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Consolevania is back. It is in pretty excellent form at present. You should watch.

25 Years of Swygart – 2003 – Daniel Bedingfield, “Never Gonna Leave Your Side”

(actual video here)

2003 was a pretty big year for me, since it was the year I started properly caring about the charts again. Every weekend (near enough) from the middle of June I sat and listened to the top 40, then reviewed it for Stylus. I got to hear some marvellous songs, some of which I’ll talk about later. I got to hear some bloody horrible songs, which I’ll hopefully not have to ever talk about again. And somewhere in the middle, I got to hear an awful lot of stuff like this.

Even if Daniel Bedingfield were to have another ten or twenty number one hits (which he probably won’t), this one would still be The Other One. Partly it’s because “Gotta Get Thru This” and “If You’re Not The One” are so toweringly, compellingly odd – the sound of a man who doesn’t know the rules, but he has heard of them, and so finds himself navigating his own peculiar path through the creation of classic pop. Hence the garage-not-garage of GGTT, a track propelled by what sounds like DB’s human beatboxing, delivered almost entirely in either falsetto or a slightly slowed-down version of Scooter’s chipmunk-effect voice thing; and the harrowing emotional inarticulacy of IYNTO, a track whose stabs at convention are ruined at every turn by the narrator’s inner fucked-up-ness, his pleas to stay in her arms married with his dreams of building his home with her. The moment when he sounds most at peace is when he sings “I hope I love you all my life”, which sounds nice enough, until you think: what about her? Bedingfield becomes some kind of sympathetically lost monster, a very confused human being indeed, albeit that seemingly he doesn’t quite realise it. He doesn’t know love, but he’s heard of it…

Those were his first two number ones, though. “Never Gonna Leave Your Side” is his third, and (probably) last. It managed one whole week at the top, in between the lengthier and somewhat more noteworthy reigns of “Crazy In Love” and “Breathe”. It also managed to be the lowest-selling number one of the year, and I’m fairly sure that, for a while, it was also the lowest-selling number one ever (so far as I know, that record is currently held by Ja Rule’s “Wonderful”, but I’d have to check it and I’m not sure how).

The first minute of the song is basically a solid run of crap similes. He feels like a song without the words, etc. His girl has left him. His girls have a habit of doing this. However, he also has his habit of doing this:

I’m never gonna leave your side
I’m never gonna leave your side again
Still holding on girl
I won’t let you go
Cos when I’m lying in your arms
I know I’m home

We’re into retread territory, except now things are getting increasingly passive-aggressive and slightly worrying. The ambiguity and insecurity of IYNTO gets lost in an arrangement that seems hell-bent on recalling “I Don’t Want To Miss A Thing” at any available opportunity. There is a big build up towards the end which is basically Dan’l singing “I know I’m home, I know I’m home, I KNOW I’M HOME” at increasing volume, just so we’re absolutely sure that he’s completely right – the volume, the straightforwardness seems to be used as a kind of airbursh to make the listener forget that actually, no, it’s her that’s left him. NGLYS (he doesn’t tend to go in for short song titles) thus becomes a cousin of The Script’s “The Man Who Can’t Be Moved”, songs whose textures are designed to lull the listener into thinking that actually no, there’s nothing even vaguely creepy going on here; narrators feigning a sympathetic nature by not bothering to consider the feelings of the other party.

I didn’t want this to happen, that I’d end up not liking it – NGLYS is always seen as the runt of Dan’s litter, if, indeed, it’s seen at all. Bedingfield was a great pop star, a scattergun creative powerhouse, alternately introverted and extroverted but always with a slightly worrying awkwardness. This awkwardness, oddly, was a big part of his appeal: he was unique, unpredictable, and made sure the listener was never entirely clear where they stood with him. Unfortunately, NGLYS really is as forgettable as its reputation suggests, as he slips over the line into everyday thrusting balladry that could have been by any number of people, were it not for his distinctively cracked, vulnerable falsetto.

Let’s not remember him as disappointing, though. Let’s remember him like this:

There. All better again!

If I were American, this would have been:

Beyonce, “Crazy In Love” – dammit Daniel. Five years on, I still can’t bring myself to actually like this. It’s the memories of what it was, really: how steamrolling the adulation was; how sickeningly deferent to this not-that-interesting woman the UK media were; how, well, oppressive it all bloody felt. Something within me still hates something about this record. I’ve liked some of her stuff since. And, y’know, when this comes on the telly or radio or what have you, I’ll not be inclined to turn it off. There’s lots of things about it that are quite good. But at the heart of it, there’s something cold, something that I find unpleasant – I can’t find a heart here. Or it can’t find my heart. Something’s wrong, and I think it involves hearts in some fashion.

