fuckers over.

 

Fittingly, the music doesn’t have much to do with Argentina, apart from a very subtle tango rhythm; the song begins with a solemn tabula of low and very English strings, as though Elgar or Delius had been commissioned to write yet another commemoration of the prematurely departed. Then the voice of Julie Covington enters; hesitant, unstable, she whimpers: “It won’t be easy/You’ll think it strange…/That I still need your love after all that I’ve done.” Then, a pause for breath: “You won’t believe me.” The voice is an ideal one; Covington had floated unobtrusively between the worlds of theatre and folk-pop for some years (see for instance 1971’s “My Silks And Fine Arrays”); it is a voice which knows both how to act and how to believe.

 

Brass takes over from strings in the second verse as Covington slowly attempts to assert herself: “I had to let it happen/I had to change,” then, with a sense of real anger slowly radiating into her tone, “Couldn’t stay all my life down at heel.” She immediately tries to excuse that incipient rage: “But nothing impressed me at all/I never expected it to,” and she sounds nowhere near convincing or convinced.

 

Strings return for the chorus: “Don’t cry for me, Argentina/The truth is I never left you.” But what is the nature of that crying – is it mourning for a lost princess, or the baying of a disgruntled mob, crying for her blood? “I kept my promise,” she sings, again on the defensive, before lowering her voice to something like a threat, “Don’t keep your distance.”

 

In the third verse, acoustic guitar and rhythm enter, together with a pan-pipe synthesiser, providing a direct link to post-Fairport Convention modes, she continues to justify herself (-love?): “And as for fortune, and as for fame/I never invited them in.” Later her voice softens again, “They’re not the solutions they promised to be/The answer was here all the time…I love you…and hope you love me.” It is among the least believable “I love you”s in all of pop. The music stops, like a curtain silently sweeping open to reveal the bloodied mouths and the gallows beneath the balcony – I think of Scott Walker’s concept of Clara Petucci, of the terrified sparrow trapped in the room; the difference being that Eva has walked straight into it, voluntarily and ecstatically (and the general tenor of the orchestration, for example the ‘celli and basses as rhythm at the end of each chorus, suggests that Webber was more than somewhat familiar with Walker’s late ‘60s work).

 

Over a drone Covington makes her central titular plea, as though her life will depend upon the outside response – as proved to be the case. There is another brief and rhetorical but seemingly eternal pause, before a chorus, evidently dreaming of Gerontius once again (think of the reinstatement of Elgar as revolutionary as proposed in Alan Clarke’s 1975 TV film Penda’s Fen), hums wordlessly, like a deliberating jury (actually, I say to my 2008 self, this is not what happens – Eva appears to falter, unable to complete her address, so the masses take up the song on her behalf, helping her along, rendering her more powerful). Finally orchestra and rhythm join to frame Covington’s concluding chorus.

 

Then the music glides to a complete halt, and Covington, now seeming for the first time genuinely distressed, whispers: “Have I said too much? There’s nothing more I can think of to say to you,” and is answered by trilling, descending flutes which sound less Latin American, more Le Sacre du Printemps…and then she turns to her jury, to her people, to us, and intones with careful slowness and gravity: “But all you have to do is look at me to know that every word is true.” The syllables of each of these last four words she stretches out over one bar line apiece; the tympani strikes a roll and she is left to ponder her fate.

 

Or is she? As the orchestra plays the melody fortissimo, now reminiscent (or so my father thought) of Aaron Copland’s setting of Streets Of Laredo, there is suddenly a terrible sense of emptiness and not a small degree of numb shock as we realise that Eva has been addressing nobody, no one at all, even though she is pretending to address what might have been tens of thousands beneath the Casa Rosata; the mental camera cuts to the dressing table mirror and she has been rehearsing the whole thing. As with Peter Sellers’ “Party Political Speech,” we gradually understand in retrospect that all Evita has been doing for the last five-and-a-half minutes – the era of the long single hadn’t quite died away with “Bohemian Rhapsody,” after all – is sweetly and grandly saying nothing at all, save a string of crowd-pleasing clichés which in truth promise and pledge not an atom of what remains of her soul.

 

The song and record end, on the single, with the orchestra on a question mark of an unresolved chord, as is only right, and its full meaning can only be grasped by listening to it in tandem with its sister song, “Oh What a Circus,” a long hiss of post-mortem cynicism allotted to Che Guevara (played in the West End by David Essex) set to the same tune but at twice the speed and intensity (converted into a 1968 orchestral maximalist pop song by producer Mike Batt, perhaps with the arrangement of the Kursaal Flyers’ 1976 hit “Little Does She Know” still fresh in his mind) it was a top three single in the summer of 1978). But “Don’t Cry For Me, Argentina” has endured as one of the greatest exposés of bullshit masquerading as emotion in all of pop; the song itself is sad enough to make you cry, and then you check yourself – at what, or whom, are you crying, and why? How much “reality” do you actually desire to derive from a piece of music; and, to extend the argument into the fuller world, look – that is, look – at those recent speeches in the United States of America that we already know only too well, and in most cases are now ducking to avoid, and examine the minute slivers of genuine meaning which exist in either, or neither.

 

That is broadly what I wrote about the single of “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina” sixteen-and-a-half years ago. Yet in the context of its parent album it scares the shit out of one, framed as it is by two semi-spoken setpieces on the Casa Rosata balcony; the newly-anointed Juan Peron assuring us that he is not going to stand for any nonsense, and – far more frighteningly – the shrieking, demotic, ecstatic Eva, marvelling at how fully the crowds have swallowed and digested her sentimental Newspeak, going back out and screaming in dissonant concordance with the masses. Diamanda Galas was never more certain of the Devil than Covington’s Eva is at that, her peak moment of existence.

 

The 1976 double album of Evita, which managed a week at number one on the NME album chart in February 1977 (but only peaked at number four in the “official” chart), is an extraordinary, if not overly consistent, thing. It is Carlos Pasini Hansen himself whom you hear in the opening cinema dialogue – one of those low-budget and probably dubbed dime store melodramas in which the younger Eva Duarte would have appeared – and this sequence immediately poses the question: what is spectacle, and do we prefer to venerate, commemorate and worship a spectacle rather than, or in place of, a flawed human being? Note that when the celluloid is allowed to run down and the death announcement succeeds it, there is no audience to hand.

 

The “Requiem” sequence comes as a shock, as was presumably intended; bitonal choruses and booming percussion, a tortuous guitar playing a line we will hear again, in an entirely different context, at show’s end. It’s a bit like the Mahavishnu Orchestra in Goth conference with Britten’s Noye’s Fludde (my school, Uddingston Grammar, staged the latter in the spring of 1976; Britten himself was very ill indeed by November of that year and I imagine was in no fit state to receive or hear Evita). I also discern a subtle Mike Westbrook influence; one of his favourite devices (as used in the opening moments of “View From The Drawbridge” from 1975’s Citadel/Room 315) is for melodies in two entirely contrasting keys to come into accidental contact with each other; the boat sails down the river and we hear a chorus of “Fishers Of Men” as we pass a school.

 

As this sequence escalates its dissonances and threatens to erupt completely, the cloud suddenly breaks and we have the original “Oh What a Circus” in which Che grumpily introduces himself as the one-man Marxist chorus, standing at the side of the stage, commenting on the action and gesturing to the audience: “can you believe this crap?” On this occasion, however, he is interrupted by a teenage girl who appears to be the reincarnated Eva – or perhaps it’s the actual teenage Eva, taking us back towards the beginning of her story.

 

Following which her story is duly told, of how she was a bastard, how her father’s “legitimate” family ordered hers to remain out of sight at his funeral, and how desperate and determined she was to escape her lowly chains. She “befriends” Magaldi – there is the hint of blackmail in the chorus’ reference to a questionable affair with another girl, as well as scarcely-suppressed rage at the implication that she may well have been taken advantage of, or much, much worse, in swinging Buenos Aires – Sammi Cammold’s recent New York production of the show makes no bones about the probability of the young Eva having been sexually abused.

