A postscript to the Puff Daddy entry – I’ve always thought it seemed a little dodgy how that record basically launched him in the UK, how he seemed to become famous because one of his friends died and then maintained this fame by being a particularly ostentatious rich dude with a penchant for attempting to pass off leopardskin rugs as coats of some form or other.
Dead people are a fairly proven formula for boosting the flagging record industry, aren’t they? And as annoyed as I might become at that fact, I can’t deny that I’m party to it. F’r instance, I didn’t own any records by Johnny Cash or Ray Charles before they died, and I can’t swear that I would have ever thought to had they not passed away. I might well have gone on thinking of them as That Feller My Mum Likes and That Blind Feller Out of The Blues Brothers. I’d like to think that I’d have chanced upon “I Still Miss Someone” or “The Night Hank Williams Came To Town” or “What’d I Say” or “Am I Blue” and the spark would have lit without the aid of the various retrospective articles, or the video for “Hurt“, but… it just seems hugely depressing that vast chunks of the history of music only come to the surface when people die, that their praises only actually get sung when they ain’t around to hear them. It’s as though death is a more brutal and depressing version of last.fm.
The one that’s really stung lately, though, is the passing of Nick Sanderson, formerly of World of Twist and Earl Brutus. Earl Brutus are a band I remember being mentioned a lot on The Evening Session when I was 15, 16-ish, but not one I ever recall hearing for myself. I saw their singles advertised in the NME sometimes, and remember being particularly taken by the title “The SAS And The Glam That Goes With It”, but I never sought them out. Ten years too damn late, I actually bothered listening to them thanks to Steve Hewitt’s article about Sanderson’s passing on FreakyTrigger:
And I can’t think of a point in my life at which I would not have thought this song (“Come Taste My Mind”) was brilliant. Yet somehow, it’s taken the singer dying for me to actually notice it and them, and as a result my relationship with them feels a bit… off. I begin to wonder to what extent death is colouring my perceptions.
Then the chorus hits and I no longer give a shit. Memories gimme the strength I need to proceed, even if they’re someone else’s.
Cos watching this 11 years later, the main message I’m getting off it is “Totally it is OK for grieving men to get their groove on while riding on a disco-lit treadmill”. Then it strikes me – we are talking about this man:
Knowing what we know of Puff Daddy/Puffy/P. Diddy/Diddy, would it not be natural that this man would express trauma by falling off a motorcycle and receiving no injuries as a result? That he would express grief by doing an extended dance routine underneath a rain machine? That, were he to announce that “This one goes out/To everyone/That has lost someone/That they truly love”, he would do so in the manner of one who believes that they are the first person to have ever dedicated something to people that have lost someone that they truly love?
What I’m tryna say here is that this record is not necessarily an insincere gesture; Puff Daddy being the man he is, it is entirely plausible that he really believes this is the best way to mourn a friend. The trouble is that it’s horribly inarticulate; it doesn’t go any deeper than “You are dead and I am sad because you are not here anymore, and that is because you are dead, and so I am sad. Because you are dead”. It doesn’t offer any meditation, any insight beyond “On that morning, when this life is over, I know I’ll see your face” – exactly the same as “One Sweet Day“, basically, American pop stars cheerily writing themselves into Heaven, except here someone’s actually died and nobody’s trying to coin the term “melismatic clusterfuck”.
Actually, that’s not entirely fair – “memories gimme the strength I need to proceed, strength I need to believe” is a pretty neat expression of how grieving and moving on with one’s own life need not be contradictory activities; we move on but we do not forget, cos our lives have been impacted; we remember by living, but we keep our selves at the same time. If you get my meaning there.
Even so, these days this record just seems to be bereft of impact. I remember I used to find it quite moving when I was younger, but not now. The clean surfaces, and especially the anodyne mumbles of 112 at the end, just don’t do anything. They sound like they’re not really singing about anyone in particular, rolling flat their vulnerabilities for the radio, muttering about some generic idea of sadness or what have you.
Still, I’m turning 25 today, and the closing shot reminds me that that’s a couple of months older than Notorious B.I.G. ever got to be. A chilling thought for all kinds of reasons.
If I were American, this would have been:
Puff Daddy, Faith Evans and 112, “I’ll Be Missing You” – yup, our second occasion upon which both sides of the Atlantic were in agreement. Which is convenient.
American Me: 7
Actual Me: 6
Other notable UK number ones of this year:
Spice Girls had three number ones, everyone else had to be content with one each. There was Hanson, R Kelly, the Teletubbies, The Verve, Tori Amos, Blur, LL Cool J, Elton John, Oasis, Will Smith, Olive, U2 and Gary Barlow, but the ones I retain the greatest fondness for are:
(Lene’s solo album= pretty decent)
But, most of all:
So far as I can tell, still the only number one with “crap” in the lyrics.
1998 next. This isn’t gonna get done on time, but it’ll get done.
I first became aware of this lot when a poster advertising “Wannabe” appeared somewhere along the bus route to Tulse Hill. My immediate reaction was:
“Why are they dressed like that?”
