(#293: 17 December 1983, 4 weeks; 21 January 1984, 1
week)
Track listing: You Can’t Hurry Love (Phil Collins)/Is
There Something I Should Know (Duran Duran)/Red, Red Wine (UB40)/Only For Love
(Limahl)/Temptation (Heaven 17)/Give It Up (KC & The Sunshine Band)/Double
Dutch (Malcolm McLaren)/Total Eclipse Of The Heart (Bonnie Tyler)/Karma
Chameleon (Culture Club)/The Safety Dance (Men Without Hats)/Too Shy
(Kajagoogoo)/Moonlight Shadow (Mike Oldfield)/Down Under (Men At Work)/Hey You
(The Rock Steady Crew) (Rock Steady Crew)/Baby Jane (Rod Stewart)/Wherever I
Lay My Hat (That’s My Home) (Paul Young)/Candy Girl (New Edition)/Big Apple
(Kajagoogoo)/Let’s Stay Together (Tina Turner)/(Keep Feeling) Fascination
(Human League)/New Song (Howard Jones)/Please Don’t Make Me Cry (UB40)/Tonight
I Celebrate My Love (Peabo Bryson & Roberta Flack)/They Don’t Know (Tracey
Ullman)/Kissing With Confidence (Will Powers)/That’s All (Genesis)/The Love
Cats (The Cure)/Waterfront (Simple Minds)/The Sun And The Rain (Madness)/Victims
(Culture Club)
Looking at the track listing
for the forthcoming Now 87, I note
with some dismay that all of the hitherto unknown songs included have entered
yesterday’s midweek singles chart. This is not a new phenomenon with Now compilations and its continuation
indeed supplants my dismay with disquiet. It is as if the charts have been
meticulously plotted so that all of the untried and untested singles will debut
at precisely the right moment and hence make next week’s compilation look
fresher than fresh. It is as if pop music has been planned to death.
Listening to the first Now volume of all, I also note that we
have not really completed the circle begun by Raiders Of The Pop Charts. Instead of finishing where 1983 started,
with a thirty-track, TV-advertised double compilation album, it is quite
apparent that we have ended up somewhere entirely different; somewhere not
quite so shambolically comfortable, and somewhere a lot more disturbing and
possibly fatal.
Is that last sentence an
overstatement? The overall priority of the Starship Enterprise, you may
remember, was to observe history
rather than try to change or influence history. With the many
TV-advertised compilations featured in this tale between 1972 and 1983, the
overall picture is one of a slightly inchoate assemblage of cottage industries
and an agreeably sloppy attitude to compiling these collections; it really was
a case of working with what you could lease from whatever record companies
would be prepared to lease to you, finding unexpected connections and more than
occasionally throwing a very welcome curveball. Ronco, K-Tel and Arcade
compilations – not to mention things like Don’t
Walk – Boogie (a true ancestor of the Now
series) - were, broadly speaking, a mess, occasionally a hugely irritating
mess, but generally a rather surprisingly fertile one.
My suspicion is, however,
that with the dawning of the Now
franchise, we witness the beginning of a direct attempt to influence the course
of pop music, and maybe even how pop music is made or consumed. The first
volume was advertised with a painstakingly irreverent voiceover by one of its featured artists, Tracey Ullman; the subtext was that this was not bargain
basement, available at Woolworths and Rumbelows K-Tel time.
The overall aim – or one of
them – seems to have been to put the house of the compilation album in order.
Although essentially a joint venture between EMI and Virgin, it was Virgin
Records who came up with the initial idea (and negotiations for the concept
involved Richard Branson himself). The album was advertised by a curious logo;
a beaming pig listening over a garden fence to a chicken singing, and
proclaiming “Now that’s what I call music!” In fact this was originally a 1920s
advertisement for Danish bacon, but Branson bought a poster of it as a present
for Virgin Records’ then managing director (and Branson’s cousin): “He was
notoriously grumpy before breakfast and loved his eggs in the morning,”
observed Branson, “so I bought him the poster, framed it and had it hung behind
his desk!"
Following negotiations,
Virgin managed to persuade EMI to come on board with the venture – this was the
first time major labels had collaborated on such a large project. Some hits
were then leased from CBS, WEA, Polydor, Island and Stiff, but none from
Arista, RCA, MCA, Chrysalis, A&M or Phonogram. There was still quite a lot
of scepticism as to whether the Now
project would work, and some unrest about whether, if popular, the album would
hinder the sales of artists’ own albums – one may view the delayed entrance of
several major acts on Now II as
having waited for the waters to be tested before becoming involved.
