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!

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…

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”.

25 Years of Swygart – 2000 – Five ft. Queen, “We Will Rock You”

I get the feeling things will be getting distinctly less embeddable from now on – original is here.

“Watch your back, we got Queen on this track!” Oh, Five. What we have here, in essence, is the closest that this series is going to get to featuring a track by Scooter, except all the bits that Scooter do well it does rubbishly. The rapping, for instance – now, HP Baxxter’s lyrics are often nothing short of nonsense, but they’re delivered with love, rhythm and no small amount of humour. When Five rap on this one, they basically sound like they have one hand down their trousers and they’re not making much progress. Their voices are flavourless, characterless grunts, slowly rattling out “some words” about, erm, collaborating with Queen. There’s not even anything to match J asserting “Ain’t got no manners cos I eat with my fingers!” from “Everybody Get Up”. It’s just plod, plod, plod…

Then, in the Scooter tradition, we slam from the rapping into the bit from the old pop hit. Except, instead of twisting it into a helium voiced refrain from HP’s War On Those Who Are Not On The Floor YEEE-UH!, the beat continues to flump on and we’re stuck with Richie sodding Neville. Richie has yet to become an estate agent in Colchester, but throughout his pop career you always got the feeling he was on the verge of it. He wasn’t just bland, he was aggressively, threateningly bland, always looking like someone had just stuck him with a needle full of something or other and it was making his skull want to escape through his face. And here… oh Lor’, here he’s trying to act hard. He’s got this idea of what him getting a growl on would sound like, but his pipes can’t match, and so he’s left sounding like he’s left his Strepsils on the bus.

Unfortunately, in a break from the Scooter-accepted norm, there is not very much of the bosh. Instead, the beat is constructed entirely from reverb’d handclaps and drums, which leaves the lads sounding ever so slightly lonely. And then it’s Enter Brian May, Stage Left. And they cut up his guitar riffery a bit. And then things go on as normal while Brian makes with the solo. And, er, that’s about it.

What we have here, basically, is a bunch of component parts that haven’t really added up to anything, because no-one’s added them up in the first place. They’re just sort of stuck there, not hanging together, just moving from A to B to C to D. It all has the air of something someone might put together for the Brit Awards. Which is because… it’s something someone put together for the Brit Awards. And then, two years later, they made it into a musical. Based on this evidence, I have no desire to see it. This, I feel, is supported by more or less any other evidence as well.

And now, this is how it should be done:

YEE-UH!

If I were American, this would have been:

*NSync – It’s Gonna Be Me: original here. Wow, Timberlake sounds like a really, deeply unpleasant little man here, doesn’t he? For a song that’s about how they’re gonna make the girl realise how lovely they are (albeit that pop music is quite good at making that concept sound oh-so-creepy normally – hiya The Script!), he sure is sneering a lot. Maybe it’s the Swedish influence, but his pronunciation of “me” as “mej” sounds almost Smeagol-esque in its insidious horrible-ness. Still, though – it’s got a hook, it’s got a chorus, and it doesn’t seem to thinkthat “If Five brings the funk then Queen brings the rock” is in some way an acceptable statement, so…

American Me: 10
Actual Me: 6

A four-point gap and only eight years to make it up? Things is gonna get hectic…

Other notable UK number ones of this year:

In 2000, the number one situation officially became silly. Forty-two songs reached the top. The longest-running number ones of the year were by Sonique and Bob The Builder, each racking up a whole three weeks on top.

This also meant that some good stuff did get through, though – in chronological order:

So if we’ve learnt anything from this exercise thus far, All Saints really do need to get recovered by history quite desperately.

Also good: this, this (sit him here next to Britney Spears, yes).

But an especial mention for this, which might be one of the most perfect music videos ever.

Ah, sweet, elusive mystery of youth. So awesome in so many ways.

Anyway, 2001 should be up next, eventually. Let’s just check what it is…

Ah.

Don’t expect a follow-up tooo soon…

25 Years of Swygart – 1999 – Ricky Martin, “Livin’ La Vida Loca”

The original video won’t embed, but can be found here.

