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In their role as a kind of Woolworth to Take That's Marks And Spencer, East 17 very much toiled through the nineties in the latter's bigger boy band shadow - the figures speak for themselves; whilst Take That notched up eight number ones during the decade, East 17 only managed this solitary entry at the top. And it's not exactly representative of what they were all about - apparently inspired by the suicide of a band member's brother, 'Stay Another Day' is a strange proposition for a boy band ballad. To go back to their rivals, one constant in Take That's output was that happiness lay within their grasp if they could just bring some girl round to their point of view. What's more, their songs tended to have a cocksure smugness of knowing they'd always be able to pull off a happy ending if they sang nicely enough.
In contrast, 'Stay Another Day' is almost relentless in it's downbeat sparseness. The cyclical battering, thousand yard stare of Brian Harvey's "Baby if you've got to go away, I don't think I can take the pain" plea and implore of the backing "stay now"s of the chorus swirl through the song as mantra, leaving nobody in a happy place by the end. And to mirror Harvey's no direction home misery, an absence of drums or any kind of shaping backbone leaves 'Stay Another Day' a song floundering in mid air at the point where Wile E Coyote, having run off the edge of a cliff, gulps and realises there's nothing between him and the ground below. With his own longing seemingly ignored, Harvey similarly waits to crash and burn with the realisation that his pleas are not going to be answered.
But then what lets all this down is a drippy weediness that pervades every part of the song from the vacuous production to Harvey's own lispy whine of a vocal. Fragility is fine and here it's apt, but there's a thin reediness about the results that produces the dull clunk of a biscuit tin when it's really aiming for the celestial sonics of a cathedral. And to further dilute its power, the Christmas bells that close it (and that bizarrely inappropriate sleeve shot) are too obviously misplaced within the context of the song to be anything other than an opportunistic nod to the time of year and they detract rather than add to the ambience of what, after all, is defiantly not a Christmas song. And yet despite the shortcomings, there's a heartfelt genuineness about 'Stay Another Day', an honest vulnerability that invites empathy or at least sympathy - emotions never ably generated by anything from the Take That stable. But then again, I've always said you could get some good bargains in Woolworth and that Marks And Spencer had ideas above their station.
An archetypical old school 90's British dance anthem, 'Let Me Be Your Fantasy' shares an acre of common ground with D:Ream's 'Things Can Only Get Better' in that both use a piano led house backing to carry an uplifting vocal refrain set to auto repeat. Which can describe most dance tracks I guess. I can say upfront I think 'Things' is the better song, but it failed to realise its potential through the lack of the main thing 'Let Me' has in its favour - that is, a powerhouse vocal from Dorothy Fearon that raises roofs and spirits every time she opens her mouth to deliver the invitation of the title. Like the pin that holds a Catherine wheel to the post, Fearon is the pivot around which the rest revolves, and the rest gets all the duller whenever she's not around. So it's a shame that things take a sharp detour at 3:10 into the dead end of a different tune in a different key that's playing at a rave where Fearon clearly wasn't invited. Maybe writer/producer Floyd Dyce thought it needed something to break up the repetition and maintain the interest, but it only serves to lob a brick through the state of blissed trance effected so far and the song never recovers from the intrusion. Better by far to have faded it early I think.
A cover version of the 1968 pop/reggae crossover hit by The Equals, Banton leaves the basic tune intact but injects a degree of pace and rhythm to bring out more of its reggae side. No harm there as far as it goes, but Banton has an ulterior motive in piggybacking on the song (and UB40) as a showcase for his toasting skills ("I must admit I was a clown to be messing around but that doesn't mean that you have to leave town") that he slots in between rounds of the chorus. It works well enough in a happy go lucky kind of way, but it leaves his 'Baby Come Back' a halfway house between innovation and regurgitation that fails to satisfy on any level deeper than that. Maybe it wasn't meant to, but in it's shameless pandering to cultural stereotyping ("and me CD collection of Bob Marley, yes with me bag of sensi") and naked pursuit of the coin of commercialism, it's also more than a bit cheap and tacky. Which isn't something you could ever accuse The Equals of.
