Manic Street Preachers: "Stay Beautiful"

24 July 1991

"To some, this is a tacky attempt to hang their coat on the peg of 70s punk rock, to others they're merely a bargain bin Welsh version of Guns N' Roses. But as long as it's just as tuneful, cantankerous, boisterous, guitar-filled and jolly as this, then who cares?"

— William Shaw

ARE KIDS INTO MANIC STREET PREACHERS

OR ARE THEY HORRIFIED BY THEM?

Hailing from Monmouthshire (it's in Wales, fact fiends), Manic Street Preachers are the latest group of guitar gods set to conquer the charts with their latest single "Stay Beautiful". But we here at Smash Hits haven't the faintest idea quite what to make of them. Aren't they just an old hat rock group? Aren't styles like metal and punk meant for dinosaurs? And who dresses like these four blokes? Bitz has admitted defeat and we have found some youngsters to guide us through a band that is either (a) the future of music, (b) the sort of thing everyone will forget about by the end of the year or (c) somewhere in between a and b. Let's see if they can edify this bunch of old codgers.

Joanne (15), Walton-on-the-Naze

"Ooh, I like this lot. I think I saw them on the telly last month. The singer's dead dishy, ain't he? I'm glad he's not one of those blokes who works out too much and has lots of muscles. I like slim guys. This song's good but I don't think it'll be a hit. I don't think it's pop enough for the charts. If they do some slushy love song then they'll have a hit but I won't like them as much."

Grant (16), London

"They're all right, I suppose. I reckon they're trying not to be clever but they all went to uni so they must know more than they want us to think. I do like what they're about but the records just don't connect with me. It would be nice if they had a laugh from time to time. The best indie bands are those that have a lot of fun when they're playing. I prefer The Wonder Stuff."

Natasha (15), Hull

"I've never heard of them. It's not really my thing but I guess it's all right. You should ask my older brother, he might know about them. They don't shock me though. There's some people in the town square who are much scarier than this bunch. I wish indie bands weren't such snobs. I bet they're always slagging off Kylie but they love miserable groups like the Inspiral Carpets. Indie groups are all the same."

Tracy (11), Poole

"Do you have the new Chesney Hawkes? I got his tape for my birthday. My friend Jane went to see his concert but my mum wouldn't let me go because we had to go visit my nan in Reading. (Bitz puts the Manics on but Tracy isn't paying attention) Chesney has a sister called Keely and she's dead nice too. Did you know that his brother is also his drummer? (Bitz admits that we do know this fact before we direct the conversation towards the band that is playing) Could you turn that down a bit? I want to sing "The One and Only" for you." (Bitz proceeds to turn the Manics up to full volume)

Steve (14), Ambleside

"Is the drummer a girl?"

Francis (18), Leicester

"They sure put a lot of themselves into such empty material, don't they? I mean, some people I know think their lyrics are really good and moving but I think they just put a lot of passion into them. Don't get me wrong, their songs are exciting and I'm sure they're good live, it's just that it's not as profound or radical as they'd like you to think it is. Other people have said this all before and a lot of them have said it better as well. They do have some skill so they might get better. There again, we'll probably have forgotten all about them in a year from now. Not like Ned's Atomic Dustbin, they're built to last!"

~~~~~

A MESS OF EYELINER 'N' SPRAYPAINT!

Those are the tools the Manic Street Preachers use for designing their famous handmade t-shirts. (Well, maybe not so much the eyeliner) And this is your chance to win one! Impress your mates! Be the envy of your neighbourhood playground! Make your granny nervous! Manics James, Richey, Nicky and Sean have each designed a one-of-a-kind shirt that they have kindly donated to your favourite pop mag (ie this one). They won't reveal exactly what will be written on each shirt but they promise it will be something like FASCINATING (a good 'un!) or CHARMING (another winner!) or UNWELL (uh, not so good) or ATROPHY (?????). The band have also promised not to use any naughty language either, much to the relief of grannies the world over.

To win a custom Manics spraypaint shirt, answer the following question: what did Richey carve into his arm as a message to people who questioned him, (a) 4TUNE, (b) 4REAL or (c) 4TOPS. Answers on a Cornflake packet to: Smash Hits Manic T-Shirt Competition, 147 Holkless Rd, Orton Randgate, Peterborough PE2 SNB. Get 'em in by August 19 or you'll have to make your own bloomin' t-shirt!

~~~~~

Also Reviewed This Fortnight

The Shamen: "Move Any Mountain"

Simon (23), Croydon

"Nah, I don't wanna listen to no Manic Street Peaceniks. Why would you want to play a guitar when you can turn on a synth and let them do all the work. I got a band with me mate Jez. We're called Toe Jam on Toast but we used to be called Blu Tack Soul. Have you heard of us? (No, I don't think we've had the pleasure) We do big beats. I wanna sample some beats but I don't know how to work this sampler thing so I just do the sound of those beats meself, like this: umph, umph, umph, umph, umph, umph (Simon keeps the umph's going for much, much longer). Good, ain't it? My favourite record these days is this one called "Move Any Mountain" by The Shamed Men. It's got some solid beats. Umph, umph, umph... (Oh do stop it!) "I can move, move, move any mountain...": I'm gonna read those words at my wedding some day. (Er, cheers for that Simon. We at Bitz are looking forward to writing about the Toe Jams one day. Might want to give the name a rethink though mate)

Oleta Adams: "Rhythm of Life"

31 October 1990

"You may well remember this rather sweet, mystical, pulsating ballad from then and wonder why it wasn't successful then, because it's such a delightfully simple tune it deserves to be ginormous."

— William Shaw

Vanilla Ice. The Little Mermaid. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Gazza. Prince struggling with (gasp!) trying to be original. Old indie faves doing more bangwagoning. Younger acts going through the motions. No bloody wonder William Shaw is so taken by some good old soul music this fortnight. Low on flash but about as far from novelty pop as one could hope to get.

Oleta Adams is one of those struggled-until-most-of-us-would've-given-up stories that pop is surprisingly low on. It has long been said that rock is a young man's game, even though such a concept is now laughably out-of-date. She was already pushing thirty when she released her debut album which only received attention around Kansas City where she had been based. Her income came playing clubs in her adopted hometown. One night she was performing at the Peppercorn Duck Club at KC's Hyatt Hotel before an audience that included Roland Orzbal and Curt Smith of Tears for Fears. The rest would've have been history but success wouldn't arrive for another four years.

Ver Fears returned in 1989 with "Sowing the Seeds of Love", a song that owed at least as much to XTC's offshoot project The Dukes of Stratosphear than it did to The Beatles. While some pretended to feign indifference, it was and remains a splendid single, every bit as good as "Everybody Wants to Rule the World" or the now more ballyhooed "Mad World". The Seeds of Love album was strong but it didn't have anything that could follow its flagship record. Yet, the duo had a hidden gem that the world needed to acquaint itself with.

"Woman in Chains" was the group's second single from The Seeds of Love. Orzbal and Smith had their difficulties during the album's recording sessions and Smith looks like a disinterested sessioner in the song's accompanying video. Seemingly much more a part of the group is singer Oleta Adams, there to make an accomplished but moody tune that much more accomplished and moodier. It only did modestly on the charts compared with its predecessor but the guest had nevertheless turned in a star-making performance. She was promptly signed up by Tears for Fears' label Fontana.