But the first Now album was an immediate success; it
sold 900,000 copies over the Christmas/New Year period and more or less rendered
the TV-dependent labels redundant overnight. Packaged immaculately – some might
say suffocatingly – Now 1 seemed to
promise proper quality; no sloppy covers pasted together in five minutes, no
filler, full, unedited 45 versions. It appeared to legitimise the enterprise of
multi-artist compilations, push them into growing up.
And yet listening to it is
such a cold, deadening experience. Overwhelmingly, despite the presence of
eleven of the eighteen singles to make number one during 1983, it is far too safe
a selection of hits, and the absentees imply that we are dealing with the
second tier of pop stars, or possibly tier 1a. For the record, neither 1983’s
first number one nor its last is included. The first was a hangover from 1982,
“Save Your Love” by Renée and Renato, a calamitous confirmation of what happens
when camp is taken too seriously, or not seriously enough (it is the missing
link between “Welcome Home” and “Barcelona”), and it says something about the
nascent Now brand that this would
have seemed out of place on any Now
album (though would have fitted without complaint onto any K-Tel or Ronco
record). The last – another unanticipated novelty – was released too late for
inclusion (and wrongfooted certain grave assumptions about Now 1) and appears on Now II.
Of the remaining five missing chart-toppers, “Billie Jean,” “Let’s Dance,”
“True” and “Every Breath You Take” have already been written about in the
context of their parent albums (and their absence here implies that they are
just too big to go on Now, since
Bowie was, at the time, an EMI act). This means that the one remaining absent
number one, Billy Joel’s “Uptown Girl,” will simply not be written about here
directly. That, I am sure you will agree, is a tragedy beyond comprehension.
But how can you have a 1983
greatest hits album without “Blue Monday” or anything by Michael Jackson? How
much better would any of the C90 cassettes you and I would have filled with our
versions of 1983 music have been? And why so safe a track listing – get past
Simple Minds, plus atypical songs by Genesis and The Cure, and there is no rock
as such – Big Country, U2, Echo and the Bunnymen, even EMI recording artists
Iron Maiden – all for the boys, all absent. In fact the record seems to have
been scrupulously assembled so as not to frighten or disturb, or even
momentarily stir, anyone who buys it or listens to it; “This Is Not A Love
Song” by Public Image Ltd, released on Virgin and beyond dispute one of 1983’s
greatest singles, was a much bigger hit than many of the songs included here,
but you will search for it on this record in vain.
Actually the TV-advertised
labels were not quite down the dumper; the late 1983 charts also included three
BOGOF compilations; The Hit Squad
(Chart-Tracking & Nightclubbing) (Ronco), Superchart ’83 (Telstar) and, a revisit from 1981, Chart Hits ’83 (K-Tel). There is
necessarily some overlap between this trio, but they do provide a fuller and
less predictable picture of the year’s hit music; if you’re looking at the Now 1 track listing and wondering where
such and such a song is, odds are that they are on at least one of these three.
But it was a losing battle; in the following year, 1984, Ronco filed for
bankruptcy.
In other words, Now 1 was the future. But what kind of
future was it trying to create? Remember what I said about the series trying to
influence history. At the time of this record’s release, several of its tracks
were climbing the chart as singles, and it’s possible that the surprising
underperformance of hits like “Waterfront” (peak position #13; not remotely
indicative of the song’s true popularity) and “That’s All” (#16) is directly
ascribable to their inclusion here. But the record’s attempted coup de theatre was to conclude with
“Victims”; the assumption being that, having begun with the year’s first “new”
number one, the record would close with the final one. It didn’t work, partly
because of Now 1 itself and partly
because Colour By Numbers was still a
hugely popular, big-selling album, but also in part because, as a single,
“Victims” was too complex and involving a song to cross over as effortlessly as
the knowing bubblegum of “Karma Chameleon”; there are no real hooks, no easy
emotional compromise. It is just too disturbing for that (it peaked in third
place in the Christmas singles chart).
And, if pop can sometimes,
at its best, prove really disturbing, I also have to say that I cannot imagine
a similar enterprise being undertaken even twelve months previously. Leasing
problems notwithstanding, what would a Now
That’s What I Call 1982 have looked like (and before any smart alecks come
on board to point it out, I am fully aware that ten year-specific Now Eighties collections were released
many years later, and no, I don’t think the 1982 album would have looked like
that at the time)? My feeling is that
the pop of 1982 was overall too radical, too disturbing, to act as a comfort
blanket for casual supermarket consumers, and that in itself may tell us how
things had perhaps lowered slightly in terms of the horizons of the following
year’s pop. Did the pig really represent the lazy, sated consumer fully
prepared to pay money to buy a new packaging of what was already available;
indeed, when some of its content was still new? Or did the pig represent the
bloated, indulgent music industry who’d be perfectly happy to sell the public
records of a chicken clucking if they took off?
