(#399: 21 October
1989, 1 week)
Track listing:
Hand On Your Heart/Wouldn’t Change A Thing/Never Too Late/Nothing To Lose/Tell
Tale Signs/My Secret Heart/I’m Over Dreaming (Over You)/Tears On My
Pillow/Heaven And Earth/Enjoy Yourself
Have you noticed how long it’s taking to get out of the
eighties? A seemingly unending procession of one-week wonders; does this
signify everybody rushing to get their word in before the decade expires or
foresee the quick-change, short-term future where spending more than one week
at the top becomes something remarkable?
I can reveal that we have another four albums to go
before we can enter the nineties, and the second Kylie album is the first of
them. “Wouldn’t Change A Thing”? If I were that
kind of critic, I’d make a cryptic remark about how many pop operatives could
have that statement serve as their epitaph and leave the review there.
But although it isn’t at all obvious from looking at the
charts of the period, SAW were now past their imperial phase and entering a
slow decline. One could listen to Kylie singing “You can’t keep me hanging
on/Now the magic’s gone” (“I’m Over Dreaming”) or “I don’t really wanna be the
one/To tell you time is running out” (“Heaven And Earth”) and directing these
words, “Winner Takes It All”-style, at the people who wrote them.
The truth is that by late 1989 SAW were finding Kylie and
Jason something of a hindrance. As they were, at that time, still actors as
well as pop stars, they had to jet back and forth to and from Australia to film
Neighbours and so, rather than the
old free-for-all Hit Factory set-up, the team were now finding themselves obliged
to tailor their schedules in order to fit Kylie and Jason in, and perhaps it
wasn’t as much fun any more; certainly many of these songs, both musically and
lyrically, suggest an air of mounting exhaustion. Nor was there really anybody
coming up to challenge Kylie and Jason – Rick Astley had gone, Bananarama were
slowly winding down, Mel Appleby was receiving treatment for cancer (the Reynolds Girls’ “I’d
Rather Jack” had been written with a view to Mel and Kim recording it), Donna
Summer had gone back to the States (and thus a full album of songs which had
been written with her in mind was eventually given over to Lonnie Gordon) and
while new acts like Sonia and Big Fun were perfectly reasonable, they lacked
the clout of the old SAW guard.
Enjoy Yourself
isn’t really a rerun of the first Kylie album, although to call it perfunctory
would not be an overstatement – it clocks in at just under thirty-three minutes
– and that doesn’t mean it’s any good. It is true that from around track four
on, Kylie gets tired with being pop’s number one doormat – I am afraid that “Never
Too Late” reminds me of the late Leslie Crowther on Saturday evening television
(“It’s NEVER TOO LATE, the star prize could STILL BE YOURS if THE PRICE IS
RIGHT!”) – and spends much of the rest of the record arguing back and eventually
walking out. In addition, it’s not that these songs are rubbish, as such; there
is some evidence of musical development (those heart-catchingly unexpected
chord changes in “Wouldn’t Change A Thing” and “I’m Over Dreaming”), and 2012’s
The Abbey Road Sessions showed both “Hand
On Your Heart” and “Never Too Late” to be readily adaptable to other musical
forms, although I remain unconvinced that Kylie didn’t simply swap one type of
Muzak for another.
Back in 1989, however, everything is subjected to the
same gloopy pop cement mixer treatment, the main difference from its
predecessor being that, instead of boring AoR soul plods, we now get a string
of horrendous MoR ballads with Fairlight string and brass sections and a
general air of Petula Clark on BBC1 circa
1971. By the time we reach the obligatory pre-Beatles cover version (Little
Anthony and the Imperials’ “Tears On My Pillow”) it is easy to wonder whether
this is the kind of thing a twenty-one-year-old woman acting the role of a pop
singer should be doing; moreover, it feels as if she has already embarked on
the path to 2012 and Abbey Road.
If you consider the song which displaced the single of “Tears
On My Pillow” at number one in early 1990 to be a pivotal turning point – see entry
#404 for further thoughts on that – then in late 1989 there were far more
palpable signs that pop was changing. It might or might not be an overstatement
to say that the simultaneous appearance of the Stone Roses and Happy Mondays in
the charts and on Top Of The Pops
marks the point where everything shifted, but it was abundantly clear, even to
a spectator, that the SAW way really wasn’t going to work any more; not when
the realer-sounding alternative was readily available. There really isn’t much
else to say about Enjoy Yourself
except that the closing title song is the most forced, least persuasive song
about having fun that we may ever have heard; her periodic yelps and whoops
throughout the song sound as though goaded by a cattle prod.
But around this time she met this guy called Michael, and
began the painful process of growing up.
Next: The four hundredth number one album. What is it?
Take a wild guess.
