(#561: 23 November 1996, 2 weeks)
Track listing: What Becomes Of The Broken Hearted/True Love Ways/Something’s Gotten Hold Of My Heart/Elenore/Saturday Night At The Movies/Bring It On Home To Me/You’ll Never Walk Alone/Oh Pretty Woman/Keep The Customer Satisfied/The Price Of Love/Silent Night/What Becomes Of The Broken Hearted (Gospel Version)/Ain’t Misbehavin’/A Nightingale Sang In Berkeley Square/The Kiss Polka
“No, this, she felt, was real life and if she wasn’t as curious or passionate as she had once been, that was only to be expected. It would be inappropriate, undignified, at thirty-eight, to conduct friendships or love affairs with the ardour and intensity of a twenty-two-year-old. Falling in love like that? Writing poetry, crying at pop songs? Dragging people into photo-booths, taking a whole day to make a compilation tape, asking people if they wanted to share your bed, just for company? If you quoted Bob Dylan or T.S. Eliot or, God forbid, Brecht at someone these days they would smile politely and step quietly backwards, and who would blame them? Ridiculous, at thirty-eight, to expect a song or book or film to change your life. No, everything had evened out and settled down and life was lived against a general background hum of comfort, satisfaction and familiarity. There would be no more of these nerve-jangling highs and lows. The friends they had now would be the friends they had in five, ten, twenty years’ time. They expected to get neither dramatically richer or (sic) poorer; they expected to stay healthy for a little while yet. Caught in the middle; middle class, middle-aged; happy in that they were not overly happy.”
(David Nicholls, One Day; London. Hodder & Stoughton: 2009)
My friend Mark Sinker recently made a pointed observation on Bluesky. In response to some talk about tribute bands getting all the gigs these days, as opposed to new artists, he did suggest that the overwhelming majority of the history of popular music has consisted of, as he puts it, reproductions of reproductions. Palais dance bands copied what they learned from records, households sang and played what they knew from the sheet music. Street peddlers might offer their own variations on known songs but were accepted as a factor of living. Groups starting out, including the Beatles, were obliged to know and be able to play and sing all of the big hits, whether ballads, rockers or novelties.
By and large – and pointedly excluding the Beatles – everybody who performed those songs, in whichever manner they opted to perform them, knew in their gut that their version would never be as good as the recorded original (which in itself might be a polished British cover of an American song; consider, for example, the difference between Artie Shaw’s “Begin The Beguine” and the Joe Loss/Chico Henderson rendition of same).
Or, if you must go back to the Beatles, think of Ray Morgan’s “The Long And Winding Road,” a minor hit single in 1970 (since the original never received a UK single release). Now, Mr Morgan was something of a veteran of what we might call “the club scene” (early-mid seventies British cabaret clubs being demonstrably different from, say, CBGB’s) and performs “The Long And Winding Road” in the manner, of…well…a club singer, performing for an audience older than the Beatles generation, or systematically alienated people of that generation (the cloakroom attendants who gave up on them after “Strawberry Fields Forever” and instead settled for comfort, familiarity and Humperdinck).
Morgan’s record might by some parties be diplomatically described as “cheesy.” Johnny Arthey’s orchestration and the recorded-in-a-telephone-box-six-bathrooms-away production seem to date it instantly. The singer’s voice settles for an even keel rather than the worrying wanderings of McCartney.
However, he does sound as though he means it, this song he’s been given to sing – not that McCartney didn’t mean it (his final, grief-exhausted “yeah yeah yeah, yeah” might be the saddest moment of any Beatles record) but Morgan sings the song as though he’s singing for his life, even though he does so in a manner that suggests it is still 1950. His version fades rather than ends, as if he were caught in a loop as fatal as the Presley of “Suspicious Minds.”