Phil Collins/Genesis
An early indicator of how
readily "adventurous" musicians from the seventies were prepared to
dress up and dumb down for the unforgiven eighties. The song's imperious beat
and encouraging catchy tune, as demonstrated in the Supremes' 1966 top three
original, hide a near-suicidal lyric: "But how many heartaches must I
stand/Before I find a love to let me live again?" These are words crying
out for Orbison at his most tormented, yet Diana Ross at her perkiest is
strangely but equally convincing at conveying the song's underlying
desperation.
Collins' cover, which in
itself is faithfully facsimilied in the mode of a reproduction antique – his
vocals aside, the recording might as well have been taken from one of those Hot Hits make-do-and-mend albums - was
the only substantial hit single from his second solo album, Hello, I Must Be Going!, by some
distance the weakest-selling of his '80s tetralogy, full of interchangeable
whining ballads about his first divorce. They do not include songs entitled
“You Can’t Take My TV” or “Why I Pay You To Go Out With Fancyman (Why I Not
Break His Jaw)?,” despite what the eximious Comstock Carabinieri claimed, but
it’s a close call. It's also telling that virtually all of his cover versions
come from an idealised 1966 - "Tomorrow Never Knows" on Face Value, "A Groovy Kind Of
Love" from Buster - but
unfortunately whatever minor merit his "You Can't Hurry Love" might
have possessed is utterly nullified by its rather creepy video featuring
multiple besuited Collinses, unflatteringly filmed on VT, performing a Blues
Brothers tribute, as if the song were just a piece of laughable fluff from his
schoolboy years to be sent up. As for “That’s All,” The Cure do a better
Beatles on “The Love Cats.”
Duran Duran
“PLEASE PLEASE TELL ME NOW!” they demand, in the manner of anxiously
psychotic hostage takers. The “Look Of Love”-derived intro heralded an attempt
at adding a harder, tougher edge to Duran Duran’s pop – le Bon’s “I KNOW you’re watching me” and “DON’T SAY you’re easy on me” warned
listeners that he really was not to be messed around with (actually he sounds
not a million miles away from that other renegade Brumrocker Ozzy Osbourne).
Hence when le Bon tells of “jungle drums” we receive booming “Poison Arrow”
echoes of drum. It’s pretty clear that this is a transitional record and also
why it didn’t get included on Seven And
The Ragged Tiger; musically the most interesting ingredient is John
Taylor’s bass (particularly in the fadeout, under le Bon’s “Every time it
passes by”), and while producer Alex Sadkin is always aware of the value of
space and silence, and a harmonica strays in from an old career in an old town
during the instrumental break (are we really as big as the Beatles?), this is a
relatively disappointing piece of work; the ingredients to enable development
of their music are all present, but are, at this point, still only perhaps
three-quarters baked.
UB40/Bonnie Tyler/Paul Young
One central problem with the
Now series, apart from making great
pop sound dull, is that sometimes 45 edits are no longer enough. Some songs are
now benefiting from their full album length, such that any single edit is like
looking at just one corner of a painting rather than the whole thing; otherwise
they run the danger of sounding emotionally constipated. The edit of “Total
Eclipse” here is (pace what I said
above) different from the edit on the original 45 and still unsatisfactory.
Then again, “Please Don’t Make Me Cry” is unedited, if a wholly unnecessary
inclusion. A very long way indeed from “So Here I Am.”
But those sleigh bells on “Total
Eclipse.” One is never too far away from the Beach Boys, or indeed from Dennis
Wilson, who slipped into the blue Pacific Ocean, never to resurface, on 28
December 1983.
As regards Paul Young’s “Wherever
I Lay My Hat,” see also Scott Walker’s “Orpheus” from 1966.
Kajagoogoo/Limahl
“Johnnie Ray!” exclaimed
Lena as we endured “Only For Love” (“And! Ew-YOU! RrrrrrRECOGNISE!”). Or
perhaps a glossier variant on Chris Andrews, whose “Yesterday Man” was
re-covered by Robert Wyatt on a very different Virgin Records compilation album
in 1975. But one of the major failings of Now
1 is the inclusion of three songs by Kajagoogoo and/or Limahl. Some might
say that was five more than was absolutely necessary.
Kajagoogoo were EMI's
"priority new act" for 1983. They achieved some useful publicity
touring as support to Duran Duran, and Nick Rhodes even co-produced their first
single. Their profile was heightened further by an appearance on the Channel 4
series The Other Side Of The Tracks,
presented by an expatriate American broadcaster who is currently under a legal
cloud, and who was then the partner of lead singer Limahl - just before the
Christmas of 1982.
