BOYZONE: A Different Beat

 

(#559: 9 November 1996, 1 week)

 

Track listing: Paradise/A Different Beat/Melting Pot/Ben/Don’t Stop Looking For Love/Isn’t It A Wonder/Words/It’s Time/Games Of Love/Strong Enough/Heaven Knows/Crying In The Night/Give A Little/She Moves Through The Fair

 

(Author’s note: later international editions of this album added “Picture Of You” as its lead track, which is logical, but since it’s also the lead track on entry #591, I will adjourn discussion of the song until then.)

 

By now, Take That were gone – for now – and Louis Walsh must have glimpsed the gap in that market. Hence it was no longer sufficient for Boyzone to be The Irish Take That; they were instead expected to take on the world and become “international.” This may explain the rather portentous opening seven-and-three-quarter minutes of their second album. It really wasn’t a wonder that overseas markets subsequently elected to frontload the record with “Picture Of You,” possibly just to wake listeners up. “Paradise” is slow, ponderous and self-consciously epic, as though auditioning for the Lion King musical – although despite the song’s characteristically cautious banality, I recognise that Ronan Keating’s vocal stylings are not a million miles away from those of Paul Heaton, and wonder what The Beautiful South would have made out of the same semi-cooked material.

 

The title song, which fans automatically sent to number one as a single – the second chart-topper from this album – was evidently intended to stand as Boyzone’s “Back For Good,” their big crossover moment. Unlike “Back For Good,” however, the music and words for which I have remembered for almost thirty years, I forgot how the song “A Different Beat” went even as I was listening to it. Nevertheless, and paradoxically, one knows exactly what it is going to sound like before you even hear it - perhaps syntactically baffling lyrics such as "Let unity become/Life on Earth be one" provide an easy clue.

 

And sure enough, the tick sheet is fully inscribed; there be the ersatz tribal chanting and drumming, the dawn over Kilimanjaro slow motion synth and piano, the forlorn Celtic pipes, and yea e'en unto the humpbacked whale samples. "A Different Beat" was Boyzone's answer to "Earth Song"; it was their first "self-composed" number one, although additional composer credits to producer Ray Hedges and arranger Martin Brannigan probably indicate who did the real donkey work here (a Peruvian donkey, mark you; Keating doesn't claim to have seen the sun rise over Maccu Picchu but has experienced rain in Africa, presumably in the footsteps of Toto, snow in Alaska and mist in Niagara so he knows what it's all about), and replaces Jackson's anguish and rage with pseudo-benign hands across the table we-are-all-one off-the-peg reassurance ("people," sometimes in rhetorical triplicate, are duly encouraged to "look around us" and "take a stand," though for or against what or whom remains non-specific; while "face" submits to being rhymed with "grace" for the millionth time).

 

The song barely exists, with no discernible tune or chorus apart from the equally obligatory "Ee-yay-oh" chant, and is even more ludicrously bombastic than you might expect, although there is a minute puzzlement at the record's end; according to the lyric sheet, "rain does not fall on one roof alone" forms the words of the closing climax, but Keating's exclamation of "one roof alone" sounds awfully close to "one rule for all" and is promptly followed by a brief bout of military tattoo drumming. Was he trying to tell us something subversive there?

 

The remainder of the album is well-behaved, sometimes irritatingly so. The old Blue Mink one-world ancestor of “A Different Beat,” “Melting Pot,” duly turns up with Madeline Bell herself dropping by and doing her skilful, tactful best not to let you think that she is effortlessly upstaging the rest of the group (in case you wondered, the problematic line about Chinese people has been modified to a not entirely convincing “Oriental sexy”). Stephen Gately turns Michael Jackson’s rat ode “Ben” into what we now know was a coded gay love song – his solo features throughout A Different Beat sound as though his voice has been tweaked and varispeeded upwards, offering the impression of androgyny; although, on his “Ben” in particular, his excited vibrati sound like a direct parent of Olly Alexander.

 

The covers, though, illustrate a fundamental problem with Boyzone and the protégés who would follow them; the disquieting harmonies of “Ben” – the unexpected dovetailing into the minor key at the beginning of its second verse, for example - are simplified and ironed out. And I’m not sure that Boyzone or Walsh – or possibly even the Gibb brothers themselves, who presumably sanctioned the cover – really get what “Words” is meant to be about; in its original form it is a small, hesitant, timid song with occasional and relatively shocking explosions of something in the suburbs of frustration – Barry Gibb vocally sounds like he’s aiming for a suburban Aaron Neville – all the better to outline the gulf between what the hopeful lover is able to say, as set against what he feels but dare not express (see also The Beautiful South’s “Blackbird On The Wire”).

 

Yet both boy band and their arrangers/producers overkill the song with glutinous Formica – worried that their fans might be scared of silence, they instead fill all spaces with heaps of nothing. Fatally the key line (“You think that I don’t even mean a single word I say!”) is delivered in Ralph Reader Gang Show sub-barbershop harmonies. Strings sweep when they should remain silent. Not that any of it mattered; all the fans heard was a simple, or simplified, love song onto which they could project their own fantasies. It’s just too bad that those fantasies seemed to be identical to those of their parents, or perhaps I fail to grasp something very basic about the behaviour of humans.

 

Actually, it's worth going into this in a little more detail. Just as Take That Mk I had their last number one with a Bee Gees cover version, so there was something of a deliberate symmetry about Boyzone having their first number one with a Bee Gees cover version. “Words” is a minefield of a Gibb Brothers song to cover, since it is all about suggestion and implication rather than overt emotionalism. Released as a single at the beginning of 1968, but recorded in October 1967, the Bee Gees original works as an extremely subtle essay in metapop; Barry Gibb sings tremulously, not of a love affair needing rekindling, but as the hopeful artist trying to convince the undecided listener (“A smile can bring you near to me”), wanting the listener’s undying devotion (“Talk in everlasting words/And dedicate them all to me”), varying his vocal towards the desperate in the axiomatic line “You think that I don’t even mean a single word I say,” but dropping it again to an immediate whisper, not confirming or denying that he means what he is singing, but simply saying, plaintively, “It’s only words…and words are all I have to take your heart away.” The production is relatively simple, with a mildly distorted piano – psychedelia seeped everywhere – and Bill Shepherd’s very delicate strings, harp and French horn arrangement providing the main backdrop to Gibb’s metamusings. At the end the music is more or less taken away entirely apart from a curious electric guitar which seems to be coming from a hundred miles away so that Gibb can crouch towards the listener and quaver in his best Aaron Neville quaver: “And words are all I have…to take your heart away,” that last “away” wavering like Charybdis.

Unsurprisingly Boyzone – in tandem with, or in submission to, their producers and arrangers – ignore the original’s subtlety and even its basic architecture; as soon as the gloopy piano, dentist’s drill high-pitched string synthesiser and Linn tympani make their bombastic entrance (at around two seconds into the track), Keating initially adopts a Gibb-type vibrato but soon bends towards bombast and overemoting. It all plods along on the same grey department store level of fake sophistication, but much, much worse is the feed of the “This world has lost its glory” declaration directly into the chorus, which not only sounds hopelessly awkward but destroys the methodical, slow build-up of the song as it was written in that it loses the emotionally crucial “Right now, there’ll be no other time” section. To rub acid into the wounds, the mess is reiterated at record’s end, and by the time the muffled Thus Spake Zarathustra timps thump their way out of the song we are left with no notion of what words might or might not mean, since Barry Gibb of course realises that it’s not just about words, but also the way in which you sing them. But the record certainly did help to “start a brand new story”; one of obedient talent show contestants, neutralised niche mass marketing and bland pseudo-global broths in which words were perhaps the least essential component.

 

The songs on A Different Beat do not tend to be “bad,” as such – the only blatant misfire appears to be the tacky New Jack Swing (or, more likely, MN8) photocopy of “Strong Enough” – but neither are they particularly inspiring, and never are they funny or outrageous. Yes, Carlin, you just want Boyzone to be The Beatles. Maybe Boyzone did too.

 

“Isn’t It A Wonder” and “Crying In The Night” are efficient and forgettable variations on the old aw-little-kid-you’ve-got-so-much-to-learn “Father And Son” theme (although the pause and key change heard towards the close of the former give an early indication of how Boyzone's anointed successors will successfully jerk a lot of knees). There are hints of inventiveness elsewhere on the record, for instance the pleasing bumps in the harmonic road throughout the choruses of “Don’t Stop Looking For Love” and the verses of “Games Of Love.” “Give A Little” is actually quite good in an Everything Changes-filler manner. Set against that are the transient piano descents punctuating “It’s Time” – did they sample a Russ Conway record? – although the arrangement is overall far too jovial for what is fundamentally a break-up song.

 

The essential problem with A Different Beat is summed up by its final track, a reading of that ancient Celtic warhorse “She Moved Through The Fair.” Few could hope to surpass the supreme interpretation by Van Morrison and The Chieftains, as heard on 1988’s Irish Heartbeat, where they convert the song into a free-form drone, somewhere just outside of tempo and reason – it would segue very naturally into the opening of the third side of Frames by Keith Tippett’s Ark – although Julianne Regan didn’t do a bad job at all with her slightly straighter rendition on the first All About Eve album from the same year.

