m people

[8] Kylie Minogue, ‘Confide In Me’

So Kylie fled the suffocating grip of Stock Aitken Waterman to find credibility, dance chops and, ultimately, zero record sales with then ultra-cool label Deconstruction. Everything looked rosy with ‘Confide In Me’ – all melodrama, crunchy beats and Top 3 success – and a decent album followed, only with diminishing returns. I worked at Deconstruction for one whole day as the album was being released, and made off with tons of promo material including a semi-lifesize (well, you can never tell with the Kylester) cardboard cut-out that my brother now owns. It was small recompense for spending eight hours sending out M People 12”s.

My own diminutive pop star claimed to “like Kylie” and admired the glossy CD booklet. At first she had it confused with the Saint Etienne CD also on the desk, which is quite the coincidence – ‘Confide In Me’’s B-side was a cover of the Ets’ ‘Nothing Can Stop Us’. Even more thrilling, the, er, other B-side was a cover of Prefab Sprout’s ‘If You Don’t Love Me’. Truly a potted history of pristine pop.

[13] M People, ‘How Can I Love You More?’

How Can I Love You More

No, wait, don’t go. Obviously, M People committed legion aural crimes with 99% of their output. Even long after their split, we’re force-fed an annual re-release of Heather Small’s gut-clearing, pious, schoolma’amish ‘Proud’ dirge. Well, Heather, I’ve sat on my arse at work all day, surfing the internet and slagging off my colleagues. Nothing to be proud of, but what’s it to you?

They made one good single – and I don’t care who knows it – with a restrained vocal performance from Small, before she rammed her histrionics down our throats, before we’d had a chance to wonder at the pineapple on her bonce. It sounds like a New York Garage track, quite different to the wailing dross that followed and the clumsy hit remix of this track itself a few years later.

Junior spends the five minutes laughing at me, of course.