Somehow or other solo success would continue to elude her. As William Shaw notes, this is a second crack at the Top 40 for "Rhythm of Life". (It would eventually make a belated appearance on the UK charts, albeit only just, at the end of 1995) While it did deserve to be "ginormous" (or least "gi-medium-ish"), I can understand why the public took a pass — and, indeed, passed on it again. Her vocal chops are outstanding but the production and arrangement are understated. Its four-and-a-half minutes could glide by with potential listeners scarcely noticing. I've been playing it on a regular basis this past week and sometimes I barely notice much beyond that fabulous Adams voice. Some tunes get stuck in your head the first time you play them but this isn't one of them.

Orzbal co-wrote and co-produced it but his stamp isn't apparent. I suppose this is noble of him since he doesn't steal the spotlight from the singer. He pops up in the video but only briefly, not quite cutting the figure that Adams had in the "Woman in Chains" promo. If you weren't aware of his involvement, you'd never guess from the results. 

As a vehicle for her astonishing voice "Rhythm of Life" works very well but as an overall pop song it is merely quite good. Superior to any of the detritus Shaw was tasked with evaluating but not nearly as magnificent as "Woman in Chains" or the song that would break her all over the world. The hit she had with Tears for Fears was slow and grand and that was just the sort of thing she needed to give her a smash of her own. "Get Here" proved the perfect choice. A stately slow song, Adams' delivery is perfect as she refrains from using the sort of vocal gymnastics that were becoming popular at the time with the likes of Mariah Carey, Celine Dion and Whitney Houston. You could ignore "Rhythm of Life" but there was no ignoring the follow-up. So very ginormous.

~~~~~

Also Reviewed This Fortnight

Gazza & Lindisfarne: "Fog on the Tyne"

The tears hadn't yet dried from his penalty kick failure at the World Cup and already everyone must have known that Paul Gascoigne was going to translate his sorrow into pop stardom. What I didn't guess correctly was who he'd be working with. Ailing in terms of potential new recruits, Stock Aitken Waterman seemed the logical place for Gazza to have ended up. Instead, he opted to collaborate with Lindisfarne (a band with a name that could only have played (a) metal, (b) folk or (c) worse yet, a mix of the two) who hailed from his native Newcastle. (Oh why didn't he go with Prefab Sprout instead?) A celebration of the northern city, his nibs does the predictable thing by knocking "London town". He was aware that he was still under contract to Tottenham at the time? "They'll spur you out..." may or not have been a a dig at his current side, their perpetual underachievement and their fickle fanbase. All would be forgiven, however, had his pop record been any good but it was anything but. Gazza can't rap, can't sing and his Lindisfarne chums contribute almost nothing. Jimmy Nail has never been this wan.

Monie Love: "Monie in the Middle"

11 July 1990

"Monie delivers a high speed rap in which she pretends to be a schoolgirl in love with, but not doing so well at it because at the same time she's being pursued by a complete lunkhead who's totally and pathetically in love with her, thus leaving her "in the middle"."

— William Shaw

"I see hip hop today as school", Monie Love told someone from Smash Hits' Bitz section in the summer of 1989. "My teachers are Public Enemy, my classmates are the likes of The Jungle Brothers, De La Soul, Boogie Down Productions, MC Mellow, MC Lyte..." She was righter than she knew. If Chuck D was that stern Language Arts instructor who you ended up learning far more from than you ever would have expected, then The Jungle Brothers were those unruly boys who never gave Mr. D a moment's peace. If Flavor Flav was the popular Social Studies teacher who coached the hopeless junior boys volleyball team and ran a board games club in his classroom over the lunch break, then the members of De La Soul were the lads who got involved in activities but never bothered doing their homework (just my kind of people!). If Professor Griff was the scary librarian with sketchy views on race and gender, then Monie Love was that crotchety old fool's worst nightmare. (I can keep this going too: if PE's anonymous armed guards were the home ec and shop teachers no one cared about, then MC Mellow and MC Lyte were the students who no one recognized while flipping through the yearbook; I can't seem to come up with student-teacher comparisons to Terminator X though)

Of course, what Love probably meant was that she and her Daisy Age rap cohorts were learning from Public Enemy but I like to think that they were acquiring lessons and skills from them while disregarding others. That's an effective student-teacher relationship. I hope she has subsequently become the teacher herself, passing on what she learned to the next generation. She'd have a lot to contribute to a group of impressionable hip hop youngsters and that's not even touching the fact that she had a lot to say about her education at the time.

"Monie in the Middle" is one of many hip hop singles of the time with a video set in a school (just off the top of my head there's also De La Soul's "Me, Myself and I" and Young MC's "Principal's Office" but I'm certain there are plenty more). But where the majority of the others deal with students having troubles with their teachers, this one concerns that worst kind of classroom love triangle: Monie in between a "knucklehead" loser who wants to be with her and the "homeboy" who apparently likes her back. I say "apparently" because she's composing letters to him just as the jerk she spurned was doing for her — and there's nothing in the lyrics to suggest that he hadn't "scrunched up the letter" in turn. Is Monie so obsessed about the silly twit in her class with a crush because she sees a bit of herself in him? (There probably wasn't much she could learn from teachers Mr. D, Mr. Flav and Griff the Giant Git)

In any case, the song is a good warning call for guys like myself who could get a little too hung up on girls that clearly had no interest in them. (In my experience, however, not a whole lot changed even after some began to reciprocate my desires) Sadly, few of us teenage dweebs were unable to heed it because not enough people bothered to go out and buy it. It seems hard to believe that "Monie in the Middle" didn't even get a nominal Top 40 placing. Were spotty British youths turned off by her being so forthright with them? If that is the case, then where were the empowered girls who should've felt that they had an ally? (I never descended so low that I followed anyone into the "ladies' bathroom" but I'm sure more than enough sad types who'd now be regarded as incels would've done so) Overt feminism in pop seldom does as well as it deserves and this was no exception.

With some stellar production from Andy Cox and David Steel of Fine Young Cannibals (possibly returning the favour from Love's excellent rap on the excellent remix of FYC's 1989 hit "She Drives Me Crazy") and samples from jazz and samba, "Monie in the Middle" is a fantastic single and should have at least matched the Top 20 performances of the so-so "Grandpa's Party" and the marvelous "It's a Shame (My Sister)", which came out later in 1990. She had been all about going to school but this isn't something that can be done forever. Perhaps the first sign that her approach was set to change was the uncharacteristically mature cover art of her debut album Down to Earth, which manages to make her look like an earnest R&B vocalist. Maturity is always difficult for young artists to deal with but luckily we'll be meeting Monie Love again on this blog so we can see how she managed. Stay tuned.

