Lisa Stansfield: "The Only Way"

28 October 1982

"Nominating this as star single isn't going to win me any credibility points. It's the kind of obvious, blatantly commercial number that everyone sneers at until it makes the top five and then some vaguely apologetic voice pops up with: "actually I quite like this"."

— David Hepworth

Much like two weeks ago when I wrote about The The, this week's entry is drenched in memories that would come much later. While I knew that Matt Johnson's outfit had a past of some sort, I had no idea Lisa Stansfield was releasing music this early on — she was only sixteen back in 1982 — and I had probably assumed that she emerged fully formed with her breakthrough hit "People Hold On" in '89. The single was made in cahoots with Coldcut, who had previously had a hit with Yazz, another newcomer, with "Doctorin' the House" a year earlier. These house music boffins were ace at digging up unknowns and making them into stars. Well, sort of. 

Turns out, Stansfield had been toiling away at that whole stardom thing for the entire length of the eighties. Emerging victorious on the UK talent show Search for a Star, she got signed up by a major record label and made further TV appearances. She was well-known enough to have merited an ITV documentary but her notoriety didn't translate into chart success. She would eventually form the group Blue Zone with a pair of mates which would eventually morph into her second and much more successful crack at a solo career. (It's unthinkable in this day and age to have an X Factor winner take the better part of ten years to establish themselves. On the other hand, given short chart career lifespans of such contestants, she may have been better off in the long term that it took her so long to have a hit)

So, "The Only Way" is a part of Lisa Stansfield's back story. On the sleeve, she looks very young, her hair nicely permed and sporting (in David Hepworth's words) a "rather fetching string vest"; a far cry, then, from the mature, short cropped (with a curl prominently featured on her forehead) and tailored (though no less fetching) power suits look she would have at the end of the decade. (Being just sixteen, it seems appropriate that her image has more than a little of the yearbook to it) Her voice, too, is different. Though still powerful — Hepworth credits producer David Pickerill with "boosting her little girl voice until it's just this side of glass-shattering" but that's as much a tribute to Stansfield's performance — her singing lacks that distinctive elasticity that would eventually convince a lot of people that she was a major talent. Still, there's enough here to see that she had loads of potential.

What brings things down a bit is the song itself. Living and dying by its catchy chorus and hooks a plenty, the lyrics are awfully hollow, depicting Lisa getting up early and being in a rush and going off to do whatever it is she has lined up for the day before heading back home to the dinginess of home that evening. The day itself isn't even worth mentioning. Now, perhaps this is a commentary on how the pursuit of pop music glory renders everything into a blur with scarcely any time for living one's life. The only way to get ahead is to be constantly on the move (or something). All well and good but how about some resolution to the story or more detail beyond generalities like "touch of the Monday morning blues" or some sort of acknowledgement as to why I'm supposed to care. Throw me a bone, people.

Perhaps a similar attitude sunk its chart fortunes in spite of Hepworth considering it a "contender". No Top 5 position, no lost credibility points, no apologetic chiming in its defense. So, let me be the first to belatedly say (above quibbles aside), "actually, I quite like this": actually, I quite like this.

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Also Reviewed This Fortnight

Marvin Gaye: "Sexual Healing"

While other sixties holdovers were beginning to be critically dumped on (see Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney, The Rolling Stones) around this time, Marvellous Marvin was enjoying a revival of sorts. "Sexual Healing" has always struck me as undeserving of its classic status even if it's probably the best he was capable of at this late stage of his life. Having alienated many more people than just his long-suffering ex-wife with his controversial masterpiece Here, My Dear four years earlier, it's easy to see why so many people were happy to have the louche and gentle Marvin of old back. Unfortunately, this is a prime example of Ian MacDonald's assertion that Gay "longed to be a messenger but hadn't much to say". (I was going to say that it's lyrically trite but how often do you come across songs that rhyme 'oven' with 'lovin'?) It's worth noting that something in his dark heart is there longing to be expressed: could sexual healing be the only thing to give him respite given the creative, financial and personal troubles that plagued him? Too bad the porn-without-the-explicit-bits video that accompanies it kind of undercuts the trace amounts of expressiveness old Marv was able to inject.

Kim Wilde: "Child Come Away"

14 October 1982

"Add Kim's strong vocal performance plus a piccolo-headed arrangement that nudges into the realms of folk-rock and you have a Rak track that will ensure standing room only throughout Kim's current tour. Outstanding."