(For an interesting early seventies parallel, listen to Mike Westbrook’s Solid Gold Cadillac’s 1973 rendition of Frankie Laine’s “I Believe,” still the longest-non-consecutively-running UK number one single – and a song already covered by Robson & Jerome [do you see where we’re going here?] – which might have been intended as a throwaway overgrown student prank, with George Khan’s electric sax throbs and Malcolm Griffiths’ downright insolent trombone solo. Even singer Phil Minton proffers a vaguely hammy talkover reading of the song’s second verse.
Yet, somewhere and somehow, Minton begins to believe – ha! – what the song is saying; you can hear it as his voice steadily rises higher and higher and there is no irony at all in how he finishes his performance. The joke? – it isn’t a joke.)
I have already spoken, on more than one occasion, about the soundalike hits albums which were allowed to preside in the album charts of the early seventies (that period again) and suggested that they represented a slightly distended variety of folk music insofar as their success proved that what mattered to most people was the song, its very existence, rather than who necessarily sang it or how it was sung.
These records possibly also cast the canonical certainty into which rock had already been shoehorned into question. As Dave Thompson says in his excellent extended diatribe I Hate Old Music, Too: How Familiarity & Overuse Killed Our Favorite Music, if critics’ Best Albums Of All Time polls tell people what they ought to like, the charts tend to represent the people’s response to that, which is: thanks, but we’d prefer to stick with those ones…after a while, the chart compilers sought to exclude those albums from their weekly lists, as though they were causing a malodorous embarrassment in the polite drawing room. Lowering the tone, those below-stairs orders.
This all takes me back to Mark, and his remark that the whole of what we call pop and/or rock, with its emphasis on ceaseless originality, invention and newness might simply represent “a cultural blip.” For as long as it has existed, music has de facto relied upon reproductions, or their fancier-named cousins “interpretations.” We hear a piece of music and our first instinct, if we find that we do not loathe it, is to copy it, feed it into what might clumsily be termed the societal mainstream (although “aorta” is, I think, a better means of putting it). The song sings something about us to the most intimate and hardwired segments of us, and we carry those songs, bear them subconsciously in our bodies like phantom limbs of narrative.
The other factor to consider as 1996 reaches its vaguely messy end is that many of popular music’s consumers had, at that stage, lived through everything that had happened. They were also by biological necessity getting older, and by then had maybe heard and seen enough. So they largely retreated to the elements they knew, which had stirred them long, long ago when they didn’t have to worry about anything life or the world might do with or to them – and in an important way it didn’t matter about who had been responsible for the stirring; it was the evanescent, semi-abstract breeze of the song, blowing through their complete (though not yet completed) histories, which proved to be enough in itself…
(q.v. that quote from Nick Tosches’ Dino: Living High In The Dirty Business Of Dreams: “The sum of Dino’s instincts had to do with the old ways, those ways that were like a wall, ways that kept the world lontano, as the mafiosi would say: distant, safely and wisely at bay. That was how he liked it: lontano, like the flickering images on the theater screen that gave him pleasure as he sat alone, apart from them and unknown to them, in the dark.”)
…the breeze which would keep them away from the young, who were more frightened of the old than vice versa, from the noisy frontloaded detritus of, oh what do they call it again, British Pop, I say…
There is an article in The Independent newspaper of 10 December 1995, co-written by a young reporter named Andy Beckett (with Nick Varley), in which “an elderly lady from Hackney named Irene” is spotted in an unspecified North London branch of Woolworth’s with her husband. They are engaging in a lively debate about whether or not to purchase the first Robson & Jerome album, on cassette. The husband is unconvinced but Irene insists they must get it because “it’s got ‘Unchained Melody’ on it.”
After a long and thoughtful pause, the husband, perhaps with a degree of reluctance, agrees that they can buy it. About 1,800,000 others thought and did likewise. On further questioning, Irene admits that “We don’t normally buy many tapes” – and there are, overall, very few people who do – but adds, “I just fancied that one. You can hear what they’re singing. What they have on Top Of The Pops is just rubbish – they’re just shouting.” Having buttoned up her green mackintosh, Irene beamingly concludes: “And I’ve got the originals of all these from the Sixties.”
