Betty Boo: "Let Me Take You There"

5 August 1992

"Cool, clever and catchy; Madonna and Kylie will probably be sick with jealousy because it's exactly the sort of thing they'd love to be doing."

— Tom Doyle

The Beatmasters were a trio of DJ's who reluctantly became pop stars during the late-eighties' house music boom. Like many of their contemporaries, they seemed out of place in the limelight (only Mark Moore of S'Express made a game effort to play the part) so they shifted the attention to guest vocalists, all of whom seemed likely to achieve stardom. First up was Cookie Crew, whose collaboration with Paul Carter, Amanda Glanfield and Richard Walmsley resulted in a Top 10 hit with "Rok Da House" but the pair largely fizzled on their own. Next came veteran singer P.P. Arnold. Their Top 20 hit in October 1988 "Burn It Up" is a banger but this failed to rejuvenate the vocalist's fortunes. Then, young English rapper Merlin joined up for "Who's in the House" which got to number eight in the spring of '89. The promising hip hop star also appeared on S'Express' debut album Original Soundtrack but his prospects were hindered by a prison sentence. The Beatmasters weren't making stars, they were showing how their featured vocalists weren't able to cut it on their own.

Betty Boo seemed to play it differently. Appearing relatively normal (she looks a bit like Natalie Merchant in her first Smash Hits appearance) for their hit single "Hey DJ / I Can't Dance (to the Music You're Playing)" before shifting into cartoon pop form once her solo career began a year later. With her records "Doin' the Do" and "Where Are You Baby" hinting at the sixties' influence that had been all over dance pop and indie in 1990, it seemed like her timing couldn't have been better. And the fact that she looked like Emma Peel and Barbarella gave her that extra bit of retro chic appeal.

Betty Boo hadn't been a big deal in North America but I liked what I saw. She was different, seemed more than happy to make a fool of herself and was the sort of girl my thirteen-year-old self dreamed of. If the quartet Fuzzbox had been one person they would have looked and acted like the former Alison Clarkson. (What I failed to recognise was that she took the pop game much more seriously than the always up for a laugh Vix, Mags, Jo and Tina; how could I have spotted a steely and determined pop starlet by just a few pics that made it across the Atlantic in the pages of the old French pop mag Salut les copains?)

As for her records, I was charmed at first but it didn't take long for her shtick to wear thin. "Hey DJ" had been robust enough but free of The Beatmasters her vocal toughness became undermined by catchy but disposable tunes that really leaned towards younger listeners. The teen boys already fancied her so why not try to attract young and impressionable girls. All this is great and she played the part well but her music just blended in with the crowd even as she seemed born to stand out.

As if giving up entirely, she came back in 1992 with a fresh batch of songs that were no better than before presenting herself as just another sex kitten pop songstress. Having been away from the pop scene for more than a year and a half, she was returning to to a world that had largely moved on. (Ver Hits even acknowledges this in this same issue in the section formerly known as Bitz: "You wouldn't be blamed for forgetting Betty Boo", the short piece commences) There were enough pop kids who had enough interest to help "Let Me Take You There" almost get into the Top 10 but this would be her last shot at chart action.

Madonna and Kylie Minogue weren't exactly at their best in '92 but even on their worst day, they could effortlessly do something that could outpace the bland "Let Me Take You There". Aside from a nod to The Beach Boys in the musical break — the aquatic floatiness brings to mind the instrumental "The Nearest Faraway Place" from the group's 1969 album 20/20 — there isn't much to recommend. Betty Boo tries to sound sensual and she just about pulls it off but this probably makes the raps in the early verses seem even more out of place.

Memorable pop stars who make a mark don't come around very often and former pop kids who are now in their forties are right to have a fondness for Betty Boo, even if her records sometimes missed the mark. But the character had mostly disappeared leaving the still young Clarkson to put herself at the centre of it. But how could she have been expected to succeed? It was Betty Boo who was the pop star, Alison Clarkson just happened to be the one doing the rapping and singing. They both needed to be present for there to be any hope of it working.

