Jona Lewie: "Stop the Cavalry"

27 November 1980

"In cavalry terms, it's called reversing the charges."

— Mark Ellen

As chart bronze medalists go, they don't get much bigger than "Stop the Cavalry". 1980's Christmas number one stakes ought to have been a thrilling race with credible challengers Adam & The Ants, Madness and The Police all in contention. (Curiously, both ABBA and Blondie released their swansong imperial period chart toppers — "Super Trouper" and "The Tide Is High" respectively — too early on in the autumn for a serious push come December) Still, none of these groups delivered their best work and it ought to have been left to perennial also-ran Jona Lewie and his poignant wartime anthem to take that year's crown. And it would have had it not been for Mark David Chapman and a children's choir. "Stop the Cavalry" got stuck in the trenches with no chance of further advancement.

In the aftermath of his shocking assassination in New York on December 8, 1980, there was a glut of John Lennon product filling the shelves. While the Americans loyally took the already released "(Just Like) Starting Over" to the top for over a month, the British had a great deal more to choose from. "Starting Over" was already slipping down the charts by the time Lennon was gunned down but it had a head start on its rivals and rebounded by flying straight to the top a week later. Others would join it soon. The week of Christmas there were three Lennon singles in the Top 10 (the other two being the seasonal classic "Happy Xmas (War Is Over)" and the now often unfairly maligned "Imagine") and it put them in competition with each other. (A week later the three singles remained in their exact same chart spots before "Happy Xmas" managed to climb two places in the first week of 1981, a sign of how high the demand was for Lennon material at this sad point) This left a spot open for Jona Lewie, who unfortunately ended up getting usurped by the St. Winifred's School Choir with their unspeakably awful "There's No One Quite Like Grandma".

Sally Lindsay was a seven-year-old student who sang on the unexpected Christmas number one and who would one day go on to play the character of Shelly on Coronation Street. She has said how bad she felt that they deprived Britain of having Lennon top the charts over the holiday because their record was "crap". But the real shame was that Jona Lewie's vastly superior Christmas record didn't have the legs to beat out both of them.

Lewie was one of those people who had been signed to the Stiff label and, thus, was tied to the pub rock scene. Like of a lot figures attached to it, he was older than your average pop star, having been a veteran of a variety of bands throughout the seventies. The pub rockers had some things in common — they tended to place a premium on songwriting and had their roots in sixties' pop — but the music itself varied greatly from one artist to the next. Lewie had been raised on blues and jazz but he also had talents that gravitated towards folk. Those pub rockers knew their stuff and could play damn-near any style requested of them.

As Mark Ellen notes, Lewie had been left behind as his colleagues ventured beyond the Canvey Island clubs. The charts alluded him until the spring of 1980 when "You'll Always Find Me in the Kitchen at Parties" gave him a much needed Top 20 hit. Sounding like a much more laid back Ian Dury, he spins a humourous yarn about, er, always being in the kitchen at parties. He's backed by a vaguely reggae beat and plenty of sythny bits which are interesting if not quite engaging. If it happens to be a novelty song then the gag wears thin pretty quickly; if it isn't a novelty then it just seems like a joke and not even a very funny one.

"You'll Always Find Me in the Kitchen at Parties" gave Lewie a foothold in the hit parade but it's likely that "Stop the Cavalry" would have done well regardless. He may not have written it with Christmas in mind — though isn't it odd how these unintended Yuletide numbers always appear just in time for the big day — but the combination of the season, the song's message, the instrumentation and a tune that thousands of people could get behind ensured that it was going to do very well.

That bit of reggae remains from its predecessor — albeit slowed down and played as if on a pump organ — but the synths are kept in check by what Ellen calls a "sort of Salvation Army backing" of "tubas, drum rolls, sleigh bells, etc.". (Again, why is it that sleigh bells always end up in songs that aren't supposed to be meant to be Christmassy?) While "...Kitchen at Parties" tried too hard to be jolly, there's nothing similar going on here. Lewie plays the part of a simple Tommy and it is his less-than-lettered observations that make the song so charming ("...I'll run for all presidencies": a vow he clearly didn't put much thought into); by contrast, lyrics that hint at much more aware soldier ("while the Tsar and Jim have tea": I feel compelled to look up who this 'Jim' is meant to be but I also feel like I shouldn't have to) distract a bit from the concise narrative. But why nitpick when I can happily listen and sing along?