Irene, as with so many fans of Robson & Jerome, was chasing a lontano, attempting to rediscover and recapture the breeze which had bewitched and entranced her a third of a lifetime before; “Unchained Melody, “White Cliffs Of Dover” and “I Believe” have a provenance which stretches some way before “the Sixties” but the timescale actually isn’t very relevant here – what matters is this utopia called “the Sixties” which serves as shorthand for younger and (so it is hoped) easier (to understand, if not to live through) times.
It is a central and utterly unavoidable fact of life that humans get older. It comes to us all, as David Peace had Bill Shankly say, and what matters is how we individually deal with it. Do we give up and shelter in the past, or try with intact dignity to keep pushing ahead? A time shelter (see Georgi Gospodinov) may prove a suffocating bunker which might, if unchecked, erase us all.
Or, as with the two main protagonists of David Nicholls’ One Day, we systematically “grow up” with remorseful, melancholic reluctance. It is difficult to sum up that novel without offering a digest of its plot, which is what Wikipedia and Google are for. Both principal characters are, I think, fundamentally unlovable, except perhaps by each other, and the contrivances which keep them linked throughout two decades, or indeed bring them together in the first place, are somewhat mechanical and unlikely.
In the Independent article I mentioned above, the adjective most used – and it repeats with the rhetorical resistance of a dagger – is “polite.” Robson & Jerome’s version of “Unchained Melody” is “polite,” as is their first album. Their function as popular entertainers is not to disturb or disrupt. Not to cause a fuss. Not to upset anybody.
The procedural in One Day seems to wind down – not up, as some readers, and possibly the author himself, would prefer us to believe – from the time of life when one cares loudly and persistently about things which matter (racism, sexism, the environment, indie pop) to one where such notions are grinningly (but keep an eye on their eyes) dismissed as childish, sublimated to and superseded by the business of conventional middle-aged, middle-class “life.” A conservatism (possibly capitalise that “c”) which accepts the status quo because it’s too tired to contemplate and act upon any alternative.
And yet, when the book comes most alive is, paradoxically, when bad things happen to its main characters. I will not offer any plot spoilers if you have not yet read One Day, but the account of what happens to Dexter Mayhew after the worst of all things happens to him is approximately concomitant with what happened to me in the last few months of 2001. And if, like me, you yawn pre-emptively at the prospect of a chapter entitled “Fathering,” Nicholls very cleverly subverts the expected norm of such situations and shows Mayhew utterly fucking up left, right and centre.
Still, just as the dreary and reactionary ending of Hornby’s High Fidelity does – again, let’s put away all that noisome puerile rot and absorb ourselves into the gleeful and unapologetically centrist mainstream – there is the notion that Art Garfunkel is always, always going to triumph over Solomon Burke. This isn’t necessarily the way things go – it’s about different timbres and emotional deployments – but it winds up meaning you make do and mend, go with the flow, settle for twelfth best.
And I have little doubt that, had the story of Emma and Dexter played out differently, they’d have ended up having the neighbours round for dinner, set up their karaoke machine and had a pleasant evening singing, or attempting to sing, the songs they know, as opposed to the songs they love (but won’t ever admit it; not at this stage of their lives – it’s far too impertinent). Content over ecstasy (then again, whom exactly am I kidding? It’s what we will all ultimately want. Trust me). Because doing or thinking anything else will drive both parties irrevocably and irreparably mad.
All of which leads me, inevitably, to the second Robson & Jerome album, another menu of impolite songs delivered and manufactured as politely as possible. It is as though Simon Cowell, in conjunction with producers and arrangers Mike Stock, Matt Aitken and Nigel Wright – a different SAW – had instructed everyone involved to ruthlessly extract every last atom of punctum from some of the greatest songs that have ever been written, aiming for cast-iron reassurance that the music will not offend the various Irenes, from Hackney and elsewhere, happier to recall Buddy Holly and the Everly Brothers than, say, Jimi Hendrix or Bob Dylan (one could never imagine Robson & Jerome being made to tackle “The Wind Cries Mary” or “Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?” “What Becomes Of The Broken Hearted,” yes, “Cloud Nine,” no).
