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1999 Westlife: I Have A Dream/Seasons In The Sun

I wonder what sort of Christmas they have over at the Westlife place? Is it all day party of food, drink, fun and good times, or do they sit around the table, crackers unpulled and turkey uneaten, stressing about all those worse off and remembering all the low points of the year just gone? Evidence tends toward the latter - there's never much of the easy going about Westlife's singles to date and this Christmas number one double A side isn't bucking any trends on that front.

Originally a number 2 hit for Abba in 1979 , 'I Have A Dream' was never a 'Christmas song' per se, but its sleighride jaunt and lyrics about angels meant there was no need to quibble over small change; it was festive enough. Unfortunately, the light and breezy melody that made it so sounds rather less so after Westlife transfuse a ton of their readymix into its veins. True to form, their heavy handedness creates a Frankenstein's monster of a song that kills, crushes and destroys the fragile delight of the Abba original by replacing its slippers with hobnail boots which it proceeds to stomp around in. By the time the choir of kids appears at the climax, the whole thing has stumbled off the edge of a cliff into the rollers below where, being as indestructible as nuclear waste, it keeps on singing until the tide carries it out of earshot.

'Seasons In The Sun' could never be classed as a 'Christmas song' no matter which way you cut it, and coupling Abba's song of hope with Brel and McKuen's deathbed reminisces makes for an odd pairing at any time of the year, let alone Christmas.* At least now the "Goodbye my friend it's hard to die" gave the boys something suitably grim to sink their serious teeth into, and they do with aplomb, but 'Seasons In The Sun' is a song written for one voice and by breaking it up so that each of the quintet gets a turn then it defuses the 'message' of the lyric until it becomes a Chinese whisper, shorn of its emotional charge by a confidence totally absent from the quivering longing of Terry Jacks' original which made it such a delight/horror (take your pick on that one). But whatever, even Scrooge would think twice about giving this a spin on Christmas morning.


* In order to provide some linking narrative, both tracks are shot through with a good blast of a penny whistle. No doubt it was meant to remind us where these boys hail from, but it's sheen is as authentically Irish as an O'Neils bar in Cardiff.

1999 Cliff Richard: The Millennium Prayer

I've recently bought 'This May Be My Last Time Singing', a compilation of African-American independent gospel singles, released privately between 1957-1982 and performed by non professionals. This won't come as too much of a surprise for regular readers who will be aware of my long standing passion for gospel music, and I'm happy to report that it's marvellous. All of it. A stand out track for me though is 'On The Right Road Now', recorded by the Crump Brothers in 1968 and sees vocalist M Crump (no other name is given) hollering out how he looks forward to the day when every day will be Sunday.

This stands out on two counts; firstly, by virtue of the sheer joy and evangelical desire to spread the good news that fires the man's voice in a way that even manages to inspire a lifelong atheist like me, and secondly by the fact that Mr Crump is able to get me to derive pleasure from a proposal that, in some ways, is one of my worst nightmares. Maybe a song advocating swallowing live spiders would give me more of the creeps, but not that many - you see I simply can't imagine anything much worse than a world where every day is Sunday. Dear me no.

I think a lot of this stems from my childhood where every Sunday afternoon, the local church down the road would ring its single bell at 5pm for fifteen minutes. Ostensibly to call the faithful to prayer, all I heard was the tolling of the end of the weekend and each ring fired a hollow point bullet into the joy that once was Saturday. BONG! Time to come in from playing with my mates. BONG! Time for a bath. BONG! Time for Last Of The Summer Wine on TV. BONG! Time for bed ready for school next day. Brrrrrrrr - that bell sucked lifelessness of the day the way a naked flame burns oxygen and the feeling of inevitable helplessness has never left me, meaning every Sunday since comes with its own black and white tinted minor miseries.

Why am I telling you this? Well, it's mainly because I want to be upfront about my inbuilt prejudices and to show, on one hand, what a fine job those Crump Brothers were doing within the medium to get me to overcome them and to listen to what they're saying - I don't believe in Fascism either, but I can't imagine any act could dress up a song with a message of white supremacy in a way that would let me give it the time of day. On the other hand though, it also demonstrates what a poor job they were doing after all; for all Mr Crump's enthusiasm, he moves me not one step closer to his God. Yet at the same time, and somewhere in the middle of both of these reactions, it can't be said either that his message is falling on deaf ears; I can draw sufficient secular inspiration from his own zeal the same way I can draw it from all the best gospel. It's why I listen to it after all. And further, it neatly illustrates why I don't listen to Cliff and his Millennium Prayer.