 

Magaldi himself is presented as a faintly ludicrous and slightly sad figure; the initial “On This Night of a Thousand Stars” is delivered to a small and unenthusiastic audience and Che makes catty remarks about how he’s not going to be remembered for his voice. The problem here is that for the character to work, Magaldi really has to be a lousy singer – whereas Tony Christie, if anything, sings the song too well. In fact he sings the song beautifully, like an absolute pro, with subtle nods to the Elvis of “It’s Now Or Never” (but isn’t this supposed to be the thirties?) and by the time he reproduces the ending of the song at the 1944 charity concert where Juan and Eva finally meet (which he never actually did, having died six years previously) the audience (even if recorded) clearly loves him.

 

But Eva works and most likely screws her way up to the top, as “Goodnight and Thank You” is not shy of reminding us. Once she hooks up with Peron, it’s time for the latter’s former mistress (explicitly a schoolgirl, hmm…) to be sent back to school (of sorts). That mistress is voiced by Barbara Dickson – Rice and Lloyd Webber didn’t think she was quite right for Eva, but did give her one song to sing. “Another Suitcase in Another Hall,” which they thought was going to be the show’s big hit (it did pretty well commercially, but nowhere near as spectacularly as “Don’t Cry for Me”). In it, Dickson, singing in a register too high for her (since she was supposed to be portraying a teenager – she pointedly lowered the key for subsequent live performances), muses with audible pain about what it means for somebody like her to be constantly thrown out of people’s homes and lives, with little optimism or even plain hope about what’s going to become of her. There is a nub of real sadness here which Eva seems intent on avoiding, at least until such time as she can no longer avoid it.

 

The characterisation of Juan Peron is, I think, an important weak spot. By Rice’s own admission, that character was underwritten, and generally tends to come across as an amiable doofus rather than a ruthless dictator. And Paul Jones is simply too young and happy-sounding to convince as Peron; when first we hear him, he sounds as though he’s strolled in from recording his contribution to Escalator Over The Hill (I wonder how familiar Rice and Lloyd Webber were with Carla Bley and Paul Haines’ masterpiece – an addendum: Jones asked to be involved in Escalator after attending a New York concert given by Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra, of which Bley was effectively the co-leader. One of many major setpieces on their self-titled 1970 debut album was a reading of Haden’s “Song For Che”). He does his not inconsiderable best, but we can never quite believe him, enter into his version of the world.

 

Evita’s first half climaxes in and concludes with “A New Argentina”; this should be a political prophecy as frightening as Cabaret’s “Tomorrow Belongs To Me” but is regularly diverted by Peron’s yes but/no but vacillations, Eva’s furious rebuttals and that dentist’s drill rollercoaster of a fuzz guitar line, as well as Eva briefly taking over Che’s intermittent Basil Exposition plot-explaining function to give a potted history of Peron’s arrest and imprisonment, the public uprising and his subsequent release and political triumph. Covington sings with searing and at times screaming commitment – yes, she really believes this is for the best, even though everybody else can see exactly where it’s all heading.

 

The show’s second half begins with the balcony-framed “Don’t Cry for Me” but we have already been alerted of Eva’s, shall I say, superficiality when it comes to human affairs, be it instant poverty remedies or loving other people. The first act’s attempt at a love song, “I’d Be Surprisingly Good For You” (actually a song good enough for Linda Lewis and ACT to cover subsequently), sounds stiffly slick, like a seventies television commercial (which again I think was the intention). In “High Flying, Adored,” a very pleasing love song if you don’t listen to the words, Che observes how high Eva has risen and how far down she’ll have to fall.

 

Act two of Evita isn’t quite as consistent as its first half; there are several longeurs – “Rainbow High” is a wonderful demonstration of shallow commitment (“so Christian Dior me”; of course the Pet Shop Boys were listening and taking notes) and a firm test of vocal registers and octaves for any singer wanting to tackle the role. However, “Rainbow Tour” is a disappointingly prosaic chat about Eva’s doomed pan-European visits, with most of those countries not exactly keen on having another Mussolini, thank you very much. In addition, Eva’s enthusiasm for the enterprise is seen to diminish markedly – indicating a far, far deeper problem.

 

The show goes on to look at what Eva did and didn’t, or wouldn’t, do. Peronism was a confused political grab-bag into which the worst elements of fascism and communism were deposited and shaken about. Eva seems to have thought it was enough for her simply to be seen, “doing things,” even if the Argentinian economy has to be crashed, seemingly beyond repair, in order to pay for them. “And the Money Kept Rolling In” is a moderate rabble-rouser – imagine the Leonard Bernstein of West Side Story doing “Proud Mary” – where Che, with moderate fury, describes how some of that money seemingly rolls into nowhere and to nobody’s real benefit (except, perhaps, the Perons) and that the enterprise was decidedly shaky, but hey, who cares when you have someone who is a Spiritual Symbol of Doing Things?

 

Throughout most of Evita we hear a grumpy chorus of stuffed-shirt upper-class types who don’t seem to like any music after The Mikado – and you can palpate Covington’s hurt and anger when, early on in the show, she screeches “SCREW THE MIDDLE CLASSES!” She’s doing this only for her beloved shirt-sleeved descamisados.

 

But the Army are unhappy. Unhappy with what they perceive as a crass guttersnipe clawing her way towards absolute authority. Unhappy with Peron for falling for it (and, indeed, her). Above all they’re unhappy with the economy. No, as much as they loathed Eva, there wasn’t anything they could do about her as long as the people were happy and the economy was booming. But by the early fifties Argentina was nearly broke and their patience was running out.

 

Peron, in the show, realises this and argues against Eva running for Vice-President (since he knows that this would lead to their immediate overthrow). Moreover, the main reason why she can’t run is because…her own body is letting her down. She is dying of uterine cancer. Very late on in the show, Eva finally realises that, yes, she actually does love Juan – and yet it’s much, much too late. In the meantime – and perhaps it’s the core of Evita – Che and Eva briefly meet for an imaginary waltz (they never met in real life, but Guevara did once write to Eva sardonically asking if she would buy him a jeep, and apparently also conferred with the exiled Juan Peron in the midst of his mid-sixties Bolivian adventures), fail to square their differences, and conclude – in the manner of a cheery Rodgers and Hammerstein stage song which takes the Then Play Long tale back almost to its very beginning – “There is evil, all around, fundamental – the system of government quite incidental.” It might be the musical’s most frightening moment.

 

So she delivers her final address to the nation, revisiting the closing words of “Don’t Cry for Me,” except, this time, she means them. Ill beyond redemption and drugged, she experiences hallucinations of her previous life before placidly concluding with “Lament” – and suddenly we are back in early seventies Basing Street, and Linda and Richard Thompson performing “The Great Valerio” (“I’m your friend until you use me/And then be sure I won’t be there”). She sings of the children she will never have – and I note that her own mother was given the same diagnosis. Eva was apparently told that to survive she’d need a hysterectomy…but the Spiritual Mother could not be seen as unable to bear children, so she declined, and so she declined. The fashionistas of “Rainbow High,” now undertakers and pallbearers, will endeavour to preserve her body familiar. The show ends as quietly as any musical had done since…West Side Story.

 

The 1976 Evita is a forbidding affair. Nobody really comes out of it in a rosy light. Certainly not Che, who demonstrates that he can be a complete c*nt when he wants to, including making fun of Eva’s dying, and certainly not Eva, so consumed by her own image she hadn’t realised that she had eaten herself – I’ve heard the stories about her final, grotesque days, how she was propped up in a standing position in a literal cage, how she may have been lobotomised at her husband’s request, and so on and so gruesomely forth.

