Tag: Elton John

Blue Christmas: NOW 100 Hits Christmas (2019)

Regular readers of this infrequently updated blog may have been wondering what the hell has been going on of late. Well, the truth is that while I still keep telling myself to kick myself in the arse and get this thing going again, life, the universe and everything just keep getting in the way, and for this I apologise. What I do not apologise for is the fact that this latest entry (the first for a while) is yet another NOW Christmas update, because, by jove, for the first time in four years (and the first time since Sony took full control of the brand) the go-to musical compilation of choice for shops, offices and parties has been dusted down, spruced up, given a new look and a surprisingly brutal freshening up.

Recent years have, of course, seen a huge decline in physical music sales, with compilations moving away from big expensive contemporary collections, and instead focussing on the more nostalgic (and cheaper) end of the market. This makes sense, as it’s mainly the nostalgia fans who are still buying them. NOW itself has finally got around to repackaging and rereleasing the series from NOW 2 on CD (with numerous alternative versions from the original releases; see the excellent Pop Fan’s Dream for more info).

This has led to a preponderance of budget ‘100’ compilations in various flavours, from various different sources. The logic is simple: five discs, a tracklisting on a theme (e.g. electronic 80s, girl’s night out, driving songs), make sure the first few tracks on each disc are very well known, and fill the rest with, er, filler. For some listeners, like me, this can lead to a goldmine of long forgotten tunes that never get played on the radio, but for many a listener this will lead to frustration, track skipping, and ultimately the charity shop or boot sale.

There have been a few ‘100 Christmas Songs’ compilations over the past few years which all follow this plan. Some cheat, by including a CD of ‘party’ tunes, or a karaoke disc, but essentially these are very good value, normally running to about £5 for a solid collection of most of the well known tracks.

A bargain bin yesterday

Someone at NOW has clearly been paying attention, because we now have, the rather clunkily titled, NOW 100 Hits Christmas. This seems a simple enough proposition. The last NOW Christmas in 2015 (and re-released every year since) featured 71 tracks. So add another 29 tracks, probably ones that had fallen by the wayside since the first release in 1985, maybe sprinkle on one or two new ones, and sit back and count the cash. Except they haven’t done that. And it’s quite shocking what they have done, and having looked at the tracklisting I’m at a loss to understand what has happened.

The first thing to note is the sleeve art. It’s still giant perspex letters floating in space, but this certainly does not have the look of a party album. A cabin in a snowy landscape with a shooting star overheard suggests a more contemplative mood than the busy, gaudy crackers and baubles of the previous incarnation. And it’s fair to say the tracklisting continues in the same vein.

Happy Xmas (War is Over) is back front and centre, and the rest of disc one is much more reminiscent of the original NOW Christmas Album back in 1985, maybe even more so than the fudged reissue from a few years back. Shaky, Slade, Band Aid, Greg Lake, all the big hitters, with a sprinkling of more up to date tracks from Leona Lewis and Kelly Clarkson. More importantly, there are several new, and very pleasant, additions. Ariana Grande’s Santa Tell Me is exactly what a modern christmas song should sound like by managing to be contemporary and nostalgic at the same time. I was surprised to see this only reached number 13 when released in 2014, as it’s exactly the kind of thing people complain never gets released anymore. The surprise for me though was Justin Beiber’s Mistletoe. I must admit I’ve never paid any attention to Beiber’s career being far too old and male, but I really liked this very stripped back little ditty (although the overdubbing of about 12 different Beiber’s harmonising with each other does grate after a bit). Again, the kind of thing you’d think would be a hit with people complaining there aren’t any good christmas songs anymore.

One thing people have been complaining about a lot this christmas (at least people that I associate with) is the appearance of a Robbie Williams christmas album. To celebrate this double (!) album mix of covers and originals, Williams has been as ubiquitous on the tv and radio as sleigh bells are on this album. NOW obliged by providing a choice cut from the album (The Christmas Present) for preview here, two weeks before its release. Let’s Not Go Shopping is a very odd choice to include here, being neither a good original song, or a listenable cover version (both options are in short supply on the album to be fair). It’s another chance for Robbie to indulge his love for big band crooning which served him so well in snagging a now pretty much forgotten Christmas number one in 2001, when he managed to persuade Nicole Kidman to duet with him on Something Stupid. The other oddity about Let’s Not Go Shopping is it’s not being used to promote the album on the radio. There you will hear either his abominable version of Slade’s Merry Xmas Everybody (with Jamie Callum, which makes me nostalgic for Steps’ version) or the ballad, Time For Change, a turgid trudge which starts by invoking the memory of Lennon’s Imagine, then descends into a nostalgia fest of what Christmas was like as a kid and features possibly the worst chorus on a christmas song ever (“Christmas time, Christmas time, merry Christmas”). I suspect Let’s Not Go Shopping will go the same way as Williams’ Walk This Sleigh, and make only the one solitary appearance on a NOW Christmas album.

Sticking with terrible cover versions, the usually reliable Girls Aloud toss out a terrible reading of Wizzard’s I Wish It Could Be Christmas Everyday. This one has been dragged up from the same set of tracks as Not Tonight Santa (featured on the 2006 variant, and revived here on disc 5), a bonus disc of Christmas themed tracked tacked onto a re-release of their album Chemistry, to get people to buy it again. What this does mean is that, sadly, Wizzard are missing from the NOW album for the first time ever. That is, frankly, unforgivable.

All the wonderful versions of Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas are further ignored in favour of Sam Smith’s version, which removes all the emotion and feeling and replaces them with vocal gymnastics and affections to better serve his ego and nothing else. Another track covered countless times (according to Wikipedia) is Mary, Did You Know. I have to admit, I listen to a lot of christmas music, and I had never heard this before in my life. The version here is by a group Pentatonix, an acapella outfit who won a TV talent show and signed to Sony. So I expect this one will stick around.

Amazingly, there are some good new tunes on show, but they are buried in the later discs, and are mostly around 60 years old. There’s a massive influx of tunes from the 50s and 60s with the likes of Ella Fitzgerald, Dean Martin, Peggy Lee turning up with tracks not previously seen before on a NOW Christmas album. Rather strangely, Julie London has the distinction of turning up twice, an honour normally reserved for legendary artists such as George Michael, Perry Como or Lord Cliffmas (who is still glaringly notable for his absence *sideyes*). I’d Like You For Christmas is especially gorgeous, but Warm December is an abysmal recording, and sounds like someone put a tape recorder up against a gramophone playing a 78. Further crimes against music include the continued use of the shorter version of The Waitresses’ Christmas Wrapping which shortens the intro, outro and loses a whole verse; someone made the ridiculous decision to extend Bing and Bowie’s Little Drummer Boy so it has the addition of the awkward spoken word banter intro from the original TV broadcast; the version of Bing’s It’s Beginning to Look A Lot Like Christmas is from the oil and water London Philharmonic Orchestra album which was also released this year; KT Tunstell’s version of 2000 Miles instead of The Pretenders; and Train’s Shake Up Christmas, just because it’s bloody awful.

I mean, come on! Which of those would you rather hear every year?

But, while all this makes it sound like the 2019 vintage is a tad vinegary, that’s not even the half of it. An even bigger problem is not what’s included, but what’s NOT. When I finished my original look at the Christmas album series, with the 2015 release, I wondered where the series could go next, as it seemed to be pretty much the definitive collection. The answer, it transpires, is to turf out a rather large number of very well loved tracks. I’ve already mentioned that Wizzard have been bumped in favour of Girls Aloud, but would you believe me if I told you their contemporaries Mud have been shaken off at the door too? Baby, It’s Cold Outside is here, but in a version arranged by Henry Mancini and featuring two unnamed vocalists. George Michael is absent, both with the teary eyed December Song but also there’s no Last Christmas! Can you imagine it? Or how about Chris Rea’s Driving Home For Christmas (or even Michael Ball’s facsimile version from the 2000 release)? No sign of that here either. Nor is there even a sniff of the two most popular Christmas songs according to a recent poll: Mariah Carey’s All I Want For Christmas and The Pogues and Kirsty MacColl’s Fairytale of New York are both missing in action. They haven’t even included the Ronan Keating version of the latter. To hear those two you’ll have to tune into Magic Christmas and listen for about 20 seconds. They’re bound to turn up.

So what the hell happened? How in the space of three years did the NOW Christmas Album go from the definitive collection of festive favourites to just another Christmas compilation which only partially satisfies and is all about the size rather than the quality? I suppose the big problem NOW has, and as I alluded to at the start, is trying to decide who the album is now aimed at. While the main series is, and always has been, aimed at the pop kids, the Christmas album has generally skewed to a much older audience, and that audience seems to be aging a lot faster now (much like myself). This may explain why such a large proportion of this release is songs from the 50s and 60s, but then why discard so many songs from that period too? Surely Alma Cogan’s Never Do A Tango With an Eskimo plays to the same crowd as Petula Clark’s Christmas Cards, yet the former has been tossed away like so many, um, christmas cards.

This is easily the worst NOW Christmas Album since the 2000 version. That time the problem was EMI pandering to its own artists too much, meaning an album that was bang up to date, but which aged very quickly, with so many tracks on it never seeing the light of day again. This time Sony have done the same thing, but also tried to go in the opposite direction at the same time, creating a ‘something and nothing’ collection which attempts to please everyone but will eventually not please anyone.

If this was a supermarket, £5 compilation it would probably be cheap enough to consider buying, but this is a NOW album. It’s £12. That is shocking for something so half arsed. There are now some really interesting christmas compilations which may not have as many tracks, or as many of the big hitters, but offer something interesting or different. I picked up a Rhino (a Warners subsidiary) release called Christmas-The Collection which featured one disc of familiar tracks (The Pogues, Wizzard, Slade etc), but discs two and three were brimming with brilliant, lesser known tracks like Clarence Carter’s Backdoor Santa, the Pet Shop Boys It Doesn’t Often Snow at Christmas and Tori Amos’ Winter. None of these have ever been on a NOW album and are better than a lot of songs that have.

Now, THAT’s What I Call A Christmas Compilation

I’m sad to say it but following on from the misjudged Christmas Album vinyl from a couple of years ago, followed by the botched CD releases of the classic albums, Sony’s stewardship of the NOW brand is proving to be a bit of a disaster. This current incarnation of the christmas album suggests a lack of attention, a lack of ambition, and perhaps worst of all, a lack of understanding of what their customers want. It will sell, because it always does, but like the 100 Hits collections, it relies on people not paying too much attention to what is actually on the track listing, and feeling warm and nostalgic for NOW Christmas Past.

December 14, 2019
30 Years of NOW – The Christmas Album Part 2 (2000-2015)

By 2005, it had been five years since the last NOW Christmas Album, and it was time for a reboot. But things had changed in the interim. Popstars: The Rivals and lying in wait The X Factor, had the Christmas number one all but monopolised, which had a strange effect of leading to both the dullest ‘races’ for Christmas number one ever and also a resurgence in the popularity of the Christmas music of old. The previously mentioned Golden Period from the early 70s to mid-80s became particularly venerated on radio and on the multitude of music channels now available. Unfortunately, this didn’t lead to a great deal of new Christmas music, at least not any GOOD new Christmas music, which may explain the decision to slim back NOW Christmas 2005 to a single cd.

NOW Xmas (2005)

It still retains the core tracks you would expect with no surprises or baffling inclusions, bar one. A chap called Patrizio Buanne, who sounds like a lecherous ice cream man with an awful karaoke backing track. It’s so stinky bad it makes you think Michael Buble isn’t actually that bad.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vl4RpS-Gmv0

The album does, though, feature the giant Perspex NOW lettering in a suitably festive landscape, but labels itself as NOW Massive Christmas Hits XMAS which is a tad unwieldy. This may have been a dig at the BMG/WEA backed Christmas Hits (as in NOW’s great 80’s rival, The Hits Album). They had knocked out their first spoiler album in 2001, utilising a near identical track listing to NOW, beefed up to 50 tracks, but crucially including those big tracks (well, two tracks) NOW no longer had the use of: Wham’s Last Christmas, and the more recent Christmas classic Mariah Carey’s All I Want For Christmas. Christmas Hits would appear again in 2004, expanded to 60 tracks and filling itself with a lot more obscure (to UK ears) tracks by the likes of Linda Ronstadt and a Backstreet Boys B-side. On the plus side it includes T-Rex’s oddly neglected Christmas Bop and Wombling Merry Christmas. So it’s clearly brilliant.

In 2006, and no doubt noticing a distinct drop in their December cashflow the previous year, NOW Christmas is back and up for a fight, expanding to 3 discs and 60 tracks. Its title is back to the more normal, NOW That’s What I Call Xmas, but it’s still using Xmas instead of Christmas. No doubt this is something they focus grouped.

NOW That’s What I Call Xmas (2006)

(This link to Allmusic is the only tracklisting I can find for the 2006 release; the info on the official NOW site is incorrect, and is actually the 2009 release. Oops.)

Upping the ante to three discs results in some fine introductions (The Waitresses finally make an appearance, a couple of Motown classics, Squeeze’s long forgotten Christmas Day, to my knowledge the only Christmas song to namecheck Morecambe and Wise, feel free to prove me wrong in the comments), a selection of much older tunes and some carols for the oldies (disc 2 would no doubt be given short shrift by the kids) and the inevitable contract fulfilling excretions by EMI/Virgin acts, although ALL of the dreadful tracks mentioned on the 2000 release (Robbie, Spice Girls, Ronan Keating, Billie) have gone. Thank Christ.