— Fred Dellar

A little girl is growing up in a small town. Everything about her life is normal: she goes to school, plays with her friends, argues with her brothers and sisters and refuses to eat anything with onions in it. She spends her pocket money on sweets and is disappointed that her parents still won't relent and get her a puppy. Then she learns about the abduction of a girl close to her age and her world is turned upside down.

"Child Come Away" is a song about two girls: the one who gets snatched and left for dead and the one who is privy to the unraveling of everything around her. Innocence ends up being yanked away from both. Obviously the former is put through so much more but the lingering affects are left as a burden on the former: not knowing quite what happened (much less how or why), learning little snippets of detail but being denied the full story by parents and a town that doesn't want to discuss it, living in fear that she could be next. Fred Dellar mentions a "town filled with terror" but I suspect there's more to it than that. The community is in denial, perhaps even complicit, as to what's been going on.

That the Wilde family was able to come up with this gripping four-minute thriller is absolutely remarkable. Having already trotted out a pair of sorrowful yet superb singles with "Cambodia" and "View from a Bridge", they were well positioned to deliver yet another tragic piece and "Child Come Away" is their zenith. Kim seems to have toned down the vocal frostiness that worked such a treat on her early records, leaving room for a sweetness that captures the childlike wonder and confusion going on. I don't know if I agree with Dellar that the "piccolo-headed arrangement" moves the song into the realms of folk-rock but it is effective. I have to wonder if it's intended as a Pied Piper-esque tool to symbolise a child being lured away, while other children are being shuffled off to the side and told to go and play and stop asking so many bloody questions.

It's as a piece of writing, however, that "Child Come Away" truly shines. The lack of clarity in the story may seem strange at first but that's precisely the point. What exactly happened to this girl in the sand? What kind of appalling state was she left in that everyone in town — including the judge at the trial — turns away from her now? Has she been cast aside by the community as much as her captor/torturer ("I saw her face in the back of the car / As they were speeding out of this town")? We aren't to know, just as the other young girl in this song isn't to know. And we can look at this situation and gasp the heartlessness of the townsfolk but that's how close-knit communities often deal with these situations. How was this not used in the TV series Broadchurch?

So, all that said, how did it fail to catch on, falling short of the Top 40? Being her third single on the trot dealing with dark subject matter may have turned people off, especially deejays who were content around this time to spin sunny reggae-pop by the likes of Musical Youth, Culture Club and Eddy Grant instead. (Hopefully it did indeed manage to grip audiences during Wilde's tour; I like to think that she still occasionally floors her fans with it at shows to this day) In retrospect, it's a shame it wasn't released as a double A-side with its jauntier — though still appropriately angsty — flip "Just Another Guy": come for the whiplash pop-rock, stay for the searing devastation.

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Also Reviewed This Fortnight

ABBA: "The Day Before You Came"

And while we're on the topic of great melancholic pop that punters and radio conspired to spurn, all hail ABBA's swansong "The Day Before You Came". Variously interpreted as recalling the last days of mundane loneliness before finding love, some sort of murder/suicide plot or the tale of a stalker, the very ambiguity of just what motivates this song's protagonist is precisely what makes it so intriguing. (I tend to lean towards the stalker theory although I'm beginning to warm to the concept that the whole thing is a delusion with 'You' never coming) Dellar mentions the amusing line about watching every episode of Dallas but I also like the fact that this lonely, aimless soul reads both the morning and evening papers, a throwback to the omnipresence of print media. Just imagine how much more miserable she would be if she spent her commutes playing nothing but Candy Crush on her mobile?

The The: "Uncertain Smile"

30 September 1982

"Never mind record of the week, this is the week of the The The record."
— Johnny Black

There are many acts I've been dealing with in this space who were unknown to my five-year-old self back in 1982 that I would later became familiar with. The following three fortnight's worth of entries are all of individuals who I came to know during my crucial '88-'89 year in England. (I had been considering doing a trilogy of pieces about what preteen Paul would have thought of these records in the context of their later stuff but I abandoned it when I realised how little he had to say...also I hate trilogies; nevertheless, I hope that at least some of that concept survives below) 

The The were an act that I had occasional encounters with over more than a decade but who I could never conjure up much enthusiasm for, which also goes for their name. Johnny Black mentions their "damn silly moniker" which is about how I've always felt, even if I can appreciate how the double 'the' could potentially throw people. While groups like Eagles, Pet Shop Boys and Talking Heads have bristled at being labelled 'The Eagles', 'The Pet Shop Boys' and 'The Talking Heads', it's always faintly annoyed me when people leave off the definite article from groups that tend to use them. Colin Larkin's absolutely indispensable Virgin Encyclopedia of... series lists groups as 'Beatles' and 'Clash' and — this one's especially jarring — 'Who'. I've never bothered checking but I suspect he chose not to label the present act as simply 'The'. But, yeah, it's a stupid name.