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Also Reviewed This Fortnight

Cud: "Purple Love Balloon"

With a terrible name and a lead singer who looked like a grumpier, more well-nourished Mick Hucknall, people couldn't have expected much from Cud. I remember first hearing about them and figuring they'd be just the sort of group I could get behind. And I did, only I wasn't always thrilled by their music. "Purple Love Balloon" is one of only three Top 40 hits for the Leeds foursome and is one of their better efforts. Carl Puttnam's voice isn't for everyone but it's distinctive particularly in the landscape of early-nineties' shoegaze and grebo. There's the sense that they were both a little late (they would've been a better fit during the Madchester era) and a few years' early (their 1992 album Asquarius is a forerunner to Britpop) which may explain why they never really caught on. The energy of Puttnam and his aggressive band suggests that they would've been in their element on stage; they're still playing shows so it's never too late, is it?

Weekend: "Past Meets Present"

22 July 1982

"But although Weekend don't make an instant impression, they leave an atmosphere hanging in the air afterwards. Three plays and you're hooked on it."

— Dave Rimmer

Play #1

Gosh this singer sounds an awful like the girl from Young Marble Giants. They both have that deadpan voice that was commonplace among post-punk female singers but done in a fashion that implies that they are convinced that they can carry a note. Does this make their form of non-singing singing a fraud since they can sing all along?

The instruments don't really mesh, do they? But I suppose that's the point. The strings and sax are meant to be all laid back but the guitars refuse to toe the line. It is the only instrument that matters so of course the guitarist has to be different.

Play #2

Nah, this isn't the girl from Young Marble Giants. This one's way too downbeat. Dave Rimmer thinks everything's in the background but maybe the vocals and instruments are all up in the front, trying to compete for the listener's attention. It's not a great way to listen to a record though.

I liked "A View from Her Room" a whole lot more I have to say. That song felt perfectly at home being a jazzy new wave song but this just isn't sure what it's supposed to be. And is there really the need for two sax solos?

Play #3

Honestly, this would have been a really strong album cut (ideally, as a final or penultimate track) but for the fact that no one bothered to put it on Weekend's album La varieté, the clots. "Past Meets Present" just isn't single material. Not sure if anything they did was compatible with the 45" format though.

Rimmer's right that it does linger in the air but so do farts. It's strange how you can fart when you're out on the street and then get on a bus and it follows you. This single isn't quite the same: it's easy to be rid of it unless you concentrate enough and then it sticks around a while. Good thing farts don't tend to be that powerful.

So, despite the pathetic "gag" above, I know full well this is Allison Stratton, formerly of Young Marble Giants. (As Brian Eno said, only 10,000 people bought the only YMG album but everyone who did formed a band that didn't get anywhere) You can have your skeletal indie rock, I'll take uneasy lounge jazz any day, even if this song is just all right.

