(#309: 26 January 1985, 3 weeks)
Track listing: Tooth And Nail/That Was Yesterday/I
Want To Know What Love Is/Growing Up The Hard Way/Reaction To Action/Stranger
In My Own House/A Love In Vain/Down On Love/Two Different Worlds/She’s Too
Tough
With some pop records, it’s
all about context. Taken alone as a single, “I Want To Know What Love Is” is an
attempt at a wider statement of the same basic theme as “Waiting For A Girl
Like You,” though its canvas is broader and coarser. The lyric’s climb-ev’ry-mountain
metaphor is definitely shop-soiled, and the record sinks into regrettable
bombast with the entrance of an entirely unnecessary mass choir, including
among its curious number Jennifer Holliday and Tom Bailey.
In the context of
displacing “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” from number one, however, the record
felt as if the previous nine years of pop had never happened, as though nothing
had moved a nanometre from “Bohemian Rhapsody.” Suddenly everything had to be a
gigantic community singalong with no subtlety, everything explained, plodding
and/or bleeping along to demonstrate that “we” were still human beings. The
record foresees with some shivering accuracy the post-Band Aid trend for Big
Statements sung by Lots Of Voices with Proper Passion.
How did Britain manage to
get from “Two Tribes” to this in six months? Part of the answer, unfortunately,
is to do with Trevor Horn, who was the original choice of producer for Agent Provocateur; however, after three
fruitless months in New York, the band felt they wanted to play as a band, rather than be treated as
dots on a computer screen, and so sent for Alex Sadkin.
If anything, “I Want To
Know What Love Is” is diminished by
the songs which surround it, all of which are either hoary old, tarted-up 1972
bar-band rock (“Tooth And Nail,” “She’s So Tough”) or dismal, insomnia-curing
ballads (“Two Different Worlds,” “A Love In Vain,” which latter is neither
Robert Johnson nor “Decades”). Listening to Lou Gramm’s generally prehistoric
attitude towards women, it is a wonder that the object of “Stranger In My Own
House” didn’t just change the locks. Worst of all is the pompous “That Was
Yesterday” – Gramm really does remind me of Gary Barlow, then fourteen – whose crowning
cry of “Yesterday will live ON!” and accompanying fanfare is scary, in a “tomorrow
belongs to us” sense.
And you could have had Perhaps by the Associates, or even, if
this was the sort of thing you wanted, Reckless
by Bryan Adams, with its sharper songs, more adventurous production (Adams and
Bob Clearmountain) and far more believable delivery. “Two Different Worlds”
might share a lyrical theme with “Run To You” but, despite the occasional bit
of decent acting (Gramm’s quiet, dread-filled hesitation on the line “I think she
knows it”), is stodge set next to pasta Amartriciana.
Of course, there is
another, highly credible explanation to why this and other number one albums of
the time were so successful, and I will expand on that when we reach entry #315.
If this really were only a case of the Old coming back in new, bigger clothes
and suppressing the New forever, however, then the days to come would yield
nothing but chill and horror.
