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John Peel once mentioned how he didn't have much time for any song with the words 'rock and roll' in the title. I have a similar aversion, though with me it's 'Babe' (unless it's being used to describe someone under three years of age). Thankfully, there haven't been that many; Styx made my skin crawl in 1980 with theirs and now Take That have a bash at changing my mind with their own story in song; a guy (this time with Mark Owen singing lead) is once again pining for a wayward female who still has his heart in a jar, though this time at journey's end he finds she has a readymade family for him in the shape of his bastard son.
Yes it's all so much sentimental mawk, but I've no doubt this twist goes all out to engender a warm, feelgood glow in the heart to leave us on an 'up'. Only it doesn't. Not in my heart anyway - there's some curiously old fashioned mores and a sexist feel to 'Babe' that repulses. Its gift wrapped veil of solemnity and hushed reverence setting aims to drape Owen's homecoming in the quasi-religious aura of the return of the prodigal when, truth be told, he's been a bit of a self centred twat. That his delivery of "Babe I'm here again, I tell you I'm here again. Where have you been?" rings with a cardboard passion of urgency with all the presence of a hologram does not help build a bridge to me either.
But insincerity aside, it's the brevity of the song that insults most, both in its basic storytelling and also what that story isn't telling us - Owen and his cheeky grin arriving on the doorstep is held up as plenty enough to make any babe's day, but where has he been all this time? Who left who and why did they lose touch? Why is he suddenly interested again and why does he assume she feels the same way? Why didn't he know about his child - did she choose not to tell him? So many blanks and so many questions. Yet whilst I don't generally feel the need to analyse the lyrics of a pop song any more than I feel the need to question why Jack and Jill went up that hill with a pail instead of digging an irrigation channel to bring the water to them, as Gary Barlow and his five Ivor Novello's are frequently held as an example of a latter day songwriting genius then I feel duty bound to investigate any evidence available to substantiate the claim.
And when weighed in that particular balance it's found wanting - 'Babe' shows the sheer cack-handedness of Barlow's 'craft', the sound of a meagre talent patronising its fanbase by spreading itself thinly over the flimsiest white bread the Poundshop has to offer. For a teen heartthrob pandering to his demograph, Barlow's continuous inablity to project anything from the female point of view with any believeability is glaring.* The world of 'Babe' is a male oriented domain where the sins of the past and past fathers can be wiped clean with a simple "Got so much to tell you about where I have been" promise mixed in with a few coos of "babe" that infantilise this single mother and her whole gender into emotional submission of acceptance. And its done with the crudeness of a mallet blow courtesy of a set of lyrics that clunk heavier than a bag of spanners thrown one by one down a metal spiral staircase ("I come to your door to see you again, but where you once stood was an old man instead. I asked where you'd be, he said "she's moved, on you see, all I have is a number you'd better ask her not me").
For my own part, listening to 'Babe' is to look at an extreme anaglyph 3D image without the cyan/red glasses; all I see a jumbled mess, and the harder I stare, the more it hurts (though I expect the 'glasses' required to make sense of this come with their own distinct chromosome - hey, if Gazza can be sexist then so can I). The best I can say is that 'Babe' plays out like a Mills and Boon potboiler with every other page torn out, including the last one, though I'd like to think this 'babe' had the good sense to slam the door in Owen's face so hard it left teeth marks.
* But they say the same about Joseph Conrad too, and nobody is calling him a hack.
Fronted by Noel Edmonds, the dark prince of lowbrow light entertainment, 'Noel's House Party' was an insanely popular Saturday evening show in the UK for much of the nineties. Set in a factious stately home where anarchic japery ruled supreme, it was presided over by a smug Edmonds who, although ostensibly game for a laugh, always looked like he couldn't believe so many people were buying into his puddle shallow crap but nevertheless was rather pleased that they were. A recurring character was 'Mr Blobby', a creation at once as basic and unlikeable as is humanly possible (somebody in a very cheap looking pink with yellow spots suit and the boggle eyed, fixed grin of a simpleton psychopath whose just seen his latest victim), Blobby was a slapstick cartoon figure who would appear at random just to fall over to roars of laughter from the studio audience in the sort of scenario that the highbrow yet equally smug Clive James used to drag out to poke fun at/be all superior about what weird TV Johnny Foreigner watched.