My predominant recollection of this one actually takes place three years after it topped the charts, when Ricky somehow found himself as the opening act at the Party at the Palace. And he performed this, his only number. I sat there bemused, trying to figure out the thought process that would have led anyone to connect a three-year-old hit song about going out with a crazy lady who makes you take your clothes off before drugging you, robbing you and abandoning you at a Travelodge with the 50th anniversary of the Queen’s coronation. Not cos I was offended at the lack of decorum or anything, but just because it was all so very incongruous, so very… crap. Or, as the BBC News piece puts it, “probably the greatest night for British rock and pop since Live Aid”. Here’s Ricky doing the air-ass-smack:

And then it dawned on me – Ricky Martin was available. Three years after the fact, he remained willing to haul his raggedy ass to any corner of the world to churn out all his hit to an audience ready to be lightly entertained.  So he turned up, sounded knacked, the BBC News site described him as a “Latin idol”, there was a certain amount of twisting in the Royal Box, the Queen pulled what I would describe as the “why am I at the pub when I’m on the verge of getting Eastleigh to the FA Cup Second Round on FM08″ face,

“Tom Jones performed Sex Bomb and You Can Leave Your Hat On” and

“Prince William found some of the artists a bit too much”.

But yes, this was very much about assembling the most impressive line-up that was available, and Ricky was exceedingly available to trot out his 2-for-1 Mojitos at Wetherspoons routine, just like those late-night football programmes that offer you five-minute interviews with Lionel Messi where he doesn’t actually say anything and every fourth word seems to be “passion”.

Maybe it’s not the record’s fault, though. It has acquired its tedious, grating connotations with time, and was not necessarily born with or of them. It’s a brisk wee thing, very rarely exhibiting any tendency to cut its frantic, uncle-at-wedding pace, and there’s some nice cartoon low-end on the guitars. Ricky certainly throws himself into things, prowling and growling with gusto, alternating between sly winks and orgasmic bellowing in an appropriately professional manner. The trumpets sound like they’re being played by that wolf-whistling feller out of Droopy.

And yet, somehow, there’s no kick to it, just a huge swell of noise. When Ricky curls his mouth around “black cats and voodoo dawwls“, he sounds like nothing so much as Troy McClure, or perhaps Brooks & Dunn or Big & Rich, or possibly Joe Dolce. He’s bustling, he’s sweating, he’s repeatedly going “C’moan!” or “Awright!“, and after a while it gets to sounding exceedingly desperate.

Cos, y’know, if we’re all having so much fun, why is it I don’t even feel remotely like dancing?  It’s too fast, too furious. There is no beat, no pulse, just frantic slapping about with the guitars and so on and so forth. Ricky’s “man, these women be cray-zee, eh fellers? FRENCH champagne! Of all the things, etc.” schtick isn’t annoying, exactly; rather, it’s distancing, impersonal. It’s all so sheeny that I just can’t connect with it. “Livin’ La Vida Loca” has always been like that, for me – just something that’s there, incapable of arousing any emotion, opinion or reaction. It’s pop for pop’s sake, and it’s all efficient and box-checking but absolutely not one tiny bit more than the sum of its parts.

If I were American, this would have been:

Christina Aguilera, “Genie In A Bottle” – the original is here, but won’t embed. It’s kinda slinky, it actually has a bassline, this project is now pretty much exactly one month overdue. It’s better than Rickaaaaay, but I still do not feel owt for it. Is that worth a point? Oh, why not.

American Me: 9
Actual Me: 6

Other notable UK number ones of this year:

These years were particularly notable for the decline in UK singles sales as nicking stuff off the internet became preferable to forking out £3 for a CD that contained three songs at most. The turnover in number ones thus began to reach levels that could best be described as “silly”, and as a result there were 36 different number ones in 1999. Most of them were utter bollocks. Four were by Westlife, two by Boyzone, one by Ronan Keating. Also: Martine McCutcheon, Geri Halliwell (twice), 911, LENNY FUCKING KRAVITZ, The Vengaboys (twice), The Backstreet Boys, The Wamdue Project, “The Millennium Prayer”… Ugguggugg.

But there were a few redeeming features:

And, well, Isaac Hayes wasn’t dead when this post was originally meant to go up, so if we were to ignore this one it’d just be rude:

And with that, we finally hit the 2000s. Huzzah! Only nine more of the sods to go…

25 Years of Swygart – 1998 – Spice Girls, “Viva Forever”

It’s strange, innit, how girl-group split rumours always seem more prevalent than boyband ones. Think: how many times are Girls Aloud meant to have broken up over the course of their existence? How often have you seen it written that Sugababes are capable of tolerating each other’s company? Should we even bother mentioning All Saints? (It was never really a problem with B*Witched, of course, but that’s mainly cos in order to have personality clashes the individual members would have needed personalities first)

This was the last song the Spice Girls released with Geri Halliwell. It starts well. Their voices melt into violins, and slow, weird space-synths coast in… then the flamenco guitar. There has, probably, been a half-decent British pop single with a flamenco guitar on it, once (maybe “Oblivious”?), but most of the time it’s one of the most dreadfully dull cliches the music industry can throw up. Horrible images of men in black v-neck long-sleeve t-shirts with chin-fuzz and sandals in the tent at Glastonbury doing exclusive acoustic live sessions live while Jo Whiley zzzzzz

