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”.
I’m just about drunk enough that I’m feeling enthusiastic. I been dancing to McLusky. Times was good. I been dancing to Tatu’s version of “How Soon Is Now” two nights in a row. Times was good. You can give it some proper hardcore singer “I HAVE A FUCKING TAPEWORM AND YOU STILL ARE NOT IN LOVE WITH ME AND I HAVE A FUCKING TAPEWORM” bending-at-the-waist mishagas and if I go to bed and wake up I know I won’t be feeling this good and I didn’t go to Doncaster but Saints won anyway and we are 20th and you know why? A: TOTAL FOOTBALL
But dammit these past two days they have made me need to play songs at people cos songs are cool and amazing and I have a guide dog stamped on my hand and I’m not sure why this gives me pleasure but yes it does
PM DAWN – I’d Die Without You
I spent a large amount of today listening to PM Dawn. I am thinking of pitching PM DAWN WEEK to A Music Publication. History left them behind, you can sort of see why – they’re very often verbose for the sake of it, and with verbosity comes hella pretension, and often this leads to non-lyrical flow and annoyance and sweet fuck they’re basically wearing bedsheets, big shiny bedsheets, and you can see why that doesn’t fly nowadays.
But god, PM Dawn. Young people do not know PM Dawn. This was not PM Dawn’s big hit, because that was:
I don’t know if I prefer this as such – it’s more straightforward, the lyrics make more sense, there’s actual narrative flow. It’s one of those love songs that make me feel awkward, cos it’s the subject putting hell of pressure on the object, but god it fucking RESONATES – “Is it my turn to watch you walk out of my life and not do a damn thing?” It’s desperation – “Isn’t it amazing how some things can completely turn around?”
One day I will be a grown up and I’ll know what I’m doing and that day had better fucking come soon cos otherwise a life in admin awaits me and I ain’t want that, and one day I can look at my “PM Dawn Phase” in the past tense and laugh, but for know sweet fuck PM Dawn are the band for me. It’s how fucking lonely yon piano sounds, how every note tinkles and sparkles, how those fucking harmonies just kill in the chorus, that moment of desperation when you will promise absolutely anything regardless of thought or consequence just so long as you can get what it is you want at that precise moment – “whatever babe, what ever bay-bay” - you will swear to literally anything at all, because the moment overwhelms you to that extent, the enormity just swallows you and there is no future or past, only NOW. NOW is all that you know. Human existence is all about you and that fucking instant. This song is that moment, that moment absolutely perfectly.
PM Dawn really need to be reassessed. I want to sing this song to people. All of you, preferably, I am not sure why. I need to sing at you. I need to play records at you. That’s kind of what this post is about.
BELINDA CARLISLE – Leave A Light On
Video here – it used to embed, now it doesn’t. Basts.
People who play “I Think We’re Alone Now” at clubs – I AM TALKING TO YOU.
Yes, it got to number one and this only made number four, but at the same time – why do you play that when this song exists in the world and is unquantifiably better than it? This again falls into the category of songs I must sing to people. I think Richard Hawley would absolutely kill it, but unfortunately, I am not ever actually going to be Richard Hawley, or sing like Richard Hawley, so I’ll have to let you know that the chorus is something I MUST SING because, as Ramzy was saying, you hit an amazing bit AND THEN SOMETHING EVEN MORE AMAZING HAPPENS!
HARMONIES!
HARMONIES!
HARMONIES!
Dammit, why is “Heaven Is A Place On Earth” her enshrined classic? I wanna be in a room full of people singing this song till their lungs give out. It’s so poised! So perfectly measured in its distribution of high points, bits to sing along to…
I have got to find the motherfuckers that kept this off number one.
I didn’t mean to include this, by the way, but I’ve got it playing now, and you know what? Their biggest hit, and it’s very, very good. It’s where the lyrics start not making sense, and the video doesn’t necessarily need Tony Hadley to pop up at the end, but the hell with it.
PROLAPSE – TCR
Prolapse are the best band from Leicester ever, because:
a) the only other one I can think of is Kasabian
b) PROLAPSE ARE AWESOME
Prolapse in many ways anticipated the YouTube generation by naming themselves after the medical term for shitting your guts out, since I don’t think Prolapse would have necessarily been hugely in favour of people finding their songs on YouTube and as such would prefer them to get lost in a miasma of videos about shitting your guts out.
Anyway: this is not the best Prolapse song. However, this is one of the few that they did a proper video for (in America!), and it is still very good. Find their records and listen to them and love them.