 

Boyzone hired Phil Coulter, no less, to arrange and produce their version. But Coulter, an honourable man in numerous ways, really ought to have known better; here the song is ensconced in proto-Lord Of The Rings soundtrack bombast, all echoing “LET THIS BE THE HOUR WHEN WE DRAW SWORDS TOGETHER!” drums, winsome Celtic piping and Gandalfian gulfs of space. The mission seemed to be to nullify any strangeness in the history of music and render it palatable – i.e. neutralise it – to gain the biggest potential audience. Outside the United Kingdom, the Republic of Ireland and (unexpectedly) Taiwan, A Different Beat did not make the top ten so the international gambit didn’t particularly pay off. But Boyzone’s “She Moved Through The Fair” seems to me as well-meaningly absurd as The Bachelors tackling “The Sound Of Silence.” The final drum rattle sounds like the door of the tomb being closed on the record’s ambitions.

The BEAUTIFUL SOUTH: Blue Is The Colour

 

(#558: 2 November 1996, 1 week)

 

Track listing: Don’t Marry Her/Little Blue/Mirror/Blackbird On The Wire/The Sound Of North America/Have Fun/Liars’ Bar/Rotterdam (Or Anywhere)/Foundations/Artificial Flowers/One God/Alone

 

From guilty but solvent middle-class streets, we travel to innocent but ceaselessly-punished working-class terraces, or get marooned in some gaudily polite halfway house. Why The Beautiful South’s affable rancour hits when Simply Red’s angry consolation can do little more than tickle might have its roots in a shadier but more defiant defensiveness against those who strive to hide or minimise what they see as smug assaults on “their” music.

 

Dave Hemingway spells it out in the sourly-melancholic anti-capitalist tirade “The Sound Of North America”; it is all about keeping those countenances, whatever their personal cost to personal happiness, remaining in strict line with unwritten but understood societal contracts. You can be as “wacky” as you wish, but as the song indicates, God help you if you sing out of key or fail to follow the script – and that goes for everyone, even if you happen to have been Presley, Garbo or Ali.

 

It is the international system of capitalism which determines the totality of anti-life on the dulled planet of Blue Is The Colour, The Beautiful South’s fifth and darkest studio album (cf. Paddy Chayefsky via Ned Beatty). Blue as in sad, blue as in the Conservative Party who at this point were barely clinging onto power, blue as in a post-Derek Jarman haze which refuses to dissipate.

 

Blue Is The Colour, much like Scott 3 had done for a wider cast of characters half a lifetime previously, focuses principally upon one unhappy couple stuck in one of those terraces. He is a chronic alcoholic, she has been frustrated into dullness. They both want something better but lack the capacity or courage to do anything about it, other than self-destruct in unwitnessed defence.

 

Where The Beautiful South score over Simply Red is that you cannot really avoid or avert yourself from what some might perceive as ugliness. If the voices of Paul Heaton and Jacqui Abbott sound ostensibly “unattractive” (although they certainly do not sound as such to me) then in many ways that is the music’s point. They have unattractive things to say about the kind of situation you’d dive into the Pacific to avoid (San Francisco Bay?). Those charmed or cumulatively bored by the relatively harmless radio version of “Don’t Marry Her” may have been startled on the recorded version to hear Abbott casually toss “fuck me” onto the song’s central hook as though darning another needle (“Those blackbirds look like knitting needles”; cue an atonal onomatopoeic piano descent), as though it were a big deal; just do it, the song seems to demand.

 

The subject matter of “Don’t Marry Her” is identical to that of the Specials’ “Too Much, Too Young,” but Abbott’s brashly amiable insistence trumps Terry Hall’s grumpy mouth-foaming. The sentiments sound so much more convincing coming from the woman’s point of view. Here, she says, don’t settle for boredom and premature, wilting death, let’s have fun instead…

 

Cut to the song “Have Fun,” which Heaton reckons is the saddest song he ever wrote, and which he and Abbott perform as a duo, with its closely-miked acoustic pickings reminiscent of…blackbirds pecking. The song pitilessly documents a mock-relationship built on mutual loathing; he is literally too drunk to fuck (“I’ve had a life of booze, but that’s all I’ve ever had”) and in both of their minds lurks a ghost, of someone who actually has possession of their hearts – and this could be a Sliding Doors scenario where the man does run off and fuck her…but then they discover, too late, that fucking is all they will ever have in common.

 

Over and over this album talks of “graves” and “whores” in ways which aren’t that far away from (but work considerably more effectively than) Nick Cave’s contemporaneous Murder Ballads. Abbott even sings “Mirror” cast as a prostitute, wanting more than this rotten world is ever prepared or even programmed to offer to her – the chorus of “So imagine a mirror bigger than the room it was placed in/Imagine my wish for a future that cannot hold my wish” is one of the most tragic lyrical passages in all of the group’s catalogue. A victim who may well be repeatedly visited by the travelling salesman (or is he just a glorified wino?) of “Liars’ Bar” or the pissed-off pisshead of “Rotterdam (Or Anywhere).”

 

These two latter songs form both sides of the same coin. As a regular, Walkman-bearing commuter between London and Oxford at the time, I associate the opulent emptiness of “Rotterdam” with the point past the huge open tunnel of chalkface cliffs, just before the Lewknor turnoff, where London, or the notion of London, decisively ends and Oxfordshire begins. The eerie one-note high-C string line piercing each chorus like the most courteous of lances, or the most poisonous of cocktail cherries, encapsulates the song’s essence of irreparable, icy isolation, as Abbott sings Heaton’s words about an alcoholic wreck stumbling into a bar, only to be angrily told that he/she can’t just have a drink and be done with it, and silently scolded for not blending in with the anonymously international clientele. Heaton used to escape on the ferry from Hull to the Netherlands whenever he felt bored – although, as “Alone” direly points out, loneliness and boredom can in certain circumstances prove interchangeable – and “Rotterdam” is actually a calm diatribe against the international capitalist standardising of things, and humans. Everybody everywhere the same…the whole world as The Village.

 

Whereas “Liars’ Bar,” ostensibly a funny, extended Tom Waits pastiche, could be talking about the same person several glasses or bottles down the line. Actually it stops being funny about halfway through and patiently mutates into something a lot more sinister – Heaton’s growl is too harsh and leonine to mimic that of Waits and when he slurs and machine-guns lines like “He's missed a hell of a lot of buses for a man who wants to roam” he starts to scare. The use of the Glaswegian term “pish” suggests a sozzled Patrick Doyle, the self-destroying anti-hero of Kelman’s A Disaffection; his next logical step from weaving in and out of traffic islands, hiccupping and joking to no laughs.

 

The personal and political aspects of Blue Is The Colour reluctantly coexist in simmering parallels. “Foundations,” sung by Hemingway with an entertaining horn section/organ introduction which sounds quite like…The Foundations…knows that capitalism is going to destroy everything but warns in Heaton’s pet lyrical trick of piled-up similes, that trying to do anything about it (implication: that does not involve blood and violence) will frankly be akin to farting against thunder. Meanwhile, in “One God,” Heaton cautions, in words worthy of Richey Edwards (“Well, if Peter is a prostitute, then what does that make me?”), that the world has been shrunken to global Disney plastic.

 

As far as looks of love are concerned, “Little Blue” (sung by Hemingway) is a canny “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’” variant, exhausted by pretence – they might seem happy to the outside world, but her eyes roll with different clouds of thunder. But “Blackbird On The Wire,” as sung by Heaton – and we do not really hear directly from him at all on this record until its fourth song – is the album’s masterpiece, a vast canyon of electronic melancholy fully worthy of Older (and George Michael may for all I know have kicked himself moderately hard for not having thought of the song first). It is as if he sees this other woman – you know, the one who urges him not to marry her (1) but fuck her (2) instead (or does the whole of “Don’t Marry Her” only happen on the inside of Heaton’s head?) – and…he doesn’t know what to do. He knows, or anyway thinks, that she’ll be able to take him away from all of this domestic hell.

 

But he’s not going to do anything about it. The song bears an underlying bitterness – do “the people” who “actually come and ask me how I feel” (the “actually” accented to imply the prefix “they have the nerve to…”) really have a “tongue built from quicksilver and the character of steel” (the latter phrase gives rise to Heaton’s most outwardly angry vocal phrasing on the record), or by “the people” does he mean the one person that he’s with? Yet he knows himself only too well…no, he will sacrifice his own happiness, he will not be one of the “thousand other guys who'd say they loved you with all the rest of their lies” (cf. The Association), he will play it cool and inelegantly walk away (as Matt Monro had already done in the pop charts when Heaton was still only two years old); his tears, much like Matt’s protagonist, will “fall unnoticed…down below,” and the emphasis Heaton places on the phrase “down below” leaves no doubt as to what he means by it. Who knows – as with the object of Eddie Kendricks’ affection in “Just My Imagination,” she might not even be aware that he exists. But putting others above oneself with salvageable dignity. That’s socialism.