There's nothing especially brilliant about "Stop the Cavalry" but it's difficult to imagine a Christmas compilation or playlist without it. Yet, there are worries that it may gradually fade from Britain's seasonal canon in favour of olde time American classics by Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin, as well as Mariah Carey's slightly overrated "All I Want for Christmas Is You". The British deal with reality in their Christmas songs, even if it's a fantasy of said reality. It was bad enough when Mark Chapman and some brats from Manchester ruined Jona Lewie's chances of nabbing the Christmas number one but the chances of someone like him getting that close again are growing increasingly remote.

~~~~~

Also Reviewed This Fortnight

Bow Wow Wow: Your Cassette Pet

Ellen describes this eight song mini album (which, strangely, qualified at the time as a single due to only being available on tape) as "Brilliant!" but he neglects to mention the music within, so I chose to disqualify it as a de facto Single of the Fortnight on those grounds. Malcolm McLaren's charges that he nicked from the original Adam & The Ants as well as teenage vocalist Annabelle Lwin were expert at pressing people's buttons as well as keeping a more genuine punk spirit alive, even if it was as contrived as Jimmy Pursey put upon rage. After-all, no one else championed tapes like they did: they released the first cassette single (with a blank second side) and this was in effect a brand new LP available only in this most D.I.Y. of formats. A triumph of packaging and marketing to the extent the music within hardly matters.

Madonna: "Like a Prayer"

8 March 1989

"Madonna returns triumphantly. Gasp in amazement."

— William Shaw

It was in the early part of 1989 that Madonna was back (BACK!!) after what seemed like a lengthy sabbatical of making movies no one liked (or so I've been told: I'm quite sure that I've never seen a single Madonna picture) and breaking up with Sean Penn. The hits from Michael Jackson and George Michael's blockbuster albums were finally beginning to dry up, people were starting to tire of U2, Prince was losing the plot a bit and the time was right for a Madonna comeback. The public was ready to welcome her back with open arms and, as William Shaw implies, she could've offered up a steaming pile of dung for a single and the punters would've been pleased to have her back (BACK!!).

A slew of singles followed over the course of the year but it wouldn't be long before she was back (BACK!!) yet again in 1990. I'm Breathless was a relatively low-key release used to promote the Dick Tracy movie (a rare Madonna vehicle that critics didn't despise) but the "Vogue" single quickly became one of her career defining moments. A long-awaited greatest hits, The Immaculate Collection, was released closer to the end of the year and it was an event. She didn't take the easy road of titling it The Very Best of Madonna or The Singles or something similarly trite and she even took the bold step of leaving some of her biggest hits off of it. (It is probably for this reason that records like "Gambler", "Angel", "Causing a Commotion" and "Dear Jessie" have felt like second division Madonna songs)

Those fifteen established tracks that made the cut for The Immaculate Collection were all remixed. While the likes of "Lucky Star" and "Into the Groove" sounded pretty much the same as they always had, a pair of more recent hits, "Like a Prayer" and "Express Yourself", were radically different from what they had been like just a year or so earlier. Then, in a bout of collective amnesia, everybody seemed to forget all about the originals and accepted that these revamped cuts had never been changed at all.

Therefore, it comes as something of a shock to discover that the 1989 "Like a Prayer" is an altogether different beast from what ended up on The Immaculate Collection eighteen months later. (We'll get to the sorry state of "Express Yourself"'s status before long) It should be said that as remixes go, it isn't awful. The song is too good for Shep Pettibone or whoever it was to ruin it completely. The acid house-esque squelching suits the tune well enough and there's a nice dramatic build up that is a little harder to identify in the original. Nevertheless, there's far too much hi-hat, the 'Yea! Whoa!' is cliched and the breakdown is utterly pointless.

There's nothing to quibble over with the original single version though. Prince pounds out a mad guitar riff to open before the ethereal sets in. But that soon gets swept away by a chugging and infectious gospel beat. It could almost be a Motown song and Madonna's debt to sixties' black pop is emphasised by quoting from Wilson Pickett ("in the midnight hour, I can feel your power") and Dionne Warwick ("like a little prayer" and "I say a little prayer") Rising to the challenge she set for herself, Madonna sings as beautifully as she ever has. She smartly avoids the vocal tricks that frequently grate (her occasional husky-voiced bursts can be funny but they do her no favours) and manages to employ a fine balance of feeling and joy. She isn't typically regarded as a technically brilliant singer or anything but it would be hard for anyone to top her performance here.

Then there's the choir. I would soon get sick of the use of gospel choirs in pop (it often felt like they were there to provide meaning in otherwise meaningless songs) but "Like a Prayer" shows how effective they can be in the right hands. As I just mentioned, Madonna doesn't have the strongest voice and she rightly stays out of their way perhaps knowing that she'll be exposed in their presence. ("Let the choir sing" is a lyric that doesn't need to be there but it's a good way for a woman with a supposedly gigantic ego to shine the spotlight elsewhere; the 1990 remix undercuts this a bit by featuring the choir prior to Madonna's introduction)

"Like a Prayer" became a massive hit around the world but it doesn't sound like much else from 1989. Being a masterful hybrid of black pop, it has a timelessness about it that you don't come across everyday. Yet, it was too timeless a year on and had to be transformed into a product of the late-eighties to fit better with Madonna's vision for her first greatest hits set. It's not everyday you get someone taking something timeless and willfully choosing to make it dated.

What the revamped version of "Like a Prayer" ended up doing is that it unknowingly opened the door to the second phase of Madonna's career. She was no longer translating the sound of the New York clubs that was in her heart into her records, nor traces of new wave, disco and glam rock she grew up on; from here, she was content to let her producers and remixers take the lead. This being Madonna, it still worked though not on as consistent a basis as in her eighties' imperial period. Ironically, it was in the nineties that people started praising her for being "clever Madonna" but I'd say she was much smarter back before everyone began figuring her out.