"I'm sitting here waiting for my lover, last time we met I wasn't too sure. Now I'm hoping, maybe dreaming, for a life as one. When she reads this I'm hoping she'll call but I need much more than before, I need positive reactions whenever I'm down" - me me me me me - it has to be Take That hasn't it? Who else would kick off a song of love with a set of personal demands that need to be satisfied? The 'Sure' of the title might refer to the certainty that any boy wants that this girl is 'the one', but the want here is all so much one way traffic and this gal has a number of criteria that need to be ticked off before they're sure she's made the grade.
First up, "It isn't a game so don't play hard to get", so step messing about love because they need to be sure you're "social", "compatible", "sexual" and "irresistible ". Oh and they're going to find out via some "holdin", "squeezin", "touchin", "teasin", "wantin", "wishin", "waitin", "teasin" (again) "blindin", "groovin", "findin", "breathin", "bracin", "breedin" ..."with you girl". Presumably, the more scores on the doors the better chance she has, and if she fails, well there's always plenty more fish in the sea. That's for sure too. The fact that she's sure about the bloke is taken as read and so there's no need to ask.....but do you know what? I've banged on enough about the seventies sit com male world view that Gary Barlow operates in for the time being so I'm going to leave the above speak for itself and let you make your own minds up.
And I'm happy to do so because for once I can afford to - 'Sure' rides in on a rubbery sweat funk groove that overpowers the lyric beneath to make it a secondary concern. It's derivative certainly (mainly of The Isley Brothers' 'Between The Sheets'), but the falsetto swing of the " Sure so sure, that it's heaven knocking on my door" hook of the chorus (which, let's be honest, is all the fanbase is really going to 'hear') and the attendant hip hop flourishes carry a streetdance energy and vitality sorely lacking from any their previous entries ('Pray' is from the same drawer, but it's pale vanilla in comparison). 'Sure' is more a song of its time, albeit in an identikit American R&B kind of way and albeit one that sounds more like a one hit wonder than anything forming part of a complete body of work. Which is where their underlying message of woman as commodity for male happiness certainly belongs, along with the rest of them - "It's gotta be right for love"? Well, as long as you're sure she gives you those positive reactions when you're down then you go for it Gary.
Your writer can remember a drunken night in 1994 where he watched a vision of a violently beautiful, totally unobtainable girl from his course dancing to 'Saturday Night' on a club dancefloor and wishing he could be everything she was. 'Saturday Night' had its own dance you know. In fact, I heard about the dance long before I managed to hear the song - some UK tabloids, whipped up by the hype surrounding the two year old song that was taking the continent by storm, printed the moves in advance it being released to let the eager get some practice in (you can look them up on YouTube if you're interested).
What was the fascination? I honestly don't know - 'Saturday Night' is more Eurodance but this time set to a series of beeps and bleeps that could have played over the end credits of a contemporary Nintendo game, their repetitive simplicity bolstered by Whigfield's own enthusiastic statement of Nordic intent to ensure that tonight's the night ("I'll make you mine you know I'll take you to the top, I'll drive you crazy"). There's no doubt it's catchy*, and yes it's fun too, but it's also dumb - 'Saturday Night' is a dumbed down take on 'Macarena' but minus the humour, and that's a comment that can double as both the best and the worst thing I can say about it. Ok, I can provide my own humour by fondly remembering my drunken stare all those years ago, but that's never going to be enough to compensate for the song's inherent facelessness that I find so withering; a blank slate with a sell by date dictated by the day of the week and a success built on hype, none of which marks it out as a good pop song.
* It caught the ear of both The Equals and Lindisfarne anyway who (unsuccessfully) claimed it plagiarised their own songs. But as anyone with ears could tell that the main melody is taken directly from 'Spanish Bombs' then I'm surprised The Clash didn't throw their hat into the ring too.
