1997 Various Artists: Perfect Day

It hasn't escaped my attention that the volume of number ones per year has been steadily increasing. In past decades, a tally of eighteen would have made for a busy year but right now it feels like I've been slogging through 1997 forever and it's not over yet. There will be worse to come too. I don't believe that this is because there are significantly more singles being released than in the past; rather, aggressive marketing and promotion of multi pack formats by the record companies resulted in a spate of songs rocketing out of the traps to the top in the first week of release only to drop out of sight completely by the fourth when momentum fizzled out.

It all made for a choppy looking chart where flavour of the month recordings came and went in a brave new world where the slow, steady climb to the top was, like vinyl, becoming a thing of the past. In a further unwelcome development, where a number one was once regarded as the pinnacle of achievement, heavily promoted artists and their songs were now being regarded as some kind of failure if they only managed a lowly number three placing. How times change.

If you're going for a heavy marketing push in the UK though, then there's no better medium than the ubiquitous BBC. The only fly in the ointment with that is, being financed by a licence fee, the Corporation is by and large advertising free. The rules aren't so stringent when it comes to blowing their own trumpet though - 'Perfect Day' is a cover of Lou Reed's 1972 album track by an impressive roster of star names, the main purpose being to promote/celebrate the diversity of the BBC’s output but with a (not that) subliminal message in the accompanying film that encouraged us all to pay our licence fees.

Whilst it undeniably gives me no small frisson of pleasure to see a Reed song (and the man himself - he sings the opening and closing lines) at number one, the product as a whole is only more or less successful depending on what side of the face you take its value on. In its function of self promotion then I've no doubt that it worked well, but I can only take it on terms of my brief and on that level the recording in front of me is less successful. Reed's original was a meditative confessional soaked in barely disguised self loathing ("You made me forget myself, I thought I was someone else. Someone good") and ambiguous menace ("You're going to reap just what you sow") - Reed is glad of his day but a character flaw stops him from enjoying the moment as much as he should have. It gave the song an air of tragic inevitability that fitted the edgy, faded glam of its parent 'Transformer' album to a T (and also used to good effect on the drug overdose/hallucination scene in the 1996 film ‘Trainspotting’).

The current recording is a bi-polar affair split along an axis of those who know the song and are out to do it justice (Bowie, Brett Anderson etc) and those who seem less familiar and sanitise it as a thing of uplifting joy (Heather Small, Lesley Garrett etc ). And by bouncing from style to style like a damaged pinball (the turns by and large take a line each), it makes for a choppy take and an awkward listen that's a microcosm of the crudely eclectic charts it inhabits. Nothing here fits with dovetail smoothness and the crude joins are glued in place by Reed's melody that remains largely unchanged from the original. Which makes this 'Perfect Day' little more than highly professional karaoke and the only verdict I can offer is to roll my eyes and wonder why anybody would want to go to the trouble of owning a copy. Other than to bask in the self satisfaction of knowing all proceeds went to that year's Children In Need appeal. Obviously.