The sales demographics seem to suggest that nobody under the age of forty-five was likely to have bought either Robson & Jerome album, except for housewives in their thirties who fancied them on (or off) the telly and serving soldiers (the duo proved to be really big in Army barracks up and down the land). The fact was that the median age for pop music consumption had steadily increased over the forty or so years of the “rock” era and that the proportion of that amount of consumption devoted to actual “rock” (or any of its outlier neighbours) had diminished almost exactly inversely.
And, because people get old, they naturally look back to the music of their youth, or the Selective Amnesia remix of it at any rate, with far greater fondness, and want that youth – at the very, very least, its spirit – reproduced. These were people who, like Irene, bought the original recordings of these songs (or, if not the originals, the Righteous Brothers’ cover versions) at the time and maybe just wanted to be reminded of them, to feel reassured in a world which they perceived to be rapidly disintegrating.
Because older people generally have more disposable income, they tend to be fussier about what they spend their money on – that may be a paradox, but if you were brought up in the post-war Britain of ration books and make-do-and-mend, that inner fear of nothingness never truly recedes – and what they usually desire or require is an airbrushed photograph of their past rather than a contemporary snapshot (hence, for instance, the multiple hoops through which retro chart shows on the radio have to jump in order to allow for changing tastes – what wowed thirtysomething housewives in 1968 is extremely unlikely to attract their modern equivalents) cancelled performers and so forth). Their past, with the awkward, odd and downright bad meticulously edited out by the sober scalpel of hindsight.
Robson & Jerome’s “What Becomes Of The Broken Hearted” is therefore what becomes of a great song after it has been put through the Fairy Snow wash (with added perborate, because Take Two is precisely the sort of album someone like Craig Douglas might have recorded in, say, 1971). As Bob Stanley has already pointed out elsewhere, one knows this version is doomed to fail from its very own introduction, which evens out the deliberately unsettling three-bar prelude to Jimmy Ruffin’s reading (so that you’re immediately and unexpectedly plunged into the Appian Way of misery) to four bars, for no good reason other than potential buyers might find three-bar introductions confusing (see also the stupid 1987 remix of the Temptations’ “Papa Was A Rolling Stone” with all its multi-rhythmic subtleties brutally replaced by thump-thump-thump prescription pacemaker beats, and don’t even get me started on the Was [Not Was] cover).
When Jimmy Ruffin sang the song, more or less as a Civil Rights metaphor, or even when Colin Blunstone, with the other Dave Stewart, rendered it as an allegory for Thatcher’s denuded Britain, it felt like a profound soliloquy, complete with a Hamlet-style turnaround in its closing moments (the Ruffin version, anyway; the Blunstone/Stewart reading leads to an inconclusive question-mark of a fadeout), Robson & Jerome perform it dutifully, as though ticking off items on a Somerfield’s grocery shopping list, with no audible evidence of hurt or desertion. Even the video for the song, which enacts what might have been an alternate ending for One Day – no one is innocent – cuts more deeply than the record itself. Even when the San Fernando Valley Community Gospel Choir are roped into the proceedings to provide suitable soulful, passionate and honest back-up, they cannot dispel the record’s underlying nullity, which is not helped by an asinine closing key change, a repeated chant (“NOW DEPARTED! NOW DE-PAR-TED!!”) and a pointless final major key shift.
The duo proceeds to work its way through pop music as, presumably, Cowell wanted their audience to remember it. Actually I have just thought of an intriguing alternate-universe parallel for Simon Cowell, especially given that the first record he bought was apparently “Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep” – both men born either side of the beginning of “the Sixties” (1959 and 1961 respectively), both attracted to a warped but curiously correct notion of the priceless disposability of what might seem to be the crassest pop music, both pursuing their very singular individual visions of pop, both in their differing ways deliberately veering away from, or perhaps (respectively) above and below the mainstream. Even on stations like Boom Radio, you never hear any of what can be termed “Cowell Pop”; Pete Waterman has marvelled at the fact that Cowell succeeded in creating his own category of pop music which really had nothing to do with pop music as most people felt and remembered it.
