Erasure: "Chorus"

12 June 1991

"More power to your perv-tights, "missus"!! (P.S. And it made the household cat jump out of the first floor window, nearly, and you can't say fairer than that.)"

— Sylvia Patterson

Gracing the cover of this fortnight's issue of Smash Hits is The Twins, an Australian sister act of Gayle and Gillian Blakeney. The not-entirely-ugly pair had been on the popular soap Neighbours which led to them getting signed up for a music career in the UK. While the likes of Kylie Minogue, Jason Donovan (see below), Stefan Dennis and Craig MacLachlan had all enjoyed some degree of chart success, Gayle and Gillian flopped. They flopped hard in fact. In a steady decline for nearly a year-and-a-half, the songwriting/production team of Stock Aitken Waterman had been hemorraging acts and Kylie was really their last vestige. Figuring they needed to roll the dice, SAW handed the single "All Mixed Up" to The Twins. Unfortunately, the combination an uninspired composition, a Euro-pop sound the once-powerful trio struggled with and some ghastly singing torpedoed its chances.

With The Twins getting an undeserved Hits cover, Erasure were once again denied the chance to finally grace the front of the magazine themselves. In the five years since "Sometimes" broke them in the UK, the likes of Nick Kamen, Nick Berry, Pepsi & Shirlie, Philip Schofield (three times!), Sinitta, Halo James, Candy Flip (twice) and Gazza all graced the front of the top pop mag. Between them, these seven acts had nineteen Top 40 hits; Erasure had have thirty-five. (The duo would remain a top pop act for the next three years but coming changes at ver Hits meant that Christian Slater and the cast of Beverly Hills, 90210 would become preferred cover stars at the expense of actual pop groups)

I've written before that Erasure were the last major synth-pop group but this depends on how one would go about defining the term 'major'. They had seventeen Top Ten hits and five of their albums went to number one in the UK so they were hardly a minor act. Yet, they had trouble avoiding the 'also-ran' tag. Pet Shop Boys, their closest competitors, were bigger around the world and they seemed to matter to people more. Label mates Depeche Mode weren't hit makers on nearly the same level but they, too, outstripped them internationally and they had indie cred. So did New Order, whose legacy was already immense. All three synth acts had also been seminal at some point, as were The Human League, OMD and Soft Cell. But Erasure? They just never seemed as important as their synth-pop brethren.

There was also the problem of consistency — specifically, their lack of it. Though mostly a singles band (it's still hard to believe they had so many chart topping albums considering what a mixed bag their LP's are), their 45's didn't always hit the mark. On 1989's very patchy Wild!, for example, there's one absolute belter ("Blue Savannah"), another one that's quite good ("Drama") and two more that just go through the motions ("You Surround Me", "Star"). '88's mighty The Innocents produced two bangers ("Ship of Fools", "A Little Respect") and another that was just all right ("Chains of Love").

Returning swiftly in '91, Andy Bell and Vince Clarke were back (BACK!!) with some of their strongest material to date. The four singles were all top notch and the Chorus album would prove to be one of their better long players. (Ver Hits' Johnny Dee was less impressed, arguing that much of it sounded like "frightening techno muzak they play in McDonald's to make you eat your cheeseburgers quicker") Overall, it's probably a notch below both The Innocents and their self-titled 1996 release (ie the first one in ages not to got to number one) but it's still a quietly brilliant work. But even Erasure's best albums weren't especially essential affairs: you could always enjoy the hits if you couldn't be bothered with the LP.

