Pulp: "Babies"

14 October 1992

"Ahh...Pulp could well become the band of all our tomorrows. A most joyous noise has been created."

— Tim Southwell

When I first came to South Korea I started to develop an interest in local films. From the clever rom-com 엽기적인 그녀 (My Sassy Girl) to the absurd drunken low-budget road movie 낮술 (Daytime Drinking), I found that was I able to learn a great deal about Korean culture while also enjoying some excellent pictures led by an outstanding generation of actors, including Sol Kyung-gu, Jeon Do-yeon, Moon So-ri, Song Kang-ho, Kim Hye-su and Hwang Jung-min.

But I didn't care for every picture I saw. Films which depicted massacres committed by Korea's authoritarian regime (화려한 휴가, aka May 18) and fictional accounts of natural disasters (해운대, aka Tidal Wave) ended up being undermined by unnecessary and  insulting comic relief characters. 미녀는 괴로워 (aka 200 Pounds Beauty) couldn't have been clumsier in taking on body positivity. 실미도 (Silmido, they couldn't be bothered coming up with a pointless English title of its own) told the fascinating tale of convicts who had secretly been trained to invade North Korea in the early-seventies but the film suffered due to a manipulative ending in which viewers were expected to cry over the deaths of a bunch of vile thugs and rapists.

Many Koreans I have spoken to about appreciating their films have been impressed that I've seen so many of their pictures. They don't take my criticisms very well though. A common response to me knocking Silmido or Tidal Wave is that "[I] don't understand Korean culture". (Strangely this ignorance has never prevented me from enjoying their many good films but this point is never acknowledged for some reason) Apparently, cracking jokes in the midst of a tragedy or feeling that I ought to get emotional over despicable turds being killed are things I'll never understand because I am an outsider. Well, good.

Which brings me to the subject of today's blog post, Pulp. I used to be quite the Anglophile back in my teen years and considering what this space is all about perhaps I still am. British pop, British comedy, British chocolate, British girls, British towns: sign me up! But this doesn't mean I can appreciate it all. I've always been fond of Coronation Street (something that I must get from my mum, a longtime Corrie fan) but I've never thought much of other English soaps. Bands like The Who and The Police have never done much for me, barring the odd moment here and there, And don't get me started on blackcurrent juice!

Dislike of Pulp appears to be a bridge too far, however. Jarvis Cocker is a national treasure for being stick insect thin while still somehow being considered sexy and he's good in interviews and on panel shows. Plus, that whole thing with Michael Jackson. Who wouldn't love this guy? He even has resilience going for him since his band had been active since 1978 but wouldn't hit it big for sixteen long years. I understand the love he gets, I just don't think much of him as a singer even if I can totally see what everyone sees in him as a frontperson for his band. As a singer, he's like a louche Nick Cave without the range or a country and western singer attempting to send up a series of corny old numbers with an eyebrow knowingly raised to the crowd. As subtle as stubbing your toe on the edge of the bed. If that's not bad enough, there's his highly irritating habit of talking in the middle of their songs. ("Common People" may well be one of the greatest singles of all time but it's ruined by that dreadful "Are you sure...?")

The group's famously long gestation period could be seen as the UK not being ready for them but instead it was Pulp not being ready for stardom. 1991 and '92 is about where Cocker and mates Russell Senior, Candida Doyle, the late Steve McKay and Nick Banks start to look and sound like pop stars even if hardly anyone was listening. They had gone through many changes in lineup and style (in the early days they were said to have been a mix of "ABBA and The Fall") which leads me to wonder if some of Cocker's real passions had to be weeded out in order for them to belatedly break through. Leonard Cohen, for one, is frequently acknowledged as an influence on their early work but you'd never know it by the time the nineties rolled around.

Even at their best ("Do You Remember the First Time?", "Disco 2000"...I'm struggling to think of a third), it's hard to escape the feeling that a little Pulp goes a long way. Getting through an entire album is no easy task. It isn't so much that they're a bad group because they clearly have a lot going for them; rather, they're pretentious and they're over-studied in their presentation. In the promo for "Babies" Russell Senior glances at the camera as though he's Ron Mael giving viewers the evil eye. There's nothing original about these people. If they didn't exist, we wouldn't need to invent Pulp though it would be really easy to do so.