 

The impression appears to be that Rice fundamentally approved of Eva – a poor girl arising from the dirt to make life better for as many people as possible – and less so of Guevara, an upper-class medical student of distinguished ancestry who, it is implied, only went into Marxism because he couldn’t cut it as a capitalist (possibly Evita’s most purposely embarrassing moments come when Che plugs his insecticide; in one such moment, he interrupts Eva’s soliloquy in the manner of a random YouTube or Spotify advertisement). Whereas Lloyd Webber seems not to have liked Eva at all, and Covington pointedly declined to reprise the role on stage because she found that she could not summon one atom of sympathy for her.

 

Hence, when Harold Prince agreed to mount a stage musical of Evita – Rice and Lloyd Webber had sent him a copy of the 1976 album to see whether he might think a stage show feasible; Prince commented that any musical that starts with a funeral can’t be bad – they needed a new Eva for the West End. Out of thousands of applicants the pair picked Elaine Paige, a singer I’d previously only known for appearing on an early-evening BBC1 middle-of-the-road singalong medley series called One More Time! (other regulars included Scotsman Danny Street, session pros like Paul Curtis and Jane Marlowe, and, in later series, a young Hazell Dean) and who at the time of Evita was fed up with session singing and not having much money and was on the point of retraining as a nursery nurse. However, her agent at the time recommended that she go out and buy the Evita album because, in her (agent's) opinion, she was cut out to play Eva.

 

Paige did go out and buy the album, played it over and over and learned it by heart…and after eight exhausting auditions she got the part (almost uniquely among the applicants, she made a point of not singing “Don’t Cry for Me” as a party piece). Although she still only had second billing to David Essex (who was, admittedly, a very big star at the time) as Che, she won the audience over from opening night onward.

 

I am not sure how much of that power is evident on the album of the West End production of Evita which came out in 1978. Irritatingly for awkward historians such as myself, only an album of highlights, as opposed to a complete performance, seems to have been recorded. Essex is far and away the best Che – angry, truculent, self-loathing when he needs to be – and it is he who turns the final “Lament” against itself and adds the sinister spoken coda that, following the military takeover, Eva’s body disappeared for seventeen years. Curtain falls on what was, at Prince’s insistence, a sparse, minimalist set.

 

But it’s difficult to discern the impact that the production itself must have made – “A New Argentina,” for instance, is cut to a mere two-and-a-bit minutes – and Paige largely sounds reserved and in places a little hesitant, as though holding back her full power, or conserving it for the stage. The unlikely figure of Joss Ackland – the voice of a thousand television commercial voiceovers – as Juan actually works, however; he is, after all, supposed to be old enough to be Eva’s father, and we get a little more of Peron’s lecherous savagery communicated. Siobhán McCarthy’s evicted mistress is convincing, but Mark Ryan’s Magaldi is slightly stiff.

 

Prince’s production then transferred to Broadway, although Paige could not repeat her triumph as the Actors’ Equity Association insisted that American performers be used. Prince therefore hired two then-largely unknown performers, Patti LuPone and Mandy Patinkin, to play Eva and Che. At the time Patinkin was known only as an actor and had never sung publicly. LuPone found the show a dispiriting ordeal; “Evita was the worst experience of my life,” she told Jesse Green of the New York Times in July 2007. "I was screaming my way through a part that could only have been written by a man who hates women.”

 

Prince’s chief insistence – apart from getting completely rid of the insecticide subplot – was that the musical’s already rather dated-sounding seventies rock moments (“Dangerous Jade”) be either omitted or modified, a.k.a. their rock elements minimised. He knew that the stage show couldn’t simply be a reproduction of the record, that it had to play more like a “traditional” musical in order to compete with Sondheim et al.

 

Prior to Broadway, the show had some tryout runs in Los Angeles and San Francisco, and perhaps to Prince’s surprise gained a huge gay following; Eva as an Argentinian Judy Garland. On Broadway, backed by relentless television advertising, Evita ran successfully from September 1979 until June 1983.

 

A full cast recording of the production was, thankfully, made. Although many who were there and saw the production speak highly of it, I found it as frustrating as Patti LuPone must have done. She does indeed seem to shout her entire role, rather than sing it or unearth concealed emotion. Patinkin sounds like, well, Patinkin, except when he sounds like Meat Loaf when the music speeds up. Bob Gunton’s Peron sounds fine to me. Unfortunately, the late Mark Syers played Magaldi for camp.

 

Alan Parker had actually spoken with Rice and Lloyd Webber about the possibility of doing a movie of Evita not long after the 1976 album had come out. Robert Stigwood, who had unsuccessfully tried to persuade the pair to write a musical about Peter Pan in 1972, was the producer of the West End production of Evita and, round about 1980, very much wanted Parker to direct the film; having just made Fame, however, Parker was loath to commit to another musical so soon (although he did direct The Wall in 1982).

 

After that the film rights were up in the air, open to all comers. In 1981 Jon Peters tried to convince Stigwood that he could co-produce a movie of Evita and persuade his then partner Barbra Streisand to star in it; however, Streisand had seen the Broadway production and was deeply unimpressed by what she perceived to be a sympathetic portrait of a fascist. Then, remembering the success they’d had with the film of Tommy, Stigwood hired Ken Russell to direct. Various actresses and singers were auditioned – Russell was keen on getting Liza Minnelli to play Eva (speaking of “an Argentinian Judy Garland”; Russell screen-tested her using blonde wigs and custom-made period gowns) but Stigwood, Rice and Paramount Pictures were insistent that Elaine Paige should do so; Russell was dropped from the project following further disagreements – he had begun rewriting the screenplay without consulting anyone else, recasting the character of Che as a newspaper reporter and staging “Waltz for Eva and Che” in a pair of criss-crossing hospital gurneys (Eva being treated for cancer, Che having just been beaten up by rioters).

 

Stigwood then approached various other directors, including Herbert Ross (who went off and made Footloose instead), Richard Attenborough (who thought the project impossible), Alan J Pakula and Hector Babenco, without any success. In 1986 Madonna, bringing her into the story six thousand or so words in, came to Stigwood’s office sporting a forties hairdo and period gown to show how good an Eva she would be; she also expressed the preference that Francis Ford Coppola direct.

 

In 1987, however, Oliver Stone began to express interest in making an Evita movie. Madonna met with both Stone and Lloyd Webber but insisted on rewriting the score and retaining script approval, so Meryl Streep was then approached. Stigwood commented that Streep learned the entire part in one week and as a singer and actress was “sensational” and “staggering.” However, the film’s parent company, Weintraub Entertainment Group, dropped the project after suffering several recent box-office flops. Stone then took the film to Carolco Pictures, but Streep’s demands became more numerous, and although they were agreed to, she dropped out of the project for “personal reasons” (ten days after dropping out, she called Stone’s people to inform them she had changed her mind, but Stone had become fed up and moved on to filming The Doors).

 

Disney acquired the Evita film rights in 1990 and were set to begin filming, again with Madonna in the lead role. However, plans were cancelled in 1991 when the film looked set to go some five million dollars over-budget. Ownership rights then changed hands again, but in 1994 Stigwood finally managed to persuade Alan Parker – remember him? – to both produce and direct. Parker was determined to ignore Stone’s alterations to the story and ensured that the film would be more solidly based on the original 1976 album; however, Stone protested that much of the script that was used was actually his, and, following a dispute, Parker was legally obliged to share a co-writing credit with him.

 

Stone had previously met with the then Argentinian president Carlos Menem back in 1988. In 1995 Parker also paid a visit to Argentina to see Menem, who said that, although he had reservations about the project, he would permit filming but not within the Casa Rosata itself, and advised Parker that there were likely to be protests from diehard Peronists, as turned out to be the case.

 

Antonio Banderas was the first major star to be hired for the film, as Che; indeed, he had been pencilled in to co-star from the Disney days. Parker de-Guevaraised the character and had him assuming more of an everyman observer role; if Evita “was Argentina,” then Che could stand for “the Argentinians.” For the role of Eva, Glenn Close was considered, then Streep again, but Madonna sent Parker a four-page letter explaining why she would be perfect for the part, together with a copy of the video for her “Take a Bow.”

