(#290: 22 October
1983, 3 weeks; 19 November 1983, 2 weeks)
Track listing:
Karma Chameleon/It’s A Miracle/Black Money/Changing Every Day/That’s The Way (I’m
Only Trying To Help You)/Church Of The Poison Mind/Miss Me Blind/Mister
Man/Stormkeeper/Victims
Two observations. First, Colour By Numbers was released in the same blowsy October week as
The Jam’s double greatest hits compilation Snap!,
and duly kept the latter at number two in the chart. While my dutiful buying of
both had no effect on either’s chart position, Culture Club’s triumph did seem
like a natural succession as far as pop was concerned. Paul Weller and Boy
George; two young men brought up at enough of a distance from London to make
the city seem exotic and desirable (both have lovingly recalled exciting
childhood train journeys from suburbia to the capital, and never wanting to
leave), and both musicians with enough ambition and chutzpah to want to
reorganise the pop music they loved into new, relevant shapes, something which
might actually speak to the people who, they hoped, would love or at least
admire them. Beyond that, they were both young men for whom style
(specifically, clothing; both the clothes they wore and the way they wore them)
was of equal importance to music; they regarded the look and sound as
indivisible.
Growing up in Glasgow as I did, too young to go to London
and hang out at Billy’s or the Blitz – not that I would have ever been let into
either – in an environment where reading a book was enough to mark you out as being
potentially gay, never mind how you dressed, I have to admit that The Jam’s way
was closer to my time and inclination than that of Culture Club. I spent the
eighties attempting to dress as smartly as possible, rather than outrageously,
which usually took the form of bright, primary-coloured suits – the sort you
don’t really find these days outside of ludicrously priced limited edition
items in Sloane Street - and suchlike. It was a Mod thing rather than a dodgy
eighties television presenter thing. Moreover, as a naturally introverted fellow,
I never had the cheek or the confidence to do any meaningful networking or push
myself forward in any artistic circles. I’m not an expert, or even competent,
in working the room.
By the time Colour By
Numbers came out, I was still a student, away from London and therefore out
of the perceived centre of early eighties pop activity. But I had learned
enough about Culture Club and what New Pop was becoming, or turning into, to
recognise what I was witnessing. And so it was that, if only for the briefest
of times, Culture Club became to its followers what The Jam had been to their
followers half a decade previously; a touchstone for how to look, how to sound,
and, with any luck, how to live. Snap!
in its original 2-LP (with bonus 7” live EP) form is not quite perfect, but as
a Jam/Weller starter pack it was, and is, indispensable (avoid the
unsatisfactory Compact Snap! CD which
loses key songs like “English Rose,” “The Butterfly Collector” and “Tales From
The Riverbank”; thankfully the record was released on CD in its original form
in 2006). But The Jam no longer existed in 1983, and The Style Council were not
(yet) really as popular as The Jam had been. Whereas Culture Club most
certainly did exist, and Colour By
Numbers sounded bright and confident, looked colourful, and was about as
good, or as great, a pop record as you might find in the later days of the
first wave of New Pop.
My second observation is to do with the 1982 film Tootsie, a light entertainment which
skilfully skates over difficult questions, a movie which treats gender
uncertainty as a source of amusement and completely avoids the question of
whether somebody’s sexuality could be swayed or altered in an environment –
show business – where such things had long been taken as read. Much of this,
admittedly, could have been done despite the protestations of some of the
screenwriters involved, Elaine May among them, by jittery studio executives
anxious to keep the film “clean.” My point is that Boy George and Culture Club
set up a perspective – in my view, a truer perspective – where sexual ambiguity
and gender subversion, even if only to demonstrate that effeminacy in men was a
valid attribute in itself, did not
constitute some slapstick trick, but were part of the DNA of show business, the
fuel which underscores all industry.
Furthermore, setting up such a perspective in the
heartland of New Pop was itself a deeply New Pop gesture, and I suspect a big
part of what New Pop had been working towards, for its audience to accept. It
is a matter of documented fact that the gay community regarded Culture Club
with some suspicion; they were not popular in San Francisco, George cheerfully
admitted having been thrown out of gay clubs more times than he could remember,
and some gay pop figures who would come to prominence in 1984, such as Jimmy
Somerville and Paul Rutherford, wondered whether the singer had set things back
rather than move them forward; George’s angry response was to say that he was
pushing the envelope far further, pushing effeminacy into people’s living
rooms, rubbing it in their faces, forcing them to accept it.
