(#349: 25 July
1987, 1 week; 30 January 1988, 8 weeks)
Track listing: If
You All Get To Heaven/If You Let Me Stay/Wishing Well/I’ll Never Turn My Back
On You (Father’s Words)/Dance Little Sister/Seven More Days/Let’s Go
Forward/Rain/Sign Your Name/As Yet Untitled/Who’s Loving You
The first thing to ask is that, if you were around at the
time and old enough to remember, you try to forget the gargantuan typhoon of
hype and hoopla which surrounded, and was in great part propagated by, Terence
Trent d’Arby in 1987. In every interview he gave – and in 1987 he gave many –
he was intent on impressing on our brains what an original visionary he was.
All that bumfluff about his first record being the best album since Sgt Pepper, and a lot of people wanted to believe that it was, or could
be. The problem for him was that, around two-and-a-half months earlier, an
album had been released that many people thought WAS the best since Sgt Pepper – Prince’s Sign “☮" The Times. “I think it was overrated myself,”
huffed d’Arby, not entirely convincingly, in an interview that September, but I’m
sure he would allow himself a little smile at the fact that his album made it
to Then Play Long, whereas Sign "☮" The Times did not (it peaked at #4, behind Now 9, The Joshua Tree and Level 42’s Running
In The Family).
While that statistic doesn’t in itself make Hardline the better record, it is not an
uninteresting or unengaging one. There
is a lot of unorthodox juxtaposing of different musical elements, if nothing
new or innovative as such. Indeed, tropes like the whirligig calliope on the “choruses”
of “Wishing Well” and even the solemn metronomic electronic procedurals of “Sign
Your Name” become more understandable when you realise that d’Arby co-produced
most of the record with Martyn Ware; much of Hardline plays like a buffered-up mid-period Heaven 17 album (on the
long, ruminative “Let’s Go Forward” we could be in the middle of a Tina Turner
session).
d’Arby’s vocal stylings mainly fall under the standard gospel
category; the pained Sam Cooke growl is
there, and the 1987 Rod Stewart is nowhere in it, although he presses down on
the whooping and laughing buttons a touch too often. On “If You Let Me Stay,”
he seems so intent on professing his ability to testify without fear that the
listener is in danger of missing the abrupt lyrical turnaround in the middle
eight, where he barks “Your pretensions aim for gullible fools/And who needs
you anyway?,” suggesting that this may not quite be a song about a departing
lover. Equally, “Dance Little Sister” is a call to live and survive rather than
a get-up-and-dance romp.
However, there is one influence – and it might not be in
a one-way direction – on d’Arby’s singing that nobody seems ever to have
mentioned, and that is Michael Jackson. Given the startling job the latter had
done with “Who’s Loving You” some years before, you would have thought somebody
might have picked up on that, but there are times when high innocence and low gruffness
combine to give a preview of the less cuddly Jackson whom we will be seeing in
the nineties. The opening “If You All Get To Heaven” – one of the record’s more
adventurous songs – plays with time and perspective, its (relatively) quiet and
distant verses suddenly veering into a loud foreground with a doomy chant
(featuring an instantly recognisable Glenn Gregory), and its hoped-for global
fury (“Old men’s cigars puff up the wars/To protect their fuck-ups again/Young
men must die/To keep the old ones alive/And to prove they’re studs once again”)
is an uncanny ancestor of “Earth Song”’s multiple “what abouts?”
Most remarkable of all are the closing two songs. One “As
Yet Untitled” is entirely acapella,
with occasional multitracked choirs somewhere between the Beach Boys’ “Our
Prayer,” and Daryl Hall’s chorale on the “Preface” to Fripp’s Exposure, and is about an American, lost
in different parts of America, and then Germany, and now London, wondering in
horror at what his country might have turned into. “I don’t like the vibe I
catch when I walk the streets of America,” he said in 1987, “so why should I
put up with it if I can find somewhere else where I can eventually raise kids
or whatever?”
But he can’t get away from America, either. Midway through
the song, he pauses:
“Y’see, my daddy died to leave this haunting ground
“Y’see, my daddy died to leave this haunting ground
And this same ground still haunts me.”
He rages, he is quiescent, he is heartfelt. “I’ll return
a stronger man,” he sings. “I’ll return to me, my homeland/No grave shall hold
my body down/This land is still my home.”
It’s the same story, isn’t it, and it is an intensely
moving performance. That “me” in the middle of the prepenultimate line quoted
above suggests that like another Piscean, the late Mr McGoohan, d’Arby is
furiously intent on ensuring that he is his own man. But you can run away from
Manhattan, and Chicago, and Daytona Beach, and Orlando, and the 3rd
Armored Division in Frankfurt (I wondered whether Chuck Eddy might have known d’Arby,
as he was in that area around the same time, but Eddy actually served as a
First Lieutenant in the Army Signal Corps), and the Bojangles (a band with whom
d’Arby briefly worked in 1986 and who provide the backing on much of Hardline), and even change your name –
since 2001, he has been legally known as Sananda Maitreya - and still never get
away from yourself, or the land from which you came. You are obliged to take
yourself with you. And so “As Yet Untitled” is a performance – a declaration of
principles, if you must – which I think can speak to, and for, anybody who is
far from their home.
He signs off the performance with a chuckling “Meanwhile,
on the other side of the world…” before segueing into the best version of “Who’s
Loving You” you ever heard, a suggestion perhaps of what another version of Michael
Jackson might have grown into. Generally, Hardline
tosses much of what pretended to be Soul, Passion and Honesty in 1987 into the
cockiest of cocked hats; like the Hendrix of late ’66, this is a version of the
“real thing” convincing enough to pass for reaiity. If d’Arby had a fellow
traveller that year, it was Bono; both the ominous Volga choir-throated “Seven
More Days” and “Let’s Go Forward” see him restlessly, if slowly, searching for
something that he cannot quite uncover. He promised to go off the aesthetic
scale with the next one, and so he did; Neither
Fish Nor Flesh is one of the eighties’ greatest and bravest albums, and few
of those who had bought into the Hardline
were patient enough to listen to it. Unlike Prince, he has not had a
seldom-broken stream of platinum records since then. But Hardline at least suggests that the hype was camouflage for
distressed and disorientated melancholy. Supporting musicians included the
aforementioned Bojangles, as well as pros like Mel Collins, Frank Ricotti, Nick
Plytas and Lance Ellington, and the old Rip, Rig and Panic rhythm section of
Bruce Smith and the late and great Sean Oliver (who helped write “Wishing Well”
and, at the time of the album’s release, and according to its credits, still
owed d’Arby “ten quid”).
