(#312: 2 March 1985, 5 weeks)
Track listing: Sussudio/Only You Know And I Know/Long
Long Way To Go/I Don’t Wanna Know/One More Night/Don’t Lose My Number/Who Said
I Would/Doesn’t Anybody Stay Together Anymore/Inside Out/Take Me Home
The story was that Phil
Collins and Robert Plant were visiting a Chicago restaurant called the Pump
Room. Plant was allowed in but Collins was not, as the maitre d’ insisted that
a jacket was required. Collins protested that he was wearing a jacket but was told that it was the wrong kind of
jacket. This stuck in his craw, and he whined about it on Carson, whined about
it on Letterman, whined about it just about everywhere he could whine. He wouldn’t
stop whining. Arrive at your own conclusion.
It is still slightly
baffling how, only four years after Face
Value could just about pass muster as art-rock, Collins became the world’s
biggest understudying pop star, or perhaps his was simply the most prominent
instance of ancient (seventies) musicians and music being cosmetically
fashioned to resemble newness. Richard Cook’s contemporaneous NME review of the record is so generous
and articulate that I wish that what he said were true. Perhaps in 1985 No Jacket Required might have
represented cunning, up-to-the-mark pop-rock, but twenty-nine years later it is
hard to see beyond the crushing, deafening picture that the record largely
presents.
Listening to NJR is like being bludgeoned repeatedly around
the head with an early club sandwich-sized mobile ‘phone. No drumbeat is left
un-gated – Hugh Padgham is, wearily, back again, as co-producer with Collins –
no song left free of irritating, crisscrossing horn charts or glutinous
eighties guitar (mostly Daryl Steurmer) or sax (Don Myrick or Gary Barnacle; it
makes little difference). “Sussudio” came off poorly when set beside a reissue
of “1999” but they are not really the same song, and most of the record’s other
tracks are minute variants on the one song. Every beat has to be big, every
introduction must herald yet another day off for Ferris Bueller.
It is oppressive; even
listening to my elderly cassette copy at moderate volume inspired mild migraine
– and I’m sure that was the intention, to batter any opposition into submission
with its bigness, including the spectre of Collins himself, pictured on the
inner sleeve, grimacing at the camera while wearing a suit at least two sizes
too big for him (with frightful shoes). It’s sobering to think that at the
time, he was just thirty-five.
Most of the album’s songs
were improvised around drum machine patterns, and while some of them may
express hoarse soul-baring, their messages are mostly impossible to decipher
behind the gleaming clamour, and the snippets that do come through suggest that
he is still stuck in the whining past; at least two songs bear reference to the
“same old story.” “Take Me Home” might be about a patient in a mental hospital,
but even the distant ghost of Peter Gabriel cannot elevate it above a prototype
soundtrack for slow-motion football or athletics footage on television sports
programmes.
There are a couple of
ballads; “One More Night” is “If Leaving Me Is Easy” with all fight
eviscerated, while “Long Long Way To Go,” a.k.a. “Starve With Sting” – I saw
the two perform the song at Live Aid, which reminded me just how vital the
third musician on stage with them, Branford Marsalis, was – highlights the
record’s innate conservatism with its “a little charity for the poor” stance.
But mainly the record plods in concrete clogs; “Inside Out” is so dreary in its
intended massiveness that it sounds written for a BBC comedy-drama series abouttwo former prison inmates trying to go straight by forming an employment agency. Meanwhile, “Only You Know And I Know” sounds like “Abacab” stripped of
ingenuity and invention.
Who is the “Billy” of “Don’t
Lose My Number” – and why should anybody care? Nobody, I suspect, really treated
NJR as anything other than a big
soundtrack to a big life, to be played through big speakers while driving a big
car and wearing a big suit. This is
the eighties which people like Dylan Jones regard as the apex of Western
civilisation, Bullingdon-Orientated Rock (BoR), the dead-eyed, iron-eared
soundtrack to a lifestyle whose jackets were required only to have their
sleeves rolled up halfway. Meat Is Murder
only went gold; No Jacket Required
went six times platinum in Britain alone. Clearly there was still a long, long
way to go.