What was it with record buyers and songs from the movies in the nineties? We've already had Bryan Adams and Whitney Houston hogging number one for 16 and 10 weeks apiece with songs from a film soundtrack, and now Wet Wet Wet notch up 15 weeks there with this from 'Four Weddings And A Funeral'. Another cover version, The Troggs' 1967 original had a definite US west coast Monkees pop feel veering close to a bubblegum bounce that perfectly suited the "I feel it in my fingers, I feel it in my toes" lyric. Wet Wet Wet's version promises a major rock re-interpretation with a guitar lashed introduction of drama, but it soon settles down to a run through of the same song albeit one dressed up in the doilies and lace curtains of strings and things. The simple directness of the original gets lost in a halfway house, fussy swamp of guitar hero soloing and toffee treacle orchestration poured straight from the tin, with most of it landing in Marti Pellow's mouth, making him chew and smack his lips around the words as if was tasting the finest wine.
But he wasn't, and presenting the song as something it was never meant to be the abandons the shyly innocent hippie ethos of The Troggs and replaces it with something that tries to apply the same high brow 'quality product' label that attached itself to so many British films of the decade - to say you can't polish a turd would be doing the song a great disservice so suffice it to say that it's very unwise to try and pass off a theme park as a cathedral. Apparently, the band themselves got so bored by the song's longevity that they insisted it be deleted after its fifteenth week at number one. I got bored with it considerably quicker than that.
I've already expressed my lack of enthusiasm for football songs in the charts, but while I can sort of understand a song celebrating a national identity doing well, one that bigs up a club side leaves me without even the flimsiest straw to grab at. Unless you're a Manchester United fan then this party clapalong set to the tune of the already intensely irritating 'Burning Bridges' by Status Quo (with their full co-operation - "We'll maintain The Status Quo, Man United here we go" indeed) is not going to draw in the non partisan on any level. As a 'winding up' exercise for non fans then it's second to none, but I think ultimately it all forms part of the general aimlessness at the mid point of the decade, a number one indicative of the lack of direction in popular music that goes some way to explain why, in the face of such apathy, the waiting Britpop era was embraced so readily . I was drunk for most of 1994 myself though so I didn't care.
The story goes that Levi jeans, keen to tap into the 1994 Grunge zeitgeist offered the Smashing Pumpkins a large sum of money to licence their 'Today' single for their latest television commercial. When head Pumpkin Billy Corgan refused, Levis hired Brit Peter Lawlor to come up with a tune-a-like that was as close to 'Today' as the laws of plagiarism would allow.* 'Inside' was the result. Or it kind of was - the cartwheeling guitar riff and snatch of vocal worked well enough to soundtrack a (admittedly striking) ninety second commercial, but this full single is pushing five minutes long and it's interest levels decrease exponentially with every ten seconds that pass.
In its defence, like The Rutles with their spoofs of The Beatles, 'Inside' is a fair patchwork approximation of the genre and Ray Wilson's vocal does a passable Mark Lanegan, but whether that's going to make your eyes light up or not is going to depend on your views on grunge as a whole. "Swing low in a dark glass hour, you turn and cower, see it turn to dust. Move on a stone dark night, we take to flight, snowfall turns to rust" - I wasn't there, but I'd hazard a guess that any Seattle bar in the mid-nineties would have had a resident check shirted, long haired combo grinding out a similar nonsensical Black Sabbath on ice fuelled diet of affected angst and self loathing.