~~~~~

Also Reviewed This Fortnight

Roachford: "Family Man"

It had only been thirty years since the heyday of Chuck Berry, Larry Williams and Little Richard but somewhere along the line the idea of black rock music had become a novelty. Andrew Roachford had as soulful a voice as anyone (and probably still has; he now sings with Mike + The Mechanics which makes me wonder how nice his delivery of "you can whistle as well as you hear" must be) which makes his decision to rock out admirable when he could've easily gone the R&B Romeo route. The power of his voice works well with the rockist sounds of his band but "Family Man" has always felt more like an album cut than single material to me. "Cuddly Toy" had hooks aplenty and it rightfully gave him a memorable Top 5 hit at the start of the year. Its follow-up was more of the same but less immediate and more forgettable. Good stuff but there's a reason it stalled outside the Top 20. And with that, Roachford's career seemed to stall a bit. He's had a fine career but it always seemed like he was going to be bigger. But how about a second opinion?

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?

Bruce Springsteen: "Hungry Heart"

13 November 1980

"Taking it that Dylan can be temporarily listed as AWOL in Heaven, I rate Springsteen the greatest living and active rock artist."

— Mike Stand

"Bobby said he'd pull out, Bobby stayed in

Janey had a baby, there wasn't any sin

They were set to marry on a summer day

Bobby got scared and he ran away..."

"Spare Parts" is a track on Bruce Springsteen's Tunnel of Love, a masterpiece of love gone sour and loneliness. It isn't one of the albums highlights but it isn't mere filler either. For one thing, it's a welcome rocker in the midst of all these bleak acoustic guitar strums and/or synth wails. It's also nice to hear something that isn't first-person derived ("Spare Parts" is followed by the folksy "Cautious Man", the only other track that uses a narrative of other lost souls instead of Springsteen himself). It was an unlikely single — though beyond "Brilliant Disguise" there wasn't much chart potential for any of Tunnel of Love's dozen songs — and only performed modestly. It wasn't even released in the US where Born in the USA had resulted in a ridiculous number of hits, a feat that its predecessor couldn't come close to replicating.