~~~~~

Also of some cop

The Soup Dragons: "I'm Free"

From the end of June in 1991 until I finished school four years later, "I'm Free" was my start of the summer holidays anthem of choice — but why did it fail to catch on with anyone else? Celebratory and with a chorus that everyone can singalong with instantly, it has both terrace chant and high school graduation theme written all over it. An early Jagger-Richards composition, it was nothing special when The Rolling Stones first recorded it but kudos to The Soup Dragons (or their management, or their record label) for seeing potential in it. Happy Mondays had set the template for the baggy cover version with their still stunning rendition of "Step On" but the choir, the dancefloor beat and the memorable toasting courtesy of Junior Reid ramps it up to another levels of joy (even if I'd still take "Step On" over "I'm Free" in a pinch). You can all have your bittersweet numbers by bloody Green Day or Natalie Merchant as you bid farewell to school or the job you hate or as you move to another country but I'll have this. I might even have it played at my funeral, which would be laugh if only for me.

Lonnie Gordon: "Happenin' All Over Again"

24 January 1990

"Hold on to your trousers! It's time for disco fun!"

— William Shaw

The week of March 12, 1989 may have been the apogee of the Stock Aitken Waterman production/songwriting team. Sure, four singles in the Top 40 was just a routine showing for them but they all occupied places in the upper half of the chart and were all of significance. Three of the top four spots were SAW compositions and/or productions. Jason Donovan was enjoying a second week at number one with "Too Many Broken Hearts", an exuberant bit of pop fluff in which the Neighbours star just about manages to sing his way through without cracking. Two places below was Bananarama's charity cover of The Beatles' "Help" along with comedians Dawn French, Jennifer Saunders and Kathy Burke which was that year's Comic Relief single. One notch down from it was "This Time I Know It's for Real" by disco legend Donna Summer.

What's amazing about this is that SAW had three potential number ones in competition with each other. Donovan's singing career started slowly with the poor "Nothing Can Divide Us" the previous September (still a Top 5 smash) but his star was on the rise, especially after the chart topping success of "Especially for You" alongside fellow Australian Kylie Minogue just after Christmas. The 'Narns had come up short of the top spot a couple times and "Help!" was widely tipped to be their first chart topper, especially since they had the charity single advantage. Summer hadn't been at the top of the UK charts in a dozen years but her offering was the best of the lot and might have stood a chance of equaling "I Feel Love" under the right circumstances.

The fourth SAW record on that week's top 40 is probably the most influential. At number twelve (and soon to be in the top 10) was "I'd Rather Jack" by The Reynolds Girls. Having been ignored by voters at that year's Brit Awards, the trio resolved to put out the most feeble protest song imaginable in response. It didn't matter that their sales were way in front of everyone else in pop at the time, the critics didn't like them and DJ's weren't playing them (both over-simplifications mind you) and that just wouldn't do. As if proving their detractors' point that SAW could put out any old crap sung by a pair of no-names and still have a hit with it, "I'd Rather Jack" did well. It struck a chord with kids who felt that a mind-numbingly boring single like "Belfast Child" by Simple Minds had no business being number one hit, even if absolutely no one bought their attempt to align themselves with the burgeoning house music scene.

It is the legacy of "I'd Rather Jack" that is the most troubling. As I stated above, The Reynolds Girls were nobodies. Liverpool sisters Linda and Aisling Reynolds sent mogul Pete Waterman a demo and the wheels were in motion. They were meant to represent the average pop fan in the late-eighties as they railed against "Pink Floyd, Dire Straits, it's not our music, it's out of date". They weren't plucked from an Aussie soap like Kylie and Jason, they weren't groomed for stardom like Rick Astley, they weren't an established pop act like Bananarama, they weren't even a struggling band in need of a hit like Brother Beyond: they were a pair of girls having a laugh and this seemed reason enough to make them into stars. As the year progressed, Astley, the 'Narns and the Yond all began to walk away from the SAW stable. Their replacements were the likes of Sonia and Big Fun who were very cut from the same cloth as the Reynolds Girls (Neil Tennant even commented that if the Reynolds Girls could be combined into one person the result would be Sonia). Your average person could seemingly be a star and this was something that would carry over into Pop Idol and The X Factor in the future. Pop music has never fully recovered.

SAW looked to continue their dominance into the nineties. Though some of their name acts were in the midst of moving on, they still had a strong selection of stars to work with. The had risen to the challenge of collaborating with Donna Summer and it was hoped more hits would be on the way. A planned second album would end up being nixed after the singer was unable to return to the UK. This would have to be considered a huge missed opportunity for SAW. Not only did they lose out on the finest vocalist they ever worked with, they also missed the boat in terms of other American acts they could've helped revive. The expectation was on Summer coming to them but why didn't they travel across the Atlantic in order to record her? Setting up shop in Los Angeles would have then allowed them easier access to Barry Manilow, Dionne Warwick and a host of aging talents in need of some chart action.

But, then, why would they come to any of their acts when their acts could come to them? If Summer wasn't available then why not recruit a would-be diva who was? This amounts to how they ended up gifting "Happenin' All Over Again" to Lonnie Gordon when it was meant for the Queen of Disco.

Obviously Summer would've made more of it but Gordon does all right herself. Borrowing from Italian house, her voice is manipulated not unlike Black Box's massive "Ride on Time". Indeed, there's a strong Eurodisco vibe which suggests SAW were subtly trying to change up the formula for a new decade. In any event, the vocalist present is in fine form which just about hides the fact that the songwriting team was running on fumes. William Shaw's enthusiastic review mentions Summer's hit from a year earlier and how this is a return to that pumping sound of old. True but I'm not so sure that's a good thing. Neither is the line early in the song about how the antagonist put his "hand upon [his] heart" which is a callback to Kylie's hit from the previous year. Referencing earlier material, using a little-known vocalist in place of a superstar, borrowing tricks from house music: perhaps SAW were losing their sharpness.