Basically is a marriage of the 'lyrics' of The Lord's Prayer to an overcooked rendition of 'Auld Lang Syne' as musical backing ('Living Doll' it ain't), Richard's voice solemnly quivers like a plucked string with the enormity of the lyric he's been called on to deliver. This is no time for any light-hearted banter about mistletoe and wine, this is serious, end of the Millennium territory, and yet rather than recite the message as blank verse, Cliff falls between the stools of song and sermon and goes for the pop bait by trying to force the lines into a tune and rhyme of sorts as they crawl over a rousing drum tattoo to march the Christian soldiers onward into the coming Millennium.

Sincerity isn't the problem here; Cliff is no less sincere than the Crump Brothers were; he's just a whole lot less enjoyable. You see, outside of the already converted, his sincerity is neither infectious nor contagious. It's not inspiring either - Richard wasn't the first to record a version of the Lord's Prayer,* but he surely serves up the worst with his dullard thud of showbiz schmaltz dressed up as populist religiosity covering fascistic evangelism as Cliff in his own way wishes every day of the new Millennium could be Sunday too, whether the rest of us want it or not - this is THE Millennium prayer don't forget.

But in trying to do God's work on earth, he's succeeded only in raising hell in a truly awful concoction that really does not make me wish that everyday was like Sunday** and its success must surely have fed on new Millennium fears and some subliminal desire to appease the gods into not delivering earthquakes, plague, and the catastrophic destruction of the world via the vague notion of a Millennium Bug waiting in the wings to wreck havoc as soon as the clock chimed midnight on New Year's Eve. That's how I rationalise it anyway. But maybe it's simply a logical and fitting (almost) end to a year that, in terms of number ones, has been pretty bloody poor. Cliff's Christmas songs would get a hell of a lot lighter after this, but there would be no more number ones. I'd like to think even God knew when enough was enough.


* For a whistle stop tour, check out the Nina Hagen and Siouxise and the Banshees versions for punky irreverence that aim for controversy but are no less dull in their own way. Mario Lanzo managed to wring some melody from the lines without the need for a sing song tune, but for a showstopping version that has all the inspirational passion of of any gospel song, then check out Mahalia Jackson's paint stripping take at the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival. Cliff was clearly taking no notes.

** Then again, Wizzard never made me wish it was Christmas every day either.

1999 Wamdue Project: King Of My Castle

Wamdue Project was an alias of American producer Chris Brann and 'King Of My Castle' is a house remix of an ambient dance track originally released in 1997. This remix tightens it up to a defined percussive thump and walking bassline to secure its house credentials but all I ever hear is Daft Punk in callipers, an 'Around The World' with a once flexible vertebrae fixed with titanium pins that make it all a lot less fun than it could have been. This was a popular enough track to warrant a re-release and remix in 2009, but whatever caught the clubber's ear back then simply isn't catching mine now.

1999 Robbie Williams: She's The One/It's Only Us

A double A side, 'She's The One' was originally written and recorded by World Party in 1997. On this, Williams takes the unusual step of not only borrowing writer Karl Wallinger's song and arrangement, but of also copying his own style of vocal. But whereas Wallinger's husky strain comes naturally, Williams' attempt at heartfelt means his trademark cheeky persona and charm is banished to the dug out for the duration to leave him sounding like Neil Young on bad news day. And while none of this detracts from the quality of the song underneath, this 'She's The One' is more forgery than bona fide cover and nobody here are earning their biscuits. Flip side 'It's Only Us' is livelier, but its in your face quick thrill rush of The Cars meet Green Day soon wears thin when the quick thrill rush wears off after it's parted from its original FIFA 2000 video game soundtrack setting. Everso quickly in fact.

