Scritti Politti: "Faithless"

29 April 1982

"The revamped, remodelled Scritti Politti deliver a slinky desert-island-shore, pineapple-sky soundtrack. The cream always rises to the top."
— Martin Fry

Pop stars— or DJ's or school boys — guesting in the Smash Hits singles review seat was something that produced mixed results over the years. It was a special treat that was there almost from the off — one of the first being a very entertaining, very bitchy rant from XTC's Andy Partridge which somehow managed to prove that he could bash a collection of 45's in print far more effectively than whenever he ripped into male chauvinism ("Down in the Cockpit" from English Settlement), global politics ("Here Comes President Kill Again" from Oranges & Lemons) or his ex-wife ("Your Dictionary" from Apple Venus Volume 1) — but one that would inevitably become bastardised by "critics" who had bad taste in music couldn't write. (On the other hand, they never went to the extreme of rival mag Number One who always seemed to have a guest pop star reviewer of dubious taste)

Stepping up this fortnight is ABC's Martin Fry, a man who was at the top of his game in the spring of 1982. Coming off their debut single — and SOTF — "Tears Are Not Enough" from the previous autumn, they'd recently scored their first Top Ten hit with "Poison Arrow" and their soon to be critically acclaimed album The Lexicon of Love was in the can and a few weeks away from hitting the shops. It's impossible to say if Hepworth and Ellen and co were prescient in choosing Fry to sift through a pile of new releases at this juncture (it's either that or he just happened to be available) but they couldn't have picked a better individual who had their pulse on the sound of '82.

There's a significance to Fry's anointing of Scritti Politti's "Faithless" as a SOTF. Like ABC, the Srcits came out of punk and were now heading in the direction of a slicker, more soulful sound. Green Gartside's band had long been darlings of post-punk indie scenesters in Britain and their move towards pop was an event that may have horrified their narrow but loyal fanbase but probably gave a boost to contemporaries. Trading in their rough DIY sound for synths and gospel may sound like the dictionary definition of selling out but in applying his songwriting talents and still sparse arrangements to modern pop, Gartside was upping the ante for Paul Weller, Kevin Rowland and, yes, Martin Fry.

"Faithless" itself is pretty damn good, if not quite as glorious as ABC's seminal records from the same time. Building off of their creative breakthrough, "The 'Sweetest Girl'", it name drops its predecessor, though to what end I'm still trying to figure out. Not that it matters since the vocoder gospel soul on display here is a huge leap forward. Obviously hindsight does me favours here but there's a sense that they're on to something that certainly has its own merits but isn't quite chart ready. I usually consider 'transitional' to be a dubious term for pop criticism (either an artist or group likely didn't know they were in transition at the time or they're someone like Miles Davis or David Bowie who was always transitioning or it tends to trivialise a work for being around in order to get us to the next work — or it's a combination of the three) but perhaps it applies here. Gartside was still signed to indie label Rough Trade at this point and he was yet to jettison his increasingly disgruntled bandmates and these elements were likely still pulling him towards his DIY roots. (In fact, I'm not so sure that he ever relinquished that spirit even as his sound altered)