In their place however, we get Samantha Mumba’s horribly weedy (and far cheaper, in every respect) version of All I Want For Christmas Is You. Despite its belief that a Spector-like Wall of Sound is achieved by chucking as many different sounds into the mix as possible, it actually achieves the near impossible feat of making perhaps the best Christmas song of the past 25 years utterly unlistenable. It even steals Macca’s squelches. Slow hand clap.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obsUKs78VhY

Slightly saucy Andrew Sisters knock-offs The Puppini Sisters (who, incidentally do a rather superb Dixie jazz version of the Mariah track) deliver the most recent track on the album. Their fun version of Jingle Bells was made available as a download only track, but only AFTER the NOW album had already been released. It was all good publicity for them and their soon-to-be released album, no doubt. Girls Aloud’s Not Tonight Santa is one of the bonus guffs from the Christmas cash-in release of their album Chemistry in 2005. It’s the slightly naughty tale of the Girls’ boyfriend (it’s not clear if they all share the same one or if they are singing about their own significant others) and what he can offer that Santa can’t. Sadly, they missed the opportunity for references to bulging sacks and only coming once a year. It’s fairly dreadful, considering the cracking tunes they could knock out.

His great Lord Cliffness manages to snag three places on the album, with the perennial Mistletoe and Wine being joined by the almost as ubiquitous Saviours Day (whose video reminds me so much of the Wicker Man I once mashed them up) and long forgotten almost-Christmas-number-one-that-no-one-remembers, Little Town. No idea why, maybe Cliff had a Greatest Hits out that year.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJzdxjGEWhk

Other newcomers include a one-time only appearance of Kate Bush’s Home for Christmas. It’s pleasant but inconsequential (it’s less than two minutes) and pales next to the brilliant December Will Be Magic Again. There’s also Band Aid 20, the ’20 years on’ rerecording of Do They Know It’s Christmas? with a bunch of acts most of which have now been long forgotten just 11 years later. There are many problems with this, the biggest of which is that it gave Sir Bob a handy excuse to forever consign Band Aid II (the Stock, Aitken, Waterman version) to the dustbin of musical history forever. There was the fact that Robbie Williams and Dido desperately wanted to be on it, but couldn’t be arsed to get to the studio with everyone else, but they still let them record a bit and included it; there’s Justin bloody Hawkins who thinks a Christmas charity song is the perfect place for his oh-so-ironic axe wanking; there’s bloody Bono and that bloody line (obviously he had his nose very much put out by Matt Goss and Jason Donovan’s reading of the line in 1989 that he felt compelled to come back, despite the fact Mr Hawkins was intended to sing it); there’s the fact that Bananarama weren’t even asked to be on it, and maintain a 100% appearance rate; there’s Chris Martin’s bafflingly out of tune piano; there’s the Sugarbabes sounding like a computer generated girl band; there’s the John Lennon/Give Peace a Chance ending. Perhaps the most maligned aspect at the time of release was Dizzee Rascal’s rap. Listened to now, that’s probably the best part. At least he’s trying, everyone else sounds so utterly bored. One of the problems with Band Aid 20 (and its later 30 cousin) is the sense of duty involved. Adele got absolutely pelted by the media in 2014 for not appearing on Band Aid 30 despite Bob Geldof insisting he never asked her. If you don’t appear on a Band Aid single you are worse than Hitler. So artists trudge to a grotty recording studio on a cold Sunday morning, probably the worse for wear, and sing a song they’re probably just as sick of hearing as we are. You’re bound to be sound a bit bored. At least on the 1984 original the concept alone was exciting enough to generate much enthusiasm (that and coke, probably), but no one ever thinks about why (let alone gets angry because) so and so isn’t on it (Clare Grogan of Altered Images has at least admitted they were asked and they turned it down, brave girl.)

Sod it. You’re not going to hear it on the radio this year. Or any year.

Even Band Aid 20 isn’t the worst track on NOW Christmas ‘06. State of the Heart’s smooth jazz radio version of Last Christmas takes that particular accolade this time round.

There is a rogue element on here that should be mentioned though: East 17’s Stay Another Day. It’s not a Christmas song. It’s sentimental, yes. It’s got bells on, yes. It has a suitably snowy video wiv da boyz from Da Stow in dare puffer jackets, innit. But it ain’t a Christmas song.

NOW That’s What I Call Xmas (2009)

Onto 2009 which features identical artwork but a different tracklisting. A couple of attempted ‘modern’ Christmas songs find their way onto this one, some of which never saw the light of day again. Probably the most celebrated (i.e the one you hear the most) was from Spinal Tap wannabes The Darkness, whose Christmas Time (Don’t Let The Bells End) from 2003 was a genuine attempt to wrestle the Christmas number one back for ‘proper’ Christmas songs. You know, proper Christmas music made by sarcastic piss takers who want to write themselves a fat annual cheque. It’s as cynical and calculated as anything The Dark Lord Cowell ever does and the fact people thought this should be number one over the Popstars is frankly laughable now. What was most chucklesome at the time was the fact that it DID outsell that years’ Pop Idol contestants version of Merry Xmas (War Is Over) (good lord) but couldn’t outsell Gary Jules’ Mad World, a song which managed to out depress Tears for Fears, and instill itself into the nation’s hearts. That track has yet to find itself of a NOW Christmas album, but is a Christmas music channel staple now.

(Amazingly, The Darkness, who have had what some may refer to as a comeback this year, are having another pop at the Christmas charts in 2015, with I Am Santa, an utter dirge of a tune which even a wonderfully well made retro video can’t rescue.)

Other newcomers include Gabriella Cilmi (Warm This Winter) whose attempt at a career in the UK (rather than in her native Australia) needed a boost. What better way than to have your Christmas track included in a supermarket ad campaign, along with a NOW appearance. The Wombats (crazy name, crazy guys) tried their hand at the ‘tell it like it really is’ Christmas song, which isn’t bad, but not exactly great either. For a song from 2008, there’s a distinct whiff of 2005 about this. If you heard it on the radio you’d struggle to recall if it was The Kaiser Chiefs, Futureheads, Razorlight or any number of XTC-rip off merchants from the dark days of the mid 00’s. Even an introduction from Les Dennis can’t raise this above ‘meh’.

Other than this the 2009 vintage is starting to taste extremely familiar, with only the late arrival of The Pretenders’ 2000 Miles and Chris Rea’s Driving Home For Christmas (finally) making the thing slightly more definitive than it ever has. Wham and Mariah are still missing, but we still have State of the Heart and Samantha Mumba to annoy the hell out of people who only want to buy one album with all their faves on it.
2010 appears to be identical music wise, but the artwork has been subtly changed from red to purple and given a tad more room to breathe. The Wombats are still on it.

NOW That’s What I Call Christmas (2012)

Joy to the world! The Wham has come! In 2012 people stopped writing crap Amazon reviews of the NOW Christmas Album because of ‘the shitty instrumental version of Last Christmas’ because, finally, Wham’s version returned to NOW for the first time since the original release. In light of this it was also given a prominent place as number three in the almost immovable disc one tracklisting. That running order was given a bit of a spruce and shake up. Not radically so, but at least it didn’t look like nothing had changed, as with the previous couple of go arounds.

George Michael’s second appearance on the album comes from his more recent, and rather neglected, Christmas song, December Song (I Dreamed of Christmas). It’s a proper heart-tugger, which features one of George’s best vocal performances for years. It’s in no way a party tune though, which may account for its lack of airplay in the time since its release in 2009.

Whilst State of the Heart had to give up their slot of Last Christmas to its rightful owner, Samantha Mumba suffers the indignity of being let go in favour of ANOTHER cover version of Mariah’s hit, from someone (or something) called Lady Antebellum. Now, I had to look this one up because that name meant less than bugger all to me, and I really wish I hadn’t. I wonder if this is supposed to be one of those ‘cool christmas’ things that have been popular for a while whereby hipster acts do covers or even attempt a new Christmas song (I blame Sufjan Stevens for all of them). This comes across like S Club 7 trying to do a really heartfelt reading of what was a great pop song. It’s almost interchangeable with Never Had A Dream Come True.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cmbLDpy4z50

Mick Hucknall’s Happy This Christmas can, however, sod off. No hit for years? I know, I’ll write a god awful song, stick Christmas in the lyrics, add some bells and ‘little drummer boy’ percussion. Bingo! Or not. It didn’t chart. If it wasn’t for this blog post, and the radio station Smooth Christmas, I would probably never have heard it.

In other changes The Darkness (after just one appearance), Tom Jones and Cerys Matthews, and, sadly, Squeeze, were let go, and replaced by the distinctly unfestive Coldplay (another dreary would be ‘modern classic’), a suprising return for Sinead o’Connor (her brilliantly haunting Silent Night) and mum favourites Il Divo.

NOW That’s What I Call Christmas (2013)

The 2013 release should have been a cause for much celebration as Mariah Carey’s All I Want For Christmas finally made its NOW debut (straight in at number two, pop pickers; John Lennon is still hanging on at number one after all these years), but this is a tainted release for just one reason, and massively controversial it was too (in my head). The past few years have seen the emergence of a new Christmas tradition, and like all great new Christmas traditions it is in fact the revival of an old one. When I was a lad way back when, Christmas didn’t start until the unveiling of that years star-studded Woolworths christmas advert (also available at Woolco). Whether it was Eric Bristow battering a kid at darts, Anita Harris twirling a record stand, Joe Brown being a ringmaster, or The Goodies dancing to an astonishing Super Trouper knock off, you could guarantee it was all anyone was talking about the next day. That and which Star Wars figures you weren’t going to get this year. Well, that tradition is back with us, with many proclaiming John Lewis Day as the official start of the yuletide festivities now. This has not only led to ever increasingly budgeted super commercials by them and their rivals, but also a clamoring to be the unknown (or in Lily Allen’s case, desperate for the work) artist doing an insipid cover of a (sometimes) very famous song in the ad. In 2012, whilst the ad was very good (the snowman getting his snow lady a scarf) the accompanying song was anything but. Worse, Gabrielle Aplin’s cover of Frankie’s The Power of Love usurped its big brother on the NOW album that followed it a year later. I’m not sure why though. The Power of Love is, frankly, one of the best songs of the 80s; powerful, evocative, gut-wrenchingly beautiful, brilliant produced, and, rather sadly in my eyes, a Christmas classic (I say sadly, because it’s so much better than to only be confined to December airplay). Aplin’s version retains none of the original’s potency, replacing a strong message (which incidentally fits the ‘never say die’ message of the ad much better) with a weedy, fragile vocal where the singer sounds like she can barely finish the song. And a year later, no one even remembered it, because, like most Christmas related things, you forget about last year because this year is already creeping up the drive ready to shove a ‘Ho, Ho, Ho’ up your jacksy any second now. No one would have noticed if Aplin’s version wasn’t there; no one would have set up an online petition demanding to know why NOW how snubbed it. No one would have cared. I imagine many DID care that Frankie wasn’t there.

Even more annoyingly it was still present and correct on the 2014 release, which is a carbon copy of 2013.

Which brings us bang up to date.

NOW That’s What I Call Christmas (2015)

I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to suggest NOW Christmas 2015 may be the best edition since the first, 30 years ago this very year. The convergence of record companies over the years has led to a situation where almost every major label (Warners being the exception) now falls under NOW’s umbrella, meaning almost everything is up for grabs. What this means is that they can now separate the wheat from the chaff and still knock out a 70(!) track compilation that would keep most festive parties happy. The tracklisting has been shaken to its very core with John Lennon finally forgoing his position at the top of the tree for the first time since the original release (both on the record and in the ads too, where he is now nowhere to be seen) to be replaced by Mariah Carey. No harm done. Interestingly, along with Lennon, many of those survivors from 30 years ago now find themselves bringing up the rear on CD3, including, rather surprisingly, the original opener, Band Aid, though thankfully only in its original incarnation with Band Aid 20 falling by the wayside and (Jesus praise you) no one had the bright idea of including Band Aid 30.

There is a sprinkling of new tracks and a massive addition of new/old tracks too. The actual new stuff (as in songs from the past few years) seems to fit quite nicely, and I’d actually be happy to see them again. Kelly Clarkson manages the best Spector sound-a-like since Mariah’s with the big and bouncy Underneath the Tree. THAT’S how you do a modern Christmas song.

Leona Lewis’ One More Sleep is a perfectly pleasant modern confection which is so in thrall of Christmas past its video even knocks off the one for Last Christmas. The inclusion of Do You Wanna Build A Snowman? is, sadly, inevitable, but at least it isn’t Let It bloody Go, so we should be thankful for small mercies.

What takes it up to another level is the extra classic Christmas tunes of old, many of which will be ingrained in your brain from endless Christmas shopping trips and Christmas movies, but have never before appeared on a NOW Christmas Album. James Brown’s masterful reading of Merry Christmas Baby and Eartha Kitt’s version of Santa Baby are just the start of it. We now have half (HALF!) of the Phil Spector Christmas album. the missing tracks are all replaced by other versions of the songs with the exception of Parade of the Wooden Soldiers (which means naff all to UK listeners) and, tragically, Darlene Love’s majestic Christmas (Baby, Please Come Home), a song the combined mights of Springsteen, Bono and Buble have failed to tarnish. Marshmallow World is here though, and that’s almost as good.

There’s also a superb Ella Fitzgerald hat-trick, providing criminally ignored versions of Sleigh Ride, The Christmas Song and (along with Louis Jordan) Baby, It’s Cold Outside.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tnEbRaFaqfg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xg6FcaYHf4

There appears to be a great deal of thought in the sequencing of the tunes too, with CD1 clearly being everyone’s favourites along with the party and more up to date hits; CD2 is the classic disc for the oldies (and the not quite that oldies); and CD3 is the more thoughtful, sombre side of christmas, with a couple of carols chucked on for good measure.