Blobby's sole means of communication was to say 'blobby blobby blobby' over and over, a trait that hardly makes for a likely candidate to front a pop single, which I guess goes some way to explain why 'Mr Blobby' was and remains such a gruelling experience. Over the course of its three and a half minutes it presents a target for hatred bigger than just the barn door, but for me it's the whole lack of effort that grates the most, the absence of any ambition other than to churn out a Christmas single as humourless and unlikeable as the character himself. "Blobby, oh Mr Blobby, when disaster strikes you never get depressed" sing a battery of kids over a tune that does the bare minimum to actually qualify as being a 'tune' while Blobby himself does whatever bits of blobby business he can in the background. Not good pop, not even good cheese, 'Mr Blobby' is as cold and cynical an example of an opportunistically money making single as you're ever likely to hear.
In Fassbinder's 'Lili Marleen', Giancarlo Giannini's 'Robert' is imprisoned by the Gestapo and locked in a room, tortured to insanity by having to listen to 'Lili Marleen' being played on a broken record for 24 hours a day. I have some sympathy; in 1993 I was living on the top floor of a three storey house and for around three months solid the guy in the room immediately below took it upon himself to play (the then newly released) 'I'd Do Anything for Love (But I Won't Do That)' over and over and over again. And again.
To be fair, he wasn't doing it just to annoy me - he genuinely liked the song that much. But make no mistake, we're not talking about the already lengthy single version here; this was the full length, twelve plus minutes of the album version. Needless to say it got very old very quickly to the point I used to joke that I knew what Meat Loaf wouldn't do for love even more than he did. Better by far to joke than to go down, kick his door in and grab him by the throat anyway. Which is what I dearly wanted to do. Happy days.
That parent album he was playing, of course, was Meat Loaf's 'Bat Out Of Hell 2 - Back Into Hell'. Not many albums get their own sequel, but this one was kind of inevitable. The only surprise is that it took so long. Meat Loaf and 'Bat Out Of Hell' are so intertwined as to be the double helix of their own DNA strand, each being so closely identified with the other that it's pointless to try and separate them. Everything that Meat Loaf did post that album was always game for "it's not as good as 'Bat Out Of Hell'" comparisons or "it sounds a lot like 'Bat Out Of Hell'" criticisms. Often it could justifiably be accused of both, and on that score 'I'd Do Anything for Love (But I Won't Do That)' is a good enough example.
Because this does sound like 'Bat Out Of Hell'. Not overtly maybe, but from the opening motorbike revving and Roy Bittan's busy finger piano intro there are enough nudges and winks to the earlier song to brook no illusion as to exactly what territory we're in here. There are comparators in its scope too - the original 'Bat Out Of Hell' ran for a shade under ten minutes whilst this (as I learned the hard way) runs to twelve in its full length form. Even on the single it's pushing six, yet while the original 'Bat' flowed like a standard rock track stretched in it's propounding of the virtues of a one night stand, 'I'd Do Anything' is far less varied in its grand statement of eternal love.
Lacking an anthemic chorus and Todd Rundgren's guitar hero soling it lurches between in its main musical themes like the centrepiece of a new Lloyd Webber musical - i.e. with all the grace of a three legged dog. Steinman's lyric pays predictable homage to the holy 'sex and drugs and rock & roll' trinity (yes, that phrase/cliché appears in the song) in a Springsteen crossed with Wagner posture of macho chest beating as Meat Loaf boasts how he'd run "to hell and back" for the chance of a snog. For five whole minutes.
