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While I can own up to have done a fair bit of clubbing during the early to mid nineties, I was never what you might call a 'professional clubber'. My choice of venue was always dictated by whoever was running the best deal on vodka, and the sort of club that would let me through the door weren't the kind of places to employ DJs who'd get in a lather over the latest 12 inch, white label remix. So seeing as this is a 1994 remix (of Di Bart's 1993 original) that generated exactly that kind of excitement amongst the hardcore, I feel self consciously unqualified to be commenting on it.
Despite the name and track's Italian house-lite feel, Di Bart was an English DJ who created his music Joe Meek style in a recording studio above the bathroom shop business that formed his day job. In its first incarnation, 'The Real Thing' had the straighter structure of basic pop; the remix added a set of dance remoulds in the form of an almost ambient groove that coaxed you onto the dancefloor instead of bludgeoning you there. But in so doing, 'The Real Thing' becomes too polite for its own purpose, too wordy for its own chilled moodiness and too inconsequential to be memorable; like the ripples from a small pebble tossed into a deep pond, 'The Real Thing' asks for nothing, gives nothing and drifts past me leaving no discernable impression save a shoulder shrugging indifference and a vague feeling of guilt that I don't have anything else to say about it. Except to comment that 1994 is not shaping up to be a vintage year.
As a music fan growing up in the eighties, the lead off singles that heralded each new Prince album were always something to look out for, an event offering up a rare treat in an all too often sea of bland.* '1999', 'When Doves Cry', Alphabet Street', 'Kiss', 'Sign O The Times' - fine singles all that in their own way pushed boundaries just that bit further so strange that his first UK number one came in a decade of struggle for the artist instead of the one he part ruled. Maybe there was always something just too off the wall about his best work to enjoy mass acceptance - the bass free face slap funk of 'When Doves Cry' or the compressedtowithinaninchofitslife 'Kiss' for example are borderline experimental recordings with skew enough to not invite the universal appeal of a number one. Maybe, but whatever, 'The Most Beautiful Girl In The World' (not a cover of the Charlie Rich song) is as shamelessly direct and risk free a song as he's ever written.
"Could you be the most beautiful girl in the world? Its plain to see you're the reason that God made a girl" - unmistakably Prince, over the chime of a guitar sparkling like sunlight on water, his falsetto picks out the lyric with a precise sense of wonder at the power and purity of love that banishes the sleazy bump and groan innuendo that had become his adopted trademark. It's the sort of song Take That should themselves have been writing/covering instead of trying to be clever beyond their talent, yet it's precisely this normality and absence of the unexpected that makes it a far less satisfying single than the brace mentioned above.
At a shade under five minutes long I'm on constant tenterhooks for Prince to whip off the mask and blast out a squally solo, for his voice to stretch to a squawk or for a sudden key change to shift it into leftfield to break up the ordinary. But it never comes, and 'The Most Beautiful Girl In The World' plays itself out to fade like a stand up recounting a story that has no punchline. Of course, not every story needs a punchline to be memorable or rewarding, but with Prince at the wheel then an interesting journey is the least I expect - I always rely on him to take me to good times at the beach and so it's with a vague feeling of disappointment that he parks up outside an empty warehouse at journey's end.
* 'The Most Beautiful Girl In The World' isn't by 'Prince' though, it's by the squiggly symbol he adopted in the early nineties. Unfortunately, my keyboard doesn't have that font and besides, if it looks like a duck and moves like a duck…….
After the blotchy bore of 'Babe', 'Everything Changes' finds more of a purpose by adopting a Philly soul structure and glide that leads directly to the dancefloor. Retro, but not blatantly so, 'Everything Changes' has the feel of a lesser O'Jays B side dusted down and given a new lease of life via a gritty lead vocal from Robbie Williams. By borrowing from a tried and tested formula, this should have been something of an open goal, but as is its wont, the music and tune come part of a package and it's the whole that makes my hairs rise.
I tend to think that Take That missed a trick by not releasing this as a prologue to 'Babe' and as part of a trilogy of casual misogyny that would find it's natural conclusion in 'Back For Good'. Williams and his "Now don't you cry, just one more kiss before I have to go" somewhere where " We're a thousand miles apart" is the narrator of 'Babe'' when he gets back from his trip ("I'm here again, I tell you I'm here again. Where have you been?"). Which in itself is harmless enough, but rather than part with ae fond kiss, Williams gives this girl a blunt "Girl, come on over here, let me hold you for a little while" before nailing her to the floor with "The rumours true, you know that there've been others. What can I do, I tell you baby they don't mean a thing. Now girl don't go and throw our love away, I'll be home soon back in your arms to hear you say that everything changes but you". In other words, "you're a doormat I can take for granted whenever I'm in town and can stop screwing around long enough to need a bed to sleep in".
The lyric's complete lack of self awareness at what a self centred bastard this man is being just ramps up the nastiness, and with such a unpleasant and spiteful standpoint underlying it any soul the music had takes on a dark and rank hue in its sweetening of such callous mean-spiritness. In fairness, I put this down to a hamfisted cluelessness on the part of the writers more than any genuine intent, but by the same token the "Everything changes but you. You know every single day I'll be thinking about you" chorus might seem an agreeable pop sentiment wrapped in a catchy tune, but that's sheer fluke too. Because nothing I've heard so far gives any confidence that Gary Barlow knows the first thing about what a woman thinks or feels in any given situation ever; far from a position of equality, females in the Take That world are there purely to provide whatever degree of stability or gratification the guys might be needing at any given point. And it's this ignorance makes stuff like 'Everything Changes' nigh on unlistenable for anyone who actually takes the time to listen.