But there is one very notable, and elephant-in-the-room-sized omission. Stevie Wonder may be singing about what Christmas means to him, but to a great deal of the UK population, when it comes to Christmas music, Christmas means to them… Cliff Richard. But he is nowhere to be seen. How has the Lord Cliffmass himself managed to go from three tracks a few editions ago, to none. Normally I’d speculate wildly here about the reasons for it, but I can’t afford very good lawyers, so I’ll leave you make up your own minds. Some may argue it isn’t Christmas without Cliff. I am not one of them.

“Hello ladies…”

It’s pretty difficult to see where NOW Christmas goes from here. Obviously we could see a swathe of new Christmas classics released in the next few years, but I doubt it. How many could you name from the past decade? Looking back over the past 30 years, it’s amazing that almost all the original 18 tracks on the 1985 edition have survived all this time. Obviously Gary Glitter isn’t here anymore; Queen’s Thank God It’s Christmas seems a strange omission, but the fact that it has never appeared again after the 1985 edition may suggest the band don’t want it included; Shakey’s Blue Christmas was quickly replaced in the nation’s affections by Merry Christmas Everyone, so that’s an acceptable loss. But the rest are all still here, most of them ever-present. I think that’s rather lovely. And makes me wonder if my generation’s views on Christmas music were probably shaped by that album. I obviously know sod all about the kids today, but I often feel my generation is the one that most cherishes Christmas music, the generation that most enjoys it, reveres it, and criticises the fact that none of the new stuff is as good as the old stuff. I’ve said elsewhere on this blog that I believe everyone thinks the pop music from their youth is the best period. With Christmas music, I don’t think that’s the case at all. I think everyone, no matter how old, could pick their top ten Christmas tunes, and it would encompass a vast, diverse range of artists, periods and styles. And they’d probably all be quite different as well. Though most would probably pick Fairytale of New York or All I Want For Christmas as their number one, instead of Wombling Merry Christmas. The idiots.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DzAL9ELsFRw

December 4, 2015

30 Years of NOW – The Christmas Album Part 1 (1985-2000)

The internet never fails to amuse itself by asking “Want to feel old?”, does it? “Here’s what the kid from Cadbury’s Fudge advert looks like now”, “We’re now further away from the release of back to the Future than the number of years Marty travels in the whole trilogy”, and of course, “That person you fancied in your teens now looks like your Nan/Grandad”.

Well, now it’s my turn. Want to feel old? This year marks the 30th anniversary of the release of the first NOW Christmas album. Yep, 30 years since this the sound of John Lennon heralded the arrival of one the most ubiquitous adverts of the festive season (everywhere except on You Tube it seems, where the original remains oddly elusive), and the album became a party must-have for every generation that followed.

If you weren’t around when the first NOW Christmas Album landed in 1985, it’s difficult to convey just how legendary this was. Finally, all your favourite Christmas songs could be found on one album (if the words ‘favourite’ and ‘Christmas songs’ do ever feature in your particular vocabulary). In the dark times, before NOW, Christmas albums fell into very distinct categories. There was your album of standards popularised by the likes of Bing Crosby, Perry Como and Frank Sinatra (in our house the Elvis Christmas Album would hit the deck as we were decking the halls and wouldn’t leave the record player until mid-January). Occasionally, someone like James Brown would pop up with a truly interesting attempt to do something different, but these were rare and often overlooked in the December record buying chaos. (Brown’s Funky Christmas is a brilliant piece of work, combining the familiar and new, socially conscious Christmas fare. It does have a dreadful, fuzzy felt-style cover though). Next was your loose collection of artists from the same record company performing contractually-obligated numbers for a ‘Merry Christmas From…’ collection (the best examples hail, of course, from Motown and the Phil Spector Christmas Gift For You, which hasn’t let the fact that the producer/genius/nutcase is a convicted murderer prevent it from being an annual best seller). There was also your ‘Sing-a-long-a-thons’ from the likes of Chas n Dave and Max Bygraves, instrumental concoctions from Mantovani and James Last, and the inevitable Carols from King’s type affair. As ‘traditional’ as these may all have been, come the 80’s it was very difficult to have a Christmas party and only stick one album on. At least for an hour. Party DJs needed serious help, and Christmas 1985 saw that help arrive in the shape of the first NOW Christmas Album.

If you’ve paid any attention to this infrequently updated collection of ramblings about 80s pop, you’ll know that by the end of 1985 NOW was huge business. The regular series of chart compilations were beginning to be augmented with additional collections under the NOW brand, starting with NOW Dance in the summer of 1985. A Christmas addition must have seemed like a no brainer, particularly with so little serious competition. Even nearly 30 years on the tracklisting is pretty definitive, having the advantage of coming at the end of the Christmas song Golden Age which kicked off in the early 70s, with the likes of Mud and Slade, and ending with Band Aid, Wham and Shakey’s Merry Christmas Everyone (1985’s yuletide chart topper, but sadly, and obviously, omitted).

The great thing here also is the songs are all so ingrained in your brains that I don’t have to spend too much time discussing the merits (or otherwise) of individual tracks and can instead witter on about useless trivia and be rude about Chris de Burgh and Paul McCartney. Hooray!

NOW That’s What I Call Music – The Christmas Album (1985)

(The spine title is NOW – The Christmas Album. The cassette version was known as NOW – The Christmas Tape, and the CD release in 1986 was, rather cunningly, titled NOW – The Christmas Compact Disc)

Tracklisting

Do They Know It’s Christmas?	Band Aid
I Wish It Could Be Christmas Everyday	Roy Wood With Wizzard
Merry Xmas Everybody	Slade
Last Christmas	Wham!
Step Into Christmas	Elton John
In Dulci Jubilo	Mike Oldfield
Another Rock ‘N’ Roll Christmas	Gary Glitter
Wonderful Christmastime	Paul McCartney
Blue Christmas	Shakin’ Stevens
Merry Christmas (War is Over)	John Lennon & Yoko Ono*
I Believe In Father Christmas	Greg Lake*
A Spaceman Came Travelling	Chris De Burgh
Stop The Cavalry	Jona Lewie
Little Saint Nick	The Beach Boys
Thank God It’s Christmas	Queen
Lonely This Christmas	Mud
When A Child Is Born (Soleado)	Johnny Mathis
White Christmas	Bing Crosby

(* – omitted from the 1986 CD re-issue)

As I said, that’s pretty much all you need, right? Everyone is going to have their favourites on that, but for me the standouts are Step Into Christmas (a song I seem to love more and more each year), In Dulci Jubilo, and Greg Lake’s wonderfully sardonic I Believe In Father Christmas, a song written in criticism of modern Christmas that has become a staple of the very thing he is railing against. I’m sure his bank manager doesn’t mind though. That’s not to say Slade, Wizzard, Wham and all the other artists whose names are only one word bring nothing to the table. Christmas would not be Christmas without Noddy’s yell, Roy Wood’s glittery cheeks or George Michael’s bouffant, even for someone like me who endured seven years of shop work at Christmas having them beamed directly into my cerebral cortex from mid-October.

Obviously there are some problems though. The ridiculously popular-with-my-Dad-for-reasons-I-never-understood A Spaceman Came Traveling has much to answer for, not least because it was included here BEFORE De Burgh became a star through The Lady in Red. No one had given a toss about this song for the previous decade, so its inclusion here not only led to it gaining a reputation as a ‘Christmas classic’ (and annual appearances everywhere) but also increased his popularity with the public and, probably, led to the success of The Lady in Red the following year. Chaos theory.

The other pop music criminal hiding in plain sight is Macca, positively glowing on the cover whilst delivering one of the worst pieces of music ever recorded. I’ve said before that the billions he made off of Yesterday and Hey Jude were just flukes, and I submit Wonderful Christmas Time as Exhibit A. Maybe that theory about him dying in the 60s are true, because it’s hard to believe that the same guy wrote this and Hey Jude. What IS that squelching noise? It sounds like a synthesised version of someone playing a guitar through a synthesiser. And then synthesising it. Take the sleigh bells off and you’ve just got a squelchy noise. Macca apparently recorded the whole thing himself, which is a shame as he could have done with a Wing or two to point out it was shite, despite making him a reported £200,000 a year. Which just makes me sick. (I’m rather fond of this Tom McRae cover version which, for me at least, wonderfully sums up the utter joylessness of listening to the bloody thing.)

Paul McCartney, Yesterday

And Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas without a little Glitter. Yes, we are never going to see Another Rock n Roll Christmas gracing a UK Christmas compilation ever again, because while it’s fine to continue to swell the coffers of a convicted murderer like Phil Spector, Glitter is now considered something less than human. It’s still a great track, though. There, I said it.

Of the rest, Shakey’s Blue Christmas seems like an afterthought to modern eyes, presumably because he didn’t want Merry Christmas Everybody included and damage his chances of getting the festive top spot (he’d already held the track back a year to avoid a clash with Band Aid in 1984) and it was cheaper than licensing the far superior Elvis version (which, although not the first recording is probably the definitive recording). In fact Shakey’s version was a huge hit, and was only stopped from being his first festive chart topper by the baffling popularity of Renne and Renato’s Save Your Love; The Beach Boys experiment with the sleigh bells which they would soon adopt and become the only band allowed to use them the rest of the year; and Jona Lewie becomes a millionaire overnight despite not actually writing a Christmas song (this is a theme which will recur as we move through the ages, not least here, where Johnny Mathis’ When A Child is Born makes no specific reference to Christmas beyond mention of a ‘tiny star’, but the production is amazing…)

Ol’ Black Eyes, Bing Crosby, is the sole inclusion from outside the Golden Age, but you always need something for the old folks, don’t you, so what better than perhaps the most famous Christmas song of all time (and even that made the top 10 during the Golden Age, in 1977).

The Golden Age of the Christmas song is worth brief further analysis (with the emphasis on the word anal) as it’s often bemoaned that the recent crop of crimbo chart-toppers (say, the last 20 years) aren’t really in keeping with the spirit of the occasion, being as they are now manufactured and manipulated by the telly to snag the top spot from the rightful grasp of some millionaire pop stars ruthlessly manipulating the charts by releasing a festive themed tune around December in the hopes of securing the summit, and a tasty pension pot at the same time. This is, of course, nonsense. In the entire history of the singles chart only 12 Christmas number ones have actually been about Christmas. That’s 12 out of 61. That 12 includes When a Child is Born (which is tenuous), 3 Band Aids, 2 Mary’s Boy Child and Slade and Mud. But not Wizzard. It doesn’t include the ‘adopted’ Christmas songs such as East 17’s Stay Another Day, which just happened to be number one at Christmas, and thanks to the music TV channels are as ingrained in the public consciousness as any number of sleigh bell riddled ditties. It is interesting though that five of those twelve appeared between 1973 and 1985, and since then only The Lord Antichrist Cliff and Band Aid have had actual Christmas number ones. So any talk that the Christmas number one isn’t the same as it used to be is both way off the mark, but also true if you of a certain age (as, to be fair, most people who complain about it are).

But what of NOW, or rather ‘then’. The first NOW Christmas is pretty perfect but a few omissions stand out. From today’s perspective, The Waitresses’ Christmas Wrapping is perhaps the biggest miss, but the fact is it wasn’t a hit when released in 1981, and only made number 45 the next year, the compilers may have assumed the public wasn’t interested. Kate Bush’s December Will Be Magic Again is a more puzzling MIA as Ms Bush is an EMI stalwart and the song is now a long forgotten gem. The Pretenders’ 2000 Miles, Bowie and Bing’s Little Drummer Boy and Wombling Merry Christmas can be excused by, presumably, prohibitive licensing fees from rival record companies. Paying extra for Wham’s Last Christmas (the biggest selling single in the UK not to get to number one, fact fans!) is one thing. It’s a bit harder to justify it for a bunch of overgrown muppets, even if it is one of the greatest Christmas songs ever.

While we’re on the subject of myth debunking, here’s another: NOW do not re-release the Christmas album every year, and add one track to the tracklisting to get you to buy it again. That would be silly, and not very cost effective. But mostly silly. The album (in its most recent incarnations) is certainly re-issued every year but the tracklisting has only changed nine times in the 30 years since the original release, and all of those changes have occurred since 2000. (Wikipedia states that the original album was reissued in 1986 missing the Queen track, but I haven’t been able to verify this and every copy available on eBay and Discogs seems to have the track present and correct. The first CD issue, also from 1986, is missing the Greg Lake and John Lennon tracks for some reason, but the Queen track is on it, so it would appear odd for it to be taken off of the vinyl and cassette. The track has, however, never appeared on any subsequent new release.)

Part of the confusion for this may arise from the fact that for some reason in 1989 EMI broke ranks from their NOW partners and released It’s Christmas. The tracklisting was near identical but out went Wham, Mike Oldfield, Gary Glitter and Queen, in came Cliff’s Mistletoe and Wine, the aforementioned Kate Bush track, Brenda Lee’s Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree and Nat King Cole’s The Christmas Song. Shakey’s Merry Christmas Everyone replaced his Blue Christmas. It’s branding and cover design are near identical to the NOW design, so it’s very easy (and probably deliberate) that many punters assumed it was the latest incarnation of the more famous cousin. It’s Christmas was reformatted as It’s Christmas Time in 1992, with Glitter and Queen reinstated, as well as Steeleye Span’s Gaudete, which the kids had been crying out for inclusion on a Christmas compilation I’m sure. And more was to come.