But to claim that NGLYS is better than it? I’m not a fucking idiot, jeez.

American Me: 13
Actual Me: 6

Other notable UK number ones of this year:

There were a few, yeah.

But most of all, the song that topped my first ever proper end-year singles list.

Yuh doggone right.

Five entries left!

Tindersticks, “Can We Start Again?”

Not really sure what to say here. Another song from the past comes and makes brrrrap upon me for what feels like no reason. I’m kind of happy that it has, though. I vaguely remember having a two-track promo single by Tindersticks that I once let run on loop for an entire evening back when I was in Birmingham. Turned the heating up slightly too high, lay on my bed and just drifted off. I have absolutely no recollection of what either of those songs were; it might well be that this wasn’t even one of them. They used to play it on Xfm a bit, which I’d reckon is where I heard it most.

What’s it doing in my head today?

25 Years of Swygart – 2002 – Gareth Gates, “Anyone of Us (Stupid Mistake)”

The Man is refusing to ‘low us embed this one – the original video (filmed in Actual Venice!) can be found here.

Anyway – reality TV (insofaras I have any kind of working definition of that)! Gareth was the stammering Bradford teen who captured the nation’s hearts on the original series of Pop Idol by stammering, singing the hits of Westlife and generally having all the edge of an ounce of butter wrapped in Kleenex. Somehow, however, when it came down to the big final vote, the Great British Public preferred Will Young; not that that stopped Gareth. Not for a bit, anyway.

This was the second of his four number ones (the last two being duets with Will Young and The Kumars respectively), and the only one that wasn’t a cover. It is a tale of EL AMORA Y EL PASSIONNE: Gareth has been unfaithful to his love – in Actual Venice! What follows is an account of his FILTHY BETRAYAL:

She was sorta exciting
A little crazy – I should have known
She must have altered my senses
Cos I offered to walk her home

FIEND! VARLET! RAPSCALLION! SCURVY, SCURVY KNAVE!

It’s not working, is it? Sorry, but that’s about as racy as things get here – he offers to walk a girl home. Who is not his girlfriend. I am unsure if there’s an animated version of this story, but if so, I’d imagine ITV would air it just after Morning Worship.

Except, well, Gareth’s pleas to his girl seem a bit unconvincing, and worryingly vague. “The situation got out of hand/I hope you understand” – the way he delivers the latter line suggests that he expects she has already understood and he’ll be getting his sexing in due course. The waters are muddied still further by the chorus’ assertion that “It could happen to anyone of us, anyone you think of”. Gareth’s apology is therefore not exactly an apology after all – for all his anguished clenching in the video, what’s he’s really trying to say is that, actually, it’s just one of those things, innit? It happens. Gerrover it, luv!

The murkiness of the sentiment makes this one a peculiarly unfocused listen. Gareth’s performance is… well, I’m leaning towards “passive”, but it’s more all over the place, half-hushed whispers, half-vague anguish. One can easily imagine him being conducted via cue cards – “SAD! SOOTHING! UP! DOWN!” – or one of those mood indicator devices like that Frank Luntz feller uses. He sounds like he’s being led through the thing, and he’s following along blindly. And then there’s the chorus, which doesn’t sound like it actually involves him at all. Instead, it sounds like it’s being delivered by some kind of perfectly neutral multi-tracked generic noise – no accent, no inflection, no tone, just the sonic equivalent of grouting. It fills in the space and then comes out the other end.

Still, even though it sounds like there’s hardly anything of Gareth in this record at all, this is still slightly better than our last entrant by dint of shifting quite nicely into its key change. Given that we’ve suffered plenty of key changes in the duration of this exercise, it seems safe to say this is one of the better ones. Then again, as a signifier of just how far S. Cowell seemed determined to set pop music back, how bland and putrid he seemed set on making it, it’s also really quite depressing.

If I were American, this would have been:

Nelly, “Hot in Herre”: I can’t honestly say I’ve ever given a shit for this, but it has funk keyboards. This fact alone means it dumps greatly on Gareth And His Gates.

American Me: 12
Actual Me: 6

Other notable UK number ones of this year:

“Freak Like Me” might just be the best number one of this decade, but it won’t embed. “Round Round”, though:

Also still holding up nicely:

And then, right at the end of a year which had seen no less than six number one singles spawned from Pop Idol, it was time for S. Fuller and S. Cowell and so forth to announce that they’d decided to turn the Christmas Number One into a no-horse race for the foreseeable future. Thing is, though, that the record that heralded that also heralded a shitload of other things, too:

And then 2003 came along. And 2003 was a very interesting year for pop music in many, many ways. Would that include the song that topped the chart on my birthday? Stay tuned to find out…

Drunk again

But maybe not drunk enough this time, I do not know. I ended that sentence with a full stop, for instance. No way does that bode well.