And with a song written to order then sung by a hired gun, 'affected' is an appropriate word; 'Inside' and all its "And if you think that I've been losing my way, that's because I'm slightly blinded" is little more than a caricature of a movement that had long since lost its momentum. Three years on from Nirvana's ground zero 'Nevermind', most of the bands that hopped onto the bandwagon for the ride had all chased their tails with such a studious intent they simply grew tired and fell over. And for a debut single, 'Inside' sounds incredibly tired - the empty fury of a sound railing against nothing from a band that play it as if they've been grinding it out all their lives simply because it pays the bills. Which, ironically is exactly what they are now doing, though I suppose that's a slightly more honourable pursuit than it's original purpose to sell jeans.
* Some of the shine gets knocked off Corgan's integrity with the appreciation that his own 'Today' borrows liberally from Status Quo's 1967 recording of 'You're Just What I Was Looking For Today'. Very liberally in fact.
While I can own up to have done a fair bit of clubbing during the early to mid nineties, I was never what you might call a 'professional clubber'. My choice of venue was always dictated by whoever was running the best deal on vodka, and the sort of club that would let me through the door weren't the kind of places to employ DJs who'd get in a lather over the latest 12 inch, white label remix. So seeing as this is a 1994 remix (of Di Bart's 1993 original) that generated exactly that kind of excitement amongst the hardcore, I feel self consciously unqualified to be commenting on it.
Despite the name and track's Italian house-lite feel, Di Bart was an English DJ who created his music Joe Meek style in a recording studio above the bathroom shop business that formed his day job. In its first incarnation, 'The Real Thing' had the straighter structure of basic pop; the remix added a set of dance remoulds in the form of an almost ambient groove that coaxed you onto the dancefloor instead of bludgeoning you there. But in so doing, 'The Real Thing' becomes too polite for its own purpose, too wordy for its own chilled moodiness and too inconsequential to be memorable; like the ripples from a small pebble tossed into a deep pond, 'The Real Thing' asks for nothing, gives nothing and drifts past me leaving no discernable impression save a shoulder shrugging indifference and a vague feeling of guilt that I don't have anything else to say about it. Except to comment that 1994 is not shaping up to be a vintage year.
As a music fan growing up in the eighties, the lead off singles that heralded each new Prince album were always something to look out for, an event offering up a rare treat in an all too often sea of bland.* '1999', 'When Doves Cry', Alphabet Street', 'Kiss', 'Sign O The Times' - fine singles all that in their own way pushed boundaries just that bit further so strange that his first UK number one came in a decade of struggle for the artist instead of the one he part ruled. Maybe there was always something just too off the wall about his best work to enjoy mass acceptance - the bass free face slap funk of 'When Doves Cry' or the compressedtowithinaninchofitslife 'Kiss' for example are borderline experimental recordings with skew enough to not invite the universal appeal of a number one. Maybe, but whatever, 'The Most Beautiful Girl In The World' (not a cover of the Charlie Rich song) is as shamelessly direct and risk free a song as he's ever written.
"Could you be the most beautiful girl in the world? Its plain to see you're the reason that God made a girl" - unmistakably Prince, over the chime of a guitar sparkling like sunlight on water, his falsetto picks out the lyric with a precise sense of wonder at the power and purity of love that banishes the sleazy bump and groan innuendo that had become his adopted trademark. It's the sort of song Take That should themselves have been writing/covering instead of trying to be clever beyond their talent, yet it's precisely this normality and absence of the unexpected that makes it a far less satisfying single than the brace mentioned above.
At a shade under five minutes long I'm on constant tenterhooks for Prince to whip off the mask and blast out a squally solo, for his voice to stretch to a squawk or for a sudden key change to shift it into leftfield to break up the ordinary. But it never comes, and 'The Most Beautiful Girl In The World' plays itself out to fade like a stand up recounting a story that has no punchline. Of course, not every story needs a punchline to be memorable or rewarding, but with Prince at the wheel then an interesting journey is the least I expect - I always rely on him to take me to good times at the beach and so it's with a vague feeling of disappointment that he parks up outside an empty warehouse at journey's end.
* 'The Most Beautiful Girl In The World' isn't by 'Prince' though, it's by the squiggly symbol he adopted in the early nineties. Unfortunately, my keyboard doesn't have that font and besides, if it looks like a duck and moves like a duck…….