"Spare Parts" is about a young couple and how each reacts differently to an unexpected pregnancy. Bobby is a coward, a rogue ("Bobby heard 'bout his song bein' born, swore he wasn't ever goin' back") and a loser. He doesn't Walk Like a Man. Janey's situation makes her despair and she seriously considers pulling an "Ode to Billie Joe" in order to rid herself of the child she has to care for. Instead, she ends up discarding remnants of her life with Bobby and  winds up with some "good cold cash" from the pawnshop. Her story is unresolved from there but the implication is she's going to be strong and that she'll raise her infant son to be more of a man than Bobby ever was. What goes unacknowledged here is that old Bobby had a Hungry Heart. After all, everybody's got a Hungry Heart.

Bruce Springsteen was already over thirty when he finished recording The River, a double album of maudlin reflections and balls-out comedy rockers — as well as a great deal in between. I don't know if it's many people's favourite Boss LP (the popular picks are Born to Run, Darkness on the Edge of Town, Nebraska and Tunnel of Love) but it is perhaps the most representative of him. It was initially going to be a single disc known as The Ties That Bind until Springsteen changed his mind at the last minute. Manager Jon Landau suggested expanding it to encompass more of the diversity of his work and that's what eventually happened. Philip Larkin would put a great deal of care into how his collections of poems would be sequenced — "I treat them like a music hall bill: you know, contrast, difference in length, the comic, the Irish tenor, bring on the girls" — and that is not unlike how The River took shape.

Would-be title track and Heartland anthem "The Ties That Bind" opens the first disc in much the same way "Badlands" kicks off 1978's Darkness on the Edge of Town. But it's the album's second track that indicates changes have been made. "Sherry Darling" is one of Springsteen's most engaging rockers and it must tear the house down whenever he performs it live but it is also funny. To have the earnest and painfully sincere Bruce Springsteen singing about being fed up with having to drive his irritating mother-in-law down to the unemployment agency every Monday makes for a refreshing change. The trope of the nagging in-law was probably more amusing then than it is now since it had been such an established as sitcom fodder. Members of Springsteen's E Street Band cheer and holler The Boss as he spins this yarn and it's as if they recreating the casual, good-natured vibes of The Beach Boys Party album.

Having "Sherry Darling" appear so early on The River turned out to be a canny move for Springsteen. The album's twenty cuts didn't necessarily need to be taken seriously even if some still did. The remainder of the first side of disc one is a return to a more straight laced Boss with the imploring "Jackson Cage" and the desperate "Two Hearts" and once the lovely closer "Independence Day" is done, it's time for a palate cleanser. Side two's opening track doesn't quite do the job as effectively as "Sherry Darling" but it does provide light relief.

"Hungry Heart" doesn't have to be taken as a lighthearted number but that's how I've always heard it. I will always remember how jarring it was the first time I listened to the album because of his voice. ("Is that even him or has another E Street Band member taken over the vocals for once?") He sounds younger and his throat is far less ravaged than normal. It's almost pure which makes the narrative easier to swallow. Oh, and about that narrative: there isn't much of one. As Mike Stand himself does, the song's opening lines ("got a wife and kids in Baltimore, Jack / I went out for a ride and I never went back") are often quoted because (a) it's so gloriously wrong and (b) it's the only thing anyone remembers of it. For such a popular Springsteen tune, it sure is lyrically slight. That said, it displays one of the finest recorded performances of the E Street Band with everyone in top form and raging.

It was famously supposed to be for the Ramones, which is yet more evidence that "Hungry Heart" is much more of a comedy number than it may appear. While it's hard to imagine the sneering Joey Ramone singing it at all, there's no way he would have taken as anything but a joke. And he would have been right to. Springsteen could have done with treating it a little less seriously.