On the other hand, George was, at the time, legendarily
ambiguous about his own sexuality; he would tend to dismiss any such
suggestions with one-liners or sidesteps. But then again, his declared aim was
to get, or persuade, as wide a demographic as possible to love him and his
music, and while he got the balance between forthright and lovable right, he
managed to do it; he won over America in the same way Elton John had done a
decade earlier – in times of strife and uncertainty, cheerful and colourful
reassurance was required – and in Britain he came through to the grannies in
Arbroath as effortlessly and naturally as the hipsters in Soho. I saw him in
early 1981 as a very temporary co-lead singer in Bow Wow Wow (as “Lieutenant
Lush”) at the Rainbow Theatre in London, where the band were just one of many
fairground-style attractions; there was a full-scale helter-skelter, candyfloss
stalls, even a jazz big band (The Sound Of 17, as I recall), and it felt like pop’s
future, but George in particular already carried an aura about what he did, and
how he disposed himself around the stage, such that it was clear that he wouldn’t
stay at this level for very long (my only comment at the time was that he could
do with looking a little less severe).
In any case, the story of the people involved in those
early days at Billy’s, etc., is the story of a London long since vanished; a
world of cheap rents, of easily available squats in the centre of the city, a
society where people who had nothing, indeed had been forcibly ostracised from
mainstream life, could use that nothing to their advantage, picking up what
they could find or scrounge or scrape together to create something entirely new
and wholly individual. So when George and Helen Terry stood at either end of
the front of the stage to sing “That’s The Way (I’m Only Trying To Help You)”
to each other – this gangling six-foot transvestite and a small but full-bodied
woman approaching thirty – it was like one misfit reaching out to, listening to
and touching another misfit, and the recorded version, which is really only
George and Helen, with Roy Hay (I think) on piano, is one of the album’s most
moving moments for that reason. It touches the intended listener, too; the
loose nail in the classroom or the office who wouldn’t be hammered in, the
vulnerable teenager told by the Job Centre that they are nothing and have
nothing to offer society – this, the song seems to say, is for you too, although
it remains a song of substantial sadness; the piano introduction, briefly
referencing “Oh You Pretty Thing,” is the record’s only real nod to Bowie, that
lighthouse for dismissed and confused souls a decade earlier (and George was as
keen a Bowie boy as Almond or Morrissey). The song sweeps along with a
generosity and understanding of musical space which makes it worthy of
peak-period Prince. And yet – “Hey, I woke up on my own this morning,” and the
dread-filled “That’s the way we destroy baby,” which when sung sounds like “That’s
the way we destroy a baby,” thereby placing
this song in the unlikely lineage of the Pistols’ “Bodies.”
(And given the general importance of Helen Terry to Colour By Numbers – even though she was,
strictly speaking, a session singer rather than a full member of the group,
paid per recording or performance – it may be time to dispel the notion that
she was a member of the group Thunderthighs, who appeared on “Walk On The Wild
Side” and “Roll Away The Stone” and later released a few singles of their own,
including 1974’s deeply disturbing Lynsey de Paul-penned anti-rape song “Central
Park Arrest,” which was, though unimaginable today, a Top 30 hit; at that time
Terry would still have been a teenager, and the singers who actually did
constitute Thunderthighs were Karen Friedman, Dari Lalou and Casey Synge.
Still, their subsequent two non-charting singles, “Dracula’s Daughter” and “Stand
Up And Cheer,” remain strong and distinctive enough to justify a salvage job on/CD
release of their never-issued album.)
I’m focusing on this song in particular because of the
general reception and perception of Colour
By Numbers as the apogee of cheerful, uplifting eighties pop. Certainly its
music continues to carry a lightness and beneficence which, frankly, wipe the
floor with many of the record’s TPL
contemporaries. Like all great pop records, it plays like a greatest hits
album; hit after hit after tune, every song different in style and approach,
and all performed with this aforementioned confidence and ease, like multiple
suns rising to blot out darkness forever. There is no reason why you should not
be gladdened or elevated by this record – that is, until you listen to it more
closely and realise what it is saying, or trying to say.
It is not the business of this piece to dwell on who had
an affair with whom, or whom these songs are about; this information is well documented
and can be found in many published sources, and all I will say here is that a
good comparison would be with Rumours,
a comparison which I am sure George would relish. My concern here is how well Colour By Numbers stands up as a record
and what greater thing it is trying to say.
The record opens, as it had to, with “Karma Chameleon,”
the year’s biggest single (and in terms of 1983 album sales, Colour By Numbers was second only to Thriller) and a song which, according to
its singer and co-author, is about “the terrible fear of alienation that people
have, the fear of standing up for one thing. It's about trying to suck up to
everybody.” About avoiding ever having to decide who you are and express how
you feel. It is, musically, superior bubblegum, complete with Mr Bloe
harmonica, which superficially might have hit for Daniel Boone in 1972 or Jimmy
Jones in 1960 (the chorus is slightly reminiscent of “Good Timin’”), ”),
expertly moulded to provide an international smash, down to the Eurovision
military tattoo of Jon Moss’ drums towards the song’s end (and in terms of
expert moulding, one should pay due respect to the fifth composer of “Karma
Chameleon” and unofficial Culture Club keyboard player Phil Pickett, formerly
of Sailor – “A Glass Of Champagne,” etc. – who lent his considerable experience
and knowhow to the Culture Club sound).