Sorry Rims, not hooked.

~~~~~

Also Reviewed This Fortnight

Kid Creole & The Coconuts: "Stool Pigeon"

Play #1

Damn, this one's a banger!

Play #2

Still a banger! And rather miraculous considering August Darnell's zoot suit trousers go up to his nipples and he was flirting with novelty pop on "Stool Pigeon". But who could resist such a catchy delight?

Play #3

The bangiest banger that ever did bang! FYI, I was hooked three plays ago.

(Click here to see my original review)

Cicero: "Heaven Must Have Sent You Back to Me"

22 July 1992

"It's a bit cool, a bit enigmatic, a bit good."

— Mark Frith

For the first time in living memory (or close enough to it) UK pop was going through a full calendar year without a new release from Pet Shop Boys. They had been a cornerstone of Britain's charts in the late eighties but their fortunes had begun to slide at the start of the new decade. Behaviour had been their best album — as it remains to this day — but a combination of not great word-of-mouth and the public being a bit tired of them meant that its stay on the L.P. charts had been brief. The singles were underperforming as well, especially with the relative flop of the magnificent "Being Boring". Even their strength-to-strength greatest hits collection Discography failed to generate similar sales to compilations from Queen, Eurythmics and Madness. So much for being a national treasure.

The Pet Shops may have been away from the "scene" but Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe remained active. The singer appeared on the Electronic single "Disappointed" which is every bit as good as a team up involving members of PSB, New Order and The Smiths deserved to be (in spite of the horrible use of French in the chorus). It was a Top 10 hit albeit one that crashed out of the listings rather promptly. They were also at work helping to put together the soundtrack to the outstanding Neil Jordan film The Crying Game. They even came this close to putting out a stand alone single with "Go West" which they ultimately decided to hold over for the following year. The pair were also getting involved in their own label Spaghetti Records and its first signing, Scottish singer David Cicero.

Tennant and Lowe weren't just massive pop stars but they were also their generation's finest songwriting duo. Patsy Kensit's band Eighth Wonder, Dusty Sprinfield and Liza Minelli all had hits with their compositions. But rather than gifting another Tennant/Lowe original to Cicero, they evidently had enough faith in him to allow him to write his own material. They even stayed away from the production side for the most part. It was only when third single "That Loving Feeling" ("wordy but dull", according to Mark Frith) stalled outside of the Top 40 that the decision was made to his famous mentors in for a little "additional production".

"Additional production": apparently, a simple "remixed by" credit just wasn't good enough. Either way, however, it should've been easy to spot that Tennant and Lowe had come in to lend some long-needed support to a young artist who wasn't delivering on his own. And this wasn't simply a case of a disinterested public no longer keen on anything to do with the Pet Shop Boys: Cicero's records were on the whole competent but unremarkable. (The exception was probably "Live for Today" which was credited to the Scottish singer as well as Sylvia Mason James, a longtime backing vocalist for Tennant and Lowe; it would appear on the Spaghetti Records soundtrack to The Crying Game, alongside Boy George's wonderful cover of the song of the same name)

It would be easy to dismiss something like "Heaven Must Have Sent You Back to Me" as a Pet Shops clone record but for the fact that it's not that at all. Cicero's voice is closer to Tennant's Electronic mate Bernard Sumner, making it resemble a New Order record more than anything — and, even then, one of those forgettable deep cuts from the forthcoming Republic album, so hardly vintage NO. That patented Tennant/Lowe songwriting style of brimming choruses with sparkling middle eights isn't present either. Very few can write a song like Neil and Chris and there's no shame in that. And good on him for trying his best not to piggyback on his famous benefactors. He'd been hopeless at waiting tables while dreaming of his big break and it only came when he had the nerve to hand a demo to a member of the Pet Shops' inner circle at a concert in Glasgow. 

This remix is an definite upgrade on the original "Heaven Must Have Sent You Back to Me" but it nevertheless nothing special in the scheme of things. Even among a fairly rum selection of new releases for Mark Frith to go through, it's just average. (The only standouts are the selection below and Annie Lennox's "Walking on Broken Glass"; at least Cicero isn't one of the utterly hopeless entries like Dannii Minogue's horrible cover of The Jacksons' "Show You the Way to Go" and Nu-Matic's "Spring in Your Step" which must have emerged from novelty song hell) A bit cool? Yeah but only had it come out five years' earlier. A bit enigmatic? No, not particularly. A bit good? Yeah, I can go along with that.

~~~~~~

Also Reviewed This Fortnight

The Brand New Heavies: "Don't Let It Go to Your Head"

Allegedly popular with people who don't like music and dismissed by too cool for school types ("you're not supposed to enjoy pop music, you know"), The Brand New Heavies are Generation X's version of Shakatak, right down to their insane longevity. Is it glorified wedding band music? Sure but why's that even a bad thing? I realise they're so utterly middle class but I like The Brand New Heavies and "Don't Let It Go to Your Head" is one of many first rate singles they crafted over the course of the nineties. Frith reckons you have to live the Heavies' life of "designer waistcoats" and "star-shaped shades" in order to really be a fan but I respectfully disagree: it's their music that instantly gives you all the accompanying accoutrements which is great since I'm otherwise not a designer waistcoat kind of guy.