Nothing original about these people. Fans of Pulp tend to focus on Cocker and those of us who are not as impressed are no better but I think the band as a whole deserves to be knocked while we're at it. Doyle's keyboard flourishes bring to my sunshine indie pop like the Lightning Seeds without the delight. Senior's playing fails to wow the listener the way the likes of Johnny Marr, John Squire, Graham Coxon and Bernard Butler managed to do so effortlessly. Their ensemble playing is tight — just as it bloody well ought to have been considering how long they'd been around — but it isn't enough to save "Babies" from being bland indie fare that couldn't hope for a sniff of the Top 40 (until the finally hit it big a couple years' later).

Pulp will be coming up in this space at least two more times before long. Until then, I had better find more to say on the matter of trashing perhaps the most overrated British band of all time. I don't want to blow my load. But I imagine I'll find a way of continuing pick from the low hanging fruit of a group that ought to have been great but for all the ways they managed to balls it up. And if you don't care for my thoughts on Pulp then remember: I'm not British and I couldn't possibly understand them anyway.

~~~~~

Also Reviewed This Fortnight

The Orb: "Assassin"

While Enigma and Deep Forest got lumped in with yuppie new age music, The Orb remained cool (this never prevented them all from appearing together on the excellent Pure Moods compilation). Honestly, you can have them. I like my blissed out music to be high on pop hooks the way those annoyingly earnest Euro acts did so effortlessly. The Orb never quite managed to do so, although it's quite possible they weren't striving for it in the first place. Brian Eno, Codona, Moby: there's plenty of great new age music out there that doesn't have to be tuned out every time its put on. "Assassin" isn't one of them: it's probably for the best that you focus on washing the dishes or reading a pop mag or doing your biology revisions or whatever while it's on; there's not much to be gained from listening to the damn thing.

The Cure: "A Letter to Elise"

30 September 1992 (carrying on over on the next page)

"Sombre, beautiful, packed with ideas...I've gone all cheery! There's a big sloppy grin on my face!"

— Rob Newman

I recently quit Twitter. It was a day or so after the stupid X rebrand but it had been a long time coming. And it wasn't all the fault of that dipshit Musk. I was bored. Others found Music Twitter to be a welcoming place where opinions could be shared and everyone could discover new acts to follow but all too often I found it to be a place where I'd go to be ghosted. And, in a way, fair enough: if people didn't want to hit that 'like' button then I just had to deal with it. Plus, the challenges had begun to get to me. One month it would be 'Post a song about travel', then the next it would be 'Post an album that defined your teenage years' and so on ad infinitum.

I didn't bother to announce my departure, nor did I bother to join a rival social network. (A couple weeks' prior to quitting, a guy I follow posted a survey asking if we were planning to join (a) Bluesky, (b) Mastodon, (c) another network whose name escapes me or (d) just stick with Twitter till it breathes its last dying breath. I would have chosen option (e) ('To hell with social media') but, alas, it wasn't provided)

One of the (many) weaknesses of Music Twitter was that it got me sick to death of acts that I don't normally have anything against. I had my David Bowie phase back in 1998 when I went on and on about Ziggy Stardust and Low but I have since moved on, yet on a daily basis I would be greeted with tweets about the alleged virtues of Hunky Dory, Diamond Dogs, Station to Station, Scary Monsters and, ludicrously, Tin Machine. My Joy Division period was even earlier than my dalliance with Dame David and didn't really result in much so I quickly tired of seeing the memorable cover of the overrated Unknown Pleasures regularly popping up on my feed. Music Twitter is (was?) also flush with Fall fans, people who seem unaware that if you've heard one album recorded by Mark E. Smith and his ever-changing line-up then you've heard them all. I once liked Depeche Mode quite a bit until I got sick of them constantly popping up on my feed. And then there's The Cure: the world's best band that I've never been all that fussed about.

I've known some Cure fans. They're pretty much the same as any other group of people who are into something that I am not: nice people on the whole though I don't have a whole lot in common with them. What I was unaware of is how many of them there are. Music Twitter seems to have a lot of time for Pornography and Disintegration, albums that have always provoked not much more than mild disinterest. But I'm probably just jealous: Twitter Cure and Twitter Mode and Twitter New Order are much more popular than Twitter Pet Shop Boys or Twitter Beautiful South — and, yet, fans of those bands are far more likely to mark themselves down as outsiders.

A Smiths fan since the early nineties, I went along with that made up rivalry with The Cure. Apparently, we just had to choose between the two. This was absolute nonsense and I for one should have known better since I dug "Love Song" every bit as much as I was into "Everyday Is Like Sunday". Yet, my antipathy remained, even after I had moved on from my late-teens worship of Morrissey and Marr. Goth Cure left me feeling cold and unmoved, while jangly Pop Cure could depress me a lot more than their darkest stuff. Beyond Smith and co.'s mastery of the music video, there hadn't been much for me.

This blog has corrected this misjudgment on my part, though only to an extent. "The Lovecats" and "The Caterpillar" are both brilliant singles and I'd have a higher opinion of "In Between Days" if it wasn't such a prototypical Cure outing. None of these singles had been unfamiliar to me prior to when I started up VER HITS but fresh ears can do a world of good. "Jumping Someone Else's Train" isn't so bad itself, even if it isn't quite up to the standards of early efforts like "Killing an Arab" and "Boys Don't Cry".

Yet, "A Letter to Elise" tests the patience and provides a welcome reminder that while I may respect Robert Smith's considerable talents and dig some of his work, I'll never love his band. Rob Newman makes a good case for it virtues which would no doubt be echoed by many Cure fanatics out there. Actually, he probably makes a better pitch for them than devotees ever could, unless, of course, big sloppy grins are much more commonplace than I ever would have guessed. A "great testament to human survival against the banal in these times" is about the nicest thing I've ever heard said about The Cure, even if I don't understand it myself.

Maybe it's my state of mind at the moment but I'm struggling to think of a record previously covered here that I felt so numb towards. I've disliked plenty of others far more but few have inspired such an uninspired state. I've been listening to it for weeks yet I can't recall anything about it. I know that Newman is correct about the lyrics being so thoughtfully considered — it's actually one of Smith's strengths as a songwriter — but I couldn't tell you without looking them up what any of them mean or what this letter from Robert to Elise is all about. It's useful mainly as a reminder of what a slog their ninth album Wish has always been. Convinced I'd be into it, I borrowed my sister's copy only to discover that its more than sixty-six minutes of running time was way more Cure than I could hope to handle. But that's being a Cure neutral in a world of Cure Twitter: I don't need them in my life even if I'm glad they're still around.

 

