(#338: 22 November
1986, 2 weeks)
Track listing: I’ve
Been Losing You (a-ha)/Walk Like An Egyptian (The Bangles)/Heartbeat (Don
Johnson)/Wonderland (Paul Young)/World Shut Your Mouth (Julian Cope)/The Way It
Is (Bruce Hornsby and The Range)/What’s The Colour Of Money (Hollywood
Beyond)/Each Time You Break My Heart (Nick Kamen)/You Can Call Me Al (Paul
Simon)/Thorn In My Side (Eurythmics)/Always The Sun (The Stranglers)/Don’t Get
Me Wrong (The Pretenders)/Rain Or Shine (Five Star)/Brand New Lover (Dead Or Alive)/Roses
(Haywoode)/Straight To The Heart (The Real Thing)/True Colors (Cyndi
Lauper)/You’re Everything To Me (Boris Gardner)/Every Beat Of My Heart (Rod
Stewart)/Glory Of Love (Peter Cetera)/A Different Corner (George
Michael)/Because I Love You (Shakin’ Stevens)/The Greatest Love Of All (Whitney
Houston)/Love Will Conquer All (Lionel Richie)/For America (Red Box)/Heartbreak
Beat (The Psychedelic Furs)/Anotherloverholenyohead (Prince and The
Revolution)/Infected (The The)/Rage Hard (Frankie Goes To Hollywood)/Rock ‘N’
Roll Mercenaries (Meat Loaf and John Parr)/Fight For Ourselves (Spandau
Ballet)/Addicted To Love (Robert Palmer)
By 1986, a truce, of sorts, seemed to have been reached
between the Now and Hits series; just one release each for
much of the year, neither of which coincided with the other (Hits 4, Now 7), with Hits 5
released two weeks in advance of Now 8
for Christmas. That it stayed on top for two weeks perhaps indicates who was
still really ahead in this race, but I wonder whether too great a rush was made
to get the record out; just one of its thirty-two songs made number one, with
another five failing to make the Top 40 at all (one of which, “Heartbreak
Beat,” did not even break the Top 75), and it’s the usual curious mix of
intermittently terrific stuff with an ocean of treacly dreariness. Yet again,
the charts of late 1986 at times had to struggle to keep up with itself, so
rapid were the changes taking place, but here I sense a last-ditch, and
possibly forlorn, attempt to make the old stuff still matter.
a-ha
A fantastic start, and one of the Norwegians’ best, with a
song and arrangement which at different, and occasionally simultaneous, times
suggest the Teardrop Explodes, Roxy Music, Laurie Anderson and even Nick Cave,
since this is the tearing-himself-apart soliloquy of somebody who has just
killed someone, possibly the person to whom he is singing, in the rain; he puts
his gun down on the bedside table and can’t entertain the notion that he could
be capable of this. The music rises, dips and challenges; by the time Morten
reaches the beyond-exasperated scream of “PREYING” in the couplet “Thoughts to
wreck me/Preying on my mind,” he is finished; at one point the song makes as
though it’s going to end, before quietly and menacingly restarting. “How can I
stop now?” asks Morten, in the full and horrific realisation that he can’t.
The Bangles
Did “Walk Like An Egyptian” really become an unofficial Arab
Spring anthem? Its balance of whistling girl-group bubblegum and noisy gong and
guitar dissonances sounded sufficient to spur any revolution. There may also be
an irony in the Bangles’ best-known songs all having been written by men. But
Liam Sternberg had first offered the song to Toni Basil, who turned it down;
three of the group take turns to sing the verses, but producer David Kahne
didn’t like any of Debbi Peterson’s lead vocals, so relegated her to back-up
and furthermore replaced her drums with a drum machine. The wonder is that they
didn’t throw the guy out of a twenty-fifth storey window.
