— William Shaw
The next two entries covering the 1989 Singles of the Fortnight are, in effect, part 1 and part 2 of the same essay. Both deal with the influence of an overwhelming figure of the time who happened to be losing his way.
I have long taken the term 'Beatlesque' as a warning to stay away. It tends to be code for very predictable, very boring power pop. Three chords and the truth. Radio exec Kevin Howlett, musicologist Rob Bowman and ex-Klatuu (ie the 'Canadian Beatles') drummer Terry Draper managed to come up with eight possible definitions of what constitues 'Beatlesque' and the first seven have some merit, though they seldom apply to bands described as such. The eighth suits the purposes of this review because it is a "simucalarum of the Beatles' reputed sound that ultimately means nothing ("a copy without an original")".
Thus, let's have a look at another, less commonly used adjective borrowed from the name of a musical giant. "Princian" probably ought to refer to artists or groups with oodles of talent, stubborn single-mindedness, some wild eccentricities and a complete lack of concern for what anyone else thinks but, instead, it is used to describe R&B acts who use rock guitar, pop groups who try to be slick or anyone who brings to mind the late singer from Minnesota.
It would have been inevitable for both Wendy & Lisa and Cat to be compared to Prince since they were all in his inner circle and they owed their musical careers to their old boss. Nevertheless, is their work all that similar? Just how Princian were they?
William Shaw points out a growing concern in the camp of Wendy Melvoin and Lisa Coleman: their relative lack of success. The critics may not necessarily have been fawning all over them but their reviews tended to be strong (so much so that the usually cold, pop-neutral Tom Hibbert seemed to genuinely appreciate their single "Sideshow" the last time they popped up on this blog; he also admitted to being an admirer of an earlier effort of their's which he reckoned was the "greatest single of 1987" which happened to be the original single release of "Waterfall"). But the public weren't having it. "Satisfaction" managed to give them a minor Top 30 hit in the UK in the summer of 1989 but everything else they put out flopped. With the singles "Are You My Baby" and "Lolly Lolly" having already missed, their best bet to capatalize on their first proper hit was to re-release and remix their most commercial-sounding pop song from two years' earlier.
Superficially Princian, "Waterfall" is awash with crunching guitars and a big fat beat that could've come straight from the Purple Perv (Melvoin even unleashes a wicked ax solo that is not unlike what she would've played on the 1999 and Purple Rain albums: this isn't so much her nicking from Prince as borrowing from herself; if they owed plenty to his nibs than the success of The Revolution owed an awful lot in turn to the two of them). Yet the hooks and sunshine melody puts it in entirely different territory.
The 1989 remix (the 'Alice and Sundial 7"') adds some slap bass, the pace seems a little swifter and there are some effects going on the background. A little more like Prince, come to think of it. If they wanted to distinguish themselves from the guru they apprenticed under then this revamp undermines them a little. On the other hand, Prince himself had a new single out at the same time and the duet "Arms of Orion" with muse Sheena Easton does a fine job on its own of undermining his own supposedly untouchable legacy (William Shaw describes it as a "sloppy...sluggish and even unconvincing love ballad, with quite the corniest words ever" and he's not wrong). A revamped Wendy & Lisa single may not have been necessary but at least it reminded everyone of how great Prince once was.
I previously compared Prince to Duke Ellington, noting that they were these two huge musical figures at the centre of a pair of accomplished groups. The members of Duke's band had him to thank for their lengthy careers but he needed them just as much. The departures of Ben Webster (permanently) and Johnny Hodges (for just four years) proved crippling but he was able to work around them; the deaths of longtime collaborator Billy Strayhorn and Hodges in 1967 and '70 respectively ensured that his work in the last years of his life would never be quite the same. Prince's biggest shortcoming was that he never fully appreciated his bandmates to the same extent. He gave them a chance to be part of the greatest band in the world and they repaid him by being the greatest band in the world. Then, he figured he could do without them and he was never really the same. The "stubborn single-mindedness" that I mention above could be a Princian trait that worked to his advantage but it could also be his creative undoing.
As for Wendy & Lisa, they're only surface-level Princian. Princian because that's what we know them as and Princian because that's what they were expected to be. Not so much because they sound like Prince but because they came from Prince and that's close enough. Talented remixers could manipulate them into sounding more like their old boss but there was much more to them. Could they have been as successful as him? Probably not. They didn't have his charisma, they weren't mavericks and never had command of pop the way he did. But, Princian or not, they were very much their own thing — not so much a "copy without an original" but a pair of originals working off of a copy.
~~~~~
Also Reviewed This Fortnight
Chris Rea: "The Road to Hell (Part Two)"
It is December 23, 1987 and a still blond and well-tanned Chris Rea is heading up to Middlesborough for Christmas. Traffic is slow but he's in a cheery mood and by the time he reaches his hometown and his family he has a new song called "Driving Home for Christmas". Five days later and he is heading back down the motorway to London and the snail's pace his car is crawling along to only makes him angry and despondent. By the time he gets back to his flat he has yet another composition as well as a dark beard and slicked back hair to show for the long journey. This isn't how the two songs were conceived but it's how I like to imagine they came to be. "The Road to Hell" sounds like Leonard Cohen singing over a Dire Straits backing track, something that Shaw noted at the time but never occurred to me. It was the much bigger hit than "Driving Home for Christmas" but there's no question which one has lasted and which one has been largely forgotten. "The Road to Hell" seemed immensely cool to me as a twelve-year-old but I don't have much time for it now. Either it has aged badly or I have.
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