It is equally valid to say that you never hear any of what I might term “Lawrence Pop” anywhere either but it is interesting to come to that fork in the road and imagine Cowell taking one path and Lawrence taking another. Go-Kart Mozart is as happily removed from the primary flow of things as Gareth Gates*. I tend to think that both men would have been happier if they’d been about ten years older and ready and available to prosper in that Neil Reid and Handley Family world of the early seventies.
(*Obviously this writer finds himself on the Lawrence side of the fence, having followed his music since the first Felt single “Index” when the fifteen-year-old me thought to myself “I could have done that.” Will Hodgkinson’s book about the man, Street-Level Superstar: A Year With Lawrence – a literal labour of love – is a recommended, if frequently gloomy, read. Think of the man as Derek Bailey’s gauche spiritual nephew but arrive at your own conclusions with regard to much of his behaviour.)
How a Take Two administered by Lawrence would have sounded is anyone’s guess, but it would have been infinitely more interesting if markedly less profitable than the Take Two which actually exists. This “Something’s Gotten Hold Of My Heart” positively eviscerates the remotest hint of wonder or blood which Pitney, Cave and Almond variously donated to the song. It isn’t even on the Darren Burn level of commitment. Robson & Jerome recite the song as schoolchildren might do in a Music Appreciation class; the notes are all present, but the soul is a blank. It sounds like A.I. pop.
The cull of politesse goes on. “Elenore” is stripped of irony. “Saturday Night At The Movies,” never the best of songs to begin with (look, I saw the Dechmont House Show in the late spring of 1977*, I know what I’m talking about!), is traduced further to spineless slapstick and a ‘phoned-in trumpet solo.
(*Annoyingly obscure reference to Uddingston Grammar School “House Shows,” revues of songs in costume which were organised annually when I was a pupil there in the mid-to-late seventies. We were all divided into five “Houses,” each named after different rivers, or more accurately Clyde tributaries, which flowed in and around Uddingston – Calder, Clyde, Kelvin, Dechmont and Douglas. The “Houses” were arranged alphabetically by surname, hence I was in Calder House [for pupils with surnames from A to C). Since participation in those “House Shows” was not mandatory, I never contributed to any of them. I don’t regret not doing so.])
While the duo’s attempt at “Bring It On Home To Me” is vocally and emotionally woeful, the song’s orchestral arrangement – presumably done by Nigel Wright – is surprisingly inventive and strikes when strings suddenly swoop up mid-song like a newly-awakened bat and drag the track into a different dimension. Much as David Whitfield did with Mantovani’s orchestra, unfortunately, the voices do not follow the arrangement’s implications at all.
That is a rare example of inventiveness intruding into the record. I do not see the point of this “You’ll Never Walk Alone” with its bargain basement synthesiser presets, which neither pauses nor crescendos and provides no useful reassurance at all, simply a faded memory of something that might once have meant something. Which brings me to another comparative observation…
Take Two is literally nothing more (or less) than what it says it is and what it is meant to be. The record does not offer interpretations of songs, other than their systemic neutralisation. It does not re-examine songs in ways that give you clues to the singers’ own lives and experiences.
In short, and particularly in view of the fact that both records offer versions of “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” Take Two is not Kevin Rowland’s My Beauty (which appeared less than three years later) which latter, much like the B.E.F.’s Music Of Quality And Distinction Volume One, seems to want to render popular music as unpopular and avant-garde as possible. Rowland takes sick-of-hearing-them standards from “The Greatest Love Of All” to “Rag Doll” and turns them inside out to provide a motor for telling the story of how he as a human being related to and was altered by these songs. By the climax of his “I Can’t Tell The Bottom From The Top,” a nearly-forgotten Hollies hit from 1970, he sounds ready to shoot himself. Yet he manages to pull himself out of the morass, or more importantly allows someone else to help out with the pulling, which is precisely why the record should never have lost “Thunder Road,” in which Rowland makes his escape from Hell*.
