(#358: 28 November 1987, 1 week)
Track listing: Never
Gonna Give You Up/Whenever You Need Somebody/Together Forever/It Would Take A
Strong Strong Man/The Love Has Gone/Don’t Say Goodbye/Slipping Away/No More
Looking For Love/You Move Me/When I Fall In Love
I hardly ever listen to Pick
Of The Pops these days as, unlike what would seem to be the vast majority
of Radio 2 listeners, I am able to lead a contented and fulfilling life without
the need to hear “Maggie May” or “Love Train” ten times per day. I understand
completely why the programme should trounce Radio 1’s The Official Chart show so soundly in the ratings, though note that
it itself is trounced by almost the same margin by Capital Radio’s Vodafone Big Top 40 programme, which
does not halt the flow of music or enthusiasm by calling everything “Official”
and assuming that its listeners do not possess a level of intelligence
equivalent to a two-year-old child or a capacity for memory retention similar
to that of a goldfish and do not need to have the same few phrases shouted at
them every twenty seconds.
Then again, you might think that in a world which is
speedily going to hell, or at least back to the fourteenth century, in a
handcart, people need the reassuring blanket of aged security that old records
and old charts offer. I don’t believe that the old is better than the new by
virtue of age alone, however, and this was quietly demonstrated by the first
hour of last Saturday’s show, which featured the twenty best-selling singles
from 1956. The fifties are a decade seldom revisited by the show – every few
months, as, I suspect, a tentative experiment in audience engagement – and
1956, with one foot still in the pre-rock era, is a territory practically never
ventured into. I noted with slight disappointment that the show wasn’t going to
go through the Top 20 of the week ending 7 January 1956, where, I think, hits
like Dickie Valentine’s “Old Pianna Rag,” two versions of “Suddenly There’s A
Valley,” Jimmy Shand’s “Bluebell Polka” and Winifred Atwell’s “Let’s Have A
Ding-Dong” would have befuddled too many people (despite there being, at number
one, something called “Rock Around The Clock” and something else called “Rock Island
Line” at number seventeen).
Still, the 1956 hour was a revelation, if only of how
shockingly dated, to the extent of being practically prehistoric, most of the
twenty featured records were. I well remember listening to a similar
retrospective chart show on Radio 1 at Sunday lunchtimes in the seventies – a programme
now written out of history due to its having being hosted by a broadcaster to
whom Anthony Burgess, correctly as it turned out, referred as “the most evil
man in Britain” – when these records were only twenty or less years in the past
(i.e. the distance between “Some Might Say” and now) and they already sounded a
bit pickled, a little frayed at the edges. But grotesque things like Anne
Shelton’s “Lay Down Your Arms” sounded eviscerated from the nineteenth century
(“March at the double down Lover’s Lane,” post-rationing self-denial in the age
of Rachman and Christie). Frankie Laine’s “A Woman In Love” simply sounded
ludicrous (“CRAAAAYYY-ZILLY GAAAAZE!”). Novelty instrumentals like “Zambesi”
and “Poor People Of Paris” bore a creak worthy of Edison cylinders. Rock ‘n’
roll-inspired novelties like “Rock ‘N’ Roll Waltz” hit bigger in Britain than “Be-Bop-A-Lula.”
Even forward-thinking records like Lonnie Donegan’s “Lost John” sounded decidedly
wrinkled, regardless of how many rock stars he or it may have inspired at the
time. Things like “It’s Almost Tomorrow” – though anticipating the quiet dread
of Fleetwood Mac’s “You & I Part II” – made me surprised that there wasn’t
a lute or a crumhorn to accompany the medieval plainsong. The year-end top
twenty contained two Elvis songs, but also two songs by Teresa Brewer, both of
which have dated quite atrociously (one, “A Sweet Old-Fashioned Girl,” tries
for Betty Hutton OTT-ness, but Brewer is too sweet to be convincingly unhinged;
the other was “A Tear Fell,” about which you can read here).
The music demonstrated how, and why, Presley became so big –
“Heartbreak Hotel” and “Hound Dog” in this context sounded as though they were
proclaiming against what surrounded
it – and otherwise, perhaps only Dean Martin’s “Memories Are Made Of This,”
Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers’ “Why Do Fools Fall In Love?” (Britain’s first
R&B number one) and, at a stretch, Doris Day’s “Whatever Will Be, Will Be,”
would still pass muster and remain playable now.