None of this mattered at the time as "Happenin' All Over Again" went top 5. In spite of the new bells and whistles, this was the SAW of old and that was good enough. The shiny, glorious pop of "Showing Out", "Love in the First Degree", "Never Gonna Give You Up", "I Should Be So Lucky" and, yes, "This Time I Know It's for Real" was back and it was set to happen all over again. Unless, of course, SAW were about to dry up. At least they had one big star left for them to funnel all their remaining great songs through. What had Kylie been up to?

~~~~~

Also of some cop

Everything but the Girl: "Driving"

My god, what a poor crop of singles we have this fortnight. I don't have much of an issue with Shaw's choice of SOTF because the rest of the competition is so dismal. Coming in second is the latest from Everything but the Girl. There's a lot of the late-eighties to "Driving" (slick production, loads of sax) but Tracey Thorn can overcome a lot with her voice. It would definitely have been better had her and Ben Watt kept things simple with acoustic guitar strumming and maybe a delicate piano as backing. Something they might want to return to if they ever get round to recording together again.

Wendy & Lisa: "Waterfall '89"

18 October 1989

"This extraordinary lump of swingy guitar rock drives along at a simply glorious pace while Wendy belts out in the most beautiful voice ever about one moment you're floating down the river of life, the next moment, pouf!"

— William Shaw

The next two entries covering the 1989 Singles of the Fortnight are, in effect, part 1 and part 2 of the same essay. Both deal with the influence of an overwhelming figure of the time who happened to be losing his way.

I have long taken the term 'Beatlesque' as a warning to stay away. It tends to be code for very predictable, very boring power pop. Three chords and the truth. Radio exec Kevin Howlett, musicologist Rob Bowman and ex-Klatuu (ie the 'Canadian Beatles') drummer Terry Draper managed to come up with eight possible definitions of what constitues 'Beatlesque' and the first seven have some merit, though they seldom apply to bands described as such. The eighth suits the purposes of this review because it is a "simucalarum of the Beatles' reputed sound that ultimately means nothing ("a copy without an original")". 

Thus, let's have a look at another, less commonly used adjective borrowed from the name of a musical giant. "Princian" probably ought to refer to artists or groups with oodles of talent,  stubborn single-mindedness, some wild eccentricities and a complete lack of concern for what anyone else thinks but, instead, it is used to describe R&B acts who use rock guitar, pop groups who try to be slick or anyone who brings to mind the late singer from Minnesota.

It would have been inevitable for both Wendy & Lisa and Cat to be compared to Prince since they were all in his inner circle and they owed their musical careers to their old boss. Nevertheless, is their work all that similar? Just how Princian were they?

William Shaw points out a growing concern in the camp of Wendy Melvoin and Lisa Coleman: their relative lack of success. The critics may not necessarily have been fawning all over them but their reviews tended to be strong (so much so that the usually cold, pop-neutral Tom Hibbert seemed to genuinely appreciate their single "Sideshow" the last time they popped up on this blog; he also admitted to being an admirer of an earlier effort of their's which he reckoned was the "greatest single of 1987" which happened to be the original single release of "Waterfall"). But the public weren't having it. "Satisfaction" managed to give them a minor Top 30 hit in the UK in the summer of 1989 but everything else they put out flopped. With the singles "Are You My Baby" and "Lolly Lolly" having already missed, their best bet to capatalize on their first proper hit was to re-release and remix their most commercial-sounding pop song from two years' earlier.

Superficially Princian, "Waterfall" is awash with crunching guitars and a big fat beat that could've come straight from the Purple Perv (Melvoin even unleashes a wicked ax solo that is not unlike what she would've played on the 1999 and Purple Rain albums: this isn't so much her nicking from Prince as borrowing from herself; if they owed plenty to his nibs than the success of The Revolution owed an awful lot in turn to the two of them). Yet the hooks and sunshine melody puts it in entirely different territory.

The 1989 remix (the 'Alice and Sundial 7"') adds some slap bass, the pace seems a little swifter and there are some effects going on the background. A little more like Prince, come to think of it. If they wanted to distinguish themselves from the guru they apprenticed under then this revamp undermines them a little. On the other hand, Prince himself had a new single out at the same time and the duet "Arms of Orion" with muse Sheena Easton does a fine job on its own of undermining his own supposedly untouchable legacy (William Shaw describes it as a "sloppy...sluggish and even unconvincing love ballad, with quite the corniest words ever" and he's not wrong). A revamped Wendy & Lisa single may not have been necessary but at least it reminded everyone of how great Prince once was.

I previously compared Prince to Duke Ellington, noting that they were these two huge musical figures at the centre of a pair of accomplished groups. The members of Duke's band had him to thank for their lengthy careers but he needed them just as much. The departures of Ben Webster (permanently) and Johnny Hodges (for just four years) proved crippling but he was able to work around them; the deaths of longtime collaborator Billy Strayhorn and Hodges in 1967 and '70 respectively ensured that his work in the last years of his life would never be quite the same. Prince's biggest shortcoming was that he never fully appreciated his bandmates to the same extent. He gave them a chance to be part of the greatest band in the world and they repaid him by being the greatest band in the world. Then, he figured he could do without them and he was never really the same. The "stubborn single-mindedness" that I mention above could be a Princian trait that worked to his advantage but it could also be his creative undoing.

As for Wendy & Lisa, they're only surface-level Princian. Princian because that's what we know them as and Princian because that's what they were expected to be. Not so much because they sound like Prince but because they came from Prince and that's close enough. Talented remixers could manipulate them into sounding more like their old boss but there was much more to them. Could they have been as successful as him? Probably not. They didn't have his charisma, they weren't mavericks and never had command of pop the way he did. But, Princian or not, they were very much their own thing — not so much a "copy without an original" but a pair of originals working off of a copy.

~~~~~

Also Reviewed This Fortnight

Chris Rea: "The Road to Hell (Part Two)"

It is December 23, 1987 and a still blond and well-tanned Chris Rea is heading up to Middlesborough for Christmas. Traffic is slow but he's in a cheery mood and by the time he reaches his hometown and his family he has a new song called "Driving Home for Christmas". Five days later and he is heading back down the motorway to London and the snail's pace his car is crawling along to only makes him angry and despondent. By the time he gets back to his flat he has yet another composition as well as a dark beard and slicked back hair to show for the long journey. This isn't how the two songs were conceived but it's how I like to imagine they came to be. "The Road to Hell" sounds like Leonard Cohen singing over a Dire Straits backing track, something that Shaw noted at the time but never occurred to me. It was the much bigger hit than "Driving Home for Christmas" but there's no question which one has lasted and which one has been largely forgotten. "The Road to Hell" seemed immensely cool to me as a twelve-year-old but I don't have much time for it now. Either it has aged badly or I have.

Redhead Kingpin & The FBI: "Do the Right Thing"

12 July 1989

"He's one of the those rappers whose words trip of the tongue with such casual ease, it makes the point he's trying to put across sound utterly simple and totally and completely obvious."

— William Shaw

It was 1968 and pop music was going through yet another sea change. The Beatles released the so-called White Album. The Byrds put out the influential Sweetheart of the Rodeo. The Beach Boys delivered Wild Honey at the tail end of the '67 and followed it with Friends, both of which had dialled back from the days of 'pocket symphonies' "California Girls" and "Good Vibrations". The Kinks offered up The Village Green Preservation Society, their highly unsuccessful...

Wait, did I already go into all this? That's right, just last week I was going on about how the predominance of acid rock in the late-sixties had been exaggerated, especially given the fact that seemingly everyone at the time was doing against the supposed tide of psychedelic pop. This I then connected to rap having a reputation for being all about showing off and gold medallions and fancy cars and stuff when in actual fact most of the big names were busy creating hip hop records that dealt with a wide-variety of topics. Last week, comical hippies De La Soul proved they could be serious and fly in the face of all that rap posturing and this time it's the turn of a young man named David Guppy, who wished for everyone to Do the Right Thing.

De La Soul were part of a loose scene of playful hip hop artists who sampled from all kinds of sources, looked like hippies and appeared to be in it for a laugh. Other notable progressive rappers (aka The Daisy Age) included Monie Love, The Jungle Brothers and Dream Warriors (all of whom will be featured before long on this blog). Guppy and his mates (ie Redhead Kingpin & The F.B.I.) were not in this camp. They were as earnest as Chuck D but without his in-your-face attitude and forceful raps. Their music seemed to epitomize the idea of rap having a "message", one that was meant to be deep and meaningful. Stay away from drugs. Find alternatives to violence. Finish school. Respect yourself. All very noble and well-intended.