Up front, meanwhile, George repeatedly sings, or taunts
“You come and go,” and further, “When you go, you’re gone forever” while
paraphrasing the bitching of the song’s
subject (“I’m a man without conviction” and “you used to be so sweet” are both
attributed to the song’s second person). “Every day is like survival!” George
protests, smiling sweetly. “Sur-vi-val!” chant the band back cheerfully.
“You’re my lover, not my rival!” An “empty” song about emptiness; what better
song to signal its year? Though obviously unanticipated at the time, Lena
looked at the 45 single cover and noted how much George resembled Lorde.
In terms of getting that international smash, it should
be noted that “It’s A Miracle” (also co-written by the group and Pickett) was
originally entitled “It’s America,” and the music on the album sounds expressly
tailored to meet the demands of its hoped-for global market; it sounds
transatlantic rather than specifically British or American. As jolly as the
song’s surface skips along – with a keyboard riff which may owe something to
Gilbert O’Sullivan’s “Matrimony” – the lyric, and its delivery, are no laughing
matter, speaking as it does of “guns,” “counterfeit” and “plastic smiles.” “Monroe
was there,” sighs a weary George of Hollywood, “but do you really care?” Nick
Grainger’s saxophone solo is aptly grainy, whereas Terry’s brief scat-singing
interlude serves, in this context, to introduce her as the alter ego who can
express what George sometimes only hints at.
Whereas “Black Money,” the album’s longest song, is a
superb ballad, probing, mysterious, compassionate and bleak, which borders on
deep soul; again the subject is emotional betrayal (“Somebody else’s life
cannot be mine”) and the interplay between George and Terry, if not quite Bobby
Womack and Patti LaBelle, is exacting and gripping. Both this and “Changing
Every Day” strongly suggest consolidation of things that the 1983 Style Council
were still working towards but had not yet quite achieved; the latter’s
Tropicalia-lite balances perilously on a fence separating it from The Jimmy Young Show, and succeeds
mainly because of Terry’s determined and pushy supporting vocals and the
unsentimentality of the lyric, which combines the theme of “In The Ghetto” (“Someone
says/Wake up, child/And throw your life away”) with a critique of the free
market (“Pushed into production/What a way to live our lives”).
“Church Of The Poison Mind,” which opens side two, is
brilliant and poundingly angry pop, inhabiting a triangle whose borders are
Stevie Wonder’s “Uptight,” Martha and the Vandellas’ “Nowhere To Run” and Echo
and the Bunnymen’s “The Back Of Love,” with Judd Lander’s harmonica now
sounding closer to “A New Career In A New Town” and Terry’s co-lead vocal
explosive; there are even hints of the Beach Boys in the middle-eight
harmonies. As a huge “NO!” to everything that the rest of 1983 pop appeared to
stand for, it remains a compelling listen.
“Miss Me Blind,” a single just about everywhere except
Britain, is just terrific pop, with a lyric which skilfully skies between
faithless lover putdown (it includes another rhetorical “would I lie to you?”)
and cynicism about the ability of money in itself to save anybody or anything
(such that the song’s second half is effectively a metaphor for capitalism; “And
you’ll never be sure/If the way that you need/Is too much like greed”). Over
this, Hay’s guitar – inspired, apparently, by Eddie van Halen’s solo on “Beat
It,” but bearing the huge influence of Ernie Isley – rages (George originally
bridled at the guitar, allegedly recorded by Hay one afternoon while the singer
was at the dentist’s, but appreciated how it helped the song’s innate anger);
from his solo the song segues directly, and miraculously, into a passage which
could have come straight from Shalamar (specifically “A Night To Remember”).
The next two songs return to reggae from different
angles; “Mister Man” more or less puts UB40 in the shade, with George’s highly
nuanced and multidirectional vocals and a far punchier production (from Steve
Levine) – and also a harmonic line which is strikingly similar to Jackson’s “Human
Nature” (not that Culture Club’s magpie borrowings are any less valid than
Springsteen’s enthusiastic ‘50s and ‘60s cut-and-pastes throughout Born To Run). The lyric, however, is one
of the record’s darkest – there are yet more guns, as well as violence and
hatred, but also culminates in a plea – or is it a threat? – to the concept of “man,”
that other notions of “man” need to be introduced, understood and accepted
(hence the blackly comedic double
entendres about needing no gun to be shot dead by “the midnight cowboy”). “I’m
much more black than blue,” sings George. He is singing directly to his deepest
enemies. Patrick Seymour’s flutes on “Stormkeeper,” a fairly straightforward
lover’s rock ballad, were allegedly influenced by Men At Work, although Boris
Gardiner’s “Elizabethan Reggae” may be a better comparison point; and yet here
too, love is receding, ignorance is replacing enlightenment and cowardice
bravery. The resounding gong which terminates the song is reminiscent of “Bohemian
Rhapsody,” and I am sure that this was not an accident.