Everything about "Too
Shy" betrays the slide rule. It is a ghastly melange of absolute
misunderstanding of New Pop; as if the swooning entrance of the keyboards
allied to a burbling, harmonically ambiguous bassline could in itself conjure
up Level 42, or Japan. When Limahl enters for the first verse, it becomes
worse; a tortuous Lexicon Of Love
parody ("Try a little harder" with sub-sub-sub-Anne Dudley piano)
swiftly followed by dangling Tin Drum/New Gold Dream angles of warbling synth
over which Limahl coos "Move a little closer" in the manner of Cheggers Plays Pop host Keith Chegwin,
before we reach the chorus which fully reveals Kajagoogoo as the dull,
Jamiroquai-presaging jazz-funk drones they secretly always wanted to be - and
when Limahl huffily walked out, or was pushed (depending on whom you ask), some
six months later, they indulged their sub-Shakatak fantasies freely (“Big
Apple,” which set new standards in flaccidity, both musically and lyrically, is
perhaps the worst song about New York ever written, from the perspective of
people who sound as though they had travelled no further west than Hounslow).
The song seems to be about sexual timidity, but faced with Limahl, one is
scarcely surprised by his Other's reluctance to "dilate." "Too
Shy," however, dilates New Pop to the point of nullity.
There was an album – White Feathers, which peaked at #5 at
the end of April, and which, despite including songs entitled “Ergonomics” and
“This Car Is Fast” – and two other hit singles that are rather more disturbing
than “Too Shy” (“Ooh To Be Ah” might still be one of the most abstract things
ever to make our top ten; play against, say, Gabi Delgado’s “History Of A Kiss”
and see the connections, while “Hang On Now” is a downbeat ballad sung as
though its singer were hanging onto the edge of the world with a turquoise
fingernail) – is ultimately no more than placid jazz-funk, even if in Icelandic
terms it might be a missing link between Mezzoforte and Björk. I mean,
“Magician Man.” Whereas Limahl’s first solo effort (which peaked at an
unsurprisingly low #16) is not even interestingly random, like a Dadaist jigsaw
puzzle, but merely a ghastly cut-and-paste of 1983 pop elements, none of which
fits with each other. As well as equally ghastly and obligatory soulful,
passionate and honest backing singers. Honest about what?
Heaven 17/Human League/Tina Turner
From the first second of
“Temptation,” you are never in doubt that, unlike Limahl, Heaven 17 know how to
structure a great pop record, and they also know that without conflict and
pain, there really wouldn’t be much pop music, of any stripe, left. If “Let Me
Go” had given notice that the dream wasn’t working, or even coming true, then The Luxury Gap from its cover inwards
set about demolishing illusion. The knowledge that it’s all bullshit, that you
can travel the world, go crazy with plastic and before day is done you still
have to get back, get home, to desolate, semi-derelict Sheffield – such things
power the polite screams of “Key To The World “(“I’m Mister Obsolete –
DELETE!,” complete with the ironically opulent Earth, Wind and Fire horn
section) or “Crushed By The Wheels Of Industry,” or the quietened tragedies of
“Come Live With Me” (the song Rod Stewart never sang, but should have done) or
the closing “The Best Kept Secret” which sees Glenn Gregory staring out onto an
ocean of nothingness which will evidently take forever to fade.
“Temptation” is angry,
righteous, arranged with maximal ingenuity by BEF and sometime AMM accomplice
John Barker, with a continued, upward, creeping angle of progress between
topline chords and underscore rhythm which anticipates what Calvin Harris would
do on 18 Months. It is sinister yet
ultimately liberating, thanks to the explosive co-lead vocal of NYJO graduate
Carol Kenyon.
Both Heaven 17 and the Human
League peaked at #2 behind “True” in consecutive weeks; Top Of The Pops proved a challenge. But “Fascination,” Melody Maker’s single of the year for
1983, was the last thing that Phil Oakey’s League did with Martin Rushent, and
overall – although there was no telling at the time – the record (still
credited to “Human League Red”) serves as a fond farewell to the association,
with everybody in the group taking a vocal turn, and Jo Callis’ wobbly
guitar-processed-via-synth riff sounds like the missing link between “Magical
Mystery Tour” and “Only Shallow.” Meanwhile, Oakey’s deep “hey, hey, hey, HEY”
is reminiscent of Larry Graham with Sly and the Family Stone.