Before NOW Christmas was rejigged and re-released at the turn of the decade/century/millennium (delete where appropriate) Virgin would become the second NOW partner to go rogue, in 1993, releasing The Best Christmas … Ever! This album raised the stakes by being a double, and brought in a lot more ‘classic’ (i.e. old and possibly neglected) Christmas tunes from the likes of Eartha Kitt, Doris Day and Dean Martin. More modern tastes were catered for by Snap’s Mary Had A Little Boy and Enigma’s Sadness, which was one of many songs included for their more tenuous links to Christmas (others included Freiheit’s brilliant Keeping the Dream Alive and The Flying Pickets 1983 Christmas chart topper, Only You) which just struck of padding. Along with the usual suspects, some interesting inclusions included a rare appearance for Mel (Smith) and Kim (Wilde)’s version of Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree (recorded for Comic Relief in 1987) and Miles Davis’ extraordinary Blue Christmas, which is sequenced immediately before Willie Nelson’s version of the more famous song with that title! An almost identical tracklist appeared as the more familiar sounding Best Christmas Album in the World… Ever! (along with truly terrifying cover art)in 1996.

Various other cheaper, tattier, collections would start to litter the shelves of Our Price throughout the 80s and 90s, but special mention must be made of A&M records A Very Special Christmas, which managed to avoid all the obvious Christmas tracks, and included tracks from the likes of Eurythmics, U2, Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band and is possibly the only mainstream Christmas collection to include Run DMC’s Christmas in Hollis (“This IS Christmas music, man!”). Sadly, while it includes a Bon Jovi track, it isn’t R2D2, We Wish You A Merry Christmas.

And so we all meet up in the year 2000, a year which once seemed to promise so much but which ultimately delivered exactly the same stuff in slightly different packaging… like the NOW Christmas Album (do you see what I did there?). After 15 years the annual festive best seller was given a dusting down, a spruce up and an influx of some 22 extra tracks. In keeping with The Best Christmas Album a few years before, a single disc just wouldn’t cut it anymore, and whilst this means an increase in great tracks from the 50s and 60s, it also means more tenuously connected tracks (Angels?), along with some truly bizarre cover versions to bring down the cost of licensing the more famous versions, as we will shortly see.

(From this point I’ll link to the official NOW site for tracklistings, or this is going to get very very very long)

NOW! The Christmas Album (2000)

Firstly, the cover. It’s dreadful. The giant floating Perspex letters in space had long been established as the NOW house style, so, I’m not sure what they were thinking branding the Christmas album with what looks like a Poundshop tree topper, and with the NOW logo banished, almost invisibly into the corner. This may go some way to explaining its relatively poor sales, but I would suggest the tracklisting helped also.

Of the new additions, no one can possibly argue with the inclusions of Dean Martin, Nat King Cole, The Jackson 5 and Brenda Lee. The Love Unlimited Orchestra’s It May Be Winter Outside is pushing things a bit, but I’ll let it slide, along with Frankie’s The Power of Love which pub bores will argue about til the cows come home; fact is, it’s not a Christmas song, even if the video did play up to its release date, but I’d miss it if it wasn’t here, mainly because it’s one of the best songs on offer. Walking in the Air seems a no-brainer as well, despite not exactly being a party tune, but then neither is Sinead O’Connor’s Silent Night which is almost as good (but not nearly as bone-chilling) as Simon and Garfunkel’s take on the carol (including THAT would have taken a very brave man). Tom Jones and Cerys Matthews Baby It’s Cold Outside had taken about 30 nanoseconds to become a Christmas mainstay, and in the process rejuvenated a long forgotten song for a new generation and even more cover versions in the following years.

The most bang up to date track is S Club 7’s Perfect Christmas which was mere days old when NOW Christmas was released, being one of the B-sides to Never Had a Dream Come True. Frankly this was good enough to be released on its own and but for the fact its big brother was chosen to be the official Children in Need single for 2000, and thus released in late November, they could have had a good run at that year’s Christmas number one. It’s not a classic, but it is pretty much what you expect an S Club Christmas single to sound like, and that ain’t too shabby.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCUit4tMHVg

Also bang up to date, but in hindsight ridiculously presumptuous, is Hannah Morris, whose version of When a Child is Born means poor old Johnny Mathis (and his amazing production) are jettisoned in favour of a flash in the pan teen sensation signed to Virgin on a one album deal. I’d never heard of her and any information about her seems to have been removed entirely from the internet. Fair play, she’s got a great voice for a 14 year old, but this is woeful stuff. The whole thing is slavered in church bells and ye olde Oirish charm. I’d include a link, but I can’t find one. Anywhere.

Robbie Williams’ anointed status in 2000 as the biggest solo artist going (and EMI golden boy) meant he had to be included, so we get Angels just because, that’s why, but also that single’s appalling B-side, Walk This Sleigh (younger readers may need to ask a grown up to help them find out what a B-side is, or rather was). Thankfully it isn’t in anyway an attempt to re-write the Aerosmith barnstormer with hilarious festive lyrics. It’s somehow worse than that. It probably set the template for a number of Christmas hits which followed which tried to repaint Christmas not in hues of white and blue, but in the beige and brown reality that most people experience but try to escape by listening to the likes of Wizzard and Cliff. For some reason Robbie sings most of it a scouse accent, slags off the Spice Girls (who at the time of the single’s release were Robbie’s biggest chart rivals) and whilst it’s clearly a dry run for Millenium, it also invokes the Muppets Manna-Manna just for the sake of being really annoying.

Amazingly it’s not even the worst track on the album. Other contenders include Billie Piper’s pointless, soul-less and emotionless version of Last Christmas which starts off rather effectively with the sound of Billie trapped in a blizzard and whispering to the apparition of her dead boyfriend who has just appeared to her as a vision, but then becomes the worst karaoke backing track of Last Christmas you’ve ever heard, combined with one of the most ‘sod it will this do’ vocal performances I think I’ve ever heard. It also proves what a dreadful song it can be in the wrong hands and, like most Christmas songs, should never be covered unless you do something really special with it (and no, I don’t mean Jimmy Eat World, or even Crazy Frog. Nor sadly do I even mean Whigfield). It was released in 1999 as the B-side to She Wants You if you’re at all interested.

Michael Ball’s version of Driving Home for Christmas is rather odd. Ball is a fine vocalist, but this song needs Chris Rea’s gravelly tones to best replicate the terrain of a bumper-to-bumper motorway on Christmas Eve. Interestingly, possibly, is the fact that Rea’s version wasn’t a big hit on initial release in 1988, only reaching number 53. It took a couple of Iceland campaigns, and then a re-release for the charity Shelter, to get the song to deserved status it has now. Thankfully not for this version though. State of the Heart (presumably some kind of in-house covers band) provide a suitably dreadful version of Please Come Home For Christmas (on later NOW Christmas’ they submit their inimitable take on Last Christmas, which puts Billie’s in a whole new light). This is the kind of toss that turns up in the background of Christmas specials of sitcoms that won’t fork out serious money for proper Christmas songs, and gives Christmas music a bad name.

But perhaps the greatest cover crime on offer comes from the Spice Girls. Now, whilst they had dominated the Christmas charts in the late 90s they hadn’t released an actual Christmas song. (Both 2 Become 1 and Goodbye do feature Christmas themed videos, ensuring annual dust offs by the music channels; the video for their second Christmas number one, Too Much, was slightly scuppered by having to promote the Spice World movie.) For Goodbye, the third of their hat trick of Christmas number ones, someone decided it was a good idea to desecrate one of the greatest Christmas songs of all time. Luckily being a B-side, and appearing on one of the lowest selling NOW Christmas albums, the fallout was minimal. Thank Christ, because their version of Christmas Wrapping is the stuff wars are made of. I’ll admit I don’t hate the arrangement, it’s suitably updated (i.e. it sounds ridiculously cheap and tacky and like it was recorded using Music 2000 on a PlayStation, which it probably was) but the whole thing stinks of a ’15 minutes of studio time left and we need another track for the 3 CD limited edition digipack edition with fold out poster (1 of 5 to collect)’. There’s the fact that Mel C is reduced to sounding as bored as she ever did whilst in The Girls; the fact Emma can’t pronounce “ending” properly; the fact they ‘hilariously’ update the lyrics to mention 24 hour garages and Tesco; the fact that three of them don’t appear to sing on it; the fact it’s a minute shorter (and seemingly cut off early); the fact that it has a billionth of the heart, soul and, let’s face it, brilliance of the original. So, once again The Waitresses miss out on well-deserved royalties from NOW simply to appease the manager of one of the labels biggest acts who had just split up anyway. Sorry, were on ‘hiatus’.

But what’s this? What’s THIS? Maybe the Spices’ isn’t the worst. I’ll let you decide if you think Ronan Keating’s oh-so-heartfelt cover of Fairytale of New York should take the crown. If you read my review of NOW 10 from way back when you’ll know exactly how I feel about this song, and I’ll be honest I’ve only ever listened to Ronan’s version all the way through once before. I’d heard about ‘that’ lyric change and was prepared for it, so what surprised me was how utterly fake the whole thing sounds. It’s like an American producer took the song and decided it needed to be a bit more Oirish, because Oirish is very big right now. Yes Ronan, I like your accent, but can you play it up a bit, it’s not quite hitting the numbers we’d like. We focus grouped it and decided we need more penny whistle, more wistfulness, less aggression apart from that bit you try it and it just sounds like you’ve sworn in front of your parents for the first time to try and show them how independent you are now but you’re actually a bit embarrassed by it all. You’ll notice I haven’t mentioned his accomplice in this, but that’s because no one ever remembers her, despite her being (and this was news to me) the lead singer of Clannad. Though no one’s sure if she’s called Maire or Moya.

Almost as a footnote, his Cliffness doubles up with Mistletoe and Wine, and as an added bonus his long-forgotten (even just a year later) Millenium Prayer, which would have been number one if Radio 1 had played it (*stifles guffaw*). This began a (kind of) tradition of including one or two tracks intended for New Years parties too, supposedly to ensure an extra week’s shelf life for the album. Later releases would include ABBA’s Happy New Year as standard, and various Auld Lang Syne’s would soon join it.

From fear of dulling your senses into submission like so many turkey sandwiches, I’ll pause here and allow you a breather.

It would be a further five years before NOW Christmas got a reboot, and in that time pop music changed, man. Just how this affected NOW Christmas, we’ll find out soon.

Note:

The original 1985 release features a note on the rear cover stating:

“A donation from the proceeds of sale of this record will be made to the NSPCC”

I’m not sure if this was a gesture that extended to the subsequent releases.

November 30, 2015

NOW 22 – Something good is gonna happen

I suppose it’s typical of this endeavour that just as I was starting to feel that the NOW series was showing signs of having nothing left of any worth to offer, along with 1992 being, in hindsight, a pretty lousy year, NOW 22 arrives and blows those misconceptions from the water like Roy Scheider and so many rubber sharks. NOW 22 is easily the best NOW album since NOW 11. What is it with the repeated digit editions? Will NOW 33 equally deliver? I have no idea and frankly I’ll be amazed if I make it that far. For now I can say NOW 22 has revitalised my interest and it will make you smile, you sonofabitch.

Any pretensions of game-changing genres, era-defining trends and left-field inclusions can be pretty much put to bed now. NOW 22 has no time for such fancies, preferring to focus on pop, pure and simple. This is quite understandable given its window covered the summer of ’92 when nothing of any great worth happened bar me getting spectacularly drunk on my brothers stag do, and failing to follow it up at the wedding when one of the barmaids recognised me from school and refused to serve me as I was underage. Spoil sport. Nevertheless, the music was pretty good by all accounts.

Erasure reclaim top billing, scoring their first number one with their ABBA-Esque EP. Take A Chance on Me was by far the most played of the four tracks, though as Voulez-Vous is my favourite ABBA track, I always preferred Andy and Vince’s take on that. I feel a little sad that the boys had to resort to (almost) novelty tracks to bag a number one, but I suppose whatever works.

Erasure as Abba — **“Supa dupa, it’s supa dupa that we’re number 1 again.”**

Ce Ce Peniston’s Finally, er, finally became the hit it deserved in a (ever so slightly) remixed version after failing to breach the top 20 the previous year. While its ubiquity may have made it slightly unpopular in the intervening years, I still rate this very highly. KWS’ Please Don’t Go sounds much better than I thought it would, but was part of an unnerving trend over the year for ‘bands’ (i.e. dance producers) to make lucrative careers out of cover versions. Chart rivals Undercover were even more blatant about it, but their version of Baker Street (which, like the original, did not feature Bob Holness) didn’t hit the top like KWS did. It’s massively repetitive, and adds nothing to the original bar a fairly heavy bass line, but the singer is enthusiastic and has the knack of making you tap along, however begrudgingly.

Take That (including the NOW record holder for most appearances, Robbie Williams) make their debut with It Only Takes a Minute, and they’re followed by the return of the never-popular Nick Berry, somehow snagging another number one off another god-awful song from another god-awful TV show. Seriously, the UK, what is wrong with you? This man has more number ones than Bananarama, Depeche Mode and The Clash COMBINED. That’s inhuman. (EDIT: Thanks to Feel the Quality in the comments for putting me straight that Heartbeat didn’t actually reached number one. It got to number two.) It’s rather hilarious for a jangly 60s guitar to segue way into Rhythm is a Dancer though. A song now more famous for a poor choice of simile than for the song itself, it’s easy to forget how massive this was, topping the charts for weeks. It’s not as good as The Power though, though B&Q are currently doing their best to make everyone hate that one.

