— William Shaw
I was a young pop kid in early 1989 but the radio was seldom on. We would return from a weekend trip to, say, Norwich, Windsor or York and the "wireless" would be promptly switched on to catch the Top 40 Countdown with Bruno Brookes but, otherwise, I never gave much thought to listening to Radio 1 or Capitol Radio after coming home from school to accompany doing my geography homework. My sister and I spelled each other with the small tape player in the room we shared but, again, the radio was hardly ever on. In the car on the way to school or on those weekend trips it would play out much the same way: tapes would frequently be playing and no one gave much thought to turning on the radio. (This is odd looking back because we always had the radio on back in Canada)
Thus, I never got much exposure to pop music that wasn't on the charts — hey, if it isn't on the Top 40, how popular can it be anyway? — so the music of someone like Nick Heyward completely passed me by. It was left to Smash Hits to fill the void: they'd describe his records and I'd imagine how they'd sound. (I was just eleven at the time and still a long way off of trusting my luck by taking a punt on something unknown to me) Luckily, he had his champions at the top pop mag, even if he was being ignored elsewhere.
Alex Kadis already gave Heyward a Single of the Fortnight for comeback single "You're My World", describing it as "joyfully poppy and daffily jaunty as ever and it's shamelessly romantic and summery to "boot"!" She concludes her review by welcoming him back (as does William Shaw just over four months later: I'm surprised he was able to miss him since he hadn't been gone all that long). Richard Lowe isn't exactly bowled over by album I Love You Avenue but it is a "nice record" filled with "smashing" songs. I read and re-read that review and was convinced I was going to love it; I was so sure of it's brilliance that I didn't even have to hear it.
Just prior to the release of the album came "Tell Me Why", a second shot at the hit parade after "You're My World" missed out. This time, it's William Shaw's turn to heap some well-deserved praise on our Nick. As he says above, it opens on a unexpected downbeat note as he channels Morrissey in the verses. It might have been better had he held the chorus back a bit to really catch listeners off guard but that's a trivial knock against an otherwise astonishing single. At a time when the charts were exploding with techno, hip hop and indie rock, there wouldn't have been anything fresh at the prospect of a modestly sung sunshine pop song but who else was able to pull such a thing off back then? (Heyward's only real competition in that regard would have been the duo of Grant McLennan and Robert Forster of Australia's Go-Betweens and they were hardly conquering the charts either)
A common thread in the reviews of Kadis, Lowe and Shaw is how Heyward was once a pretty big deal when he was in Haircut One Hundred but things ended up going pear-shaped for him in his solo career. He had become a classic case of a faded pop star who couldn't escape from the shadow of his former band, or so we might assume. Luckily, his muse had remained and he seemed resigned to a life outside of chartdom. He was neither clinging desperately to former glories nor pathetically attempting to hop on the bandwagon of slick sophisti-pop production. Yes, his music had gone a little more indie and he wasn't unwilling to use synths but his M.O. remained and he's managed to stick with it to this day.
Still, it's easy for me to love it to death today when I have YouTube to feed me Heyward tunes from over thirty years ago. Back in the day this was a single that existed strictly in the pages of Smash Hits and I had to go on whatever I had read to provide me with some semblance of a pop song. It was around this time that I saw myself as a budding songwriter and attempting to picture how a tune would go based strictly on reviews proved a valuable exercise. (It also led me into a habit of coming up with titles before composing songs to go with them) I would wistfully sing the lines "tell me why" to myself in a style that wasn't a world away from his finished product but coming up with the rest proved much more challenging. We can't all be as talented as Nick Heyward.
~~~~~
Also Reviewed This Fortnight
Marc Almond featuring Gene Pitney: "Something's Gotten Hold of My Heart"
Shaw isn't terribly impressed this, one of those cross-generational duets that were big in the late-eighties. Feeling it was a song that was "over-the-top" to begin with, he tuts at how the pair of Marc Almond and Gene Pitney have taken it to "hysterical extremes". I would've been in agreement with him at the time — actually, I was just bored by it — but now I'm in awe of this vocalist's masterclass. Almond really shouldn't be in the same league as Pitney but he holds his own and the pair sing in tandem beautifully. A surprise UK number one, it had a small part to play in the sixties revival going on in 1989 even if the pop kids still weren't quite ready for Burt Bachrach. Scintillating stuff.
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