— Cliff White
Well, it had to happen, didn't it? After an impressive four top notch Singles of the Fortnight on the bounce, we were probably due a come down. A pair from that batch are simply outstanding — Blondie's "Heart of Glass", which topped the charts all over the world and is still immensely popular, and Rick James' "High on Your Love Suite/One Mo Hit (of Your Love)", which didn't do overly well at the time and isn't remembered today — while the other two — Lene Lovich's "Lucky Number" and Fischer-Z's "Remember Russia" — are just a notch below in quality but still excellent. In comparison, then, Rachel Sweet's "I Go to Pieces" isn't anything special: a countrified cover version of an inconsequential sixties pop song. Ho-hum.
That's not to say that there aren't elements to admire here. It's actually a marked improvement on the better known version by Peter & Gordon with the duo's typically bland vocals dragging things down quite a bit (composer Del Shannon's subsequent recording is preferred for his customary emotive restraint but it too lacks something). Sweet perhaps doesn't give it an ideal reading but her carefree, flirtatious singing gives the song a spark of life that never existed before. In contrast with Cliff White's observation above, it seems more effective as a record to be played when you're sitting forlornly on your own and feeling like you need nothing more than to get the hell out of that lake of tears you've been wallowing in.
Great break up songs should have their feet in two camps: one to wallow in self-pity, the other to guide you out of it. Grant McLennan and Robert Forster's compositions on The Go-Betweens' superb 16 Lovers Lane (the greatest relationship-gone-to-pot album of all time no matter what fans of Rumours and Blood on the Tracks would have you believe) are drenched in sorrow and contain bitterness and pain but it's also clear that they're going to get through these bust ups — and, by extension, so can we. The heartbreak Sweet's going through has shot her nerves but it's not about to let her curl up in a corner and die. She's tough — she wouldn't be sat on a motorbike in the promotional video just to show off, would she? — and has sass and doesn't care if anyone else happens to see her breakdown at the sight of her ex.
Despite being just sixteen-years-old at the time and hailing from Akron, Ohio, Sweet was part of Stiff, the renowned British record label home to grumpy singer-songwriters, music hall mavericks and so-called "performance artists" — not exactly where you'd expect a promising country singer to land. Still, the pub rockers who were the backbone of Stiff's early period were all country and western fans at heart and it's possible they were after another Tanya Tucker teen star. (And why fabricate a drawling, faux-hillbilly songstress in the UK when you can land a full-formed, authentic one in the US?) Unfortunately, the label wasn't iconoclastic enough to make Sweet truly interesting. Fed a bunch of old pop tunes and tasked with doing her thing, there are good intentions here but with a faint pointlessness to much of her material (she just about pulls off an awkward "And Then He Kissed Me/Be My Baby" medley in 1981). She may have been too young and not at all interested but it's a shame she couldn't have been given free reign on her creativity — not unlike Blondie, Lene Lovich, Fischer-Z and Rick James.
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Also Reviewed This Fortnight
M: "Pop Muzik"
Some songs sound better in your head than when you sit down and listen to them while others are so much better heard than imagined but few tunes are exactly the same in either state. "Pop Muzik" is one, even if I can never quite get the order of the cities quite right (though I do know it ends with 'Munich' which Robin Scott is somehow is able to rhyme with 'muzik'). Actually not a great song, it is nonetheless a terrific record which sums up the entire history of the rock 'n' roll era while being sonically futuristic. It would be as relevant today as it was then but for the fact that hardly anyone talks about pop music anymore...unless you host a podcast or have a blog or something.
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