First up was the title track and it's as great as anything they've ever done. The song's first half is seemingly as repetitive as "Stop!" until the bridge kicks in ("Holy Moses, our hearts are screaming...") which then gives way to another bridge ("The sunlight rising over the horizon..."). If the standard verse-chorus was thrilling enough (and it is), its these sections that put it over the top. And then there's Clarke putting away his acoustic guitar. I don't know, sometimes that strumming can be just the thing an Erasure song needs it's not what we were there for. "Chorus" opens some computerized notes and electronics are what the listener is treated to throughout — and it paid off. At last they had a single that was as good as "Don't You Want Me", "Tainted Love" and "West End Girls". (Sadly they were unable to repeat the chart topping success of those singles; the public, as ever, was much more willing to take a punt on drippy love songs)

Sylvia Patterson suggests that "Chorus" might have something to do with the environment. Its chorus does go on about covering up the sun, birds flying away and the fish going "to sleep" so she may be on to something but who's to say? Bell has always liked spouting indecipherable philosophical lyrics; the more difficult to pull apart the better, in fact. It could be all about their ecological concerns or about some of Bell's patented overwrought heartbreak or it could be just yet more or his nonsense set to a blistering techno-pop tune. Whether meaningful or meaningless, Bell had the voice to pull it off

Erasure always seemed like a group that everyone 'quite liked' but was nobody's favourite. While they may not have inspired the devotion that fans had for Depeche Mode, New Order and Pet Shop Boys, they managed to avoid the backlash that the others occasionally faced or were visible enough that they weren't easily forgotten about. They somehow toed the line between prominence and obscurity into over a decade of hit singles and best selling albums. They weren't as big or as important or as seminal as their contemporaries but they continued to be Erasure, a band who were sometimes great, typically reliable and seldom boring. What more could they have done?

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Also Reviewed This Fortnight

Jason Donovan: "Any Dream Will Do"

Some broke away from the Stock Aitken Waterman hit factory in order to assert their creative independence; Jason Donovan wasn't one of them. No one leaves one restrictive media empire for an even bigger restrictive media empire thinking that their artistic vision had any kind of hope. Then again, Jase never gave anyone the impression he had an artistic vision to begin with. You would at least expect the jump from SAW to Andrew Lloyd Weber's inner circle would've resulted in better "sounding" records but "Any Dream Will Do" is as cheap as they come. As Patterson says, it's distressingly superior to the detritus Pete Waterman had been flinging his way (possibly his best single since "When You Come Back to Me") but this wasn't saying much. Though it would spent a fortnight at number one, it would quickly become overshadowed by the single which would usurp it. It's one you might know.

Redhead Kingpin & The FBI: "Superbad, Superslick"

29 November 1989

"Look, He's got a CD round his neck."

— Ben

"I like that brring bit."

— Nick

"Energy without violence is just great too."

— Julian

"We'll all choose different records from this as our favourites but this is the one we all agree on."

— Migi

Over the last several months I have looked at bands doing guest spots as Smash Hits singles reviewers. Wet Wet Wet were the first group in some time to take on the task together (and certainly the first quartet to do so), with lead singers or prominent musicians handling said duties for the most part. The Scottish foursome came to a consensus, as did fellow Caledonians Hue & Cry a few months later. Erasure and Aswad also managed to agree on a Single of the Fortnight but this harmonious situation changed when Communards Jimmy Somerville and Richard Coles went with separate picks. Members of Bros, Brother Beyond and T'Pau followed suit. None seemed interested in compromising.

But that is what the members of Curiosity Killed the Cat have done in this issue of ver Hits. As drummer Miguel "Migi" Drummond says above, they each have their own personal faves but they decided to present a solitary SOTF in a show of unity. I have included my thoughts on each of their individual picks before I get to the one they all agreed on.

~~~~~

Kate Bush: "This Woman's Work"

Julian, the "Kate Bush authority", opts for the dramatic second single from the highly anticipated The Sensual World LP. He makes the faux pas of referring to her as 'Katie' but he's bang on in every other respect. A Top 30 hit though it deserved to do better but I suppose Katie's thirtysomething fanbase had all been happy to snap up the album instead. Nevertheless, "This Woman's Work" is outstanding. Also features a captivating video starring British actor Tim McInnerny, who played Lord Percy and Captain Darling in Blackadder, as Katie's devoted but brokenhearted husband. He even touched her once.

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Glen Goldsmith: "One Life"

Easily the worst of the individual picks. Ben doesn't exactly come right out and say it but it's either this or the hopeless new single from Curiosity Killed the Cat and we're not going to go there. Sounds like generic R&B pop from about three years earlier and its chart prospects were even bleaker than the hopeless new single from Curiosity Killed the Cat.