A pop group's pop group. I have no idea if this title has been bestowed upon any other bands over the past fifty or sixty years — though the words Big Star and Jellyfish certainly spring to mind — but I would like to put forth my nomination. Scritti Politti were never quite critical favourites nor did they seem to inspire a cult devotion but they were admired by their peers and influenced the sound of the eighties. The fact that would inspire the names of both Wet Wet Wet and Milli Vanilli says all you need to know. Imperial leather indeed, Mr. Fry.

~~~~~

Also Reviewed This Fortnight

Bad Manners: "Got No Brains"

If "Faithless" catches Scritti Politti on the cusp of a commercial and creative apogee, the latest release has Buster Bloodvessel and his gruff Mad Banner cohorts visiting ver dumper for the first time, a place they'd be firmly residing in within the year. A shame since this is yet another perfectly likable chunk of low brow reggae pop straight from its source. 'Yet another', though, means that maybe the public had grown weary of their shtick by this point. As Fry notes, the hooks they pack into this betray a smartness that they wouldn't ever have admitted to. Too clever/stupid by half then.

Kim Wilde: "View from a Bridge"

15 April 1982

"The Wilde family comes up trumps again. Dad's written a spry story, Ricki has peppered his production with some Trevor Horn tactics while Kim supplies those wonderfully subdued and smokey vocals."

— Ian Birch

It's difficult to pinpoint the precise moment that Smash Hits — top pop mag loaded with song lyrics, features and reviews — became Smash Hits — even better pop mag with all of the above plus pages full of whimsy, hilarity and getting the members of U2 to draw pictures of ducks — but a key issue in along the way came out in the middle of April 1982 with contributor Mark Ellen pointing his fellow scribes in a direction they'd all soon be heading towards. Putting the newly famous Bananarama on the cover, ver Hits decides to dispense with all that exclusive interview/intimate profile nonsense and has the 'Narns traipsing around some popular London spots, including the Zoo, the Monument, Pall Mall and, er, Burger King. The "haystack-haired" trio overate, palled around with a very unconvincing pair of Charles and Di impersonators, picked out some ridiculously overpriced duds from an upscale fashion boutique on South Molton Street and enjoyed 75p slices of rich chocolate gateau, all of the Hits' dime (desserts AND clothing).

Possibly on the very next day (there's nothing to lead me to believe that the two pieces were done on consecutive days, I just like to think that's how it worked back then), Ellen flew off to America in order to interview Meat Loaf. Sitting down in his rock star lair in Connecticut, they discuss Meat's work ethic, the inspiration he provides to fans and his cash-flow troubles — despite receiving instructions before hand to under no circumstances ask His Nibs about money — before the county sheriff shows up in order to help repossess the Loaf family home. The plus-size star suddenly goes mental and is soon off in pursuit with a baseball bat in hand and murder in his eyes. (This anecdote is expounded upon in Ellen's autobiography Rock Stars Stole My Life! which I highly recommend)

The insanity of the preceding two features are sadly not hinted at in the Singles Review for that fortnight. Of course when your SOTF is a paean to suicide then one might be forgiven for dialling back on the craziness.

One of the clichés of suicide is the assumption of many that those who take their own lives are cowards. Facing a grim future, the theory goes, people are too afraid of whatever is in store for them and they ultimately decide to end it all as a result. It's a nice idea — and, to be sure, one I've not been above uttering myself — but it overlooks that the act of ending one's life takes a certain amount of bravery. How does one get to the precipice of existence and go through with it knowing that it'll all be over and there won't be any second chances?

Quite whether the protagonist in "View from a Bridge" ends up going through with offing herself is another matter. Songwriter, former pop star and patriarch Marty Wilde has offers up the following analysis:

"I don't know if any of you have ever travelled across the Forth Bridge, but if you have and you've ever stood in the middle of it when the mist is very low you will get more of a feeling of what the song is all about. That's how I pictured the song, a girl in the middle of the bridge, in a raincoat, jumping off and disappearing into the fog." 

But the lyrics indicate there may be more to the story. Building up to such a desperate moment, the crushed, heartbroken girl finally makes the leap, only to feel the tug of her ex-boyfriend's arms, who then, it transpires, turns out to be a "ghost without a face". Our Kim then admits that she doesn't know "what's fact or fantasy / Cause when I look below the bridge, the girl I see is me."

Confusing, then, but getting a grasp of suicide is something few who haven't been there have been able to explain. Marty Wilde's lyrics do his best to work it out and perhaps he has succeeded. Daughter Kim's delivery is also commendable, even if it's largely how she sang at the time; emoting probably wouldn't be the best way to convey the moment before (possibly) jumping. (In a review of the accompanying Select album, Elly McDonald considered her voice to be "amazingly vacant" which I initially took to be a compliment)

So there you have it: a day out with Bananarama, a Meat Loaf meltdown and high praise for Kim Wilde's single about suicide. They don't make top pop mags like this anymore.

~~~~~

Also Reviewed This Fortnight

Bardo: "One Step Further"

Kim Wilde's SOTF triumph would appear to be all the more impressive considering the big names who also put up singles for consideration. No less than seven artists or co-artists here have been inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame (In truth, however, that number really ought to be either five or nine, although you're invited to try to convince me exactly why Hall & Oates and Joan Jett & The Blackhearts belong while Olivia Newton-John and Simple Minds don't) and that's not even including other notables such as Spandau Ballet, Squeeze and Talk Talk. Some formidable names but it's not as if the likes of Bowie, Costello and McCartney/Wonder submitted some of their finest work here. Tedium reigns on the singles review page and a half and it's up to cheery Eurovisionist duo Bardo to pick up some of the slack. "One Step Further" is far from a brilliant number but it's a likable, hook-filled singalong which makes for a welcome change alongside all the more-of-the-same synth-pop and white boy funk. Blimey, am I getting tired of eighties music?