I also ain’t been dancing with no people who I felt the need to say “Hey, you know what it is? Peter Fox is what it is. Aw yeeeeeh!” I been to see Bob Log III on my own at a venue with an audience consisting mostly of people about 10-15 years older than myself who has maybe got subscriptions for Uncut and Word magazines. I drank two Kopparbergs whilst mad crazy overdressed for the temperature levels of the venue, hence drunk I is.

But, y’know, last drunken post I made got twice the hits of the last sober one, and far be it from me to be getting cynical about this sort of thing, but 50 hits in a day? This, for me, is kind of like not-quite-Christmas, so perhaps Hannukah or something, but it’s enough for me to go at this again.

FREDDIE MERCURY & MONTSERRAT CABALLE – Barcelona

I went home via one of the local burger shops despite knowing full well I had microwaveable lasagne in the freezer at home and given ten minutes I could have that in my tum, but no, some desire within me required burger and chips. And as I was in there, a young couple was trying to figure out what pizza to share, and they chose the “Barcelona”.

At that precise instant, the chorus of this RIPPED INTO MY BRAIN. And it’s been effing years since I heard this, had any cause to hear this, but there it was – “BAR-CE-LO NAAAAAAAH!!!”

“BAR-CE-LO NAAAAAAAH!!!”

This song is completely magic I had forgotten all about it but here I am in my bed at 1am on a Monday morning, and what is here with me?

“BAR-CE-LO NAAAAAAAH!!!”

THIS IS YOUR FUCKING DREAM POP! This is what inspires, this one word, bellowed by Freddie and Montserrat, paints a thousand colours in your mind all at once, a whole world unfurls beneath you, and at this precise moment in time it’s the most romantic piece of art I can think of.

I have never seen Barcelona. Things I know about it are roughly limited to their football team running things in the 90s, back before British teams over-ran Europe and year after year European coverage would be politely cajoling us into encouraging Rangers to try and overcome the might of AEK Athens, or watching Aston Villa go out in the third round of the UEFA Cup to Helsingborgs again – back when European football seemed exotic, these Continental superpowers in their titanic stadia, the elite units of the football world, the greatest players in the game summoned together to do battle and make Steve Bruce look like a wally – the names whispered in hushed tones by the kids at school who read World Soccer and who would cut you in half with their looks if you so much as mentioned Christian Vieri’s name – back when the best in football took place in far-off lands between stubble-chinned gods, and we were left with watching Ian Dowie and Darren Peacock jostling by the corner flag and we were happy with it…

This became the anthem of the 1992 Olympic Games, because this song makes Barcelona sound like the most magical place on earth. This song – well, that one word, to be precise – elevates Barcelona beyond the modern city into that realm of the mystical Better Place – the Place For Us, the Time & Place For Us. Listening to this song, it is clear that in Barcelona, no-one will ever bitch about how the council has messed up the bin collection schedule again, or about how British Gas are a bunch of blooody rip-off merchants. Barcelona is magical. Barcelona is the promised land.

This is what makes my relationship to Queen so troubled – on the one hand, their songs do have this annoying knack of being wheeled out for any occasion at all, and it’s fucking annoying, because “We Are The Champions” JUST FUCK OFF GOD DAMMIT – but on the other, no-one does this anymore, do they? It’s why the people on Strictly Come Dancing treasure Bruce Forsyth so much, because they all know that none of them can do what he does. None of them can make occasion, can command the stage or the audience like he can. Queen, in a way, have emasculated an entire generation of rock bands; Freddie Mercury has done the same to a generation of rock singers. Because they cannot touch this, or at least they are not prepared to try.

Or the world is not prepared to let them.

When was the last time a British band could make anything sound so magical as “BAR-CE-LO NAAAAAAH!!!”? Who could be so unafraid as Freddie here, so enamoured with possibility, so in love with the world? Maybe people do it differently nowadays, I do not know. Maybe irony has shielded us, cushioned us, blinded us, distracted us… maybe we’re all idiots stuck chasing our childhoods, chasing simplicity… maybe it’s just me…

“Barcelona” makes me wanna be excited again, like how I used to be. Shit, that’s probably a terrible thing. This song needs a revival, though.

Oh dear, I fear I might be sober again.