(*I should at this stage overturn the standard line that Bruce Springsteen’s people, or possibly Springsteen himself, said no to Rowland changing the lyrics to “Thunder Road.” What seems far likelier to have happened is that Rowland’s label boss at Creation, who at that stage was still Alan McGee, on account of being Alan McGee, simply put the letter to Springsteen’s people asking permission to change the words in a desk drawer somewhere and forgot to send it. Hence Bruce never actually knew about Rowland’s cover, let alone had heard it, and it was not until many years, and possibly decades, later that he finally got to listen to it and said, that’s fine, go ahead. So the complete My Beauty with “Thunder Road” restored to its rightful place finally appeared in 2020.)
Coming out of “Thunder Road,” we find a fine performance of the Marmalade song (and, for many, an actual “anthem”) “Reflections Of My Life,” where Rowland seems as keen as the Spice Girls did in “Take Me Home” to go back to what matters – a performance so good that it was praised fulsomely on YouTube by Junior Campbell, the man who wrote the song. In this context his “You’ll Never Walk Alone” acts as catharsis; that song you’ve heard and maybe even sung millions of times which suddenly, as the last millennium drew to a fretful close, was heard to matter again and viewed as a beacon – a way out.
My Beauty was an important album to me in 1999, a point where my life seemed to be collapsing into confused pieces and I…but those thoughts are not for here (far too raw). I was driving into a metaphorical brick wall at around 500 miles per hour and this record stopped me, persuaded me to look at things and perspectives anew and realise…you know, there are ways to dig yourself out of this tunnel – just keep digging (see also “Hunger Games” by Bob Vylan). And I have managed to talk about the album without once mentioning its cover.
If Robson & Jerome had attempted such a cover for Take Two they most likely would have been run out of the country, never mind town. In an anti-culture of loaded laddism, My Beauty didn’t really stand a chance (although, again pace the standard story, it actually did somewhat better commercially than was indicated at the time).
But Cowell would never have dared to allow them to try that, nor do I think that they would have tried it anyway (it would not be in their character). An avant-garde Robson & Jerome is a contradiction in terms (you cannot picture them tackling “The Electrician”). Therefore we get a largely de-sexed “Oh Pretty Woman” – the “mercy!” remains intact to tickle the housewives but Orbison’s leonine growl after verse two doesn’t – with absolutely no indication that the singers’ emotions have been upended by the woman walking back to him; shock and awe being presumably deemed too unseemly. It’s just a moderately pleasant song about a woman who’s pretty. Perhaps Irene from Hackney never viewed it as anything more than that.
Simon and Garfunkel’s “Keep The Customer Satisfied” – then already more than a quarter of a century old – is the most modern this record dares to venture and sounds like a Hot Hits Number Whatever cover. Worse is the video for the song which unsuccessfully attempts to convince us that everybody in the club is raving and going mad over two awkwardly closely-positioned men in fifties suits, standing at close right angles to each other as though marooned in the middle of a non-existent packed train and as if rock ‘n’ roll had never actually happened (as I suspect, deep down, Cowell fervently wishes that it hadn’t). Not even in Jack Good’s direst dreams could such a scenario have come to pass. In its way, the video is as much of a misfire as Streisand’s lounge-act-at-rock-festival routine in A Star Is Born (and if you can amass the strength to read through the endless, unedited and possibly uneditable My Name Is Barbra, you’ll see that Streisand and her people charged an actual fee for admission to this performance; you may not be surprised to learn that she ended up being booed offstage. Laura Nyro she was, and is, most assuredly not).