~~~~~

Also Reviewed This Fortnight

R.E.M.: "Drive"

"I loved Losing My Religion and hated Shiny Happy People", Newman states. Indeed, much of his review of "Drive" consists of him deriding the latter's "breakfast time jolliness" while also knocking R.E.M.'s fanbase for being far too precious and snobby. Perhaps this explains why he gave their latest single just one out of five despite having a "bit of genuine emotion and depth". Sounds like three out of five to me. Then again, what were they doing putting out "Drive" as a single when they had four or five better 45's on the way from their forthcoming masterpiece Automatic for the People as well as deep cuts like "Try Not to Breathe" and "Sweetness Follows". "Drive" is a perfect opener to such a brilliant album but I would never have considered it for singlehood. Not unlike "A Letter to Elise".

Rockers Revenge featuring Donnie Calvin: "Walking on Sunshine"

19 August 1982

"It stands out from the crowd because of the depth and rhythmic density of the arrangement which teases the melody with endless invention. And, leaving all that aside, it's a new dance classic."

— Neil Tennant

Looking over the charts in the eighties, it's interesting to note how often American dance music was able to penetrate the UK Top 40 while failing to garner much interest at home. Some, like The S.O.S. Band and Cameo, enjoyed early success in the States before achieving fame across the pond, while others like techno pioneers Inner City were never able to gain much of a footing at all. Of course they all found success on the R&B and/or Dance Music charts which only goes to show how ghettoised black pop music was at the time. The British, unencumbered by (musical) prejudices, just lumped it all together and let punters go out and vote with the few bob in their pockets.

Written and recorded by Eddy Grant, the original "Walking on Sunshine" probably didn't have much potential for club play. It is a dance number but better suited for a Mardi Gras parade in the middle of Port of Spain than Studio 54. Reggae adjacent, it brims with sunny vibes — even if it's let down by a horribly weedy synth driving the arrangement — and a lighthearted vocal from Grant, who may not have given the sort of powerful throaty performance with which he was often capable but one that suits this lighthearted record nonetheless.

The Arthur Baker-led Rockers Revenge got hold of "Walking on Sunshine" and added some much needed big city sizzle. Yes, the clubs got a hold of it and took it to the top of the Club Play Charts but it's just as easy picturing this blasting out of a boombox on a street corner in the middle of Harlem — assuming, of course, that radio was having anything to do with it, which, at best, was likely only selective. Perhaps no one knew quite how to classify it. I for one love how this seems to be a throwback to a wonderfully catholic New York scene. Rap was beginning to emerge, the DJ's from the disco boom were looking at ways to move on, home computers were making programming and sampling as easy as playing an instrument and there was room for funk, synth-pop, soul and reggae mixed together in such a landscape. The British were keenest to listen but only American producers, remixers, singers and musicians could have forged such an effort.