But at about the point where I start looking at my watch, Cher soundalike (via Newcastle Upon Tyne) Lorraine Crosby initiates a dialogue of equally bombastic, labours of Hercules desires and needs that border on the ludicrous ("Can you colorise my life I'm so sick of black and white?", "Will you hose me down with holy water if I get too hot?") but which Meat Loaf is unquestioningly happy to go along with ("I can do that!"). But then in a breathtaking act of table turning rug pulling, Crosby reveals she was taking the piss all along and that she's got the measure of the man and his promises of the earth and proceeds to burst his balloon with "I know the territory - I've been around, It'll all turn to dust and we'll all fall down, and sooner or later you'll be screwing around" that cuts him and the entire preceding song off at the knees with a reality check. His only response is "I won't do that" in a little boy voice that combines both shock at being found out and guilt in the realisation that she's probably right. You can almost sense his cock wilting in his pants.
It's a marvellous piece of street theatre, a moment of emotional realism that a Lou Reed couldn't have bettered and it's what the whole song has been building to - a self built mythology of love on a mountaintop rock and roll dreams that's pierced and brought crashing down to earth by a woman who's heard it all before and knows better than to buy into it. The idealism and imager of all this rock and roll romance has the curtain pulled away from it to show that it's all just another case of boys with their toys and it leaves 'I'd Do Anything' to close on a surprisingly downbeat note and one that negates virtually everything Meat Loaf and the genre was supposed to stand for.
After all, in the macho world of rock the men are meant to get the hot chicks, not have their balls cut off and the 'I don't listen to Meat Loaf for THIS' angle leaves me feeling as cheated as watching a Tom and Jerry cartoon where the balloon that floats an anvil onto Tom's head does in fact end up killing him. But it's the trick that switches the ridiculous to the sublime to save the song from itself; until that point 'I'd Do Anything' was going nowhere that I'd want to follow and it's appearance is the grain of sand in the oyster that, if not quite creating a pearl (it's still too long and dull for that - Jim Steinman seems contractually obligated never to write anything less that four minutes long even when the song doesn't need it), does at least raise it above the dreary yawn of soft rock balladry it would have found itself inhabiting.
We've already met Take That once so far this year, and as we're going to be meeting them a fair few times over the coming years I think this is an opportune moment to come clean and say up front that I don't have a lot of time for them. The reasons why will be explained within the individual entries, but for now I can say that, on an irrationally personal and wholly unfair (on the band anyway) I've never been keen because they were the band that made me realise that, no matter how hard I pretend otherwise, I'm not as young as I used to be. None of us are I suppose, but Take That were the first contemporary pop phenomenon that absolutely passed me by.
The Bay City Rollers, Duran Duran, Bros, New Kids On The Block et al - I was never a huge fan of any of these either, but I was always aware enough of their existence and the music they made to be able to form that opinion. During the course of the nineties, I was always aware that Take That were there or thereabouts too, but nothing about them caught my ear to push me to form an opinion either way; every 'new' Take That single sounded pretty much like the previous Take That single and with no desire to disentangle the blur the feeling old and in the way me was content to just let the kids have their fun.
Writing now in 2011, I'm aware that the band have now reformed and are enjoying no small degree of success second time round, and yet my interest gauge remains static. Their 'comeback' single made it sound like they'd never been away and it got me to thinking whether my nineties indifference wasn't so much rooted in being too old and wise to appreciate them (after all, I had some very definite opinions about the Spice Girls who came later), but whether it was Take That's fault all along for not giving me something to care about. Because listening to 'Relight My Fire' tonight, I think the latter is more prescient.
Again, I was fully aware of 'Relight My Fire' in 1993, but my awareness was really limited to two factors. Firstly, I already had a certain familiarity with it via the Dan Hatrman original and secondly, as far as Take That's version went, it was always Lulu's contribution that stood out. Listening afresh this evening, little has changed - Take That's 'Relight My Fire' sounds like Hartman smothered by a pillow. To play them back to back is to contrast Hartman's leap-into-your-face-on-a-spring-of-disco-funk version to Take That's arm's length, flat and staid interpretation that relies heavily on the tune alone to carry it. Lulu's appearance is the rescuing cavalry and she comes as a literal breath of fresh air.
