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…