Things then take a very odd turn. Whilst Utah Saints continue the dance groove from Snap, they are a very different beast, and by god is Something Good fantastic. In fact it compelled me to revisit their back catalogue and I suggest you do too. Rumours of them snaffling the Kate Bush without permission are not true; Ms Bush loved it. For me, disillusioned with acid house and gangster rap, THIS was the sound of the future, picking up where KLF left off, combining hard dance with rock riffs and heavy bass, to be listened to loud.

The Cure’s Friday I’m Love doesn’t merit much time here since every knows it and you know if you like it, hate it because it’s popular, or just hate it because you think it’s a bit shit, like I do. It’s their Shiny Happy People as far as I’m concerned; it may be frightfully witty and ironic, but it’s also irritating and crap. Unlike Marc Almond’s Days of Pearly Spencer. I was frankly gobsmacked to see that on NOW 22, but even more staggered to discover it reached number 4! Personally, I think his cover version of Jackie from the same release window is much better, but it’s very welcome if only for the wonderfully wilful slow down ending. Bet this one got a fair few skips by the listeners. They may have also avoided the Beautiful South’s Bell Bottomed Tear, another of their so-ironic, lovely tunes about what bastards men are. They seemed to be on the slide commercially, and would continue to be for the next two years before their renaissance with their ‘every home should have one’ greatest hits, Carry On Up The Charts.

A couple of big hitters are up next, breaking up the dance groove, with Prince’s ludicrous Thunder appearing in its full album version, rather than the slimmed down single version, and U2’s Even Better Than The Real Thing. Whilst U2’s track is one of the best they ever released (even better in the similarly chart bothering Perfecto Mix), Thunder is diabolical. No one really remembers this beyond the chorus surely? Rumour has it Prince wrote it after a particularly troublesome acid trip. If that’s the case, he really should just say no.

The decision to include a full fat Thunder is intriguing, but more so was the decision to include The Shamen’s L.S.I. in a version which wasn’t even commercially available in the UK. Admirable as that may be, it may have been a good idea to promote that fact somewhere on the track listing. It certainly isn’t the version anyone who remembers it will recognise. Some hunting in the dark passages of online second hand record shops suggests this may be the ‘Shamen 7”’ version, only available in the USA. This is certainly the only version I can find with the same running time of 3’ 52” (ish) but can’t find an online version of that particular remix to verify.

Electronic’s Disappointed certainly did leave me feeling so, after the tremendous first album, even with the return of Neil Tennant on vocals. It’s no Getting Away With It. Much better is Shakespeare’s Sister’s I Don’t Care, a truly great forgotten tune. A great tune to follow Stay, it rode the coat tails of that massive success to score a top 10 hit it probably wouldn’t have been otherwise. This small section of quirky tunes continues with one of Carter USM’s worst tracks, Do Re Me So Far, So Good. It’s not a patch on their other 1992 tracks and seems a bizarre choice for inclusion. Less bizarre is the inclusion of the ridiculously popular Everything About You by Ugly Kid Joe. Hated everything about it then, hate everything about it now.

To polish off the first CD, we get two very contrasting dance tunes from opposite ends of the turntable. SL2’s On A Ragga Tip is not my thing at all. It sounds like a watered down version of whatever was the noisy reggae influenced variant of the day (there’s always a new one, I can’t keep up). Much more appealing, and the genuine shock inclusion on NOW 22, is The Orb’s Blue Room. Now the stuff of legend thanks to their Top Of The Pops appearance, this is wonderful after dinner mint of a track, cleansing the palate and drifting you off into the centre of the record. They definitely didn’t include the album version of this one though.

Anyone not convinced by the brilliance of NOW 22 will no doubt use CD 2 as their case for the prosecution. We’re very much in Dad country here, with a twist of dance at the end. But while, for the most part, there’s nothing particularly dreadful, there’s no stand out classics either. Things start badly with Richard Marx’s homage to the wonderful TV chiller Dark Knight of the Scarecrow, as the poor victim of a lynch mob baying for blood over the disappearance of a little girl. It’s a truly odd song since it never explains why everyone in town hates Marx and what, exactly, his relationship with the girl consisted of (he says she was the first person who looked at him with prejudice so of course they fall in love) but with so little extra detail, it can’t help but be construed as suspect. This isn’t a film of course, but if your song tells the story of the (implied) murder of a girl, and the subsequent man hunt, that’s pretty hefty stuff for a simple pop song. We need details, Dick. Like, did you do it? Go on, you can tell us. Your secret’s safe with us.

Richard Marx — **The blackest eyes… the devils eyes…**

Almost certainly not a serial killer, Baldy Reg offers one of his lesser known, but most over blown, tracks with The One. Full of seaside sound effects (and dolphins, natch) for no apparent reason, it’s a pretty good number, reminiscent of a slowed down version of Healing Hands. Though lines about “drunken nights in dark hotels” and “when sex and love no longer gel” conjures images in my head that big stadium ballads probably shouldn’t summon and leave a very icky taste. Reg is back later on using the sheer force of will to implant himself on George Michael’s arena destroying version of Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me, a cover so ubiquitous and successful that karaoke singers ALWAYS say “ladies and gentlemen, Mr Elton John” when they do it now.

Roy Orbison’s take on I Drove All Night may have been better being sequenced after did-he-or-didn’t-he Marx, as it too creates a rather creepy atmosphere that maybe pop should leave alone. Far better than the Cyndi Lauper original, being sung by a man it does rather sound a bit more sinister than probably intended. Released four years after his death it was originally recorded BEFORE Lauper’s version, but was eventually released after being picked up by Jeff Lynne for production fairy dust duties on an album of unreleased material. Jennifer Connelly and (slightly less excitingly) Jason Priestly appear in the video.

Some would argue the real crime on show here, as opposed to the ones I’m dreaming up when listening to these innocuous songs, was that Jimmy Nail’s Ain’t No Doubt was such a big hit. Those people are idiots. Ain’t No Doubt, which to be fair is rarely heard these days, except perhaps ironically (ffs!) is a brilliant song. Nail does sing, and sings well. It’s far better than his horrible Crocodile Shoes nonsense which would fill the charts in the subsequent years, and it’s certainly original. Dad-friendly chart bothering continues with Joe Cocker’s “90s version” of Unchain My Heart (a Ray Charles standard) which sounds suspiciously similar to the version from 1987, but was re-released to plug a greatest hits album. It’s a cracker.

Lady Gaga's new 'Geordie' look alienated a few fans — **Lady Gaga’s new ‘Geordie’ look alienated a few fans**

Less of a cracker is the only other Curtis Stigers song anyone remembers after I Wonder Why appeared on NOW 21. You’re All That Matter To Me is much better but still has a whiff of someone who’s been caught doing the do where he shouldn’t and a bunch of flowers just won’t cut it. I’m just suspicious of any man with more hair than a lion’s mane. While Stigers is pretty much forgotten now, I’m sure he’s still better remembered than Wilson Phillips’ You Won’t See Me Cry. Amazingly this was their second biggest UK hit after Hold On, but Christ knows why. The usual faultless harmonies are present and correct but it’s so bland to the point of sleepwalking. Structurally it’s identical to the more famous song, but done at a snail’s pace. I could well imagine this being popular with those American shows that have end of episode montages. It’s got a touch of the three-bottles-of-wine-down-air-punch about it, but is ultimately as cheesy as the sax solo I’d forgotten was there until I listened again just now.

This brings us to the most depressing sequence of songs on a NOW album so far, as Californian pop royalty’s long forgotten lament to lost love gives way to Crowded House’s Four Seasons In One Day and Annie Lennox’s Why. The New Zealanders’ track is one of their best, demonstrating their Rutles-like ability to craft songs which sound like White Album-era Beatles rip-offs but still retain their own unique identity (a trick shared by their near neighbours, the not-at-all-lamented Jellyfish). Lennox’s first solo track maybe caught people a bit unawares as it’s so different to her Eurythmics stuff. It’s a straight out tear-jerker, which is sadly lacking Dave Stewart’s knob twiddling and now sounds rather dated.

Following George and Reg’s duet, we get another horrendous Diana Ross track plugging the DOA album, the Force Behind the Power. Whilst When You Tell Me That You Love Me’s chart success warranted its inclusion on NOW 21, there are no such excuses for the drivel that is One Shining Moment. It may have scrambled its way to number 10, but it was the SEVENTH single from the album and there can’t have been too many casual listeners who would have complained had this not been included. Vanessa William’s gravy-flogging Save the Best Til Last demonstrates how bland pop could be at the time, and many fans of Desperate Housewives (or even the Arnie movie, Eraser) may be surprised that she had a successful career knocking out this kind of cotton wool before Hollywood beckoned.

Luckily things improve for a final flurry of dance-related pop which gives some hope for the rest of the year. En Vogue provide one of the best tracks on the compilation with My Lovin’, doing what Salt n’ Pepa should have been doing for the previous couple of years; sassy, sexy and bold without being vulgar. Christ I sound like an old man, but this is a world away from Let’s Talk About Sex. It’s got that New Jack Swing sound down to a tee (before it became the soundtrack for every boy racer cruising the seafront of my home town) and has lasted well. It’s a song of great moments (‘oooo….bop!’, ‘never gonna get it, no you’re never gonna get it’, and that wonderful doo-wop breakdown) but the whole is so well produced it was copied by so many acts over the years, including our own Eternal (of which we’ll hear more from later in the series).

Soul II Soul’s Joy is not as fondly remembered (if at all) as Jazzie B’s 1989 vintage, but it’s passable enough as a summer tune. But the real gem of NOW 22 is the final track. Incognito’s Don’t You Worry ‘Bout A Thing frankly knocked my bloody socks off. Another of those tunes that was embedded in my brain from drunken under-age sessions in the ‘fun’ pubs of my youth (I swear it was played on loops in every bar) I hadn’t realised how good a tune it was. Songs don’t get much more uplifting and joyous as this. It’s got slightly cheap production (I don’t deal well with synthesised brass) and the vocal could pack a bit more of a punch, but this is hands down the best track on CD2, if not the whole album.

Maybe it was the surprise and warm fuzzy feeling that Incognito leaves that led me to so play up NOW 22 as a masterpiece at the start of the review. It’s not a masterpiece, and CD 2 does threaten to turn into a sad sack, drunken nightmare with your Dad standing in the corner tapping his feet asking what you’re listening to. Taken as a whole NOW 22 is the best entry since at least NOW 17, maybe even 11. And that’s without a game changing genre like House, or baggy to provide it with half a side of truly classic tunes. What it’s got is a brilliant selection of great pop tunes; few classics, but mostly these are tunes that have drifted form the public consciousness, or been replaced by other tunes by the same artists. Lose Nick Berry and a few of the tear jerkers from CD 2 and you’ve got a damn good party record here. Though it seems the makers didn’t agree. NOW 22 seems to have been all but abandoned if the TV ad is anything to go by.

Two songs plugged? Both of which had already been bought by anyone who wanted them?

With a third instalment incoming for Christmas, this would be the first time for three years NOW had released three albums in a year. Maybe they were keeping the marketing money for the big Christmas push?

NOW THAT’S WHAT I CALL MUSIC 22

Release date

27th July 1992

Biggest tracks

It Only Takes a Minute – Take That

Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me – George Michael and Elton John

Lost gems

I Don’t Care – Shakespear’s Sister

Something Good – Utah Saints

Don’t Worry ‘Bout a Thing – Incognito

Forgotten tracks

Days of Pearly Spencer – Marc Almond

One Shining Moment – Diana Ross

Joy – Soul II Soul

What’s missing?

The Life of Riley – The Lightening Seeds

Midlife Crisis – Faith No More

Track listing

CD 1
Take A Chance On Me	Erasure
Finally	Ce Ce Peniston
Please Don’t Go	KWS
It Only Takes A Minute	Take That
Heartbeat	Nick Berry
Rhythm Is A Dancer	Snap!
Something Good	Utah Saints
Friday I’m In Love	The Cure
The Days Of Pearly Spencer	Marc Almond
Bell Bottomed Tear	The Beautiful South
Thunder	Prince & The New Power Generation
Even Better Than The Real Thing	U2
L.S.I.	The Shamen
Disappointed	Electronic
I Don’t Care	Shakespears Sister
Do Re Me So Far So Good	Carter USM
Everything About You	Ugly Kid Joe
On A Ragga Tip	SL2
Blue Room	The Orb
CD 2
Hazard	Richard Marx
The One	Elton John
I Drove All Night	Roy Orbison
Ain’t No Doubt	Jimmy Nail
Unchain My Heart	Joe Cocker
You’re All That Matters To Me	Curtis Stigers
You Won’t See Me Cry	Wilson Phillips
Four Seasons In One Day	Crowded House
Why?	Annie Lennox
Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me	George Michael And Elton John
One Shining Moment	Diana Ross
Save The Best For Last	Vanessa Williams
My Lovin’	En Vogue
Joy	Soul II Soul
Don’t You Worry ‘Bout A Thing	Incognito

July 1, 2014

NOW! 18 – The pompatus of love

In some ways the much-derided (by smart arses like me), and often ignored (by everyone else) re-vamp of the NOW design is nice and simple. No one was calling the albums by their full name, so why bother putting the whole title on the cover? They barely bothered with NOW 17, but retained the iconic balls for one last round. Also, the series had been going for so long now, surely everyone had given up on the numbering by now? The latest release would be just another NOW album, people will flock to buy it anyway, it doesn’t matter what number it is. We’ll keep the number, but we’ll hide it on the sleeve, like a game, or like some cryptic cigarette ad. With NOW 18, the balls were chopped off in their prime and replaced by what I can only compare to old pub wallpaper, with the word NOW! emblazoned across the front (note also the addition of the kiddie-friendly but otherwise useless exclamation mark). It’s breathtakingly dreadful. Even as a teenager I knew this was a horrible design, mainly because it looks cheap and generic. Add some band photos down the side and it’s not a million miles away from the rip-off Out Now! series Chrysalis and MCA records briefly released in the mid 80s.

