"Yes, I admit to being a bit of a seventies revivalist — and quite proud of it too I am."
— Marc Andrews
Cor! Yet another special edition of VER HITS!!!
Every so often I get the urge to pull away from top pop mag Smash Hits in order to see what some of the less celebrated music journals were up to. I have already taken a look at reviews from both Record Mirror and Star Hits and now it's time for Smash Hits Australia!
As a Canadian, I have always been vaguely jealous of the land Down Under. While my homeland is bigger and has more people, Australia is generally better known. They have exotic animals, while we have the beaver, which only prompts everyone — myself included — to giggle like schoolchildren. The country is on an island (or is it a continent? No one seems able to offer a satisfying answer on that one) and they're the big boys of their neighbourhood, while my homeland is just north of the nation that perpetually overshadows us. They had big pop stars and their telly was popular; we had singers that were a joke and hardly anyone in Canada watched our domestic TV shows, let alone anyone else. (This even carries on in South Korea where I currently live: Australia is one of the few countries that gets a special Korean name — 호주, which is pronounced 'ho-ju' and guarantees, fact fiends, that there's at least one country in which Australia and Austria do not enter back-to-back at the Olympics' opening ceremonies; Canada is simply known as the (almost) phonetic 개나다) They even got their own edition of Smash Hits while we had to make do with Star Hits from across the border.
Similar to the US counterpart, Aussie Hits drew heavily from the British original. Both used a mix of original material and copy they nicked from the parent mag. This present issue, for example, includes a piece about Neighbours and future Memento/Iron Man 3 star Guy Pearce and a short feature about a "supergroup" called the Australian Olympians recording a charity single called "You're Not Alone" in anticipation for the Seoul Olympics (well, I wasn't expecting much so at least it didn't disappoint!). Aussie content fleshes out Bitz, RSVP and the letters page but much of the remainder of the issue contains articles recycled from Blighty (including pieces on Pet Shop Boys, Debbie Gibson and Bros). And fair enough, it's not like the average Australian pop kid would've been privy to "real ale" Smash Hits.
The Australian version obviously doesn't measure up to the original but it is streets ahead of the American Star Hits. Two things give it the edge: (1) the tried and tested humour of the UK edition is present and correct and the Aussie staff does a commendable job keeping up with it and (2) the singles review page appears to be a regular part of the magazine (though I only have two proper issues to go by). The Americans wanted to focus on album reviews, leaving the singles to only be included seldomly (I only decided to write about bloody Until December giving "praise" to Corey Hart because the options were so limited) but Smash Hits isn't Smash Hits without both 45's and LP's.
A big thanks to Michael Kane's excellent Flickr page for providing the scans from this issue. I highly recommend it for everyone who loves their music magazines.
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Mark Moore was the house boffin who seemed to be the most willing to pretend to be a pop star. I just posted the other day about the difficulties that DJ's had playing the pop game but the man behind S'Express seemed more amenable to this world. Coldcut seemed to find a way around it by recruiting glamourous vocalists to front their records but they weren't interested in embracing the spotlight themselves. Tim Simenon could happily mug for the camera in Bomb the Bass' videos but he was still an awkward band figurehead. But Moore did promo, had little trouble looking like a pop star and would even get himself on the cover of Smash Hits.
Moore's idea was to dispense with the mixing desk and make S'Express seem as much like a real band as possible. Looking like Chris Lowe or Vince Clarke with a keytar in hand, he made himself into the man behind the music, which of course he was. Jocasta, Michelle and Linda Love are credited in the Original Soundtrack album sleevenotes though it's unclear what they actually did. This was well in advance of controversies surrounding fake lead vocals on Black Box and Milli Vanilli records and no one cared if those striking girls were lip synching to lines like "Come on and listen to be baby now ooh" and "I've got the hots for you". All that mattered was that they were cool and their song was a banger.
And what a song it is. With the basis of the tune pinched from the superb "Is It Love You're After" by Rose Royce, Moore could easily have pieced together something limp that couldn't even approach its source material but the layers of other samples only make you forget about everything that came before. Talent borrows, genius steals, says the old cliche but there's also a certain genius to be found in being able to crib bits of various other records and make them into something that's a marvel in and of itself. Sure, Andrews used to "boogie" and "bump" to some of these numbers when he was a "wee thing" but the future would be all about "boogieing" and "bumping" to these wonderful hybrids for another generation of "wee things".
"Theme from S'Express" had already topped the UK charts for a fortnight when Andrews gives it his seal of approval. As with a lot of popular house music of the time, it didn't do much in North America but it almost made the Top 10 in Australia. Americans and Canadians weren't ready for this type of thing outside of the clubs but Europeans and Aussies recognised it immediately as the glorious pop that it was, past, present and future.
Postscript: We'll be seeing Marc Andrews again in this blog after making the move to Britain and the switch to "real ale" Smash Hits. Stay tuned.
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Also of some cop
Louis Armstrong: "What a Wonderful World"
So, if S'Express seemed old to Andrews then what of Satchmo? I love me lots of Louis and it can be tempting for us big fans to be dismissive of the later hits like "Hello Dolly", "We Have All the Time in the World" and "What a Wonderful World". He could barely play the trumpet by this point in his life and for me his vocals always take a backseat to his extraordinary soloing. All that said, this was excellent in 1968, 1988 and still now in 2021. While clearly not the most gifted vocalist around, few had more character (he and Johnny Cash still have the most recognizable singing voices in all of western music) and he knew how to emote properly. Used memorably for the Robin Williams film Good Morning Vietnam, "What a Wonderful World" gained a second wind in the summer of '88 and a whole new generation was able to get a glimpse of Pops' genius, even if it was a long way off from the Hot Fives and Sevens. It even got to number one in Australia so Andrews wasn't alone.
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