By now a committed fan of dance music, it's easy to hear this track having a profound affect on Neil Tennant the budding pop star. (Honestly, I had no idea that an offshoot of this blog would be to act as a deep dive into the psyche of the future Pet Shop Boys vocalist as he goes from Smash Hits scribe to stardom but I might as well go with it at this point) Just as important, New York's musical culture was rubbing off on him as well. All he needed was to find an NYC studio boffin of his own.

The UK took to "Walking on Sunshine" nearly as enthusiastically as Tennant but it predictably went nowhere beyond the charts that had been earmarked for African Americans and the clubs. So much so that it would quickly become overshadowed by another pop song with the same name. Katrina & The Waves happened to be white and they sort of looked like a rock band which was evidently all it took to give them a Trans-Atlantic smash in 1985, one that remains well-loved to this day. In terms of quality the two Sunshines are mostly a wash but only one of them had much of a chance of taking the charts by storm in the US. Shame.

~~~~~

Also Reviewed This Fortnight

The Flirts: "Passion"

It's kind of disappointing that Tennant didn't go with this Canadian 12" import instead of Rockers Revenge. Not because I was interested to hear what this obscure all-female Canuck group sounded like that they could have charmed Neil so much (because they weren't Canadian and don't sound one bit like the Martha & The Muffins rip offs I had imagined) but because it's an early Bobby O offering. Yes, the very same NYC studio boffin that I mentioned above. The very same Bobby Orlando who guided Tennant and Lowe to recording some club faves that the public either didn't have the time for or hadn't been exposed to. Neil would soon give a stronger Bobby O record a Single of the Fortnight so I guess there's some justice. Actually, scratch that: I wish Tennant had given his approval to a sub-Muffins Canadian girl band who sang with little emotion and played guitar solos like they were Peter Hook going nuts on a bass. It could've done him some good. Granted, maybe not in the same way same way Bobby O did but still. NYC dance pop, Canadian indie, either way.

(Click here to see my original review)

Suede: "Metal Mickey"

16 September 1992 (with further value judgements in place of actual substantive pop critique here)

"I like his jackets, his haircut, the things he says and the fact that he looks like a rent boy from King's Cross. And I like the bags underneath his eyes."

— Richey James (aka Richey Edwards, aka Richey Manic, aka 4REAL)

I like that Richey's concern is for the state of pop. Not rock. Not self-righteous indie nonsense. Pop. 

I like that he clearly didn't bother to listen to any of the thirteen new releases Smash Hits tasked him with evaluating. I sure fancied myself as the type who could write a masterful book report despite never having read anything but it never really worked out for me. Perhaps it was because I tried to act like I had read Timothy Findley's The Wars or Carol Shields' The Stone Diaries when it would have been obvious to my teachers that I had done nothing of the sort. Richey went in a different direction: he makes a series of broad claims about every act and their role in the pop music scene. He appreciates a valuable contribution to pop and has nothing but contempt for anything that demeans it. 

I like that he doesn't seem to mind The Beautiful South. Paul Heaton "looks like a football player" but Richey is big enough to look past this glaring flaw. A positive side effect of him not having played any of the singles is that we're spared Richey's take on "36d" being problematic. I mean it is problematic but I think there's something nice about wanting to know more about a Page 3 model than simply her bust size. Who's her favourite author? What kind of food does she like? Is she a fan of Reg Holdsworth on Corrie or does he infuriate her? (The fact that he infuriates everyone is precisely why he was such a good character but clearly not everyone agreed) Isn't there more to her than a body? So, what's wrong with that?

I like that he points out the "bags" underneath Brett Anderson's eyes. Save for a five day trip to Jakarta in 2008 in which I stayed at a nice hotel and slept as much as I could, I've spent my entire adult life with periorbital puffiness of one size or another. It didn't make me look too bad when I was in my twenties and was just about what might be called handsome but now that I'm in my mid-forties and look more and more like Gene Hackman, they do me no favours. But hey! A few better choices, plenty of wrong ones as well, a drug habit that would be the envy of Lord Byron, a voice elastic enough to front a solid guitar band and I might have been just like Brett. Or Richey. That said, I'm happy with the mediocre life I've led, bags and all.

I like that he's more than willing to take a giant dump on Pearl Jam and Kris Kross. Bloody hell, American music sucked in the nineties. Even traces of it that I could bring myself to listen to seemed to be made by the worst people imaginable. Not the jocks that Kurt Cobain fretted over but the indie jerks who were really just rock classicists and the hip hop fans who were always going on about rap's "message" but not having anything to say themselves.

I like that Suede never really became the group that everyone had them tipped to be. They never became the "future of British music". Come to think of it, why the hell did anyone think so? Predicting the future seems to doom the prediction. I'm sure if anyone had marked Blur or Oasis or The Spice Girls as future saviours they wouldn't have amounted to much. I also like that Richey doesn't bother with any of this crap. Nor does he bother praising "guitar hero" Bernard Butler (difficult to do so when you haven't heard him play) nor the group's overlooked rhythm section. All that matters is Brett's looks and intelligence and I'm not so sure he's wrong.