“Victims” is this not particularly happy record’s final
word (note how there is no specific point on the record where the singer is
uncomplicatedly happy and settled with somebody) and through its sorrowful
arteries flow what sounds like a pocket history of pop music. Essentially a
three-part ballad, first with George and piano, second with George, rhythm
section and full orchestra, and third with no George at all, this complex and worrying
song is about the end of a relationship, perhaps the end of love, coupled with
a passion on the part of the singer for love NOT to end. They are not getting
on, and the person he is singing about may be responsible for the post-Phil
Collins gated drums which open the song up, like a preserved Babylon, but he is
also addressing a greater, wider emptiness. There are passing references to
Free (“What places our hearts in the wishing well”) and Joy Division, the group
New Pop just can’t forget (“Take a ride into unknown pleasure” – need I even
say here that the elephant in the 1983 TPL
living room is “Blue Monday”?). But there are also interludes of unexpected
tenderness amidst the grief, not least George’s defiant “Push aside those who
whispered NEVER!” Although the theme of loss remains paramount (“The victims,
we know them so well…/So well”) there is, somehow, still hope awaiting rebirth;
“Victims” could almost be New Pop’s “Surf’s Up.”
Around George’s voice swirls an immaculate pop
architecture. Drums give rise to a glum sunrise of strings, French horns and
voices, Helen Terry now just a part of the detail of the overall picture (and
one of the other backing singers on this and other songs on the album is the
young Jermaine Stewart). It is as if George is moving forward and leaving the
rest of the group behind him (although this clearly was not – yet – the case).
There is a moment when high strings sail into the song which made me think of “When
Two Worlds Drift Apart” – like Cliff, George boxes around the matter of love so
deftly and endlessly that he can’t always tell what the real thing is until it ups
and walks away from him. Mikey Craig’s bass work reminds me of Bernard Edwards,
and hence makes the song a brooding sequel to “At Last I Am Free.” An oboe
conjures up the spectre of “We’ve Only Just Begun” – the life of Karen
Carpenter, a victim we knew so well, yet didn’t really know at all, had only
just ended, in February 1983 – and the climactic, if reluctant, uptempo
orchestral section is reminiscent of both “MacArthur Park” and “Mr Blue Sky.”
As a singer, George is more like John Coltrane than Marvin Gaye – the voice as
semi-abstract instrument with saxophone-like tonalities; see also the Cocteau
Twins’ contemporaneous Head Over Heels
– and probably more like Dennis Brown or Gregory Isaacs than either.
But “Victims” sounds like the end of something; the final
chord is like the lid of a box closing down, to be forever sealed. Remember
that this is the first unabashed New Pop album in this tale since The Lexicon Of Love, and its singer ends
up similarly disappointed by what love had to offer him. But if New Pop weren’t
to end here, it certainly had to move on from here. How was this done? Colour By Numbers is, more than anything
else, concerned about people who just do not fit in (the opening piano of “Victims”
is of course irresistibly reminiscent of Elton John); the jumbled religious and
sexual symbols decorating the Assorted iMaGes sleeve suggest confusion rather
than a new resolution or all-inclusive eclecticism. But within its grooves, the
record somehow knows that this perfection cannot be reproduced or replicated,
that there is perhaps no way out of the flawless utopia that it proposes.
It is therefore my conclusion that what George proposed
was swiftly taken on board and modified by someone else in pop. A month after Colour By Numbers entered the chart at
number one, “This Charming Man” debuted in the Top 40 singles chart, and the
way forward abruptly became clear. Like George, Morrissey has a voice that is
eerily capable of sounding both high and low (and therefore free of normative
gender) at the same time. He is also a Bowie boy and well documented misfit
from an Anglo-Irish family driven to achieve something just to prove that he
ought not to be laughed at. And it may be that Morrissey’s subtler gender
subversions actually pushed things further in the direction of acceptance.
Hence it may well be the case that The
Smiths, not Waking Up With The House
On Fire, is the true sequel to Colour
By Numbers (“Does the body rule the mind, or does the mind rule the body? I
dunno,” “No I’ve never had a job because I’ve NEVER WANTED ONE”). In the
meantime, I cannot listen to “Victims” without thinking of those first dreadful
reports which came over from the States in the early eighties, or the song’s
unexpected (1986) sequel from someone who, even if George didn’t particularly
rate his music, was certainly cherished by George for his love of show business
as thing in itself. Or, for that matter, the knowledge that an album which
managed to sell over ten million copies worldwide has now almost entirely
vanished from view, and the question of who is to blame.