But is "Do the Right Thing" any good? Well, it's not bad and, as William Shaw says, the Kingpin has a facility with rolling verses off the tongue that not everyone can replicate. It doesn't exactly plant itself in the mind but at least I can get through the whole thing without turning it off. Not much of a recommendation but in a year with some extraordinary rap and house records, it's a surprisingly plain effort without much to make it stand out from the pack. Curiously, it's only the single's understated modesty that gives it a unique quality but that wouldn't suffice to make it a truly memorable cut. Getting that message out seemed to ensure that the quality of the music would be secondary. It's as if we're not even meant to enjoy it.

Guppy steered clear of the bling and boasting about what a righteous dude he was but "Do the Right Thing" is still something of a throwback. While Shaw praises the music — it "swings along with devil-may-care jollity — there's even an accordion twiddling away there" — it is unfortunately dragged down by an over-reliance on samples that were already cliches by the end of the eighties ("ah yeah" and "check this out" were they were both so 1987). Top DJ's of the time were able to utilize tried and tested bits of other records effectively in creating fresh works of their own but the Redhead's F.B.I. was not up to the task. A little Daisy Age fun would have been a welcome addition but I imagine it would have threatened to diminish the message — and you can't have that.

"Do the Right Thing" was supposed to be used in the influential Spike Lee picture of the same name but it got dropped prior to the film's release. (Rather unjustly, they didn't even bother to include it on the accompanying soundtrack album though it would eventually appear in Wes Craven's The People Under the Stairs, which couldn't have been much of a consolation prize) Nevertheless, it became a Top 20 hit in Britain in the summer of 1989. This success would be fleeting but Redhead Kingpin will be back in this space soon enough. I just hope he didn't further sacrifice a good record in favour of his "message". We'll see.

~~~~~

Also of some cop

Gloria Estefan: "Don't Wanna Lose You"

Miami Sound Machine → Gloria Estefan & Miami Sound Machine → Gloria Estefan (Wendy James sure called it back at the end of 1988, didn't she?)

Easing her way into a "solo" career was probably a good strategy. Singles from final group album Anything for You were slow to take off in Britain and there wasn't much of a gap between "Can't Stay Away from You" and "comeback" "Don't Wanna Lose You". Two slow songs in a row went against the ver Sound Machine's policy of alternating between a weepie and a Latin dancefloor stormer but they seemed to get away with it all right. Estefan could sometimes be guilty of overdoing it on the vocal front but she does a commendable job of keeping her pipes in check. Earlier "ballads" could never quite measure up to the faster numbers but "Don't Wanna Lose You" placed her firmly in the realm material for teenagers awkwardly slow dancing. Adolescent lust had come roaring in and you can bet we didn't want to lose it.

Madonna: "Like a Prayer"

8 March 1989

"Madonna returns triumphantly. Gasp in amazement."

— William Shaw

It was in the early part of 1989 that Madonna was back (BACK!!) after what seemed like a lengthy sabbatical of making movies no one liked (or so I've been told: I'm quite sure that I've never seen a single Madonna picture) and breaking up with Sean Penn. The hits from Michael Jackson and George Michael's blockbuster albums were finally beginning to dry up, people were starting to tire of U2, Prince was losing the plot a bit and the time was right for a Madonna comeback. The public was ready to welcome her back with open arms and, as William Shaw implies, she could've offered up a steaming pile of dung for a single and the punters would've been pleased to have her back (BACK!!).

A slew of singles followed over the course of the year but it wouldn't be long before she was back (BACK!!) yet again in 1990. I'm Breathless was a relatively low-key release used to promote the Dick Tracy movie (a rare Madonna vehicle that critics didn't despise) but the "Vogue" single quickly became one of her career defining moments. A long-awaited greatest hits, The Immaculate Collection, was released closer to the end of the year and it was an event. She didn't take the easy road of titling it The Very Best of Madonna or The Singles or something similarly trite and she even took the bold step of leaving some of her biggest hits off of it. (It is probably for this reason that records like "Gambler", "Angel", "Causing a Commotion" and "Dear Jessie" have felt like second division Madonna songs)

Those fifteen established tracks that made the cut for The Immaculate Collection were all remixed. While the likes of "Lucky Star" and "Into the Groove" sounded pretty much the same as they always had, a pair of more recent hits, "Like a Prayer" and "Express Yourself", were radically different from what they had been like just a year or so earlier. Then, in a bout of collective amnesia, everybody seemed to forget all about the originals and accepted that these revamped cuts had never been changed at all.

Therefore, it comes as something of a shock to discover that the 1989 "Like a Prayer" is an altogether different beast from what ended up on The Immaculate Collection eighteen months later. (We'll get to the sorry state of "Express Yourself"'s status before long) It should be said that as remixes go, it isn't awful. The song is too good for Shep Pettibone or whoever it was to ruin it completely. The acid house-esque squelching suits the tune well enough and there's a nice dramatic build up that is a little harder to identify in the original. Nevertheless, there's far too much hi-hat, the 'Yea! Whoa!' is cliched and the breakdown is utterly pointless.

There's nothing to quibble over with the original single version though. Prince pounds out a mad guitar riff to open before the ethereal sets in. But that soon gets swept away by a chugging and infectious gospel beat. It could almost be a Motown song and Madonna's debt to sixties' black pop is emphasised by quoting from Wilson Pickett ("in the midnight hour, I can feel your power") and Dionne Warwick ("like a little prayer" and "I say a little prayer") Rising to the challenge she set for herself, Madonna sings as beautifully as she ever has. She smartly avoids the vocal tricks that frequently grate (her occasional husky-voiced bursts can be funny but they do her no favours) and manages to employ a fine balance of feeling and joy. She isn't typically regarded as a technically brilliant singer or anything but it would be hard for anyone to top her performance here.

Then there's the choir. I would soon get sick of the use of gospel choirs in pop (it often felt like they were there to provide meaning in otherwise meaningless songs) but "Like a Prayer" shows how effective they can be in the right hands. As I just mentioned, Madonna doesn't have the strongest voice and she rightly stays out of their way perhaps knowing that she'll be exposed in their presence. ("Let the choir sing" is a lyric that doesn't need to be there but it's a good way for a woman with a supposedly gigantic ego to shine the spotlight elsewhere; the 1990 remix undercuts this a bit by featuring the choir prior to Madonna's introduction)

"Like a Prayer" became a massive hit around the world but it doesn't sound like much else from 1989. Being a masterful hybrid of black pop, it has a timelessness about it that you don't come across everyday. Yet, it was too timeless a year on and had to be transformed into a product of the late-eighties to fit better with Madonna's vision for her first greatest hits set. It's not everyday you get someone taking something timeless and willfully choosing to make it dated.

What the revamped version of "Like a Prayer" ended up doing is that it unknowingly opened the door to the second phase of Madonna's career. She was no longer translating the sound of the New York clubs that was in her heart into her records, nor traces of new wave, disco and glam rock she grew up on; from here, she was content to let her producers and remixers take the lead. This being Madonna, it still worked though not on as consistent a basis as in her eighties' imperial period. Ironically, it was in the nineties that people started praising her for being "clever Madonna" but I'd say she was much smarter back before everyone began figuring her out.