 

Thus Heaton is left unhappy and the album ends with the deceptively harrowing Heaton/Abbott duet “Alone.” Deceptive, because…well, a lot of the time with the scenarios of Beautiful South songs I think not quite so much Gilbert O’Sullivan or Jake Thackeray as I do of…Victoria Wood, or Mike Leigh. Or, keeping it in the should-be-beautiful North, Alan Bennett. Christgau approvingly considers Heaton’s art as that of the music hall entertainer, singing to and for the economically disadvantaged, and makes the excellent point that, as Ray Davies does, Heaton scrupulously avoids the slightest hint of sentimentality in his observations (“Alone” works in part because it comes packaged as a jaunty jazz ballad or vaudeville lament, rather like Davies’ double-edged sword of “Sunny Afternoon” and “Dead End Street” - perceptions of how the poor live versus how the poor are actually forced to live).

 

And then there is The Beautiful South’s interpretation of “Artificial Flowers.” The song was written for the 1960 Broadway musical Tenderloin, which was set in the red-light district of Manhattan at the end of the nineteenth century. A worthy clerical social reformer determines to “clean up” this district and its Spanish practices. The latter constantly hinder his efforts, but a scandal sheet hack gets intrigued by the affair and decides to infiltrate the Reverend Brock (for that is the worthy clerical social reformer’s name)’s church.

 

This he does by coming up with and performing a song called “Artificial Flowers” which he intends as a deliberate send-up of weepy, melodramatic Victorian-era parlour ballads with an improbable lyrical scenario (girl loses parents aged nine, has to make artificial flowers for “ladies of fashion” in her cold, squalid tenement room, is discovered frozen to death). The song was probably interpreted most famously in August 1960 by Bobby Darin, who treats it like an uptempo Rat Pack stomper in the “Mack The Knife” vein, presumably steering a steamroller of irony while doing so.

 

There is no irony in Paul Heaton’s reading of the same song. Here the personal and political are indivisible. He grasps the essence of what “Artificial Flowers” really is about – cheap and nasty child labour – much as Alex Harvey understood the essentially squalid nature of the song “Delilah.” It’s the fucking system that killed her, he seems to imply, the same self-satisfied fashionable system from which you, guilty middle-class streets who buy my records and never listen to the words, profit so wonderfully. Cue Anne Reid’s monologue about the one-pound T-shirt in Years And Years. If red is ever to be the colour, simply or otherwise, it might have to make itself apparent in the form of blood.

SIMPLY RED: Greatest Hits

 

(#557: 19 October 1996, 2 weeks)

Track listing: Holding Back The Years/Money's Too Tight (To Mention)/The Right Thing/It's Only Love/A New Flame/You've Got It/If You Don't Know Me By Now/Stars/Something Got Me Started/Thrill Me/Your Mirror/For Your Babies/So Beautiful/Angel/Fairground

"You'll never see me walking down a guilty middle-class street/I'm frequently appalled by them pretending to be poor men." Those aren't the thoughts of Morrissey, but of a fellow audience member at that Free Trade Hall Sex Pistols gig. I wonder if Mick Hucknall has frequently pondered the paradox that guilty middle-class streets house the vast majority of people who have liked and bought his music for getting on forty years now.

That couplet comes from his song "I Won't Feel Bad," which appears on the second Simply Red album, 1987's Men And Women. It is a fiercely and admirably unapologetic lyric which challenges his critics to sneer at his imminent wealth and associated power; look, quit picking on me, look at the gangsters who are really raking in the money, away from all of us.

It is a pity that Men And Women is only represented on this end-of-imperial-phase best-of by its one big hit, the satyric and equally unapologetic "The Right Thing," since it contains some of Hucknall's most intriguing songs and performances - "Infidelity," which does Costello's "The Only Flame In Town" better and in which Hucknall refuses to be sorry for sleeping around, the inscrutable "Lady Godiva's Room" (originally a single B-side, then incorporated into deluxe editions of the album) and a rather moving "Ev'ry Time We Say Goodbye" which seems to owe its poignancy to the inadvertent memory of the great ghost that haunted British New Pop of the eighties, Ian Curtis.

Still, Hucknall has been haunted by the need to get his messages into those places which might otherwise sneer at and reject them, all the time doubtless worrying about whether his audience has ever "got it." The blue-eyed Soul, Passion and Honesty smokescreen conceals the likelihood that the nearest equivalent to his voice is, of all reluctant Englishmen, Leo Sayer; "Holding Back The Years" best demonstrates the two singers' identical just-accidentally-sat-on-a-cockatoo yarragh.

At the time Simply Red's Greatest Hits appeared like a blockbuster newly gone missing, although the compilation very quietly went on to go six times platinum. Its cover is unassuming, Hucknall's mind clearly elsewhere. The collection gives the public what it wanted; most of the "recognisable" hits, one or two curveballs - "So Beautiful" if anything sounds more convincing in this setting - and a token new recording, a somewhat perfunctory take on Aretha's "Angel."

The album confirms the story of a thoroughly sincere fellow who unequivocally means what he sings, whether it's about politics or sex or anything else. Picture Book worked - to a point - because Hucknall was only on the way to becoming famous and determined not to exhibit pre-emptive arrogance. He does the Valentine Brothers' masterpiece - a song which didn't get a proper British release precisely when it was needed - and uses it to escort Face/NME hipsterdom into the uncomprehending faces of the wider public, which is something a lot of New Pop artists didn't really achieve.

On Men And Women, Hucknall let all of his other tendencies - particularly the post-Tom Jones lurve man persona (in an unfortunate coincidence, not long before Jones himself essayed a full-scale comeback) - run freely, but where did that leave him save in a cul-de-sac? A New Flame buried its nuggets of angry wisdom beneath pastel shades of apologetic blandness. On Stars, he got the balance absolutely correct; he learned to slow down, reflect and, to a degree ("Thrill Me") zip up. With Life, however, Hucknall found himself back at the same paradoxical roundabout.

This is a very nice record of songs, if niceness is all you want and/or need. It may well be that Hucknall is singing and playing to...the suspicious people, the reasonably well-off types who don't view themselves as a central cause of society's problems, who do not consider themselves to be "fighting" or on a "mission" because, by escaping from the horror of the world so eagerly, they think themselves their own heroes, in control of their own historical fantasy. They see their passions and misdemeanours as part of a drama, view themselves as participants in an epic poem. Their lives exist as channels for light entertainment. They do not possess the capacity or imagination to consider just how passively receptive and actively complacent they might really be.

Yet these are the people for whom (they believe) Hucknall is speaking, and by some odd combination of chance and dogged perseverance his music is able to reach out to them. It's perhaps not his fault if their reception is faulty. In that sense, his nearest American equivalent is not Michael Bolton, but Garth Brooks. I said something above about "the suspicious people," suspicious because, much as the hardcore country addicts who resist any attempts at crossover being imposed because they are defensive of the music's perceived "commonness," the guilty middle-class streets are filled with Jerry Leadbetter types who really only want to crash out on their expensive sofa with a glass of wine and an Engelbert Humperdinck record but will rise up to the ramparts in order to defend what they view as an assault on the culture they like, again because it is thought common and lowbrow - "it" in this case being middle-of-the-road (a.k.a. centrist) pop (easy listening, if you must). The people, if you insist, with the real cash. I am not sure Mick Hucknall would disagree with that theory, if only because he reaches that audience with relative (musical, but not necessarily lyrical - nobody listens to the words in pop, not really) clarity and directness. And, like Brooks, he is proud and confident enough not even to consider changing his spots midstream.

The downside to that access is that only the surface of Simply Red's music prevails, and nothing genuinely changes. Thirty years ago, in the course of my day job, I befriended one of the clinic nurses - or, more properly, she befriended me. We began talking about music and ended up compiling C90 mixtapes for each other. Don't get the wrong idea - we were both spoken for and it was purely friends-only. One tape I made for her included a mix of then-contemporary music and things which were older but still reasonably hip. Side two, track two, was "Sweet Surrender," one of many priapic epics on Tim Buckley's Greetings From L.A. She commented to me that, although she really, really liked the tape, she couldn't understand why I'd put Simply Red near the beginning of side two.

I was quite tickled by her confusion. I had already heard the singer's Buckley aspirations towards the end of "Holding Back The Years" but really she was right; emotionally there was little substantive difference between the two voices and what their owners did with them. And it may be that it is the emotionalism which never vacates Hucknall's singing is what counts with his band's music and accounts for his immense popularity. At this (1996) point I was also busy picking up CD reissues of classic dub on Hucknall's Blood And Fire imprint. He did, and presumably still does, nothing but good. Not long thereafter my nursing colleague left for another job elsewhere and I never saw or heard from her again. That's the way life goes. I hope hers - if she's still out there - has gone and is going well.

Peter ANDRE: Natural

 

(#556: 12 October 1996, 1 week)

 

Track listing: Flava (ft Cee)/Natural (C&J Street Mix)/Mysterious Girl (ft Bubbler Ranx)/I Feel You/You Are (Part Two)/All I Ever Wanted/Show U Somethin’/To The Top/Tell Me When/Only One/Message To My Girl/Turn It Up (ft Ollie J)/Get Down On It (ft Past To Present)

 

I wonder whether this album could more aptly be called Younger. Most of it sounds as though it might have emerged from 1989 with its Old Jack Swing moves and post-Michael Jackson balladeering – and New Jack Swing at least six years past its sell-by date sounds to some inexplicable extent more dated than Kula Shaker’s 1969 or Jamiroquai’s 1973 tributes – but the likes of “Flava” and “Turn It Up” chunder along like fresher paradigms for “Fastlove,” before things got “spoiled.”