None of this is to condemn "Hungry Heart", only to make a case that it's lighter than it's typically thought of. Springsteen wrote far more convincing songs about unsatisfied souls dreaming of better lives for themselves than one with some glaring contradictions. In a way, it's a number that isn't quite sure of itself. It doesn't completely convince as a song of a restless soul and neither does it engage nearly as well as "Sherry Darling". Bruce could occasionally be guilty of trying to be all things to all people in his songcraft and that's what's going on here.

Theory time: "Hungry Heart" and "Spare Parts" are about the same couple. If this is the case, Bobby comes out of it looking even worse. In "Spare Parts", he's a character that Janey and their infant son are best rid of; in "Hungry Heart", he makes a rather feeble case for being such a free spirit: there's something inside of him that makes him crave the road but we aren't meant to understand why. I guess it just goes to show how Bruce Springsteen was still improving as a songwriter. By the time he got to Tunnel of Love, no one could touch him — not even the earthly/heavenly Bob Dylan.

~~~~~

Also Reviewed This Fortnight

Devo: "Whip It"

There was something so utterly cool about discovering Devo for the first time. To find out that there happens to have been a group of nerds who wore flowerpot hats and did creatively oddball tunes is revelatory at any age and at any time — and that's before even getting to their outstanding music videos and their still-brilliant and original concept of wrap-around themes for their home video releases. The world is a much better place for having Devo as a part of it. That said, I'm more than twenty years out of university and their music no longer has that same thrill as when I was younger. Everyone should have a Devo period even if they end up outgrowing it eventually. "Whip It" is indeed great but it just doesn't sound the same as it used to. But I'm sure that's at least as much on me as them — if not much more so.

Dusty Springfield: "Nothing Has Been Proved"

8 February 1989

"It's been written and put together by the Pet Shop Boys and it's extremely slow and moody and is a bit of a "grower" (i.e. everyone declares that it's "useless" the first time they hear it then change their minds pretty sharpish)."

— Chris Heath

At the conclusion of a lengthy piece in the Smash Hits Yearbook 1989, Neil Tennant is asked how they foresee the future of the Pet Shop Boys when they finally wind up going down the dumper:

"Everyone thinks it's a joke but it's serious. The Pet Shop Boys will carry on, but we'll stop being the front men. Instead we'll change the line-up every year or so — suddenly there will be four sixteen year old boys as the Pet Shop Boys and the next thing you know they'll be replaced by two thirty-five year old Elaine Page types. We'll be fed up with it all by then so we'll just write the music. We'll be able to spend our time doing nice things like going to bed early. We won't have to have our photograph taken or be asked why we're called the Pet Shop Boys. We can just make the records. And make lots of money."

It has now been nearly a third of a century since this article was published and the Pet Shop Boys of Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe remains. The Pet Shop Boy Band has yet to materialise and neither have the Pet Shopettes. If they didn't quite crash into the dumper, then they certainly witnessed their popularity begin to tail off over the course of the nineties though their aging fanbase remains loyal enough that their great-to-indifferent albums still sell well and they're a strong concert attraction. (Not bad for a group that once described themselves as "not a live band, really" while on tour) Their back catalog is one of the most admired in British pop. They've even written a musical together.

Yet, composing for others has always garnered more mixed results for the Pet Shop Boys. They've written for Dusty Springfield, Liza Minnelli, Tina Turner and Kylie Minogue albeit in rather forgettable fashion and they have wisely saved their best material for themselves. The relatively trivial "Heart" had originally been earmarked for Hazel Dean and, later, Madonna but in the end it wound up on their second album Please with a remix of it giving them their fourth UK number one hit. "One in a Million", a deep cut from 1993's Very and theme tune to long-running South Korean sketch comedy show Gag Concert, had an eye on rising boy band Pet Shop Boys Take That. Even those tracks they gave away to others were generally better when done in one form or another by the pair themselves.