But then there is Tina
Turner, returned like the grown-up co-protagonist of “Temptation,” and these
days she had seen, and how they bled their way slowly into how she sang “Let’s
Stay Together” – is my memory fallible, or was the original single credited to
“B.E.F. Presents Tina Turner” (it might have been “Ball Of Confusion” from
1982)? In any event, it was the Heaven 17 fanbase who got it into the Top 40, but
then perhaps an older demographic helped elevate it into the Top Ten; absent
from the charts for a decade, and perhaps from the world from as nearly as long
a time, here she was; alive, and in pain, and euphoric, the B.E.F. voices
gently ushering her into centre stage, and for once the old times were
justified.
KC & The Sunshine Band
Lena commented that “Give It
Up” might well have been the “Get Lucky” of its age and I would agree with
this. Long, hot summer – no, Weller’s nowhere to be seen here – and a number
one song inhabiting that nice middle place where everything just works. Also
“Give It Up” was the year’s only number one single without an accompanying
video (N.B.: there was a VHS companion to this album which included the
otherwise Now-avoiding “I.O.U.” by
Freeez and “Never Never” by the Assembly).
The record was an unexpected
and brief but highly welcome resurgence of the Miami Sound. Only its discreet
synth marks out “Give It Up” as having been recorded in 1982 rather than 1974,
and that’s no bad thing. While “That’s The Way (I Like It)” remains KC’s best
record because of its underlying sense of approaching menace, “Give It Up” is
busily arranged but basically straightforward three-chord bubblegum disco with
a terrific good humour which is admirably happy to remain as such. An
anachronism in the land of “Just Be Good To Me” and “Hey You (The Rock Steady
Crew),” perhaps, but a contented one.
Malcolm McLaren
Worthiness is not the same
thing as worth. To seize a music, take it to pieces, expose it to its aesthetic
polar opposite and thereby (hopefully) refresh it is not a task to which the
adjective "worthy" should be applied. There are places for reverence
and respect as long as you don't let them block your future. I could spend the
rest of my life revering Spencer's Resurrection
at Cookham but simultaneously realise and adore the pelvis-driven
imaginings which give that masterpiece its multiple puncta.
As with World Music. If
music is truly to be of the world then it must by definition be exposed to
"impure" things, it must be acknowledged that the music itself is
probably "impure" to begin with. It cannot be adopted or handled with
dainty fingers, nervously examining their adrenalin reserves to ensure that
they contain adequate nullifying agents of respect. Otherwise any World Music
is all middle-distance, respectful, designed never to derange. More of a lead should
have been taken from Malcolm McLaren and Trevor Horn.
It is deliberate that, with
the Duck Rock project, McLaren set
out to combat and nullify what he viewed to be the sterile blandness of New
Pop. And how better to attack than to employ its chief architect, Trevor Horn,
to arrange and produce? McLaren said he wanted Horn to obtain some
"bollocks" in his work, get "a bit of the rough, the
spontaneous" into his meticulous productions. It is therefore doubly
ironic that Duck Rock is one of the
most seamlessly, microscopically put-together things which Horn ever did.
How did they approach this?
It was McLaren's ceaseless strivings for a new punk, and his moderately keen
ear for developments. He was in America while hip-hop and electro went
overground with Flash and Bambaataa, witnessed with amazement kids breakdancing
to a modified "Trans-Europe Express," scratching up records like John
Cage with a good drummer (a disciple of Karel Appel's COBRA group/philosophy as
well as of Debord, McLaren instinctively knew how to insert the art into this
sort of thing). His ears wandered vaguely in the direction of Africa,
specifically in view of Bambaataa's Zulu Nation and any connections which
McLaren could discern (Nigeria's King Sunny Ade and Senegal's Youssou N'Dour
had yet to break overground, though the former's Synchro System was, usefully, a minor UK hit at around the time of Duck Rock's release, while the fatally
less mischievous Laswell got to N'Dour first). His wits further led him to
discern a vague (probably imagined) link between the square dances of the white
South and the hip hop culture of the black North - apart from their both being
ritual occasions to allow participants to somehow become more
"themselves" - the same idea which, of course, prompted Punk into
existence. How to marry all of this up?
McLaren and Horn did some
field trips to NYC, Tennessee and the South African townships, made some
recordings and then returned to London to knock them into shape with what was
eventually to become the Art of Noise (indeed, the latter's epoch-beginning Into Battle EP largely originated from Duck Rock outtakes) with some help from
Thomas Dolby. Significantly, from NYC, they employed the DJ duo The World's
Famous Supreme Team to act as a kind of Greek chorus for the album, turning it
into one of their then legendary late night/early morning radio shows.
It's hard to visualise just
how radical the first single from the album "Buffalo Gals" seemed
when it came right at the death of 1982, right when certain careerist ambulance
chasers seemed determined to strip New Pop of all its mischief and sensuality.
