1994 Wet Wet Wet: Love Is All Around

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.