"Nothing Has Been Proved" is a special case for the Pet Shop Boys because it hadn't been composed with anyone in particular in mind and wasn't even initially intended to be used in a film. Tennant wrote it on a guitar in the seventies when he was a struggling young musician and the song languished as his prospects began to take off after meeting Lowe and then hooking up with Bobby O. The group became interested in film soundtracks and had even been approached with the possibility of doing a Bond theme. While Norwegian pop group A-ha would go on to do the theme to The Living Daylights, they remained interested in doing film work. (Disappointingly, they didn't bother recording any fresh music for the soundtrack to their own cinematic project It Couldn't Happen Here) Producer Stephen Wooley then requested a song from them for the film Scandal about the Profumo affair of the early sixties. How serendipitous that Tennant already had such a song.

(Critics frequently cite Tennant as one of pop's great purveyors of irony but few give him credit for his historiography, perhaps in part due to the relative obscurity of these numbers of his. "Nothing Has Been Proved" is a rare case of one of his historical songs receiving the prominence of a single; "Jack the Lad" and "Don Juan" were both B-sides while "My October Symphony" and "Dreaming of the Queen" were deep cuts. All, however, remain firm fan favourites)

In an age when politicians will not step down from their positions under any circumstances (at a time, ironically, of supposedly rampant cancel culture) it's hard to believe that the Profumo affair was such a big deal. Conservative member of parliament John Profumo had been engaged in an extra-martial tryst with nineteen-year-old Christine Keeler. The Tory Secretary of State for War was asked about it and he denied any involvement on his part. His lie was exposed and it ended up bringing down the government of prime minister Harold MacMillan. All of this happened but it isn't what "Nothing Has Been Proved" is about; what we have, instead, is individuals on the periphery whose names weren't in the papers as much — if at all — and aren't remembered but who were affected by this scandal all the same. At least one took much more of a fall than the names that were on everyone's lips.

In a way, "Nothing Has Been Proved" is Tennant's equivalent of The Smiths' "Suffer Little Children" from the group's 1984 debut album. Both songs recount shocking events from the sixties, one a political scandal, the other a series horrific child killings. Tennant and Morrissey were just kids themselves when news of these events broke and it's natural to assume that they didn't really understand what was going on. Whispers, rumours, stuff they each heard on the playgrounds of their schools. Obviously its impossible to compete with the sorrowful content of "Suffer Little Children", in which Morrissey identifies with the innocent victims, but "Nothing Has Been Proved" has pathos in its own right. While Moz quotes Myra Hindley's infamous line "whatever he has done, I have done", Tennant doesn't bother repeating the famous words of Keeler's friend Mandy Rice-Davies, "well he would, wouldn't he?" and opts for quoting from Stephen Ward's suicide note instead ("I'm guilty till proved innocent in the public eye and press"). Most importantly, the two songs give a voice to those who aren't able to speak for themselves but who we should be trying to remember.

Chris Heath alludes to the song's peculiar nature of name-dropping people that hardly anyone knows but it's one of its most beguiling elements. I've never seen Scandal but I know a bit about the affair and so I have a vague idea who 'Christine', 'Mandy' and 'Stephen' are; as for 'Vicki' and 'Johnny', I haven't the faintest idea, though I guess the latter was played by Roland Gift of the Fine Young Cannibals (there's a clip of him shooting at someone or something in the video just as Dusty utters the line "Johnny's got a gun" so I think it's a safe assumption). But, again, these aren't celebrities, they're ordinary people caught up in something extraordinary. Profumo would end up getting hounded out of political life but he would live long enough to witness his rehabilitation. Keeler and Rice-Davies would be tabloid fodder for years but they both lived to their seventies and had families. Ward ended up committing suicide on the eve of being sentenced for the crime of "living off immoral earnings". (Profumo and others paid those "immoral earnings" but they all somehow got off scot free) By using their Christian names, Dusty Springfield is passing rumours about them on to those of us listening, making all of us culpable.