This might be excusable if NOW 18 bestrode the charts like a sales statistic behemoth (whatever one of them might look like) but it doesn’t, and I’m beginning to wonder whether it’s me or the music. This blog was a direct result of me wondering if pop music got bad or did I just get old. The question I forgot to ask myself was, do we only like the pop music from when we were kids? Does every generation think their music was the best?

NOW 18 is certainly not short on number ones; side one kicks off with three in a row, and features a further three later on. The Beautiful South’s A Little Time, Steve Miller Band’s The Joker and Reg Dwight’s first UK number one, Sacrifice, represent probably the lowest key opening to a NOW album so far. Strange that they re-brand, presumably, to appeal more to a hip, happening teenage market (it’s unlikely many who bought the first NOW were still buying them by this stage), and then they choose to open the album with some of the most insipid, turgid, beige-sounding songs of the year. The Joker in particular, featured in a Levis ad, so a nailed on number one, really perplexes me now. What was it about this song (apart from its ubiquity on the TV) that made it so popular, particularly when it failed to score on its original release in the 70s? Lest we forget this is the song that stopped Deee-Lite’s Groove Is In The Heart from reaching number one. Elton John’s song is a mystery too, since Sacrifice and it’s double A side brother, the much better, Healing Hands, had BOTH been released as singles the year before, and neither had charted!

The dirge doesn’t stop there. It Must have Been Love isn’t a bad ballad (and I was sure it had been a chart-topper but it stopped at number 3), but following on from Baldy Reg (still in hat-wearing rather than bad weave mode) just demonstrates why you shouldn’t pack all your smooch songs too close together. Four songs in and NOW 18 is making me reconsider whether this blog will ever get finished. A lively horn section and a small orchestra jerk me back into action. Sadly it’s courtesy of Phil Collins’ Something Happened On The Way To Heaven, surely one of the worst song titles of all time. The song’s alright, nothing special, but I’m probably giving it an easier ride because of what came before it. Collins somehow manages to snag himself a prime location as the first artist name on the cover, a spot normally reserved for the coveted side one, track one artist.

Just as side one is starting to feel like a complete washout, NOW 18’s first forgotten gem arrives. Last year Wilson Phillips’ Hold On got itself a bit of a mini revival thanks to the awful Bridesmaids movie (a film whose best scene features a group of ladies in wedding dresses suffering explosive diarrhoea…), but listening to it again here it still generates that “I haven’t heard this for years” feeling. Given they are the daughters of various Beach Boys and Mamas and Papas, it shouldn’t surprise that they can hold a cracking pop tune. It’s ridiculously uplifting and nice in a fun way rather than being nice because it’s not dreadful.

The mood then drops immediately, but to be fair, it is for one of the best songs on the album, if not the whole of the 90s: Nothing Compares 2 U by Sinead O’Connor. Given its release date, this really should have featured on NOW 17, and one can only suspect it was held back so as not to affect sales of Ms O’Connor’s album (which sold very well, thank you very much). As breathtakingly good as the song is, it brings to a close the least inspiring side of NOW I’ve experienced thus far.

And things don’t improve on the flipside either, at least not at first. Thanks to the movie Ghost, Unchained Melody found itself vying with The Joker for the title of Biggest Selling Re-release of 1990. The Righteous Brothers were victorious, becoming the biggest selling single of the whole year into the bargain. I’ve always found this endlessly popular (and endlessly covered) song to be a bit of a slog and in the Righteous Brothers discography I’ve always preferred You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling and the less well-known Ebb Tide, both of which were released as a double A-side later in the year, but performed less well.

Now That's what I Call a Pop Group Publicity Photo. I love this a bit too much. — **Now That’s what I Call a Pop Group Publicity Photo. I love this a bit too much.**

An act whose chart career seemed to end almost at the same time as the the 80s was Belinda Carlisle. Her chart placings had been steadily declining since she burst onto the scene at the tail end of 1987, with successive singles registering lower and lower, so it was a bit of a surprise that the fifth (FIFTH!) single from her Runaway Horses album would not only be a hit, but would be her biggest hit since Heaven Is A Place on Earth. It’s not that much of a surprise though when you learn that single was the car- flogging We Want The Same Thing. Now regarded as one of her best-loved songs, the single version was a radical reworking of the version on the album, at least that’s what Wikipedia says. Not having a copy of the album to hand I can’t verify this, and the interwebs are no help either, offering only this, more famous version. It follows the template of Heaven to a tee, and is a brilliant pop single as a result. A number six finish seems a bit harsh now for such a great pop nugget, but the charts were much tougher in those days.

Sadly, the charts weren’t quite tough enough to prevent Status Quo’s Anniversary Waltz from reaching number two! Obviously conceived to try and cash in on the success of Jive Bunny the previous year, The Quo take a three-chord-wander their way through a succession of 50s rock n’ roll standards with all the enthusiasm of a pub band on a wet Tuesday night. Dreadful. Much better is INXS’ Suicide Blonde. The first new single after the massive success of the Kick album, this was always going to be a tricky prospect. Luckily, it still sounds pretty damn good, though that harmonica does have a tendency to wow and irritate in equal measure. INXS takes us into a cul-de-sac of ‘indie’ tunes, but with baggy imploding as quickly as it started, it’s left to two old hands and one doomed new act to provide our left-field choices this time around.

Public Image Limited’s (PiL) Don’t Ask Me is the big “huh?” on NOW 18. Never a big hit (and PiL were never more than critically-acclaimed rather than chart successes) it is a pretty good tune. Not as good as This Is Not A Love Song or Rise, this does strike me as filler for a NOW album. Were Virgin really trying to sell PiL to the kids of the early 90s? One band that definitely was successfully sold back to the kids was Talk Talk. Never as successful as they should have been, a greatest hits album led to a couple of top 20 hits with It’s My Life (on show here) becoming their biggest ever hit, 6 years after its original release. Such a brilliant track, it opened up the band to whole new audience (myself included) who had not been aware of them. Listened to now it’s easy to spot Talk Talk’s influence over so much of the alternative scene in the intervening years, it’s shameful it took a contract-fulfilling compilation to get them noticed in their own country.

You mean I could have my landline, broadband and TV all handled by just ONE 80's experimental rock band? — **I could have my landline, broadband and TV all handled by just ONE 80’s experimental alternative rock band?**

The La’s also never got their dues and are more widely regarded as one hit wonders. Due to its ubiquity, it may be hard to fathom that There She Goes only reached the dizzy heights of number 18 and remains their only top 40 single. Despite it being a wonderful piece of jaunty pop fluff (allegedly about heroin addiction) I’ll gladly never hear it again. If you like it, I implore you to buy their debut (and to date, only studio) album. There at least five songs on it better than this.

Side two then finishes itself off with the seemingly obligatory inclusions for Tina Turner’s Be Gentle With Me Baby (kind of like The First Cut Is The Deepest by way of Stay With Me Baby) and Robert palmer and UB40’s I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight, which is playful if not exactly good. Palmer helps a lot.

Perhaps reflecting the shift in sales to CD’s, there seems to be a definite attempt to theme the halves of the albums now, with, usually, sides three and four given over to dance music, as is the case here. This reflects the charts at the time, but it’s telling that five of the number ones on NOW 18 were on the first half, in with all the rock and pop, while the second half, almost exclusively dance-orientated features just the one, which we’ll come to in a moment. The Pet Shop Boys return with So Hard, and ‘proper’ bands get a brief look in thanks to the wonderful remix of The Cure’s already wonderful Close To Me, and the dreadful Ben Liebrand remix of Sting’s already dreadful An Englishman In New York. There’s also the jaw-droppingly simple but effective remix treatment given to Suzanne Vega’s Tom’s Diner, which still impresses.

Producer-led dance was taking over though: Fascinating Rhythm from Bass-o-matic (which I always thought was a great name for a washing machine) sounded great in 1990, but sounds awfully generic now. It’s probably no fault of the song, but the endless, pointless samples are over the top and irritate enormously. Soul II Soul’s Missing You is pretty ropey stuff compared to their 1989 vintage, despite the presence of Kym Mazelle on vocals. This should have made for a stronger vocal than Carol Wheeler, but somehow it ends up sounding even weedier. Also disappointing is Neneh Cherry’s I’ve Got You Under My Skin; a self-conscious attempt to re-write Prince’s awesome Sign o’ The Times, it fails completely. Cherry’s vocal is fine, and the subject is laudable, but it feels contrived and cheap. Blue Pearl’s Little Brother is only here in anticipation of it being as big a hit as its predecessor, Naked In The Rain. Not a chance, but it’s not as bad as I remember considering it’s a very difficult song to remember.

Please tell me this image doesn't need a caption... — **Please tell me this image doesn’t need a caption…**

Side four feels like it will be the proper party side, kicking off with Kylie’s Step Back In Time (a change in chart fortunes no doubt prompting her re-appearance, two years after I Should Be So Lucky appeared on NOW 11). Kim Appleby’s Don’t Worry is one of the best songs on NOW 18. Lyrically it’s about getting over a bloke, but everyone knew it was really about the tragic death of her sister, Mel. For a floor-filler it’s genuinely moving stuff. The public agreed pushing it to a number two slot that, sadly, subsequent releases couldn’t match. It was produced by Ken from Bros, fact fans!

Next we get two absolute jokes of tunes. Technotronic’s Megamix (I can’t believe that’s the title, but that’s how it’s credited… just Megamix) is one of the most shameless rip-offs I’ve ever heard from the music industry. Having sold the public the same song four times (only Rocking Over The Beat showed any sign of variety) they then cut all four together, along with a fifth, unidentified track, and sell it back to the kids again! It’s like KFC taking all your left over bones and bits of skin, re-heating them and then selling them back to you as “Spicy Scraps” or something. And given that all the songs are bloody identical, it couldn’t have been too much of a chore to mix them all together. One point of mild interest comes from the fact that MC Eric (pfft) is rapping a different lyric from This Beat is Technotronic. Meh.

Next comes the gobsmackingly awful Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Polka Yellow Dot Bikini from Bombalurina (aka Timmy Mallett, crazy name, crazy guy). You all know this, don’t you? Bloody awful… number one all summer… novelty crap… Well, I’m shocked to report that you are wrong. All of you. It’s actually pretty good. I don’t mean in a Pet Sounds/ The Queen Is Dead sense of the word good. We’re not talking about topping a Q magazine list of the greatest number ones of all time. I mean, it’s good in a good, fun pop song kind of way. On NOW 12 there was some discussion (in my head) of the KLF’s Timelords project and how it was a cynical attempt to ‘create’ a number one record. They succeeded. I see Bombalurina as an attempt to use the same principles but to create, not a deliberately bad record but, a good fun pop record. It samples The Incredible Bongo Band, Holly Johnson, Gil Scott Heron and that “ah yeah” heard on every record in 1990. Mallett can’t sing but holds the whole thing together. And let’s not forget, the song is not some great work of art to start with; it’s pop fluff, Mallet just updated it, retaining the fun (an aspect of pop that was slowly being eradicated) and having a massive hit into the bargain. And all power to him. The man was one of the greatest kids TV presenters ever and by all accounts is a thoroughly decent gent. I’ll not hear a word said against him.

Legend — **Utterly utterly utterly utterly brilliant**

Fun pop continues with Betty Boo’s wonderful Where Are You Baby?, which is still brilliant, and Dirty Cash from The Adventures of Stevie V. Not a favourite of mine back in 1990, listened to now (for the first time in two decades) it’s actually rather splendid. Dark, moody and still danceable, it’s just a shame about the incongruous rap that appears halfway through. It’s completely out of place, but luckily, quite short.

The whole thing finishes off with a couple of smoochers. That old Scottish rapper McHammer deconstruction of The Chi-Lites’ Have You Seen Her? deserves little mention, but Jimmy Somerville’s To Love Somebody is rather special. Giving his best vocal performance for years, it somehow manages to make white-boy reggae listenable again. Compared to UB40 this feels a lot more heartfelt and honest. But it’s another notch on the cover version/re-release bedpost, taking NOW 18’s total to a whopping 16 songs! It’s a pleasant end to the album but one which is indicative of the album’s underwhelming whole.

An underwhelming hole, yeaterday — **An underwhelming hole, yesterday**

In NOW 18’s defence (a bit) 1990 was far from a banner year for pop music, and was definitely a transitional year. Stock, Aitken and waterman were on their way out, with ‘purer’ dance music coming to the fore, mainly from Europe. It wasn’t all good, far from it, but it was to become the dominant sound of the charts and arguably still is today. It should be no surprise to learn that NOW only had two regular releases in 1990, but there were three NOW Dance releases (I may come to NOW Dance at a later date). Indie took a bath, and it would be a few more years before it would re-emerge in any meaningful way in the NOW universe. The notable absence is rap. While the charts today are happy to mix hip hop with chart regulars, the record buyers of 1990 were notably unsure, and after a few fruitful years, it too seemed to be on the wane in the mainstream.

NOW 18 is a fair reflection of its cover: shouting from the rooftops about good it is, and how big its hits are, just like the Hits Album used to, but just like Hits, it flatters to deceive. There is some absolute class on show here, but it’s suffocated by old songs, insipid ballads, poor programming and a lack of innovation. Ironic given its ‘innovative’ new look.