Take Two’s take on the Everlys’ “The Price Of Love” seems to take after Bryan Ferry’s 1976 cover, mariachi trumpet intro inclusive, but the Beat Boom purposiveness of the original is disengaged. The album’s natural end comes with “Silent Night” – since it was almost Christmas; let’s all hold hands solemnly around the tree – but the unanticipated power of its predecessor’s “Danny Boy” is absent and its muted ending (most if not all things about this album are muted) putters out like a prematurely-exhausted fuel tank. Even Bros managed to interpret the song better.
As I said, that would seem to indicate the end of this album, but there are four “bonus” tracks still to come. One of those, the “Gospel Version” of “What Becomes Of The Broken Hearted,” is a reprise of track one but minus the rhythm track. Sheer value – I marvel that Cowell didn’t think of putting together a Robson & Jerome Stack-o-Tracks album of instrumental backings (“for EVERYONE IN THE FAMILY to SING ALONG to!”).
The other three take Take Two into strange, and not necessarily, intriguing territory, namely that of pre-rock big bands. Of Robson & Jerome’s variation on Fats Waller’s “Ain’t Misbehavin’” – a song that, despite its surface jollity, is actually about a deeply lonely and possibly disturbed man imagining that a lover will eventually materialise in his life, although he seems to be going out of his way to avoid such a thing ever happening in reality – there is little to be said (it shouldn’t be sung as a duet, for a start); they opt for mannered coarseness.
Their “Nightingale Sang,” which one of them (Robson?) sings in a manner very akin to Paul Heaton, does not work as an uptempo big band “romp,” and is anyway derailed by a final, pointless and mood-shattering “I know ‘cos I was there!” What are you (Jerome?), James Murphy? These utterly stock-standard big band arrangements are, it has to be admitted, for many people the main stumbling block they have with RAYE’s “Genesis.”, emerging from the lurid darkness of Part II to the chugging light of Part III. Some feel that section spurious, disappointingly conventional and unconvincing. But I don’t know that a throw-it-all-up-under-endless-crisscrossing-lines Mike Westbrook approach would have done anything other than obscure RAYE’s message – and, crucially, one has to watch the song’s video, with the very young schoolchildren inventing their own dances anyway and THEREBY MAKING THE PERCEIVED CLICHÉS WORK ONCE MORE.
Not that Take Two is concerned about bringing in light, in its wider meaning. Apart from my patience, it isn’t there to challenge. At least not until we reach its fifteenth and final track, and the record’s real wild card, “The Kiss Polka,” a foxtrot recorded by the Glenn Miller Orchestra for the movie Sun Valley Serenade in August 1941 (on its original 78 rpm release, it was the B-side of “It Happened In Sun Valley”). On Miller’s lively and ebullient original, Paula Kelly, Ernie Caceras and the Modernaires all pitch in with their vocals. Whereas Robson (I think?) simply proves how inept he is at singing jazz, even in its simplified swing form. When Caceras switches into Mexican Spanish, he sounds affectionate and enthusiastic, but Green simply hams it up and aurally resembles a bad seventies television impressionist, with smacking-lips sound-effects which are really beneath contempt.
That is, if what or whom we are hearing really is, or was, Robson & Jerome. In his authorised autobiography from 2003, I Don’t Mean To Be Rude, But…, Simon Cowell was less than complimentary about the duo, and the feeling appeared to be mutual. More seriously, allegations were made about whether the two actors actually sang on any of their records. If you listen carefully to Take Two and think you’ve heard one of those voices before somewhere, then you wouldn’t necessarily be wrong, since one of the three session singers drafted in to “help” the pair was Des Dyer, formerly of the band Jigsaw (“Sky High” etc.).
In fact, Dyer approached a newspaper with his allegations at the time, and although Mike Stock managed to obtain a court injunction in order to prevent Dyer from telling his story, he did eventually (in 2008) admit that session singers had been involved; Dyer as a surrogate Jerome and two others (as yet unnamed) to cover for Robson in general and also Robson’s high notes. The head of the duo’s record label BMG, one John Preston, also decided to pay £75,000 to Dyer – at Simon Cowell’s direct request – and deducted the differential from Stock’s producing royalties.
