(#345: 9 May 1987, 2
weeks)
Track listing: Misfit/Down
To Earth/Free/Know What You Know/Curiosity Killed The Cat/Ordinary Day/Mile
High/Red Lights/Shallow Memory
Not just of its time, but utterly of its place; I knew
something of Fulham wine bars in 1987 and this I heard coming out of all of
them. It’s a wonder this bunch of amiable, if confused, Sloanies – coming variously
from Earl’s Court, Sunbury-on-Thames, Strawberry Hill and Putney – were ever
seriously touted as the new Duran Duran. Theirs is depressingly grown-up music,
ideal fodder to make the twenty-something Cameron and Johnson feel they were
modern, without all the awkward political stuff (don’t tell me they were really
digging The World Won’t Listen or The People Who Grinned Themselves To Death).
The problem is not that Curiosity’s music was bad – it isn’t (although “Down To
Earth” is by far their best song) – but it’s not exactly earth-moving or
life-changing either. It squats in the middle of the Broadway like a sulky
sausage. Ben VP’s vocals are either too timid or too overstretched, various
backing singers and eminent British jazz musicians read the flyshit and get
their mortgages paid off, and – as was the regrettable norm of mid-eighties
mainstream British AoR pretending to be pop – his lyrics, whether they deal
with school bullies (“Shallow Memory” is no “Rusholme Ruffians”) or sententious
finger-wagging (eponymous band song), are too pretentiously unfocused to make
us feel or believe anything. Sly and Robbie pop up to produce “Free” and no
doubt chuckled to themselves as Ben “I’m Independent, Are You?” VP droned “If
we can’t be free/Then we don’t wants (sic)
to be we” but simply make me wish I were writing about Rhythm Killers instead. And in “Red Lights,” the backward fisherman’s
cap-wearing vocalist intones the following classic line: “The touch of your
hand gives me the command to donate.” To donate what, Ben? Your left kidney?