Raw and exciting, Lulu's vocal is more raucous even than Loletta Holloway was on the original; whereas Holloway sounded like she belonged, like she was always invited to the party and knew how to have a good time when she was there, Lulu bursts in like she's come round from next door with a bottle of vodka on a mission to get a dull party kick-started. That she doesn't isn't entirely her fault, it was an uphill task all the way - there's no fun in this 'Relight My Fire', no enjoyment in its predictability and no personality in its anonymity. Nothing, in short, to engage with on any level other than to swoon over the lads on the sleeve. Which probably explains why it all passed (and continues to pass) me by; there's simply nothing here to notice save a slick professionalism that knows its market and goes for its throat. And while I'm not criticising that per se, if there's no heart in the grooves then it may as well be marketed as a blank disc to let the listener fill in the gaps themselves. While looking at the cover, obviously.
...or what Will Smith did before he became a Hollywood A lister. I can't say I have any knowledge of 'The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air' TV show that brought him screen fame (or indeed much affection for any of the films he's starred in subsequently), but I've always had a soft spot for Smith's early rap output. 'Boom! Shake The Room' owns the softest spot, not least because it reminds me of student days where the local club DJ would always play it back to back with House Of Pain's 'Jump Around', a paring both apt and not so; House Of Pain are feted as serious rappers but DJ Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince....less so. Maybe there's a clue why in the videos for both these songs - Smith hams it up to an audience of white kids in a way that stands in stark contrast to the more aggressive, black oriented 'Jump Around'. And yet play them back to back and there's very little to choose between them; Smith's rhymes aren't great (and the usual rapper self promotion rings a little winsome in this PG rated, cuss free setting), but there's no doubt he's more than a capable rapper with the "ya really done want me to tig-a-tig-a-tig-a tell ya wassup" a particular delight. 'Boom! Shake The Room' is the family friendly face of hip hop, a bouncy castle of a single that, if it lacks the street credible grit of the genre also manages to avoid the stigma of novelty. Best of both worlds really.
More Eurodance, but this is definitely one of its lesser offerings - there's a lazy, cash in feel to 'Mr Vain' that reminds me of one of those bootleg t shirts hawked outside concert venues. Cheap, but not all that cheerful, 'Mr Vain' takes and applies the genre elements with the economy of Occam's razor, but the flabby oompah beat dances on treacle and Jay Supreme's bull bellow rapping makes Turbo B sound like Nas back on those Snap! tracks. Brit vocalist Tania Evans does her best, but the unimaginative and uninspiring 'Mr Vain' barely gives her lemons to work with; it might pass muster when slotted into the middle of a dance mix, but shorn of its mates to prop it up it just falls flat on its face. It's also with a heavy heart I can report that this was the first single since the early 1950's not to be released on seven inch vinyl and so heralds the beginning of the end of a medium I hold so dear. Ah well.
It's a common enough scenario; an individual commits suicide and former friends/colleagues rally round to express their shock and surprise in a 'we never had any idea' kind of way. Every action or utterance of the deceased is then recalled and analysed for clues as to why they did what they did in a self flagellating search for a covert or coded cry for help that was missed. Of course, Freddy Mercury didn't commit suicide, but the aftermath of his death produced a similar reaction amongst fans and non fans alike and Queen's latter day output was re-cast in the new light shone by the knowledge that Mercury knew he was dying when he recorded them.
So taken on one level then it's easy to read a degree of poignancy into 'Living On My Own' by ignoring the layer of camp to reveal the man beneath pretending everything is ok when it wasn't. It's not quite as simple as that though - originally released in 1985 on Mercury's Mr Bad Guy' solo album, 'Living On My Own' isn't particularly 'latter day' product and it pre-dates Mercury's HIV diagnosis by two years. Even so, the "Sometimes I feel I'm gonna break down and cry, so lonely" doesn't suggest a man at ease with himself either, though the sadness is masked by the tinny eighties disco bounce of the original that lets him sashay all over the top of it with a pantomime drama in typical Mercury style that, with the recurring "Dee do de de, dee do de de - I don't have no time for no monkey business" nobody could ever take too seriously. Certainly not as a cry for help.*
This 1993 model comes spruced up courtesy of a No More Brothers mix that bolsters its flimsiness with a chunky 'Radio Ga Ga' shimmer and backbone that's the equal of Mercury's vocal. It gives it something to bounce off in any case, making it sound like a genuine new Queen single instead of the re-jigging of an eight year old song. And of course, Mercury's death the previous year gives it a context as fresh as the remix which, I must confess, the cynic in me regards as the result of EMI's marketing department scenting financial blood bleeding from an opportune moment. The non cynic however can recognise that the remix is a strong one, and with Mercury on such fine theatrical form then it seems churlish to snipe at what is in fact fitting closure to mark the end of a remarkable career. There would be no more releases in his name.