I dunno if it was irritation or disapproval that led me to think this, so much as a state of incomprehension. Their clothes did not match. Some wore oddly garish, violent dayglo shades of orange and green; some wore black, some wore white, but it all seemed a bit weird, haphazard. No-one person’s clothes bore much similarity to any other’s; I think 13-year-old me came up with the phrase “they’ve had a fight with a charity shop and lost”, and I’m pretty sure 13-year-old me was exceedingly pleased with himself for so doing. They didn’t look like pop stars – they didn’t look like anyone I recognised from, well, more or less anywhere. By that point, I reckoned that pop stars were meant to be in some way stylised, to dress in ways to make them appealing to record buyers. The Spice Girls’ attempt at this left me completely befuddled. Who was meant to be being appealed to by whatever it was that the red headed one was wearing? Why does the blonde one look like she’s wearing shoes that she can’t lift off the ground? What does the one in the black dress do? How do we know they’re even in the same band? It just didn’t make sense. It couldn’t work. No, failure it was for them. They will go and fail. Yes they will.
Except.
The Spice Girls would become the first British all-female group to ever have a UK number one (assuming we don’t count duos). It took 44 years for that to happen. They did it by failing to adhere to the recognised rules of how a pop group should behave. They were different, not just to any other act, but to each other. Five seemingly disparate, distinctive individuals come together to sing songs about how friendship never ends, insisting that “if you wanna be my lover, you gotta get with my friends” – “bros before hos” gets tipped upside down in a way that no pop act of the time would have thought of (could you imagine, say, Robbie Williams turning a girl down because she’d used Jason Orange’s tea towel to mop up some orange juice? Or Ronan Keating even coming close to giving a shit about Mikey Graham’s opinion on anything?). It was a somewhat rare outing for the opinion that girls could have goals in life that didn’t involve having boys deem them worthy of attention. The era of the non-threatening boy-band would last a bit longer, but “Wannabe” was a clear statement that things were very much on the turn.
As songs go, it’s something of a cut and shut job – heavy, clumping piano stomps get segued in and out of a very British-sounding attempt at smooth pop-R&B. The attitude rubs up rudely against the pop bits – going from Mel B and Geri bellowing “Itellyouwhaddawan’, whaddarillyrillywan’!” “SO Temmewhachurwan’, whachurrillyrillywan’!” at each other to the straight-outta-My Little Pony chirrups of “Make it last forever – friendship never ends!” hints at a peculiar balancing act within the thing, trying to simultaneously appeal to young girls’ sense of rebellion and adventure while at the same time assuring parents that Emma Bunton is not going to lead their daughters into a morass of sin and harlotry. (Then again, the video does feature Emma nicking a beggar’s hat at the start, then tossing a doorman’s papers in the air for seemingly no reason at all, other than a misplaced attempt at being fun and spontaneous. Presumably the makers assumed that the nation’s young ladies would be sensible enough to realise that Emma Bunton is A Bit Annoying and that following her example would just be kind of crap. If so, well done them).
The tension created by the conflict in approaches carries through to the peculiarly thrilling video. Shot in one continuous take, the girls are given just under four minutes to launch themselves upon the public, charging through a hotel lobby , pausing for a brief soft-shoe shuffle on a staircase, then gallivanting in the restaurant before leaving just in time to get on the Routemaster that will take them to who knows where. With the exception of the odd set piece, there is an air of flying by the seat of their pants. Notice, for example, how Geri’s signature move appears to be miming someone backing through a door while carrying a stack of vegetable crates; how Emma’s feet seem peculiarly stuck to the floor (pre-dating Cascada by nine or ten years); and how, for the entire video, Victoria appears to have absolutely no idea what she is supposed to be doing. And yet, there’s no fear in any of this – nerves, certainly, but also a kind of exhilaration, a revelling in the spontaneity, of being given the freedom to go out and express themselves fully (I would post the video for Westlife’s version of “Uptown Girl” by way of comparison, but, well, no).
And it carries through to the record. Admittedly, Geri sings “If you really bug me then I’ll say good-bye” like it’s in a foreign language, but the chants of “HUP! HUP! HUP! HUP!” in the big finish are strikingly reminiscent of the grunts and bellows of American football quarterbacks; Mel B in particular sounds like she’s having the time of her life, merrily slinging off nonsense and bantering with the listener with an air of confidence and open-ness that seemed completely out of keeping with the prevailing chart climate at the time. When she goes about introducing the band, you can almost hear hear looking straight at you, reaching out through the speakers – it’s a pretty incredible performance.
“Wannabe” didn’t seem anything particularly special to me at the time, being as I was a 13-year-old Private Eye-subscribing Beautiful South fan, but looking back at it now it feels like a massive shot in the arm – a heroic, daring record that broke through the stiff-backed approach that British pop generally took at the time; a record that wasn’t scared to be different, to get in the listener’s face and invite them to join in; a record that actually treats women as subjects rather than objects. It isn’t the best record that we’ve looked at in this series, but it might well be the most important.
If I were American, this would have been:
Los Del Rio, “Macarena” – next to “Wannabe”, this can’t help but look a bit crap. It’s got a nice enough chorus, but beyond the first minute or so it requires an awful lot of teeth-gritting to get through. Top of the American charts for 14 weeks, of which this was the first. Poor sods. Still, it did wind up getting knocked off (in November) by this:
So it all worked out alright in the end, I guess.
American Me: 7
Actual Me: 6
Other notable UK number ones of this year:
Boyzone and Peter Andre had two number ones each. Deep Blue Something and Robson & Jerome had one each. These things do not concern us, however, because the following records also got to number one:
So yes, that was totally worth taking six days to finish. 1997 sees our second simultaneous UK & US number one, so with any luck that’ll be up slightly more promptly than last time. Heck, get a following wind and I may get this finished before I turn 30…
There were some charmless dickheads about in the mid-90s, weren’t there? Being a 12-year-old at an all-boys school when this was around meant I got exposed to it fairly regularly and, well… actually, I can’t remember what I thought of it. I really can’t. I know it was there. And the kids used to yell out the chorus of it a lot. But somehow, it never really seemed to have anything to do with me, y’know? I don’t recall ever dancing to it, ever singing along to it… absolutely nothing, nothing at all.