One part of the song that has always stood out for me is the repeated reference to The Beatles, a line that either captures the mood of the times or intrudes upon the narrative, depending on how I'm feeling. "Please Please Me's number one": it is said to be about the Fab Four's debut album which had been dominating the LP charts but I'm convinced it's really about the single of the same name. Not technically a number one, it had nevertheless topped several unofficial charts and would have been widely accepted as a number one regardless of singles chart rules. More importantly, it was rumoured to be about fellatio, with John Lennon supposedly promising a fair and equitable exchange of head. Buttoned-down, gentlemanly English society was being rocked by a pair of beautiful call girls and a quartet of Scouse lads, all of whom were from humble backgrounds. All of this is appropriate to consider within the context of the song but it is used twice which feels a bit lazy and what's it even doing there among all these references to 'Mandy' and 'Johnny' and 'Stephen in his dressing gown' anyway?

So, I've gone this far without mentioning Dusty Springfield which is simply unforgivable. She was pushing fifty by this time (Heath notes that she was "quite a lot older than Kylie Minogue and Jason Donovan put together") but her voice still oozes that same mix of lust, melancholy and wisdom. There are cracks here and there and she's even more nasal that ever but no one listens to Dusty expecting a technically flawless performance. It's her limits as a singer that make her one of the all-time greats. I don't know how much of an effect her living through early-sixties' Britain has on her performance here but certainly her years of being in the public eye, of stardom and a faltering career, lends itself to the subject matter of the song. She experienced rumours surrounding her private life and faced deep depression of her own. This isn't the story of her life by any means but it's one she understood all too well.

"Nothing Has Been Proved" is yet another masterful Pet Shop Boys' work and hints that the Tennant-Lowe songwriting team had a future composing for others full time. This has yet to happen as they continue to focus on their own recordings. With both of them being in their sixites, it seems unlikely that they'll ever choose to farm out the duties of being pop stars to anyone else at this point. It's no great loss: Dusty aside, they never found anyone to compose for who could match or exceed Tennant's role as vocalist (although the guest performances by Frances Barber, Rufus Wainwright and Robbie Williams on the wonderful live album Concrete suggest that there are vocalists out there who are able to do Pet Shop's songs justice). If finding replacement Pet Shop Boys wasn't a joke, it definitely should have been.

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Also Reviewed This Fortnight

Bananarama/Lananeeneenoonoo: "Help!"

Heath tips it to be Bananarama's first number one but it came up just short, even though this humble blogger did his part by buying a copy of the 7". The umpteenth cover version the Bananas had done but "Help!" is quite easily the best source material for a reinterpretation. There's none of Lennon's vocal power but they're as faithful to The Beatles as one would expect for something cut in 1989. It's still quite funny even now probably because Dawn French, Jennifer Saunders and Kathy Burke ham up the backing vocals but don't bulldoze their comedy chops all over the recording. The video spoofs all those cheesy Bananarama promos of the time and makes fun of Help, The Beatles' very pointless, very boring film. I like to think that had he survived, Lennon would have adopted the Lananeeneenoonoo backing vocals ("down-down-down!", "dow-ow-ow-own") when playing live. He was perverse enough to have been into it.

Awake Me!: VER HITS on a 10

(I haven't published a non-review on here in ages and I think it's long past time I did so)

Toms Ewing and Breihan both run entertaining blogs covering the UK and US number ones. The former was even a big influence on my decision to get back into music blogging. They both rate the hits they write about which is something I've never given much thought to doing for this blog. Yet, a recent post led me to think about personal favourites and those I would wish to give a score of 10.