NOW THAT’S WHAT I CALL MUSIC 18

Release date

19^th November 1990

Biggest tracks

Nothing Compares 2 U – Sinead O’Connor

It Must have Been Love – Roxette

Unchained Melody – The Righteous Brothers

Forgotten tracks

Little Brother – Blue Pearl

Missing You – Soul II Soul ft Kym Mazelle

Hidden gems

Hold On – Wilson Phillips

Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini – Bombalurina (seriously… try it again)

To Love Somebody – Jimmy Sommervile

What’s missing

King of Wishful Thinking – Go West

Kinky Afro – Happy Mondays

The elephant on the room is the best single of 1990…

Groove is in the Heart – Deee Lite, which had sadly snapped up for The Hit Pack, the latest incarnation of the Hits series.

Track listing

Side one
A Little Time	The Beautiful South
The Joker	Steve Miller Band
Sacrifice	Elton John
It Must Have Been Love	Roxette
Something Happened On The Way To Heaven	Phil Collins
Hold On (Single Edit)	Wilson Phillips
Nothing Compares 2 U	Sinéad O’Connor

Side two
Unchained Melody	The Righteous Brothers
(We Want) The Same Thing	Belinda Carlisle
Anniversary Waltz (Part One)	Status Quo
Suicide Blonde	INXS
Don’t Ask Me	Public Image Ltd
It’s My Life	Talk Talk
There She Goes	The La’s
Be Tender With Me Baby	Tina Turner
I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight	Robert Palmer Featuring UB40

Side three
So Hard	Pet Shop Boys
Fascinating Rhythm	Bass-o-Matic
Missing You	Soul II Soul Featuring Kym Mazelle
Tom’s Diner	DNA featuring Suzanne Vega
An Englishman In New York	Sting
Close To Me	The Cure
I’ve Got You Under My Skin	Neneh Cherry
Little Brother	Blue Pearl

Side four
Step Back In Time	Kylie Minogue
Don’t Worry	Kim Appleby
Megamix	Technotronic
Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini	Bombalurina
Where Are You Baby	Betty Boo
Dirty Cash (Money Talks)	The Adventures Of Stevie V
Have You Seen Her	M C Hammer
To Love Somebody	Jimmy Somerville

August 1, 2013

NOW 12 – the compilation they forgot to bomb, come, nuclear bombs

So what does summer sound like to you? Maybe it’s some Hi-NRG dance track imported from the med by swathes of hormonal twenty-somethings. Perhaps it’s some cool, magic-hour ballad sung as the sun sets on another fleeting August romance. It may even be, at a stretch, the sound of Daleks screeching “loadsamoney” over a Gary Glitter sample. As dreadful as all those may sound, they are all present and correct on NOW 12, given a summer theme on its cover, and ALL are preferable to the dirge that opens the album.

It’s always difficult to criticise charity records, particularly ones put together for a fledgling charity, with the best intentions, and which did amazing work in raising the charity’s profile. Sadly Wet Wet Wet’s awful version of The Beatles’ With a Little help From My Friends is pretty much indicative of how lazy and dreary the 80’s pop scene was becoming. The song was part of a re-recording of the entire Sgt Pepper album, as Sgt Pepper Knew My Father, by contemporary artists, organised by the NME to raise money for the then upstart ChildLine charity. Among the other artists involved were the more NME-friendly Wedding Present, Sonic Youth, Frank Sidebottom (!) and The Fall’s amazing cover of A Day In The Life. Also included, and backing up the Wet’s single, was a heart-breaking version of She’s Leaving Home by Billy Bragg. It’s emotional, moving, relates to the cause at hand in a much more human way than the Wet’s “let’s record the song right here”, slapped together atrocity. For a number one record, and one deemed worthy of opening a NOW album, it’s probably been all but forgotten now, and good thing too. Bragg’s song would have made a nice closer to NOW 12, to bookend the whole album. Lest we forget, the single was a double-A-side, so Bragg did technically get to number one also. Good fact to remember for pub quizzes, if you are ever asked what was Billy Bragg’s only chart topper.

**Smash Hits used this joke at least twice per issue in 1988**

After this false start, NOW 12 settles into a summer groove which probably seemed very appealing and astonishingly up to date in July 1988, but now looks awfully dated and has one reaching for the ffwd button (or skip, you modern thing you) rather than the volume up. Belinda Carlisle’s Circle in the Sand has not aged well and what seemed impossibly exotic and sensual now sounds cryptic and downright odd, even if it does a good job of conjuring images of Californian beaches at dusk. A good thing too when you grew up in the mud hole of Weston-super-Mare. Maxi Priest’s Wild World has fared slightly better, probably because it’s a cover of a song from the 60s, and they generally do. It’s definitely chart friendly pop reggae, which was the turn also taken by former purveyors of the ‘real thing’, Aswad. They no doubt jumped the bandwagon on the back of the surprise success of their former single, Don’t Turn Around. The follow-up, Give A Little Love, on show here, is the kind of reggae that gives reggae a bad name.

Four tracks in, and you are already beginning to fear for the integrity of the NOW series… Has the 80s finally got so bad, that even a NOW album can’t collect together a listenable collection of Top Chart Hits? Just when you think things can’t get any worse, pop comes flying to save the day in the nick of time. Climie Fisher’s Love Changes Everything is probably the best pop song on the whole album. I never liked it as a kid (thinking it soppy and girly) but now, as far as pure pop goes, I think it’s an amazing song. And like all the best pop, you can’t really explain or define why it works so well. It’s just perfect. The fact that Climie Fisher didn’t fully capitalize on its success (cruelly kept at number two by The Pet Shop Boys’ Heart) is truly baffling. Maybe the Stock, Aitken, Waterman pop puppet conveyor belt did for them. The fact is they were better song writers and producers than SAW, but like KFC, SAW knew the secret formula (possibly heroin) which kept the kids hooked and coming back for more. We’ll come back to SAW shortly.

In a similar Adult-Orientated vein Elton John is back with, what I think is his best song of the 1980s. So of course, I Don’t Wanna Go On With You Like That was ridiculously unsuccessful, reaching only number 30. A stomping pop song with a wonderfully odd hydraulic hissing drum noise and a brilliantly camp video, I have a theory its chart chances were scuppered in its first week when on the top 40 show the CD stopped and the DJ (possibly Bruno Brookes) skipped to the next song in the charts. Given that the countdown was the only chance a of record buyers heard songs, I wonder if this had an impact on its sales the following week. Or maybe I’ve been reading too many 9/11 conspiracy theories.

The young, impressionable me that didn’t care much for Climie Fisher did, for some odd reason, adore Scritti Politti’s Oh Patti, but I’ve no idea why. Listened to now, it’s got that familiar ‘plinky plonky’ artificial sound so abundant in a multitude of bland tunes around at the same time (some present on NOW 12), so I can only suppose what raises it out of the beige, for me, is the impression I always get from Scritti Politti that they are not taking themselves terribly seriously. There is always some witty word play, and a wry grin on Green Gartside’s face in every video. You get the impression he knows exactly how ludicrous this all sounds. It’s probably not a valid excuse for blandness to admit that you know it’s bland, and that’s sort of the point, but it does make you listen with slightly different ears. Someone who needs different ears was the person who edited the NOW 12 page on Wikipedia which (until recently) stated that the version of Phil Collin’s In The Air Tonight included was listed as the ’88 remix, but was actually the original recording. Sorry, but it is most certainly the remix, featuring as it does, a pointless, and barely audible, extra drum track from the start of the track, whereas the original, as we all know from our ‘oh so witty’ chocolate ads, features no drums until the gorilla starts playing them halfway through. This song will appear later on our journey on the back of said advert.

Wrote a song about someone drowning after seeing someone drown. And is a gorilla. — **Wrote a song about watching someone drown after watching someone drown. And is a gorilla.**

After all that depression, side two puts us briefly back in the mood for a summer party promised by the cover, with the still wonderful Don’t Go, from Hothouse Flowers. Of course, the song is so impossibly upbeat it must actually be about something really sad, which it is, being about the death of a loved one. But, hey!, it’s still wonderfully jolly and its mix of harmonica, glockenspiel, accordion, Hammond organ and even bagpipes, can’t fail to put a smile on your face. Such jollity is short-lived, however, with Moz arriving to remind us that Everyday is Like Sunday. Growing up in a seaside town that they forgot to bomb, this song has always had an extra frisson for me and I still think it’s his best solo single. It doesn’t suffer from a too contemporary production that befell too much of his solo stuff (and some Smiths’ tracks too).

From the tunefully downbeat we move to the dreamy pop balladry of Danny Wilson’s Mary’s Prayer…which I hate. I know I’m invoking some pop fatwa here, but I really dislike this song. Maybe it’s the fact it rhymes “careless” with “care less” in the first verse. After that I’m done. You can’t come back from such a crass piece of song writing as that. And if it’s so great why did it have to be released three times before it was a hit? This wasn’t a song failing to find an audience; this was the record company hitting the public over the head with the record until we bought it. Which we (by which I mean you) did in our (your) droves. And, the minor success of The Second Summer of Love aside, Danny Wilson were never to trouble the charts again. Go back to football management, Danny.

Also rubbish is yet another appearance for Johnny Hates Jazz (another act that the record companies loved to batter the public into submission with), with Heart of Gold, one of the few upbeat, jazz-influenced pop songs about the sex industry. Much better is Voice of the Beehive’s Don’t Call Me Baby. Good solid pop and a track that rarely gets an airing these days. You may be surprised to discover this was not their only NOW appearance, but we’ll get to their second in due course. Hair rock finds itself demoted from a whole side to just three tracks at the end of side two, with Iron Maiden making their only NOW appearance with Can I Play with Madness?, Heart’s turgid In Dreams, and T’Pau’s I Will Be With You, again a better song than China in Your Hand.

I've been slagging them off for three albums, I could at least show a photo of them — **I’ve been slagging them off for three albums, I could at least show a photo of them**

Side two’s mix of and match of styles is probably a reflection of the fact that three and four are where the real party is at, and the first sign that NOW were starting to sequence the albums with CD’s in mind as well as the four-sided LPs and tapes. What follows is a huge dance fest of rap, soul, house, samples, Hi-NRG and enough Rolands to keep Grange Hill running for four more series (If you’re younger than about 30 that will mean nothing to you). There’s also four further number ones, the first of which is now probably one of the rarest tracks to appear on a NOW album, as it never appeared on any other album and the single was deleted.

The Timelords’ Doctorin’ the Tardis was, of course, the work of pop pranksters The KLF, before they became rich and famous under that name. Part of their attempt to completely subvert the music industry from within and bring it crashing to its knees, they created a massive number one record, made a fortune (which they allegedly set fire to in the name of art), used the song as the basis for a bestselling book, and got Gary Glitter back on Top of the Pops when such an act was just irritating rather than deeply subversive. Doctorin’ The Tardis is dreadful, but that’s not really the point. It demonstrated that the public will buy any old crap, which WAS the point. I’d forgotten that the Daleks said “Bosh, bosh, loadsamoney” though. That made me chuckle.

Chuckles of a very different kind are supplied by Sabrina’s Boys, mainly as a result of the fact the over-endowed chanteuse can’t sing for toffee. The song is now only remembered for (and was possibly only ever bought as a result of) the video which featured Sabrina “accidentally” falling out of her bikini top for a split second. No chance of such shenanigans from Bananarama, sadly. I Want You Back was the first single featuring the long forgotten Jacquie O’Sullivan. Given the shameless candy floss sound it’s a surprise to find it had actually been recorded when Siobhan Fahey was still in the group, and her vocals re-done by O’Sullivan But it’s far removed from Venus or Cruel Summer, and sounds like a rejected Kylie b-side. So of course it was their biggest hit in years.

One of the biggest hits of the year (the 5^th biggest to be precise) was, of course, Tiffany’s I Think We’re Alone Now. Not much I can say about this that you probably don’t already know except it’s a brilliant pop tune (obviously, because it’s a cover of an old 60s song) but I always prefered Debbie Gibson, who, being signed to Atlantic (a subsidiary of Warner Brothers/WEA) only appeared on Hits albums. Boo.

SAW return with Hazell Dean’s Who’s Leaving Who, which is far better than the Banana-fluff from earlier. Dean could never be a big chart star today, sadly, with her fuller figure, butch looks and songs that sound like an Essex Gloria Gaynor. She’d probably (and in fact does) have a cult following, but top ten hits? Unlikely I’m afraid, which is a shame. Who’s Leaving Who is a great hi-NRG tune hampered by unimaginative and repetitive lyrics. Very much of its time. That vibe continues with the Communards There’s More To Love, a track I was convinced was Jimmy Somerville’s first solo release. A plea for sexual tolerance, its sentiment is laudable, but musically it’s cheap and muted, reminiscent of, and far too similar too, the then re-vamped Grange Hill theme.

Much better, and the absolute diamond in the rough of NOW 12, is Jermaine Stewart’s Get Lucky. Another one of those songs that managed to slip the net of my memory, maybe it just needed more mature ears. This is brilliant, frankly, a bit dark, with a sprinkle of the Will Youngs about it, so much so that with just a few knob twiddles to beef up the tinny production, this could possibly have been a hit for Mr Pop Idol himself in the past decade. Worth a listen.