The Shamen: "L.S.I."

8 July 1992

"Old folk but they know a cuffin' good groove when it tweaks their ear-lobes."

— Johnny Dee

It's interesting how bands can alter their identities. Freur (ie the band whose actual "name" was in fact a "squiggle resembling a poorly tapeworm") evolved in M|A|A|R|S. Colorbox eventually retooled as Underworld. If at first you can't make a go at being a "proper" band, why not try out this house stuff everyone was going on about at the end of the eighties?

The case of The Shamen is somewhat different though forged along much the same lines. Between 1985 and 1991, a great deal had changed for the Scottish group. A total of eleven individuals counted themselves as members of this organization, a turnover rate that was excessive even by the standards of struggling indie outfits. And why did so many people come and go? I'm sorry to say that little of it appears to be down to old rock faves sex and drugs but from boring old musical differences — and death in one instance. They had previously been known as Along Again Or, an on-the-nose nod to sixties' LA group Love which signaled where they were coming from, something they were slower to rid themselves of than disgruntled bandmates and guitars. The music changed but the approach hadn't.

Coming in between "Move Any Mountain" and "Ebeneezer Goode" (the two singles anyone remembers from The Shamen), it's inevitable that "L.S.I." would have slipped through the cracks. I actually assumed that it was only really remembered because of its full title which seemed prone to being misheard. And as opposed to "hold me closer Tony Danza" or 'scuse me while I kiss this guy", interpretations vary. On the excellent Back to NOW! podcast, host Iain and guest Catrin Lowe discussed possibles like "Love, Sex and Chatterpants" and "Love, Sex and Teletext". My sister had initially thought it was "Love, Sex and Janet Jacks" (which I was happy to see had also been misheard by at least one commenter on YouTube). But I haven't been able to find much else. I thought up "Love, Sex and Taller Gents", which appeals to me as a guy of considerable height but it's clearly a stretch. (That said, it was nice to hear that others thought that fellow chorus line "comin' on like a seventh sense" was in fact "comin' on like a set of stamps": you can never predict just what people will manage to get wrong)

In a bubble, "L.S.I." is a perfectly good dance-pop record. It's catchy, it's a lot of fun and if you enjoy clubbing or raves or any of that stuff, it'll get you on the dancefloor pronto. As a Shamen release, however, it's a bit of an anticlimax. The liner notes from Now That's What I Call Music 22 state that it's the "long awaited follow-up to "Move Any Mountain", a single that had been in the Top 5 way back in the summer of '91 when people still weren't utterly sick to death of Bryan bloody Adams. Having been a chart afterthought for over six years, you would think that The Shamen would've hastily put out something to cash in on finally having a hit on their hands. Instead, fans were just going to have to wait while they dealt with the aftermath of the tragic death of member Will Sin who had drowned in Tenerife while they were shooting the video to their breakthrough single.

"Move Any Mountain" had proved that they could translate their sixties' influenced psychedelic rock into a house-dance rave up and not miss a beat. (It hadn't been their first attempt but it was easily their most successful) This was the way that the acid house of A Guy Called Gerald and 808 State had been meant to sound. (Ironically, The Shamen ditched the guitars just as The Stone Roses and Happy Mondays were starting to "do" house music with old school instruments) "L.S.I." does have a smattering of subcontinental mysticism but little else to connect it to their roots. It's a perfectly fine dance number but didn't they have more in their trippy vault to share?

