Posts from October 2014
29
Oct 14
BAZ LUHRMANN – “Everybody’s Free (To Wear Sunscreen)”
“Everybody’s Free (To Wear Sunscreen)” is an artefact from the Pre-Cambrian of social media, a fossil ancestor of today’s viral hits. You could go further: by making the jump into offline culture, it’s a kind of missing link to them. Natively, though, it belongs to the long, grey, clickless epoch of text-only circulation: paragraphs indented by lines of arrows, replicating in the unseen spaces of email accounts, far from the light of analytics.
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24
Oct 14
SHANKS AND BIGFOOT – “Sweet Like Chocolate”
Seeds sown in London’s clubland bloom in the charts sooner or later – but sometimes there’s a particularly fine flowering, an alignment of pop and underground when the most beguiling and unexpected of the capital’s sounds are also precisely what the country wants to buy. 2-Step – the off-kilter sound of UK garage at the end of the 1990s – was one such moment.
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20
Oct 14
BOYZONE – “You Needed Me”
There’s no “Goodbye” or “Never Forget” for Boyzone, no bravura statement of a legacy: that legacy, after all, was happily preparing its second single. Ronan and the lads’ final release missed the top, but as a valediction, this will do. It’s a cover of a string-soaked number by Anne Murray, a country-esque hit (Grammy-awarded, no less) from the 70s heyday of Tammy or Dolly. In either incarnation, it’s something of a slog – a pretty, wistful melody laden down by a glutinous arrangement and a lyric that peters out. Under Boyzone’s care it’s basically a Ronan spotlight number – so whether intentionally or not it feels like priming the audience for the imminent solo career.
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19
Oct 14
THE BACKSTREET BOYS – “I Want It That Way”
With Westlife, Simon Cowell was finding a way to broaden the appeal of male vocal groups, and create something more stable than the firework appeal of the traditional boyband. But the old model was resilient, and more to the point, it was still astonishingly profitable. Britney Spears – who shared songwriters and producers with the Backstreet Boys – had seen her early solo aspirations dismissed as a needless risk: lone stars were finished, groups were the future. And this was why: the state of the pop art, number one worldwide, a band ascending into an Imperial Phase.
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12
Oct 14
WESTLIFE – “Swear It Again”
Westlife have always been this blog’s nemesis, the doom encoded in its premise: however entertaining the song or era I’m writing about is, at some point I will have to deal with fourteen Westlife number ones. There have been times when I’ve wondered myself what on earth I would say, given that from a standing start I could barely remember two of them. But here we are.
Implicit in the jokes is a feeling that Westlife are different. Look at the list of the most successful Number One acts – Elvis, the Beatles, Westlife. One of these things is not like the others, apparently. The scale of Westlife’s success, more than almost any other factor, was enough to convince even sympathisers that the charts were broken, that pop was broken, a damaged transmitter no longer capable of processing the cultural signals around it.
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9
Oct 14
MARTINE McCUTCHEON – “Perfect Moment”
Soap star to pop star had been an effective route to fame in the late 80s: Kylie and Jason turning their next-dooriness into a ready-made pop identity, the line between their characters and their pop personas as fuzzy as SAW could make it. In the stage-school era of pop stardom you might expect that to be a template – but this is a rare sustained attempt, and it flared and faded quickly: Martine McCutcheon was dropped before her third album (songs from the shows) could come out.
She is still famous, though – no recent achievements to match her stint on Eastenders or her Number One, but none of the small humiliations of diminishing celebrity, either: no Celebrity Big Brother stints, no grisly comebacks. And the reason, I think, was also key to her acting and pop success: in her heyday there was something essentially likeable about McCutcheon – to be cynical, there was no money, or audience, in seeing her embarrassed or made to look bad. Which is not at all true of many celebrities. Bad things happening to her were another matter, though. McCutcheon’s Eastenders character, Tiffany Mitchell, became sensationally popular as a sort of modern-day Little Nell – a kindly soul plot-abused even by the fearsome standards of Walford, E20, who died in a hit-and-run at New Years’ 1998.
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7
Oct 14
MR OIZO – “Flat Beat”
Just what we needed, another corporate puppet at Number One. To be fair to Flat Eric, he was in fact an indie puppet – if you hired French house act Mr.Oizo, the yellow flannel sidekick came as mandatory. The Eric we see in the Levis Sta-Prest ad that birthed “Flat Beat” was reworked by Jim Henson’s Creature Shop, and he has that irresistible Muppety limberness. But none of Kermit’s pals were this aloof: Eric – and his pal Angel – drive around a suburb, Eric flexing and banging his head to techno. When the police pull them over they switch the music to a country crooner, and Angel complies with the cop’s request, flipping open the trunk to show immaculately folded shirts and pants. He lets them go. They put Mr Oizo back on, and the policeman glumly considers his own crumpled, suddenly uncool clothes.
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3
Oct 14
B*WITCHED – “Blame It On The Weatherman”
Arriving a few weeks after Britney, “Blame It On The Weatherman” could be a sad afterthought, forgotten jetsam from a swept-away moment like Frank Ifield’s “I’m Confessin’”, his last number one released into the teeth of Beatlemania. Instead it’s a delightful last hurrah for the tweenpop British and Irish bubblegum of ’98: not the most exciting or best-selling record of the time, but one of the sweetest.
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Oct 14
BOYZONE – “When The Going Gets Tough”
There could be no Comic Relief without a Comic Relief single, but finding a way to do it successfully was more troublesome than it looked. Even though this is the third Comic Relief record in a row to get to the top, the last two had been a team-up of genuine pop heavyweights, and then the Spice Girls lending the charity a couple of songs they had going anyway. Neither approach seemed likely to become a formula: acts as bankable as the 1997 Spicers didn’t come along every year, and team-ups were an organisational headache. Plus, whatever else you might think of “Love Can Build A Bridge” and “Mama”, their relationship to comedy – the point of the brand – was non-existent.
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