(#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.