To come upon The The at this early stage has brought back memories of the bits and pieces they later released. "The Beat(en) Generation" with its irritating in-word parentheses was a Top 20 single in the UK in 1989 and was something that I recall deejays and journalists really getting behind, as if they felt it important or something. I wasn't terribly impressed. At the time, I was bothered by its faint whiff of country and western music which I had absolutely no time for. I still don't think much of it now though more due to Matt Johnson's hectoring lyrics which seemed to talk at young people living through the doldrums of Mrs Thatcher's reign rather than to them. "Kingdom of Rain" was a follow up (also taken from their Mind Bomb album) with a video that featured seahorses possibly copulating and a sullen young woman who most certainly was not guest vocalist Sinéad O'Connor. What it lacked was anything approaching a memorable tune. I would later come across singles from the Dusk and Hanky Panky albums which were equally forgettable. Finally, I acquired a promo copy of 2000's NakedSelf when I was supposed to interview Johnson for my university paper; it actually wasn't too bad but I was too interested in Gomez and Grandaddy to care too much (particularly after the interview fell through due to a scheduling conflict; incidentally the only question I can recall preparing to ask him was if The The could be anything more than just a solo project, so it's probably for the best that we never spoke).

All that said, what am I to make of "Uncertain Smile"? Well, I will acknowledge that it would be my choice for SOTF as well. Although certainly a marked improvement on last fortnight's glum crop of singles, the likes of Ultravox's "Reap the Wild Wind" and The Pretenders' "Back on the Chain Gang" are pleasantly unremarkable efforts but nowhere close to this good. A lovely, floating melody with some fine flute and sax solos courtesy of one Crispin Cioe provide a nice undercoating for an intriguing lyric which manages to read rather well as poetry. Johnson's vocal is vaguely whiny which seems to suit such a restless and insecure song. A very pleasant surprise.

My only reservation is that I keep finding myself connecting "Uncertain Smile" to Johnson's later work which I've never thought much of. Johnny Black concludes his review admitting that much of their early stuff was "a bit aimless, but this is right on the button". I agree but from the perspective of what came much later. Perhaps it's time I filled in the gaps, not just to see if Matt Johnson was up to churning out more equally formidable gems but also if I can catch where it all began to go south. Till we meet again, The.

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Also Reviewed This Fortnight

Tears for Fears: "Mad World"

An earnest pair with a truckload of earnest songs and an earnest name, it's no bloody wonder earnest Americans eventually took to Tears for Fears. Earnestness was always their worst trait, especially whenever Curt Smith took on lead vocals as he does here. A pretty great composition that so succinctly captures depression, it is let down a bit by Smith's bland delivery. It's hard to say if Roland Orzbal's mouthpiece for humanity vocals would've been any better suited to such an individualist track so maybe he was right to give it to his more nuanced partner. Perhaps there just isn't a perfect vocalist for such personal work. Best just to sing it to yourself with as much or as little earnestness as you see fit.

Musical Youth: "Pass the Dutchie"

16 September 1982

"This cover of an excellent Mighty Diamonds song — originally it was "kouchie" they were passing — boasts some fine youthful "biddley-biddley-bong" toasting and a rock solid rhythm."

— Dave Rimmer

Beverley Hills Cop. Bull Durham. The Flight of the Navigator. The Goonies. Gremlins. The Neverending Story. Planes, Trains & Automobiles. Risky Business. Robocop. Say Anything. Terminator. True Blood. Withnail & I. Popular eighties films all, none of which I have ever seen. Feel free to take this time to lift your jaw off the floor, if that's how you feel you must overreact to such news. Movies unseen have a strange power to astonish people in a way other forms of entertainment do not. If I say, for example, that I've never read Charles Dickens' Bleak House, which I haven't, I'm likely to be answered with either a "oh really?" or a "oh you should, it's great". If I've never seen Swan Lake, which, again, I haven't, then I'm probably most likely to get a response of "neither have I". But movies seem to be a medium in which many people assume we have as a common reference point. Of course, it's all bunk. Some cultural touchstones make an imprint and other just pass us by as if they never happened.