Apparently not. "Ebeneezer Goode" was certainly soaked in drugs but its contents have much more in common with the more intense and thrashy school of dance music of overlords The KLF and The Prodigy, with rapper Mr. C beginning to sound more like the late Keith Flint. If this was the sound of rave culture and the Ibiza bars in '92 then they were being taken over by a harder element, one that would become a fixture of Britpop, Cool Britannia and the lad mags. This was no longer about blissfully floating away among a tribal congregation of zonked out youths in a field in Kent but of getting the aggression out without the hassle of having to play an instrument or bash someone's head in. By the early nineties, a generation had changed every bit as much as The Shamen.

~~~~~

Also Reviewed This Fortnight

Aztec Camera: "Spanish Horses"

The summer of '92 was pretty crummy (at least it was on the Canadian prairies where I hail from) but the Barcelona Olympics were a ray of sunshine. After decades of Games ruined by politics, cheating, corruption, jingoism, terrorism, poor planning and doves being burned to a crisp, the Games of the XXV Olympiad were fun, exciting and made the Spanish city look like a whole lot more than just the place that Manuel came from. As if sensing this, Roddy Frame had the appropriately Iberian "Spanish Horses" released. Johnny Dee predicts a hit which it might have been had Frame handed it over to someone more fashionable. (Amazing how someone who was still only twenty-eight years old could have been considered passe but that's the world of pop for you; fun fact: Frame is four years younger than 100 meter gold medalist Linford Christie) Yet another musical artifact that commemorates the Spanish Civil War (as conflicts go, it's been well-represented), it isn't quite Miles Davis' Sketches of Spain or The Clash's "Spanish Bombs" but it is good enough that it should've been this issue's Single of the Fortnight Best New Single, even if it isn't quite premiership-level Aztec Camera.

Yazoo: "Don't Go"

8 July 1982

"Vince coaxes a sterling song out of his synthesizer while Alf balances its metallic clip with a deep, emotion-packed vocal that gets better with every hearing."

— Ian Birch

A mash up of a pair of songs with the same title: no, I didn't strain any brain cells coming up with this one. Helped along by the words 'Don't Go' being at the end of one chorus while starting off another, it only really works when I'm singing them to myself; I never hear one "Don't Go" and end up thinking of the other.

To have the hits of Yazoo and Hothouse Flowers merge is meaningless but it's illustrative of a point I hinted at but ultimately failed to make five years ago the last time this Single of the Fortnight came up in this space. I suggested that the song sounds rushed, as if Vince Clark and Alison "Alf" Moyet had been under serious pressure to deliver a quick follow-up to their excellent debut smash "Only You". Clark had written this acclaimed hit while still a member of Depeche Mode (there's a pop music what if for you) but it is in fact "Don't Go" which is much more reminiscent of the keyboardist's previous group, even down to the ultra-repetitive chorus being not unlike that in "Just Can't Get Enough".

Clark penned ver Mode's early hits but he wouldn't really come into his own as a songwriter until he began working with Alf. Dave Gahan is a charismatic lead singer and he has the right kind of voice for a gloomy and pervy synth act but he was no Alison Moyet. (Who was?) Writing material for a such a commanding vocalist would have been a challenge, one that Clark proved up for. Yet, "Don't Go" demonstrates that she possessed the kind of cliched 'she could sing the phone book' voice that so very few have.

"Depeche Mode brought a new warmth to electronic pop," Neil Tennant observed in a May, 1982 profile. "Yazoo will give it some soulful passion". Again, this is chiefly down to what Alf was able to bring to the duo, though it's a credit to Clark that he began contributing compositions that worked along those lines as well. The pairing wouldn't last but the big beneficiaries were Clark and eventually partner Andy Bell after they formed Erasure. While both the Mode and Yazoo hit the ground running with standout singles, this third attempt at a Vince Clark project that might last (needless to say, it did) started slowly but half a decade of songwriting and recording graft would pay off with a series of good-to-great hits starting off with 1986's "Sometimes". Bell's voice proved to be almost as strong as Alf's. It was wise of Clark to start doing co-writes with his Erasure co-hort. (Last time round I argued that Yazoo was actually the best group Clark was a part of; I take it all back now)

