(#314: 13 April 1985, 6 weeks)
Track listing: You Spin Me Round (Like A Record) (Dead
Or Alive)/Things Can Only Get Better (Howard Jones)/Love & Pride
(King)/Wide Boy (Nik Kershaw)/Mr Telephone Man (New Edition)/A New England
(Kirsty MacColl)/Since Yesterday (Strawberry Switchblade)/1999 (Prince)/Easy
Lover (Philip Bailey [Duet with Phil Collins])/Solid (Ashford and Simpson)/This
Is My Night (Chaka Khan)/Yah Mo B There (James Ingram)/Let It All Blow (Dazz
Band)/Close (To The Edit) (Art of Noise)/I Want To Know What Love Is
(Foreigner)/Everything Must Change (Paul Young)/You’re The Inspiration
(Chicago)/I Should Have Known Better (Jim Diamond)/Friends (Amii
Stewart)/Nightshift (Commodores)/That Ole Devil Called Love (Alison Moyet)/Kiss
Me (Stephen “Tintin” Duffy)/Who Comes To Boogie (Little Benny and The
Masters)/More Than I Can Bear (Matt Bianco)/This House (Is Where Your Love
Stands (Big Sound Authority)/Legs (ZZ Top)/Just Another Night (Mick
Jagger)/Breaking Up My Heart (Shakin’ Stevens)
(Author’s
Note: Judging by the sleeve design, this record may well be called Hits 2 The
Album, but I have let common sense
prevail. The track listing is what is written on the rear sleeve; you know and
I know that “Yah Mo B There” is a duet between James Ingram and Michael McDonald
and that the erstwhile founder member of Duran Duran was at the time called,
strictly speaking, Stephen “Tin Tin” Duffy, but CBS/WEA were presumably not
that bothered about accuracy, given that the record went double platinum. I do
know that the cassette edition was entitled The Hits Tape 2.)
I am not adhering to my recent promise of more concise blog posts. Around a thousand words on the Smiths, 750 on Phil Collins and over 1200 on Paul Young. Well, I could argue that everything needs to get in there one way or another, but you could equally counter-argue that this is not The Key To All Mythologies.
So be it. I had little
idea how to deal with the proliferation of compilations that still await us in
this tale, but from listening to Hits 2
it is clear that the novelty of the compilation was beginning to wear off. This
is pop as fire sale. Where the first Hits
record had quality and direction, I am unsure what, if anything, this latest
collection of thirty-two songs is trying to tell us.
What I do recall from the
period is that the beginning of the year saw a lot of 1984 flops on fire sale
discount, in the hope that cheapness might propel them into the charts, and
that hope proved to be founded. The impression is one of arriving late at a
party where all the food and drink are gone and you have only leftovers and
half-asleep partygoers telling you what a fine time they had had. Some of the
1984 leftovers were very good indeed; it is baffling how records of the quality
of “Solid” and “Yah Mo B There” couldn’t have cleaned up first time around. But
others are not so good, and in many cases time is being marked. There are no
less than four songs here from 1983, including two reissues and two remixes.
There are cover versions ranging from Billy Bragg (his second consecutive
number one album) to Billie Holiday.
The songs here by Prince,
Chaka Khan, ZZ Top and Chicago prompt no further will on my part to say
anything further or different to what I have already written. In the spirit of
the exercise, therefore, I propose to cannibalise my previous writing and
recycle the thoughts that they express, and which have not noticeably changed in
the years (or, in some instances, the decade) since I wrote them.
Dead Or Alive
If 1985 was New Pop's 1974,
then Pete Burns was New Pop's Alvin Stardust, and not simply because of the
Pete Waterman connection - both veterans of a previous era, both hitching a
belated ride on the rapidly defuelling gravy train. Older and considerably more
resilient than Boy George - it's that Northern thing again - Burns belatedly
reintroduced a notion of dagger-thrusting glamour which George had by this time
largely abandoned in favour of cups of tea, whining about "I hate all that
Labour crap" and heroin.