 

Parker took Madonna on, but on the firm understanding that he, not she, would be in charge. Lloyd Webber was sceptical about her singing ability and insisted that she take formal lessons; these would have a direct effect on her post-Evita work. Rice, however, was adamant that Madonna was the right choice for Eva; he said that he wasn’t looking for “a singer” per se, but rather someone who could sell the songs. Perhaps he realised that Madonna would, in large part, be singing about herself.

 

Madonna herself travelled to Buenos Aires shortly before starting filming, speaking with those friends, relations and contemporaries of Eva who were at the time still alive. Midway through filming she discovered that she was pregnant with Lourdes. She found the filming experience uniquely intense. Jonathan Pryce was hired to play Juan, Jimmy Nail to play Magaldi.

 

After the film had been wrapped up, the next job was to record the songs in the studio. Madonna and Banderas were both petrified, Madonna so much so that she found the prospect of singing in front of a large orchestra intimidating; she was used to singing to prerecorded backing tracks. Following a crisis meeting, Parker and Lloyd Webber agreed that she could record her vocal tracks separately and take alternate days off recording. Despite thorough training with vocal coach Joan Lader, all of Madonna’s songs had to be taken down in key in order to accommodate her relatively limited vocal range. Interestingly, the music producer was Nigel Wright – who had also produced Robson & Jerome.

 

Musically, the soundtrack very much takes its lead from the 1976 original, as Parker had intended; “Dangerous Jade,” excised from all stage productions, reappears as “Peron’s Latest Flame.” “The Lady’s Got Potential” deletes all references to insecticide and capitalism. The musical chairs shuffle of “The Art Of The Possible,” written for the stage, appears as an interlude between “Charity Concert” and “I’d Be Surprisingly Good For You.” Elements of previous manifestations of the show appear in “Partido Feminista” and the children’s choir of “Santa Evita.”

 

However, a lot of stuff gets lost, possibly to placate the Argentinian authorities so that they could get permission to film on the actual balcony of the Casa Rosata; the “which means” punchlines of “Goodnight and Thank You” are mostly missing, the messy economic mismanagement of “And the Money Kept Rolling In” gets overlooked.

 

Most problematically, Madonna now gets “Another Suitcase in Another Hall,” and out of sequence – it is now a very long way away from “Hello and Goodbye.” While there is a logic to this – the young Eva seeing her life evaporate in endless quick-change liaisons – it has to be said that the seventeen seconds the then-still unknown Andrea Corr gets, as the actual ejected mistress, at the end of “Hello and Goodbye,” are emotionally cutting and might see directly into a rotting and hollow heart. Then again, might not the mistress be just a mirror reflection of Eva herself (and Madonna singing the song balances out with the harrowing reprise of the chorus that she offers at the end of “Your Little Body’s Slowly Breaking Down”)?

 

Rice and Lloyd Webber were also asked to come up with a new song in order to straighten out a few loose narrative ends (and also to qualify for an Oscar); “You Must Love Me” sometimes sounds like an instruction but Madonna generally makes it clear that this really is love and she needs it to be confirmed and reciprocated while she is still capable of receiving it - although the song was subsequently, and far more convincingly, recorded by...Elaine Paige. However, Madonna does a good Julie Andrews on the excitedly morbid “Waltz” and surprisingly negotiates the low lines of “star quality” in “Buenos Aires” and “Rainbow High” more securely than other Evas have managed.

 

Of the other major performers, Banderas’ Che is perhaps misguidedly recast as a Where’s Wally?-type invisible man of the people and retreats to conservatism at picture’s end. Vocally he has the authentic Hispanic accent but he doesn’t cut as deeply or viciously as Essex did. Jimmy Nail I thought an improbable Magaldi – who certainly wouldn’t have indulged in any dalliances with teenagers, but that’s the licence which telling a story buys you – but “On This Night” sounds closer to its tango roots than before, and Nail makes a nice switch-up between his two readings; the first is quavery and uncertain, the second more assured (but isn’t he already a ghost in 1944? Is that one of my hospital nightmares recurring, that second reading – the ghost of Danny Street in the dark, lit up in a packed stadium?). Jonathan Pryce is by some distance the best Juan; he sounds genuinely ominous in the first balcony sequence, yet deeply compassionate when he knows Eva’s life is ending. The arrangements and musicianship are punchily-defined and inventive – Courtney Pine drops by on occasional saxophone, and the lead guitar on “Requiem” is recognisably that of Gary Moore.

 

As for Madonna? Well, I think she plays the part as though auditioning to play the lead in Evita, much as Eva seemed to be auditioning for the part of Argentina’s “Spiritual Mother.” Her vocal range is fairly narrow, but somehow her emotions become intensified as a consequence – she knows that she needs to concentrate more - and she seems to burrow to Eva’s hollow core pretty accurately (because she, Madonna, knows she might be Eva’s reincarnation?); on the closing “Lament” she is as wrecked as the Kristin Hersh of “Delicate Cutters.” She sounds angry when she needs to be angry. The calling card of “Buenos Aires” could have gone on her first album. I’ll get back to her “Don’t Cry for Me” shortly.

 

But what does all, or any of this, tell me about Eva Peron and the cult that has grown up around her? Before Evita, few non-Argentinians knew who she was, whereas every Argentinian, for better or (usually) worse, did. I have listened to, watched and read so much, including Tomás Eloy Martínez’s supernatural thriller Santa Evita…and still I am no closer to understanding what is supposed to be so great and worldly (as in world-consuming) about her.

 

Perhaps it is to do with Trump having killed harmony, happiness and hope a few weeks ago. Despite all of my efforts, I have failed to evade the fact that Trump saw the Broadway production of Evita six times – it is apparently his favourite musical - and was moved by it so deeply he thought he could run for office and be another Eva.

 

Nor can I escape the probability that this show is asking me to sympathise with a figure who facilitated tyranny and rendered it compatible with sainthood. Hence Evita is either lavish and empty, leaning on the love story and soft-pedalling the inconvenient politics, or is a hugely cynical analysis out of which no characters come out well, pinpointing the limbo where far Right meets far Left and each finds and embraces each other in the centre.

 

It may be an idea to listen to “The Electrician” by the Walker Brothers – a study based in great part on the doings of the Argentine military junta of the mid-seventies - to learn everything that Evita doesn’t, or won’t, tell you (and how great a Juan Peron would the “lemon bloody cola” Scott Walker of Climate Of Hunter have been?). Or to hear Sinéad O’Connor singing “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina” in 1992, as part of what was lazily assumed at the time to be a cover versions vanity project (how many other hit singles are as fearlessly extreme as “Success Has Made A Failure Of Our Home”?), with its backdrop of a lifetime of inflicted pain and inherited grief.

 

Best of all, go to the glorious “Miami Mix” of “Don’t Cry for Me” where Madonna, free from all singing-lesson and preloaded cultural restrictions, captures absolutely the song’s centre of vapid ecstasy, donating all the emotion she withheld, perhaps on purpose, from the ballad reading (which she had to do, shivering with nerves, in front of Lloyd Webber and was convinced that she had made an absolute mess of it). Then look at our world now, and realise how irrevocably it has been shattered by our deathless deference to the calamitous chimera of “images.”

 

"I don't know, though, which version I should keep. Why does history have to be a story told by sensible people and not the delirious raving of losers like the Colonel and Cifuentes? If history - as appears to be the case - is just another literary genre, why take away from it the imagination, the foolishness, the indiscretion, the exaggeration, and the defeat that are the raw material without which literature is inconceivable?"