And my reaction to it has barely changed since then. I’m watching it back now, and, well, the beat’s nice and pumping, though I could swear they’ve nicked it from somewhere else, but god, the vocals… ugh. They take that chorus and kick it and kick it and kick it and eventually it dies but they keep bloody going, but that’s OK because they have some verses where they go “IF I CANNOT BE WIV YOO MAYBE I CAN HAVE A TASTE” so that varies things a bit because that means they can run their misogyny into the ground as well as the chorus and it just goes on and on and zzzzzz…
It’s the leering that really puts me off, though, this sort of suggestion that “they’re only saying what everybody is thinking”, which thus entitles them to get away with being fucking lunkheads. It limpets onto pre-conceived ideas of what having fun involves, taking that status quo and hugging it for all it’s worth, and at the heart of it we find nothing at all. It’s so half-arsed, too, just taking that beat and chorus and slapping the two together with no real care or thought or anything at all. Compare it to, say, this:
Which has pacing, variety, a beat that properly thumps and cuts, production that functions in more than one bloody dimension, a vocalist who sounds, y’know, engaged with the material and shit, and at least some idea that constantly shoving the chorus into the audience’s ears isn’t really that great a plan, particularly if the chorus is as fucking tepid as the one for “Boom Boom Boom”. And thinking about it, that beat really isn’t that great either. “Boom Boom Boom” is a complete and utter non-entity of a record, no imagination, no style, no heart – absolutely nothing at all. I don’t know if that means it’s any better than “The Lady In Red”, though.
If I were American, this would have been:
TLC, “Waterfalls” – the analogies are questionable, but the way that trumpet note just stretches out forever is undeniable. A walkover, more or less.
American Me: 7
Actual Me: 5
Other notable UK number ones of this year:
Blur and Oasis both had their first ever number ones this year, which is nice for them. Shaggy had his second:
Also hitting the top was a song that, for me, has always signified it being a certain point on Sunday night; the point where the top 40 would end, and Dave Pearce’s Dance Anthems would come on and that would be the point where the weekend was over, time for a bath and then while away the hours til bedtime, and school in the morning. Amazingly enough, that still doesn’t stop me from loving “Dreamer”:
Doesn’t quite sound the same without someone going “Darrrnse Anthemmmms with Daaaave Peeeearce!” over the top every thirty seconds before getting clumsily segued into “Zombie Nation“, but never mind.
And now we’re into 1996, having put up two whole entries this weekend. 13 left, nine days to do them. Tick, tock, tick, tock…
So this’d be the year I started secondary school, and the year I entered the private school system. Oddly, this song offers one of the more memorable moments of that year. We were in a music lesson, and the teacher decided to teach us to sing this, given that it had (fairly recently) been number one for 14 (fourteen) weeks (the longest run since Bryan Adams, and one that hasn’t been equalled since) and would therefore be popular among us younger types. Given that we were a bunch of 11-year-old boys, he wasn’t entirely on the money there, but that’s by the by. The reason I remember it is because he felt the need to change the lyrics: “On my love you can depend” became “Oh my love, I will be your friend”. Quite apart from the fact that that doesn’t scan, the fact that he felt the need to water down the lyrics to a Wet Wet Wet single (originally by The Troggs, yes, but still)… hmm.
Anyhow, on listening to it this morning, the record itself really isn’t as bad as its reputation would suggest. So many North American bands have got away with so much worse – for example, I’d say this stacks up very well against the Goo Goo Dolls’ never-less-than-wretched “Iris”, most of the records Chad Kroeger’s ever breathed on, anything I’ve ever heard by Matchbox 20, and the vast majority of film-related bumph that we’ve come across in this series thus far (“Shakedown”, Bryan Adams, “Glory of Love”, UB40, “Turtle Power”, and apparently that Steve Winwood thing was on the OST of Nuns on the Run, though I’m guessing it didn’t really owe its US success to that).
Course, the “not-as-bad-as-these” argument isn’t much of a justification for liking it in and of itself, and there’s plenty of strong objections that could be made, mostly centred around Marti Pellow’s stupid fucking grin. A facial expression whose smarm and smugness had spread itself all over the 80s and early 90s, and the all-too-easy charm was ever present in his voice too, seemingly mocking the listener for daring to take any of this pop lark seriously, or believing that there should be any kind of effort, involvement or engagement on anyone’s part. It carried the air of a man who felt he could just turn up and knock out a hit record, and as a result seemed to turn every lyric in every Wet Wet Wet song into “I’ve tossed off a hit record/And everyone is buying it/LOL LOL LOL LOL (LOLLL, LOLLL, LOLLL, LOLLL)”. Worse still, in the video for this, the smirk was paired with a ponytail. And the smirk and the ponytail were paired with a purple crepe suit. And the smirk and the ponytail and the purple crepe suit were paired with the rest of the band fannying about with some canvases in a sort of “this will do for the likes of you” manner. Furthermore, all this was being used to soundtrack Hugh Grant snogging Andie MacDowell. In a Richard Curtis film. And, for fourteen weeks, there was no escape from it. At all.