B.E.F. presents Sandie Shaw: "Anyone Who Had a Heart"

1 April 1982

"The old Cilla Black number is beautifully delivered by fellow '60s chanteuse Ms Shaw, who's been dragged out of retirement and given a pair of shoes specially for the occasion."
— Dave Rimmer

In a recent episode of Slate's Hit Parade podcast, host Chris Molanphy discussed the 'featuring' credit in pop music, something which has grown increasingly common in recent years. While fascinating, I was expecting him to go into more detail about other forms of artist credits. And/& denotes a certain equality and even provides hope that their collaboration may be more than a one off. 'With' has an imbalance to it, with the headline act having a distinct prominence over the other. 'Featuring', by contrast, gives the guest the upper hand, putting the spotlight on a vocalist — or, in the case of the brilliant "Big Fun" by Inner City featuring Kevin Saunderson, a producer/mixer type — who wouldn't normally be getting such credit.

Those are the most common credits but there are others. One of my favourite singles of the early nineties was "In Yer Face" by 808 State who also enjoyed further Top 10 success with "The Only Rhyme That Bites", credited to M.C. Tunes vs. 808 State. While there were elements to enjoy there — Tunes' shifting between lightning-fast raps and audible pauses to gasp for breath, State's lush, spy-thriller backdrop — I hated the contrived nature of the credit. The collaborating parties weren't in competition against each other and even if there was a considerable amount of tension to merit such a combative description it doesn't mean a thing to me. (Happily, 'vs.' never took off to any great extent, its most prominent placing in "It's Like That" in which Run D.M.C. took on Jason Nivens) Though not strictly speaking a credit per se, albums with titles such as Louis Armstrong Meets Oscar Peterson and Coleman Hawkins Encounters Ben Webster gave off a mythologising vibe that jazz musicians would show up unannounced at a studio and start playing with whoever happened to be there at the time. And, finally, we come to the billing for the present offering, "Anyone Who Had a Heart" from B.E.F. presents Sandie Shaw. Here sophistication is the name of the game. Good taste brigadiers Martyn Ware and Ian Craig Marsh — formerly of a pre-fame Human League and but by '82 they were heading the British Electric Foundation production team and in charge of Heaven 17 — have used their good graces to coax Ms Shaw back into the spotlight and here she is with a very special performance. The fact that they gave their album the title of Music of Quality and Distinction says all you need to know. 

"Anyone Who Had a Heart" was originally a hit in the mid sixties for Dionne Warwick in North America and Cilla Black in the UK and Europe, an Anglo-American divide which was common at the time for Burt Bachrach and Hal David compositions. Shaw would have a Bachrach-David hit of her own with "Always Something There to Remind Me" (also recorded by Warwick) and here she makes up for never having had the chance to take her own crack at AWHAH. The fact that Warwick and Black were both in their early twenties at the time gives their readings a naivety and vulnerability; being by this point in her mid-thirties, Shaw's is tougher and more defiant, even if she toes ever so closely towards power ballad territory. Dave Rimmer expresses surprise that the Ware-Marsh "electrickery" is so sparse (though I can't hear it at all); perhaps they felt it best to stick with the basics of sixties pop. It shimmers, as all classic Bachrach and David deserves to.

