music

[18] U2, ‘Mysterious Ways’

U2

Never having heard Rattle & Hum, Junior’s not well placed to assess U2’s seismic brand realignment from holier-than-thou, campaigning rock monoliths to fun-loving, wraparound-sporting, INXS wannabes with better songs. Good. 15 years on, Achtung Baby is just another rock album, most songs a bit tighter and poppier than U2’s earlier offerings but there’s more obvious filler.

The Perfecto Mix of ‘Mysterious Ways’ did it for me. A couple of minutes of looped guitar at the start before the nice big riff comes in, and then no sign of the first verse, just the second verse twice with a couple of choruses. It’s careless, but it works. Oakenfold’s sausage fingers were all over 1991.

Junior rocked side to side throughout; she definitely goes for the rock guitars and the sturdy drums. She needs to hear more Belle & Sebastian and Eg & Alice. I won’t have an infant Suzi Quatro on my hands.

[19] Manic Street Preachers, ‘Stay Beautiful’

Manic Street Preachers

So, they arrived looking like Joe Strummer fronting Japan, lost their spiritual core and eventually waddled off dressed as fat Welshman at Next. A bizarre trajectory that became very uninteresting very quickly. They were never much good. Some diverting early singles, the odd OK track on later albums, not enough to justify the devotion.

Standard gibberish in the lyrics. Junior looked all louche, draped over the side of her chair. A mess of eyeliner and spraypaint sounds like a whale of a time to her.

Ah, I do like this shoddy record. It was the first MSPs song I ever heard and I was wryly surprised that this new, shocking punk thing had basically recorded a Huey Lewis melody.

[20] The KLF featuring The Children Of The Revolution, ‘3 A.M. Eternal (Live At The S.S.L.)’

The KLF

Another slab of ludicrous brilliance from Rockman Rock and King Boy D. “Basic face kick, elemental”. You had to laugh, but they were so good at what they did, and they built up their own mythology with every single they released. Then, within a year, they were gone, leaving rumour and apocrypha in their wake. Now there are people – mentioning no names – who look out for KLF-in-disguise records in each crop of new singles.

‘3 A.M. Eternal’ is meaningless, of course – “down with the crew crew” – but we’ve heard as much tosh from serious emcees. It’s the flow that matters, man. Junior was down with the mayhem, shaking the head and shoulders from side to side. Rocking the Stevie, if you will.

Someone nicked my copy of The White Room days after I bought it. I’d hazard that it’s not as good as I think it is, so I’ll continue not replacing it.

Author’s note: There is no Wham! in this chart. I repeat, there is NO Wham! in this chart. However, there is – as Kiss AMC might put it – a little bit of U2.

[1] Wham!, ‘Freedom’

We’ve established that I was a low-key Duranie. Revisionist history always has it that pop from ’82 to ’84 was all about Duran Duran vs Spandau Ballet*. Rubbish. The world was fought over by Duran Duran and Culture Club. As a consequence I hated Culture Club, even though these days I can listen to one or two singles and always enjoy a crass and bitchy Boy George innuendo.

‘Freedom’ killed Culture Club. There was a blaze of publicity for CC’s return, but ‘The War Song’, released the same week as ‘Freedom’, just couldn’t cope with Wham!’s sales juggernaut and was pulverised**. A swift fall down the chart was assured, and next single ‘The Medal Song’ peaked at No.32. Disastrous.

This is No.1 for other reasons, naturally. It’s a perfect pop Motown pastiche, for one, and the guitars and horns go mad at the end, for another. It was all very easy for George. Time after time, he was releasing vinyl joy.

Junior got into the record by standing on her dad’s lap, clapping and trying to eat his hands. By the last chorus, she was trying to eat her own feet. We’d reached the edge of elevenses.

*Spandau Ballet were irredeemably awful. No exception. Ok, except maybe that winningly hackneyed saxophone solo in ‘True’, weirdly.

**It’s incidental that ‘The War Song’ was useless anyway.

[2] Scritti Politti, ‘Wood Beez (Pray Like Aretha Franklin)’

I asked Junior to type up her own comment on this and got “bvgyijuhh”, and my glasses stolen for good measure. Green Gartside would’ve deconstructed this, intertextualised it, restructuralised it and turned it into a shimmering pop tune, glossy surfaces and candyfloss heart belying the cold intellectualism.