Somehow, though… I don’t mind. I quite like how self assured this song is; having endured that many shit songs in the name of film for this series, hearing someone sing and sound happy about it, as opposed to sounding like they’re forcing themselves to eat horse manure, is something of a relief. I like the clanging guitars in the intro (they reminded me of “Portland, Oregon” for some reason, though on re-listening to both I don’t quite know why). I like that there’s a certain ease to proceedings, and that everyone sounds comfortable. Admittedly, having this easy-going-ness expressed by Marti Pellow constantly inserting his ad-libs into proceedings isn’t the greatest thing in musical history – those growls of “c’mawn c’mawn c’mawn c’mawn LET it show!” and so forth are a bit, y’know, forced, innit? – but this is an easy record to get along with, basically happy to get by on charm and those big, woozy clumps of guitar that tear merrily into the chorus. It’s boozy, laid-back, the Wets kicking back and revelling (moderately) in treading in someone else’s footsteps.
Course, you could argue that the smugness on show here and in said film set us up nicely for the modern British pop scene where people complacently fart about with the past like it’s their bloody playground, where the ability to see beyond the end of one’s nose is afforded similar importance to, say, a city-break to Prague, where in is in and out is out and never the twain shall meet, and where we’re all chums together and we’re completely safe so long as we remember to stay in our wee compartments and keep very, very schtum. And you might have a point. But this is still better than Glenn Medeiros.
If I were American, this would have been:
Lisa Loeb & Nine Stories, “Stay (I Missed You)” – so yes, there’s many problematic things about my relationship with “Love Is All Around”, lots of issues I feel need resolving, but I feel pretty confident in saying that this knocks it into a cocked hat any day of the week. The rambling structure suits it wonderfully, the chorus getting returned to as some kind of afterthought, only picked up when Loeb can calm herself sufficiently to remember it; the rest is flurries of angst that can’t figure out where they’re meant to be directed, confused gabblings that don’t add up to much – “somebody said we’re only waiting for the other who was dying since the day they were born, well, this is not that think that I’m throwing but I’m thrown”, for instance – and at the heart of it all, a woman who just doesn’t know how or what she feels anymore. “I turn the radio on, I turn the radio up, and this woman was [i]singing my song[/i]“.
Those opening notes are also special; there’s something to be said for being in command of the emotions, of knowing how to touch the senses in order to heal and to comfort. There’s a lot to be said for this record, really. The volume of words I can produce about it doesn’t measure up to the amount I’ve splurged on Wet Wet Wet, but the impact it has on me is far, far more estimable.
American Me: 6
Actual Me: 5
Other notable UK number ones of this year:
Who am I to judge, anyhow? I’ve never really been much cop at handling the ups and downs of life, and it probably won’t surprise those who know me that, when I was 11, I was even worse at it. As such, my favourite number one of that year was, quite comfortably:
Closest thing that 1994 could offer to a poorly-animated cartoon rabbit dancing to Glenn Miller, I guess, but the sheer manic pace of the thing still endears it greatly to me. Quite apart from that, there’s not a lot here that ever really meant that much to me: we get Prince’s only UK number one, “The Most Beautiful Girl In The World”, but we’ve already found that there’s no way of streaming that on here; “Stay Another Day” is certainly one of the better recent Christmas number ones; and, well, you can hardly ever go far wrong with:
Brief word for Tony di Bart, who recorded his lone big hit above his bathroom shop in Slough, and Chaka Demus & Pliers, whose version of “Twist & Shout” is much under-rated, but is apparently still deemed significant enough not to be embeddable here. Hmmph.
Anyhow, that rush of posts that was meant to be happening this weekend hasn’t quite materialised, has it? Not yet, anyhow. Nine days to get 14 more entries done… best get cracking. Fortunately, 1995’s entry has always been a crock of shit, so hopefully that’ll be up shortly.
OK, so I looked at the Billboard Hot 100 today – work was a bit dull, plus I thought having a bit of an advance scout to see what I might be enduring for the US part of our last entry seemed like an idea. Things didn’t look overly promising in the top 10, but that wasn’t the big concern. That, unfortuntely, was lurking in the top left hand corner:
Now, you may have noticed that today is not the 26th July. It is the 17th. And this led me to a horrid realisation. I’ve been getting the US number ones from the list on Wikipedia, and I’d been figuring out which ones were applicable from looking at the “issue date”, without having previously looked on the Billboard website to find out what that actually means:
The printed magazine first reaches newsstands on Friday. Each issue is dated based on the end of its publication week. Thus the Billboard that reaches newsstands on Friday, Sept. 9, for example, is dated Sept. 17.
Ergo, our US entries should have been the songs that topped the Hot 100 on the “issue date” of August 6… ah. Time to do some amendments:
1983, 1984, 1991, 1992 and 1993 remain unchanged.
1985: Tears For Fears, “Shout”(replacing Paul Young, “Everytime You Go Away”)
Appropriately, given its title, the chief achievement of this is that it is very, very loud and very, very strident. Also, it is Not Terrible. However, the over-riding feeling is that you are being nagged for six minutes without any real idea as to what you’re being nagged about. Up against “Into The Groove“, that really ain’t good enough.
