Betty Boo: "Let Me Take You There"

5 August 1992

"Cool, clever and catchy; Madonna and Kylie will probably be sick with jealousy because it's exactly the sort of thing they'd love to be doing."

— Tom Doyle

The Beatmasters were a trio of DJ's who reluctantly became pop stars during the late-eighties' house music boom. Like many of their contemporaries, they seemed out of place in the limelight (only Mark Moore of S'Express made a game effort to play the part) so they shifted the attention to guest vocalists, all of whom seemed likely to achieve stardom. First up was Cookie Crew, whose collaboration with Paul Carter, Amanda Glanfield and Richard Walmsley resulted in a Top 10 hit with "Rok Da House" but the pair largely fizzled on their own. Next came veteran singer P.P. Arnold. Their Top 20 hit in October 1988 "Burn It Up" is a banger but this failed to rejuvenate the vocalist's fortunes. Then, young English rapper Merlin joined up for "Who's in the House" which got to number eight in the spring of '89. The promising hip hop star also appeared on S'Express' debut album Original Soundtrack but his prospects were hindered by a prison sentence. The Beatmasters weren't making stars, they were showing how their featured vocalists weren't able to cut it on their own.

Betty Boo seemed to play it differently. Appearing relatively normal (she looks a bit like Natalie Merchant in her first Smash Hits appearance) for their hit single "Hey DJ / I Can't Dance (to the Music You're Playing)" before shifting into cartoon pop form once her solo career began a year later. With her records "Doin' the Do" and "Where Are You Baby" hinting at the sixties' influence that had been all over dance pop and indie in 1990, it seemed like her timing couldn't have been better. And the fact that she looked like Emma Peel and Barbarella gave her that extra bit of retro chic appeal.

Betty Boo hadn't been a big deal in North America but I liked what I saw. She was different, seemed more than happy to make a fool of herself and was the sort of girl my thirteen-year-old self dreamed of. If the quartet Fuzzbox had been one person they would have looked and acted like the former Alison Clarkson. (What I failed to recognise was that she took the pop game much more seriously than the always up for a laugh Vix, Mags, Jo and Tina; how could I have spotted a steely and determined pop starlet by just a few pics that made it across the Atlantic in the pages of the old French pop mag Salut les copains?)

As for her records, I was charmed at first but it didn't take long for her shtick to wear thin. "Hey DJ" had been robust enough but free of The Beatmasters her vocal toughness became undermined by catchy but disposable tunes that really leaned towards younger listeners. The teen boys already fancied her so why not try to attract young and impressionable girls. All this is great and she played the part well but her music just blended in with the crowd even as she seemed born to stand out.

As if giving up entirely, she came back in 1992 with a fresh batch of songs that were no better than before presenting herself as just another sex kitten pop songstress. Having been away from the pop scene for more than a year and a half, she was returning to to a world that had largely moved on. (Ver Hits even acknowledges this in this same issue in the section formerly known as Bitz: "You wouldn't be blamed for forgetting Betty Boo", the short piece commences) There were enough pop kids who had enough interest to help "Let Me Take You There" almost get into the Top 10 but this would be her last shot at chart action.

Madonna and Kylie Minogue weren't exactly at their best in '92 but even on their worst day, they could effortlessly do something that could outpace the bland "Let Me Take You There". Aside from a nod to The Beach Boys in the musical break — the aquatic floatiness brings to mind the instrumental "The Nearest Faraway Place" from the group's 1969 album 20/20 — there isn't much to recommend. Betty Boo tries to sound sensual and she just about pulls it off but this probably makes the raps in the early verses seem even more out of place.