Don Johnson
Written by industry pros Eric Kaz and Wendy Waldman,
“Heartbeat” dates from an age where famous actors were inexplicably also called
upon to sing. Crockett mostly roars rather than sings the song, in a below par
Bryan Adams fashion (the line “I’ve been standing by the fire” being delivered
as though making immediate and unexpected contact with a red-hot poker). Its
typical skyscraper-skateboarding drum fills, guitar squeals and DX7 blasts
cannot quite mask a degree of sweaty straining on Johnson’s past. Only #46 in
Britain, but a top five smash in the States (Hits 5 would probably have done much better in the USA, since many
of its songs were far bigger hits there than in the UK).
Paul Young
“I see you in a dress of blue/With a question in your hand/I
see you in your attitude/Of sorrow and demand” – another Thatcher analogy?
Alas, Young now sounded lost; it is frequently impossible to hear him clearly
through the production fog, and the song, which at times tries hard not to be
Smokey Robinson’s “My Girl,” is not really up to anything. For many 1983-5
stars, the late season of 1986 was to provide some unwelcome shocks; suddenly
the likes of Howard Jones, Ultravox and Young were finding things very hard
going. Passing fashions? In part, but substandard material was also to blame.
Copey
The Belated Entry of the Crucial Three Into Then Play Long, Part 2of 3. What’s left
to say about Julian Cope? Musician, songwriter, psychedelic metal warrior,
activist, psychogeographer, noted archaeologist and historian, accredited
expert on the rock music of Germany and Japan, Head Heritage founder, acidly smart autobiographer and, most
recently, acclaimed crime writer. This suggests either a versatile and
inquisitive mind whose interests and energies are tireless and inspiring, or a
restless and unfocused spirit, unable to stick at one thing for more than five
minutes.
On balance I’d go with the former. I loved the Teardrop
Explodes, me. Wonderful WTF bubble-organ McGoohan-delia, they were. I played Kilimanjaro without end in my first year
at university – and realised I had a lot of work to do when a neighbouring
student asked me whether “Treason” was Duran Duran. “Ah, it’s all the same to
me,” he grinned. Wilder was a
bleared, BLURred November ’81 spike of rosy dreaming which made that month and
my endurance of it worthwhile. I wore my father’s old RAF coat with suitably
psychedelic scarf, and at the time I still had enough hair to let it grow to a
reasonable facsimile of the Cope crop. All that and he had an alter ego (Kevin
Stapleton) who brought Scott Walker (Emmett Hayes) back from charity shop
wilderness into the centre of something.
I stuck with him right through his first two solo albums and
was pleased to see him back on TV in late ’86 belting out “World Shut Your
Mouth” from his customised mike-stand-cum-stepladder.
After two records of Barrett quiescence he reckoned he’d earned the right to do
a third album of scuzzy garage rockouts, and that was Saint Julian. “World Shut Your Mouth” was and is a great “Louie
Louie” ripoff with Cope just wanting everybody to pay attention to things worth
paying attention to. Better on the album where it never seems to end.
I’ve stuck with him up to Brain Donor as well.
Bruce Hornsby
Ben Folds was just about turning twenty when piano-toting
Hornsby, from Williamsburg, Virginia, crept onto the scene with his melancholy
“The Way It Is”; as with “Boys Of Summer,” an abject reminder of how the
ideals, if ideals there were, of the sixties were impolitely being scored out.
“Some things will never change,” sang Hornsby, but nobody listened to the
counterpunch of “AH, BUT DON’T YOU BELIEVE THEM.” Best heard as the background
to Mancunian rapper MC Buzz B’s profoundly moving “Never Change.”
Hollywood Beyond
Remember when Mark Rogers was the future of pop? True, it
was one week in late summer when Melody
Maker was a bit stuck, but this fusion of Squeeze’s “Take Me I’m Yours” and
Irish jig is still quite striking, even though, with the repeated “Don’t tell
me that you think it’s green/Me, I know it’s red,” Rogers argues his point more
often than he strictly needs to do. An album followed, but not in Britain, and
Christ knows what became of him.
Nick Kamen
She’s there, of course, co-writing and producing, and
crooning in the background – as if her trademark “Look in your eyes” scarf
weren’t a big enough clue. But if Madonna now considered herself too good to go
on compilation albums, there was still room for her cast-offs; male model Kamen
can’t really sing and does his best with painfully thin material. Meanwhile, an
exasperated Sean Penn wonders whether he’s supposed to be the eighties’
giraffe.
