1992 Jimmy Nail: Ain't No Doubt

From Vic Reeves' comedian turned singer to an actor turned singer - Nail is best known to the UK as Geordie brickie 'Oz' in TV's 'Auf Wiedersehen Pet'. Best known to me anyway and to the extent that in 1992 I found it next to impossible to separate the two - as far as I was concerned, it was Oz up there singing this in the same way as it was Bart singing 'Do The Bartman'. Which meant I couldn't take it seriously. Unfair maybe, but it wasn't my fault that Nail had typecast himself to such an extent, and anyway time the leveller has since done much to put enough distance between the two for me to tackle 'Ain't No Doubt' on its own merits.

You can tell an actor is behind all this - Nail opens with a spoken moan about a woman giving him the runaround ("She says 'it's not you - it's me. I need a little time, a little space. A place to find myself again, you know?"), but when she tries to re-assure him with an "I don't want nobody else, I love you", Nail can only respond with a stage whisper "she's lying" aside to the listener before setting out his main beef on the chorus: "Ain't no doubt, it' plain to see, a woman like you's no good for me". Questions as to why he just doesn't dump the brazen hussy aside, there's a pleasingly neat roundness to the song's narrative structure but it's execution ties its laces together so that it falls flat as soon as it tries to run.

And that's because 'Ain't No Doubt' aims for the soulful satisfaction of other sung/spoken tales of lost love like (for example) The Chi-Lites' 'Have You Seen Her?' Which is a lofty enough aspiration to be sure, but 'Ain't No Doubt' instead sounds as provincially low rent as the horrid sung/spoken tale of lost love that was Driver 67's 'Car 67'. Nail can carry a tune, but he carries it in a mouth that clogs fall out of whenever it's open, and to compound the gulf between aspiration and reality,the music has a tinribs thin eighties production of a Level 42 B side coming down a telephone line. Which is all a bit of a shame really because there's potential here, the raw material to fashion something of a gem. Shame then its been wasted by mounting it on a plastic locket hung on a toilet chain.