 

And maybe that’s being kind to Peter Andre’s music. Not Andre the man himself, who tends to come across in the media as something of an amiable dork but who I think is cannily self-aware of this underlying dorkness and uses it to his advantage, but his music. He became famous on the Australian version of the talent show New Faces by basically doing Bobby Brown – hopefully not in the manner of his rather unfortunate video for “Get Down On It,” which is present on my cassette edition of Natural (10p from downstairs at Notting Hill Music and Video Exchange) but absent from the Spotify edition.

 

While Andre’s early Australian hits such as “Funky Junky” are not tunes I am exactly rushing to hear, his beach bum hunkdom, muscles rippling like a fence of the purest corrugated iron and his physical resemblance to as near a white Michael Jackson as anyone could get (with the possible exception of Michael Jackson) eventually exported their way back to Britain. Beyond the fact that he gets guest rapper Cee to comment “I wanna rock with you just like Bobby Brown” – so at least he’s honest about it, albeit at one remove – “Flava” is essentially fluffily white swingbeat with its baby-faced cod-Babyface beats, its central keyboard riff borrowed from Montell Jordan’s “This Is How We Do It,” its nod to Mark Morrison (“The mac’s back”) and Andre’s own pale vocal which appears to have been varispeeded to sound even weedier.

 

Nevertheless, Natural eventually yielded no fewer than three number one singles. The second of those, “I Feel You” – nothing whatsoever to do with Depeche Mode – is actually, and slightly surprisingly, not the worst of chart-toppers. The continued 65 rpm varispeeding of Andre’s voice works better in this context than it did when he tried to be Mr Brown; on “I Feel You” he is clearly going for the Michael Jackson ballad market and it isn’t a shameful effort.

 

The singer is alone at home, pacing the floors, wondering where she’s gone, knowing deep down that she’s not coming back (“oh I wonder if you’re coming home tonight”), tearing himself apart over what he might or might not have done, aching for her presence (“’Cos it’s cold when we’re apart”). He doesn’t achieve catharsis but it’s a perfectly decent Britsoul song, skilfully handled and delicately produced (with a nice puff-of-smoke vanish of an ending); had it been performed by Loose Ends it might have been hailed as a classic, but if anything Andre's varispeed voice is tweaked up a little too enthusiastically, his “well well well”s do not threaten Terry Callier, his attempts at male assertion (“I’m thinking about the things that I want to do to you/Soon as you get home!”) are unbecoming and unconvincing, and overall the performance is scarcely in the same universe as Vandross’ “The Other Side Of The World” or O’Neal’s “If You Were Here Tonight” or Gaye’s “Just To Keep You Satisfied” – but it’s hardly a disgrace either.

 

The album possesses other moments. “Show U Somethin’” – oh yeah, Pete, what might that be exactly; your Etch-A-Sketch Gold? – would work better as Middle-Aged Jack Swing if the rhythm track did not sound as though it were provided by a freshly-emptied box of staples. “To The Top” would be routine were it not for producers Ashley Cadell and Mark Forrester’s slightly distended background, akin to The Magic Roundabout theme’s barrel organ having taken the wrong pills by mistake.

 

Andre’s forte does indeed appear to be The Ballad. Two of those on Natural were composed by him alone. “Tell Me When” is modestly engaging but “You Are (Part Two)” is something more than that. “Part One” was the same song performed as acapella doo-wop (and is present on the original Australian edition of Natural, which was heavily reordered and rejigged for international ears) but “Part Two” finds Andre’s voice alone with only a piano to accompany him and is a very brief but quite strikingly magnificent piece of work.

 

And, possibly to everybody’s surprise, Andre brings Natural towards its climax – behave at the back - by covering a song composed by…Neil Finn. “Message To My Girl,” from the penultimate album by Split Enz, 1983’s Conflicting Emotions; a song which Finn subsequently dedicated to his wife Sharon on stage in 2006 (clearly an Antipodean salute). Suddenly, everything blooms into colour, and finding a song that is genuinely charged-up, both harmonically and emotionally, is a discovery which audibly pleases Andre, who gives a fine interpretation.

 

Ah yes, you say, but what about the man’s most famous song?

 

Well, times got rather tough for Mr Andre after his first - and most at the time thought only - wave of success; I'm not saying that he was reduced to sweating in a Hofmeister Bear costume and forced to wander around Kettering town centre scattering leaflets on a wet Friday (it was Leominster) but when you're appearing on nineties revival bills and it's still 1998 you know there's something amiss.

 

So I daresay that 2004’s invitation to the I’m A Celebrity… jungle was more than welcome, since by accepting it he met Katie Price, to their mutual benefit - when you have to hack your way through Australian bushes and eat crocodile testicles to get your career back I'd say it was a pretty serious endeavour - and on this renewed wave of goodwill, blended with politely aghast nineties nostalgia, "Mysterious Girl" got its third chance, largely due to the pound sterling efforts of then-top Radio 1 DJ Chris Moyles, another in the long line of music broadcasters anxious to prove that as long as you have broadcasting skills, a love of or interest in music comes a distant second, if it comes anywhere at all.

 

The resuscitation of “Mysterious Girl” in 2004 symbolised the third coming of a decent enough but fundamentally average pop-reggae tune – the song struggled to #53 on its initial 1995 release, and then a year later peaked in second place, behind the Fugees' "Killing Me Softly" - which lopes along reasonably agreeably despite appalling lyrics ("No doubt I'm the only man who can love you like I can") though dips rather flatulently when Bubbler Ranx isn't involved. Nonetheless, it did the trick – and along with the enhanced rebirth of phenomena like “Amarillo” and “Let’s Get Ready To Rhumble,” might indicate a profound rejection of then-contemporary pop (see entry #744 for further thoughts on this matter) - and the man has subsequently survived and to a small extent has even continued to thrive. I once found myself in a lift with both Andre and Price at the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital one Wednesday lunchtime and they seemed like perfectly fine, down-to-earth people, happily chatting with nurses and giving autographs to kids. Let’s leave the picture that way.

KULA SHAKER: K

 

(#555: 28 September 1996, 2 weeks)

 

Track listing: Hey Dude/Night On The Town/Temple Of Everlasting Light/Govinda/Smart Dogs/Magic Theatre/Into The Deep/Sleeping Jiva/Tattva/Grateful When You’re Dead-Jerry Was There/303/Start All Over/Hollow Man (Parts 1 & 2)

 

There to fill a gap in the market rather than create a new one, Kula Shaker were briefly in public favour in the mid-nineties. They evolved from a psych-Mod revival band called The Kays and frontman Crispian Mills was (is) the son of Hayley and the grandson of Sir John. They became popular with boys who don’t care to think too much and K – as Alan Bennett has noted, “the angriest of letters” – probably would have gone nowhere near number one, let alone spend a fortnight there, at any other moment.

 

K is mostly an enterprising but finally dull affair. On the back of a few catchy singles we find not very much, other than standard, gruel-heavy rock workouts which could have come from a below-par Charlatans album. Nor are the singles themselves, generally, of much merit. “Hey Dude” – incredibly, a number two hit – sounds like the boyfriends of The Last Dinner Party having a go at being Black Grape, though ends with the decidedly non-Ryderian protest that “But you treat me like a woman when I feel like a man!” Mills is neither Joe Elliott nor Shania Twain.

 

Similarly, the devotional mock-ragas of “Govinda” and “Tattva,” however heartfelt their content, plod unexcitingly with none of the natural fizz of Cornershop’s "6am Jullandar Shere" (from an album entitled, pointedly, Woman’s Gotta Have It). Alonza Bevan is, it has to be said, an excellent bass player, and there are times when the band do show a modest degree of adventure – the abandoned television theme instrumental “Magic Theatre,” and the later moments of “Into The Deep” where the band do make something of an effort – not nearly enough of an effort, but at least it’s something - to escape their Stone Roses backdrop. The way Mills just about manages to get through the line “Think I'll grow myself a big ol' hairy moustache” without corpsing in “303” demonstrates an admirable and humorous sense of self-awareness. On the other hand, the portentously-titled “Hollow Man (Parts 1 & 2)” constitutes tedious sub-Pink Floyd noodling; if they were thinking of recapturing the uncanny magic of Gilmour’s three-part “The Narrow Way” from Ummagumma, then they were some considerable distance away from doing so.

 

Where Kula Shaker unexpectedly thrive is when they drop the spiritual pretensions and bullet-point philosophy and simply concentrate on being a rock band. The problem for me, and for those of you expecting a full-on demolition of this band and record, is that “Grateful When You’re Dead” is beyond question a fantastic and dynamic pop single which would have worked at any time between 1966 and 2006. It does its business in about two minutes fifty and even its album segue into yet more tiresome ambient bollocks cannot mar its undeniable power. On it, Mills sounds as though he’s been suddenly snapped awake.

