Wendy & Lisa: "Sideshow"

13 January 1988

"It churns and stonks along and has some shiveringly pretty singing and the best thing about it is the way they pronounce "sideshow" as "satchel" on account of their "funny" American accents."

— Tom Hibbert

1988. A key year for Smash Hits and for your humble blogger. Pop itself may not have been in peak form but the magazine tasked with glorifying it was at the top of its game. An ace "crew" of music journos with a very liberal use of "inverted" commas made the British youth keep coming even when the pop stars themselves weren't much cop. Traces of the mag's roots in punk, new wave and New Pop remained even as the era of Stock Aitken Waterman and the return of the boy bands was upon us. You might say that late-eighties Smash Hits encompassed the entire decade.

For myself, 1988 was the year in which everything changed. I began to slowly get into music over the first several months of the year which would only serve as a teaser for our move to England that August. My sister began buying Smash Hits, we never missed Top of the Pops and I quickly took to sitting through the entirety of Bruno Brooks' Top 40 rundown on Sundays. (Saturday morning pop-centred fare such as Going Live and The Chart Show was a rarity, however, since we went away a lot on weekends) Many of my childish passions had been left behind in Canada, never to return. I also discovered my love for travel and took my first steps towards becoming the person that I am today. (Read into that whatever you will...)

In the world of ver Hits, '88 began right where they'd left off. Tom Hibbert takes the reigns once again as singles reviewer. Nothing new here, this was his tenth "go" at it. Turns out, it would also be his last. Hibs had been with the top pop mag for a while, a throwback to the days when critics were about his age, not several decades younger. He would act as inspiration and mentor to a generation of excellent writers but this chapter was beginning to close. He wasn't yet done — it wasn't as if there was anyone else capable of replacing him as Black Type — but as this was his last kick at the singles "can" then this entry can be his farewell. And what a run it was: from getting me to shift ever so slightly on Big Country to making me suspect that he used his position in order to give the covert impression that modern pop was nothing but crap

His final SOTF was awarded to Wendy & Lisa for their single "Sideshow" and, for once, I don't think he's trolling anyone either. He reckons it's "really groovy" and "frightfully "sexy", if you will pardon the term". A much more convincing case than his justifications for the likes of Red Lorry Yellow Lorry, Limahl and even Heart. Hibs actually liked at least one pop song from this time? Yes, I believe he did.

The Revolution had been modern pop's answer to Duke Ellington's orchestra. Both organizations had immensely talented figures at the forefront and both were backed by musicians with considerable abilities of their own. People like Johnny Hodges, Barney Bigard and Cootie Williams all seemed like stars but their lofty status only remained while under Ellington's employ; on their own, they could never escape his shadow. Not unlike Prince's backing band. The Purple Perv had a formidable lineup that had helped him through his prime years and it seemed like these people were all stars in waiting as opposed to, say, The E-Street Band, a group that looked like they'd end up right back in Asbury Park, NJ as plumbers (or accountants in the case of Max Weinberg) if The Boss had ever had them disbanded.

On the other hand, Ellington knew that he needed the key members of his group. The departure of Hodges in 1951 resulted in a lukewarm four year solo career for the alto saxophonist and a bit of a creative downturn for Duke. He composed with particular soloists in mind and struggled a bit with one of his top players missing. Prince had been underpaying his musicians for some time and his decision to augment The Revolution was unpopular. He would eventually blow the group up and the success of the resulting solo trilogy — Sign o' the Times, The Black Album and Lovesexy — must have led him to believe that he was better off doing everything himself. Being a generational talent — as multi-faceted musically as Paul McCartney, as chameleonic as David Bowie, as prolific as Miles Davis — this was something he was always capable of but the price he paid was the end of his great period.