~~~~~

Van Morrison with Cliff Richard: "Whenever God Shines His Light"

A clear Christmas number one contender pretender. Nick is very taken with it and Ben is right there with him but, tellingly, the other two don't bother to chime in. I thought it was lame Jesus nonsense as a youth but now I just find it a bore. Van was capable of much better and, indeed, so was Cliff. Amazingly, it was Van's biggest Top 40 hit since all the way back in 1965 when he was a grumpy young man in Ulster group Them.

~~~~~

Soul II Soul: "Get a Life"

They last had a hit with Single of the Year "Back to Life" and followed it up with "Get a Life" — what the hell was Jazzie B playing at? (I'm still waiting for their cover of Opus' "Live Is Life") Not as immediate as their earlier hits but but the kids chanting "what's the meaning" and the (possibly) sampled flute sticks with the listener. The Bee's raps on Club Classics Vol.1 were a bit more effortless but this is easily the most commercial thing featuring his voice. A near Christmas number one that was only held off by some charity wretchedness and a horrific Jive Bunny megamix. Soul II Soul had managed to tap into the zeitgeist earlier in the year but their luster was soon to slip a bit.

~~~~~

As for "Superbad, Superslick", it's a solid compromise choice. I wasn't fussed by Redhead Kingpin's "Do the Right Thing" that I covered on this blog a while back but this is a marked improvement. As I think I have said before, hip hop artists could get caught up in the "message" of their records that they'd often forget about trivialities like hooks and melodies and, you know, crafting a sturdy song. It was easy at the time to be down on boastful rappers but nine times out of ten they bested the irritating positive types.

Relying heavily on an organ part that may or may not have been played by David "Redhead" Guppy and a stuttering guitar part in the chorus, "Superbad, Superslick" is largely free of rap cliches. Even the use of a James Brown sample towards the end is a little used "get into it" bit and not one of the Godfather's grunts nor that "Funky Drummer" part that was absolutely everywhere at the time. The Ginger even raps more forcefully on this. His style isn't particularly unique but he's a more than adequate rapper.