The reaction on social media thereafter was quite revealing;
many listeners had felt that the show had reached back a little too far, beyond their collective memory –
well, we are talking about music that is almost sixty years old – and most
seemed relieved to be immersed in the relatively familiar past of 1980 which
followed in the second hour (then again, 1980 alone is now thirty-five years
away, the same distance it was at the time from the end of the Second World
War). 1956’s charts were also a field for subtle, or not so subtle, separatism.
The “Only You” which hit big in that year’s Britain was not the Platters’
original, but the anaemic cover by white Kentucky college boys the Hilltoppers.
Top for the year – which added to the general sense of
anti-climax; was this as good as it
got? – was the record which kept “Heartbreak Hotel” at number two, Pat Boone’s
weepie “I’ll Be Home.” But this was a bastardisation of a 1955 record by the
Flamingos, whose original is superior to Boone’s in every way (the lyrics of Boone’s
version seems to transpose some of the Flamingos’ lines); Sollie McElroy’s lead
vocal is pained, ecstatic and dread-filled all at the same time; Boone does not
attempt to repeat the “A-a-a-a-at the corner drugstore” which opens the second
verse, and being a black doowop group from Chicago, their intonation of lines
like “Our love will be free” and even “I’ll be home to start serving you” – the
song is about a serviceman called off to fight – necessarily carries a deeper
weight than Boone’s, which imply that to “be free” is to be free of dirty
Commies. On the B-side was his blasphemous downsizing of “Tutti Frutti.” This
is the world into which John Lydon was born.
You may wonder what any of this has to do with Rick Astley.
But to look at his apprehensive apprentice face on the cover of Whenever You Need Somebody, you could
have been forgiven for thinking that the intervening three decades had not
happened. Actually, Astley was a tougher character than that; when discovered
by Stock, Aitken and Waterman he was singing (having previously drummed) in a soul
band called FBI, and four of the album’s ten songs were written or co-written
by him. Nonetheless, the record’s deliberately arcane liner note, telling the
lad’s story as though it were still 1957 and he were a Tommy Steele of the
North, sets out a gradual but steady and grafting rise to fame; Astley was one
of the first musical beneficiaries of the Enterprise Allowance Scheme, one of
the Thatcher government’s few good ideas (£40 a week – in eighties money – to start
up and run your own business; and it should be reinstated, taking inflation
etc. into account; £40 a week doesn’t sound much now, but in the mid-eighties
it went a very long way) and he was then employed in SAW’s studio in
Bermondsey, learning the business from tea-making upwards. A classic tale of
free enterprise, in other words.
Now, I have to be clear here; I am an ardent fan of the work
of Stock, Aitken and Waterman. I refuse to join in the sneering demolition job
that is still being carried out on their achievements by commentators who
really ought to know better. Along with New Order, the Pet Shop Boys and the
Smiths, they basically kept the British pop single going in the puzzling days
of the mid-eighties (and slightly less puzzling ones of the later eighties) and
their commercial and aesthetic pummelling of the majors by, essentially, punk
rock means is a New Pop feat in itself. “Today’s Sounds/Tomorrow’s Technology!”?
I’m all for it.
But SAW were at their best as a singles team. With albums
they tended to struggle, and once you get past the frontloading of hits there
tends not to be too much else of interest. Moreover, they worked best with acts
who had a bit of fight about them, who argued back and who, overwhelmingly,
were female. Mel and Kim, Bananarama, even Mandy Smith (whose “I Just Can’t
Wait,” the “Cool and Breezy Jazz” 12” mix thereof, also from 1987, is probably
SAW’s finest single achievement) and, God bless her Scouse boots, Sonia – not
to mention the Australian coming just around the corner (and there were more – Princess?
Lonnie Gordon?) – all gave back more, arguably, than was put in.
Whereas Astley sounds a little overwhelmed. The opening trio
of hits is fine enough; ideal soundtracks for strolling through sparkling,
glittery late eighties shopping malls, knowing bubblesoulgum for the M25 and
Big Bang, although one notices that a large part of Astley’s appeal was that he
was straight as a die. In a year whose serenaders included confusing,
ambivalent, troubled William Boldwoods and extravagant, flamboyant Sergeant
Troys promising the world, the girls settled for eighties pop’s Gabriel Oak.
Nothing wrong with this, per se;
Astley stands in the midst of a long line of reliable Britpop boys-next-door
which extends from Craig Douglas to Olly Murs – and is noticeably “meatier” of
voice than either.
Astley was loved for his sense of reassuring permanence, a
sense comparatively rare in the parallel world of rock ‘n’ roll. Listening
through the hits, I am struck at the sentiments they express. “A full
commitment’s what I’m thinking of.” “You wouldn’t get this from any other guy.”