* You can also read it as Mercury's personal re-write of 'The Great Pretender', a song he covered in 1987 and which itself was re-released in 1993. And taken along with 'Living On My Own', it does in hindsight more than suggest he was trying to tell us something after all.....
When doing a write up a couple of entries ago, I started setting out an opinion that the number ones were starting to look like a police identity line-up - that is, different, but with enough of a family resemblance to make you have to look twice to be able to tell them apart. Don't look for this; after a quick scan of the songs to come I decided to hold it back specifically because there seemed a more appropriate place to wheel it out. Here.
The nineties for me always had the air of being dominated by certain flavour of the month/year acts who had their day in the sun before being replaced by something else. Nothing new there, it was always thus, but this decade more than others seemed to have more than their fair share of dominant boy band/girl solo singers or a dominant girl band/male solo singers who seemed to either garner a lot of critical acclaim or else they garnered none at all and with a popularity that was either short lived or else had legs. It seemed almost pot luck as to which side of the line they'd fall and yet the output of all was grounded in the same dancey/soul/hip hop based pop groove (with the influencing genres taking more or less of a dominant role depending on the act) that, like a police line-up tended to blend into one sound of bland conformity. And to illustrate what I mean, I'm going to take 'Dreams' and 'Pray' in tandem.
Gabrielle was a London born singer songwriter whose debut single 'Dreams' hit number one. Her Wikipedia entry lists her genres as 'R&B, soul, blues, jazz, urban contemporary and dance'. Take That were nineties boy band par excellence who, to date, have scored eleven UK number ones (unlike Gabrielle, 'Pray' was their seventh single, not their debut). Their Wikipedia entry lists their genres as 'Pop', Pop Rock' and 'Dance'. It's the dominant boy band/girl solo singers I mentioned above and yet played in the background on low volume then both 'Dreams' and 'Pray' sound pretty much the same, two candidates in the 'nineties pop hits' line-up that the non partisan would struggle to tell apart.
Interchangeable certainly - the artists could have swapped songs with little detriment save Gabrielle would have made 'Pray' slightly more urban and Take That would have made 'Dreams' slightly more poppy, but both could/would still have dropped off the same conveyer belt of the nineties hit machine that provided the decade's distinctive/indistinctive stamp of tameness that, by merely skimming the froth off each of those genres and serving it up low calorie lite, smoothes over any jag or hint of originality and individuality.
To be fair, Gabrielle and Take That would not be the only offenders on that front, but as far as the songs at hand go, 'Dreams' goes for the inspirational 'don't give up' message for the rest of us after she's landed her dream squeeze but it's missing that extra gear, that extra key change to get you punching the air with a 'Yeah!' determination. "Dreams can come true" is positive enough, but Gabrielle sings with a curiously downbeat rasp that implies a layer of cynicism she probably didn't intend. 'Pray' is a dream not yet come true where the boys wish an absent female would come back ("All I do each night is pray, hoping that I'll be a part of you again someday"; a scenario that would become something of a theme in anything Gary Barlow wrote). I don't doubt the sincerity, but there's a dullness about the song, like chrome polished so hard that its worn through to the dull metal beneath, with most of the wear coming from the heavenly choir of bricklaying angels backing vocals that pour a jug of very cold water over Barlow's already damp enough squib of a voice.