American Me: 1
Actual Me: 2
1986: Peter Cetera, “Glory of Love” (replacing Peter Gabriel, “Sledgehammer”)
Now this one, it is fair to say I am a bit cross about. Replacing the insane sprawling genius of “Sledgehammer” with… this? Gaze upon Cetera’s horrific peroxide-job here and remember – PETER GABRIEL’S FACE WAS MADE OF FRUIT. And the song itself is, y’know, one of those numbingly slow 80s American rock ballads with guitar noodling that seemed to be blaring out of the stereo in every restaurant when I went on holiday when I was a kid – irksome in its earnest bigness, lyrics that don’t quite chime with their delivery… but it’s a fair bit less draggy than several of its contemporaries, and it’s still better than “The Lady in Red“.
American Me: 2
Actual Me: 2
1987: Bob Seger, “Shakedown”(replacing Heart, “Alone”)
The theme from Beverly Hills Cop II, and with our reshuffling this becomes our first US number one to have never done owt in the UK. It is… rubbish. Taking that great tradition of mid-80s Hollywood theme tunes, it takes the theme of the film (being a cop and arresting people) and transfers it to the arena of fucking a lady. “Shakedown! Takedown! Y’bus-tayyyd!” It drags its metaphor backwards repeatedly through a massively overproduced Las Vegas hedge, and is basically a jelly-legged mess. If nothing else, though, it’s sorted out the meddlesome dead heat we had between Heart and “La Bamba“…
American Me: 2
Actual Me: 3
1988: Steve Winwood, “Roll With It” (replacing Richard Marx, “Hold On To The Nights”)
This now becomes our second US chart-topper to have done nothing in the UK – given Stevie is actually a Brummie, that is perhaps a bit unexpected. Anyway, listen close and you can hear Later… with Jools Holland more or less being born. Drums are set to slow-handclap pace, slabs of brass are detonating everywhere, Winwood is croaking cliches like a man who now writes about love for the sake of writing about love, and there’s the feeling that when he plays this live, it lasts for about 20 minutes and he introduces every member of the band at least twice. Is that preferable to “Nothing’s Gonna Change My Love For You“? Well… pretty much, yes.
As we’ve already found out, Prince does not like his stuff being on Youtube, and so it tends to go down quite quickly. There’s a version of this here, but it’ll be gone soon enough. Anyway, assuming it’s got nuked, Wikipedia describes it thus:
“Batdance” is almost two songs in one—a chaotic, mechanical dance beat that changes gears into a slinky, funky groove before changing back for the song’s conclusion. The track is an amalgam of many musical ideas floating around at the time. No fewer than six songs (some unreleased) contributed to “Batdance”: “200 Balloons,” “We Got the Power,” “House in Order,” “Rave Unto the Joy Fantastic,” “The Future,” and “Electric Chair,” and last but not least the 1966 “Batman Theme” by Neal Hefti. Some of these were mere snippets, and other segments showed up only in remixes of the track. The song was also loaded with dialog samples from the film.
Which more or less accurately conveys just what a gigantic blindside this record is. It’s up against “You’ll Never Stop Me From Loving You“. This isn’t a particularly hard choice to make.
American Me: 4
Actual Me: 3
1990: Mariah Carey, “Vision of Love” (replacing Glenn Medeiros ft. Bobby Brown, “She Ain’t Worth It”)
That’s the live version from the 1991 Grammys; the actual video is here, but it won’t embed.
Anyway, this one’s where it all started for Mimi; her first ever single, got to the top in the US and number nine over here, and it is belting. Her presence is astonishing, so strong, so confident; her voice runs deep, rich and full, and that’s in much more of a sense than she can make the mooing noises. Character is shot all the way through this record. There’s the peculiarly dark edge to the ethereality of those backing vocals. There’s the way she uncorks that melisma, those high notes for which she is so often slated, but it never, ever sounds out of step, never forced, never put on for show. When she sings “I’ve realised a dream”, she delivers it with total, utter conviction; this vision of love she had, it is a complete, living, breathing entity, and it’s completely compelling. This is a woman in total control, achieving some kind of perfect, brilliant focus, on her first bloody single. Aged 20. It’s pretty breathtaking, whichever way you slice it, and I had no idea that it existed before today. Here’s her doing it acapella on Wogan:
Anyhow, that’s everything tidied up now – scores remain the same, but now they’re attributed to the correct songs and everything, so it’s all alright. Now to work on getting the project back on schedule – 1994 is up next, and I’ve now got about 12 days to get to 2008. This is gonna be a busy weekend here, so keep an eye on us; the updates should be coming thick and fast, like.
Right, the proper video for this disnae embed, so of the various alternate options I’ve gone for them performing this at what, confusingly, appears to be Christmas time on Des O’Connor Tonight. Full line-up, original version, and some… interesting staging. By “interesting”, I mean that one should perhaps note that Gary Barlow gets to do live vocals, while the other four mime; Gary Barlow gets a handheld mic, while the other four are stuck behind their mic stands; and Gary Barlow gets to walk forward onto the lit bit of the stage, while the others are in virtual silhouette down the back (I suppose the way they all sit rather awkwardly on Des’ illuminated steps at the end might also count as interesting, actually). Youtube also offers the Canadian version of the video (which has no Robbie, no homoeroticism, and fairly terrible sound quality), various performances from their reunion tour (without Robbie), and the original video. Which doesn’t embed.