SKY LARKIN – Fossil, I
I tried doing a poll on ILM about which was the best song Huw Stephens played the other week, and FOUR WHOLE PEOPLE voted, and, er, I wasn’t one of them, so there we go. This was my favourite song that he played. It is not especially big or clever but it has stuck and stuck hard and they made a video (in America! Even though they’re from Leeds!), plus I saw them live and thought they weren’t that great, but no, this is a good single and makes me think I have missed something.
THE PASSIONS – I’m In Love With A German Film Star
It is fabulous. It is slow and slinky and goth-but-not-quite-goth and it’s always a little faster than I think it is. It’s so very great, really it is.
NE-YO – When You’re Mad
This is my favourite Ne-Yo song. What is yours? If you do not have one, you should get one. He’s very good. This is a good place to start – it’s about how he finds his girl even sexier when she is angry, and that premise is kind of dickheaded, but he delivers it in such a way as to be adorable. He’s good at that. Very good.
NE-YO – Closer
This gets better the more you hear it. I heard it on the top 40 last week and it was beautiful.
JORDIN SPARKS & CHRIS BROWN – No Air
Though obviously this is better. I do not get how people can resist this. It is heavenly, from tip to toe. It’s the pitch, it’s the tempo, it’s the way the vocals run not-quite with the beat, it’s how they open up, it’s how in the video when they finally meet all they can think to do is scream “NOOOOO” at each other, it’s the chorus – IT IS TOTALLY THE FUCKING CHORUS – it’s the way they rip off “Umbrella”, it’s when Chris Brown walked and ran and jumped and flew you believe, you believe that it is possible that Chris Brown does transcend humanity that much, it’s how it’s a song about constant struggle but the struggle is always completely worth it, it’s the bits where the strings get tense, it’s the keyboard solo, it’s the ballad for this year, it’s the ballad for these times, it’s the constant fucking rise, I need it to hit you, I need you to feel like I feel, I want that moment, I want to know it isn’t just me, because this is too damn big to be just me. This song, and possibly only this song, is why I listen the top 40 nowadays, so I can be reminded that no matter how many other pieces of shit people listen to, this is still there, this still lives and breathes and walks and runs and jumps and flies and flow-ows every Sunday afternoon, and all the rest of the damn time.
ULTRASOUND – Stay Young
God, this encapsulates me too well. I’m old enough that I’ve come to realise that youth is slipping away from me, and I’m getting annoyed with the people that are younger, but I know I am wrong to do this, and I know I am jealous of them and that’s stupid and it hurts, and when I look back on my youth I won’t do shit but regret and that’s stupid too, but that’s not Ultrasound’s fault, and I don’t want you thinking this song is kneejerk stuff and it’s bitter indie and can be ignored, because ignoring this song is the last damn thing I want you to do.
This song is extraordinary. I had a ten year gap between the first time I heard it and the second, but somehow on the second I could remember it exactly. The first time I heard it, I liked it cos the guitars reminded me of “Lucky Man” by The Verve, because, well, 10 years ago, that excited me, and I don’t want to act like that didn’t happen, because it did, and, well, it’s part of the reason I’m where I am at the moment. The second time, all the layers came rushing upon me; all the contradictions operating at once, all the vulnerabilities coming to light…
I wanna stay young, wanna go and never come undone – I wanna go out, wanna have fun and never come back home
You realise how transitory an experience youth is, particularly when youth is sold to you through music. All that bollocks about how rock should always be about pissing off your parents – the deliberate barriers it sets up, the deliberate exclusions it incorporates – and never thinks of those it excludes, because rock is for winners, rock is for youth – “It’s a naked pagan glory, celebrate the new” – and it leads the fans to believe that the rest of the world doesn’t matter…
And yet the song envies that too, it envies the freedom, it chases that fucking feeling. Hear them guitars, hear their heft, hear how they clash, how they yearn for the eternal and the epic and perpetuity. Hear how the vocals contrast: Tiny Wood (the man) is drawn, haggard, despairing, lunging to cling onto what he’s got, searching for that one more hit he doesn’t know if he’ll get, or if he’ll deserve; Vanessa Best (the woman) is aloof, tremulous, riddled with dramatic, quivering highs. They don’t interact, they just happen to exist at the same time; they are both completely extraordinary in their own ways. The song is rock destroying you and creating you all at once, and you can’t tell if it’s a good thing or not, it’s just what you do, it’s all you know, and it is the most beautiful, most empowered you have ever been, but at the same time you know it won’t last, there is doubt nagging at you all the goddamn time, and bear in mind that this song was Ultrasound’s first charting single. They’d not had an album out by this point. It’s still their highest-charting single, too – the first time I heard it was on the top 40. It got to number 30.