I'm always partial to a bit of quirk in anything, and there should always be room in the charts for something that almost defies categorisation. Quirky even. But I also think there's a line between a lightning in a bottle flash of genius and taking people for mugs. On paper another Eurodance act (from the Netherlands this time), this 'dance' though is sampled from a twenties Charleston romp overlain with a 4/4 dance beat with the producers scat "doop be doop" over it; there's literally nothing more to 'Doop' than what you'll hear on first listen. It's a nice idea I suppose, and the ragtime clarinet squeals add a touch of the time capsule exotic, but 'Doop' is like being handed a single dinner plate as a wedding gift - it's not entirely useless, but opportunities to put it to any good use are limited to situation and circumstance. 'Doop' could be a fun piece to get the would be flappers going at a drab office party, but its one dimensional fencepost dumbness is not going to slot easily into any club DJ set. Or anywhere else at all really. Genius or piss-takers? Probably neither, Doop are a pair of chancers who got incredibly lucky, and the best to be said is that at least it was a one shot deal that didn't herald the start of a string of hits in the same vein of awfulness that was Jive Bunny. I guess sometimes you have to take your mercies wherever you can find them.
There's a part of me that's always seen this as round two of a pissing contest between Carey and Whitney Houston. Houston had already fired the first shot by taking a blowtorch to 'I Will Always Love You' and now Mariah steps up to the plate to do much the same to 'Without You'. Carey has never been shy about putting her vocal wares on display and to be fair she has picked a song that welcomes a little melodrama - from the day it was written 'Without You' served to roll out a barrel of angst over seeing the back of your lover walking away for the last time. By far the most famous reference point is provided by Nilsson's 1972 version, but where Harry adopted a slow burn to unleash his anguish, the echo drenched sparsity of Carey's take drips with the tension of a woman on the edge from the first notes.
And that's kind of the problem with this; it's not a song built to withstand that level of pressure. By the time the "I can't live"s roll 'round then rather than releasing the steam, the pressure cooker simply cracks in two. 'Without You' by Mariah Carey might have worked as a histrionic white knuckle ride, but by adding go faster stripes to what was a quality vehicle in its own right, Carey serves up her theatrics with a heavy side dish of "Ooooohoooo"s and vocal tic groans that make it the work of a bad actress trying to project to the back of the room, blissfully unaware that the ham of her overplayed hand hasn't even engaged the front row. Overwrought, overlong with precious little true fire, this is a dud.
I know someone from my parent's generation who says they are unable to listen to anybody singing 'The Little Drummer Boy' without feeling stressed over it's association with Myra Hindley and Ian Brady. For many among my own generation, the fact that 'Things Can Only Get Better' was used to soundtrack the Labour party's successful 1997 election campaign means that it now comes with baggage of stress all its own. And for a subset of them, the once Micawber-like optimism of the title has now become a by-word for lost opportunity, broken promises and a whole truck load of cynicism at how it all turned out. None of which is fair on D:Ream or their song, although I guess there's an element of complicity in that they at least had a say in the use of the song for political sloganeering in a way that 'The Little Drummer Boy' writer Katherine Davis most certainly did not.
But back in 1993 it was just another Brit dance song, albeit one remixed from its 1993 version. Both takes spurn the cheese of a Eurodance bounce to boast a revivalist feel instead. And being built up from a gospel base the song should be soaring, and it would if it were not for Peter Cunnah's lead boots vocal that's determined throughout to not count the chickens of the title and to couch most of his "better"s on the downturn note of anticlimactic caution of a man who doesn't quite believe what he's singing. And if Cunnah doesn't believe, then I don't believe either and its this inability to get a good arms aloft, celebratory fist pump in the air at the thought of a better tomorrow that hamstrings 'Things Can Only Get Better' and makes it a good hook wasted. Maybe its political use was more perceptive than anyone could have imagined.
It can come as a surprise to find out that The Beatles neither wrote nor were the first to record 'Twist And Shout'; i'ts a song become so closely associated with the fab four that they may as well have done both. So much so that when listening to any version, I'm always on tenterhooks for Lennon's 'wooooo's; they're as much part of the song as the lyrics for me and I miss them when they don't arrive. They don't arrive here either - Chaka Demus & Pliers reggae take shifts the song back towards its wannabe 'La Bamba' origins (as recorded by The Top Notes in 1961) with the toasted ad-libs from Pliers adding colour, verve and a sense of spontaneity to the mix that's lacking from most of the piledriving rock and roll versions. Yet at heart though, it still just a reggae version of a popular song that was never crying out for such a makeover and in so doing it gives both the song and the act a jokey, almost novelty feel that diminishes the credibility of the medium more than it spreads the word. And while there's more heart and sheer enjoyment contained within than in anything UB40 had released in the previous ten years, it's still more of an inessential release than not.
While I can own up to have done a fair bit of clubbing during the early to mid nineties, I was never what you might call a 'professional clubber'. My choice of venue was always dictated by whoever was running the best deal on vodka, and the sort of club that would let me through the door weren't the kind of places to employ DJs who'd get in a lather over the latest 12 inch, white label remix. So seeing as this is a 1994 remix (of Di Bart's 1993 original) that generated exactly that kind of excitement amongst the hardcore, I feel self consciously unqualified to be commenting on it.