 

Perhaps the band’s best moment, which got grudgingly added to later editions of the album, was their 1997 number two smash hit single reading of “Hush,” the old Joe South/Deep Purple warhorse and a performance which to my ears is far more reminiscent of The Prisoners than The Charlatans; it strips out all the extraneous luggage (no solos), Mills assaults the song with genuine zest and, again, it takes just two minutes and 58 seconds to make its point. They treat the song as colourful Archies bubblegum, something Tommy James and the Shondells could have done (and there is nothing on K to approach “Crystal Blue Persuasion”).

 

But it didn’t last. Mills made some hazily naïve comments about reclaiming the swastika from the Nazis and returning the symbol to its Hindu origins – the term “swastika” in Sanskrit means “conductive to wellbeing” and first appeared in print in Pāṇini’s Aṣṭādhyāyī, serving as explanation of a grammatical point – and was summarily pilloried and rendered unmutual. It then transpired that Mills’ previous-but-one band, Objects Of Desire, deployed the slogan “England will rise again” – which might have worked on a European Cup level in 1996 but not at all in 1993 – and also performed at a Wembley conference of conspiracy theorists entitled “Global Deception”; one of the chief speakers at the latter, William Cooper – the term “illuminati” tells you all that you need to know about him (except that he was shot dead in a gun battle with the Arizona police in November 2001) – is thanked in the credits of K.

 

Kula Shaker did not really recover from any of this. The controversy – which Mills later publicly decried – torpedoed the prospects for their then-imminent second album, Peasants, Pigs & Astronauts, and the band split in September 1999. They reformed in 2004 and have subsequently continued to perform and record; this year’s Natural Magick album even restored them to the top thirty. But their moment was perhaps always fated to be brief.

R.E.M.: New Adventures In Hi-Fi

 

(#554: 21 September 1996, 1 week)

 

Track listing: How The West Was Won And Where It Got Us/The Wake-Up Bomb/New Test Leper/Undertow/E-Bow The Letter/Leave/Departure/Bittersweet Me/Be Mine/Binky The Doormat/Zither/So Fast, So Numb/Low Desert/Electrolite

 

If Monster represented the beginning of a new journey for R.E.M., then New Adventures In Hi-Fi marks that journey’s consolidation, with improvements. The album’s songs (along with others which didn’t make the final cut) were written and recorded while the band were on the road touring Monster, mostly at live soundchecks around the United States – Charleston, Boston, Auburn Hills, Memphis, Phoenix, Philadelphia, Orlando and at home in Atlanta – with four other songs recorded in a rather lo-fi local studio (Bad Animals in Seattle).

 

Inevitably, much of New Adventures concerns travel and movement – such song titles as “Leave,” “Departure” and “Low Desert” adequately tell the story in themselves – but the record (or records; on one format it came as a double LP) also documents in particular the increasing frustration of Michael Stipe at the world and people around him, and maybe even with himself (“Bittersweet Me”). Certainly Stipe has rarely been more punchily direct as a lyricist than he is on New Adventures, as witness the smiling melancholia of “How The West Was Won…” or the snarl at the sponsored superficiality of chat shows (“New Test Leper”).

 

Equally, the band are now far more at home with the rock direction signalled by Monster; songs such as “Undertow” and “Binky The Doormat” convey much more musical power and confidence, and the steady build-up of “Be Mine” from fuzzy folk meditation to something approaching An Anthem is handled in an absolutely masterly fashion, as heralded by Bill Berry’s drums, which awaken at 3:50 and escort the song into a wholly larger, but completely logical, arena.

 

It is perhaps a miracle that Berry was on the record at all; he had collapsed on stage in Lausanne, Switzerland, with a ruptured brain aneurysm in March 1995, and although he recovered sufficiently to rejoin the band and help them complete New Adventures, things were, for him, decidedly not the same. So it is rather poignant that the record is introduced by his drums alone, laying out the ground for the echoey piano and dub-like disorientation of “How The West Was Won…”; some commentators at the time referred to a trip hop influence, but the song actually sounds like one of those secretions of cloistered dread one might encounter on later albums by the Clash (“Shepherds Delight,” “Death Is A Star”).

 

On “How The West Was Won…” Stipe muses about the induced dream of the unending frontier, and how it finally came to not very much at all – his quaking “ah”s at the end of each “and where it got us” may represent either lamentation or irony. “I point my nose to the Northern Star/And watch the decline from a hazy distance” he observes, as well as offering characteristic Stipeisms which don’t really make sense yet fit the song’s central emotion exactly (“I cross it, bless it, alkaline,” which corresponds precisely with Mike Mills’ distended, Robert Wyatt-doing-Cecil Taylor-at-16 rpm piano solo).

 

The song lulls the unwary listener into imagining an album of reasonably quiet contemplations. How delightfully shocking, then, to be shaken awake by Stipe’s chuckling, in-our-faces “I LOOK GOOD IN A GLASS PACK!” “The Wake-Up Bomb” is sleazy glam-rock which proves quite forcibly that Suede still had a bit of a way to go, and also efficaciously self-aware glam-rock which subsists on the knowledge that this imposed fable of music’s past could act as a metaphor for the neutron bomb, leaving structures intact but wiping out actual people.

 

“The Wake-Up Bomb” is just one of the best pastiches of glam-rock, and specifically British glam-rock of the period which was already, in 1996, approaching a quarter of a century ago, that I’ve heard, with its sneeringly loving references to 1973, Queen, T Rex moves and even the New Seekers (“I had to teach the world to sing by the age of twenty-one”), not to mention Stipe’s unexpected echoes of the vocal idiosyncrasies of Steve Harley (“Carry my dead bored, ‘been there, done that’ any-THIIIIIING”). By song’s climax he has had more than enough, now referring to “you lunch meat, pond scum” and magnifying his Harleyisms (the repeated coda of “Yeah, I'd rather be anywhere doing any-THIIIIIING!!!!”). The punctum element here is unquestionably Bill Berry’s tambourine from verse two onward.

 

“New Test Leper” (I think it’s meant to be shorthand for the New Testament) is more recognisably in the regular R.E.M. line of approach – though note Mills’ very free-ranging bass-playing throughout, and also Peter Buck’s Robin Guthrie-esque fuzz lead in the choruses, while Stipe ponders on how raw a deal Jesus would have had on daytime talk shows, culminating in an Elephant Man reference (“I am not an animal”) – those who do not fit into a securely monetised paradigm of international currency-reliant humanity (“all organised and blank”) are pitifully and often painfully excised from it. “Undertow” is rock dynamism which makes nineties U2, let alone Monster, seem relatively jejeune; the important element here is Mike Mills, whose voice immediately responds to Stipe’s pained “I’m drowning me!” as if to save him.

 

“E-Bow The Letter” was the audience-testing lead single from the album – much as “What’s The Frequency, Kenneth?,” “Drive” and, arguably, “Losing My Religion” had been on its receding predecessors – but undaunted British record buyers placed it at number four in their singles chart, making it statistically the band’s biggest hit single up to that point. Its surface of jokey, semi-rapped reminiscences conceals a canyon of mourning – it is said that the song’s lyrics derived from a letter Stipe wrote to River Phoenix, hence the song itself can reasonably be viewed as an elegy, as underlined by the hovering background ghost of Patti Smith, alternately reassuring (“I’ll take you over there”) and menacing (“I’ll take you over”). The song incorporates some of Stipe’s saddest and most resigned words (“Will you live to eighty-three? Will you ever welcome me?,” “My loss, and here we go again”). But the two voices intermingle at the song’s modest climax, and Smith finally guides the wretched soul away from Hell (“There, there…There, baby”).

 

“Leave” is for me the album’s highlight. It begins with a sourly beautiful passage for orchestra, resolving, as it must, in a Picardy third, as though indicating that this represents the “old” R.E.M. Indeed the band made a recording of the whole song in this style, but in the album’s emotional context the passage signifies a goodbye to…something.

 

Headphone listeners should especially be warned; there follows a rude awakening. A siren starts blaring and refuses to relent – who let the Bomb Squad into the studio (Answers: nobody, because the song was recorded at a soundcheck at the Omni Coliseum in Atlanta, while the siren effect was provided by Scott McCaughey relentlessly moving the octave switch of his Arp Odyssey up and down)? “Leave” is one of R.E.M.’s most raging rock grinds, at the very least on a par with “Turn You Inside Out” from Green. It does not let up as Stipe allows his frustration to foment and explode. This wall of pressurises sound persists for over seven-and-a-quarter minutes, including a priceless moment when the song appears to end, but oh no, the siren starts up again. And if the repeated chants of “leave it all behind” don’t spell it out to you – the band have clocked and listened to…Ride! Flipping heck.

 

“Departure” is jocular but powerful travelogue rock, a bit like Stereolab remixing “Get Off Of My Cloud,” Stipe’s rapid-fire observations countered by undulating rhythmic traction (think particularly of Mills’ fuzz bass and Farfisa organ). “Bittersweet Me” does its best to resemble old-school R.E.M., but Stipe’s anger cannot quite be contained as securely as before; if anything, he ventures into John Lydon vocalese at many points in the song (“How easy you think of all of this as bittersweet me!”). Yet the song also includes some of his severest and most poetic jibes – the younger Morrissey would have been proud to pen “Oh, my peer, your veneer/Is wearing thin and cracking.”