Paul Simon
Just to say that Ezra Koenig was something like
two-and-a-half years old when Graceland came out, and that one of the more boneheaded reviews of the record at the time
praised the South African musicians for playing their instruments “with
vitality and honesty.” How does one play a musical instrument dishonestly? On
the I Love Music message board, one
of the responses to my piece on the record states: “Graceland is one of my
favorite albums ever I won't listen to alternative opinions under any
circumstances so there,” and the author of the post in question appears to be
named “art.” Who am I to argue with the giant responsible for such masterpieces
as Fate For Breakfast?
Eurythmics
In which the formerly trying-hard-to-be-hip duo surrender to
the demands of FM programmers and do a boring,
straight-down-the-middle-of-the-block-line AoR record of which this is the most
stupidly played and replayed example. The album was entitled Revenge, and was very popular with
people who didn’t buy albums. What do you mean, you need me to explain what
albums were? What am I, Lowell freaking Thomas?
The Stranglers
Laurie Latham produced again, and it’s a typical mid-period
Stranglers iron-fist-in-mutton-glove, though Hugh Cornwell’s snarl is more
noticeable than it was in things like “European Female,” as if the whole band
is just about ready to blast out and shriek proto-Merzbow no-tonality for a
hundred straight fifty-CD box sets. The song? It’s about Thatcherism, and the
modern world, and Chernobyl, and “Always The
Sun” may refer to the newspaper.
The Pretenders
I’m not sure where Chrissie Hynde was finding herself in the
middle of 1986. She didn’t really have a band, for a start; on the Get Close album, she expressed extreme
dissatisfaction with a Steve Lillywhite-produced cover of Hendrix’s “Room Full
Of Mirrors” (although it sounds more than fine to me). Specifically, she
thought drummer Martin Chambers had lost it – although, as she later admitted,
he was still severely traumatised from the loss of two former bandmates – and
so let him go. Reassembling, with Bob Clearmountain and Jimmy Iovine now
producing, and a room full of session musicians (one of whom was, by a
delicious irony, Mel Gaynor), Get Close
essentially turned into a Hynde solo album, with two songs about her children
(“My Baby” and “Hymn To Her”), a lot of funk, and “Don’t Get Me Wrong,”
apparently inspired equally by a British Airways in-flight call-signal (the
song’s central four-note melodic motif) and an attempt to “do” the Beatles.
Still with Jim Kerr at this point, Hynde’s state of mind
during this period could fairly be described as undirected – when Simple Minds
came back from touring, the Pretenders had to go off on tour, so the two never
really saw each other – and some of that uncertainty may be projected into the
song’s structure and performance, in which Hynde implies that this might be
great or just very temporary, with several sardonic nods to Kerr’s big visions
(“Upon a sea where the mystic moon/Is playing havoc with the tide”). But her
tone and the song’s ending are none too hopeful.
Dead Or Alive
Pete Burns sounding relatively low-key and unfussed here,
maybe because Stock, Aitken and Waterman have worked out how they’re going to
sound.
Haywoode
Her first name is Sidney, she was in Flick Colby’s Zoo
troupe for the later days of TOTP,
and “Roses” is moderately likeable bubblegum from industry pros Leeson and
Vale. Typical can’t live with/without ‘em fare; she wants to go, but then he
brings her roses – “WHAT? DO? I? DO?” she asks us. It’s a more convincing
conundrum than any of Phil Collins’ sweatier ones.
True Colors
Proof that in 1986 Cyndi was still hipper than Madge. On one side there was the iceberg, “DON’T
DIE OF IGNORANCE,” clinical staff wearing gloves or refusing to touch patients,
Section 28. On the other, a song originally written with Billy Steinberg’s
mother in mind, which was first offered to, but turned down by, Anne Murray,
but a song which, through circumstance, Lauper made her own and which became
unofficially resonant throughout the gay/LBGT community. Politically, this
record’s most radical song, and also its most sweetly sung. “You’re beau-ti-ful
like a rainbow,” whispers Lauper, as though saying goodbye.