(Tomás Eloy Martínez, translated by Helen Lane, Santa Evita. London: Doubleday, 1997; chapter 6, 'The Enemy Is Lying in Wait")

Saturday, 23 November 2024

ROBSON & JEROME: Take Two

Take Two (Robson & Jerome album) - Wikipedia

 

(#561: 23 November 1996, 2 weeks)

 

Track listing: What Becomes Of The Broken Hearted/True Love Ways/Something’s Gotten Hold Of My Heart/Elenore/Saturday Night At The Movies/Bring It On Home To Me/You’ll Never Walk Alone/Oh Pretty Woman/Keep The Customer Satisfied/The Price Of Love/Silent Night/What Becomes Of The Broken Hearted (Gospel Version)/Ain’t Misbehavin’/A Nightingale Sang In Berkeley Square/The Kiss Polka

 

“No, this, she felt, was real life and if she wasn’t as curious or passionate as she had once been, that was only to be expected. It would be inappropriate, undignified, at thirty-eight, to conduct friendships or love affairs with the ardour and intensity of a twenty-two-year-old. Falling in love like that? Writing poetry, crying at pop songs? Dragging people into photo-booths, taking a whole day to make a compilation tape, asking people if they wanted to share your bed, just for company? If you quoted Bob Dylan or T.S. Eliot or, God forbid, Brecht at someone these days they would smile politely and step quietly backwards, and who would blame them? Ridiculous, at thirty-eight, to expect a song or book or film to change your life. No, everything had evened out and settled down and life was lived against a general background hum of comfort, satisfaction and familiarity. There would be no more of these nerve-jangling highs and lows. The friends they had now would be the friends they had in five, ten, twenty years’ time. They expected to get neither dramatically richer or (sic) poorer; they expected to stay healthy for a little while yet. Caught in the middle; middle class, middle-aged; happy in that they were not overly happy.”

(David Nicholls, One Day; London. Hodder & Stoughton: 2009)

 

My friend Mark Sinker recently made a pointed observation on Bluesky. In response to some talk about tribute bands getting all the gigs these days, as opposed to new artists, he did suggest that the overwhelming majority of the history of popular music has consisted of, as he puts it, reproductions of reproductions. Palais dance bands copied what they learned from records, households sang and played what they knew from the sheet music. Street peddlers might offer their own variations on known songs but were accepted as a factor of living. Groups starting out, including the Beatles, were obliged to know and be able to play and sing all of the big hits, whether ballads, rockers or novelties.

 

By and large – and pointedly excluding the Beatles – everybody who performed those songs, in whichever manner they opted to perform them, knew in their gut that their version would never be as good as the recorded original (which in itself might be a polished British cover of an American song; consider, for example, the difference between Artie Shaw’s “Begin The Beguine” and the Joe Loss/Chico Henderson rendition of same).

 

Or, if you must go back to the Beatles, think of Ray Morgan’s “The Long And Winding Road,” a minor hit single in 1970 (since the original never received a UK single release). Now, Mr Morgan was something of a veteran of what we might call “the club scene” (early-mid seventies British cabaret clubs being demonstrably different from, say, CBGB’s) and performs “The Long And Winding Road” in the manner, of…well…a club singer, performing for an audience older than the Beatles generation, or systematically alienated people of that generation (the cloakroom attendants who gave up on them after “Strawberry Fields Forever” and instead settled for comfort, familiarity and Humperdinck).

 

Morgan’s record might by some parties be diplomatically described as “cheesy.” Johnny Arthey’s orchestration and the recorded-in-a-telephone-box-six-bathrooms-away production seem to date it instantly. The singer’s voice settles for an even keel rather than the worrying wanderings of McCartney.

 

However, he does sound as though he means it, this song he’s been given to sing – not that McCartney didn’t mean it (his final, grief-exhausted “yeah yeah yeah, yeah” might be the saddest moment of any Beatles record) but Morgan sings the song as though he’s singing for his life, even though he does so in a manner that suggests it is still 1950. His version fades rather than ends, as if he were caught in a loop as fatal as the Presley of “Suspicious Minds.”

 

(For an interesting early seventies parallel, listen to Mike Westbrook’s Solid Gold Cadillac’s 1973 rendition of Frankie Laine’s “I Believe,” still the longest-non-consecutively-running UK number one single – and a song already covered by Robson & Jerome [do you see where we’re going here?] – which might have been intended as a throwaway overgrown student prank, with George Khan’s electric sax throbs and Malcolm Griffiths’ downright insolent trombone solo. Even singer Phil Minton proffers a vaguely hammy talkover reading of the song’s second verse.

 

Yet, somewhere and somehow, Minton begins to believe – ha! – what the song is saying; you can hear it as his voice steadily rises higher and higher and there is no irony at all in how he finishes his performance. The joke? – it isn’t a joke.)

 

I have already spoken, on more than one occasion, about the soundalike hits albums which were allowed to preside in the album charts of the early seventies (that period again) and suggested that they represented a slightly distended variety of folk music insofar as their success proved that what mattered to most people was the song, its very existence, rather than who necessarily sang it or how it was sung.

 

These records possibly also cast the canonical certainty into which rock had already been shoehorned into question. As Dave Thompson says in his excellent extended diatribe I Hate Old Music, Too: How Familiarity & Overuse Killed Our Favorite Music, if critics’ Best Albums Of All Time polls tell people what they ought to like, the charts tend to represent the people’s response to that, which is: thanks, but we’d prefer to stick with those ones…after a while, the chart compilers sought to exclude those albums from their weekly lists, as though they were causing a malodorous embarrassment in the polite drawing room. Lowering the tone, those below-stairs orders.

 

This all takes me back to Mark, and his remark that the whole of what we call pop and/or rock, with its emphasis on ceaseless originality, invention and newness might simply represent “a cultural blip.” For as long as it has existed, music has de facto relied upon reproductions, or their fancier-named cousins “interpretations.” We hear a piece of music and our first instinct, if we find that we do not loathe it, is to copy it, feed it into what might clumsily be termed the societal mainstream (although “aorta” is, I think, a better means of putting it). The song sings something about us to the most intimate and hardwired segments of us, and we carry those songs, bear them subconsciously in our bodies like phantom limbs of narrative.

 

The other factor to consider as 1996 reaches its vaguely messy end is that many of popular music’s consumers had, at that stage, lived through everything that had happened. They were also by biological necessity getting older, and by then had maybe heard and seen enough. So they largely retreated to the elements they knew, which had stirred them long, long ago when they didn’t have to worry about anything life or the world might do with or to them – and in an important way it didn’t matter about who had been responsible for the stirring; it was the evanescent, semi-abstract breeze of the song, blowing through their complete (though not yet completed) histories, which proved to be enough in itself…

 

(q.v. that quote from Nick Tosches’ Dino: Living High In The Dirty Business Of Dreams: “The sum of Dino’s instincts had to do with the old ways, those ways that were like a wall, ways that kept the world lontano, as the mafiosi would say: distant, safely and wisely at bay. That was how he liked it: lontano, like the flickering images on the theater screen that gave him pleasure as he sat alone, apart from them and unknown to them, in the dark.”)

 

…the breeze which would keep them away from the young, who were more frightened of the old than vice versa, from the noisy frontloaded detritus of, oh what do they call it again, British Pop, I say

 

There is an article in The Independent newspaper of 10 December 1995, co-written by a young reporter named Andy Beckett (with Nick Varley), in which “an elderly lady from Hackney named Irene” is spotted in an unspecified North London branch of Woolworth’s with her husband. They are engaging in a lively debate about whether or not to purchase the first Robson & Jerome album, on cassette. The husband is unconvinced but Irene insists they must get it because “it’s got ‘Unchained Melody’ on it.”

 

After a long and thoughtful pause, the husband, perhaps with a degree of reluctance, agrees that they can buy it. About 1,800,000 others thought and did likewise. On further questioning, Irene admits that “We don’t normally buy many tapes” – and there are, overall, very few people who do – but adds, “I just fancied that one. You can hear what they’re singing. What they have on Top Of The Pops is just rubbish – they’re just shouting.” Having buttoned up her green mackintosh, Irene beamingly concludes: “And I’ve got the originals of all these from the Sixties.”