The production team of
Mike Stock, Matt Aitken and Pete Waterman had first come to full notice some 12
months previously with a "Relax" ripoff entitled "The
Upstroke" sung by some female session singers grouped under the name of
Angels Aren't Aeroplanes. A big club hit, it led to further mainstream hi-NRG
crossovers more indebted to "Blue Monday," such as Hazell Dean's
"Wherever I Go (Whatever I Do)" (with an astonishing, apocalyptic
12-inch mix), Divine's "You Think You're A Man" and, eventually,
"You Spin Me Round." Though classified as the first major product of
the Hit Factory, Burns and the group wrote the song and SAW produced it pretty
much in accordance with Burns' unsurprisingly firm instructions. Charting in
November 1984, it proved to be yet another sleeper, hitting especially big in
Scotland and the North West, but bided its time over Christmas before nudging
its way into the Top 40 and thereafter hurtling to the top; the most prominent
of several underperforming 1984 releases which found renewed success in the
bargain basement clearance sales of early 1985.
Nevertheless "You Spin
Me Round" is an important transitional record, the most direct link
between the fading embers of New Pop and the imminent age of SAW (and to a
degree New Order) dominance. Its beats are trebly but resonant, harshly
staccato and slightly crude but finally rather compelling. Over the top Burns
flashes his "I"s and swims deliriously in the pre-E ecstasy
palindromic roundelay of the chorus, riding a Moebius rollercoaster, with some
ingenious touches of near-punctum, e.g. the bass-led descending harmonic figure
linking the first chorus to the second verse possibly inspired by UB40's
"Food For Thought."
It falls just short of
being a great pop record largely because
Burns' undeniably fulsome operatic tenor sometimes falls through the Tom Jones
trapdoor of knicker-happy pomp (for instance, on the line "I've got to
have my way now, ba-BEEEEEE") and at other times he grits his teeth too
hastily (the sneer on "You look like you're lots of fun"). But
"You Spin Me Round" was undoubtedly the liveliest number one since
"I Feel For You" and in the light of the dour drear which would
characterise much of the rest of 1985's upper reaches, its blue glow was as
near to the carrying of a New Pop torch as was likely to be discovered.
Howard Jones
1985’s equivalent of Ed
Sheeran’s “Sing.” He has a full band, complete with slap bass and horn section,
and somehow I think that wasn’t the original idea. “Things” is the usual
panacea with a “funk” interlude which is more Tony than Herbie Hancock and
bearing all the persuasive oomph of a Special K commercial. Join Weightwatchers
and lose £££!
King
Poundland ABC.
Nik Kershaw
Could have been on the
soundtrack of Buddy’s Song but always
far more interesting than his residual image would have you think. I haven’t
disliked any of his contributions to TPL
thus far. In fact, I rather like him.
New Edition
It took the Jackson 5 three-and-a-half
years to move from “I Want You Back” to gluey gloop like “Hallelujah Day” but
with New Edition eighteen months was enough. Here they don’t seem to get the
message; they ring “twenty times,” get the voice of “some strange man,” ask the
operator whether there’s a problem. I’ll tell you the problem, pal; you’re
creeping her out. You can’t take no for an answer. And one of New Edition is
already an apprentice jerk.
Kirsty MacColl
Asked Bragg to write an
extra verse and for the chorus to be feminised. It’s very fine like the average
1987 Smiths B-side is very fine. What else am I meant to say, or think?
Strawberry Switchblade
“The lassies who know”
says the gnomic sleeve comment. Know what?
1983’s “Trees And Flowers” was a gentle, sad study of agoraphobia. “Since
Yesterday,” eventually a top five hit, is part “Beach Baby” and part “As Tears
Go By,” and they might have something to communicate but it’s buried beneath
the trebly avalanche of a stupid producer who thought he was Trevor Horn.