25 Years of Swygart – 2001 – Atomic Kitten, “Eternal Flame”

Let’s get into the history bit of the post early. 2001 was a shit year for number ones. At various points, the top spot was occupied by DJ Otzi’s version of “Hey Baby”, Bob The Builder’s version of “Mambo #5″, Geri Halliwell’s version of “It’s Raining Men”, Blue’s version of “Too Close”, Westlife’s version of “Uptown Girl”, Robbie Williams and Nicole Kidman’s radical re-imagining of “Somethin’ Stupid” as a song conveyed entirely via the medium of muttering, and, worst of the bunch, the Moulin Rouge-inspired mass slaughter of anything likeable about Pink, Mya, Lil Kim, Christina Aguilera and “Lady Marmalade”.

And then there was this. In total, Atomic Kitten spent six weeks at number one in 2001, more than any other act. In “Whole Again”, they had the joint longest-running number one of the year, scoring four weeks in February; “Eternal Flame” chalked up two weeks in the summer. Its relationship to its predecessor is one of awkward reverence, trying to add something to the mix but always in hock to the original as artefact. It never seems to treat The Bangles’ version as an actual living song, but more a series of lines to be harked back to and repeated, karaoke style.

An affordable whack of Swedish-flavour swingbeat is soldered to the song’s underbelly, the better to fit in with both the Atomic Kitten back catalogue and the British radio pop of the day,  and the sheerness of the resulting sheen is oddly appealing for a while; but it also serves the purpose of completely dislodging the pacing, tension and drama of the original, sucking it dry of individuality or originality. The song is best served when Natasha Hamilton is singing it – she seems more prepared to treat it as being something special than her colleagues, who plod through like it’s another day at the office. The occasional flaps at spontaneity are half-hearted and incongruous – Liz McLarnon’s sickly cooing of “dreee-mengg” over the closing choruses is delivered in the manner of a six-year-old who’s just learnt the meaning of the word ‘precocious’ and is now determined to shoehorn it into any sentence going.

Let’s look at the original again.

The original is a striking piece because of the intensity of mood and emotion within – the shift into the chorus is markedly different from the rest of the song, as a doubly-hit bass drum goes off and the strings spiral rapidly into the sky, and the rush of passion that it generates is like little else that pop music has ever managed. The backing vocals create shapes and textures, waves, mountains, seas, valleys - as a physical sound, it’s incredibly vivid. It’s tender, warm, intimate.

Now, to be fair, the Kittens don’t entirely mess up the chorus, but that’s cos it’s the only time in their version that there’s any kind of dynamic shift – that fucking swingbeat is stuck under it all the time. Hamilton’s got a certain amount of intensity; however, unlike the original, the other singers on the song aren’t used as contrast for her, but solely to occasionally nick the lead vocal from her, because someone needed to perpetuate the illusion that Jenny Frost can sing. Hamilton’s occasional surges and some syrupy, coasting strings are all this version’s got going for it, because there’s no feel to the thing anymore. They’re reading the fucking words.

Honestly, though, if you want an argument against dynamic compression, this record is your homeboy, no doubt about it. Everything. Is. The. Same. All. The. Fucking. Time. It’s pop as an industrial process, designed only to avoid causing offence, squidged and squashed and shaved and set, a record created solely to continue the process, with no greater ambition than to go unnoticed among all the other records that are exactly the same. Seven years later, both the group and the record have been almost entirely forgotten, and that’s just how it should be.

If I were American, this would have been:

Destiny’s Child, “Bootylicious”: As if Beyonce got where she is today by letting people embed her shit from YouTube. Original video here, and hot-damn if this isn’t the widest margin of victory thus far. It could just be three minutes of that chopping guitar noise, it’d still win. It could just be that bit where they go “WHOO!”, it’d still be a complete ass-handing-to. And yes, that would be “ass”. If your side gets this much of a kicking, you don’t generally get to dictate the terms.

American Me: 11
Actual Me: 6

Other notable UK number ones of this year:

Remember all those articles about why punk had to happen? Give it five-to-ten years, and I’ve a suspicion they’ll all be about why garage had to happen instead (I’ve a stronger suspicion they’ll be about why The Strokes had to happen, but never mind). Consider that Blue, Westlife, Hear’Say, S Club 7 (“Don’t Stop Moving” was, is and always will be dogshit) and Robbie Williams As “Non-Threatening Boy” (he’s had some good singles, but none of them were number one in 2001) all managed two number ones this year, and suddenly DJ Pied Piper & The Masters Of Ceremonies stick out quite a bit.

Which is as nothing compared to how out of place this was:

One could debate whether “Gotta Get Thru This” was actually garage. Regardless, it’s still pretty damned extraordinary. As A Certain Other Internet Music Writer might be given to point out, there ain’t no school that’s gonna teach the kind of idiosyncratic mania that drives a man to create something like this:

Oh, and apart from “Whole Again”, only one other record managed four weeks up top. It was this one:

2002 next. Things get marginally better. Emphasis on “marginally”.