 

Irene, as with so many fans of Robson & Jerome, was chasing a lontano, attempting to rediscover and recapture the breeze which had bewitched and entranced her a third of a lifetime before; “Unchained Melody, “White Cliffs Of Dover” and “I Believe” have a provenance which stretches some way before “the Sixties” but the timescale actually isn’t very relevant here – what matters is this utopia called “the Sixties” which serves as shorthand for younger and (so it is hoped) easier (to understand, if not to live through) times.

 

It is a central and utterly unavoidable fact of life that humans get older. It comes to us all, as David Peace had Bill Shankly say, and what matters is how we individually deal with it. Do we give up and shelter in the past, or try with intact dignity to keep pushing ahead? A time shelter (see Georgi Gospodinov) may prove a suffocating bunker which might, if unchecked, erase us all.

 

Or, as with the two main protagonists of David Nicholls’ One Day, we systematically “grow up” with remorseful, melancholic reluctance. It is difficult to sum up that novel without offering a digest of its plot, which is what Wikipedia and Google are for. Both principal characters are, I think, fundamentally unlovable, except perhaps by each other, and the contrivances which keep them linked throughout two decades, or indeed bring them together in the first place, are somewhat mechanical and unlikely.

 

In the Independent article I mentioned above, the adjective most used – and it repeats with the rhetorical resistance of a dagger – is “polite.” Robson & Jerome’s version of “Unchained Melody” is “polite,” as is their first album. Their function as popular entertainers is not to disturb or disrupt. Not to cause a fuss. Not to upset anybody.

 

The procedural in One Day seems to wind down – not up, as some readers, and possibly the author himself, would prefer us to believe – from the time of life when one cares loudly and persistently about things which matter (racism, sexism, the environment, indie pop) to one where such notions are grinningly (but keep an eye on their eyes) dismissed as childish, sublimated to and superseded by the business of conventional middle-aged, middle-class “life.” A conservatism (possibly capitalise that “c”) which accepts the status quo because it’s too tired to contemplate and act upon any alternative.

 

And yet, when the book comes most alive is, paradoxically, when bad things happen to its main characters. I will not offer any plot spoilers if you have not yet read One Day, but the account of what happens to Dexter Mayhew after the worst of all things happens to him is approximately concomitant with what happened to me in the last few months of 2001. And if, like me, you yawn pre-emptively at the prospect of a chapter entitled “Fathering,” Nicholls very cleverly subverts the expected norm of such situations and shows Mayhew utterly fucking up left, right and centre.

 

Still, just as the dreary and reactionary ending of Hornby’s High Fidelity does – again, let’s put away all that noisome puerile rot and absorb ourselves into the gleeful and unapologetically centrist mainstream – there is the notion that Art Garfunkel is always, always going to triumph over Solomon Burke. This isn’t necessarily the way things go – it’s about different timbres and emotional deployments – but it winds up meaning you make do and mend, go with the flow, settle for twelfth best.

 

And I have little doubt that, had the story of Emma and Dexter played out differently, they’d have ended up having the neighbours round for dinner, set up their karaoke machine and had a pleasant evening singing, or attempting to sing, the songs they know, as opposed to the songs they love (but won’t ever admit it; not at this stage of their lives – it’s far too impertinent). Content over ecstasy (then again, whom exactly am I kidding? It’s what we will all ultimately want. Trust me). Because doing or thinking anything else will drive both parties irrevocably and irreparably mad.

 

All of which leads me, inevitably, to the second Robson & Jerome album, another menu of impolite songs delivered and manufactured as politely as possible. It is as though Simon Cowell, in conjunction with producers and arrangers Mike Stock, Matt Aitken and Nigel Wright – a different SAW – had instructed everyone involved to ruthlessly extract every last atom of punctum from some of the greatest songs that have ever been written, aiming for cast-iron reassurance that the music will not offend the various Irenes, from Hackney and elsewhere, happier to recall Buddy Holly and the Everly Brothers than, say, Jimi Hendrix or Bob Dylan (one could never imagine Robson & Jerome being made to tackle “The Wind Cries Mary” or “Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?” “What Becomes Of The Broken Hearted,” yes, “Cloud Nine,” no).

 

The sales demographics seem to suggest that nobody under the age of forty-five was likely to have bought either Robson & Jerome album, except for housewives in their thirties who fancied them on (or off) the telly and serving soldiers (the duo proved to be really big in Army barracks up and down the land). The fact was that the median age for pop music consumption had steadily increased over the forty or so years of the “rock” era and that the proportion of that amount of consumption devoted to actual “rock” (or any of its outlier neighbours) had diminished almost exactly inversely.

 

And, because people get old, they naturally look back to the music of their youth, or the Selective Amnesia remix of it at any rate, with far greater fondness, and want that youth – at the very, very least, its spiritreproduced. These were people who, like Irene, bought the original recordings of these songs (or, if not the originals, the Righteous Brothers’ cover versions) at the time and maybe just wanted to be reminded of them, to feel reassured in a world which they perceived to be rapidly disintegrating.

 

Because older people generally have more disposable income, they tend to be fussier about what they spend their money on – that may be a paradox, but if you were brought up in the post-war Britain of ration books and make-do-and-mend, that inner fear of nothingness never truly recedes – and what they usually desire or require is an airbrushed photograph of their past rather than a contemporary snapshot (hence, for instance, the multiple hoops through which retro chart shows on the radio have to jump in order to allow for changing tastes – what wowed thirtysomething housewives in 1968 is extremely unlikely to attract their modern equivalents) cancelled performers and so forth). Their past, with the awkward, odd and downright bad meticulously edited out by the sober scalpel of hindsight.

 

Robson & Jerome’s “What Becomes Of The Broken Hearted” is therefore what becomes of a great song after it has been put through the Fairy Snow wash (with added perborate, because Take Two is precisely the sort of album someone like Craig Douglas might have recorded in, say, 1971). As Bob Stanley has already pointed out elsewhere, one knows this version is doomed to fail from its very own introduction, which evens out the deliberately unsettling three-bar prelude to Jimmy Ruffin’s reading (so that you’re immediately and unexpectedly plunged into the Appian Way of misery) to four bars, for no good reason other than potential buyers might find three-bar introductions confusing (see also the stupid 1987 remix of the Temptations’ “Papa Was A Rolling Stone” with all its multi-rhythmic subtleties brutally replaced by thump-thump-thump prescription pacemaker beats, and don’t even get me started on the Was [Not Was] cover).

 

When Jimmy Ruffin sang the song, more or less as a Civil Rights metaphor, or even when Colin Blunstone, with the other Dave Stewart, rendered it as an allegory for Thatcher’s denuded Britain, it felt like a profound soliloquy, complete with a Hamlet-style turnaround in its closing moments (the Ruffin version, anyway; the Blunstone/Stewart reading leads to an inconclusive question-mark of a fadeout), Robson & Jerome perform it dutifully, as though ticking off items on a Somerfield’s grocery shopping list, with no audible evidence of hurt or desertion. Even the video for the song, which enacts what might have been an alternate ending for One Day – no one is innocent – cuts more deeply than the record itself. Even when the San Fernando Valley Community Gospel Choir are roped into the proceedings to provide suitable soulful, passionate and honest back-up, they cannot dispel the record’s underlying nullity, which is not helped by an asinine closing key change, a repeated chant (“NOW DEPARTED! NOW DE-PAR-TED!!”) and a pointless final major key shift.

 

The duo proceeds to work its way through pop music as, presumably, Cowell wanted their audience to remember it. Actually I have just thought of an intriguing alternate-universe parallel for Simon Cowell, especially given that the first record he bought was apparently “Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep” – both men born either side of the beginning of “the Sixties” (1959 and 1961 respectively), both attracted to a warped but curiously correct notion of the priceless disposability of what might seem to be the crassest pop music, both pursuing their very singular individual visions of pop, both in their differing ways deliberately veering away from, or perhaps (respectively) above and below the mainstream. Even on stations like Boom Radio, you never hear any of what can be termed “Cowell Pop”; Pete Waterman has marvelled at the fact that Cowell succeeded in creating his own category of pop music which really had nothing to do with pop music as most people felt and remembered it.