The Two Phils
The only number one
performed by two singing drummers called Phil with part-time solo careers -
although only Collins plays drums on the record - the utilitarian video for
"Easy Lover," depicting Bailey and Collins rolling up their sleeves
and getting on with making the record in the studio, gave early notice of the
re-emergence of frills-free "Real Music" in 1985, a catchment area
which somehow managed to snare everybody from Dire Straits to Trouble Funk. No
more trivial dressing up and colouring in of fading New Pop books - and, to
echo my first year Home Economics teacher at grammar school, wasn't it all a
bit of an irrelevance when there are people starving in Africa?
"Easy Lover"
accordingly "rocks" with Collins' cavernous Big Bang of percussion
filtering out any subtlety or real swing - such things are left to Nathan
East's occasionally inventive bass. And while it provides partial redemption
for Earth, Wind and Fire never having had a UK number one single in their own
right ("September" and "Let's Groove" both made #3,
although Maurice White did produce Deniece Williams' "Free"), it is,
like so many number ones of this period, utterly functional - it comes in,
hangs about and does its job for a little while (in the case of "Easy Lover,"
for five minutes, although you don't really notice it) and then wanders off,
leaving minds unchanged and souls untouched.
Ashford and Simpson
It strikes you slowly and
subtly – they’re trying to do Marvin and Tammi, like they should have lived to
live and sing this song and mean it.
James Ingram and Michael McDonald
You could just swim in Quincy Jones’ productions and
Temperton’s chord changes, couldn’t you? Don’t understand the faith but somehow
I’m persuaded to believe theirs.
Out Of Battle
Clever sequencing; follow
a record inspired by Art of Noise with the thing itself. But Motown’s Dazz Band
actually sound marginally more alive; the music is strictly mid-eighties BBC
World Cup highlights montage but there is a continuation of the brittleness of “Superstition”
and the slacker work chants of Funkadelic.
Whereas “Close (To The
Edit)” is magisterial and glorious, and everybody should have Who’s Afraid Of…?, but the mystique was by
now being steadily stripped away by endless overexposure and remixes. It is a
mighty and important record but making the top ten in early 1985 was like “Heartbreak
Hotel” not becoming a hit until 1958. And ZTT in 1985 was in danger of becoming
as unhip, or anti-hip as 1958 Elvis.
Jim Diamond
PhD's "I Won't Let
You Down" was one of the great one-off hits of 1982, a Jon and Vangelis
derivé which manages to become something more, especially in its hosanna of a
final section when Tony Hymas' cathedral organ and Jim Diamond's pinched
contralto turn it into a New Pop hymn, just the other side of yellow from the
Teardrop Explodes' "Tiny Children" and the two prog rock/pub rock
veterans succeed in exceeding themselves.
Hymas proceeded to a
curious career which involved both extensive session work and some toe-dipping
in the world of improv - playing and recording with, inter alia, Lol Coxhill,
Steve Beresford and Tony Coe - while Diamond, a stockily cropped Glaswegian
with an alarming resemblance to Jimmy Somerville's unfunny uncle, returned as a
solo artist, managing to squeeze himself into the top slot for just one week in
between the heavier hitters.
"I Should Have Known
Better," co-written by Diamond and Graham Lyle, and nothing to do with
either the Beatles or Wire, is a far more conservative proposition than "I
Won't Let You Down," a fairly straight would-be power ballad - a
Cumbernauld "Careless Whisper" - which with its pre-Knopfler guitar
solos seems to belong in 1974. Although there are some interesting touches -
the regretful, shoulder-shrugging three-step semitone descent after Diamond's
"I know that you saw me...you turned away," his rueful
"yeah!" in the third line of the first verse - the dominant strains
are Diamond's yodel of "Ay-ay-ay-ay-ay," which unintentionally echoes
in part the next number one, and his rather less attractive vocal stridency, a
patch of grass somewhere between Freddie Mercury and Kevin Rowland on which you
wouldn't wish to sit for more than four minutes, not to mention the completely
out-of-place phlegmatic "ooh yeah!" just before his final assault.
After PhD, it's a bit of a letdown. If I say that “I Should Have Known Better” is
a song that Deek would love, fans of River
City will understand exactly what I mean.