 

As for “Be Mine,” Stipe manipulates the corniest elements of Valentine’s Day cards and suchlike in an encyclopaedic attempt to explain how strong his love is and what he would do for, and occasionally despite, it; one is never quite convinced that he is not an obsessive rather than a would-be lover or saviour. Yet the song’s architecture builds up beautifully, leaving us with an arm-waving ocean of guitar riffs and chord changes which would not have disgraced prime Oasis. This is tremendous rock music.

 

“Binky The Doormat” is one of the album’s most powerful and ominous rockers. Here Stipe retreats to his semi-abstract globe of imagined imagery, but none of it conceals a profound absence of self-esteem. Binky himself is an antagonist in the nice-try-but-shoddily-realised 1991 black comedy horror drama Shakes The Clown whose self-pity does not obscure the fact that he is a murderer and near-rapist. Stipe confines his concerns to the self-pity, and that is manifestly quite enough. Following the brief instrumental interlude “Zither” – recorded in a dressing room, no less - which sounds like an early draft of “Everybody Hurts,” we return to rock with “So Fast, So Numb,” which revisits the River Phoenix subtext a lot more furiously than “E-Bow The Letter,” even implying that he and Stipe might have been more than just friends (“I’ve been around, I’ve been your lover”) while damning Phoenix’s seemingly self-willed descent (“You love it, you hate it/You want to recreate it”). Meanwhile, the relatively straightahead rock of “Low Desert” finds Stipe terminally exhausted with The Road (“There's a radio tower, it's egging you on/Back to the place where you never belonged/Where the people thrive on their own contempt”).

 

That leaves “Electrolite,” the album’s most obviously “R.E.M.” song – musically it’s like an angular variation on “Nightswimming” (Mike Mills was again responsible for the central piano motif) - and one of the best and most acrid love songs to Los Angeles, and for the matter the twentieth century, that I know. Stipe lived in Santa Monica for two years in the nineties and was inclined to stand on Mulholland Drive – far enough not to smell the city, but close and wide enough to see its audacious ambition. Sometime around June 2006 Stipe wrote an essay about Los Angeles, some of which was quoted in the Los Angeles Times, including the following passage:

 

"And nowhere seemed more perfect than the city that came into its own throughout the 20th century, but always looking forward and driven by ideas of a greater future, at whatever cost.

 

Los Angeles.”

 

Underscoring that cost was, principally, the San Andreas Fault, and “Electrolite” was directly inspired by the Northridge earthquake of 17 January 1994, the worst the city had experienced since 1971, in which Stipe’s Santa Monica home was severely damaged (although technically the eruption was caused by the previously-undetected Pico Thrust Fault).

 

Later in the same essay, Stipe wrote:

 

"I name check three of the great legends of that single industry 'town,' as it likes to refer to itself. In order: James Dean, Steve McQueen, Martin Sheen [as he looks down on Hollywood, although in the song itself the actors are cited in reverse order]. All iconic, all representing different aspects of masculinity—a key feature of 20th century ideology. It is the push me-pull you of a culture drawing on mid-century ideas of society, butt up against and in a great tug-of-war with modernism/rebirth/epiphany/futurism, wiping out all that that came before to be replaced by something 'better,' more civilized, more tolerant, fair, open, and so on ... [see 'reagan,' 'soylent green,' 'bladerunner,' current gubernatorial debates]”

 

The song’s title comes from Stipe’s impression of seeing Los Angeles from the air while flying towards the city; the notion of a starlike phosphorescence. The performance itself is, I would say, resonant, full of signifiers of love, most notably Nathan December's patient guiro, reminding us of how Los Angeles came into being and also of the subtle percussive undertow which enhanced so many of the sunny, optimistic songs materialising on the radio from around the time Stipe was born (and of course I also think of its startling use in the Beach Boys' "Cabinessence").

 

But the song is also, as I intimated above, a song of farewell to the twentieth century, bearing not much in the way of hope for a twenty-first. In “Electrolite” Stipe might be bidding farewell to “the future” or that century’s idea of it; hence “20^th century, go to sleep/Really deep/We won’t blink.” “I’m not scared” Stipe asserts as the song and record end. A slight theatrical pause, and finally: “I’m out of here.” As, for quite a lot of people, were R.E.M. But for them, the journey, though necessarily diverted, was nowhere near completion.

SUEDE: Coming Up

 

(#553: 14 September 1996, 1 week)

 

Track listing: Trash/Filmstar/Lazy/By The Sea/She/Beautiful Ones/Starcrazy/Picnic By The Motorway/The Chemistry Between Us/Saturday Night

 

This wasn’t quite the same band as the one which recorded entry #476. Bernard Butler had been gone for two years. Who was going to replace him? Nobody really visualised a seventeen-year-old A Level student who sent in a demo tape to the band’s fan club explaining how good he’d be for them. Yet it was drummer Simon Gilbert who walked into the office while Brett Anderson was sifting through a whole pile of tapes and thought he was listening to an early Suede demo – Richard Oakes had recorded his own versions of some of their songs and added a few of his own compositions to show how much he could contribute.

 

Intrigued, the band invited Oakes in for an audition. The chemistry between the two parties sparked immediately but they asked him to come back for a second go the following week just to prove it wasn’t a one-off. He duly returned, and it most certainly wasn’t, so he was offered the job. He had hitherto been playing in a Dixieland jazz band as well as in school “rock” groups, so he had a pretty good idea about how to assemble a song.

 

Hence the third Suede album, hailed by everyone as a mighty against-the-odds comeback, and perhaps easier to assimilate than the second one. The gestation period of Dog Man Star had been painful. Butler’s father had died shortly before the band had been due to begin their tour of the United States. In addition, he also became engaged, and felt overall that he was drifting away from the other three, and they from him.

 

There were virulent arguments and disagreements, and unquestionably a shipload of drugs floating around. For the album, Butler recorded his parts in a completely separate studio area from the rest of the band. He angrily quit the group before the record was properly finished, meaning that unnamed session musicians had to be brought in in order to cover for his absent work.

 

Not that Anderson was necessarily in a better place at the time; he had just moved into a flat in hilly Highgate, adjacent to what was essentially a Mennonite church, and would hear their hymnals floating through his walls. All well and good, of course, but spiritually and emotionally he was kaput, wasted.

 

Much of that waste naturally filters through to Dog Man Star. It is a forbidding and opaque collection. Its faster songs did not possess the snappy cheek of those from the record’s predecessor; humour, indeed, was almost entirely absent. The non-album single “Stay Together" which preceded it should have acted as a warning, since it was practically bipolar in nature; its first half a straightforward boisterous arm-waving consolation (Anderson), its second a hellish drive into a limbo beyond rational recognition (Butler, although it’s Anderson who yells “Don’t take me back to the past!”).

 

And yet, when it slows down, cools down and becomes more intimately intense, Dog Man Star offers us music as profound and moving as anything else of its decade. There are subtle clues on the album as to where it might be heading; the icy ethereality of “Daddy’s Speeding,” the rude snort of Andrew Cronshaw’s ba-wu flute which introduces “New Generation,” like an abruptly-awoken hippopotamus.

 

The sequence of “The 2 Of Us” and “Black Or Blue” – note Anderson’s prophetic “And I don’t care for the U.K. tonight” in the latter – is shiveringly brilliant, piercing through to emotions that much other mid-nineties music didn’t even strive to reach (Global Communication’s “14 31,” with its patient rhythm of the profoundest clock that ever ticked, bounds to mind as a comparison). “The Asphalt World” would work as an escape route from those cloisters – it is, or ought to be, the album’s antechamber to climax – were it not for some ill-advised extended jamming (Butler at this stage was no David Gilmour, who generally knows what notes to play, when to play them and most importantly why he should play them). “Still Life” is a splendidly semi-cathartic coda and the corniness of the closing orchestral passage doesn’t bother me at all; on the contrary, it elevates the dreams of the song’s everyday Valium Court housewife into a literal bolero of absolution.

 

Usually, in critical overviews of this closing section to Dog Man Star, writers focus on an assumed Scott Walker influence in its key songs. If there were, then hiring Andrew Cronshaw and Brian Gascoigne and his Sinfonia strings was actually slightly ahead of the Tilt game. But the overarching influence has never, to my knowledge, been acknowledged – listen to Anderson’s climactic “us” in “The 2 Of Us” or the way the word “coast” wriggles from his spirit in “Black Or Blue,” not to mention his mastery of the forlorn falsetto, and it is suddenly and abundantly clear that the singer is channelling Billy Mackenzie (hear “And This She Knows” or “Nocturne VII” and tell me I’m mistaken). Given that Mackenzie was about to be signed to Suede’s label Nude Records, the comparison here is surely unavoidable.

 

The imperfectly-completed artefact was perhaps too much to assimilate for everybody, including Suede themselves. Ironically, before he left the band, Butler had actually agreed with Anderson that their next move should be to get back to snappy pop songs with tangible hooks – you can witness the glory of McAlmont and Butler’s “Yes” as evidence of where Suede might have gone had Butler stayed. As things were, however, Anderson and Oakes, after a slightly wearying period touring Dog Man Star, knuckled down in an attempt to write such songs.