Lyrics of the calibre of “I’ll always do what’s best for you” had been by and
large absent from mainstream pop since the days of Dickie Valentine, another
youthful reliable with a pleasant, if somewhat limited, vocal mid-range and an
approachable personality (although Lena wondered whether the 21-year-old Astley
didn’t more resemble “Frankie Howerd’s nephew”; that same “ooh, not ME, surely!”
quality). I also note that the title track was originally recorded, by SAW,
with a female singer called O’Chi Brown, with no commercial success, in 1985;
in a song which successfully manages to paraphrase both Dusty Springfield and
Steve Arrington, Astley sounds, if anything, like a stronger Mark King.
“It Would Take A Strong Strong Man” was not a single in
Britain, but went top ten in the States (as did the album) and topped the
charts in Canada. Noticeably more strident and pained than the more familiar
hits – you can picture Ashley, hoarsely yelling at the microphone – it suggests
that his adoration might in part be one-sided, an impression which the
faster-paced “Don’t Say Goodbye,” the record’s only remaining SAW-penned song,
reinforces.
The trouble is we then dive headlong into Astley’s own songs
– just to remove any tired notion that he was an SAW “puppet” – and they are…decent,
but not much more than that, and certainly not very memorable, not even the
Deep House anticipations of “You Move Me” which intertwines expressions of love
with humdrum life in Thatcher’s Britain – he works his socks off, but the boss
still calls him in to say, with regret, “Here are your cards” (is this the only
song with such a phrase in its lyric?). This side of Astley is better than
Curiosity Killed The Cat, certainly, but how low is that bar set? Like the fourth side of Welcome To The Pleasuredome, we are reminded that it’s only because
of “Never Gonna Give You Up” that we’re hearing this stuff at all.
The album’s most troublesome song is its last, and the one
which throws up all of the bothersome questions. Astley’s “When I Fall In Love”
is an attempted carbon copy of the Cole original, down to Gordon Jenkins’
arrangement (here reproduced on Fairlight, or Fairlights), and vocally is no
more than adequate. However, it is a strangely desolate piece of work, and one
is drawn to the unfortunate conclusion that had this been 1956, Astley would
have been out there dutifully covering American hits of the period. It sounds
like an attempt to erase the three
decades of uprising which separate the two recordings, a deliberate attempt to
go back to a time when rock hadn’t happened and singers knew their place.
The video is creepier still; Astley wanders around a
deserted, snowbound studio set, hanging out in front of, or inside, a log cabin
– there is no object of his love, only the camera, only us. There is in the
distance an arched bridge which could have fallen in straight from It’s A Wonderful Life. He looks as he
sounds; like a sad, small robot, lost in an abandoned world; I think of WALL-E and his endless viewing of
highlights from Hello Dolly, as if to
remind us that this was what humanity was once capable of creating. I do think
of a George Bailey who kills the world by never taking any risks. And last week’s
Pick Of The Pops was a timely
reminder of what such a world – this world which so many people in Britain
supposedly desire – would actually be like.*
*An interlude here about radio comedy, mainly because I
listened for a bit to BBC Radio 4Xtra on Wednesday evening. Some art doesn’t
transcend its time, and may not even have been art. Was there ever anything
remotely funny about The Navy Lark? I
listened to what sounded like the first episode of the second series – from September
1959 – and it was creakily unfunny, a prematurely tired set-up with mirthless
non-development. Stephen Murray’s Commander (“the new Number 1”) was so
bumbling and anonymous, one forgot he was there most of the time. Leslie
Phillips, as he has always done, played himself. Ronnie Barker and Michael
Bates were wasted. A little of Jon Pertwee’s gurning gurgle – he sounds as
though warming up to play Worzel Gummidge – goes an awfully long way (with the
emphasis on “awful”). And yet the series ran, unchanged in any detail, until
the era of punk. What was the attraction? Moderate pleasure giggling at a
fundamentally inefficient British way of doing things?
A May 1966 episode of I’m
Sorry I’ll Read That Again followed, and was as bad, if not worse. Given
what most of its participants went on to do, this was thin stuff indeed, like a
bad student revue where sound-effects and silly voices are allegedly funny in
themselves…and with a thick dollop of misogyny, laid on with such relish that
one marvels that Jo Kendall didn’t just hit the rest of the cast over their
heads with a spiky baseball bat for the full half-hour. Derek Bailey was in the
studio band, and wisely kept his head down. As regards “When I Fall In Love,”
its best use in 1987 was as a scratchy introduction to Pop Will Eat Itself’s “There
Is No Love Between Us Anymore,” which more or less could be construed as
everything Rick Astley wanted to say, but couldn’t, or wouldn’t.
