— Zodiac Mindwarp
Though it's trite to say so, the quality of guest pop star reviewers in Smash Hits has been lacking of late. For the most part, they've never been especially suited to the role but there were occasional Gary Kemps and Martyn Wares to put some real consideration into their choices. Failing that, at least you could rely on Morrissey or Andy Partridge to offer up charmingly bitchy assessments of the new releases. Lately, however, guest critics have been bland or have been far too concerned with building themselves up to bother with anything close to analysis. True, Robert Smith's turn proved to be an entertaining read though it was slightly let down by overly predictable favourites. Gary Numan made it all about himself. Wet Wet Wet and Hue & Cry both attempted the petty bitchiness tack but they lacked the wit and spark to rise above looking like complete prats.
Things don't seem particularly encouraging this fortnight either. Sitting in round the turntable at the Hits office is the former Mark Manning, headliner and leader of Zodiac Mindwarp & The Love Reaction and self-proclaimed 'Sex Fuhrer'. Oh, what joy! A filthy biker wannabe who makes dreadful metal records for people who look just like him. He'll love all the rawk music because guitars and reasons and he'll trash everything else because real men don't play synths or try to dress presentably or any of that nonsense that goes with pop music.
His choice of Single of the Fortnight plays into this stereotype but Zodiac isn't so bad. He makes lewd comments about Madonna and Whitney but he happily discusses the quality of their records too. He despises the politics of The Housemartins but digs their latest single "Build". He defends Michael Jackson against charges of being weird (when your stage name is 'Zodiac Mindwarp' you can probably identify with someone who sleeps in an oxygen chamber). He doesn't think Prince is as good as he used to be yet still reckons his latest record "I Can Never Take the Place of Your Man" is "brilliant". He manages to find something complementary to say about everyone even if he's not crazy about all of it. Sure, he's a bit of an oik but it's nice to see this oik likes his pop and isn't married to rock. Call me pleasantly surprised and feeling a big bad that I had judged him so wrong in the first place.
As you can probably tell from the preceding paragraph, the singles page is loaded with big names, with DJ/producer Jellybean being the closest thing to an obscure . Eight of the fifteen acts involved are now in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. And why not? This issue of Smash Hits is from November of '87 and the race towards the Christmas Number One was already on. As it would turn out, none of them were factors a month later and with good reason. Jacco's "The Way You Make Me Feel" and Whitney's "So Emotional" aside, I'm struggling to remember how any of these tunes go. I can understand Madonna choosing to leave the ho-hum "The Look of Love" off her compilations. Mr Mindwarp may indeed enjoy Five Star's "Somewhere Somebody" and "Reasons to Live" by a makeup-less Kiss and he can have 'em.
Among the forgettables is "Hysteria" by Def Leppard (or it did until a month ago when I began listening to it). The title was familiar — it's the name of their breakthrough album from the same year — but the song itself was new to me. Why hadn't I heard this track before? Like a lot of big albums of the era, Hysteria had a lot of singles taken from it. Six records reached the pop charts around the world with another ("Women") being a minor hit in certain territories. And this was spread out from the summer of 1987 through to the winter of '89. Those of us who may have otherwise been neutral to a group like Def Leppard would tire of their omnipresence but this flood of product didn't do them any harm. The album kept selling and they were a lucrative concert attraction so fair play to them. But this glut of charting singles failed to seep into the public conscious with only "Pour Some Sugar on Me" being a tune that you could reliably say most people know (or at least knew back in the day). Their US chart topper "Love Bites" was vaguely familiar to me but it hardly flooded my mind with memories of 1988. Obviously it did well but it ended up being just another Def Leppard single that sounded just like all the others.
Like a lot of metal from the time, it's remarkable how tame it all sounds now. With the charts packed with the likes of Bon Jovi, Whitesnake, White Lion and Motley Crue, hair metal was inescapable. The establishment found it threatening while teenagers were either drawn to it or found it repulsive. It was not a genre that you could go either way on or that you could pick and choose. My own aversion to it was at least as much down to the way it presented itself as to the music. The artists and fans all seemed to look alike and all seemed like outcasts who had nothing interesting to say. Everyone wore their hair long and had Iron Maiden t-shirts but no one was to know that they were all paper tigers. Def Leppard's Joe Elliott was as much a fan of Queen as Black Sabbath and his generation's school of metal in Britain was formed around performing the way the glam rockers did. Their album covers looked dangerous but their music was rather less threatening. It had been been five years since Ozzy Osbourne had bitten the head off a bat on stage but the acts of a charismatic but unhinged frontman seemed to define the genre forever.
Like a lot of rock groups, Def Leppard's strength was in their passion. You could tell Elliott really meant it when he sang, particularly in the choruses where he always seemed out of breath. Their beats and melodies were never as pounding as befits a bunch of Yorkshire headbangers but there was a workmanlike precision to their playing. Their slow songs were, mercifully, not as cynically commercial as those of Cinderella or Poison; "Hysteria" is not unlike a so-called ballad, only that it's just like all their other songs but slowed down a tad. These guys clearly lived and breathed their lyrics and even if they didn't they sounded committed enough to pull it off. And that's "Hysteria" (and, indeed, every Def Leppard song) for you: tough but just tender enough, giving never less than 100% and believing in all those myths of rock 'n' roll but lacking memorable hooks and genuine thrill.
"Hysteria" scarcely seems like metal and perhaps there's a reason for it beyond it being a genre that was constantly shifting its goalposts. Def Leppard had been working with South African producer Mutt Lange for some time and his influence had rubbed off on the Sheffield rockers. Another of Lange's big name acts was Bryan Adams, who had originally been a hard rocker himself as a lad when he joined Vancouver group Sweeney Todd as a replacement for departed vocalist Nick Gilder. The Todd failed to repeat the success of their early Canadian hit "Roxy Roller" but this experience helped launch Adams as a solo artist. The hard rock, metal-adjacent sound continued on his self-titled debut album but the rough edges (Adams' voice excepted) would be smoothed over en route to worldwide stardom. Lange seems to have taken much the same approach with Def Leppard: if Bryan Adams couldn't be metal than why not make metal sound more like Bryan Adams?
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Also Reviewed This Fortnight
Alison Moyet: "Love Letters"
There's a rule that vocalists who come up through pop have to prove their "chops" by attempting to be jazzy. Generally, this is saved for when a singer is on the back end of their career and is sought out strictly by devoted fans but Alison Moyet chose to do it rather early in her run, perhaps with an eye on the coveted Christmas Number One (she came up short though it still gave her a Top 10 hit). As old Zod says, it's very well done but there's not much to it. She sings the forties standard well and the music is perfectly fine but there's nothing much to get excited about. The fact that they had to recruit French and Saunders to laugh it up in a video for a song otherwise lacking in humour is indicative of just how out of place this cover is. Why didn't she save it for a Tony Bennett duets albums ten years later?
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