~~~~~

Also Reviewed This Fortnight

Boy George: "The Crying Game"

I don't like Richey's claim that George O'Dowd is a "sad old man who doesn't know what he's doing anymore" (even if he wasn't wrong; I mean he didn't have to say it, did he?) nor his description of the Pet Shop Boys as "mak[ing] the worst kind of English music, like when you're walking home from the pub and you're down on your knees staring at a pile of your own sick". I guess he couldn't bring himself to use tried and tested homophobia in knocking Tennant and Lowe, so that's to his credit I suppose. But I call bullshit. Just as Richey's best mate Nicky Wire wished Michael Stipe would die of AIDS, this is just the sort of "shocking" statement made by someone who doesn't want to own up to having been a fan all along. I will never be able to prove it but I am certain he loved the Pet Shops. Not even necessarily for their music but for the same reasons he loved Kylie, ABBA, The Bee Gees, Duran Duran and, yes, Suede: because of what they did for all things pop. But that's okay, I had to be something of a closet Pet Shop Boys fan myself — even if this was thrown out when I made a Behaviour t-shirt in shop class.

The Smiths: "How Soon Is Now?"

2 September 1992

"It rockets off with the braces of every other effort here, leaving a proverbial "trousers-down" situation in Current Pop Music."

— Sian Pattenden

There's a stiff price to paid from enjoying Morrissey's music and that is having to be a fan of Morrissey. My knowledge of him was minimal growing up in Canada and this proved to be advantageous. It's obvious listening to even his best work that he probably isn't a great human being, which is only confirmed when you come upon an interview with the man. And forget about his problematic views for now, Morrissey is such a antisocial turd that I can't fathom anyone thinking he has any redeeming qualities beyond his considerable talents as a singer and songwriter (and maybe as an armchair music critic).

And this comes from the man's solo career which was already kind of patchy. The Viva Hate album was good enough but 1991's Kill Uncle was poor and forgettable and Your Arsenal from the following year was a supposed return to form that was nevertheless blighted by few genuinely brilliant moments. The only thing by him I treasured was the Bona Drag compilation of singles and select B sides, especially the peerless trilogy of 45's "Suedehead", "Everyday Is Like Sunday" and "The Last of the Famous International Playboys. Just as his old band — more on them soon — put out the popular comps Hatful of Hollow and Louder Than Bombs, which many rightly think are better than their actual albums, Moz's answer to them proved that he was still capable of churning out some wonderful singles even as his LP's kind of sucked.

So strong was Morrissey as a solo artist that his old band was already in danger of becoming an afterthought. Even compared to artists who were much more popular this is difficult to believe. George Michael and Sting may have been superstars but no one had forgotten that they had been launched by Wham! and The Police respectively. "Paul McCartney was in a band prior to Wings?" was a corny joke you'd sometimes hear but no one actually believed it. Yet, Morrissey seemed to have escaped the shadow of the once-mighty Smiths.

Not that I knew much about what he had previously been up to. Sure, I was aware that he had been in a group called The Smiths but I couldn't tell you anything about them. Okay, I knew that their guitarist was Johnny Marr who had subsequently been a member of The The and Electronic. The point is, I didn't know any Smiths' songs and I was strangely uninterested in correcting this lapse of mine.

One issue was that there wasn't much available in the early nineties. The racks of CDs and tapes at some of my regular record shops only seemed to have the horribly-titled Rank, which I discovered was a live album. Their studio albums (the outstanding self-titled debut, the patchy Meat Is Murder, the overrated The Queen Is Dead and the mostly great Strangeways, Here We Come) never seemed available. Though I wasn't to know it at the time, it probably helped that his solo material wasn't a whole lot different to his stuff with The Smiths (albeit mostly of inferior quality).

"How Soon Is Now?" has served in all capacities for The Smiths. It was originally a B side, and even then it was only made available on the 12" of "William, It Was Really Nothing" (whose real flip side has already been written about in this space). It then appeared on the superlative odds and sods comp Hatful of Hollow. American label Sire liked it and had it issued as a single in its own right in the US. Though it struggled Stateside, it would soon come out on its own back in the UK. North American editions of the Meat Is Murder album included it as well. While it didn't exactly set the charts alight, it did manage to appear as part of two separate Top 30 singles and on a pair of Top 10 albums.