Ultrasound now are footnotes, if they’re even that; they made their first album a double album (that’s a double-CD album, by the way, due to the last song being 35 minutes long). It didn’t sell. They were shuffled out of the back door and split up, cos rock had had its use, they hadn’t served it as it saw fit, and there’s always more, always younger, always fully ready to bend and submit to cultural behemoths, always willing to obey and not challenge things, not try and change things; they can be honest, of course, but that’s only cos apparently that’s the kind of thing that women are into todays. Honesty, skinny jeans, ukeleles; hint at your vulnerability, hint that it might exist. Don’t actually say it out loud.
I can’t let “Stay Young” lie. I can’t. British guitar music tends to churn out ignorable stuff cos that’s what fuels it – there always needs to be someone at number 26 in the charts, and every week it changes. British guitar music is disposable by nature, almost by necessity. It is clumsy, it is overly blatant, it will be forgotten inside a year, it will not make any lists beyond the ones that get put out in order to try and recoup the label costs. Ultrasound’s mistake, on this evidence, was to try and get clear, to try and take the generic big sound of British guitars and make it actually big, actually grand, but no-one would go with, and so people haven’t heard of Ultrasound because then 1999 happened and someone else came along instead and their guitars were just as big, and people didn’t realise how special Ultrasound were, and so repping Ultrasound now is like setting yourself up as the biggest joke – in a world where Radiohead and My Bloody Valentine and Slint and Shellac and Fugazi and Belle & Sebastian and Nirvana and U2 exist, why hitch yourself to these? Are you mental? Are you stupid?
Look, this song is bloody special, it cuts deeply, it is bloody painful, it needs to rise again, I can’t help it, I love it, it’s too goddamn much for me to start making any remote amount of sense about, I want people to hear it and listen to it and love it just as much as I do and unfortunately I am afraid that it and me are currently intertwined that badly that somehow anything less just wouldn’t bloody work, you know? Look, I’m drunk, and hell, I’ll regret this in the morning or afternoon or whenever it is I wake up, cos that’s what happens when I’m sober, but I can’t let this bastard song lie, I can’t let its textures get away, I can’t let its confidence, its exceptionality go ignored – oh God, even though I’m drunk I know exactly how ludicrous I’m sounding, and that this is all screaming out for an editor, and I wish that was how I worked, I wish I could write in something other than these flurries of inspiration, that I could organise and plan and plot, and I know I’m the problem but I genuinely can’t figure out how to sound sensible about this matter, because I need you to hear this song and fall for it totally and utterly and just bloody realise.
“I’d Die Without You” is the only thing in my head. Its madness fits in nicely with my own.
ROCK HARD POWER SPRAY – Trigger Nation
Sometimes, as weak as it makes me look, I can’t explain beyond “This riff is pretty great. This chorus is pretty great. I need to dance to this as soon as is possible.” This is that time.
SUPER FURRY ANIMALS – Demons
There are people whose hearts don’t melt during the bit in the middle of this song where it’s just trumpets, and one day I would hope to join them, but, well. If I can’t help crying at the end of The Snowman (this is the Raymond Briggs one, by the way – I am sure there are several films of the same name, but I’m not talking about them), then I’m pretty much powerless against this.
I have not really bothered with either of the last two Furries albums, but maybe I should – I’m not sure there’s many other bands that can do poignant as well as they can.
SABRES OF PARADISE – Wilmot
Maybe I just like to get infested by things, maybe I want things to fill my brain when life happens, and if that’s true, then this is where music reaches its zenith.
MARIT LARSEN – Don’t Save Me
Myself and young people listened to ABBA the other night, I should have played them this too. It ain’t easy being a Marit Larsen fan, but her songs are too bloody good for me to choose any other option.
MARIT LARSEN – Under The Surface
STOP PLAYING WITH YOUR HAIR. You’re too articulate for that. Dammit, Marit Larsen, you’ve got some annoying habits, and hot damn but you are hell of twee, but you’re so incisive, so articulate, so damn true – Scandinavian pop is clean and elemental and the criticism is that it’s too cold, it divorces the emotions from reality too much, so pain is only know because pain happens in pop songs, and Scandinavian artists only feel things for art’s sake; Scandinavians, so it goes, aren’t actually real people. They’re too cold and analytical, too pleased with themselves in their bilingualism. They know how the parts fit together and they fit their words and play their notes around that accordingly. They pull strings, they use tactics, they arrange things just so.