The single is superior to its predecessor is every way but this made little difference to the British public as it had a two-week stay in the lower reaches of the charts at the end of 1989. Happily, there was a new form of hip hop that had been emerging over the course of the year and it was soon to really take off. Redhead Kingpin & The FBI might've found a home in this subgenre of jazzy, quirky hippies who opted out of either boasting about themselves or the plight of the streets. I am very much looking forward to the Daisy Age as this blog moves into the nineties.

~~~~~

Also of some cop

Jason Donovan: "When You Come Back to Me"

With three number one singles and an album that was massive, 1989 was Jason Donovan's year. (His records spent just under seventy percent of the year on the Top 40 but I was expecting it to be higher) His fortunes were to fall off somewhat the following year and "When You Come Back to Me" gives a taste of his imperial period drawing to a close. Not only did it fail to hit number one (which Jase made up for by appearing on Xmas chart topper "Do They Know It's Christmas?" by Band Aid II) but it's duff even by his standards. The members of Curiosity despise it but they do admit to a bias due to their overall distaste for Stock Aitken Waterman. Well, I loved SAW at the time and still like some of their records and I can confirm that this is beyond horrible. Jason sounded lost on debut single "Nothing Can Divide Us" but he's probably the best thing about this. Kylie would be going strong for some time but Jason's fans wouldn't be coming back to him for much longer.

Elvis Costello: "Veronica"

22 February 1989

"It also boasts the best funny noise on a record this fortnight courtesy of a bloke called Benmont Tench who does his stuff on a "Baldwin spinnet". And you thought it was all done on computers these days."

— Richard Lowe

There are a lot of questions I would love to pose to former Smash Hits writers. I'd ask William Shaw how he managed to make the transition from pop journalism to mystery novelist. I'd ask David Hepworth if having to the review the singles was really the chore that he made it out to be. I'd ask Tom Hibbert why he felt the need to make bloody Limahl his Single of the Fortnight. But most of all, I'd ask Richard Lowe what made him so damn cheerful in this issue.

Lowe was the newly-appointed editor of ver Hits and, not unlike predecessor Barry McIlheney, he chose to do the singles at the start of his reign. And he didn't exactly give himself the easiest bunch of records to sift through. Of the ten he evaluated, seven failed to make the "Fun 40" and two more weren't exactly big chart movers either. He had faded giants (Boy George, Howard Jones), recent fluke number one artists trying to make failed attempts at another big hit (Robin Beck, Gene Pitney), acts that were clinging to Top 10 glories from several months earlier (Breathe, Tanita Tikaram) and a fine if inconsequential live track that no one asked for (Depeche Mode). The one flop of note is "Info Freako" by Jesus Jones, a group that was busy fusing Brummie grebo with the emerging sound that would soon be known as "baggy" or "Madchester" and seemed like an act to keep an eye on (though no one would have predicted just how popular they'd become two years later).

Little of note on offer yet Lowe is smitten with all of it. Breathe's "Don't Tell Me Lies" has a "brilliant singalong chorus" while Howard Jones' "Everlasting Love" sounds "just like his old ones" and has an "infernally catchy chorus". Tanita Tikaram's "World Outside Your Window" is "ace" while Gene Pitney's cover of Roy Orbison's "It's Over" ought to be loved by everyone unless you are in reality a "dead sheep". Depeche Mode's "Everything Counts" is still a "perfectly agreeable tune" which sounds much the same as it did only now it's recorded in a "basketball stadium or something" while Jason Donovan's "Too Many Broken Hearts" (see below) has Lowe proclaiming that the Stock Aitken Waterman writing/production team is the "bee's knees" (one of the things that made Lowe such a perfect Smash Hits writer for this period is that he was equal parts indie rocker and pop kid). Boy George's "Don't Take My Mind on a Trip" is a "cracker", Robin Beck's "Save Up All Your Tears" is "very stirring" and Jesus Jones' "Info Freako" is a "smashing record" that will "definitely frighten your grandmother". Blimey, Lowe's Single of the Fortnight must be the greatest pop song ever written next to all these supposed heavy hitters!

I had never heard of Elvis Costello until reading Lowe's review of "Veronica". Had I been twenty-one at the time, my initial reaction would have been that his name sounded made up (which, of course, is true); instead, I was eleven and figured that he was old. Dead old. Had I been asked about his age in relation to Neil Tennant's, I would've guessed that he was about ten years older than the Pet Shop Boys frontman. Turns out, he's a month and a half younger.

In fairness to my poor judgement, there were plenty of reasons for assuming that he was of advanced years. First, this was Smash Hits I was reading and anyone over twenty-four was basically a cranky old pensioner in their eyes. Lowe mentions that Costello "has been knocking around for donkeys' years" and that he was now working alongside Paul McCartney ("the legendary Fab Macca out of the so-called "Beatles"", as he mysteriously notes). Then there's the fact that this latest single happened to be about an old lady slipping into senility, hardly the subject matter for youngish pop types. The accompanying photo one the singles page is of a unsmiling man who looks well into middle age. Yeah, this Elvis Costello bloke must've been ancient — or so I thought.