It's generally highly regarded; I would imagine that among people who profess to hate The Smiths that it's the exception. Johnny Marr's presence had always been a benefit in terms of their critical reputation: hacks may have loathed Morrissey but they'd still give the group's extraordinary guitar hero his due. Fans of The Smiths also regard it highly, though they may place it just a notch below beloved faves like "This Charming Man" and "There Is a Light That Never Goes Out". But for all the acclaim it has rightful earned, "How Soon Is Now?" isn't the greatest entry point into one the finest groups of the eighties. As the closest they ever came to a stadium rock anthem, it hardly represents their jagged take on good old jangle pop. Morrissey's words are scattered and lack any semblance of a narrative. (Turns out, he just added various chunks of lyrics he had jotted down which explains why the "there's a club if you'd like to go..." section doesn't quite fit)

The Best 1 and Best 2 compilations ended up being flawed (songs like "Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others" and "Nowhere Fast" have no business being on any kind of 'Best of The Smiths' sets) but they got young fans of Morrissey and/or current alternative rock into one of the great indie bands of all time. Those of us who had looked up to Moz were astonished to discover that this earlier period was even better than his solo work; people who didn't care all that much for him could look past his many flaws (and, I dare say, some of their own prejudices in some instances) due to the star guitarist and rather underrated rhythm section that could churn out some sublimely intricate recordings and could even be something of a live powerhouse. At best, the albums were adequate samplers and The Smiths wouldn't be compiled well until 1995's essential Singles, which was my jumping off point into their back catalog.