I'd never heard "Pass the Dutchie" until a few months ago (not so surprised by this discovery, are you?), around the time I began compiling a list of Smash Hits Singles of the Fortnight. While I decided to embargo most SOTF's that remain unfamiliar to me until I have to deal with them, this one piqued my curiosity due its status as a number one hit (the first one we're encountering on here though the next one isn't far off). If not exactly a near universally loved chart topper handed down from one generation to the next like "Bohemian Rhapsody", "Wuthering Heights" and "Ghost Town", it may be more in the vein of "Maggie Mae" or "Hit Me with Your Rhythm Stick" or "The Only Way Is Up", a huge success that those present at the time took great pleasure in and remember fondly to this day (it was recently the subject of a How We Made feature in The Guardian), if not so much those of us who missed out. It may even have more than a little of the zeitgeist to it.

Being very much of its time, it's tempting to dismiss "Pass the Dutchie" as dated. It's a term I try to avoid using — even though that hasn't stopped me in the past — because it's unhelpful and smacks of being a cop-out argument. In any event, I wasn't there at the time (well, I was five-years-old in '82 but given that my favourite album at the time was Sesame Street Disco it wasn't as if my tastes were refined enough even for Musical Youth) and didn't even have knowledge of this song a half-dozen or so years later when I was approaching the age of Dennis, Kelvin, Michael, Patrick and Junior and might have understood it so how can I say one way or the other if it hasn't aged well.

Listening to it now, however, I can happily say that there's plenty going on to enjoy. Tom Ewing's analysis makes the case that if it is gimmickry then at least it's "gimmickry with ambition, the very best kind." (Perhaps this also explains why we're both so fond of "Mouldy Old Dough" by Lieutenant Pigeon since it's a prime example of a creative novelty hit) Kelvin Grant's very youthful toasting contrasts well Dennis Seaton's smooth — though not slick — vocals. Some Caribbean clichés have been added (a reference to Jah here, some delicate steel drums there) but it refuses to be married to a reggae purity — there's far too much pop ebullience in the way for any of that nonsense.

Pop to be sure but not manufactured pop. Having cut my teeth as a music fan on the formulaic — though, admittedly, occasionally brilliant — late-eighties pop of Stock Aitken Waterman and the family friendly, boy/girl next door images they cultivated in their charges, it's wonderfully refreshing to come across a band of youngsters who'd clearly cooked up something from their own collective imagination (though ironically co-produced by one Pete Waterman). It's a cover sure (in fact its a mash-up of "Pass the Kouchie" with U Roy's "Rule the Nation" and U Brown's "Gimme the Music) but one that they brought enough of themselves into while not sacrificing any musical authenticity. Expunging the original's drug references probably ought to have rendered this a ham-fisted and watered-down recording, consigned to going no further than a very rough home demo on a dodgy tape recorder. The very fact that they pulled it off to the tune of an addictive hit record is nothing short of remarkable.

It probably wasn't inevitable that Jamaican music's seventies golden age and UK ska's two year window of chart dominance would usher in a reggae pop boom but that is indeed what happened in the waning months of 1982. New Pop had gone on sabbatical and five London lads stepped up to fill the void. Musical Youth were never spoken of alongside the progressive leftist pantheon of the Rock Against Racism or Two Tone but what they had to offer may have been just as radical and self-sufficient. British kids of all races could only look on and wonder if they too could be part of the generation to rule the nation.

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Also Reviewed This Fortnight

The Jam: "The Bitterest Pill (I Ever Had to Swallow)"

Blimey, what pitiful pack of singles poor old Dave Rimmer had to sift through. Far too many covers and more than a smattering of established acts who were floundering creatively. I  didn't have much desire to write about yet another Jam single but the glut of inspiring records has left me with little choice. Coming in the group's imperial phase, "The Bitterest Pill" made the runner-up spot in the charts — held off by the young bucks above — and is a decent first attempt at grand gesture lush pop, something Paul Weller would improve upon in the next three years. Irritatingly overloaded with garbled, indecipherable  lyrics, it doesn't quite work although I've long had a distant fondness for it as something you'd never expect The Jam to record. It's almost as if Weller needed something new to come along.