— Mark Frith
Now That's What I Call Music 13; Now That's What I Call Music 18; Now That's What I Call Music 22; Now That's What I Call Music 26; Now That's What I Call Music 27; Now That's What I Call Music 28; Now That's What I Call Music 29; Now That's What I Call Music 30; Now That's What I Call Christmas; Now The Anthems: Live Forever
As you may have guessed, this is my collection of Now albums in full. I no longer have all of them, mind you. I never really took to Now 30 so I hardly missed it when it disappeared. Plus, the cassettes of Nows 13, 18, 22 and 28 no longer play properly. (This list doesn't include volumes 12, 17, 19 and 21 which I borrowed from friends at various points nor Now 14 which I randomly found at a used CD shop in the South Korean city of Gwangju about twelve years ago and which I ended up giving to my sister) The only Nows that I still listen to are relatively recent purchases Christmas (bought the last time I was in Britain back in 2012) and The Anthems (which I found up in Seoul at the start of the year for a bargain price). Anyway, it's not a bad batch of Nows for a Canadian kid who balked at the stupid import price tag on Now 32 at Calgary's old downtown HMV store (I opted for a pricey but manageable CD single of The Beautiful South's forgettable "Pretenders to the Throne" instead; it was yet another disc that I didn't miss when it too went missing).
In retrospect, Nows 26 through 30 ought to have shown listeners the landscape of the coming Brit-pop movement. With Blur and Oasis each appearing twice, there is a glimpse of this but there's little else that suggests what's in store. (Rather than being placed on Now 27, Suede's Top 5 smash "Stay Together" was relegated to the far less relevant Hits 94) Instead, there's an emphasis on, well, what was popular. Dance pop of various stripes was what most of the kids were after and they weren't to be disappointed when they went into their local Woolworth's to get the latest Now release.
Many pop acts make multiple appearances on these comps with the likes of Meat Loaf, Reel 2 Reel featuring The Mad Stuntman and China Black among those on two of them. Italian dance organization Cappella (who I was previously familiar with due to the '89 Top 20 hit "Helyom Halib") are on three while both Chaka Demus & Pliers and M People are on four. But it is the London pop/R&B quartet Eternal who are the most represented by running the table with spots on all five.
As I have already stated, female vocal groups of the early to mid nineties tended to have the upper hand on their male counterparts, particularly in the United States. En Vogue, SWV and TLC made far sturdier records than the likes of Boyz II Men and Color Me Badd. Their sultriness wasn't as creepy, their sincerity didn't come across as sickly and the girls didn't seem bothered about having to resort to inserting supposedly macho raps into the middle of songs that didn't need them. This was far less of an issue in Britain, however, where the all-singing groups were boy bands. Eternal wasn't quite a girly equivalent of Take That or East 17 (something that wouldn't fully emerge until 1996 in the form of The Spice Girls) but more of hybrid: a bit of Bananarama, a bit of Mel & Kim, a bit of En Vogue.
Mark Frith is absolutely captivated by second single "Save Our Love" and it's easy to see why. Picking up all those Nows from '93 and '94, Eternal's many contributions were generally a highlight and none more so than this one. While there's nothing about it that pushes the boundaries of pop, it's just so superbly sung and produced that it hardly matters. Had Stock Aitken Waterman still been active, creative and relevant by 1994, they might have written "Save Our Love". This is where Eternal differ from American R&B acts of the time: there's a certain joy and optimism in their many songs about heartbreak. Melodrama? They had some set aside for a timely future release but it was something that was otherwise best left to the "keepin' it real" types on the other side of the Atlantic. Eternal clearly did swingbeat but with much more of a pop uplift.
Frith's predicted Top 3 hit failed to materialize with "Save Our Love" peaking at number eight and spending just a solitary week in the Top 10. Yet it did help push their debut album Always & Forever up the charts as it went on a lengthy journey from sleeper to genuine hit over the next fifteen months. It even seems like predecessor "Stay" and future hits "Just a Step from Heaven" (more on it in a few weeks) and — for some reason — "Oh Baby I..." are all much better remembered nowadays. Still, for me this is their finest single. Vernie Bennett belts out a vocal that is indeed "shouted out with gusto" while her sister Esther, Kéllé Bryan and the future Louise Redknapp add charm and lightness to the chorus and their backing vocals. "Stay" might come back to me from time to time but "Save Our Love" has seemingly never left.
As a teenager in the nineties I was frequently at odds with my taste in music. If I was going through an indie phase, pop was always tugging at me as if in need of attention. If mainstream chart music was my bag, I'd feel pangs of guilt about turning my back on the fringes. Occasionally having a Now collection come into my life was often a good way to recalibrate. Now 17 opened my eyes to Madchester while 22 got me out of the mire of tired alternative rock in the middle of 1992. Eternal wasn't the sort of thing I should've been listening to as a seventeen year old (aside from my fondness for the photogenic pair of Kéllé and Louise) but they would do while I waited for the next thing to arrive.
~~~~~
Also Reviewed This Fortnight
One Dove: "Why Don't You Take Me?"
Sadly not appearing on Now 27 or 28 is the unsettling beauty of One Dove's "Why Don't You Take Me?". Dense sound effects (kind of like Brian Eno recording at Scratch Perry's famed Ark studio only not like that at all), organs and what may or may not be real instruments played to sound as synthetic as possible, this is a record that manages to be as much fun to listen to as "Save Our Love" while being as original as anything you care to name. Never before has the sound of marching band drums been put to such good use. Frith got his Top 3 megahit prediction wrong when it came to Eternal and his fortune telling skills are no more accurate with One Dove. "These people will be very famous", his nibs informs us. They sure deserved to be.
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