I reckon that’s what he did with ‘Wood Beez’. It doesn’t mean much but it sounds clever. What it is is the most brilliant white funk track to come out of the decade, zipping along a skyway of scratchy guitars and keyboard flashes, loosening ever more until he’s exchanging shouts of “schizo” with the backing vocalists and just keeping from breaking down before the last chorus.

I finally caught his disguise show a couple of weeks ago – under the name Double G & the Traitorous 3 (Plus 2), he’s playing his first gigs for 25 years or so – and it was brilliant, of course. He seems to be treating the gigs as rehearsals for the new album (the fifth in those 25 years), which sounds like something to get excited about already. Two more shows at the Luminaire in March, pop fans.

[3] Grandmaster & Melle Mel, ‘White Lines (Don’t Don’t Do It)’

The little B-girl launched herself towards the stereo when this kicked off. She was even more captivated when her dad tried to rap along, believing him to be, of course, something like a phenomenon.

I was proud to know all the words back when I was eleven. I remember that surprising the bloke at school who was meant to be the embodiment of cool because he owned a Run DMC record. (I’d never had the heart to tell him that ‘It’s Tricky’ wasn’t one of their best). They were easy words to learn, of course, and I imagine I had my own spin on the meanings: “I think they’re giving away free bass”.

It’s an odd record when you listen to it now. Very soft and poppy for hip-hop at that point, with some kind of doo-wop call and response going on, and verses and choruses. None of that stops it being a bass-rolling, imperative-repeating, tongue-in-cheek classic.

[4] Frankie Goes To Hollywood, ‘Relax’

Junior passed the time walking up and down her mum’s belly. Just checking for siblings.

My claim to credibility is that I bought this before Radio 1 banned it, back when even my mum liked it. She claimed that she didn’t when it was dogged by notoriety, but children don’t forget these things. I’d bought my first record player for £10 from a guy in Hemel Hempstead – actually, my dad paid and it was only £9.50 but, inexplicably, he let the seller keep the change. I was aghast. 50p was a fortune. To get to the point, it was one of those record players on which you could flick a switch and it would keep playing the record on the turntable over and over again until you took the arm off.

The day I bought ‘Relax’, I played it 11 times in a row.

Junior probably won’t want her dad to go out and buy a rickety turntable with a free 7” single (Bo Kirkland & Ruth Davis, ‘You’re Gonna Get Next To Me’) thrown in. She’ll just want that chip in her right earlobe upgraded.

[5] Madonna, ‘Like A Virgin’

Seasoned 12-year-old chart watchers knew that this single was make or break for Madonna. ‘Holiday’ made a decent impact, but ‘Lucky Star’ missed the Top Ten and ‘Borderline’ barely registered at all. ‘Like A Virgin’ edged up the chart at agonising pace, before peaking at No.3, and then the world just went into Madonna meltdown with seven more UK Top Five hits in 1985 alone.

She could’ve gone the way of Cyndi Lauper. That wouldn’t have been pretty.

What a perky number it is. Junior misses any naughtiness in the lyrics, chews every toy in sight, has a go at singing along and dances with her mum. Perfect.

[6] Chaka Khan, ‘I Feel For You’

I see the lilac lothario is flavour of the month again after last week’s Brits performance. It was pretty good, yeah, but it doesn’t take a superhuman effort to make the Kaiser Chiefs and Coldplay look ordinary. What a disgrace those awards are. What exactly are they rewarding? Marketing campaigns, that’s what. I mean, no one’s bought that Jack Johnson album, but we’ve all seen it advertised a million flipping times.

Anyway, back to Prince. I’m making a big deal of his writing credit here because I feel a bit guilty about ‘When Doves Cry’ not being in this chart. No, I don’t know why either. Chaka’s performance is great, but it’s the song and the Melle Mel rap that make the record.

I’m also a big fan of the abstract drawing of a slimline soul diva on the single cover, a world away from cuddly Chaka. Junior squealed at the song, bouncing up and down on her baby booty.

[7] The Style Council, ‘Shout To The Top!’

Junior was trying to drink from one of her stacking cups, clearly getting into the spirit of café culture. She’s not one of the luddites who believed that Weller had cooked his goose as soon as he hooked up with Mick Talbot and ditched the spiky Woking-class anthems. She knows that he was taking colour from a broader palette, not afraid to wear flat-fronted trousers and pink sweaters, not afraid of a female backing vocalist, a falsetto delivery, a mannered sleevenote, a little tickle of his keyboard player’s ear.

‘Shout To The Top!’ was the Style Council’s seventh single in 18 months. A rich, rich vein of prolific form. I’ll brook no argument.