1994 East 17: Stay Another Day

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.