 

If anything, “Trash” was a glorious knockout comeback, proving to doubters that the new Suede were freshly capable of cutting it. While still very much the apprentice, Oakes nevertheless finds space to insert his subtle stamp on the song – which really acts as a manifesto for Suede and their fans - and the band sounded livelier than they had done in three years. “Filmstar” may get a little too comfortable in an imagined 1972 oasis, but as skulking bubbleglam it does its sneakily catchy business, while “Beautiful Ones” relies on the underlying bed of concealed sadness which rendered Suede different from (insert Sky Bet League One glam-indie band of your choice). Hooks and handclaps aplenty, exactly as though the new boy had swept into the room, thrown the curtains open and let the light back in. The band feels like itself once more. Meanwhile, “Starcrazy” indicates that Oakes was already working on ideas of his own, and they delightfully do not clash with Anderson’s.

 

Of the ballads, “By The Sea” dates from 1993 – which is why its opening line reflects “So Young” – but the album’s closing three tracks are new, and rather splendid, slowly reaching out to the listener as opposed to shutting the porthole on them. “Picnic By The Motorway” is so provincially grand that you don’t initially notice the song’s framing horror; it could be a sequel to “Daddy’s Speeding.” The forebearing languidity of “The Chemistry Between Us” – what does Anderson really know of “Streatham trash?” – supports a searing melancholy, not of a romance, but two drug addicts who have only their drugs in common, as a tool of communication.

 

But “Saturday Night” – and throughout Coming Up, Craig Armstrong’s string arrangements are a far apter fit for Suede than Gascoigne’s; they breathe (i.e. coming up for air) and cohabit with the songs rather than overpower them or comment on them from the sidelines – concludes on a note of cautious optimism and acts as a courtly response to Petula Clark’s “Downtown”; the day job is out of mind on a Saturday so let’s get out, enjoy ourselves, never trade a stupid decision for another five years of life, and most importantly of all, “never let the winter in.” Coming Up sounds as though Suede have freshly partaken of a new spring.

CROWDED HOUSE: Recurring Dream: The Very Best Of Crowded House

(#552: 6 July 1996, 2 weeks)

 

Track listing: Weather With You (Single Version)/World Where You Live/Fall At Your Feet/Locked Out/Don't Dream It's Over/Into Temptation/Pineapple Head/When You Come/Private Universe/Not The Girl You Think You Are/Instinct/I Feel Possessed/Four Seasons In One Day/It's Only Natural/Distant Sun/Something So Strong/Mean To Me/Better Be Home Soon/Everything Is Good For You

The sense of a parallel and slightly hazier world prevails throughout the more intelligent Antipodean rock of the second half of the eighties, and of the year 1986 in particular; think, for instance, of the Go-Betweens’ “Twin Layers Of Lightning” or the Triffids’ “Tarrilup Bridge,” each bearing a heat so hazy it could make pizzeria store fronts seem like tablets from heaven. The haze of “Don’t Dream It’s Over” may have a lot to do with Mitchell Froom’s keyboards, but there is a subtle commitment in Neil Finn’s writing and performance which doesn’t have to underline the fact that this is an anti-capitalist protest song. It doesn’t make a fuss but quietly stands in the corner, incrementally making a difference.

 

That last sentence fairly sums up what Crowded House have been trying to do in the subsequent half-lifetime. On the surface their music appears, or sounds, reasonable and approachable, and therefore possibly "centrist" - they are routinely described, or dismissed, as "dad rock," which reminds me of how odd it is, or isn't, that there does not seem to be such as thing as "mum rock" - and their approach certainly differs in superfluous kind from the band's arty predecessor Split ENZ (the capitalisation is important), though that may be down to Crowded House being essentially Neil Finn's project, whereas Split ENZ was principally his brother Tim's concept.

Still, the implicit menace felt through things like "I Got You" pervades in the unusually hazy keyboard lines of "Fall At Your Feet" and the politely gloomy confessional of "Into Temptation," the latter underscored by what sounds like a Mellotron. Though superseded by subsequent compilations, in particular 2010's two-CD The Very Very Best Of Crowded House - which includes their best song, "Chocolate Cake" - Recurring Dream marks an inadvertent temporary memorial, as Neil Finn decided to split the band up shortly after its release. Drummer Paul Hester had messily left in 1994, and the grudging "with Paul Hester" credit on the album suggests some residual grudges.

Yet this is proudly unworldly music, and inevitably this has something to do with New Zealand; without wanting to venture into dreary generalised pseudo-philosophical travelogues about the edge of the world, etc., it is true that the two islands' best bands sound as though at a diplomatically defiant distance from the mainstream of things, as though music filtered through to them in imperfect, faxed photocopies. The work of The Verlaines, for instance, can be interpreted as a manically sped-up punk variant on Crowded House's characteristically angular structures - 1993's Juvenilia is basically an inversion of the subject matters of Together Alone - and we see glimpses of The Chills - rest in peace, Martin Phillipps - in particular during the lengthy vanishing-into-nothingness of "Private Universe."

 

One could even - well, I would - suggest that the (im)perfect counterpoint to Crowded House would be Dunedin's The Dead C, where emotion and adventure finally overcome politesse and reserve; you really cannot appreciate Woodface (bearing Tim Finn's obvious presence in mind) without listening to Trapdoor Fucking Exit ("Hell Is Now Love," "Helen Said This").

If I'm focusing on artists recording for Flying Nun Records, it may be due to the fact that Neil Finn (together with his wife Sharon and another undisclosed business partner) has held a 25% shareholder stake in that label since it was bought back from Warner Music in 2009. But it enhances the totality of understanding Crowded House's music.

Recurring Dream is a straightforward singles compilation; four songs from each of their (then) four studio albums plus three new songs (for a proposed new album which was ultimately abandoned). Much of it will be accidentally familiar to you, yet there are bits of sonic business which gently steer the band away from being unambiguous easy listening; Tim's ad libs of "Aye!" and "Hey!" on "Weather With You," the free jazz trumpet solo which takes "Mean To Me" out (played by a member of a session band known as the "Heart Attack Horns"), the disconcerting electronic FX which announce "It's Only Natural." "Pineapple Head" is a delightul R.E.M.-style roundelay which could theoretically go on for always.

I'd say that, of the four original albums, Together Alone is the most ostensibly adventurous - the debagged post-baggy rage of "Locked Out" plus the aforementioned "Pineapple Head" and "Private Universe" - and Temple Of Low Men the most secluded (Neil seems be singing "Better Be Home Soon" while angrily crouching in a far, not-yet-dusted corner of the studio). Of the three new songs, "Not The Girl" is an explicit White Album tribute - far more Lennon than Neil's customary McCartney-esque deliveries - while "Instinct" buries its supremely catchy chorus in a sandy morass of indecision. The band did reassemble - minus Hester, who took his own life in March 2005 - in 2007, and it is encouraging to see that their more recent work, up to and including this year's Gravity Stairs, demonstrates undiminished imagination. And if you listen to 2010's Intriguer - particularly songs like "Inside Out" - you'll discover healthy evidence of the band being structurally influenced by...The Chills. Easy listening has never quite been Crowded House's thing, unlike meticulously-refined subtlety.

Bryan ADAMS: 18 til I Die

 

(#551: 22 June 1996, 1 week)

 

Track listing: The Only Thing That Looks Good On Me Is You/Do to You/Let’s Make a Night to Remember/18 til I Die/Star/(I Wanna Be) Your Underwear/We’re Gonna Win/I Think About You/I’ll Always Be Right There/It Ain’t A Party…If You Can’t Come ‘Round/Black Pearl/You’re Still Beautiful To Me/Have You Ever Really Loved A Woman?

 

It was a Wednesday. I remember that much. To be more specific, it was the morning of Wednesday the eleventh of August, 1971. It was a gloriously hot and blue day, just under a fortnight before I had to return to school for the new term. I was seven years old. My father was at work, so my mother took me out to a park which was not the one which we regularly visited in Uddingston (because I remember going out with my mother on the bus to Tollcross Park on many occasions), which was Maryville Park, adjacent to the Tunnock’s factory and close to what at the time was called Muiredge Primary School. On this occasion we went to a park, or a play area I guess you’d more accurately call it, on Kylepark Drive, where all the well-off people whose children went to school with me and barely tolerated me lived.

 

I can’t remember why my mother took me out there except maybe she fancied a change. But it was a very fine and relaxed morning. I took it upon myself to sing all the songs in that week’s top thirty singles chart – because at the time if you listened to the charts on the radio they only went down as far as number thirty – and link them in the manner of a radio disc jockey.

 

It just felt like the right and most natural thing for me to do in that setting and at that time in my life, and I must have been pretty good at it because before long my performance drew a small crowd of admiring girls and in some instances their beaming parents. I wasn’t there to make a racket or cause a fuss, but just to entertain as best I could.

 

Everybody who was there agreed that I was quite remarkable. I sang all the songs from that week’s top thirty, which had only been announced on the radio less than twenty-four hours previously, in sequence of ascending order and from memory. Some even started to sing along with me as the ninety or so sunny minutes went along. No fuss or unpleasantness; just communal happiness.