Memorable pop stars who make a mark don't come around very often and former pop kids who are now in their forties are right to have a fondness for Betty Boo, even if her records sometimes missed the mark. But the character had mostly disappeared leaving the still young Clarkson to put herself at the centre of it. But how could she have been expected to succeed? It was Betty Boo who was the pop star, Alison Clarkson just happened to be the one doing the rapping and singing. They both needed to be present for there to be any hope of it working.

~~~~~

Also Reviewed This Fortnight

Cud: "Purple Love Balloon"

With a terrible name and a lead singer who looked like a grumpier, more well-nourished Mick Hucknall, people couldn't have expected much from Cud. I remember first hearing about them and figuring they'd be just the sort of group I could get behind. And I did, only I wasn't always thrilled by their music. "Purple Love Balloon" is one of only three Top 40 hits for the Leeds foursome and is one of their better efforts. Carl Puttnam's voice isn't for everyone but it's distinctive particularly in the landscape of early-nineties' shoegaze and grebo. There's the sense that they were both a little late (they would've been a better fit during the Madchester era) and a few years' early (their 1992 album Asquarius is a forerunner to Britpop) which may explain why they never really caught on. The energy of Puttnam and his aggressive band suggests that they would've been in their element on stage; they're still playing shows so it's never too late, is it?

R.E.M.: "Stand"

2 August 1989

"It's brilliant. I love this. It sounds like a song we like by a band called The Pixies."

— Shirley Manson

"It's a good pop record and I like it because the guitar solo's slightly incompetent."

— Martin Metcalfe

Oh blimey!! Not another special edition of VER HITS!!!

Until now, special editions of this blog have covered Record Mirror and both the American and Australian versions of Smash Hits but I had yet to write about the magazine's chief competitor and bête noire Number One. Established in 1983, it was never able to escape the shadow of ver Hits despite the fact that it was a weekly rather — than a fortnightly — publication. The writers generally weren't as good (sorry John Aizlewood), the layout looked cheaply done and it catered a little more toward celebrity gossip. They did print the weekly Top 75 singles and albums charts but these listings came from The Chart Show and they never quite matched the proper Top 40 on Radio 1 and Top of the Pops. (In this particular issue, the singles that made up the Top 10 are the same albeit in different order)

It may sound like I was never a fan of Number One but I used to buy it semi-regularly. I could get impatient during that two week wait between issues of Smash Hits and picking up a copy of its poor cousin satiated my desire somewhat, even if I would never shell out for it when the real thing was available. While music journalists such as Andrew Panos and Ro Newton would sift through the new releases in past issues, it had since become all about having guest reviewers by the end of the eighties. Being a weekly, it's clear they often had to scrape the bottom of the barrel to find enough pop stars, DJ's and other celebs to do the deed. Among the "big" names they had during my state in the UK were Climie Fisher, Angry Anderson and Swedish "sensation" 2 Brave. Not all of them were third rate but enough were to make the singles review page much more of an ordeal than it was in Smash Hits. It was for this very reason that I held off writing about the singles in Number One until now: I couldn't find a single and/or reviewer that I felt any desire to write about. I didn't buy this issue but I would have had I been paying attention. I would subsequently buy two more import copies of Number One in Canada and I am planning to write about those when they come up.

Martin Metcalfe and Shirley Manson are this issue's reviewers. The lead singer and keyboardist/backing vocalist out of Goodbye Mr Mackenzie respectively, they had one Top 40 entry with the punchy "The Rattler", a record that owed as much to the Celtic stadium rock of Big Country and Deacon Blue as it did to indie stalwarts Orange Juice and The Jesus and Mary Chain and one that deserved to do better than its modest number thirty-seven placing. Much like the group they picked for their Single of the Week, they seemed set for big things. One of them would go on to enjoy a remarkable career but they would have to wait a bit.

A big thanks as always 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.

~~~~~

It was Friday, August 4, 1989. I was wearing the Coca-Cola denim jacket my mother bought for me eighteen months' earlier. The sleeves were much shorter than they used to be. My baseball cap was only able to balance on the top of my head. I had already outgrown the life I had left behind in Canada a year earlier and now I was outgrowing the clothes I had brought with me. Why on earth was I heading back at all? (Oh right, because my parents said so)

Gatwick was a lot brighter and more modern than I remember it being fifty weeks earlier. It had all been a blur when I was first there but now I was just to glum to notice much. Such was my state that I didn't even have a look around. Had I peaked inside the WH Smith's that the airport almost certainly had, I would have noticed that there was a new issue of Number One that I didn't have. It would've added a flicker of joy to a day that I had been dreading. I hadn't wanted to go to England a year earlier and now that I had been here a while, I didn't want to leave. Having a fresh copy of a second-rate pop mag for the eight hour flight back to Canada would have made the trip that little bit less unbearable.

Still, I didn't miss much. The cover "story" involves TV's Lenny Henry answering a series of silly questions as his famous characters Theophilus P. Wildebeeste and Delbert Wilkins, the latter of which he put to more amusing use five years earlier when reviewing the Smash Hits singles. Elsewhere, there's the first in a two-part feature on songwriting/production monolith Stock Aitken Waterman (who bristle at criticism leveled their way while also claiming that groups like U2 and The Smiths are boring), Bruno Brookes' Radio 1 Roadshow Diary (those roadshows never seemed like much fun and this page confirms it) and yet another round of The Genius of Pop, in which various "stars" take a quiz on, you guessed it, pop music. On the plus side, the Indie singles chart is a welcome reminder of what an excellent year 1989 was for alternative music and, as if to confirm it, Martin and Shirley from Scottish group Goodbye Mr Mackenzie review the singles.