Sorry, yes. Anyway, the problem is that it sounds as though they were aware Geri was fucking off and therefore decided that going through the motions would be plenty. Geri’s own vocal at the end is a prime example – presumably put there to suggest that the split was entirely an amicable thing, Friendship Never Ends etc., but she sounds like she’s slung herself an octave too low and now has no idea what to do other than buzz like a fridge for a bit. Mel C is allowed to squawk all over the chorus, as tended to be her wont (see also the outros for “Goodbye” and “Say You’ll Be There”, for instance), and more than ever it sounds like over-compensation. This is meant to sound tender and regretful, but they’ve just taken that as shorthand for “a bit quiet”. Sentiments get mumbled. Someone goes “haaa-staaa man-yaaa-naaa”, and that bit seems to happen more than the other bits, so maybe that’s meant to mean something, cos otherwise one would imagine they’d not be doing it so often.

This is goop, basically. Nothingy, nothingy goop. I don’t believe or care about any of it, nor, I suspect, do they. It happened, it was number one for two weeks, and is possibly preferable to listening to Boyzone’s “No Matter What”, which succeeded it at the top.

If nothing else, though, it did set the precedent for the remainder of the Spice Girls’ singles. First, there was “Goodbye”, wherein they tried and failed to act like they definitely missed Geri and were still totally cool with her, and Mel C squawked all over the chorus, and it got to number one; then there was “Holler”, where they tried and failed to act like they were delighted to be working with Rodney Jerkins and were still totally cool with each other, and it got to number one and spawned one of the worst album sleeves ever:

See? Totally enjoying being in the same room. They’d definitely not be holding hands if they weren’t. See how far Mel B’s stretching in order to clutch one of Mel C’s fingers? That’s commitment, that is. That’s togetherness. That’s Friendship Definitely Not Ending.

And then… “Headlines (Friendship Never Ends)”. The reunion. Totally they were all delighted to be there. Would there have been an accompanying BBC documentary entitled “Spice Girls: Giving You Everything” otherwise? Would the chorus have decided that “Friendship Never Ends” would be the lyric to be lifting from their past?

It got to number 11, and so their career ended with their first ever single to chart outside the top 10. In with a bang, out with a whimper, then back with a damp, damp fart. “Viva Forever” is the sound of dreams slowly and pathetically dying.

If I were American, this would have been:

Brandy & Monica, “The Boy Is Mine” – as UK number ones started to have shorter and shorter runs at the top, this reigned o’er the Hot 100 for 13 weeks. Brandy and Monica find the most fantastic way to express their enmity – taking their assigned words and lobbing in additional notes and syllables so that they wind up extending all over the top of each other’s parts. They could run the Olympic 100 metres final in the time it takes Monica to sing the word “took”. Never mind that Brandy has the charisma of a J-Cloth; this is so far out of “Viva Forever”’s league that it ain’t even funny.

American Me: 8
Actual Me: 6

Other notable UK number ones of this year:

Between them, Cher’s “Believe” and the Jason Nevins remix of Run DMC’s “It’s Like That” spent a quarter of the year at the top of the charts, getting seven and six weeks respectively. Apart from that, though, the year was characterised by increasingly brief tenures of the number one spot, with 26 other singles getting a slice of the pie. This led to Usher, All Saints, Robbie Williams, Billie, B*Witched, Jamiroquai, Another Level and The Manic Street Preachers getting their first ever number ones. Somehow it doesn’t feel quite right that Texas aren’t in that list, but never mind.

Anyway, the high turnover also resulted in this getting to number one:

I rushed out and got the album in anticipation of similar stuff, then discovered that actually, Cornershop sound like this:

But that is also cool.

Britain found out that Aqua sounded a bit different sometimes, too:

And The Tamperer got to redefine flashing up lyrics on the screen, sort of:

Actually, from that clump we mentioned earlier, “Never Ever” is pretty great, really:

I’ll add links for some of the other stuff later. Anyhow, that only tookfive days to get round to, and 1999’s up next – only 10 left! It’ll all be over by Christmas. Possibly.

25 Years of Swygart – 1997 – Puff Daddy, Faith Evans and 112, “I’ll Be Missing You”

I dunno, do I want him to bleed or something?

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.

25 Years of Swygart – 1996 – Spice Girls, “Wannabe”

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…

25 Years of Swygart – 1995 – The Outhere Brothers, “Boom Boom Boom”

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…

25 Years of Swygart – 1994 – Wet Wet Wet, “Love Is All Around”

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.