 

It is equally valid to say that you never hear any of what I might term “Lawrence Pop” anywhere either but it is interesting to come to that fork in the road and imagine Cowell taking one path and Lawrence taking another. Go-Kart Mozart is as happily removed from the primary flow of things as Gareth Gates*. I tend to think that both men would have been happier if they’d been about ten years older and ready and available to prosper in that Neil Reid and Handley Family world of the early seventies.

 

(*Obviously this writer finds himself on the Lawrence side of the fence, having followed his music since the first Felt single “Index” when the fifteen-year-old me thought to myself “I could have done that.” Will Hodgkinson’s book about the man, Street-Level Superstar: A Year With Lawrence  – a literal labour of love – is a recommended, if frequently gloomy, read. Think of the man as Derek Bailey’s gauche spiritual nephew but arrive at your own conclusions with regard to much of his behaviour.)

 

How a Take Two administered by Lawrence would have sounded is anyone’s guess, but it would have been infinitely more interesting if markedly less profitable than the Take Two which actually exists. This “Something’s Gotten Hold Of My Heart” positively eviscerates the remotest hint of wonder or blood which Pitney, Cave and Almond variously donated to the song. It isn’t even on the Darren Burn level of commitment. Robson & Jerome recite the song as schoolchildren might do in a Music Appreciation class; the notes are all present, but the soul is a blank. It sounds like A.I. pop.

 

The cull of politesse goes on. “Elenore” is stripped of irony. “Saturday Night At The Movies,” never the best of songs to begin with (look, I saw the Dechmont House Show in the late spring of 1977*, I know what I’m talking about!), is traduced further to spineless slapstick and a ‘phoned-in trumpet solo.

 

(*Annoyingly obscure reference to Uddingston Grammar School “House Shows,” revues of songs in costume which were organised annually when I was a pupil there in the mid-to-late seventies. We were all divided into five “Houses,” each named after different rivers, or more accurately Clyde tributaries, which flowed in and around Uddingston – Calder, Clyde, Kelvin, Dechmont and Douglas. The “Houses” were arranged alphabetically by surname, hence I was in Calder House [for pupils with surnames from A to C). Since participation in those “House Shows” was not mandatory, I never contributed to any of them. I don’t regret not doing so.])

 

While the duo’s attempt at “Bring It On Home To Me” is vocally and emotionally woeful, the song’s orchestral arrangement – presumably done by Nigel Wright – is surprisingly inventive and strikes when strings suddenly swoop up mid-song like a newly-awakened bat and drag the track into a different dimension. Much as David Whitfield did with Mantovani’s orchestra, unfortunately, the voices do not follow the arrangement’s implications at all.

 

That is a rare example of inventiveness intruding into the record. I do not see the point of this “You’ll Never Walk Alone” with its bargain basement synthesiser presets, which neither pauses nor crescendos and provides no useful reassurance at all, simply a faded memory of something that might once have meant something. Which brings me to another comparative observation…

 

Take Two is literally nothing more (or less) than what it says it is and what it is meant to be. The record does not offer interpretations of songs, other than their systemic neutralisation. It does not re-examine songs in ways that give you clues to the singers’ own lives and experiences.

 

In short, and particularly in view of the fact that both records offer versions of “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” Take Two is not Kevin Rowland’s My Beauty (which appeared less than three years later) which latter, much like the B.E.F.’s Music Of Quality And Distinction Volume One, seems to want to render popular music as unpopular and avant-garde as possible. Rowland takes sick-of-hearing-them standards from “The Greatest Love Of All” to “Rag Doll” and turns them inside out to provide a motor for telling the story of how he as a human being related to and was altered by these songs. By the climax of his “I Can’t Tell The Bottom From The Top,” a nearly-forgotten Hollies hit from 1970, he sounds ready to shoot himself. Yet he manages to pull himself out of the morass, or more importantly allows someone else to help out with the pulling, which is precisely why the record should never have lost “Thunder Road,” in which Rowland makes his escape from Hell*.

 

(*I should at this stage overturn the standard line that Bruce Springsteen’s people, or possibly Springsteen himself, said no to Rowland changing the lyrics to “Thunder Road.” What seems far likelier to have happened is that Rowland’s label boss at Creation, who at that stage was still Alan McGee, on account of being Alan McGee, simply put the letter to Springsteen’s people asking permission to change the words in a desk drawer somewhere and forgot to send it. Hence Bruce never actually knew about Rowland’s cover, let alone had heard it, and it was not until many years, and possibly decades, later that he finally got to listen to it and said, that’s fine, go ahead. So the complete My Beauty with “Thunder Road” restored to its rightful place finally appeared in 2020.)

 

Coming out of “Thunder Road,” we find a fine performance of the Marmalade song (and, for many, an actual “anthem”) “Reflections Of My Life,” where Rowland seems as keen as the Spice Girls did in “Take Me Home” to go back to what matters – a performance so good that it was praised fulsomely on YouTube by Junior Campbell, the man who wrote the song. In this context his “You’ll Never Walk Alone” acts as catharsis; that song you’ve heard and maybe even sung millions of times which suddenly, as the last millennium drew to a fretful close, was heard to matter again and viewed as a beacon – a way out.

 

My Beauty was an important album to me in 1999, a point where my life seemed to be collapsing into confused pieces and I…but those thoughts are not for here (far too raw). I was driving into a metaphorical brick wall at around 500 miles per hour and this record stopped me, persuaded me to look at things and perspectives anew and realise…you know, there are ways to dig yourself out of this tunnel – just keep digging (see also “Hunger Games” by Bob Vylan). And I have managed to talk about the album without once mentioning its cover.

 

If Robson & Jerome had attempted such a cover for Take Two they most likely would have been run out of the country, never mind town. In an anti-culture of loaded laddism, My Beauty didn’t really stand a chance (although, again pace the standard story, it actually did somewhat better commercially than was indicated at the time).

 

But Cowell would never have dared to allow them to try that, nor do I think that they would have tried it anyway (it would not be in their character). An avant-garde Robson & Jerome is a contradiction in terms (you cannot picture them tackling “The Electrician”). Therefore we get a largely de-sexed “Oh Pretty Woman” – the “mercy!” remains intact to tickle the housewives but Orbison’s leonine growl after verse two doesn’t – with absolutely no indication that the singers’ emotions have been upended by the woman walking back to him; shock and awe being presumably deemed too unseemly. It’s just a moderately pleasant song about a woman who’s pretty. Perhaps Irene from Hackney never viewed it as anything more than that.

 

Simon and Garfunkel’s “Keep The Customer Satisfied” – then already more than a quarter of a century old – is the most modern this record dares to venture and sounds like a Hot Hits Number Whatever cover. Worse is the video for the song which unsuccessfully attempts to convince us that everybody in the club is raving and going mad over two awkwardly closely-positioned men in fifties suits, standing at close right angles to each other as though marooned in the middle of a non-existent packed train and as if rock ‘n’ roll had never actually happened (as I suspect, deep down, Cowell fervently wishes that it hadn’t). Not even in Jack Good’s direst dreams could such a scenario have come to pass. In its way, the video is as much of a misfire as Streisand’s lounge-act-at-rock-festival routine in A Star Is Born (and if you can amass the strength to read through the endless, unedited and possibly uneditable My Name Is Barbra, you’ll see that Streisand and her people charged an actual fee for admission to this performance; you may not be surprised to learn that she ended up being booed offstage. Laura Nyro she was, and is, most assuredly not).