As Sian Pattenden says, "How Soon Is Now?" exposed just how weak the current pop landscape had become — and this was even the case when it came to the current indie scene. But it also began to expose the weaknesses of Morrissey's own output. Your Arsenal had been tipped to be his best album yet but it suddenly seemed of little consequence when held up against his old band whose brief existence had been all peak. He had spent the first four years of his solo career proving that he could live up to The Smiths only for it all to come crashing down when we finally got to listen to them.

~~~~~

Also Reviewed This Fortnight

ABBA: "Dancing Queen"

1992 did produce a number of quality singles but to my mind only five albums from that year are worthy of my time. They are Automatic for the People by R.E.M., Nonsuch by XTC, ABBA Gold, Divine Madness and A Life of Surprises: The Best of Prefab Sprout. Two big takeaways: (a) you can't go wrong if you happen to use initials in your band name and (b) it was a good year for greatest hits packages. (I actually prefer More ABBA Gold myself but there's no arguing with the likes of "Knowing Me, Knowing You" and "One of Us" even if I still don't know why everyone makes such a fuss over "The Winner Takes It All") As much of a classic as "How Soon Is Now?" but with the added feather in the cap of also having been a monster hit way back in its day, "Dancing Queen" didn't quite hit as hard fifteen years later though it did really start to solidify its place as a wedding dance staple just as people were beginning to realise that ABBA wasn't the guilty pleasure they had initially thought.

Elvis Costello & The Attractions: "Man Out of Time"

5 August 1982

"Excellent, but so it everything Elvis does. What he needs is another "Oliver's Army" — a big hit that will become a standard — and this is not it."

— Tim De Lisle

Did The Beatles give everyone the wrong idea about creativity and success going hand in hand? The fact that they were able to parlay their wildly popular early hits into works of increasingly greater experimentation, introspection and sophistication all the while maintaining their commercial dominance is probably more astounding today since no one else has been able to replicate it. Even among the Fab Four's contemporaries there was little correlation between artistic achievement and the charts. The Beach Boys were starting to falter commercially just as Brian Wilson was delivering his masterpiece Pet Sounds, The Byrds found themselves releasing one better album after another with ever decreasing sales and The Kinks best album suffered the indignity of missing the charts completely. (Of course I'm cherry picking examples that suit me here but it only goes to show that there was never a rule to go by; not that anyone ever suggested there was a rule...is it possible to strawman yourself?)

The Beatles example may have been what virtually everyone aspired towards — even if they had denied at the time — but few could have expected even a fraction of the same for themselves. Elvis Costello, a passionate devotee of every genre of music from rag time to ye ye and something of a pop music scholar, would've known that better than most.

Tim De Lisle is concerned with Costello's lack of Top 40 action, urging readers to "Buy This Now!" all the while acknowledging that his self-composed singles hadn't gotten nearly enough punters to shell out the requist bob since "Oliver's Army". (I wonder if it rankled the man a touch that following his almost number one hit he only had two more placements on the Top 10, both of which were covers; on the other hand, maybe the old scamp musicologist took extra pride in getting his renditions of "I Can't Stand Up for Falling Down" and "Good Years for the Roses" into the upper echelons of the charts) Last week, I wrote about Marshall Crenshaw's "Cynical Girl" and how critics must have scratched their heads in wonder at the clever singer-songwriters they'd slather with praise that would never catch on beyond a loyal cult following. That's Elvis Costello, ramped up to someone people generally knew about and whose albums still sold pretty well but just didn't get the mass acceptance the press felt they deserved.

The centrepiece of one of Costello's three truly flawless albums, Imperial Bedroom (along with This Year's Model and Trust), "Man Out of Time" is its lengthiest track but it's a swift five and a half minutes nonetheless. Opening with some a chaotic (possibly drunken) rock-out from the L.P.'s early sessions, it glides smoothly into the song's piano/organ-led dream-like melody. (So effortless is the abrupt transition that you'd think it all been recorded en masse, rather than splicing together an early take of the song with the more stately recording that dominates the single) Tinkling away as if randomly at the keys, Steve Nieve's playing acts as a response to Costello's lyrics with some gentle mocking, adding some levity to what could very easily be an over-melodramatic tale. The nobleman/prominent politician depicted in the song is about to be found out, his entire life is about to crash down upon him — maybe he's going to get caught up in a sensational tabloid scandal or maybe a murder-suicide or maybe he's just a great big paranoid git who's built up guilt in his head and imagines that everything is about blow up: who the hell knows? Whether real or delusional, the pleas of "Will you still love / A man out of time?" are among the most poingiant Costello ever crafted, indicating that his own experiences or thoughts are hidden in the at least a part of this, his greatest song. (Significantly, he would divorce his first wife within two year's of the release of Imperial Bedroom, as chronicled on the flawed though somewhat misunderstood Goodbye Cruel World)

Applied to Costello as well is another meaning in the title. Clearly by 1982 he wasn't especially interested in contemporary pop — or even if he was, he certainly wasn't about to start making some of his own, or so everyone must have thought — and he was situating himself deliberately in another era. (At least as far back as the sixties but stretching even further to the days of Gershwin and Porter, two of his nibs' prime musical heroes) Drafting in Beatles engineer Geoff Emerick is evidence enough of that. Hence the lack of chart success that everyone felt he merited. But he'd soon be giving it all a rethink.

With his music heritage and catholic tastes, Elvis Costello would have wanted nothing more than to compose pop music standards. While others from Ella Fitzgerald to Bob Dylan have mined the Great American Songbook, he is the type who wishes he could have added a chapter of his own ("Everyday I Write the Book" indeed), even if he's British and wouldn't and shouldn't qualify. Much as I love his work from 1978 to 1986 (though not a whole of it lot since then), I can't say he ever composed a true classic. "Oliver's Army" is of course beloved in the UK but it's not especially notable elsewhere and its lyrics have become problematic of late. "Alison" is another firm favorite (though not so much by me: there's no reason to bother with boring Elvis) but it's popularity seems tied to the generation that first encountered it back in the late seventies. Indeed, Costello appears to be fading in the public consciousness. Those fussy melodies and arrangements are all well and good but they necessarily limited the number of people who could fully appreciate his genius. Even his best songs (to wit) suffer from this.