And how appropriate that both McLaren and Horn should signify a way out. Radio
One played it; and their DJs sounded completely baffled but, to their credit,
they knew that this was something new and correctly predicted that it would be
a gigantic hit. True, to those long familiar with things like Grandmaster
Flash's "Adventures on the Wheels of Steel" (which just missed the UK
Top 75 about a year previously), this was not exactly something unprecedented,
although one could argue that what McLaren and Horn did with it was
unprecedented. Certainly square dance cut-ups were not yet on the Zululand
template, although downtown Double Dee and Steinski were simultaneously busy
preparing their likewise groundbreaking "Lessons." For the other big
hit off the album, "Double Dutch," McLaren reversed the template,
getting Zulu singers to exalt the praises of NYC skipping contests.
The album itself remains
eminently playable. Though the Supreme Team's patter is now a stock template for
Radio 1/Kiss DJs, it sounded fresh and spontaneous at the time, sounded like an
injection of (s)punk into the barrenness in which post-New Pop pop had marooned
itself. And McLaren let no stones lie in his "world tour." From the
near-holy murmurings of the introduction "Obatala" effortlessly into
the welcoming Supreme Team ("leave your guns at home! Tell me Shirl, how
do you manage to stay up until four o'clock in the morning to listen to our
show??!?") and the killer opening sequence of "Buffalo Gals," "Double
Dutch" and "Merengue," this is a grin-inducing record. On the
latter, six clear years before the Lambada came to public prominence, McLaren
gleefully romps through the salsa-meets-kwela-meets-Charlie Haden's Liberation
Music Orchestra like a postmodern Bruce Forsyth, excitedly intoning lines like
"nice little cemetarios will be waiting for you!" Even the fact that
McLaren's delivery (especially on "Double Dutch") recalls no one so
much as the late Harry Corbett of Sooty the Bear fame somehow lends even more
humanity and mischief to this record.
And what about "Punk It
Up"? In his sleevenotes, McLaren recalls the glee and enthusiasm with
which the Zulus entertained his stories about the Sex Pistols, and how enlivening
and joyous it is to hear the Zulus singing, "I'm a Sex Pistol man" to
top-notch Afrobeat. This seeming disrespect for "other musics" (sics)
actually betrays a greater and deeper respect for them than mere Xeroxing and
blanding out. The whole thing continues in similar (if slightly more
contemplative and ritualistic) mood on side two before bowing out with
"Duck For The Oyster," a straightfaced square dance for fiddles and
scratch DJs where McLaren manfully fuses both mutually hating though ultimately
alike extremes together. Note the parting cry of "Promenade you know
where/AND I DON'T CARE" where he performs the final bonding ceremony with
Punk and thereby regenerates it.
A shame that no room could
be found on the CD for perhaps McLaren and the Supreme Team's greatest moment,
"D'Ya Like Scratchin'?" (the B-side of the 12-inch of
"Soweto") where the Team's especially demented scratching interacts
with proto-Art of Noise beats to almost hysterical levels until McLaren strides
in with a straight hoedown version of "Red River Valley" (cf.
Scooter's "Fuck the Millennium" to see how this spirit remains
propagated even into the present century). But this is a joyous record which
superficially doesn't give a fuck but deep down its fuck is much more sincerely
given than any "worthy" or "respectful" people I could
mention could really offer. Liz Phair quoted “Double Dutch” in her song “Whip-Smart,”
while Paul Simon, with whose “The Late Great Johnny Ace” we could close down
1983, was sufficiently intrigued by the record to begin a controversial
adventure of his own.
Culture Club/Men At Work
Say something once, why say
it again?
Men Without Hats
A classic example of an act
wrongfooting its audience with its videos – although the medieval undertow of “The
Safety Dance” was really always evident. They were from Montreal, they came,
they impacted and they went back into the rest of the world.
Mike Oldfield
A decade after Tubular Bells set the whole thing going,
was it deliberate, or a nice accident, that Virgin’s original star should
reappear on this record? On TOTP he
looked ecstatic, clean-shaven and grinning, perhaps relieved at no longer
having to share a chart with Paul Nicholas or David Soul, accompanying Maggie
Reilly, erstwhile singer with Glasgow white soul band Cado Belle, with guitars
which at times border on the hysterical. All in keeping with a song whose
subject matter is the assassination of John Lennon, that other 1980 ghost whom
New Pop can’t quite forget.