Amii Stewart
Six years before, she’d
done sixties covers and sounded like the nineties. Now she was in Europe and suddenly
singing potential 1972 Eurovision entries (Luxembourg?). All quiet, no storm.
Commodores
Their only major hit without
Lionel Richie, and better and more heartfelt than anything on Can’t Slow Down. But it wasn’t 1985’s
only homage to Marvin and Jackie; there was the very touching “Only Survivor”
on Bobby Womack’s So Many Rivers,
wherein he also ponders Otis, Sam and others. And now there are no survivors.
Get everything Womack recorded, touched or breathed on. He never did anything
that was less than remarkable.
Alison Moyet
Difficult for me to forget
the grinning TV-AM presenter (although I’ve long forgotten his name) who after
broadcasting the video for “Ole Devil” made some patronising comment about how
nice it is that Alison Moyet is recording proper songs. You know the sort; in
1956 he’d have complained about why Billie Holiday couldn’t be clean, prim or
proper like that Joan Regan. Moyet didn’t particularly like this record,
either, but it reached number two regardless, kept off the top by “Easy Lover.”
It was just three years since “Party Fears Two” and “Ghosts.”
Kiss Me
The best member of Duran
Duran finally got a hit, after several remixes; the best is the 12-inch of the
hit version, with its “James Joyce” loop (Art of Noise, more or less). Petition
idiot radio stations who stop the song before the long, menacing, Frankie’s “War”-segueing-into
ending.
Wake Me Up, Go-Go
The DC sound never quite
caught on outside of certain London postcodes, which I think is more of a shame
than I did ten years ago. The sleeve commentary terms go-go “a certain style
which has been well known on the soul/funk/rap scene for a number of years.”
Well, that’s one way of not putting it. “Who Comes To Boogie” sounds a bit
timid now but Little Benny does a good square dance caller routine. Art of Noise
are kind of go-go, when you think about it (and that thought would eventually
lead to “Slave To The Rhythm”). But, unlike Trouble Funk’s Montreux performance
of “Still Smokin’” from the same year, I could happily live out the remainder
of my life without ever hearing this again.
Matt Bianco
The sleevenote calls them “those
fast-emerging masters of stylish dance-orientated pop.” Actually they were
respectable mid-table performers for around half a decade. “More Than I Can
Bear” begins with some icy Basha harmonies and a harmonically chilling, static
verse but then moves back into Jimmy
Young Show territory and that about sums this, and them, up. The single
peaked at #50, just two places higher than the contemporaneous, WEA-released “Never
Understand” by the Jesus and Mary Chain. I recently bought the 2CD deluxe
reissue of Blue Rondo Á La Turk’s Chewin’
The Fat. Entertaining enough but really you had to be there, preferably
watching and experiencing them live.
Big Sound Authority
Soulcialism! They weren’t
on Respond but might as well have been. Actually “This House” might be this
record’s most influential song, pointing decades ahead to the Duffys and
Palomas to come. But singer Julie Hawden growls far too much, possibly to
conceal some questionable pitching.
ZZ Top
“The beards get longer and
the boogie gets stronger.”
Mick Jagger
Jeff Beck! Bill Laswell!
What could possibly go wrong? Mick is hungry. Then he’s thirsty. The fadeout
sounds like a shootout. And this was NOT his “first solo single.” That had been
“Memo From Turner,” fifteen years older and infinitely superior.
Shakin’ Stevens
Even poor old Shaky couldn’t
escape the power-drilling 1985 ill-lit pop skip. Same plot as “Man In The Iron
Mask” but far creepier, as the singer promises to be at his cheating lover’s
side “every step of the way.” I heard “Cry Just A Little Bit” earlier on this
evening on the radio, a record I’d been innocently enjoying for three decades.
But: “Forbidden love is never what it seems”? What the hell is going on here?
Fragmentary and not very
satisfying, which is much what the record offers us. What do you mean I’m
nearly up to three thousand words? Damn!