After the blotchy bore of 'Babe', 'Everything Changes' finds more of a purpose by adopting a Philly soul structure and glide that leads directly to the dancefloor. Retro, but not blatantly so, 'Everything Changes' has the feel of a lesser O'Jays B side dusted down and given a new lease of life via a gritty lead vocal from Robbie Williams. By borrowing from a tried and tested formula, this should have been something of an open goal, but as is its wont, the music and tune come part of a package and it's the whole that makes my hairs rise.
I tend to think that Take That missed a trick by not releasing this as a prologue to 'Babe' and as part of a trilogy of casual misogyny that would find it's natural conclusion in 'Back For Good'. Williams and his "Now don't you cry, just one more kiss before I have to go" somewhere where " We're a thousand miles apart" is the narrator of 'Babe'' when he gets back from his trip ("I'm here again, I tell you I'm here again. Where have you been?"). Which in itself is harmless enough, but rather than part with ae fond kiss, Williams gives this girl a blunt "Girl, come on over here, let me hold you for a little while" before nailing her to the floor with "The rumours true, you know that there've been others. What can I do, I tell you baby they don't mean a thing. Now girl don't go and throw our love away, I'll be home soon back in your arms to hear you say that everything changes but you". In other words, "you're a doormat I can take for granted whenever I'm in town and can stop screwing around long enough to need a bed to sleep in".
The lyric's complete lack of self awareness at what a self centred bastard this man is being just ramps up the nastiness, and with such a unpleasant and spiteful standpoint underlying it any soul the music had takes on a dark and rank hue in its sweetening of such callous mean-spiritness. In fairness, I put this down to a hamfisted cluelessness on the part of the writers more than any genuine intent, but by the same token the "Everything changes but you. You know every single day I'll be thinking about you" chorus might seem an agreeable pop sentiment wrapped in a catchy tune, but that's sheer fluke too. Because nothing I've heard so far gives any confidence that Gary Barlow knows the first thing about what a woman thinks or feels in any given situation ever; far from a position of equality, females in the Take That world are there purely to provide whatever degree of stability or gratification the guys might be needing at any given point. And it's this ignorance makes stuff like 'Everything Changes' nigh on unlistenable for anyone who actually takes the time to listen.
I'm always partial to a bit of quirk in anything, and there should always be room in the charts for something that almost defies categorisation. Quirky even. But I also think there's a line between a lightning in a bottle flash of genius and taking people for mugs. On paper another Eurodance act (from the Netherlands this time), this 'dance' though is sampled from a twenties Charleston romp overlain with a 4/4 dance beat with the producers scat "doop be doop" over it; there's literally nothing more to 'Doop' than what you'll hear on first listen. It's a nice idea I suppose, and the ragtime clarinet squeals add a touch of the time capsule exotic, but 'Doop' is like being handed a single dinner plate as a wedding gift - it's not entirely useless, but opportunities to put it to any good use are limited to situation and circumstance. 'Doop' could be a fun piece to get the would be flappers going at a drab office party, but its one dimensional fencepost dumbness is not going to slot easily into any club DJ set. Or anywhere else at all really. Genius or piss-takers? Probably neither, Doop are a pair of chancers who got incredibly lucky, and the best to be said is that at least it was a one shot deal that didn't herald the start of a string of hits in the same vein of awfulness that was Jive Bunny. I guess sometimes you have to take your mercies wherever you can find them.
There's a part of me that's always seen this as round two of a pissing contest between Carey and Whitney Houston. Houston had already fired the first shot by taking a blowtorch to 'I Will Always Love You' and now Mariah steps up to the plate to do much the same to 'Without You'. Carey has never been shy about putting her vocal wares on display and to be fair she has picked a song that welcomes a little melodrama - from the day it was written 'Without You' served to roll out a barrel of angst over seeing the back of your lover walking away for the last time. By far the most famous reference point is provided by Nilsson's 1972 version, but where Harry adopted a slow burn to unleash his anguish, the echo drenched sparsity of Carey's take drips with the tension of a woman on the edge from the first notes.