The Rock Steady Crew
“DIGITAL” beeped the voice,
repeatedly, and top B-boy producer Stephen Hague, presumably with Duck Rock on his mind, set about
recording this fantastic piece of avant-bubblegum (although it is really “Hang
On Sloopy” plus “Looking For The Perfect Beat”). Like “I Can See For Miles,”
there is continued build-up (the live turntable scratching = Keith Moon’s cymbals)
but no climax or release. Pop, this is your smiling future. At least until you
see the video and watch with an increasing rictus grin as the second half turns
into a display of American military weaponry. World, this must not be your unsmiling
future. But the song was sampled by De La Soul (on “Cool Breeze On The Rocks”)
and the nod to Numan at fadeout suggests that somebody else will have the last
laugh.
Rod Stewart
All this new-looking design;
all these old-looking names. If someone had time-travelled from 1976 to 1983
they’d still recognise Genesis, Mike Oldfield, Tina Turner, Roberta Flack,
Bonnie Tyler, KC & The Sunshine Band. If they were really hip they’d
remember that Malcolm McLaren was the Pistols’ manager.
And of course Rod, always
bloody Rod, haven’t seen you since the seventies Rod. "The situation ain't
all that new," croaks Rod, and indeed it isn't; the
brought-you-up-from-nothing plot is borrowed from "Don't You Want Me?,"
the rhythm from Eddy Grant and the resignedly exasperated tone from
"Maggie May." A dozen years on from the latter and now it's Rod's
turn to tell his ungrateful paramour to sling her hook, though the line
"I've said goodbye so many times" indicates that the problem is not
one of the semi-hapless Jane's making.
Soaring to number one on the
back of a bizarre WEA promotional campaign which included a free beach ball
with every copy of the single - oddly this offer was only available at chart
return shops - "Baby Jane" is Rod's sixth, and to date last, number
one single, and it is the most airless. Revisiting this most purposely forlorn
of 1983 hit singles, the overwhelming sensation is one of nullification;
despite the presence of Tom Dowd as co-producer (with Rod), this is yet another
"big" and seamless production, treble-heavy and metronomically
precise, such that no art can hope to breathe or thrive within its
consumer-flattering/suffocating bubble-packed surface. However, the bluff
"When I Fall In Love" citation does provide an early indication of
Rod's eventual (though not permanent) mutation into a hoarse-faced
granny-pleasing MoR crooner. Cheryl Cole’s birth song; it’s enough to make me
feel sorry for her.
New Edition
The pre-eminent pop producer
in 1983 was not Trevor Horn - at least, not the pre-ZTT Horn - but the team of
Arthur Baker and John Robie. In striking contrast to the maximalism of ABC and
Dollar records, and with a keener ear to the urban ground, Baker and Robie
stripped their productions of anything approaching lushness in favour of skittish,
deeper beats with a staccato rather than ambulatory perspective applied. There
is evidence that the noticeably tougher Horn who emerged with things like Duck Rock, Art of Noise and "Owner
Of A Lonely Heart" from mid-1983 onwards was provoked into substantial
rethought after experiencing the impact of Baker and Robie's steely futurism.
Bambaataa's immensely important "Looking For The Perfect Beat" was
the first single to feature digital rather than manual sampling. Records like
Freeez's "I.O.U." and Robie's astonishing double whammy of C-Bank's
"One More Shot" and Jenny Burton's "Remember What You Like"
are beyond-Futurist cut-ups of notions of "song" and
"voice"; it is a wonder how, on the latter two singles, Burton
manages to retain her elegance and grace while being assaulted from all sides
by smashing glass, gunfire, car horns and Corbusier-proportioned beats. And of
course there was "Blue Monday," the point where all pop music meets,
simultaneously the beginning, suspension and end of time, the supreme
seven-and-a-half minute denial of 1983's ruination (because the song is about a
ruination) and a record whose importance casts a yellowing shadow on the
subsequent quarter-century of pop, a record so vital yet accidental that Baker
left his name off the label credits but later owned up to having produced it
(Robie is credited with the mix).
But there were also minor
ambitions to do a Motown; see the Andromeda
Strain Four Tops of Planet Patrol's "Play At Your Own Risk" and
"Cheap Thrills" (although Planet Patrol’s eponymous album remains a
marvel), and most clearly and depressingly evident in "Candy Girl,"
strictly speaking a Maurice Starr and Michael Jonzun conception, but produced
by Baker and Robie. The song is little more than an electro update of
"ABC," Ralph Tresvant was never going to be another Michael Jackson,
Bobby Brown's rapping was annoying even at that early stage, and next to the
unforced naturalness of Musical Youth it all still seems more than a little
contrived, and probably in an unpleasant sense. This underlines the ultimate
failure of Now 1; so we couldn’t get
Michael Jackson, the biggest pop star on the planet, but here’s somebody who
sounds like he USED to sound. And somebody else in the background who will grow
up to be somebody extremely unpleasant. What was that about a Georgian market square,
and hell?