~~~~~

Also Reviewed This Fortnight

Roachford: "Family Man"

It had only been thirty years since the heyday of Chuck Berry, Larry Williams and Little Richard but somewhere along the line the idea of black rock music had become a novelty. Andrew Roachford had as soulful a voice as anyone (and probably still has; he now sings with Mike + The Mechanics which makes me wonder how nice his delivery of "you can whistle as well as you hear" must be) which makes his decision to rock out admirable when he could've easily gone the R&B Romeo route. The power of his voice works well with the rockist sounds of his band but "Family Man" has always felt more like an album cut than single material to me. "Cuddly Toy" had hooks aplenty and it rightfully gave him a memorable Top 5 hit at the start of the year. Its follow-up was more of the same but less immediate and more forgettable. Good stuff but there's a reason it stalled outside the Top 20. And with that, Roachford's career seemed to stall a bit. He's had a fine career but it always seemed like he was going to be bigger. But how about a second opinion?

Nick Heyward: "Tell Me Why"

11 January 1989

"Nick's an older and more "careworn" soul these days and this song starts off all moody and Morrissey-like until, just when you least expect it, this glorious poetic and lovelorn chorus comes and grabs you by the lapels and gives you a good shaking."

— William Shaw

I was a young pop kid in early 1989 but the radio was seldom on. We would return from a weekend trip to, say, Norwich, Windsor or York and the "wireless" would be promptly switched on to catch the Top 40 Countdown with Bruno Brookes but, otherwise, I never gave much thought to listening to Radio 1 or Capitol Radio after coming home from school to accompany doing my geography homework. My sister and I spelled each other with the small tape player in the room we shared but, again, the radio was hardly ever on. In the car on the way to school or on those weekend trips it would play out much the same way: tapes would frequently be playing and no one gave much thought to turning on the radio. (This is odd looking back because we always had the radio on back in Canada)

Thus, I never got much exposure to pop music that wasn't on the charts — hey, if it isn't on the Top 40, how popular can it be anyway? — so the music of someone like Nick Heyward completely passed me by. It was left to Smash Hits to fill the void: they'd describe his records and I'd imagine how they'd sound. (I was just eleven at the time and still a long way off of trusting my luck by taking a punt on something unknown to me) Luckily, he had his champions at the top pop mag, even if he was being ignored elsewhere.

Alex Kadis already gave Heyward a Single of the Fortnight for comeback single "You're My World", describing it as "joyfully poppy and daffily jaunty as ever and it's shamelessly romantic and summery to "boot"!" She concludes her review by welcoming him back (as does William Shaw just over four months later: I'm surprised he was able to miss him since he hadn't been gone all that long). Richard Lowe isn't exactly bowled over by album I Love You Avenue but it is a "nice record" filled with "smashing" songs. I read and re-read that review and was convinced I was going to love it; I was so sure of it's brilliance that I didn't even have to hear it.

Just prior to the release of the album came "Tell Me Why", a second shot at the hit parade after "You're My World" missed out. This time, it's William Shaw's turn to heap some well-deserved praise on our Nick. As he says above, it opens on a unexpected downbeat note as he channels Morrissey in the verses. It might have been better had he held the chorus back a bit to really catch listeners off guard but that's a trivial knock against an otherwise astonishing single. At a time when the charts were exploding with techno, hip hop and indie rock, there wouldn't have been anything fresh at the prospect of a modestly sung sunshine pop song but who else was able to pull such a thing off back then? (Heyward's only real competition in that regard would have been the duo of Grant McLennan and Robert Forster of Australia's Go-Betweens and they were hardly conquering the charts either)

A common thread in the reviews of Kadis, Lowe and Shaw is how Heyward was once a pretty big deal when he was in Haircut One Hundred but things ended up going pear-shaped for him in his solo career. He had become a classic case of a faded pop star who couldn't escape from the shadow of his former band, or so we might assume. Luckily, his muse had remained and he seemed resigned to a life outside of chartdom. He was neither clinging desperately to former glories nor pathetically attempting to hop on the bandwagon of slick sophisti-pop production. Yes, his music had gone a little more indie and he wasn't unwilling to use synths but his M.O. remained and he's managed to stick with it to this day.

Still, it's easy for me to love it to death today when I have YouTube to feed me Heyward tunes from over thirty years ago. Back in the day this was a single that existed strictly in the pages of Smash Hits and I had to go on whatever I had read to provide me with some semblance of a pop song. It was around this time that I saw myself as a budding songwriter and attempting to picture how a tune would go based strictly on reviews proved a valuable exercise. (It also led me into a habit of coming up with titles before composing songs to go with them) I would wistfully sing the lines "tell me why" to myself in a style that wasn't a world away from his finished product but coming up with the rest proved much more challenging. We can't all be as talented as Nick Heyward.

~~~~~

Also Reviewed This Fortnight

Marc Almond featuring Gene Pitney: "Something's Gotten Hold of My Heart"

Shaw isn't terribly impressed this, one of those cross-generational duets that were big in the late-eighties. Feeling it was a song that was "over-the-top" to begin with, he tuts at how the pair of Marc Almond and Gene Pitney have taken it to "hysterical extremes". I would've been in agreement with him at the time — actually, I was just bored by it — but now I'm in awe of this vocalist's masterclass. Almond really shouldn't be in the same league as Pitney but he holds his own and the pair sing in tandem beautifully. A surprise UK number one, it had a small part to play in the sixties revival going on in 1989 even if the pop kids still weren't quite ready for Burt Bachrach. Scintillating stuff.

Spagna: "Every Girl and Boy"

10 August 1988

"But, phoenix-like, the mighty Italian singer with the extraordinary hair cut and a cat called Bimbo has risen — risen! — again."

— William Shaw

It was early August and a nice summer was moving along. We had only just moved into our new house a few weeks' earlier and I was too busy enjoying myself to think much about the changes that were still to come. August 19th was only a few days away but it might as well have been months as far as I was concerned. I was too busy enjoying my childhood to notice that my world of comic books, swimming lessons, Saturday afternoon wrestling shows and tree climbing was winding down.

What awaited me in England was a world of Aussie soaps, school discos I never attended (even if I secretly wanted nothing more, especially if it meant getting the chance to chat up a girl), wearing a uniform and pop music to be obsessed by. Of course, childhood doesn't disappear overnight, nor did I instantly become a cool first year with mature interests. We had been in Britain a while and I suddenly began reading The Beano — and I wasn't bothered that my mates look down upon it as "childish". Good thing, then, that there was Smash Hits to ease the way for young people suddenly dealing with maturity and puberty who weren't quite ready to be properly grown up.

This issue of Smash Hits was in the newsagents when we arrived in the UK on the 20th of August 1988. My sister and I were still some ways away from discovering the music scene for ourselves (which wouldn't really begin until after we started school in September) but the contents here only bear a passing resemblance to the pop scene we'd quickly become obsessed with. Brother Beyond are on the cover and they were only just starting their year-long ride on the giddy carousel of pop and Kylie is featured in Bitz but many of its other pages are filled with people who'd be just about irrelevant a month later. Five Star, The Funky Worm, Voice of the Beehive, even Climie Fisher and Mica Paris were just about done as hit makers. But just as I was still clinging to childish things, a top pop mag wasn't quite ready to say goodbye to some relics (a fortnight later they'd even profile faded pop types who were back — BACK!! — to try their luck again; it didn't work out for the bulk of 'em). (For more on this issue, please check out the excellent Giddy Carousel of Pop's interview with the great Jude Rogers)

Spagna was another one of those people who seemed to new arrivals like they were from a whole different time. Sporting a notoriously frightful wig and looking older than your typical popstar (was it the piece that did it?), the Italian singer was a disco throwback who ended up falling just short of the number one spot with her 1987 hit "Call Me". There's not much to it but it is indeed highly catchy and I'd even say it's a shame it wasn't able to usurp MJ's "I Just Can't Stop Loving You" from the top spot. Much to my surprise, it had been her only previous UK hit until "Every Girl and Boy" and it's probably her only song people of a certain age will remember.

"Every Girl and Boy" (not "Every Boy and Girl" as Smash Hits has it, though I will say the line "every boy and girl / in the world" would've worked about as well as "every girl and boy / enjoys" if not better) has grown on me a bit over the past few days. I'm still not especially crazy about the metal guitar solos and power chords but I have caught myself singing it at random every so often so there is that. The sort of number that I don't need, didn't ask for and would never seek out but I'm glad it exists all the same.

With all due respect to Spagna, her Single of the Fortnight needs to be looked at in the context of the miserable collection of new releases it is up against. I'm the first person who will defend late-eighties' pop but even I have to admit the selection here is poor. While many will knock the Italian singer for being dated, at least what she was doing at the time could be described as "current". Big Country were churning out that same old uninspired stadium rock, Van Halen had long since become a parody of themselves and as for Heaven 17, well it's rich that they chose to leave The Human League because they didn't want to go pop. It's more of the same from Natalie Cole and UB40 only vastly inferior to what they used to be capable of. A-ha sounding like they're in the midst of losing the plot (though they would come roaring back a bit at the end of the year with the charmingly daft "You Are the One"). A batch of singles that would've doubtless led me to periodically sticking a pencil in my (insert orifice of your choice here) just for some relief. Critics can be a prickly bunch and it's to William Shaw's credit that such a grim selection of records didn't open the door to a page of deeply hostile prose.