Boris
What is this reactionary shit – “Because you’re everything a
woman ought to be/Sweet and kind and pure of mind/And beautiful to see?” Did
rock ‘n’ roll, or liberation, actually happen? Bear this in mind; no matter how
hip, cool and wacky you imagine the
eighties to have been, it was filled with gunky crap like this. It might as
well still have been 1952, which I gather was part of Thatcher’s big idea.
Rod For One’s Back
Yes, on this day of days I’m going to come down hard on this
lament about a lost soul wanting to go home to Scotland. Why? Not just because
Rod’s actually from Finchley and is a Scotsman only in his mind. But because –
despite his even writing the lyric – I just don’t believe him. Listen to
Frankie Miller’s “Caledonia” and you can palpate
the singer’s tearful confusion; he means
what he is singing. Whereas throwing in tropes like “Jacobite,” “Emerald Isle”
and “swirling pipes” is a tourist’s Hairy Highlander notion of Scotland (which
snows when you turn it upside down). It doesn’t even begin to accentuate the
heartache felt by people who are now uncomfortable living in a country where
they are jeered at, patronised, threatened and compared with Hitler. Rather
than deliberately being kept out of the charts and off the radio for political
reasons, “Every Beat Of My Heart” rose to number two. Stay with us, Scotland,
because tourists have money.
Peter Cetera
“I am the MAN who will FIGHT for your HONOUR!” Look, it was Karate Kid TWO for feck’s sake.
George Michael
"Dedicated to a memory" it says on the reverse
sleeve of the single, and on the sleeve's front there is a black-and-white
photograph of a man with his back turned to the camera, some distance away, walking
into a huge park, unutterably alone. Although Michael was still, at that point,
officially one half of Wham!, the record drips with pungent tears of reluctant
farewells, although its subtext is more elusive.
A far more complex and satisfying record than "Careless
Whisper" - and yet also a far simpler one - "A Different Corner"
can fairly be said to be the first entirely solo UK number one single, in that
it was entirely composed, sung, played and produced by the same person. It could
with equal fairness be described to the most radical of 1986's number ones;
there is no chorus, and the song's reflective cycle wafts by in placid echoes
of repetition. Comparisons were made at the time with Eno's Another Green World - that refractory
Harold Budd treated piano, the same steady, unobtrusive flow of electronics,
the distended vocal drones in the background (though the latter may also owe
something to the intro and outro of McLaren's "Madam Butterfly") -
and through its snow-white sleeve and aura of finality, a kinship with
"Atmosphere" was seen. This latter was not far-fetched, since George
Michael had recently appeared on a BBC2 arts programme where he reviewed, among
other things, Mark Johnson's book An
Ideal For Living: A History of Joy Division, and spoke warmly of their
music.
"A Different Corner" is indeed a remarkable piece
of music in that here, after four years, we finally see the real George Michael
emerging, out of the shuttlecocked shorts and faux-machismo, with a
finely-judged and emotionally open vocal performance worthy of an older and
sadder Cassidy or Donny, and it's a George Michael we could learn to love. And
yet, although he sounds more open than on any of his previous records, the real
meaning of the song had to remain buried for a dozen more years.
The giveaway comes in the lines, "I would promise you
all of my life/But to lose you would cut like a knife/So I don't dare." In
other words, he loves his best friend ("'Cos I've never come close in all
of these years/You are the only one to stop my tears") but he loves him
that way also, and he is tortured because he cannot bring himself to tell him
(his "I'm so scared" is the reddest of excoriating wounds) - the same
subtext compelled to remain within the shadows of "Johnny Remember
Me" and "Have I The Right?" The music's careful placidity is a
striking counterpart to his agonised voice - and where does that "And if
all that there is, is this feeling of being used" come in, when really
it's the paralysing fear of rejection that prevents him from getting close to
his desired Other but also stops him from moving away; the torture of lifelong
compromise - "I should go back to being lonely and confused/If I could...I
would...I swear." Then his unheard pledge also echoes into the far horizon,
just as the man retreats into the greenery, walking away...in silence.