And that's kind of the problem with this; it's not a song built to withstand that level of pressure. By the time the "I can't live"s roll 'round then rather than releasing the steam, the pressure cooker simply cracks in two. 'Without You' by Mariah Carey might have worked as a histrionic white knuckle ride, but by adding go faster stripes to what was a quality vehicle in its own right, Carey serves up her theatrics with a heavy side dish of "Ooooohoooo"s and vocal tic groans that make it the work of a bad actress trying to project to the back of the room, blissfully unaware that the ham of her overplayed hand hasn't even engaged the front row. Overwrought, overlong with precious little true fire, this is a dud.
I know someone from my parent's generation who says they are unable to listen to anybody singing 'The Little Drummer Boy' without feeling stressed over it's association with Myra Hindley and Ian Brady. For many among my own generation, the fact that 'Things Can Only Get Better' was used to soundtrack the Labour party's successful 1997 election campaign means that it now comes with baggage of stress all its own. And for a subset of them, the once Micawber-like optimism of the title has now become a by-word for lost opportunity, broken promises and a whole truck load of cynicism at how it all turned out. None of which is fair on D:Ream or their song, although I guess there's an element of complicity in that they at least had a say in the use of the song for political sloganeering in a way that 'The Little Drummer Boy' writer Katherine Davis most certainly did not.
But back in 1993 it was just another Brit dance song, albeit one remixed from its 1993 version. Both takes spurn the cheese of a Eurodance bounce to boast a revivalist feel instead. And being built up from a gospel base the song should be soaring, and it would if it were not for Peter Cunnah's lead boots vocal that's determined throughout to not count the chickens of the title and to couch most of his "better"s on the downturn note of anticlimactic caution of a man who doesn't quite believe what he's singing. And if Cunnah doesn't believe, then I don't believe either and its this inability to get a good arms aloft, celebratory fist pump in the air at the thought of a better tomorrow that hamstrings 'Things Can Only Get Better' and makes it a good hook wasted. Maybe its political use was more perceptive than anyone could have imagined.
It can come as a surprise to find out that The Beatles neither wrote nor were the first to record 'Twist And Shout'; i'ts a song become so closely associated with the fab four that they may as well have done both. So much so that when listening to any version, I'm always on tenterhooks for Lennon's 'wooooo's; they're as much part of the song as the lyrics for me and I miss them when they don't arrive. They don't arrive here either - Chaka Demus & Pliers reggae take shifts the song back towards its wannabe 'La Bamba' origins (as recorded by The Top Notes in 1961) with the toasted ad-libs from Pliers adding colour, verve and a sense of spontaneity to the mix that's lacking from most of the piledriving rock and roll versions. Yet at heart though, it still just a reggae version of a popular song that was never crying out for such a makeover and in so doing it gives both the song and the act a jokey, almost novelty feel that diminishes the credibility of the medium more than it spreads the word. And while there's more heart and sheer enjoyment contained within than in anything UB40 had released in the previous ten years, it's still more of an inessential release than not.
In their role as a kind of Woolworth to Take That's Marks And Spencer, East 17 very much toiled through the nineties in the latter's bigger boy band shadow - the figures speak for themselves; whilst Take That notched up eight number ones during the decade, East 17 only managed this solitary entry at the top. And it's not exactly representative of what they were all about - apparently inspired by the suicide of a band member's brother, 'Stay Another Day' is a strange proposition for a boy band ballad. To go back to their rivals, one constant in Take That's output was that happiness lay within their grasp if they could just bring some girl round to their point of view. What's more, their songs tended to have a cocksure smugness of knowing they'd always be able to pull off a happy ending if they sang nicely enough.