Anyway, a significant hit, this, since it’s Take That’s first ever number one. It is perhaps worth re-emphasising here that Take That’s first three singles charted at 82, 38 and 47. These days, those are the kind of numbers you’d be expecting from a band about to get dropped by 679 or similar. Gary Barlow And His Dancing Bears, it is fair to say, had done their fair share of graft to get to this position. I remember seeing them hawking said #38 smash, “Promises”, on the Children’s BBC music series What’s That Noise. They were described as being “full of energy”, and I vaguely remember the dance routine seeming to involve a lot of the ol’ cossacking and so forth.
The video for “Pray” further accentuates the theme of them having a lot of energy. Lots of big, muscly energy. On a beach. In the sunshine. The very, very hot sunshine. So hot, they have to take their shirts off and rub water all over their pecs. And thus Take That finally reached the summit.
Sonically, though, the song is pure chintz. The synth in the chorus is horrid; it sounds like it’s stumbling towards the toilet to hurl up an undercooked Full English. The backing vocals come from a more innocent age, long before anyone realised Mark Owen might sound like he’s from Manchester, or Robbie Williams might be from Newcastle-under-Lyme: they sound like they’ve been pumped with watered-down helium, an amorphous, androgynous, anonymous gasp towards “hoping that I’ll be a part of you again some day” and other such Procter & Gamble-worthy sentiments. It’s all very non-threatening boy, and one can hardly say it doesn’t do its job. That chorus is certainly neat, tidy and memorable, though THAT FUCKING SYNTH URGH numbs whatever emotional punch Gary Barlow’s words were meant to have far too well; catchiness gets prioritised over sentiment, and everything’s a nothing. Pure mid-tempo efficiency – easy to get along with, but, y’know. Bleh.
If I were American, this would have been:
UB40, “Can’t Help Falling in Love“ – OK, this… this, I do not get. At all. I mean, the idea of UB40 having a number one in America is odd enough, but the fact that it got there due to being featured on the soundtrack of this film is baffling. What part of “MOR reggae + minor Sharon Stone psychological thriller” signals success? Have I completely missed the point?
Eh, I guess I just wasn’t made for them times. As for the song itself – well, I’m caught between a sponge and a soft place, really. Flavourless nothings vs. flavourless nothings sung in that gratingly smug quivering noise that Ali Campbell uses for a voice… eh, chalk one up for the dancing bears, I guess.
American Me: 5
Actual Me: 5
Other notable UK number ones of this year:
I don’t know if I ever knew it was this good, but oh my, it is this good: very.
So no, number ones weren’t about to start making any more sense. From what I can recall, Big Jimmy Nail (the first and only artist in this series to get namechecked in Half Man Half Biscuit’s “You’re Hard“) got to the top spot off the back of his popularity in the BBC detective series Spender, in which he played a copper from Newcastle or something (I never watched it, seeing as how it was possibly on past my bedtime when I was nine, but some feller on the IMDB page seems to think it’s quite good). This makes it the second number one in chart history from a British cop show, following on from The Simon Park Orchestra’s venerable “Eye Level” (the theme from Van der Valk), as well the second hit single from a British cop show in 1992, following on from Nick Berry’s distinctly less venerable “Heartbeat” from a month prior (that being the theme from, er, Heartbeat). Curiously, unlike those two, “Ain’t No Doubt” appears to have had nothing to do with the series in question – Spender’s apparently all gritty and real and such, and this is basically early 90s pop-swing, though the video does see Jimmy leaping over some railings in Leicester Square in a vaguely Action Man-esque manner.
So we’ve established that this had at least as valid a claim to the number one spot as, say, John Thaw covering “Radar Love” (this only exists in my head, sadly). The big surprise is that this is probably the third best single we’ve covered thus far. Yes, it’s even better than “La Bamba”.
The production is nowt to write home about – Pebble-Mill-big-band trumpets abound – but Nail’s performance is surprisingly enjoyable. Admittedly, it basically alternates between talking (the verses) and shouting (the chorus), but it does the job. His lover is attempting to go on a break. Big Jim is not convinced: “I know goodbye when I hear it – she smiles, but her heart’s already out there, walking down the street…” He delivers the lines like he’s Marlowe in The Singing Detective, writing the pulp fiction novel inside his head, even if the band appears to be under the impression he’s actually on Strictly Come Dancing. “I say ‘Fine’. I just hope I’m a better liar than she is…” The chorus is basically him yelling at her to clear off; thing is, he’s only doing that in his own head, as he mournfully admits in the closing stages: “I still love you…” Jimmy’s a depressed wee shell of a man, trapped by his hopeless love for the woman he (assumes) is doing him wrong, and all the bounce and bluster of the arrangement can’t hide it.
Vocally, he performs grand, but the video is even more fun, because we get to see Jimmy busting out his visual acting chops, which I have grabbed stills of for those of you who enjoy making your own LiveJournal icons and the like.
They’re not animated, unfortunately, so you can’t get Jimmy’s marvellous neck-wobbling here.
Or the way he does the pointing here, which is in the manner of a man attempting to throw his hand off the end of his arm.
This one more or less speaks for itself, though.
“Ain’t No Doubt” triumphs in this series cos, well, it’s entertaining. It’s actually quite nice to listen to. It makes me smile, a bit. Also, it’s got a feller talking over some early-90s synth strings, making this the closest I’m ever gonna get to having a Pet Shop Boys single at number one on my birthday, so, y’know, well done, fella.
I’d not be surprised if Jimmy moves ahead of Madonna eventually, either… but for now, he’s an exceedingly clear third. Will that change in later entries? Wait and see.