In the first ten years of his recording career, Elvis Costello released eleven albums. Artists tended to be more prolific back then but this is still an impressive feat. In both 1981 (with Trust and Almost Blue) and 1986 (King of America, Blood & Chocolate) he put out a pair of LP's and 1985 would be the only year he wouldn't put out at least one album. But such creative hot streaks don't last and Costello was going to have to take his feet off the gas at some point. Seemingly cut from the same cloth as Bob Dylan, David Bowie and, yes, Paul McCartney, he was never the same once he began to slow down.

"Veronica" was the first single taken from Spike, Costello's first album since Blood & Chocolate. Working with McCartney paid off for both of them as they also wrote songs that would appear on Macca's Flowers in the Dirt, released later on in 1989. Notably, these were their first LP's recorded in the CD era and it shows. Spike in particular is guilty of filling up as much compact disc space as possible, with a generous fifteen tracks and over an hour of listening "pleasure". (In spite Lowe's love for "Veronica", he was none-too-thrilled by the album as a whole in a review the following fortnight; if anything, the score he gives is inflated given his critique) It also suffers from being recorded in a multitude of studios in Britain and America with a vast selection of session musicians and special guests. This disparity makes Spike an uncharacteristically generic record. There's no attempt at the sort of album unity he managed with the soul/Motown influenced Get Happy!! or the country-roots romp King of America. Not only are deep cuts "God's Comic" and "Chewing Gum" both subpar songs for him but the swampy, Bayou rock of the former and the Celtic folk of the latter ensures that they aren't even able to mesh well. 

"Veronica" is one of the better songs on the album but it still has its flaws. For whatever reason, he chose not to record it in the UK sessions with McCartney, Nick Lowe and Chrissie Hynde but cut it instead in Hollywood with a large group that included Mitchell Froom, Jim Keltner and Roger McGuinn, as well as then-regular collaborators T-Bone Burnett and Cait O'Riordan of The Pogues. Costello had some talented folk working with him but it was a lineup that needed paring down. A basic quartet or quintet could have done a much more efficient job of recording a song like "Veronica". Kettle drums? Those weedy (possibly synthesized) "Beatlesque" trumpet bits? That "Baldwin spinnet" [sic] thing?

Costello's singing doesn't really suit the song's subject matter either. While often spitting out (in Lowe's words) lyrical "tongue-twisters" in the vein of "Love for Tender" or "Tokyo Storm Warning", he could often utilize his strained voice to a more sensitive effect on the likes of "Allison" and "Little Angel" but he takes the lightning-fast spittle approach on "Veronica" as if covering up the narrative of an elderly woman with dementia in order to appeal to younger listeners. If this was his intention then it worked as it gave him sizable American hit and even took him to the top of the US Alternative Rock charts. It was just a minor success in the UK, however, and it quickly became forgotten in his homeland. Elvis Costello wrote and performed many stronger songs in the previous decade than this — and he would even compose a few more in the coming decades.

The Costello-McCartney pairing didn't prove to be as fruitful as promised. A lot of people have speculated that Macca was interested in finding a talent and personality not dissimilar to John Lennon but for whatever reason the two didn't work well. They didn't appear to fully embrace their team-up and I wonder if that's what really held them back. Instead of Spike and Flowering in the Dirt as separate releases, there should have been a cohesive album combining to the two. But this only aids Costello's case: McCartney's album is the stronger of the two and proved to be his best LP since Tug of War. The gradual rehabilitation of Macca was beginning while Elvis Costello began to fade from relevance in the nineties. No wonder he seemed so old.

~~~~~

Also Reviewed This Fortnight

Jason Donovan: "Too Many Broken Hearts"

"Jason sings it perfectly adequately," enthuses Lowe; I wonder if this was meant to be funny. Jason Donovan struggled through the horrible "Nothing Can Divide Us" and managed to be badly out-sung by Kylie Minogue — not a strong vocalist herself — on the duet "Especially for You" so I suppose doing the job "perfectly adequately" is an achievement of sorts. Donovan had been a throw in pop star up until this point (Kylie was doing just fine so why not her male counterpart?) but "Too Many Broken Hearts" marks territory of his own. Perhaps acknowledging this, Stock Aitken Waterman inserted a guitar "lick" onto the beginning — either that or they were trying to mask what was becoming formulaic pablum. Yet, what did it matter? Jase looked great, he seemed to be enjoying every second of his life and everyone either looked up to him or wanted to go to bed with him. Who needs to be able to sing if you've got all that?