And that ain’t Marit. She’s too close, too real, too damnably human, too right. She knows too much, perhaps. She’s painful – you think “these are fantastic melodies, these would fit on X’s mixtape just perfect”, then you hear the words and start to worry that X will either think you fancy them or – worse – that you think they fancy you and are trying to disavow them of said opinion. Marit Larsen is dangerous for your health, seriously. She’s too damn brilliant for reality.
CAMERA OBSCURA – Lloyd, I’m Ready To Be Heartbroken
“HEY, Lloyd!” I fear that is the moment I bloody crave, I wanna make sweeping statements about how Cammie Ob (I need to remind myself I am not an American music critic – how? With NICKNAMES!) won’t ever be this good again, since the possibility that they might would possibly make my brain explode. This song puts me right on the pop-not-pop divide, it makes me wonder where indie stops and pop begins, it makes me wonder where the fences get put up – this song is brilliant, it’s about how your relationship to pop defines your attitudes to actual romance and how dangerous that actual concept really is. That’s CO’s gift – they don’t wanna be twee, cos being twee is fucking the hell out of their lives. Onceuponatime I had this excellent review in me about how Underachievers, Please Try Harder is an album about the really dark bits of twee – about how self-identifying as a failure isn’t actually as easy as all that, about how scarring your soul is actually rather painful, about how much “opting out” really fucking hurts, about how you will desire normality and curse yourself for failing to achieve it. CO definitely are not a band who approach C86 as some kind of a godhead, who genuinely believe that their way of doing things is better – they are as they are because, well, that’s what happened, isn’t it? They do not want to be boxed in, but that’s what happened, and they’re trying to get the fuck out but something has gone fucking wrong in the process.
In a way, it’s like Marit – the music is crazy mad painful, but the trumpets are just EXCELLENT.
If you’re wondering, “I’d Die Without You” is still there. “Take every little bitty piece of my heart” – the insertion of bitty to make it scan, to show the extent to which Prince Be (that is what he is called) is going off his rails in order to try and hang on.
I need to keep writing cos I can’t fall asleep. Self-consciousness is descending upon me and it’s making me worry that this post is not sufficiently celebratory, and these songs are celebratory and should be celebrated. This is the peril – the need to prove how happy you are. Over-compensation – lurching. Scary business.
And “Steal My Sunshine” won’t embed.
LEN – Steal My Sunshine
That should not stop me from mentioning it in bold, though, because it is not a thing to be frowned on. Here it go.
Plus I am in a really good mood. Thus far, it has been an excellent weekend, hence this post. I have talked to people, and dammit, I enjoy that. So consider this an extension of me talking to people. I apologise that sometimes I get kinda dark and depressing when I talk at length, it just seems to happen. I wanna share this with you not because I want to depress you, but because this stuff makes me feel incredible.
SEO TAIJI – Moai
Incidentally – how incredible is this song? It’s basically radio pop, but the beat is full-on fucking glitch. It was a big hit in Korea. Lucky fuckers. The wheeze and ease of the organ over the click and rumble creates this amazing effect, totally otherworldly and utterly great.
PETER FOX – Alles Neu
And then this! Leave shit on a positive note, is what I think would be an idea, and this is as positive as they come. Mad drums, menk strings, and a bunch of lyrics in German about rebirth and regeneration and being “completely renovated” and “Peter Fox 1.1″. Oh god I need to fucking play songs at people again and not doing so is driving me bloody mad and I’d clearly be completely sick of it after a while (i.e. and hour) but jesus this is IMPORTANT TO ME and, well, wow. Need dance, need sing, need do something.
But for the moment, this blog post will have to do.
EDIT: I FORGOT:
THE KNIFE – Marble House
I do not know any other record quite like this. I bet there’s loads. But. Oh, the Youtube don’t convey the way that bass rolls in the chorus, the way it rides – just how sensationally tactile it all feels, just how incredible this cadence actually physically makes me feel, how it goes beyond just sound to whole other bastard worlds. What a fucking album this is.
THE BIRD & THE BEE – Again & Again
I don’t mind if I have to dance to this by myself. I’d just really love it if other people were dancing to it too. This song just keeps making everything right, in a slap-tambourine-on-arse twice then hop! kind of way.
Yeah, I’ll regret this in the morning, but it isn’t morning for at least another couple of hours. I’m glad we had this discussion.
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…
Hello – I’ve currently got two posts bubbling for here and am having troubling finishing either. In the meantime, why not look at me flailing about to accurately predict the Mercury Music Prize over at Rocktimists?
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…
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.
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…