1999 Geri Halliwell: Lift Me Up

The second number one from Halliwell is a less fussy, lighter ballad affair than the last, but the same problems remain - in delivering her flim flam of a song, Halliwell's thin altitude vocal emotes no further than the roof of her mouth, presumably due to all the unmelted butter clogging up her maw that serves to coats it with a sickly schoolgirl, trying a bit too hard to be liked sweetness. Call me a snob, but I don't really regard 'Lift Me Up' as a 'proper' single; it's simply a vehicle for product placement, with that product being Halliwell herself. Not being anything I can imagine deriving any pleasure from listening to, it serves the same function as a poster hording advertising washing powder (this even comes with a free poster dammit) - it remains in place for the duration of a campaign only to be scraped off and replaced with something else when it's over. And as far as that goes, in sitting proudly at number one for a week, 'Lift Me Up' has succeeded admirably. But in its success in inflating Ms Halliwell's ego it's also devalued the currency of the medium to Weimar-like hyperinflation proportions where you needed a wheelbarrow full of marks just to buy that washing powder. Unfortunately, a wheelbarrow full of Geri Halliwell singles is always going to add up to nothing. I'm not having a good year am I?

1999 Five: Keep On Movin'

It was tempting at this point to pause and ponder my recurring 'are the charts getting worse' shtick to see if I'm any closer to an answer. But do you know what? I've decided I'm not going to. It seems to me that if I'm going to raise this issue every some assembled by audition pop band comes my way then both I myself and you the reader (if I still have any) would be in for a torrid time over the coming years with my cod philosophising. No, I'm just going to focus on the song itself and as far as that goes I can report that 'Keep On Movin' is flat pack furniture of a song; each piece fits logically in its right place to create a whole whose functionality is there for all to see. But like cheap, flatpack furniture it's also homogenous, uninspiring and unmemorable with no hint of charm, personality, character or lastability - there's nothing here to hate beyond railing at the corporate machine behind it (which I've said I'm not going to do) and nothing to like beyond getting in a lather over the five pretty boys shaking their legs in front of it (which doesn't appeal to me on any level). And even there, each of these Five boys manage to recite their lines with the passionless inflect of infants performing at the school nativity, a drab intonation that breathes the kiss of death into a song that, despite its title, never manages to get movin' anywhere. How ironic.

1999 Westlife: Flying Without Wings

'If it ain't broke, don't fix it' as they say, and that's certainly a reliable tenet to live by as far as Westlife are concerned; 'Flying Without Wings' is another chunk of soft rock balladry, though perhaps it's fairer to say it's more refined from the wailing excesses of the past rather than 'fixed'. Too refined maybe - for me, 'Flying Without Wings' is a piece better suited to older lungs. A Joe Cocker or a Bette Midler could bring a certain Rushmore gravitas to the proceedings to take the edge off the song's spiralling and predictable passage from hushed opening to hand wringing finale. In the hands of Westlife, it feels like trying to deal with the policeman who turns up to investigate your burglary when he's thirty years younger than yourself; it doesn't feel 'right' does it? Which means that whilst 'Flying Without Wings' is a decent enough example of what it is, Westlife themselves add nothing to the mix and instead let themselves be carried along by a bluster that's probably best accompanied by a montage of inspirational video clips of tearful people hugging. By itself, it kind of leaves me cold.

1999 Christina Aguilera: Genie In A Bottle

There are those among us old enough to remember when it were all green fields around here. For myself, I'm old enough to remember when Christina Aguilera was marketed as the girl next door type. I guess she still is, as long as you happen to live next door to a strip club, but even if she wasn't parading around in school uniform in 1999, the seeds of her more….liberal…. future were already being sown; 'Genie In A Bottle' is no less sexually suggestive/exploitative in its innuendo-laced painting of the young Aguilera as a virginal bottle fizzing with pent up hormones just waiting for someone to pop her cork. You just have to rub her the right way. Apparently.

But apart from seeing Aguilera all fresh faced and not tarted up in some burlesque/S&M dominatrix outfit and wailing about how ‘Dirrty’ she is, the biggest surprise I now get from 'Genie In A Bottle' is, well, just how dull it sounds. Which isn’t the song’s fault per se - since 2001, I've become far more au-fait with The Strokes Vs Christina Aguilera mash-up creation that pastes Aguilera's original ‘Genie’ vocal directly onto the backing to The Stroke's 'Hard To Explain' to create 'A Stroke Of Genius', an inspired match whose spark and crackle trumps the jaded derivation of its component parts.