Shakin’ Stevens
A glossy, mid-eighties AoR ballad. By Shakin’ Stevens. Did
his record company even know what to do with him by this point?
Whitney
We’ve done this song before, and she means it, like George
Benson and Kevin Rowland meant it. She’s also angrier, and more doomed, than
either.
Lionel Richie
Dancing On The Ceiling
is sometimes so laidback a record that it verges on the comatose. Certainly the
title song is the equivalent of your uncle doing the Charleston to the Meat
Puppets; “Say You, Say Me” is nonsense which should have been renamed “Just Say
No,” and “Ballerina Girl” is fundamentally wrong.
“Love Will Conquer All” didn’t do much as a single here - #45 plays #9 on Billboard – but it’s the great lost
Richie song, a lovely, shimmering ballad of reassurance done with Greg
Philliganes and Cynthia Weil, sung in duet with the excellent Marva King, and
featuring a wonderful, proto-Erykah Badu chord sequence of unanticipated
elegance (G major seventh, C seventh, F suspended second, A seventh [suspended
fourth], A seventh and D major seventh). Forgotten by me for a third of a
lifetime, this was a very welcome reminder (“Give love a chance”).
Red Box
What the hell were Red Box (on) about? Pioneering pop/world
music crossover? A KwikSave Thompson Twins? Old seventies heads trying to be
modern? Pretentious, overqualified hippy garbage which Radio 1 played instead
of LL Cool J or Age Of Chance? “Lean On Me” annoyed me hugely when it went top
three, and so did “For America” when it went top ten a year later. An assault
on Reagan’s assault on Grenada and Nicaragua? Perhaps, but it makes me grind my
teeth, so anaemic, bitty and inconclusive is it as a pop record. Whoever’s
singing backing vocals on it (Anthony Stewart Head is there). “For America” is
why Big Black’s Atomizer had to
happen.
Furs
Ah, gentlemen, you took so long to get here and you lost all
of what made you moderately interesting (for fake Robert Wyatt records you
can’t get much better than “Love My Way”). Flippy-floppy AoR in which Butler
reminds you that he used to be someone.
Parade
So what if the film’s rubbish? So was Purple Rain. As with Graceland,
Prince built up the songs from rhythm tracks upwards. But no other pop record
in 1986 was as ceaselessly inventive as Parade,
and maybe only very few pop records since 1967. “Christopher Tracy’s Parade”
starts off as Sgt Pepper being
ambushed by the strings from Septober
Energy (via Westbrook’s Marching Song)
and from there just gets darker and stranger, at least in part because of the
arrangements provided by Lennie Tristano’s old pupil Clare Fischer. “A New
Position” is “Sex Machine” without a James Brown. “I Wonder U” is a detuned
transistor radio trapped the other side of Maxinquaye.
“Under The Cherry Moon” is Dennis Potter’s idea of the twenties, the record’s
“When I’m Sixty-Four.” “Girls & Boys” toys with French kisses before the
whining “Cross The Tracks” Moog loses both patience and tonality before
thudding into “Life Can Be So Nice” which atomises into a Cubist jigsaw puzzle
of Bolan, Sheila E’s drumming as far out, and far in, as Susie Ibarra on Ten Freedom Summers, before CUTTING OFF
and leaving us in the lounge of Hell that is “Venus de Milo.”
Side two features more “conventional” songs, one of which
(“Kiss”) is the best pop song about sex ever recorded (whispered, always
suggested), culminating in the increasingly bitonal desert of
“Anotherloverholenyahead,” which Lena reckons is like James Brown marooned in
Joy Division’s wasteland. Thereafter there is nowhere to go except the patient,
acoustic elegy of “Sometimes It Snows In April.” Don’t you realise, listeners,
that something beautiful – perhaps even pop – is dying?