Both are perfectly acceptable songs and neither set my teeth on edge, but then neither possess anything approaching a spark or bounce, nothing to make me want to turn it up and sing along. In short, neither is any fun. Were they meant to be? Probably not, but then there's nothing here that rewards any kind of in-depth listening either; 'Dreams' would have benefited from the glass half full optimism of 'Pray's arrangement while 'Pray' would have benefited from the slightly more gritty rationalisation of 'Dreams'. But regardless of all that, both are product of the nineties equivalent of Tin Pan Alley and I find it fascinating that two acts who should in theory not be comfortable at the same table are in fact drinking from the same bowl. A harbinger of the decade (and beyond) to come.
If dance music showed that you could paste a hammering beat onto almost anything, UB40 had long since been at hand to show that mostly anything could be given a reggae makeover too. On this, the reggae backbeat provides the flim flam of Presley's original with a stiff backbone to give it a pleasing sense of purpose, but the industrial clang of the percussion and Ali Campbell's whine gives this a coldness at odds with what the message the song is meant to be conveying. But whichever way you cut it this is lazy, by the numbers stuff - another cover version off their conveyor belt of cover versions with no stamp of originality that makes it UB40's own and with their apparent disinterest perfectly mirroring my own.*
* It was around this time that Frank Zappa's touring band were playing a reggae version of 'Stairway To Heaven'. Dread Zeppelin too were doing similar to other Led Zep tracks and both provided an interesting spin on the two genres. Of course, UB40 wouldn't have been able to go out on such a limb without losing their credibility (!?!) as a reggae act, but by playing it so safe they also play it boring.
Though hindsight tends to lump them in with the rest of the nineties Eurodance merchants en-bloc, in truth Sweden's Ace Of Base operated outside the parameters of the genre, basing their sound on chunky beatbox reggae rather than a hip hop/house hybrid. 'All That She Wants' is as good example of this as any, running as it does on a dance skank augmented by doomy horn and spaghetti western whistles. As a floorfiller it does its job, which is just as well seeing as Linn Berggren's flat, exchange student accent has all the neutral engagement of a news reader as she throws the lyrics against the tune in a way that suggests she has no idea what she is actually singing.
Maybe she doesn't - 'All That She Wants' has a double vagueness in that, taken on face value, it's a song about a predatory woman embarking on a series of one night stands solely with the aim to get impregnated. Take it at the level it was meant to be taken and it's a song about a predatory woman embarking on a series of one night stands (with the opening "she leads a lonely life" itself being a vague commentary that can be taken as being either the reason for, or the result of her cavalier attitude to relationships).
But on both levels it's a clumsily executed face off between the awkwardly written ("So if you are in sight and the day is right, she's the hunter you're the fox"), awkwardly sang ("It's not a day for wuh-herk") verses and the relentless nuclear explosion of the chorus. Relentless, now that's a good word to describe 'All That She Wants' - lacking depth or originality, it's main hook steamrollers over it's own shortcomings until it becomes the song's whole raison d'etre, and though I can't find anything of much merit in it, I'm as happy as the next man to sing along. The sign of a good pop song? I guess it must be, though for the want of a nail or two it could have been a great one.
A curious artefact, this 'Five Live EP' contains, as you may have guessed, five live tracks in a sort of mini-album. What might be slightly less obvious though is that, despite the logo and the 'and Queen' blazing proudly on the sleeve and all proceeds going to The Mercury Phoenix Trust, only two of the songs are actually by Queen songs ('Somebody To Love' and 'These Are The Days Of Our Lives') and feature the remainder of the band. What's left are covers of 'Papa Was A Rolling Stone', 'Killer' (the Adamski song) and 'Calling You' from the Bagdad Cafe soundtrack.
George gets the ball gets rolling strongly enough with a bullish run through of 'Somebody To Love' where he sounds like he's auditioning for Mercury's replacement and singing for his supper at the same time. It carries more than a germ of the hysterical/eccentric swagger associated with Queen (helped by Queen's own hysterical/eccentric backing) but the best isn't saved for last and from then on each track overplays its hand to bog itself down in a welter of professional stodge and fussiness that suggests everyone involved thought a slick band and sense of occasion would be enough to make it all worthwhile.