Because in giving it the rock setting of The Strokes' guitars, Aguilera's low moan of a vocal gets charged with the mischievous longing of a woman dying for her bottle to be rubbed. The match is so 'right' that Aguilera genuinely sounds like she's singing a different song to the limp pop/R&B stylings that carry this 1999 original and which provide an environment for her not to care less in to the point that it's tempting to think the backing had deliberately been switched by some moral crusaders, intent on protecting her virtue by sabotaging the sexual frission her vocal sparks when it strikes against a harder surface.

And that's a shame, because at least that context gives the lyric a certain 'grown up' legitimacy (instead of fuelling some teen sex male fantasy) and would keep it away from the impressionable young teens that were her audience. 'Genie In A Bottle' remains a solid entry in her back catalogue, but this is pop not so much with an edge as pop spiked with rohypnol and passed to the unwitting. And once the dust from the stockings, bras, basques, high cut pants and low cut tops has settled, it's probably one of the dirrrtiest things she's ever done. But not in a good way.

1999 Eiffel 65: Blue (Da Ba Dee)

If, in some super museum of the future, there should be a need for a single exhibit to epitomise popular Western music in the nineties, they could do worse that stick 'Blue (Da Ba Dee)' on a plinth under glass. Which may seem a bold statement, but to my ears it's a mish mash of styles and traits that have dominated the sounds of the last ten years. For a start, it's another Europop single (and we all know by now how popular that genre has been), which means it also ticks the ever popular 'dance' box too, so two birds, one stone.

Crucially though, the nod to dance isn't just token - 'Blue (Da Ba Dee)' is more subtle than the overt, crayon bright thump of (for example) 'Barbie Girl' and it threads its pop hook on a credible, trance-like beat and piano loop that would only be unwelcome in the 'cool clubs' through an innate snobbishness. Add in some vocoder treated voices babbling a semi-rapped nonsense lyric that lead into a chorus of monstrous catchiness and you have an artefact that, by summing up everything it ever did or could stand for in three and a half minutes, at a stroke makes ten years of Eurodancebubblegum pop redundant. Which kind of makes it a pity I've had to suffer ten years worth of some awful stepping stone singles when the journey could have been a single simple ladder climb/snake slide (depending on your viewpoint) to get to this point.* Oh, and they're all blokes too and so technically a boyband to boot. See? The nineties in a bottle.


*But apart from that, two other things spoil 'Blue (Da Ba Dee)' for me:

1. That it wasn't actually the last number one of the decade (because how fitting would that have been eh?).

2. That Eiffel 65 saw fit to follow it up with the disturbingly similar yet not one tenth as much fun 'Move Your Body' in 2000, a move that, at a stroke, destroyed their aura of fluky, one hit wonder genius.

1999 Vengaboys: We're Going To Ibiza

A re-tooled cover version of Typically Tropical's 197? hit 'Barbados', Vengaboys strip out all the racial stereotyping of the original that furrowed my brow, switch the Caribbean destination for the Balearics and concentrate solely on the arms in the air chorus. Perhaps it concentrates a bit too much - the original at least had a story of sorts underpinning the nonsense (bus driver longs to escape the rain and head home to the sun), but in celebrating Ibiza for itself (i.e. as the clubber's destination of choice) it both underestimates and misunderstands the original to serve up a flattened cover of no discernable personality (though bizarrely, it keeps in the "I don't wanna be a bus driver all my life" line - just how long were they intending to stay?).

Being Europop, then perhaps it doesn't need to do any more to succeed, and to be honest I'd have a lot more time for this had the tune been original. But it's not, and the appropriation of Ibiza (or, as Kim Sasabone sings it, 'Eebitza') as a generic, one stop shop representation of hedonistic dance culture is lazy. Bad enough by itself, but then selling it as such to suburban office workers on a rainy Friday night at their local 'nightspot' is as patronising as Kay Starr taking the piss out of her square parents for trying to dance to the new fangled rock and roll they were clueless about. Cultural gap/generational gap - somebody here doesn't have a clue either, but I fear this time the joke is on the listener. If only they knew it.