 

Take Two’s take on the Everlys’ “The Price Of Love” seems to take after Bryan Ferry’s 1976 cover, mariachi trumpet intro inclusive, but the Beat Boom purposiveness of the original is disengaged. The album’s natural end comes with “Silent Night” – since it was almost Christmas; let’s all hold hands solemnly around the tree – but the unanticipated power of its predecessor’s “Danny Boy” is absent and its muted ending (most if not all things about this album are muted) putters out like a prematurely-exhausted fuel tank. Even Bros managed to interpret the song better.

 

As I said, that would seem to indicate the end of this album, but there are four “bonus” tracks still to come. One of those, the “Gospel Version” of “What Becomes Of The Broken Hearted,” is a reprise of track one but minus the rhythm track. Sheer value – I marvel that Cowell didn’t think of putting together a Robson & Jerome Stack-o-Tracks album of instrumental backings (“for EVERYONE IN THE FAMILY to SING ALONG to!”).

 

The other three take Take Two into strange, and not necessarily, intriguing territory, namely that of pre-rock big bands. Of Robson & Jerome’s variation on Fats Waller’s “Ain’t Misbehavin’” – a song that, despite its surface jollity, is actually about a deeply lonely and possibly disturbed man imagining that a lover will eventually materialise in his life, although he seems to be going out of his way to avoid such a thing ever happening in reality – there is little to be said (it shouldn’t be sung as a duet, for a start); they opt for mannered coarseness.

 

Their “Nightingale Sang,” which one of them (Robson?) sings in a manner very akin to Paul Heaton, does not work as an uptempo big band “romp,” and is anyway derailed by a final, pointless and mood-shattering “I know ‘cos I was there!” What are you (Jerome?), James Murphy? These utterly stock-standard big band arrangements are, it has to be admitted, for many people the main stumbling block they have with RAYE’s “Genesis.”, emerging from the lurid darkness of Part II to the chugging light of Part III. Some feel that section spurious, disappointingly conventional and unconvincing. But I don’t know that a throw-it-all-up-under-endless-crisscrossing-lines Mike Westbrook approach would have done anything other than obscure RAYE’s message – and, crucially, one has to watch the song’s video, with the very young schoolchildren inventing their own dances anyway and THEREBY MAKING THE PERCEIVED CLICHÉS WORK ONCE MORE.

 

Not that Take Two is concerned about bringing in light, in its wider meaning. Apart from my patience, it isn’t there to challenge. At least not until we reach its fifteenth and final track, and the record’s real wild card, “The Kiss Polka,” a foxtrot recorded by the Glenn Miller Orchestra for the movie Sun Valley Serenade in August 1941 (on its original 78 rpm release, it was the B-side of “It Happened In Sun Valley”). On Miller’s lively and ebullient original, Paula Kelly, Ernie Caceras and the Modernaires all pitch in with their vocals. Whereas Robson (I think?) simply proves how inept he is at singing jazz, even in its simplified swing form. When Caceras switches into Mexican Spanish, he sounds affectionate and enthusiastic, but Green simply hams it up and aurally resembles a bad seventies television impressionist, with smacking-lips sound-effects which are really beneath contempt.

 

That is, if what or whom we are hearing really is, or was, Robson & Jerome. In his authorised autobiography from 2003, I Don’t Mean To Be Rude, But…, Simon Cowell was less than complimentary about the duo, and the feeling appeared to be mutual. More seriously, allegations were made about whether the two actors actually sang on any of their records. If you listen carefully to Take Two and think you’ve heard one of those voices before somewhere, then you wouldn’t necessarily be wrong, since one of the three session singers drafted in to “help” the pair was Des Dyer, formerly of the band Jigsaw (“Sky High” etc.).

 

In fact, Dyer approached a newspaper with his allegations at the time, and although Mike Stock managed to obtain a court injunction in order to prevent Dyer from telling his story, he did eventually (in 2008) admit that session singers had been involved; Dyer as a surrogate Jerome and two others (as yet unnamed) to cover for Robson in general and also Robson’s high notes. The head of the duo’s record label BMG, one John Preston, also decided to pay £75,000 to Dyer – at Simon Cowell’s direct request – and deducted the differential from Stock’s producing royalties.

 

Nevertheless Stock remained adamant that the actual Robson & Jerome did sing on their own records, that this wasn’t another Milli Vanilli. Yet there is a curiously logical point to all of this - and it's commoner in popular music than you might think - in that it didn't really matter who was actually doing the singing on Robson & Jerome's records; it was the "brand" of Robson & Jerome that mattered, the symbolism of the two providing the "front" to the concept (theirs should not be termed an "act"). They stood there to be seen and were the effective "voices" of the entire project - and, for most of the 1,200,000 people who purchased and presumably adored Take Two (the returns were down somewhat from the record's predecessor but remained outstanding), their palpable presence was enough, in just the same way that hardly any of the Byrds appear on "Mr Tambourine Man" or the hits of Love Affair were largely performed by studio session musicians, or Bobby Farrell was really Frank Farian on all of those Boney M hits you pretended not to like in 1978.


It didn't matter; the appearances were sufficient, since the human species has always judged its fellow humans with its eyes in the first instance. As was the existence of The Song, regardless of who sang it or how it was interpreted and produced, because - and this maybe should have appealed to the stalwart socialists that Robson & Jerome, not so deep down, were and are (even at the time, they made no secret of their political affiliations; Robson Green decried Tony Blair as a shallow fake, Jerome Flynn donated at least £27,000 of the duo's royalties to Greenpeace) - what their music reminded people of was the semi-derelict, on-the-verge-of-being-abandoned notion of communality; a mutually dependent world in which people relied on each other to get everything done, shared the same joys, woes and...songs.


One suspects that Simon Cowell has never voted in an election in his life; he always seems as though he has more urgent and pressing business to which he must attend. But what he inadvertently allowed into the front room of Britain with Robson & Jerome was perhaps the last stand of "the People's Music" - just as the offspring of Robson & Jerome fans discovered that communality in the early work of Oasis, so did their parents make one final, valiant attempt to pull together and unite. Does anyone still care for the music nearly three decades later, other than perhaps those who remember it from their childhood?

 

Because, as I said earlier, that's the odd thing about Cowell pop; you simply do not hear it being played or praised anywhere today. Was it a mirage that never actually mutated into solid matter? Or was the underlying aim, perhaps unknown even to its chief perpetrator, to try to prevent society from falling apart? In his series of Bluesky posts which I mentioned at the beginning of this piece, Mark goes on to mention that just as the post-war rationing consensus began to come apart - the way it does in bad films - the war children simply picked up their parents' washboards and tea chests and proceeded towards skiffle. A new communality unknown to anybody older than the people for whom it was meant. It has never actually...departed.


"Many songs were suppressed during those bleak years, but André Midani, who continued to oversee many of the era's best recordings, has insisted that repression provided Brazilian music with the healthy stimulation of an enemy. A common sentiment expressed in seventies lyrics was 'one day...'; what the singers were waiting for remained unsung, but listeners understood."

(Joe Boyd, And The Roots Of Rhythm Remain: A Journey Through Global Music. London: Faber & Faber Limited, 2024; chapter 7, "Chega de saudade")


Envoi


Simon Cowell offered Robson & Jerome £3 million to record a third album but they declined his offer and returned to acting and "extreme" fishing. For Robson Green, the decisive break came while he was watching an episode of BBC1's Animal Hospital, where a woman came into the practice with two guinea pigs named...Robson and Jerome. "What seems to be the problem?" asked the vet. "It's Robson," the woman replied, "he's not right." Green knew bad karma when he saw it and called a halt to the exercise.


Not long afterwards, on 1 May 1997, the Conservative government of John Major was voted out in favour of the Labour government of Tony Blair, who gained a majority of 179 Parliamentary seats. A compilation album, Happy Days: The Best Of Robson & Jerome, was released in November of the same year. It peaked at number twenty and sold about 100,000 copies.


Though marketed as symbols of Britain at war, Robson Green and Jerome Flynn are actually pacifists.