 

Looking at that top thirty, as I am doing now while writing this because I can’t really remember it these days without looking it up on the internet, even though when I was younger all the charts were in my head and I never needed to look any of them up, it surprises me somewhat that I managed to pull that performance off. I know it was this chart and it was the eleventh of August because for whatever reason I remembered that “La-La Means I Love You” by the Delfonics was at number nineteen. I don’t know why that specific statistic has lodged itself in my head.

 

Today of course I recognise the record as Thom Bell at his exquisite best. I did not know of “People Make The World Go Round,” which Thom Bell did with the Stylistics at pretty much the same time, and indeed did not hear it at all for another twenty-eight years until I heard a cover version on the Innerzone Orchestra’s album Programmed and tried to find the Stylistics album which included the full six-and-a-half minute version (not the three minute-plus edit you got on compilations). I found that on a lonely and hot Tuesday afternoon, slowly walking back to somewhere (Oxford), in a crate in a record shop on Wandsworth High Street. It was Tuesday the seventeenth of August, just over twenty-eight years since my performance in the park, and of course I wondered what I had lost. The fact that it was a time that I was not really meant to see perhaps underlines the unutterable otherness of the whole experience.

 

However, getting back to looking at that top thirty, I really am puzzled as to how I managed to pull it off. There’s “Street Fighting Man” by the Rolling Stones – a song which didn’t get much, if any, play on daytime radio but still I knew it – and other political songs like “Bangla Desh” by George Harrison, “Soldier Blue” by Buffy Sainte-Marie and “Won’t Get Fooled Again” by the Who. Advanced stuff for my age. And there was tongue-twisting progressive rock in the form of “In My Own Time” by Family and the groovy “Devil’s Answer” by Atomic Rooster. Also a record called “Leap Up And Down” by Saint Cecilia which the radio had belatedly banned because at the time you weren’t allowed to sing the word “knickers” on the air but I had heard Noel Edmonds or somebody play it and it was catchy enough to stick. I sort of bleeped the offending word out, to much laughter.

 

I remember how most of those thirty songs went but not in meticulous, microscopic detail. I had no unassisted memory of “Watching The River Flow” by Bob Dylan and had to turn to volume two of his Greatest Hits to remind myself how it went – oh yeah, that one! Most of it, though, was happy random noise, whether it was “Heartbreak Hotel” (doing the rounds on reissue), “Monkey Spanner” or Slade’s “Get Down And Get With It” (I really enjoyed yelling that one out!). Even “Get It On” by T. Rex, which was right up there at number one, I simply treated as a wacky singalong, not knowing that it was rather near the lyrical knuckle (well, how are you supposed to know these things when you’re only seven, with your cream shorts and your Apollo 11 embroidered patch which came free when you sent off three used Super Mousse wrappers?).

 

Today I can rationalise why this odd assortment of songs constituted a “hit parade.” August 1971 represented a liminal period in pop, when the old (sixties) order had largely incrementally bowed out and nobody was yet quite sure what was going to succeed it (T Rex and Slade were as yet happening in isolation). Back then all I knew was that pop records either made you feel sad (“I’m Still Waiting”) or happy (“Move On Up”) or indeed occasionally both (“Just My Imagination”). A lot of the time I still think that’s all you need to know about pop.

 

So why am I thinking about all of this nearly fifty-three years to the day later? Because of the promise that could never be fulfilled, not least by myself. Everybody who was present in the park that Wednesday morning was sure I was going to become somebody really famous. One of them commented, “hey, this is the next Tony Blackburn!”

 

Maybe I’ve scrunched it all up in my imperfect memory and I was merely blurting out riffs and hooks and making a lot of noises to cover up for lyrical ignorance. That’s a major reason why minute analysis of lyrics is simply the wrong way to approach pop writing. Blue by Joni Mitchell had already been out for a couple of months but all I knew about her at the time was the song about the taxi where she laughs at the end and she wrote “Woodstock” and “Both Sides Now” but both were hits for others. I didn’t hear the album until one Sunday morning, about two o’clock, at a Christmas party in Morden in December 1988. It immediately penetrated my being and I bought my own copy from Tower Records on Kensington High Street one day later.

 

In 1971, however, all I was concerned about was, was it pop, was it happy noise, and does/do either/both work?

 

Perhaps that is still what concerns me. In 1971 I was seven and people loved what I knew and felt about pop music. After a while, though, you gradually find out that you’re not really allowed to do it any more. I didn’t become a disc jockey because that involved doing shifts on hospital radio for not very much money and as I understood things, once you managed to get employed by a radio station you had to earn a living playing music you basically hated.

 

Yes, you might justifiably argue at this stage, but you did not hate any of that 1971 chart stuff in 1971, did you? To which I can only reply, no I didn’t. Pop was all around you in a manner fundamentally different from how it’s all around you now. By “all around you” in 1971 I mean that pop was in the air, everybody breathed it, whether they liked its fumes or not. Whereas “all around you” in 2024 generally means what’s feeding into your headphones as you listen to the hot pop hits of today online – and no greater community is there to share it with you, not any more.

 

So yes, I’d say pop music in 2024 is as good as it’s ever been, and qualitatively in rude health – but how would you, or anybody, know? Furthermore – and this furtherance is very important – I know that it shouldn’t be me telling this to you.

 

Because knowing and singing the top forty in 2024, at the age of sixty, is drastically different from doing so in 1971, aged seven, and unquestionably a whole lot more sinister. It’s an indication that, no, you haven’t really grown up, have you – and people are exceptionally suspicious about people who don’t and/or won’t grow up.

 

I might have liked all pop music in 1971, but just a few years later the hormones kicked in, then punk, and both alter you irredeemably. You are obliged to take sides, learn (or learn to learn) that you do not like some pop music as much as you like other pop music. Meanwhile, playground chatter about the charts – who beat whom to number one, who got the highest new entry, where did THAT record come from, etc. – dwindles or mutates into talk about driving lessons, work placements and mortgages.

 

You are, in short, expected to grow up and put childish things away, including (implicitly and sometimes expressly) pop music. The other week I walked into the office humming “Good Luck, Babe” to myself – it’s catchy! – and you’ll never believe the blank stares I got in return, like, who is this ageing weirdo? You’re supposed to have “graduated” to classical or jazz or grown-up album artists, or to have stuck with the songs that were big when you were fifteen. Charli xcx or Billie Eilish don’t give a fuck if I think, never mind what I think about their work, and why should they – theirs isn’t intended to be “my” music, and quite rightly so; piss off back to the Beatles, grandad.

 

(Actually, as Ian Martin has commented elsewhere, it’s quite liberating to get past sixty and realise that you can think and say what you like because nobody truly gives a toss; it’s your deemed societal function to become a grumpy old git, because what are young people otherwise going to react against?)

 

So yes, like Max Schumacher in Network I am fully aware that things are far nearer to the end now than to the beginning. How is one expected to respond to that incrementally dire knowledge? I didn’t stop loving pop music because it is presumed to carry an expiry date. I listen to new music because I don’t want my mind to atrophy and consign me to a nursing home. I cannot live for, let alone in, the past. Orpheus loses Eurydice forever because he looks back. Lot’s wife looked back at burning Gomorrah and turned into a pillar of salt.

 

Hence you could say that it’s not exactly a great or helpful idea to look back, argues the co-author of a blog looking back. Maybe it’s down to how you do the looking, the angle of your gaze. But the reaction I’d get now if I attempted what I did at Kylepark over half a century ago would be horrible, brutal and probably terminal.

 

And of course I shouldn’t even think of attempting it. In the real world I of course wouldn’t. But there’s that irritating little subtext of a question, isn’t there – okay, you’ve been told to grow up, and you shouldn’t even be told, you should just do it, so no more swings and roundabouts in the park, and no more pop music. And then I’d have to go into a paraphrase of Limmy’s sketch about the swing, saying – all right, I’ll stop listening to pop, I’ll fit in. What have you got to replace pop music? I’ll tell you. NOTHING. Work, work and more work, which is all school trains you to do anyway, relieved only by booze, fags, maybe drugs, and inadequate holiday fortnights (provided you can afford any of these). No wonder people are fucked up, etc. etc.

 

So perhaps Kylepark in 1971 was my personal Millport. A moment which cannot, and should not, be recaptured. But, hey, this enduring, consumerism-based belief that you can go on being a rock ‘n’ roll adolescent forever – I can’t be seven until I die, let alone eighteen. Not even if I were born in a leap year.

 

Postscript

Yet all memory is fallible. Until quite recently I believed profoundly in the perfect day, which for me was teatime on Monday 15 August 1971. My parents and I were walking back from Bothwell Castle. The weather was beautiful. My father carried our transistor radio and we listened to Radio 4. Specifically I remember listening to Brothers In Law, a situation comedy about the world of barristers starring Richard Briers. I don’t recall anything specific about the show – least of all whether it was funny - but it felt good and fitting.

 

Being the age that I am now, however, I looked all of this up online yesterday. Not only was that Monday the sixteenth of August, not the fifteenth, but the evening repeat of Brothers In Law did not go out until Thursday – the nineteenth.

 

I note that track two on the abovementioned Innerzone Orchestra album is entitled “Manufactured Memories.” Track three is entitled "The Beginning Of The End.”