1999 Lou Bega: Mambo No. 5

Of course, if we're going to be talking about popular, mainstream Latin music, then they don't come much bigger than Perez Prado, Cuban bandleader and 'King Of The Mambo'. Bega's 'Mambo No 5' takes it's title and central rhythm (via much sampling) from Prado's own 1949 dance tune. It's all credit to Prado that his piece still sounds contemporary, though Bega (who was actually German) helps by coating it with an extra layer of bright Europop and adding a lyric that's equal part nonsense party games ("Jump up and down and move it all around. Shake your head to the sound put your hands an the ground") and equal part a tongue in cheek celebration of his love of the ladies ("A little bit of Monica in my life" etc etc). In Bega's hands, 'Mambo No 5" is a brash burst of colour that maintains enough of its Cuban origins to provide a sheen of authenticity to something that would otherwise be pretty throwaway. But I guess when you have the good fortune to be following Halliwell then anybody would be hard pressed to come up with something less enjoyable.

1999 Geri Halliwell: Mi Chico Latino

Another passenger on that creaking Latin bandwagon, ex Spice Girl Geri takes the soft option with a release sounding not unlike a 'La Isla Bonita' demo, complete with an arthritic grind in place of Madonna's dance swish and a frying pan flat groan of a vocal that rings as genuinely Italian as a Poundstretcher pizza. The Mediterranean flavour gives our Geri excuse enough to writhe around in a bikini on a boat in the video, but honestly, Halliwell and her "I've got a secret, I cannot keep it. It's just a whisper of a distant memory" are about as much fun as stepping barefoot in dogshit.

1999 Westlife: If I Let You Go

When considering boybands, the usual pithy comment/complaint that emerges is that they're interchangeable and 'all sound the same'. I have some sympathy with this, largely because it's true, but to date at least Westlife have bucked the trend by offering up something a bit different than the usual same old. Different for boybands anyway - first number one 'Swear It Again' was a dense slab of Wagnerian handwringing, and though 'If I let You Go' takes a step back from that angsty abyss, it doesn't take a huge one; the choppy indie-like opening gives way to another mini Meat Loaf blast of histrionics as the guys agonise over weighing in the balance whether a long distance relationship or unrequited love from afar is worth the candle. One of those two anyway - the exact meaning of 'If I Let You Go' is obscure save a general idea that there are some tough choices to be made in the name of love. Or maybe even more - does the "And once again I´m thinking about taking the easy way out" refer to suicide I wonder?

Probably not, but it all adds to the weighty pot that's been Westlife's stock in trade to date, the sound of a band walking the line between pop bunnies and rock pigs and unsure of which side of it to fall. 'If I Let You Go' is a mini operetta of a song, one that seems more suited as a linking narrative of a show and it's something I can easily imagine a Bon Jovi or a Bryan Adams cranking out in a stadium. Five more of either of that pair is hardly what the world is waiting for then or now, but what would be predictability personified in their hands becomes a slightly more interesting proposition in West. Only slightly mind - for all its fancy pants production and huge key changes, 'If I Let You Go' is still MOR/AOR fayre that gets dull very, very quickly.

1999 Ronan Keating: When You Say Nothing At All

First solo number one from Keating after the winding up of Boyzone and a cover of a modern country standard (taken from the soundtrack of the inexplicably popular 'Notting Hill'). At the risk of sounding unduly negative before I even start, I can say I have two main beefs with this, the first being the song itself. A typically sentimental eye waterer of love eternal, in its race to say something profound on the state of human relationships, 'When You Say Nothing At All' manages to confuse love with need and even carry an obscure message in it's very title ("You say it best when you say nothing at all") that could equally be taken in a non flattering, patronising way. To make sure it isn't, much of the song's success will depend on it's delivery; a delicate performance (such as, for example, Alison Krauss') can gloss over many of its sins by a reliance on harmony and melody. However, wearing his black and white serious face, Keating intones the lyric as a man at his wits end, a tremulous priest delivering the last rites on the gasping corpse of a song killed off by a tightly wound arrangement that piles on more angst and tension than something advocating communicating through silence really needs. And in this case, far more than I really want to hear. Ever again.

