Spectral Display: "It Takes a Muscle to Fall in Love"

3 March 1983

"Music for slouching 'cross the floor, loose-limbed and honeycomb centred."

— Johnny Black

I was recently browsing in a store and I began to notice that I was gently humming along with the song that was playing. I knew the tune but couldn't quite place it. I even seemed to know the words yet I still wasn't sure where I had heard it before. Yet, heard it I had since it was a song I'd written about for this blog.

Eventually I figured out that it was "No More 'I Love You's'". (The chorus sort of gave it away) But it wasn't the original by The Lover Speaks, nor the much more well known cover version by Annie Lennox from her 1995 album of covers Madusa. Actually, I still don't know who it was I was listening to but I'm quite sure I'll recognize it if I ever happen to come across it again: there can't be any other artists who'd choose to leave out its distinctive "do-be-do-be-do-do-do, ah".

The challenge of recording a strong cover is how to keep what makes it a song great while adding something to it. There's lots that can be done with "No More 'I Love You's'" but choosing not to bother with the bit that everyone remembers isn't the way to go. I would consider removing or re-writing the refrain in favour of nixing the do-be-do-be-do's. (Actress Hailee Steinfeld did an overhauled version with much of the lyrics changed but she was wise enough to know what needed to be kept around)

A look on the YouTube comments for Spectral Display's "It Takes a Muscle to Fall in Love" indicates that a lot of the kids listening to it now are coming to it more familiar with M.I.A.'s cover from 2010. The last time I wrote about this Dutch synth-pop classic, I referred to her version as "feeble" but I didn't go into why it missed the mark so badly, perhaps because I found it so objectionable that I wasn't about to put myself through the task of having to listen to it a second time.

I just about managed to give it that second play this time round though — and not much has changed over the last five years. While the original has, in the words of reviewer Johnny Black, "the sparest of electronic, Euro reggae rhythms", M.I.A. makes it far too Jamaican while sidestepping it's clear links with Yazoo's gorgeous 1982 hit single "Only You". And this is where her version fails: the stark melancholy just doesn't enter the picture. You'd think with lyrics like "you're gonna live tomorrow if you don't die today" she might have toned down her bouncy vocal or maybe encouraged her producer to come up with 

Otherwise, "It Takes a Muscle to Fall in Love" in the hands of Spectral Display is as brilliant as ever. It's one of those hauntingly lovely songs that I can never quite get right as it plays in my head; I awkwardly hum its melody, mess up the lyrics and fail to quite nail the voice I imagine Henri Overduin has (for some reason I keep thinking he sounds vaguely like Paul Young). I'm so much more used to preferring the way songs sound in my head to the actual recording that it's refreshing to have the opposite occur.

Some say cover versions are supposed to be better than the originals but how often does this ever happen? Carbon copies, needless to say, are pointless.What's left is to take a great song and add something to it in order to make a new version worthwhile. Or mess the whole thing up which only leads to appreciating the original even more. Well done, M.I.A.

~~~~~

Also Reviewed This Fortnight

Kissing the Pink: "The Last Film"

It's an unjust world that the passable "The Last Film" managed to fluke its way into the UK Top 20 when "It Takes a Muscle..." couldn't even get a sniff at the bottom end of the hit parade. I suppose I'd like it a bit more had it lost out on the Single of the Fortnight to something I'm far less willing to fight over. Nevertheless, "The Last Film" is original and engaging and, indeed, "definitely desirable", I just desire Spectral Display that much more. Still, I have to wonder how M.I.A. would've screwed this one up.

(Click here to see my original review)

Spectral Display: "It Takes a Muscle to Fall in Love"

3 March 1983

"Whatever can be going on in Holland?"

— Johnny Black

I first began this project by going through Brian McCloskey's fantastic Smash Hits archive and making a list of the Singles of the Fortnight. I hadn't yet come up with the idea of blogging every SOTF at this time, I just wanted to have them all jotted down. I soon noticed some peculiarities: some acts received way too many best new record honours, others not nearly enough; there were plenty I'd never heard of before and a few I'd forgotten about completely. Some songs titles also intrigued and/or puzzled me and one I had to double check because it had to be wrong.

I first imagined "It Takes a Muscle to Fall in Love" to be about sex and the male member having to exert its muscle(s) in an amourous clinch. Perhaps, I reasoned, it even harks back to adolescent boys sporting partials and misinterpreting them as feelings of love. (I'm not the only one, am I?) Sex, sex, sex, eh? Listening to it for the first time, it quickly dawned on me that it actually refers to strength and that it really ought to be "It Takes Some Muscle..." or "It Takes Muscles...". (Spectral Display members Michael Mulders and Henri Overduin are Dutch and so the indefinite article may be down to a small error of the non-native English speaker) Love requires you to be strong: not the most original of thoughts but no matter.

"It Takes a Muscle..." isn't for everyone. If you don't like synths then you don't like synths and there's little I can do for you. I could point out that this song could easily be reinterpreted as a heart-wrenching gospel number or a tender country lament or a grand operatic piece but I suppose that will only strengthen your antipathy towards the electronica here. Effective as those potential covers could be they'd likely struggle to interpret the harrowing loneliness of the original. Continental types, such as Kraftwerk, Jean-Michel Jarre and Jan Hammer (not to mention the Berlin-period Bowie-Eno), had long been using synthesizers to depict a Cold War industrial town smokestack terrain; Spectral Display take this approach but apply it to individual despair, something that British acts like Black and The Blue Nile would soon be taking up.

Delicate and sparse, the musical arrangement is so perfectly suited to Overduin's vocal, which manages to stray oh so close into melodrama while maintaining a shred of distance. Though mired in pain, the lyrics aren't totally bogged down in the singer's own personal trauma. The song's first verse reads like he's giving advice to a close friend but the remainder delves into his own feelings of loss. He offers a faint degree of hope to his troubled confidant ("You're gonna live tomorrow, if you don't die today") which he contrasts with his own far bleaker state ("Feels like I'll break down tomorrow, if I don't die today"). Yes, he appears to be making someone else's troubles all about himself but what he lacks in compassionate friendship he makes up for with a shimmering tune that puts the listener in the position of being adviser and advisee.

With so many studio boffins of the age using synthy pyrotechnics to wow the listener, it's a refreshing change to hear electronics serve the song — a point somehow missed by M.I.A.'s atrocious cover. Whatever can be going on in Holland? I don't know but I'd love to hear what other Dutch groups were up to if Spectral Display is anything to go by.

~~~~~

Also of some cop

Rip, Rip + Panic: "Beat the Beast"

With jazz dabblage being all the rage among post-punk indie types in the early-eighties, it's only right that the stepdaughter of a cog in sixities avant-garde would be in an improvisational mood. Not so much like the work of Don Cherry on  Ornette Coleman's The Shape of Jazz to Come and Free Jazz (in addition to Cherry's own excellent free jazz-waltz Symphony for Improvisers), this is more like Lester Bowie's dixieland-meets-big band-meets-bop-meets-modern craziness style. The song could easily be something recorded by Cab Calloway but Neneh Cherry and her RRP cohorts — appropriately — rip it apart with some wickedly demented soloing that wouldn't be out of place with Bowie's extraordinary unit the Art Ensemble of Chicago. And despite what I said above about dabblage, it sounds as if they were more willing to commit themselves to jazz than some of their contemporaries. A part of me wishes this this constituted the real Bristol sound.