As a potential hit this went absolutely nowhere and the Sandie Shaw revival was still a couple years away. But as cross-generational collaborations go, B.E.F. proved to be ahead of the game. Eighties synth deconstructionists Art of Noise had yet to register and it's easy to imagine Bob Stanley and Pete Wiggs using this template as the basis for Saint Etienne a decade later — not to mention all the incessant irony-laced modern pop which produced William Shatner, Shirley Bassey and Tom Jones comebacks in cahoots with the glitterati of studio techno alchemy. A lot to answer for then.

~~~~~

Also Reviewed This Fortnight

Roxy Music: "More Than This"

Bryan Ferry could very well have been singing about his band and signaling to his by-now hefty audience that they were at the road. (Creatively speaking they'd long since passed their prime once they had 1974's Country House in the can but many groups have finished on a far less distinguished note than the Roxies did in '82) Rimmer calls it a weepy and he's not wrong. Judged on its own terms, "More Than This" is gorgeous, floating and dreamy — its only real let down being my own bitterness that it's far more popular than something like "Mother of Pearl". I really ought to get over it.

Bim: "Factory"

18 March 1982

"Much of the chart music of recent months has been exciting, good for dancing, well-produced but very little of it has been powerful. "Factory" is all four things at once".
— Tim De Lisle

Day 1
Feeling somewhat dissatisfied with the entry on "Party Fears Two", you decided not to bother linking it on Facebook. Did anyone even notice? You promised yourself that you wouldn't get obsessed with page views and the number of times friends clicked on the like button but it's virtually impossible to avoid. You were hoping that PFT would be something of a breakthrough for your blog, the one where you finally began to grasp the nuances of critiquing an eighties pop song but it didn't quite work out that way.

But "Factory" represents a fresh start. You find the link on YouTube, play it a couple times and jot down any thoughts that crop into your head. Your only real goal today is to come up with some sort of theme that can act as a basis for the upcoming entry. You eventually think up a half-baked thesis that might work and you begin to feel confident that you've got a bite on it. Maybe this will be the breakthrough.

Day 2
Set aside some time in the morning for further note taking but you fail to do so in any meaningful way. The thought begins to gnaw at you that there may not be much of any real substance to say. Bim hardly being a successful, well-remembered group of the time, you resort to relying on Wikipedia for the bulk of your research. There's not a whole lot even there so you scribble down some random stuff about how both singer Cameron McVey and bassist Stephen Street would later go on to careers as producers of Massive Attack and Blur respectively. You then decide to write about the role that studio boffins played in mythologising pop music in your mind. Their names — alongside those of Stephen Hague and John Leckie and Steve Lillywhite, among others — you would take note of while leafing through album liner notes and they became curious musical heroes despite the fact that (a) you knew nothing about them and (b) you still aren't exactly sure just what producers do. You like all this but question its relevance to the blog post and decided not to bother including it.

Day 3
Nothing gets done. You make yourself work on it but you keep procrastinating in favour of crap on YouTube. You hate yourself and begin to think that you'll never make it as a real writer.

Day 4
A change of atmosphere might do the trick so you decide to work on it in a cafe. YouTube still manages to mess with you but you do get a couple pages worth of notes written in spite of your best efforts to get as little done as possible. (Just how much of it you bother using is another matter) You find yourself in agreement with Tim de Lisle that "Factory" is indeed exciting, good for dancing, well-produced AND powerful but it still doesn't do that much for you. Too bad, then, that such a trite observation has already been done on this blog. Or has it?

Day 5
When you aren't either fretting about this blog's future or ignoring getting any real work done on it you can be quite productive. Too bad, then, that you spent the whole day either fretting about this blog's future or ignoring getting any real work done. On a positive note, you've really begun to enjoy the whistling solos that follow the first two choruses of "Factory". Right up there with other great whistling pop songs such as "Sittin' on the Dock of the Bay" and "Cornflake Girl" — and way better than bloody "Joyride".

Day 7
Well, it's time to get this sucker posted. You're not especially well prepared but you've always managed to get something done on previous deadline Wednesdays so you aren't too worried about it. Desperate for information, you do a Google search for 'Bim Factory lyrics' but tracking down the words proves elusive. The best you're able to come up with is some stuff about how while, yes, this single has a lot going for it, it feels like a flop. Whereas The Passions' "Skin Deep" could have easily attained a middling Top 40 position but ended up falling short, this smacks of never having had a chance. It's getting late and you're worried about that writer's high keeping you up and so you give up on trying to explain why.

Resigned, you publish the post and are just glad to get it out of the way. You begin to think about "Anyone Who Had a Heart" by B.E.F. presents Sandie Shaw: maybe that'll be the breakthrough you've been hoping for.