1999 Ricky Martin: Livin' La Vida Loca

I commented back on 'Spice Up Your Life' that there'd be a spate of Latin flavoured pop singles coming our way in the late nineties and I suppose Ricky Martin, being himself Puerto Rican and so no cultural tourist, was the standard bearer of this odd yet short lived phenomenon. And as if to firmly put the music of his birth on the map, Martin goes for broke on his vocal with a performance of wild eyed enthusiasm only to be let down by a fancy dress outfit of a backing that politely smoulders where it should burn like fire. Being (as it was) pieced together backstage entirely using pro-tools doesn't help to pump air into the flatness. Neither does the rather one dimensional tale that Martin is peddling, meaning the effect is one of the music keen to keep its distance from the Latin femme fatale with "devil red " lips and "skin the colour mocha" who's "into superstitions black cats and voodoo dolls". Oh, and drugging men before robbing them blind too.

Oh yes - 'Livin' La Vida Loca' was co-written by soft rock stalwart Desmond Child who knew a thing or two about how women are meant to behave in songs ("She'll make you take your clothes off and go dancing in the rain. She'll make you live her crazy life but she'll take away your pain") and his idealised woman from south of the border on a mission to wring men's hearts dry is as stereotypical as the Beach Boys' 'California Girls'.* But after the recent wave of boy band simper it's refreshing to meet a woman who knows what she wants, even if it is a backhanded male fantasy. So, clichéd business as usual then? Maybe, but come on - give him a break; 1999 has been a white bread kind of year so far and it's not going to get a lot better so it's how nice is it to see a burst of colour from a someone who actually sounds like he's enjoying himself for a change? Very.


* Maybe I'm being a bit harsh here; in the late eighties I worked for a well known Japanese electronics firm where Sarah from accounts was the epitome of Ricky's Latin siren. Sultry pout, olive skin and black coils of hair that all but hissed - she ticked all the right boxes. So much so that her nickname amongst us lads on the shopfloor was 'she-devil', mainly because she looked like she could cause a boy serious harm in the heart department and laugh in his face as she was doing it. Whether this was true or not I was never in a position to find out. None of us were really, which kind of explains a lot.

1999 ATB: 9pm (Till I Come)

A common theme amongst music journos in the nineties was to question whether electronic dance music had finally killed off guitar based rock for good. It's not a theory that's ever troubled me because, frankly, I think it's a load of nonsense, but it makes me smile to wonder what those self same doubters would have made of trance anthem '9pm (Till I Come)' and the plucked steel guitar motif that skips all over it. Basically the work of German producer André Tanneberger (but with a complete absence of Eurocheese), the delight of '9pm (Till I Come)' stems from its knowing when to get busy and when to shut up. The main body of the track is an unremarkable dance pump, but by swinging across it that guitar riff bites chunks out of its hardcore piston thrust to leave acres of space that are filled in with a spiky anticipation and sexually charged female vocal come-ons to create a dance track that manages to be both frantic and calm. Simple yet effective, for me it's the trippy yet hardcore essence of the 'trance' branch of dance (sorry!) and, along with Robert Miles' 'One And One', sums up for me all that was good about the whole of the nineties dance scene in four minutes and makes me yearn for memories of nights at all the Ibiza clubs I never went to when I was young enough not to stand out like a glob of blood in a bottle of milk.

1999 Vengaboys: Boom Boom Boom Boom

Being more Dutch Europop/dance, it would be convenient to report that 'Boom Boom Boom Boom' took up where 'No Limits' left off. Only it doesn't. Quite the opposite in fact. Lead vocalist Kim Sasabone tries to start a fire with her opening "If you're alone and you need a friend. Someone to make you forget your problems. Just come along baby, take my hand" invite of a one night stand, but it's melody is a direct lift from Michael Jackson's 'Beat It' and besides, it's soon washed out by 'Boom' cubed's mallet simple beat, eighties vocoder laced "Vengaboys are back in town" and "Whoa oh whoa oh" interruptions and a wheezy Wurlitzer parp that sounds of an age where keyboards you can plug in to the mains were something of a novelty. But in 1999 they weren't, and 'Boom Boom Boom Boom' manages to reduce itself to a patchwork of the most obviously garish dance motifs to date; I know this kind of crass, overtly good time party pop isn't meant to be taken that seriously, but I at least expect those involved to have made some kind of effort in serving it up - 'Boom Boom Boom Boom' is effortless alright, but in all the wrong ways. And it's not for me.

