Nature (or so I was taught) abhors a vacuum. If the previous decades of number ones has taught me anything to date, it's that the charts aren't all that keen on one either; there's always room for a band of lads for the girls to scream over, and with the demise of Take That there were any number of potential successors to their crown. Boyzone were one, and they'll be popping up a few more times before we're done, but their first entry conveniently picks up where Take Than left off in that it's a cover of a Bee Gees song (number 8 in 1968). Once again, a side by side comparison is instructive.
The Bee Gee's track is sparse, a hesitant piano that builds in force and confidence until a minor key string arrangement sees the song to a close. And that's all that's needed; Barry Gibb's vocal is the focal point here, pushed to the fore and quivering with emotion yet never quite falling over the precipice into overwrought; if his voice breaks then it's honesty rather than theatrics and I've no cause to doubt his sincerity. Ronan Keating's chewy lisp of a voice could never hope to fill in the blanks that such an arrangement leaves, and Boyzone's producers are wise enough not to let him try; this 'Words' comes draped in an off the peg orchestral swell that tries to drag the tears from the listener that Keating on his own couldn't.
Does it work? Not really; the song is solid enough in its construction to make it hard for anybody to ruin it, but this comes coated in the hard plastic falseness of song put through a cynical mood generating machine, an undergraduate music student's exercise in arrangement that blands it out until it's stateless, anonymous and merely a product for whoever is next in line in want of it. Swap Keating for Barlow or any other boy band leader and the effect would be no different. I've often bemoaned the lack of originality in the charts, but if it's as easy as this to get a hit then where's the incentive to try any harder?
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