It was probably inevitable that the Alf-Clark duo was destined to come undone in short order. His background in electro-pop clashed with her first love the blues. Ironically, the musical valley that separated them helped Yazoo stand out in a world of synth-pop duos, especially considering that most if not all of them were all male units. Clark also had this very un-rock 'n' roll lack of commitment to the bands he was in: leaving Depeche Mode after just one album, he planned to do the same with Yazoo until he was convinced to stick it out longer, only for him to form a deliberately unstable outfit called The Assembly (as well as lending his talents to a unique Anglo-Indian supergroup who also appear in this space). Once Alf was done with Clark, she went the torch song route, rather than returning to her blues roots.

I'm tempted to bemoan the wasted opportunity that was Yazoo but perhaps it's best if I just celebrate the fact that such an unlikely pair managed to find one another. "Only You" is still brilliant, "Don't Go" is all right in spite of my comments above and further hits "The Other Side of Love" and "Nobody's Diary" deserve to be much better remembered. Synth duos like Sparks, Blancmange, Eurythmics, Pet Shop Boys and, yes, Erasure all had compelling lead singers with moody keyboardists all standing in the background but Yazoo managed to flout this convention. Alf happened to be a woman with a voice that could scare off a mountain lion who represented a way forward for Clark. "Synthesizer bands do get into this rut of having to look dead cool and composed," she told Tennant. "Whereas we intend to make complete idiots of ourselves". Which certainly explains the video for "Don't Go".

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Also Reviewed This Fortnight

Pato & Roger: "Pato and Roger a Go Talk"

Not credited to The Beat but included on their third album Special Beat Service, "Pato and Roger a Go Talk" is a platform for Ranking Roger and buddy Pato Banton to do what they were both best at. Basically, there's lots of back-and-forth toasting almost as if they're in a forties' jazz cutting session and they're Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young. There's less of that dated new wavy action that The Beat had done to death by this point and all the better for it. The late Roger Charlery had always been the heartbeat of two-tone's second best group and this feels like an attempt to return them to their ska roots. Engaging, light, fun and with a dark heart. I'd say the two should've paired up more but their 1995 outing, the Top 20 hit "Bubbling Hot", proves they were probably better off leaving things alone.

(Click here to see my original review)

Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine: "Do Re Mi, So Far So Good"

24 June 1992

"Rock that funky punk machine, dudes!"

— Tim Southwell

Top pop-jazz-rock critic Andrew Male recently Tweeted a passage from a bio or memoir or some sort of music retrospective which argued that Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine (note to all who may be interested: I have never liked referring to them as either 'Carter' or, worse yet, 'Carter USM', I like their name in full) were "written out of history" because they fell through the cracks between acid house (presumably this anonymous writer is including offshoot scene Madchester in with it) and Britpop. "Yes", Male commented wryly, "that's why [they] were written out of history".

I like Male and I understand disliking a band like this one but there is some truth to this assertion. While Britpop no doubt has its critics, there wasn't a major genre or subgenre that was looked down upon as consistently as grebo, the unruly Birmingham-area scene that gave rise to the likes of The Wonder Stuff, Pop Will Eat Itself and Ned's Atomic Dustbin. Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine, as well as groups like Jesus Jones, Kingmaker and EMF, found a home along with all those longhairs who all seemed to hail from some town called Stourbridge. A lot of them used samples, weren't averse to dance grooves but were also comfortable thrashing about on their "pop music guitars". Over in North America, it was easy to confuse them with Happy Mondays and The Stone Roses but for the lack of a druggy vibe and a distinct lack of cool.

Since they weren't tripping on a daily basis at the Hacienda Club in Manchester, some of these groups had a tougher, angrier sound. When The Wonder Stuff's Miles Hunt pointedly placed "Astley in a Noose" as the B side to their first Top 40 hit "It's Yer Money I'm After Baby" he was serving notice that this manufactured pop rubbish wouldn't do. Not everyone followed suit but Ned's Atomic Dustbin would eventually deliver the punky "Kill Your Television" and Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine would write and record a protest song of their own in "Do Re Mi, So Far So Good".