~~~~~

Also of some cop

Climie Fisher: "I Won't Bleed for You"

"Love Changes (Everything)" had been on the radio a bit that summer in Canada. I liked the song a bit but wasn't thrilled by the guy with the raspy voice, who sounded an awful lot like all those other raspy-voiced singers of the age. But there was something of a tune in there. This one, not so much. "Love Changes" and the excellent hip hop mix of "Rise to the Occasion" gave people the impression that they were yet another top notch synth pop duo in the tradition of Yazoo, Pet Shop Boys and Erasure but they show their true colours as professional songwriters trying to make it as stars with this. It didn't even matter how many photos they took of Simon Climie in a vest, they didn't look the part and didn't sound like it either. But they weren't going to trouble the charts for much longer and could return to what they were best at.

The Bangles: "Hazy Shade of Winter"

27 January 1988

"To some they are just a quaintly old-fashioned rock group who demonstrate the virtues of quaintly old-fashioned rock music but in this day and age when records are brim full of plinky synthesizers and drum machines blipping away everywhere it sometimes comes as a bit of a relief to hear four mad Californians wigging out in the quaint old rock fashion."

— William Shaw

I don't know if it was The Beatles becoming fashionable again, baby boomers flexing their financial muscle or a general ennui with modern production and synths but the sixties were back (BACK!) by the end of the eighties. (It was probably a combination of all three as well as a few other factors) There had previously been a considerable amount of disdain held towards the decade of hippies, flowers and surprisingly dull Who records but this was gradually swept away in the aftermath of Live Aid and the compact disc revolution. The "plinky synthesizers and drum machines blipping away" were only finding a more welcoming home in the works of Stock Aitken Waterman but those singles were for the kids; the grown-ups had all this "old rock", some of which was in effect new old rock.

Of course, there were always rock acts keeping the flame of the sixties going. Power pop inherited it for a while but it was largely kept to the periphery throughout the eighties. US college rock groups may have arisen during the heyday of new wave but many of them owed a much greater debt to earlier times. Indie groups may have looked like punks but their music was often much closer to the hippies they may have otherwise looked down upon. R.E.M. gradually began attracting attention as a kind of southern gothic equivalent of an English folk rock act. Paisley underground emerged applying punk energy to Beatles, Byrds and country rock numbers. Yet, in the midst of this came The Bangles, who are not typically acknowledged as being part of an old school rock revival.

I'm sure that sexism plays a part in this even if they're also overlooked as authentic rock chicks the way The Go-Go's, Pat Benetar and Joan Jett all were and still are. The Bangles were a self-sufficient unit but they relied heavily on cover versions (even though you'd have to look long and hard to find another group that does reinterpretations just as well) and were not above daft pop like "Walk Like an Egyptian" which ensured that critics wouldn't take them seriously. Their glamourous image and pop hooks also made them favourites of youngsters which also didn't do them any favours in attempting to be credible. Yet among all that, they were a great band, "geniuses of immense proportions", as William Shaw puts it. No one else in their day managed to make the sixties sound so current.

The Bangles' cover of "Hazy Shade of Winter" came during the gap between their breakthrough second album Different Light and its follow up Everything and was recorded for the soundtrack to the film Less Than Zero. I haven't yet watched it but I imagined the song playing out along its the closing credits, possibly with Andrew McCarthy and Jami Gertz preparing to leave their decadent LA lives behind for the more mature pastures of the east coast of the United States — the synthetic eighties giving way to a future that looks back to simpler times. Tipping me off is the fact that it's the last track on its soundtrack so it must be there at film's end, right? Imagine my surprise, then, that it actually comes in right at the start of the movie: McCarthy's character of Clay Easton is coming back to California for the Christmas holidays and the sunshine pop rock of The Bangles is there to welcome him back on his ride from the airport. I guess it's an acknowledgement of how the Golden State was once a mecca of free thinking and love which had descended into free market madness and mountains of cocaine twenty years later but I really should try to track down the movie before I pontificate further.

By Simon & Garfunkel's standards, "A Hazy Shade of Winter" is a rocker. Though always a talented songwriter and arranger, Paul Simon wouldn't really become musically ambitious until his solo career in the seventies, at a time when many of his fellow coffee house singer-songwriters were also spreading their wings. It ended up on their finest album Bookends but it had been written and recorded at the time of Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme and its flowery, impressionistic themes seem much more suited to the latter. Being so committed to folk music, Simon was not about to do a Dylan by plugging in and this was a rare number of his that you can say has something of a beat to it. I've never been much of a S&G person and I have to say that their version is unremarkable. The dullness of the recording really does an amazing job hiding the great composition underneath.