But it isn't I'm afraid and as a 'live album' it's a failure; nothing here flows with any spontaneity and everything on offer sounds like its been rehearsed a hundred times prior to the recording, with each performance sounding exactly the same. The mix and match nature and presentation of the songs too has the effect of giving the EP the disjointed feel of a mix tape where the loving compiler can see the link that threads the songs together but the rest of us are left in bemusement. And because of that, you almost need two separate sets of ears to listen to it - the Queen songs can be enjoyed as a tribute to the departed Mercury while the remainder can be enjoyed as George Michael flexing his soul muscles on stage, though to that I'd add the caveat that you need to be a diehard Queen fan or a diehard George Michael fan to get any enjoyment at all out of this. If you're both then I guess you're laughing. But I'm not. On both counts.
Now here's a song that weaves a tangled web - during the early eighties, Bluebells vocalist Bobby Bluebell was dating Bananarama's Siobhan Fahey and wrote 'Young At Heart' for inclusion on the girl's 1983 'Deep Sea Skiving' album.* An unremarkable clump of candy floss frump in its original form, The Bluebells re-worked the tune into a Cajun barndance reel and released it in their own right in 1984 where it reached number eight. Fast forward nine years and it was picked up by Volkswagen for use in a rather cynical 1993 television advert that took the "Old before their time, they married young" lyric literally to celebrate the virtues of divorce. The inevitable re-release took the song to number one, which is where we find it now.
Hailing from Scotland, The Bluebells themselves purveyed the jangly indie kid sound popularised by Scotland's own (immensely influential) Postcard Records but without its left field, off kilter credibility. True, 'Young At Heart'' has the scratchy, wiry sound of a Josef K or early Orange Juice (acts actually on the label), but its re-jigged chorus goes for the commercial jugular with a force of repetition that irritates rather than endears over its running time. In point of fact, the Volkswagen advert itself lasts for a mere 45 seconds and over that brief time 'Young At Heart' spills all of its beans - the remainder simply circles itself like water down a plughole. The 1984 'Young At Heart' shoved a rootsy (and welcome) two fingers up to its electronic/new romantic chart peers, but some ten years on it's garnered the gimmicky inauthenticity of a made up dance of yesteryear and has the awkwardness of a game mature student in a hall of residence full of freshers. Not bad, just unnecessary.
* I'm led to believe that Fahey's co-write credit was given out of love rather than any actual input and that Bob was mightily peeved when she received a huge chunk of the royalties from its second wind here. No doubt he was even more peeved when violinist Bobby Valentino successfully sued in 2002 to be credited as co-writer himself for coming up with the distinctive electric fiddle riff.
Back in 1980, I had a very soft spot for The Piranhas hit 'Tom Hark. I knew nothing of the song's history or what 'The Piranhas Play Kwela' meant on the sleeve, but it was a relentlessly upbeat, saxophone/whistle driven shot of happiness that seemed kin to the Madness songs that were just coming through. As what was probably my first introduction to what has now come to be termed 'world music' it was invaluable. It was only much, much later when I got to hear the original 1956 version by Elias and His Zig Zag Jive Flutes that I appreciated just how much The Piranhas take had cleaned up the sound and yet how much they left it intact.
'Oh Carolina' is a cover version of a 1960 ska recording by The Folkes Brothers and an important precursor to the then burgeoning reggae movement. Historical significance alone never shifted many units (after all, popular music charts are not there to act as a surrogate museum) and the sounds on the record are scratchy and distant enough to have been laid down some time in the Middle Ages. Yet although Shaggy tightens the beat to give its rude boy styling a gangsta appeal, takes out the rat tat tat drums to give it glossy coat of modern Ragga danceability, there a few other concessions to a commercial Western market. The ska groove remains intact and, like Althea and Donna before him, other than the title I can barely make out any other of the lyrics thorough the thick patois on either of the versions.* And because of this, the song's heritage is respected rather than sacrificed on the altar of its success. It's still fun, but the approach lifts 'Oh Carolina' up from the swamp of one-off cultural novelty where it could easily have sunk and where, whether by intention or not, The Piranhas took 'Tom Hark' all those years ago.