Nevertheless Stock remained adamant
that the actual Robson & Jerome did sing on their own records, that
this wasn’t another Milli Vanilli. Yet there is a curiously logical point to all of this - and it's commoner in popular music than you might think - in that it didn't really matter who was actually doing the singing on Robson & Jerome's records; it was the "brand" of Robson & Jerome that mattered, the symbolism of the two providing the "front" to the concept (theirs should not be termed an "act"). They stood there to be seen and were the effective "voices" of the entire project - and, for most of the 1,200,000 people who purchased and presumably adored Take Two (the returns were down somewhat from the record's predecessor but remained outstanding), their palpable presence was enough, in just the same way that hardly any of the Byrds appear on "Mr Tambourine Man" or the hits of Love Affair were largely performed by studio session musicians, or Bobby Farrell was really Frank Farian on all of those Boney M hits you pretended not to like in 1978.
It didn't matter; the appearances were sufficient, since the human species has always judged its fellow humans with its eyes in the first instance. As was the existence of The Song, regardless of who sang it or how it was interpreted and produced, because - and this maybe should have appealed to the stalwart socialists that Robson & Jerome, not so deep down, were and are (even at the time, they made no secret of their political affiliations; Robson Green decried Tony Blair as a shallow fake, Jerome Flynn donated at least £27,000 of the duo's royalties to Greenpeace) - what their music reminded people of was the semi-derelict, on-the-verge-of-being-abandoned notion of communality; a mutually dependent world in which people relied on each other to get everything done, shared the same joys, woes and...songs.
One suspects that Simon Cowell has never voted in an election in his life; he always seems as though he has more urgent and pressing business to which he must attend. But what he inadvertently allowed into the front room of Britain with Robson & Jerome was perhaps the last stand of "the People's Music" - just as the offspring of Robson & Jerome fans discovered that communality in the early work of Oasis, so did their parents make one final, valiant attempt to pull together and unite. Does anyone still care for the music nearly three decades later, other than perhaps those who remember it from their childhood?
Because, as I said earlier, that's the odd thing about Cowell pop; you simply do not hear it being played or praised anywhere today. Was it a mirage that never actually mutated into solid matter? Or was the underlying aim, perhaps unknown even to its chief perpetrator, to try to prevent society from falling apart? In his series of Bluesky posts which I mentioned at the beginning of this piece, Mark goes on to mention that just as the post-war rationing consensus began to come apart - the way it does in bad films - the war children simply picked up their parents' washboards and tea chests and proceeded towards skiffle. A new communality unknown to anybody older than the people for whom it was meant. It has never actually...departed.
"Many songs were suppressed during those bleak years, but André Midani, who continued to oversee many of the era's best recordings, has insisted that repression provided Brazilian music with the healthy stimulation of an enemy. A common sentiment expressed in seventies lyrics was 'one day...'; what the singers were waiting for remained unsung, but listeners understood."
(Joe Boyd, And The Roots Of Rhythm Remain: A Journey Through Global Music. London: Faber & Faber Limited, 2024; chapter 7, "Chega de saudade")
Envoi
Simon Cowell offered Robson & Jerome £3 million to record a third album but they declined his offer and returned to acting and "extreme" fishing. For Robson Green, the decisive break came while he was watching an episode of BBC1's Animal Hospital, where a woman came into the practice with two guinea pigs named...Robson and Jerome. "What seems to be the problem?" asked the vet. "It's Robson," the woman replied, "he's not right." Green knew bad karma when he saw it and called a halt to the exercise.
Not long afterwards, on 1 May 1997, the Conservative government of John Major was voted out in favour of the Labour government of Tony Blair, who gained a majority of 179 Parliamentary seats. A compilation album, Happy Days: The Best Of Robson & Jerome, was released in November of the same year. It peaked at number twenty and sold about 100,000 copies.
Though marketed as symbols of Britain at war, Robson Green and Jerome Flynn are actually pacifists.
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