A convenient brace of boyband bounty, there's a nice symmetry here in that, for one, it's going to be the first of many chart toppers, for another it will be their first and last time at the top while for the third it will be the last of their many appearances here. As I say, convenient. First up, 'Swear It Again' is an apocalyptic ballad built on a carpet bombing of emotional drama that even Jim Steinman might regard as a bit heavy handed. "I swore to you my love would remain, and I swear it all over again" - a powerful statement at face value, but "swear" is a strong word and to me its repetition is just a highfalutin way of saying 'I love you lots' with the effect lessened each time its spouted. Which is often.Not only that, but within the context of the song too it's not clear if this attention is welcome ("Cos in your eyes I see a love that burns eternally") or not ("Sure there'll be times we want to say goodbye. But even if we try there are some things in this life won't be denied"), or whether indeed this love is being sworn out of a sense of guilt ("I'm never gonna say goodbye, cos I never wanna see you cry" "I'm never gonna treat you bad, cos I never wanna see you sad"), and is there any inherent value in swearing anything a second time if the first wasn't believed? And so on.
Maybe I'm being picky again, but 'Swear It Again' boils down to is a patchwork of convenient rhymes and platitudes cynically stitched together with a vague 'I'll always love you' theme and the laziness of the writing (and that repetition) undermines the punch to the gut effect the song strives for, even if it does literally howl in your face in delivering it. 'Swear It Again' is a show song, and a show stopper at that - engineered for a gurn of drama and a lighter held aloft, it puts too many vague eggs into too few vague baskets to seduce and just relies on a slap in the face to get your attention. Which it does I'll grant you, but with little holding the centre together save its bawling abandon and cheap film score string arrangement, then 'Swear It Again' is a cardboard wedding cake on display in a shop window; it looks fancy and inviting but try and take a good bite and you're left chewing air.
Next up, 'I Want It That Way' is the first (and last) number one after eight attempts for Backstreet Boys, a long standing American boyband. The first time I heard this I dismissed it as just another by the numbers cover version - I'd have sworn I'd heard it before. Maybe I had (I can't remember when I first heard it), but not by anybody other than the Backstreet Boys. Which, I guess, is a roundabout way of saying that 'I Want It That Way' stands or falls on the quality of the song itself without being coloured by whatever image the boys were fronting.
And that's refreshing - there's only so much hip hop styling and faux street jive I can take from a bunch of white American guys grabbing their collective crotches through baggy pants and 'I Want It That Way' is a model of no fat brevity that marries soul and pop with a direct honesty of presentation that, unlike 'Swear It Again', doesn't ladle on the angsty, over sincere intensity to get a reaction. It all harks back to my earlier musing on what makes a good pop song, but then as '.....Baby One More Time' writer Max Miller also wrote this, then maybe I'm a little biased.
In comparison to these other kids on the boyband block, Boyzone's cover of 'You Needed Me' sounds thick, sluggish and overloaded. Much like 'Swear It Again' in fact, only this song wasn't built to bear that kind of weight; what was a gentle stream of a song in Anne Murray's hands is armed to the teeth by Boyzone's battalion of producers and turned into a swollen river in flood, with Ronan and the boys wading against both the flow and any passing kitchen sink caught up in the current. Keating's vocal itself is enough to bog the tune down in treacle, but a gospel backing choir mirroring his lines piles on the inertia until the it sounds too tired to make it's way out of the disc, making it all just too much like bloody hard work.
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