* A device that would be used to hide a multitude of lyrical sins in the Ragga movement that flowed from Shaggy's breakthrough.
'When you say twelve "No"s in a row, don't you think that's a bit negative"? Now there's a fair question and it's one that always comes to mind whenever I hear 'No Limits'. Of course, it was asked by Chris Morris in an interview with the band that was deliberately designed to take the piss, but it's forever cast 2 Unlimited as the unwitting clowns of the early nineties dance/techno scene. Unfair? Of course it's unfair - nobody listens to dance to be philosophically enlightened by the lyrics and another question 'When you say "no valley too deep" do you really mean that?" could be partially rephrased and used to take the mick out of any number of earnest but respected rock songs past and present (or even out of 'Ain't No Mountain High Enough' as it stands). There's also nothing particularly big or clever about ribbing two amiable, eager to please young Europeans whose first language wasn't English and yet....and yet...
...and yet I can't help but think Morris had method in his cruelty. Eurodance had all the cartoon colour of a kid let loose with a box of crayons anyway, but 2 Unlimited always (to me) had an edge of unwitting parody, of self consciously trying to live up to an image or type but then crossing over into something else entirely, like a young metal act's portfolio pictures of them posing in alleyways in leather jackets and slugging from bottles of Jack Daniels (pneumatic blonde in push up bra and miniskirt optional). As a dance track, it's hard to imagine something more pared to the bone than 'No Limit'; the two finger, two note keyboard bounce is dumb as a Ramones riff and certainly takes techno back to its basics in a Sigue Sigue Sputnik go clubbing kind of way.
So why is it that the first Ramones album frequently turns up on 'All Time Best' lists whereas 2 Unlimited....don't? Well the Ramones were operating within the context of deliberately working against a mainstream to return rock music to its roots; 2 Unlimited were as much a part of their own genre as any other Eurodance act and it was already a 'type' of music frequently ridiculed for a perceived inanity. 'No Limit' takes that to its logical conclusion by rubbing the listeners face (ear?) in the banality of it all without ever being conscious that that was in fact what they were doing.
And I don't think this edit of it helps matters either - the original, uncut Euro version features (as most Eurodance singles were wont to do) a rap segment. But unlike (for example) the Snap! singles where the rap punctures the song's free rolling swagger, Raymond Slijngaard's efforts here actually added some flavour to the pot's otherwise relentless repetition, but in cutting it back until only the repeated 'Techno techno techno' remains it just gives more ammunition to the likes of Morris and ramps up the parody quotient through the roof.
'No Limit' will always remind me of vodka fuelled, undergraduate nights out in some of the most makeshift nightclubs in Christendom, and even now those 'doomph doomph' beats are one of the few things that can tempt me back onto the dancefloor because it's so easy to dance to (albeit only when I have more alcohol than blood in my veins). A backbeat you can't lose indeed. But even then, I'm always guided by a sense of the ironic - 'No Limit' is the dance song that every non dance fan knows, and they know it through a guilty pleasure, kitsch awareness that somehow serves to taint dance music as a whole. It's the same the way most people know that Ozzy Osbourne once bit the head off a bat but wouldn't be able to name a single Black Sabbath song - such people irritate me so I can understand the irritation others may feel toward this but for my own part I have no major beef with 'No Limit'; it lugs enough baggage around with it without me adding to the pile.
John Peel once mentioned how he didn't have much time for any song with the words 'rock and roll' in the title. I have a similar aversion, though with me it's 'Babe' (unless it's being used to describe someone under three years of age). Thankfully, there haven't been that many; Styx made my skin crawl in 1980 with theirs and now Take That have a bash at changing my mind with their own story in song; a guy (this time with Mark Owen singing lead) is once again pining for a wayward female who still has his heart in a jar, though this time at journey's end he finds she has a readymade family for him in the shape of his bastard son.