If I were American, this would have been:
Sir Mix-A-Lot, “Baby Got Back” – surprisingly, the second of ‘our’ US number ones to have never figured in the UK top 40, peaking at number 56 then leaving the chart altogether two weeks later. Given that 2 Live Crew never made any impression on UK charts either, I’m gonna guess that we just weren’t ready for ass men.
Still, the fact that it’s not had any kind of resurgence in the download era is rather puzzling – I doubt there’s a student in this country who’s not at some point heard this one blasting out somewhere, for example. And given that I’ve spent much of the past seven years being surrounded by bloody students, the UK isn’t going to get many easier points than this.
American Me: 5
Actual Me: 4
Other notable UK number ones of this year:
Lots to love here. For starters, this was number one for 8 (eight) weeks, from late February to mid-April:
Eight weeks. Much as I do love “Stay” (it’s by Shakespear’s Sister, in case you weren’t aware of that), I can only assume that there were no other records released during that period. The idea that this was Britain’s favourite record for that length of time… perhaps it was played at a funeral on EastEnders. And the funeral went on for eight weeks.
Then again, Erasure had their only number one this year, which was a reasonable cover of “Take A Chance on Me“. This one, however, is better:
Also there was:
Not to mention:
But most of all, there was this:
It was a heck of a good year for number one singles, basically, and for once my birthday didn’t get too short-changed neither. 1993 has some decent-sized shoes (crocodile, obv) to fill – we’ll see how it does either later tonight or tomorrow.
Well, in truth, it was never likely to be anything else, was it? This still holds the record for longest consecutive run as the UK’s number one: 16 bloody weeks, from July through to November; over a quarter of the year. That record will go eventually, now that download sales have removed the option of a label deleting a single that knocks about for too long, but, for the moment, this is still the benchmark.
Sixteen weeks, though. The weird thing is that it all seemed so very natural at the time. My mum, in common with goodness knows how many others, adored Kevin Costner at the start of the 90s (how fondly I remember having to figure out the best way to tape Dances With Wolves off the telly), and she went to see Prince of Thieves at the cinema, and she got it on the video and she watched it on that, and as a result this song was basically inescapable for massive chunks of my childhood. I think this was almost certainly the peak of my time listening to the top 10 in the bath on a Sunday night; problem being, I listened to The Network Chart on Capital FM instead of the proper chart on Radio 1. I had no idea there was a difference. As such, when I was eight, I was of the impression that this had only been number one for 14 weeks, with The Scorpions’ “Wind of Change” displacing it for at least the last two (I have no memory of whether the song that took over at the end of Adams’ run, U2’s “The Fly“, got to number one on The Network Chart or not, I think I was too busy obsessing over Oceanic’s “Insanity” at this point). Still, what I lacked in accurate information I made up for by getting to listen to David Jensen instead of Bruno Brookes, which is a pretty reasonable trade.
(That is a picture of David Jensen. Jenna Fischer gets one, so does he. Bruno Brookes does not, though)
But for all that, I cannot recall ever having given a stuff about this record either way. I remember Jensen calling him “the groover from Vancouver”, which I thought was kinda nifty when I was eight, but nowadays I just try to figure out how anyone could ever have described Bryan as anything resembling groovy. We’ve had a lot of cobblers in rock’s clothing in this series, lots and lots of quite dreary guitars, and, well, this fits in. It’s one of the better examples, but I’m wondering if the only reason I can remember it is because of that constant exposure to it, hearing my mum singing it in the kitchen and thinking “No, those are not the lyrics” (when I was eight I had determined that I was good at quoting sitcoms and spelling words; these things therefore became obsessions), seeing it on Exciting New Look Top Of The Pops every week, then seeing it again on The Chart Show two days later, and possibly hearing it on the radio occasionally. I really do not know what I’d make of this song coming to it fresh. It’s never exactly had much of a revival (for all that it did wonders for Adams’ career in this country – his only previous UK top 20 hit was “Run To You”, five-and-a-half years prior; you may be surprised to find that “Summer of ‘69″ peaked at 42 in the UK), and you’d struggle to see it ever getting one.
The one notable bit, I suppose, is where it pulls into the big guitar solo towards the end. That’s the bit that really sticks in my memory, cos every week on TOTP they’d cut to the guitarist doing it, and he would look much like he does in the video, like making this guitar solo was the most complicated and profound thing in the whole wide world. Which it clearly isn’t, but somehow that is still the feeling I get, which is weird.
But aside from being at number one for over a quarter of a year, there really is nothing very special about this at all; another bog-standard love song in a career of continuously churning out bog-standard love songs. Why not have a look at his chart career on Everyhit or Polyhex? For fun, why not try and remember how he sings the title of those hits, and then see if you can remember any other part of them. I’ve managed at least two lines of “Can’t Stop This Thing We Started” – why not see if you can do any better?
If I were American, this would have been:
Bryan Adams, “(Everything I Do) I Do It For You” – yup, nine entries in and it’s our first simultaneous UK-US number one! It was only number one for seven weeks in America, though, and this would have been the first of those. Born one week earlier, and I’d have got:
Yeah.
But no, it’s a dead heat, so I’ll leave the scores alone. Half points are just messy.