This version by The Bangles tops the original in every possible way. Susanna Hoffs, Debbi and Vicki Peterson and Michael Steele share lead vocal duties and the foursome are much stronger than Paul and Art, who even I'll admit had much better days in the studio. Rick Rubin's production gives it a shine that is nevertheless grounded in the sixties. Indeed, if anything it sounds much more of its time in the original summer of love than Simon's source material. A brief trumpet flourish that brings to mind "Penny Lane", sleigh bells not unlike "God Only Knows" and one of those insistent acid rock organs provide not-so-subtle reminders that this is a throwback.

Yet, we're still a ways away from the likes of Oasis instantly recalling The Beatles. This is very much The Bangles who were simply utilizing the sixties to make their records better. "Hazy Shade of Winter" comes from approximately the same time as the songs that would turn up on Everything, an album replete sitars, tablas, six-string guitars and baroque pop string arrangements but these only added depth to their sound; by being more like their influences, they ended up sounding more like themselves. 

The sixties was becoming the new thing in 1988. Just four days after this issue of Smash Hits came out, a new American TV series made its debut. The Wonder Years was sentimental but it wasn't as hokey as Happy Days or That 70's Show. It reflected the period in which it came out just as much as the era it was set in. Looking back to a time of idealism seemed like a good way to get us through the cynical late-eighties. Though as Bono would sing later on in the year (with a line that is irreconcilable with the remainder of U2's Rattle and Hum album) "if you glorify the past, the future dries up". Rock star were going to have to decide if they wanted to be part of the present or stuck in its past. Too bad they didn't follow the lead of The Bangles who deftly toed rock's spacetime continuum.

~~~~~

Also of some cop

Eighth Wonder: "I'm Not Scared"

A big part of an imperial phase is that a band can get away with anything and still be successful and even tapping into the zeitgeist. As if to prove it, Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe gifted their first song to an outside act. Eighth Wonder had been releasing an endless parade of flops (though they did have hits in Italy and Japan) before the Pet Shop Boys entered the picture and ended their losing streak. As Shaw says, there's no sign of the male Wonders on this recording though you can hardly blame anyone for thinking that Patsy Kensit could do all the promotional heavy lifting while the others stayed in the background. She looked great but Kensit wasn't a brilliant pop star, her voice was distinctive but weak and her mannerisms smacked of too many years in stage school. It was decent of Tennant and Lowe to give her such an excellent song but they should have saved it for themselves; the far more throwaway "Heart" would have sufficed but that's a story for another time. Please stay tuned.

Aretha Franklin & George Michael: "I Knew You Were Waiting (for Me)"

14 January 1987

"So could this be post-Wham! George trying to reach a more "serious" audience by teaming up with a "soul legend"? Yes, it probably could."

— William Shaw

1987 is now upon us and thus (a) it is now officially the late eighties and (b) the younger generation of pop stars was beginning to wake up to the reality of the post-Live Aid landscape. Artists in their forties were no longer commercial poison and many began to be seen in much closer proximity to the likes of Phil Collins and Sting than they would have been at the beginning of the decade. The burgeoning compact disc boom meant that reissues were viable ('87 being the year that The Beatles' back catalog was released in the new format, giving the Fab Four a new found relevance — but more on them in a few months) but many of the dinosaurs were having success with new material as well. Younger acts were suddenly in danger of falling behind and they began dialing back on the synths and getting all roosty. Others went for the cross-generational duet.

Soul music had been the basis for a lot of figures in British pop of the eighties, a fact not lost on at least one high profile star from twenty years earlier. Aretha Franklin was already aware of George Michael as early as 1984 when "Wake Me Up Before You Go Go" hit number one in the United States. Immediately recognizing his talent, she made a play for his compositional services only to be turned down due to the young pop star's modesty, considering it "ludicrous" that he could ever write a song for her. Aware that she had to get with the times or remain a cloistered relic of the past, she she was keen to strike some new musical allies, many of whom happened to be British. In 1985, she teamed with Eurythmics on the hit single "Sisters Are Doin' It for Themselves", a song that gave a spark to the often clinical and lifeless work of Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart. The following year she did a brave but uninspired cover of "Jumpin' Jack Flash" for the Whoopi Goldberg movie of the same name with a guesting Keith Richards on guitar. Yet, the guy from Wham! remained reticent. Fortunately for her, the songwriting team of Simon Climie (who would soon have pop success as one half of Climie Fisher) and Dennis Morgan weren't so shy — though perhaps they should have been.

And about that song of their's: it's not terribly good, is it? William Shaw says it's "not up to much" (and this is his second SOTF on the bounce to be given his thumbs up in spite of the shoddy songwriting) but if anything that's an understatement. Tom Ewing considers the lyrics to have been written using a "set of gospel magnetic fridge poetry" which is harsh but sadly accurate. Luckily, Franklin gets the blustery, over-the-top nonsense which she was able to belt out as only she could; Michael's lines are much more restrained about having "made it through the heartache" and how he "just laugh(s)" at all the disappointments (how very big of him).

It's a vocal dream match and they both do well even if there's no doubt who's the star. Franklin gets top billing (doing the duet was the brainchild of her very hands on record label boss Clive Davis and Michael was just on the cusp of the mega-stardom he would reach with his album Faith and its dinghy-load of hits later in the year; the majority of generation gap match-ups from "Streets of Bakersfield" by Dwight Yoakam and Buck Owens to "Justified and Ancient" by The KLF and Tammy Wynette gave main artist credit to younger acts with their older partners getting a 'featuring' or 'with' in front of their names) and those lung-busting Ahhh's are what everyone is expecting. The real highlight, however, is her gospel-influenced responses to Michael ("I know you did") which, for whatever reason, he doesn't reciprocate. At any rate, this is still one of his best vocal performances and would anticipate his beautiful singing on 1990's Listen Without Prejudice.

"I Knew You Were Waiting (for Me)" is an enjoyable record despite the dodgy songwriting and overblown production but it's hard to escape the feeling that a lot more could have resulted from such a collaboration. Having a song at the ready probably meant that the pressure would be off Michael, who then jumped at the chance of recording with a musical idol when he had previously been so reluctant. Yet, he was one of his generation's finest pop songwriters and would surely have come up with something more inspired than this cliche-fest. Notably his only hit single up until the live "Don't Let the Sun Go Down on Me" (also a duet, this time with Elton John) in which he didn't get a writing credit, it ended up being a warning shot that he was quickly on his way to the very top of the pop world. As for Franklin, it turned out to be her last big moment even as she kept looking out for others sing alongside. The people she began working with tended to be American (Whitney Houston), older (again Elton John, gosh he gets around) or both (The Four Tops). She would have done better to look out for someone on the rise — say, Janet Jackson or Tears for Fears — who was also brash enough to offer a song for her to sing. That's all she wanted.

~~~~~

Also Reviewed This Fortnight

The Smithereens: "In a Lonely Place"

Damn Suzanne Vega was something else back then. The Smithereens were just another solid American college rock group, albeit not one that stood out in any way. But with "In a Lonely Place" she provides the finishing touches to an already lovely song. Hard to say how this would have gone over on college radio and in student union hall concerts but it was appreciated enough in the UK for an sizable indie hit. Its heartbreak is real enough but it never descends into melodrama or self-pity. Maybe there was much more to these Smithereens than I had assumed; the fact that they got Vega to sing with them alone makes me question my previous antipathy.