1999 S Club 7: Bring It On Back

Although my attitudes toward music have changed and widened considerably over the past twenty years or so, it wasn't always the case and I don't need much of an imagination to know what the early teen version of me (had he been an early teen in 1999 that is) would have made of S Club 7 as a whole and 'Bring It All Back' in particular. He'd have hated both. No doubt about that. I can see me now, wound up to a pitch well past fever, loudly dismissing its relentless bounce of juvenile enthusiasm to anyone who'd listen as disposable ephemera that wasn't played on proper instruments by a proper band. And then I'd have probably gone back to my Marillion albums.

That was then anyway, but though the 'actual' 1999 me was far less blinkered in his views, he still looked sideways at S Club 7 and their stage school precocious, overly photogenic and assembled by audition make up (the current version of me still does to be honest - there's literally nothing there beyond a raft of pretty faces), but at least the tunnel vision had broadened as regards the song itself. Essentially modern R&B with all 'r' and 'b' bleached out by S Club 7's perky yet flat vocals and a musical box churn of handclaps and whistles, that relentless bounce of sunshine now becomes a plus point rather than a negative, a clockwork spiral of verse to chorus hook and back again that barely pauses for breath in its celebratory rush of enjoying itself.

And that, I think, adds to my earlier thesis regarding what makes a 'good' pop song - whilst I can pull a dozen acts off the top of my head who'd have done a better job on this than the S Clubbers, the actual band and their method of delivery here are secondary to a song that's too strong for them to ruin (and by taking its positive message on face value with the well meaning enthusiasm of youth, then how could they totally derail it anyway?) But while it is undoubtedly good pop, it's also rebottled pop, a derivative song that chooses to mimic rather than progress the medium. And that's a hard strike against it in my eyes; 'Bring It All Back' borrows a bit too much from the Jackson 5 or The Osmonds template for its inspiration (again, I keep hearing 'One Bad Apple' as a main source here). It might work fine for a new generation (or those with short memories), but this offers up little more than a remould when I'd really rather see some new tread.

1999 Baz Luhrmann: Everybody's Free (To Wear Sunscreen)

It seems of late that at least once a month a friend or 'acquaintance' will forward me some viral email or Facebook message that sets out a heart-warming story and/or piece of homespun wisdom. The fact they usually end threatening of luck of the worst kind if I don't forward it to ten people in my address book by the next full moon is a bit of a downer but hey, no worries - I'm not the superstitious type so these things go straight in the bin anyway, though I confess that occasionally even a hard nosed cynic like me will read something in them that strikes a chord or two before they're deleted.

Being nothing more than a voice actor reciting journalist Mary Schmich's 1997 'commencement speech' (that appeared in the Chicago Tribune) over the choral version of Rozalla's 'Everybody's Free (To Feel Good)', I tend to regard 'Everybody's Free (To Wear Sunscreen)' as essentially a 1999 version of those emails. Though far less of a novelty in our modern, e-communication overloaded times, it was moreso of one in 1999 and for the want of anything better to say, your reaction to it is going to depend on your own attitude to the content of the spam mails I mentioned above.

Schmich's very American ("Live in New York City once, but leave before it makes you hard"), right leaning ("Don't expect anyone else to support you"), slightly self satisfied recipe for a wholesome life won't be for everyone, but there's nothing that's going to raise too many hackles. The sort of 'common sense' granny used to dispense, for my own part I'd have found more value in a hardcore remix of Renton's 'Choose Life' speech from 'Trainspotting', or the "You're not your job. You're not how much money you have in the bank.You're not the car you drive.You're not the contents of your wallet" speech from Palahniuk's 'Fight Club', but horses for courses I guess.

'Everybody's Free (To Wear Sunscreen)' stands as a curio from a more technologically backward, less media intrusive era where mail still came through the letterbox and people had to actively go to information instead of it coming to them, unwanted and unasked for. On occasions when it did, like this, then the message took on more inherent 'worth' and 'value' by its sheer 'not heard that before' novelty. Harmless enough I guess, but lifestyle sloganeering belongs on posters, badges and newspaper columns......anywhere really besides at the top of the charts.