Howard Jones/Simple Minds
To be written about in the
near future, but not here. For now there is Bob Marley’s “Emancipate yourself
from mental slavery” and there is “Throw off your mental chains.”
Peabo Bryson & Roberta Flack
Side three was evidently
meant to be the “adult” side, as it closes with UB40’s “Please Don’t Make Me
Sleep” followed by this 1975 snooze of a Mathis
Collection duet. But the sequencing is beyond awry and the hoped-for
demographic much too hopelessly wide. Did anybody like Peabo Bryson AND The
Cure? And yet for one week this outsold “Karma Chameleon.” Where’s “Islands In
The Stream” when you need it?
Tracey Ullman
The Kirsty MacColl-ness. The
punctum pause: “Ba-a-by-y!” He’s bad, but I love him: see “Papa Don’t Preach.”
Potential sequel to this song: “Fairytale Of New York.” Did Amy Winehouse hear
this record as an infant? It plays like a happy Amy song, complete with the he’s-bad-BUT
trademark. More ahead of its time than you imagine. The only woman on the
cover, in the centre of a field of men, two of whom appear twice.
Will Powers
It doesn’t say very much
about any newness relating to Now 1
that its most outré moment is
provided by, of all people, Lynn Goldsmith, with her musical chums, nearly all
of whom were around before punk. Terrific in a Tom Tom Club kind of way – it could
so easily have fallen over into the Meri Wilson side of that particular fence –
and Carly Simon might not have sounded better or more alive than here.
The Cure
I wish I could provide Cap’n
Bob with a more positive welcome to TPL
but The Cure essentially mucking around with jazz and psychedelia has been so
eroded by three decades of radio overplay that it’s completely lost its
mischief. No, Pornography was as far
as “that” Cure could ever have gone without exploding. But “Let’s Go To Bed”
was better pop and none of the Banshees hits or spinoffs (“Dear Prudence,” The
Creatures, The Glove) bothers to put in an appearance here. To the record’s
loss.
Madness
Their last top ten hit in
their original lifetime, and hardly heard now; it plays like a miserablist
dilution of 1982’s “Primrose Hill,” and only David Bedford’s strings lift the
song out of the morass. Suggs sings like Robert Wyatt hidden behind a muffler, “Wings
Of A Dove,” though incongruously jaunty (it made number two but sounded as
though the band were beginning to make records to please NME writers), was a bigger hit, no useful sense of liberation or
catharsis is communicated, and ultimately we are left with a…
…Hall Of Mirrors
A sense of no risk being
taken. A sense of the record not being ambitious, or brave, enough. A “grazing
experience” as Lena put it.
But there is more, and it is
sinister; I think that the arrival and success of the Now brand constituted the first nail in the coffin of what is
generally regarded as the pop single. Think, even, about that “I” in “Now That’s
What I Call Music”; who is this “I”?
Who’s doing the deciding, the dictating? It might not be as threatening as the “we”
of today – “Why we all love Breaking Bad”
when one has not even SEEN Breaking Bad
– but it was a way for the old, conservative music industry to get back in,
having worked New Pop out, and nipping any genuine newness in the bud. It would
affect the way people regarded the single – if they are all handily collected,
why bother with singles? – and, worse, alter the way in which pop was
conceived, listened to, watched and sold. Soon (in 1983 terms) there will come
the time when worried record companies will begin to make records in the hope
that they will end up on a Now
compilation, and a generation before the internet makes its full impact, the
consumers will gradually disengage themselves from the form. Before long, TPL will consist of little other than
these records, these treated logs, these doctored journals, and solidification
and morbidity will set in.
NOW, the British music
industry knows exactly what the hell is going on in their own world, and will
be damned if they will give it somebody else, somebody new and untested, or an
established artist whose career plan won’t particularly be advanced by
inclusion on these records. Thatcher had won again in July 1983. Everything,
and everybody, was happy. Don’t complain. Don’t DARE complain. Be the worst you can be.
Like I said, Now is the end of something, and this is
the fulsome picture of the hell that has now arrived; people pretending to be
happy when their souls and their homes have been stolen away, the school choir
unity of too many charity records to come, the desecration of gospel that will
culminate in Cowell, the central assembly point for people who don’t want
subtext, excitement or outrage – or even mild difference – but shiny conveyor
belt shite that will fit in the checkout with the Brillo pads and Johnson’s air
fresheners.
This music was better when I
was nineteen.
But, these days we can no
longer see.
