1992 Wet Wet Wet: Goodnight Girl

'Goodnight Girl' is often set up as a calculated attempt by the band to develop a more mature sound from their poppier eighties work and tap into an older market. I'm not so sure about that myself - lead Wet Marti Pellow may have drawn a line in the sand by growing a Bono mullet, but the band's young following always seemed to have sought them out rather than vice versa via any blatantly pop output. But the observation is a useful one for my ends here because whilst there is an effective 'grown up' ballad trying to break free in 'Goodnight Girl', it's never allowed to.

And that's because like an over-concerned parent clucking around their offspring on their first day at work, 'Goodnight Girl's overly fussy arrangements smother it in a gloop of strings, a harshly struck, migraine inducing piano and some multitracked 'ahhhhhh's that sew in the nametag marked 'cheese' that dogged much of the band's output. And the weightiest albatross is Pellow and his vocal - despite possessing a perfectly serviceable white soul voice, he wraps his tongue around 'Goodnight Girl's lyric like an oversized gobstopper, force lolling it into Dairylea before it oozing it out through his ever fixed grin. No, 'Goodnight Girl' is too restless, too overstated and too busy to be the heartfelt ballad it craves to be; it meanders and races like water on glass when at heart all it really wants to do is pull up a chair to chat. It's mores the pity that nobody lets it.