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Also Reviewed This Fortnight

Scritti Politti: "Asylums in Jerusalem" / "Jacques Derrida"

Green Gartside's highly unprolific organization has been dealt with a lot in this space but I just can't pass up the chance to bask in their lush cleverness (there's that and I don't feel like writing about anything else in this fortnight's uninspired batch). A typically excellent double A side that nearly got them into the Top 40 which is no small feat when you consider the subject matter of the two songs. De Lisle avoids knocking them for being "too clever by half" possibly because his SOTF is the similarly swotty and persnickety Elvis Costello. The reggae-influenced "Asylums in Jerusalem" is the stronger of the two but the skiffle-esque "Jacques Derrida" isn't as heavy going as the title would suggest — and Green's rap near the end makes me wonder why he sought out the likes of Shabba Ranks and Mos Def when he was more than capable of the deed himself.

(Click here to see my original review)

TLC: "Baby, Baby, Baby"

19 August 1992

"The backing has been cut down to the bone and you can almost feel the girls whispering sweet nothings in your ears."

— Tony Cross

Back in the mid-sixties, The Who would describe their music as "Maximum R&B", a slogan that became so widespread that it was used as the title of a best-selling box set of the band's career and as something to have on t-shirts worn by women in Asia who've never heard of The Who. By the early nineties, however, the term 'R&B' was starting to be applied to slick vocal groups like Boyz II Men and Color Me Badd. There's quite the missing link in the seventies and eighties, isn't there?

R&B was intended to be taken seriously. Whitney Houston's run of eighties' hits ("How Will I Know?", "I Wanna Dance with Somebody") took her to the top of the pop world but it notoriously resulted in her being booed at the 1988 Soul Train Awards. The singer was said to have taken the blowback hard and went back to the drawing board to record the more street-smart I'm Your Baby Tonight album. Being a pop diva, it was completely unconvincing. It also further solidified the noble but misguided notion that going R&B meant having extra credibility.

Luckily, there were some younger acts who were able to pull it off. Lisa "Left-Eye" Lopes, Tionne "T-Boz" Watkins and Rozonda "Chilli" Thomas dressed as if they associated with the likes of The Jungle Brothers and Monie Love but their sound was such a hybrid of nineties' Afro-American music as to seem wholly original. Their form of R&B didn't over-do-it with the emotion, a trait which always seemed to affect male vocalists in the genre much more than their female counterparts.

The TLC that would be one of the biggest acts in the world in the mid to late nineties wasn't as refined at this early stage. Still, given how much worse the sleeker, (supposedly) sexier Betty Boo was as she matured, this wasn't necessarily a bad thing. The video for "Baby, Baby, Baby" is set in a girls' dorm at a university where the trio prance around in baggy pyjamas and their finest casual wear all the while mugging for the camera at every opportunity. T-Boz does most of the actual singing with an assist here and there from Chilli with Left-Eye, well, left out a bit. A rap in the middle-eight from her wouldn't have been unwelcome but it isn't missed.

Nonchalantly gliding along for its four minutes, you scarcely notice "Baby, Baby, Baby" at first but eventually takes hold by which time there's no getting rid of it. (Much like TLC itself, a group I never needed until they were taken from us when I suddenly missed them; is it any wonder the public took Left-Eye's untimely death so hard?) Sometimes the most original thing to do is to take a variety of genres and subgenres (R&B, hip hop, sunshine pop) and roll them into one ultra-subgenre of which there is really only one relevant act. 

A magnificent follow-up to breakthrough hit "Ain't 2 Proud 2 Beg", "Baby Baby Baby" badly underperformed in the UK, not even managing to crack the Top 50. Tony Cross' words of praise could only take them so far. What surely sank its chances was Americans and their reluctance to do promo work abroad. Had TLC done the rounds of the pop and chat shows there's no reason to think they couldn't have had a smash on their hands. To think the British move to the States even when their prospects are bleak but the Americans can barely be up for a five day visit every so often. (Luckily, The Backstreet Boys would give this approach a re-think in the next few years as they must've figured the British were ready for them while they waited out their belated US breakthrough)

When people really began talking about "alternative" music in around 1992, they were naturally focused on white indie rock as being this so-called alternative. But what if playful R&B pop of En Vogue, SWV and TLC was just as much of a rebellion against the slick types who ran afoul of black pop? Sure, hip hop was an alternative itself but much of it had become a caricature by this point. Singers like Shanice and Ce Ce Peniston either knowingly or unknowingly tapped into being R&B stars who indie kids could feel welcome listening to. (Again, male acts were not welcome into this realm to anywhere near the same degree) Forget riot grrrl and girl power, this was the real feminist musical revolution wrapped up in glossy pop form.

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Also Reviewed This Fortnight

Sting with Eric Clapton: "It's Probably Me"

It's a brave thing to do a soft open for what will ultimately be your finest solo album with such a lame single. Is brave the word I'm looking for? Misguided? Ignorant? Pea-brained? I'm definitely getting warm. It might seem strange putting Sting, Clapton, soundtrack guy Michael Kamen and the third in the Lethal Weapon series together but the singer and movie do share at least one thing in common: they're both convinced that they're much funnier than they actually are. (Let's not even get into the problematic opinions of Clapton and star Mel Gibson which would no doubt have given them plenty of poisonous shit to talk about) The Stinger was wise to rid himself of much of this baggage going forward ensuring that while "It's Probably Me" was not exactly a highlight of Ten Summoner's Tales, neither was it quite as lousy as this version suggests it would be. Good thing the brilliant "Fields of Gold" and "Shape of My Heart" were in the works to remind everyone that it's probably Sting who can occasionally deliver the goods.