Infected
Not that that
worried The The. If Soul Mining were
a microcosm of eighties Britain as glimpsed from a basement in Lewisham, then Infected took on, and fought, the gloss.
Told off in the NME for not being the
Go-Betweens – but they slagged off Parade
and thought Mantronix’s Music Madness
was the end of civilisation, so who gave a fuck what they thought? Certainly
not the thousands of readers who deserted them – Infected is a terrific and big-sounding album, not headachy big
like Let’s Dance but as gleaming and
threatening as the Big Bang and the newly-opened M25. “Sweet Bird Of Truth” DID
sound like the end of the world – Johnson’s scrambled “We’re above the Gulf of
Arabia” was truly scary; exactly the sort of thing Bowie should have been doing
instead of dreck like “Time Will Crawl” – and “Heartland” frankly sends “For
America” out the door/window/continent/planet. Whereas the title song welcomes annihilation; he goes for “love,”
knowing that it will kill him, the closing angels at the elevator ready to send
him down to hell. “Dear God, God, God, GOD, slow train to dawn,”
he hisses with Neneh Cherry, and you’re down there with them.
This is highly unsettling stuff for a Christmas-time number
one TV-advertised hits album.
Dylan or Dylan?
They kept the record shops open on the Bank Holiday Monday
so that people could go in and buy “Rage Hard.” But it was no use. Holly’s
boring, climax-killing announcement, with sampled crowd noises, in the
introduction suggested nothing new or different, and a lot less. He begins by
impersonating Scott Walker, and then Martin Fry, before remembering to be
himself. But the song doesn’t have a song, and the lyric is the usual tired
parade of go-for-it tropes (“Don’t give up and don’t give in” etc.). Morley
called the second album Liverpool
because he knew that was where the band would soon be heading back. It was very
bad progressive rock which gave 1986 hard-hitters Red Box and It Bites a run
for their money, if not mine.
Why “Dylan or Dylan”? Because ZTT seemed obsessed with Dylan
Thomas not going gently into that good night; two songs on 1985’s Insignificance soundtrack, one of which
was sung by Roy Orbison, referenced the poem directly. But enough of books, the
audience screamed, what about some ACTION?
But they were busy watching the wildlife, and engaging in
other activities beginning with the letter “w.”
Meat ‘n’ Parr
“Rock ‘N’ Roll Mercenaries” is the latest contender for the
worst song ever to appear on Then Play
Long. “Money is power – power is FAME!” bark, unlovingly, a one-hit wonder
striving to have another one, and a temporarily washed-up performer who would
shortly be reduced to participating in a special edition of a now unmentionable
television game show, involving the Royal Family. The Loaf forgot to introduce
Parr onstage one night, Parr took umbrage, and they haven’t spoken since.
Everything that was wrong with the eighties, and rock music, and not
necessarily in that order.
Spandau Ballet
When you think about it, the sentiments of “Fight For
Ourselves” aren’t that far away from those of “Panic” – Britain is sinking and
something’s going to change, maybe violently. But the music, though making an
initial fist of presenting a “harder” Spandau, falls back on glossy soul clichés
all too soon, and future wannabe Conservative MP Tony Hadley evidently hadn’t a
clue what he was singing (“Well, if life is here before my eyes/I find it hard
to see”). How were the rest of us expected to receive it any differently?
Robert Palmer
Not that far away from “Infected” – “Oblivion is all you
crave” – “Addicted To Love” nevertheless carries something of a curse; Palmer,
Bernard Edwards (who played bass and produced) and Tony Thompson all died
young, while Terence Donovan, who directed the video, committed suicide. Still
stuck in the Power Station – the guitar solo is Andy Taylor’s – Palmer dimly
tries to recall 1974 tropes while knowing that doom is perhaps not that far
away. Kim Gordon’s intentionally blank reading, done in a ten-cent record booth
and heard on Ciccone Youth’s The White(y)
Album, is perhaps one of the records of the decade.
Moral: An end is coming. How courageous are we to grasp
another beginning?
Moral 2: And the dice are loaded. No matter how or where
they land, they always read “five.”