~~~~~

Also Reviewed This Fortnight

Talking Heads: "Life During Wartime (live)"

Day 6
Realising all of a sudden that you've been neglecting the other song you're supposed to pick, you make the hasty decision to write about Talking Heads, a group you used to enjoy listening to — Remain in Light was your favourite album about sixteen years ago — but have since moved on from. Still, it's an easy choice. Taking the easy way out from covering something genuinely left field like Mathematiques Modernes' "Disco Rough" or maybe Bill Wyman's "A New Fashion" just for a laugh, you opt for a live rendition of "Life During Wartime" from The Name of the Band Is Talking Heads. De Lisle points out that it's not as good as the studio version from their seminal Fear of Music album but LDW sounds pretty much as it always did. You used to wonder why ver Heads stuck with being a quartet on their records when they had become a nine-piece while on tour but now you've realised that it makes little difference. It does remind you, however, of the first time you watched Stop Making Sense with a couple friends and you observed that it would make a fantastic aerobics workout video (only to discover later when you got round to watching it with the DVD commentary that one of them — was David "swotty swot-swot" Byrne or one of the others? — made a similar remark at about the same moment. "Life During Wartime" remains reliably the same in any setting and the rhetorical "why stay in college? / why go to night school" line still makes you chuckle just as it always did.

The Associates: "Party Fears Two"

4 March 1982

"The song is excellent with an Abba-style piano tune (at least, I think it's a piano) breaking up the verses, rolling drums and a lyric which starts in the shower and proceeds to a party."
— Neil Tennant

"At least I think it's a piano". Much as I love music, I must confess that I have no ear. I can't hold a tune for the life of me, I've never been much cop at playing an instrument and aspirations to form a massively successful pop group long ago evaporated when I finally began to accept what I failure I've always been. (My one talent, if you can call it that, is for composing parodies, albeit done strictly at a dilettante level) Nor do I understand music to any degree beyond the basics. I used to think that squelching and DJ scratching came as a result of tricks of the mouth. And I'm still not completely sure exactly what a chord is.

It is therefore nice to read a Smash Hits critic expressing some confusion as to an instrument being played. And this particular Hits hack is no mere lightweight. Neil Tennant may have been a History graduate from the north of England with a background in publishing but he was soon to front my favourite group of all time. His musical ignorance makes me feel a little bit better about my own. (Tennant would have done well to check out "Party Fears Two"'s accompanying video in which the camerman spends an inordinate amount of time focusing on a fetching Martha Ladly of Martha & The Muffins as she nonchalantly twinkles the keys)

I'd been anticipating this first Tennant review ever since I unleashed this blog and I was hoping it would be a good one. Long familiar with some of his most arresting lyrics, I wondered if his criticism would mark a not dissimilar territory. (In particular, I imagined that his bitchy, irony-strewn numbers such as "Miserablism" and "Shameless" would make for superb critical fodder) It comes as a surprise, then, to read that Tennant has his music lover's hat on here, expressing appreciation for rock and funk and jazz and Gary Numan, genres I would never normally associate with Neil Tennant's discerning tastes.

But I hesitate from making this piece all about its critic — especially since he'll be making a fair share of appearances as both reviewer and reviewed in the years ahead — because the SOTF is an absolute gem, a gorgeous mix of sunny joie de vivre and acute melancholy. McKenzie's operatic Bowie vocal doesn't quite gel at first but it gradually makes itself at home in the song, eventually cascading into a blissful twenty second finale alongside Ladly's catchy as all hell keyboards and some lovely strumming from Alan Rankine. And it only gets better with each subsequent listen.

It's sad, then, to consider that this would end up being as great as The Associates ever got, their promise imploding on McKenzie's increasingly temperamental behaviour. Their position as the future of British pop ended up being usurped by the once and former Smash Hits scribe Neil Tennant.

~~~~~

Also Reviewed This Fortnight

Weekend: "The View from Her Room"

Indie-inflected jazz that isn't simply ahead of its time, it's better than virtually any of the generation of UK-based, Sinatra-inspired acts that were soon to emerge from Glasgow and Hull and, yes, Woking. Tennant fails to mention that Weekend's vocalist is Alison Statton, late of influence-on-everyone, bought-by-no-one's the Young Marble Giants, who manages the transition from sparse post-punk to jazz balladeering rather well. Like The Associates, we're hearing a future that never happened: it all could have been so different.