Wendy Melvoin and Lisa Coleman decided to venture out of the ashes of The Revolution as a duo, though one that also utilised former Revolution drummer Bobby Z. as well as Wendy's twin sister Susannah, who had been a member of Prince associate act The Family. Carrying on where they left off, their sound's source is unmistakable. Fair enough too since Prince's influence was all over the world of pop in the late eighties so why shouldn't his former bandmates indulge? It did, however, keep them tied too much to Prince who they would never fully get away from.

Much of Wendy & Lisa's self-titled debut album is about them finding their feet and establishing a sound of their own. A lot of the time it works and it mostly does on "Sideshow" except for the fact that it revels a little too much in its obscurity. In sending up their also-ran status as a mere 'sideshow', the pair display a degree of humour that Prince often lacked but there's the worrying sense that they were predicting their fate. Of course, this is easy for me to say in 2021 but listeners in 1988 may not have taken them seriously if they weren't in on the gag.

Otherwise, it's a perfectly nice pop-funk-soul number and one that holds up well alongside Prince's work from the same time. They're both excellent musicians and good vocalists, even if I wouldn't exactly describe their singing as "shiveringly pretty". It's far from being a mind-blowing performance but it suggests that they were on to something. They were sure to be the Next Big Thing — all they had to do was move themselves away from the Last Big Thing.

~~~~~

Also Reviewed This Fortnight

The Fall: "Victoria"

Mark E. Smith and whoever else happened to be in The Fall (was Brix still a member?) displayed a bit of thing for the sixties back in '88. Faithful and fun covers of both The Beatles' "A Day in the Life" and The Kinks' "Victoria" resulted. They're both good but the latter is preferred despite its predictability. One can almost imagine Ray Davies believing all his royalist irony but you won't make the same mistake with Smith. Musically it lacks the charm of the original but there's a strong group performance and Smith "sings" it with far more swagger than Davies. A good effort that deserved to give The Fall a second top 40 hit and one that you might want to listen to a few times. Unlike "A Day in the Life", in which once will suffice.

The Fall: "Cruiser's Creek"

23 October 1985

"Perhaps Mark Smith is bored by now with his "Last Angry Young Man" label."

— Paul King

Bloody hell, ver Hits is already going downhill? Well, not quite but it's in these waning months of 1985 that it took its first steps down the pop mag dumper. It became glossier under editor Steve Bush but that's no matter. The big change is just a couple pages past the singles, under the headline REVIEW. There are three music books being critiqued (including Dave Rimmer's brilliant account of Culture Club and UK New Pop Like Punk Never Happened) and four home video music collections but the biggest space saved is for films. Films. There's nothing like ruining a perfectly good music mag by filling space with films. Bloody films.

You might be beginning to suspect that I'm not crazy about films but my real problem is films overshadowing music. The eighties seemed to have an even number of blockbuster films to albums but the former really began overtaking the latter over the course of the decade and by the nineties we're well into the era when asking someone about hearing the latest record by such-and-such is thoroughly passe while it was commonplace to inquire as to whether they'd seen the newest must-see picture. By 1996 I began to be irked by everyone talking about Independence Day but ignoring R.E.M.'s New Adventures in Hi-Fi. What's the matter with people?

But there's also something worrying about a music mag critiquing films (though — also worryingly — this is something one probably only recognizes in retrospect): it sets a bad precedent. Once a music journal begins getting into other areas it's not long before it does a Rolling Stone and begins going on the campaign trail with US presidential hopefulls or a Q which began dubbing itself "the modern guide to music and more". In the case of Smash Hits, it eventually evolved into a teenager's Hello! with early-nineties cover stars from Neighbours and Beverley Hills, 90210 and pages of celebrity gossip. What about covering pop music?