American Me: 5
Actual Me: 3
Other notable UK number ones of the year:
Let’s get eight-year-old me’s favourite out of the way:
Man, satellite television seemed like the most glamorous thing to me back then, and The Simpsons was the glitteringest prize of them all – the cartoon the kids at school all talked about, but only some ever got to see. My parents did not approve. This made it all the more exciting. They were in the magazines, they were on the adverts, and I could not see a nanosecond of them. So I wound up with the merchandise instead. The Simpsons Sing The Blues was the first album I got my parents to buy for me (Carry On Up The Charts would be the second). I got a Gameboy for my eighth birthday, with Bart Simpson’s Escape From Camp Deadly following for that shortly after (we spent that day barrelling down the motorway to get on a ferry to France, dad yelling blue murder at pretty much every car between Crown Point and Dover – ah, memories). And a year or so later, I actually saw an episode. “Bart The General”. It was alright.
Speaking of which – the eleven minute video for “Black Or White”. This, for those who were not there, was THE BIGGEST THING OF ALL TIME in Croydon. I remember bringing my Guinness Book Of Records into school once, and pointing out the bit where it said the Porsche 959 was the world’s fastest production car, to be met by a volley of disagreement. “No! No! It is MICHAEL JACKSON’S CAR is the fastest!” Ah, memories.
But what of the other number ones? Well, there was the one from the soundtrack of Mermaids, the one from the Levi’s ad, the one for Comic Relief, the one from the soundtrack of New Jack City, the one from the soundtrack of Buddy’s Song, the one from Joseph And His Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat, the one from Vic Reeves’ Big Night Out, and at the start of the year, there was this:
Which not only got shot of Cliff Richard’s “Saviour’s Day”, but got banned by the BBC in the process. It got knocked off by Enigma’s “Sadness Part I”.
I’ve not even mentioned that Queen got to number one twice, and there was a duet between Elton John and George Michael, and, well, thinking about it, “The Fly” is actually really pretty good:
With all that in mind, it somehow only seems right that The KLF got to number one, too:
Eight-year-old me did not get them at all. Twenty-four-year-old me wishes they would come back.
1992 next. Do things straighten out at all? Weeell…
Yup, new decade, world hadn’t even ended or anything. To celebrate, the theme tune from the film of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (the cartoon series was entitled Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles because war is stupid and people are stupid) found itself at number one for four weeks, following on from the five-week run of Elton John’s “Saccurruh-fahhhhce” and preceding the three-week run of Bombalurina’s “Itsy-Bitsy Teeny-Weeny Yellow Polka Dot Bikini”.
Here are some highlights from the lyrics, all of which are recited by a man who sounds peculiarly similar to Chuck D:
The crime wave is high with muggings mysterious
Our police and detectives are furious,
‘Cause they can’t find the source,
Of this lethally evil force
This is serious so give me a quarter
She spied the bad guys and saw what happened,
But before she knew it, she fell in a trap and
Got caught – yeah, she was all alone,
With no friends, and no phone
Now this was beyond her worst dreams,
‘Cause she was cornered by some wayward teens
They could terrorize and be angry youth,
And they mugged the people. Who needed proof?
They were once normal, but now they’re mutants
Splinter’s the teacher so they are the students
Now this is for real, so you fight for justice,
Your shell is hard so you shout, “They can’t bust us
Four, like some old coffee table”
Since you were born you’ve been willing and able
Then light, shining from your illumination:
Good versus Evil equals confrontation
So when you’re in trouble don’t give in and go sour,
Try to rely on your Turtle Power
And after this single, Partners in Kryme basically vanished. One half, James Alpern, appears to have done an instrumental album in 1996; Richard Usher, the rapper, appears to be a freelance voiceover artist of some sort.
Oh well.
If I were American, this would have been:
Glenn Medeiros ft. Bobby Brown, “She Ain’t Worth It” – No, I didn’t think we’d run into him again either. But, well, here he is. He sounds rather more like George Michael than he used to. Bobby does a guest verse in which he announces that “One thing I hate is when a girl plays fake and tries to make me late for another date”. There’s a nice little teedy dee dee noise in the chorus, the kind of noise that tends to crop up on R&B records made by people wearing white socks in the early 90s, that’s basically better than any aspect of “Turtle Power”, so it’s another easy win for the imaginary version of me that is somehow capable of watching ice hockey.
American Me: 5
Actual Me: 3
We may as well complete the set of Glenn’s hits – this is the one he did with the feller out of Modern Talking that doesn’t look like Clive Tyldesley:
And that will definitely be the last we’ll see of Glenn in this series. Double pinky-swear.
Other notable UK number ones of the year:
In order to make up for pissing six-year-old me off last year, here’s the lone chart-topper by my favourite band between the ages of 10 and 14, The Beautiful South. “A Little Time” squeezed in a week at the end of October, between “Show Me Heaven” and “Unchained Melody” (in common with “Turtle Power”, these topped the charts off the back of their being used in Days of Thunder [yes, such was Tom Cruise's magic that he could make a film about bloody Nascar popular in the UK] and Ghost respectively), and is perhaps notable for not featuring Paul Heaton in the slightest:
It’s not a patch on the year’s other Housemartins-related number one, either:
The best number one of the year, of course, is Sinead O’Connor’s “Nothing Compares 2 U”. Which, as we all know, was written by Prince. Who, as we found out before, does not like having his stuff put on Youtube. As such, Youtube are currently taking the sound out of all the videos of “Nothing Compares 2 U” that have been uploaded to the site. This one has somehow survived, but maybe not for long. This live version may perhaps endure slightly longer, though it doesn’t feature the tear rolling slowly down her cheek:
Anyway, we’ve had a shit run of late, but maybe 1991 will turn things round. Tune in later to find out.