It isn't a terribly well-remembered hit for Jim-Bob and Fruitbat. Ask a Brit who happened to be a mopey, spotty youth in the early nineties and they'll likely tell you that they only remember one or some of the following: "Sheriff Fatman", "After the Watershed" and "The Only Living Boy in New Cross". While not quite their three biggest hits (the forgettable "Rubbish" actually outperformed "Sheriff Fatman" on the charts), they were the standouts then and they remain their signature tunes to this day. Yet, "Do Re Mi" represents both their sole Single of the Fortnight Best New Single in Smash Hits and, of greater significance, the only Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine single to appear on a Now That's What I Call Music compilation. Not bad for a song few remember and not a whole lot of people seemed to like even then. (Fun fact: it only spent two weeks in the Top 40; hit singles having chart "runs" of a fortnight or less would become common in the nineties)

Being on a Now is also ironic given the song's subject matter. If you happened to own Now 22 (as I did), you may have come for Take That and — yikes! — Nick Berry but you would've also been exposed to a trio of angsty indie-rock from Shakespears Sister (with "I Don't Care", a sentiment that ought to have appealed to teenagers or was I the only one?), Ugly Kid Joe ("Everything About You": again, hating everything is what teens do) and Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine laying waste to the throwaway pop scene that surrounded them.

The only problem was, the message didn't connect the way the efforts of both Shakespears Sister and Ugly Kid Joe did. Jim-Bob (or was it Fruitbat? I only just realised I have no idea who did what in ver Machine) had that thick accent which muffled an awful lot of the words. There's also the racket. And even then, did the lyrics do a decent job communicating this distaste for nineties' pop? Much as I would love for their to be a football club called Antarctic Thistle, I don't know what purpose their big match is meant to serve in this song. Billy Bragg had a way of making silly rhymes work but in the hands of the Unstoppables it just seems like the sort of verse I would have churned out at fourteen or fifteen, convinced of it's worthiness as a masterpiece.

A hint of where Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine went a bit wrong was their ages. Q Magazine praised their number one LP 1992: The Love Album but admitted that it was "undignified" that thirtysomethings would go by the handles of Jim-Bob and Fruitbat. More to the point, they were attempting to do something to attract the attention of teenage good-for-nothings such as myself but couldn't really pull it off because they hadn't been teens since Jim Callaghan's Winter of Discontent.

"Sheriff Fatman" had been about low income renters dealing with a slumlord. "After the Watershed" was about youngsters discovering sex on the telly. "The Only Living Boy in New Cross" was about the AIDS epidemic. All of these touched people in one way or another. "Do Re Mi, So Far So Good" may have been good fun and a nice reminder of Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine as heirs to the rock 'n' roll bombast of Meat Loaf and the trashy rock-synth of ZZ Top and Billy Idol but what it represented meant next to nothing to ver kids. And isn't that's what matters when you've spurned pop in favour of using your place in music to be a good influence? And if not, why not?

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Also Reviewed This Fortnight

Roy Orbison: "I Drove All Night"

With all due respect to Jim-Bob and Fruitbat, the rightful Single of the Fortnight Best New Single is from the late, great Roy Orbison. Originally a hit in the spring of 1989 for Cyndi Lauper, the Big O recorded this Billy Steinberg-Tom Kelly classic but it wasn't released until nearly four years after his untimely death. Both versions are good but there's no competing with Orbison's voice even if you're Lauper. (They're both miles better than Celine Dion's lifeless reading a decade later) It was a big deal at the time that TV star Jason Priestley appeared in its video but as a hormone-fuelled teen I was focused on Jennifer Connelly. She still looks great but now I'm all about Roy Orbison. Who else could sing so well despite seeming like he was putting in the minimal effort to do so?