(#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.