Please note that I won't be scoring any other records beyond the 10's. I was tempted do likewise for the absolute dreck but I couldn't be bothered doing so and, in any case, I don't think there are any I'd give a 1 to other than Limahl's abominable "Love in Your Eyes", a dubious SOTF from the trolling imagination of the great Tom Hibbert. Let's just keep it to those killer singles that I adore as much as the reviewers did back in the day.

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Year	“Artist”	Single
1979	Blondie	“Heart of Glass”
	Rick James	“High on Your Love Suite/One Mo Hit (of Your Love)”
	Squeeze	“Up the Junction”
	Buzzcocks	Spiral Scratch
1980	The Jam	“Going Underground”/”Dreams of Children”
	XTC	“Generals and Majors”
1981	The Human League	“Love Action (I Believe in Love)”
	The Police	“Invisible Sun”
1982	The Associates	“Party Fears Two
	Scritti Politti	“Faithless”
	Elvis Costello & The Attractions	“Man Out of Time”
	ABC	“All of My Heart”
1983	Prince	“1999”
	Fun Boy Three	“Our Lips Are Sealed”
	Madness	“Wings of a Dove”
	The Cure	“The Lovecats”
1984	Cocteau Twins	“Pearly-Dewdrops’ Drops”
1985	Propaganda	“Duel”
	Prefab Sprout	“Faron Young”
	Kate Bush	“Running Up That Hill”
	Dire Straits	“Brothers in Arms”
1986	The Jesus & Mary Chain	Some Candy Talking
1987	Duran Duran	“Skin Trade”
	U2	“With or Without You”
	The Housemartins	“Me and the Farmer”
	Pet Shop Boys	“Rent”
1988	S’Express	“Theme from S’Express”
	Deacon Blue	“Real Gone Kid”
	Pet Shop Boys	“Left to My Own Devices”
1989	Nick Heyward	“Tell Me Why”

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Some fun facts about this list:

• “High on Your Love Suite/One Mo Hit (of Your Love)” and “Tell Me Why” are the only singles listed that failed to reach the Top 100. At least two hundred other records were more popular than either of these magnificent songs which beggars belief. But if the masses didn’t have time for Rick James and Nick Heyward, at there’s a small number of people out there who are aware of how special they are. Hopefully that’s more than just cold comfort.
• To the surprise of precisely no one who knows me even a little, the Pet Shop Boys appear twice and are the only act with more than a single entry. It’s probable that they will back for a third time before long. The inevitable Pet Shops backlash won’t be here for a while.
• The Police, Dire Straits and U2 are perhaps the most surprising inclusions. They aren’t my favourite groups in the world though it’s worth mentioning that I don’t have anything against any of them either. The Police have never impressed me much so it was a pleasant surprise to discover how brilliant “Invisible Sun’ is. Too bad it doesn’t get more love. The other two are fine albeit in a having-the-greatest-hits-is-enough kind of way. All three benefit from having the right songs chosen: “Walking on the Moon”, “Walk of Life” and “Pride (in the Name of Love)” wouldn’t have done so well.
• 1984 and 1986 have just one single apiece. The class of ’84 was a particular slog to get through with even decent bands coming up short (Robert “Bobby Bluebell” Hudgens wanted to go for Aztec Camera’s overrated cover of “Jump” in favour of its superior A-side “All I Need Is Everything”, which might have been a 10) while ’86 wasn’t quite as poor as I had been expecting but suffered compared to the years on either side of it. But, yeah, Cocteau Twins and The Jesus & Mary Chain are the standouts from a pair of grim years, which is a reminder of just how wonderful indie music was while pop and rock were rapidly descending into an abyss of wretchedness during this time (even if ’85 was quite good).
• Deacon Blue’s “Real Gone Kid” is one people will take issue with. As I said in its write up, I have long ago accepted that very few will see eye-to-eye with me on the Scots sextet and their breakthrough hit. There aren’t many songs which make me swoon and it is one. There’s no accounting for taste and I’m not about to try to do so here.
• As the above suggests, these scores of 10 are based purely on my own tastes in the latter part of 2021. I may not necessarily have awarded the same score to each single when I wrote about them even if I’ve always rated them highly. The Human League’s “Love Action”, Fun Boy Three’s “Our Lips Are Sealed” and Propaganda’s “Duel” are among those that would’ve certainly received a score of 10 at the time. I will not be changing them in the future even if I change my mind.
• Any further Smash Hits Singles of the Fortnight that I deem 10 worthy will be added. We’re fast approaching the nineties, which isn’t a favourite decade of mine, so I suspect the totals will gradually begin to slow down. Still, ’89 and ’90 each have some solid candidates awaiting and there’s at least one more sure-fire 10 coming up when I finish off the ’81 batch next year. Keep following for more!