25 July 1990 (with more "wry" "observations" here)
"I met Billy's mum and dad once actually, and it's funny but I never thought of Billy Idol having a mum and dad."
— "Uncle" Phil Collins
Remixes, dance-rock, cover versions, Euro-dance: the likes of grunge, shoegaze, jungle and whatever it was that Hootie & The Blowfish and Spin Doctors played was still ahead of us but the nineties were well underway. But try telling that to Roxette, Billy Idol and, indeed, Phil Collins. To all of them, it was as if 1983 had never ended.
Collins was a good deal older than your average pop star moonlighting as a singles reviewer in Smash Hits, especially by 1990 when the magazine was trending younger. On the other hand, guest critics by this point were on the downswing of their careers. Matt Goss did the singles in the first issue of the new year and was then followed by London Boys, two of the blokes behind Jive Bunny and the members of And Why Not. Not exactly pop's hottest acts. If anything, our Phil was still going strong even if his UK chart placements were starting to peak lower. (As he accurately guesses, not a whole lot of people bought his latest, the Britain-only "That's Just the Way It Is", no doubt because "everybody's bought" his latest blockbuster album ...But Seriously, even though I sure as hell didn't)
The eighties were already starting to fall out of fashion but Collins was having none of it. Roxette's "Listen to Your Heart" is essentially a heavy metal slow song — for the love of god, even the video plays into this with tropes such as a swaying audience and hard rock poses from the band which could've been straight out of a Whitesnake promo — while Billy Idol's cover of "L.A. Woman" is all eighties' lust and eighties' pomp blanketing a seventies' record that needed no frills. It may not have been acknowledged at the time but the trio of Collins, Idol and Roxette might as well have been the new dinosaur acts for a new decade.
Roxette have been enjoying a bit of a critical re-evaluation as of late. They did very well for a little while but they became irrelevant by about 1992 when listeners really started getting the eighties out of their systems. From then until quite recently they were regarded as naff. (Say what you will about a group like Kajagoogoo but at least they were of their time and not clinging to a bygone era) Nostalgia for eighties and nineties acts seemed to forget all about them. Then, singer Marie Fredriksson passed away near the end of 2019 and Generation Xers remembered how much they liked them way back when. It's not inconceivable that the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame will induct them at some point.
The story of how Roxette broke through in the America has practically become a legend. What seldom gets mentioned is how the British stubbornly tried to resist them, to the extent that it mirrors how the US attempted to ignore fellow Swedes ABBA fifteen years earlier. True, "The Look" gave them a Top 10 hit in May of 1989 but follow ups "Dressed for Success" and a first try for "Listen to Your Heart" missed the fun forty altogether. It was only after the syrupy "It Must Have Been Love" returned them to the British charts that their earlier flops got a second chance. Neither of them did anywhere close to the same roaring business they attracted in the US but they both did all right, ensuring that Roxette would be respectable chart regulars in Britain while remaining monsters elsewhere — at least for a little while. Of the two, "Listen to Your Heart" is the sturdier record. As Collins says, it's a bit Bryan Adams (the poor bits) and a bit Heart (the rest) and it had been done a million times before. Very bland, very cliched but I can listen to it from end to end; "Dressed for Success" is just pitiful.
While Roxette still had another year or two of hits to go, Billy Idol was fast becoming forgotten as early as 1990. Where he had once cultivated a diverse cross-section of listeners from pop kids to metallers and from punk holdovers to assorted of castoffs and misfits, Sir Billiam audience had by this point dwindled down to his core following. Middle age suited Collins and Sting but only seemed to make Idol seem even more ridiculous than he already was. Old school punks no longer seemed to have a place at the table (a returning Adam Ant seemed to be an even sadder proposition) when there were sufficient hardcore acts and indie bands for outsiders to embrace.
His — gasp! — fourth Single of the Fortnight (joining Elvis Costello, The Cure and Pet Shop Boys in this once-exclusive group), "L.A. Woman" is nevertheless Idol's weakest record to date. There's much to recommend in the original by The Doors: it's intense, it's them at their grubby blue-rock best, at times it's poppy and catchy, Jim Morrison gives a ballsy but not highfalutin performance and they capture a city they knew all too well. None of that can be found in Idol's rendition however. It opens sounding much more like Kenny Loggins' "Footloose" than anything The Doors would ever have touched and it's only downhill from there. Subtlety goes out the, er, door. Idol's Morrison impersonation is spot on at times (at other points he sounds either like Peter Murphy or someone doing a poor Billy Idol impersonation) but Morrison himself didn't sound like Morrison by the end of his life.
The only thing that saves "L.A. Woman" is that I buy Idol being enraptured by a gorgeous groupie from Venice Beach in a way that locals wouldn't appreciate. Morrison sang it as if he'd been around these girls his entire life; Idol comes at it from the perspective of a British rock 'n' roller living it up in the California sun for the first time in his life. There's a tradition of New Yorkers arriving in L.A. and despising it while Brits who descend upon the west coast end up living it up on endless groupies and a sea of vodka. Idol always made you believe that he made the most of his rock lifestyle and all its assorted "accoutrements".
~~~~~
Also of some cop
New Kids on the Block: "Tonight"
It seemed like the long and depressing reign of the New Kids was never going to end. Luckily, they were just about to come apart and the a-bit-better-than-I-remember "Tonight" gives clues to their undoing. As everyone knows by now, your best days are clearly behind you if you go into being self-referential ("Taught you 'bout hangin' tough / As long as you've got the right stuff...": did kids who weren't me think that quoting themselves was cool at the time?) and any thoughts that they were representing the future of music had been dashed by them suddenly trying to sound like The Beatles. And then there's the fact that they had put out a single all about how much they loved their fans at precisely the same time that they were being knocked in the press for lip-synching at their concerts. Still, at least Danny, Donnie, Joey, Jon and Jordan weren't living in the past. In fact, you could say that between being a boy band, poorly trying to ape The Beatles, miming to their own recordings and being meta with their lyrics the New Kids were paving the way for the nineties.
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