R.E.M. had spent much of the eighties quietly building up an outstanding back catalog. A raw, early pressing of the brilliant "Radio Free Europe" followed by the Chronic Town E.P. got the ball rolling and they would go on a hot streak of six albums in six years. Success was modest at first but it grew over the course of the decade, especially in North America where they toured extensively and were a staple of the so-called college rock scene. The word-of-mouth on albums such as Murmur and Lifes Rich Pageant was so good that their slight creative dip beginning with 1987's Document did nothing to halt their momentum. Indeed, single "The One I Love" gave them a Top 10 US hit that year. They had been poised for a breakthrough for some time and now it was coming.

Across the Atlantic things took a bit longer. Both "The One I Love" and "Finest Worksong" came close to reaching the Top 40 but fell short and the same fate befell "Stand" on its initial release at the start of 1989. Albums Fables of the Reconstruction, Document and Green all did reasonably well and, again, a breakthrough seemed inevitable. Then, "Orange Crush" gave them at Top 30 hit which led to a memorable performance on Top of the Pops in which Michael Stipe "sang" into a megaphone. The single fell off a week later but it was looking like this was going to be R.E.M.'s time in the UK. Two short years later and it finally was!

The Green album wasn't exactly packed with potential hit singles so someone decided to give "Stand" another try. It was at this point that Martin Metcalfe and Shirley Manson gave it their stamp of approval in Number One. Perhaps because of it being a reissue, they already seem familiar with it, with Manson mentioning how much she likes the video. But neither of them seem to know all that much about R.E.M. and if you didn't know any better you'd be convinced that this was their introduction to the Athens, GA foursome. Shirley's comment above about "Stand" being not unlike a single ("Here Comes Your Man" perhaps? It was currently on Number One's classic-packed Indie chart and is like a rich cousin to "Stand") by the Pixies implies she knows more about the latter than the former. (To be fair, Pixies were a much better group at that point, their albums Surfer Rosa and Doolittle far outpaced Document and Green, at least in terms of quality if not in numbers shifted) Metcalfe's praise for the "incompetent" guitar playing also indicates how little they knew: Peter Buck was an indie guitar hero to some but he didn't mean shit to the members of Goodbye Mr Mackenzie.

What all this really tells you is that R.E.M. still had a ways to go before conquering Britain. While "Orange Crush" at least has a strong beat, "Stand" and "Pop Song 89" (passed over as a single in the UK) began to expose them as a band that could get repetitive. All three songs have basic opening verses, choruses and not much else. They had nothing on the glorious jangle-pop of "So. Central Rain" not the mournful singalong "Fall on Me". (The Green album did have some nice deep cuts — the achingly lovely "You Are the Everything", the crunchy "Turn You Inside-Out — but overall it's an uncharacteristically inconsistent work) R.E.M. had lost their way and they would use their climb to the top of the pop mountain to reclaim it — for a while at least.

The future of rock was there on page 42 of this issue of Number One and not just due to the Single of the Week. Shirley Manson was a young Scots pianist and backing singer who would one day be part of a group that would rival R.E.M. in the 'biggest band in the world' stakes. Garbage was a subtly fine group that cleverly merged American grunge with UK shoegaze, filling a void that no had even noticed. They weren't exactly a favourite of mine but they certainly gave some life to the depressing music scene of 1995 that was overloaded with ghastly US frat rock and the self-parody ridden Britpop. Meanwhile, R.E.M. spent the year I graduated from high school on a highly lucrative world tour that proved to be the beginning of the end for them. And all this from a pair of groups that had two minor hits between them in 1989. Yeah, those big breakthroughs would come eventually.

~~~~~

Also of some cop

The Beatmasters featuring Betty Boo: "Hey DJ / I Can't Dance (to That Music You're Playing)"

Paul Carter, Manda Glanfield and Richard Walmsley weren't exactly pop star material but they knew more than a little about crafting great dance pop and finding charismatic stars to lead the way. They brought back P.P. Arnold for the appropriately-named "Burn It Up" but most of their guest stars were young. Cookie Crew, Merlin and, this time, Betty Boo: it looked like they had found the future of British hip hop and house music. Alison Clarkson had a tough style and pin-up looks and her Betty Boo character ought to have become even bigger. "Hey DJ" does the trick of setting up Boo as a player while once again affirming The Beatmasters as an overlooked force in British dance-pop. One of those fine records that I missed out on because my mum and dad just had ship us back home. The nerve of some people.