To be fair, there is some effort here to link the movie reviews to pop. The main film this fortnight is the Merseyside period piece Letter to Brezhnev and it includes a glowing write-up on its soundtrack. There's also a review of The Bride starring Sting and, finally, a short bit about how crap St Elmo's Fire is — which it is. An excellent soundtrack (even though it doesn't look like much cop to me), a pop star moonlighting as an actor and the vehicle for a soft rock anthem. Fine, write about films but keep them based around pop and we're good, okay?

Paul King of King (gee, I wonder where they got their name from?) is the guest singles reviewer in this issue and he seems to have been in a very good mood. He's pleased to have been chosen for the task, is taking it seriously and is in no mood to put anyone down while doing so. The closest he gets to bashing anything is by questioning the mixing of "Blue" by Fine Young Cannibals and the slow-as-sludge pacing of Tracie Young's "Invitation" — though, notably, he still manages to praise the efforts of the artists. Elsewhere, he has nothing but good things to say about the hip (Robert Wyatt, Prefab Sprout, Siouxsie), the mainstream (Eurythmics and Aretha Frankin, UB40, Dee C Lee) and those with bleak chart prospects (The Woodentops, The Icicle Works...er...The Fall).

To pick "Mark Smith" and his group of Mancuian louts The Fall for Single of the Fortnight, then, must be high praise indeed given the top-notch quality of the competition. I'm not quite as fond of this batch of records as King is but I can't disagree. "Cruiser's Creek" is ace. (Plus, it goes some way to rectifying the film review nonsense)

It's tempting to dismiss The Fall for putting out the same bloody records throughout their forty years together. I once listened to a cassette of their 1991 album Shift-Work with a friend and expressed interest in exploring their work in more depth. "Why?" she asked me, "if you've heard one Fall album you've heard them all". (I shouldn't get too high and mighty, however, as I began thinking much the same thing not long after) Of course, there are those hallmarks — Smith's gravely voice, repetitive guitar and bass parts, a whole lot of darkness — but their sound was regularly tweaked by current trends and whatever life happened to throw at their leader.

Certainly King is correct that Smith had mellowed somewhat by the mid-eighties. Being married to Brix Smith would have helped (for now at any rate) and her presence moved them in a lighter direction (making her probably the only person ever to convince him of anything). This being The Fall, it's not as if they went pop but many of their catchiest pieces — "My New House" and "Spoilt Victorian Child", both from '85's This Nation's Saving Grace — date from right around this time. Nevertheless, he wasn't about to let a happy homelife and a creative purple-patch stop him from spewing bile all over the place.

"Cruiser's Creek" may sound like the name of an Australian soap opera but it seems to be the setting for where yuppies get together in order to make Smith vomit in his mouth. Perhaps using his modest rock star status to get into exclusive parties filled with market traders with sail boats, he immediately feels like a fish out of water. Yet, he seems to be drawn back to it. His world of "street litter twisting in the wind / crisp bags turning" doesn't quite grab him and he wants to be back where he has "nice pink bubbles" in his mouth and everyone has "Bianco on the breath". (I assume he means Calabrian wine) It's easy for him to belittle the wealthy but he's just as snide about his own culture (he couldn't have pleased many of his peers with a line like "no more Red Wedge in the pub or ZTT stuff", perhaps that's why it got excised from the 7" release). Still an angry "young" man but perhaps one who can enjoy himself knocking back expensive wines and trashing everyone he sees. I can see the appeal.

~~~~~

Also Reviewed This Fortnight

Ian Dury: "Profoundly in Love with Pandora"

Something of a national treasure in the UK, Ian Dury's appeal never quite translated elsewhere. It's quite possible that his best known song internationally is this one, even if The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole TV series wasn't exactly a mega-hit. Sitcom themes released as singles always seem a bit wrong: they never quite sound the same and there's always that rest of the song beyond the thirty seconds you're familiar with (although, at least they stick to the Mole storyline throughout). King is positive (because of course he is) but I suspect that at least half of his enthusiasm is down to wishing a hit for Dury, which is fair enough. Nowhere close to his best work, it is nevertheless a charming little curio and is accompanied by the equally cute "Eugenius (You're a Genius)" on the flip side with Dury trying his hand at rapping. A one off, as "they" say.