Such quality cannot last and sadly that means the anti-music provided by Glenn Medeiros must be tackled. Nothing’s Gonna Change My Love For You was one of the most incomprehensibly popular songs of the 80s; a trite ballad, with added sleazy saxophone, a boring melody, cheesy lyrics and a soft focus video on a beach. Of course the reason it was popular was because it appealed to the wet-knickered fantasies of the more impressionable 13 year old girls of 1988 (some of whom may well be reading this now, and if so, I don’t apologise for that potentially disgusting image because you bought the thing and made it popular). No doubt the class of 2013 require a bit more raunch from their surrogate boyfs, or maybe not. It’s not like I know a bloody thing about what teenage girls think. I certainly know a damn sight less now than I did when I was surrounded by them at school. Though reading some of the stuff they tweet to Harry from One Direction they are maybe a tad more insane than back in my day. But sadly, I now hate NOW 12 for the simple fact that it made me listen to this bloody song again for the first time in 25 years. Thanks a bunch.

Even the fleeting glimpse back at greatness that Side four threatens to offer is short-lived. The Theme from S-Express and Salt n’ Pepa’s Push It are, rightly, considered classics of their form, though I feel Push It’s star has faded slightly and what was once naughty and exciting to a teenager now seems a tad sleazy and unpleasant. Jesus, what has happened to me? Sleazy and unpleasant are two words that could also apply to Derek B’s Get Down, a wonderful track blighted by a final verse documenting a woman’s breasts “like basketballs” and how her downstairs lady parts were like “Niagara Falls”. Thankfully, there’s no such vulgarity on the rather wonderful Bad Young Brother which is the track that appears here. I’d forgotten how great this was, and there are little of the Americanisms that Mr Boland was accused of early in his career. This is (almost) proper London rap, and was instrumental in my teenage self’s fondness for the genre. It uses samples sparingly (the drum beat for Led Zep’s When The Levee Breaks and an “oh yeah” from prince’s Sign O’ The Times), unlike most hip hop of the time stole freely, often from the godfather of Soul, James Brown. To level the playing field somewhat (and no doubt to claw back some royalties) we get the Payback Mix. Put together by Coldcut it stitches together 23(!) different James Brown classics, most of which were being sampled left right and centre at the time, to create one, bold statement that you can steal from the best, but the best will still be the best. It’s epic.

Rose Royce gets the remix treatment too, for similar reasons no doubt, as it’s been estimated Car Wash is the single most sampled track of all time, as a result of its famous clapping intro. I doubt if many could tell this was a remix, to be frank. After such a classic, the rest of the album can only disappoint, and it drifts away on a tide of forgettable dance pop: Natalie Cole’s Pink Cadillac (a bit hit in the day, but not well-remembered now); flipping Jellybean again (Just a Mirage is actually the best of his NOW appearances, but that’s saying nowt); finally there’s Will Downing’s A Love Supreme. Meh.

NOW 12 is a massive disappointment, particularly after NOW 11 had been so great. There are few outright classics, but there’s a lot of very skippable, mediocre, bland, forgettable ‘product’. And it’s this sense of churning out crap for the kids that permeates throughout the whole affair. There’s little innovative, game-changing tunes here, just a by-the-numbers, this’ll do attitude. Maybe as NOW was going back to three albums a year this is inevitable. We saw earlier in the series that the initial decision to produce three albums a year resulted in a severe drop in quality, so the same could be true here. But also, the industry seemed to be in the wrong mind set. The record industry didn’t know what to do about sampling (from a legal point of view) or the rise in house and hip-hop (from a financial point of view), so they just tried to rip off both, badly, and shovel more mass-produced plastic pop to keep the little ‘uns quiet.

These men are not MPs. They were far more powerful than that... — **Ed Balls, Danny Baker and Rodney Marsh celebrate another hit record**

NOW 12 is certainly NOT the coolest album around, David “the Kid” Jensen…

Take Climie Fisher, S-Express and Tiffany out of the equation and all the great pop tunes are gone. Further take out the hidden gems (Don’t Go, Get Lucky, Bad Young Brother) and you’re left with a very sorry representation of the charts circa summer 1988. Going head to head with Hits 8 couldn’t have helped. The Hits albums were always a poor relation, but Hits 8 featured Aztec Camera (Somewhere in My Heart), Fairground Attraction (Perfect), Bros (I Owe You Nothing) and the wonderful Crash by The Primitives. It’s a far better collection.

NOW 12 is probably the first album in the series that I would gladly never listen to again. I’m a cynical, heart-like-a-piece-of-flint kind of guy at the best of times, not an easily swayed teenager lost in the wealth of good feeling that the onset of the school summer holidays can bring. I need more than this. I need something out of this world…

NOW THAT’S WHAT I CALL MUSIC 12

Release date

11th July 1988

Biggest tracks

I Think We’re Alone Now – Tiffany

Theme From S-Express – S-Express

Love Changes Everything – Climie Fisher

Lost gems

Get Lucky – Jermaine Stewart

Bad Young Brother – Derek B

Forgotten tracks

Don’t Go – Hothouse Flowers

With a Little Help From My Friends – Wet Wet Wet

I Don’t Wanna Go On With You Like That – Elton John

Worst Track

Nothings Gonna Change My Love For You – Glenn Medeiros

What’s missing

Heart -The Pet Shop Boys

Got To Be Certain – Kylie Minogue

Loadsamoney (Doin’ Up The House) – Harry Enfield

Track listing

Side one
With A Little Help From My Friends	Wet Wet Wet
Circle In The Sand	Belinda Carlisle
Wild World	Maxi Priest
Give A Little Love	Aswad
Love Changes (Everything)	Climie Fisher
I Don’t Wanna Go On With You Like That	Elton John
Oh Patti (Don’t Feel Sorry For Loverboy)	Scritti Politti
In The Air Tonight	Phil Collins

Side two
Don’t Go	The Hothouse Flowers
Everyday Is Like Sunday	Morrissey
Mary’s Prayer	Danny Wilson
Heart Of Gold	Johnny Hates Jazz
Don’t Call Me Baby	Voice Of The Beehive
Can I Play With Madness	Iron Maiden
These Dreams	Heart
I Will Be With You	T’Pau

Side three
Doctorin’ The Tardis	The Timelords
Boys (Summertime Love)	Sabrina
I Want You Back	Bananarama
I Think We’re Alone Now	Tiffany
Who’s Leaving Who	Hazell Dean
There’s More To Love	The Communards
Get Lucky	Jermaine Stewart
Nothing’s Gonna Change My Love For You	Glenn Medeiros

Side four
Theme From S-Express	S-Express
Push It	Salt ‘N’ Pepa
Bad Young Brother	Derek B
The Payback Mix (Part One) (Medley)	James Brown
Carwash	Rose Royce
Pink Cadillac	Natalie Cole
Just A Mirage	Jellybean Featuring Adele Bertei
A Love Supreme	Will Downing

May 21, 2013

NOW 11 – I know you gonna dig this

Every decade has its game changing year, the year that rocks the music world, the year where, if you’ll pardon the cliché, nothing will ever be the same again. It may be the birth of rock n’ roll in 1956, the flower power of 1967 or the twin-pronged disco-punk revolution of 1977. Some years just define their generation like few others.

1988 is not one of those years. It may have been the year that the charts took on a train-spotters fascination for a certain 12 year old not a million miles away from this keyboard, but it’s hardly remembered for any epoch-making musical movement. Of course there was some great music. The end of year lists may have been dominated by Public Enemy and their album It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back, but that won’t really concern us here. Neither will The Pixies’ Surfer Rosa or Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation. You see, as brilliant, ground-breaking and influential as those albums may have been, there were not even close to troubling the top 40 chart compilers. In fact the public was more interested in buying pretty much the same things they were buying the year before. Bad, Faith and Tango in the Night were all top selling albums in 1988 despite being a year old. Yet another Cliff Greatest Hits was, astonishingly, the second biggest selling album of the year! He found himself sandwiched between two young upstarts who made their names early on in 1988, but would go on to have wildly different careers: Kylie Minogue and Bros.

Despite all this, and despite me misremembering that Bros’ When Will I Be Famous was on it, NOW 11 somehow manages to be the best album in the series, at least so far. It always held a special allure for me, remaining tantalisingly out of reach, being released at Easter, when all my spare cash went towards the annual school French trip. This allure was not misguided. For sheer pop gold it is unstoppable, but it also manages to balance this with a sprinkling of alternative acts and a single themed side of cutting edge house and hip hop that is utterly wonderful, and remains possibly the finest side of music on a NOW album.

Being released in April gives the compiler the advantage of having the best of the year so far, and also hovering up the remaining cream missed at the end of the previous year. This, inevitably, leads to what football managers refer to as “a nice problem to have”. Track 1, side 1, for instance. As every mix tape enthusiast knows, the first track is the trickiest: hit them hard, fast and where it hurts. So when you have the choice between a massive number one, a couple of months old, from a hot new act, or the biggest act in the country with their (distinctly non-festive) Christmas number one, but which is a tad older, which way do you go? NOW 11 plays the Nick Hornby/High Fidelity mix-tape how-to guide to the letter with a stonking one-two that hits them hard, then takes it UP a notch.

The Pet Shop Boys’ Always On My Mind starts the party, followed by the biggest recent hit on offer, Heaven Is A Place On Earth. (The album’s third chart-topper, Kylie’s I Should Be So Lucky, will kick off side three).

**Very distracting to a 12 year old boy**

Both these tracks are fantastic. Always On My Mind is generally accepted as one of the greatest cover versions of all time, while former Go-Go, Belinda Carlisle, finally got her solo career off the ground a couple of years after it started in the US (helped in no small part by a prolific song writing team including Diane Warren and fellow Go-Go Charlotte Caffey). Heaven Is A Place on Earth is a great pop/rock song which can still make people jump out of their seats with its rousing intro, rock guitar and soppy lyrics.

Pop highs continue, moving from rock to dance with Billy Ocean’s Get Out Of My Dreams. Easily his best song, bafflingly the UK was about the only country it didn’t get to number one (peaking at number 3) despite heavy TV play thanks to its sophisticated animation-meets-real life video, months before the world had heard of Roger Rabbit. Dance continues with less success with Jermaine Stewart’s inoffensive but bland Say It Again, before I lose interest completely with Eddy Grant’s Gimme Me Hope Jo’anna. Reggae has never really been my bag (though I have a fondness for the 60’s/early 70s variety popularised by Desmond Dekker and Jimmy Cliff), but Grant is capable of better than this. Like I Don’t Wanna Dance years previously, this is repetitive to the point of irritating. I’m fully aware that the song is an anti-apartheid anthem and is well-loved. That doesn’t stop it being thoroughly annoying, but it was a massive hit across the world so what do I know. Although it only made number 7 in the UK it, maybe surprisingly, made number one in Spain and, maybe less surprisingly, Holland.

Levis get their plug with the peerless C’mon Everybody from Eddie Cochran (at a little under two minutes it’s one of the shortest songs ever in the series) before the compiling genius of Ashley Abram follows that with rockabilly rebel Morrissey’s first solo single, Suedehead. Whilst The Smiths made only one NOW appearance, Moz solo would prove to be a reliable mainstay of the series, at least until he stopped having top ten hits. Being signed to Parlophone, an EMI subsidiary, rather than The Smiths who were signed to the indie Rough Trade, probably helped. Side one closes out, rather incongruously, with a live version of Elton John’s Candle In The Wind. Now best known as “the Diana song”, and the biggest selling single of all time, it’s rather strange to hear it with its original lyrics. And blow me, if it’s not actually a little bit good. Released as a single to plug a live album recorded in Australia a couple of years before, this is a great performance of a song which, like a lot of Reg’s biggest hits, is susceptible to maudlin. Not here; this is pure emotion and, strangely, far more moving than the later Diana version. Reg’s anguished roar with the last chorus, his voice breaking in the process, is pretty stunning stuff, leaving the listener speechless. Perhaps, the most amazing thing is that it was such a big hit in 1988, when it had failed to make the top ten on its initial release in the 1970s.

Side two replicates Now 10 by turning over a side to soft metal, hard rock and a couple of tracks that didn’t comfortably sit anywhere else on the album. Like Wet Wet Wet, whose Angel Eyes is one of those really annoying songs that you want to hate for being so bloody smug and pleased with itself, but you can’t help but smile when you hear it. It does serve the purpose of being a whole lot better than Johnny Hates Jazz though, who follow the Wets with the uncompromisingly insipid Turn Back The Clock. When people criticise 80s music, Johnny Hates Jazz are what they are talking about. It smells like artificial sweetener, tastes like supermarket own brand Angel Delight, it’s wearing suede brogues and has a Filofax stuffed into the pocket of its black raincoat. And it makes me hate music.

That fact that T’Pau swoop in to ensure your ears won’t be lopped off by the nearest sharp (or blunt for that matter) object somehow makes Johnny Hates Jazz even worse. To be fair to Valentine, it’s a bit of a corker, which sadly sits in the long shadow cast by China In Your Hand. It does confirm my belief that the more famous track may actually be the worst single they released (with the exception of the makes-a-bit-of-sick-in-my-mouth Sex Talk). Any woman who has ever done the bottle of wine on your own, Bridget Jones, All By Myself, sing-a-long, you are really missing a trick with this one. Valentine really is the song of unrequited, woe is me, pissed up self-loathing. Sadly, even being released around the same time as the most depressing ‘holiday’ of the year couldn’t shove it any further up the charts than number 9. And just three singles in, it would be their last top 10 hit.

**OK, you can have a drink, but for God’s sake stay off twitter, Carol!**

Hot in the City continued Billy Idol’s late 80s revival (all calculated to coincide with the release of a Greatest Hits package, hoovered up by the public, and me, a few months later). Like his previous hit, and NOW appearance, Mony, Mony, Hot in the City had originally been recorded in the early 80s and failed to make much of an impression, and this was a re-recorded version. Or was it? I’ve discovered, over the years, that it’s a song that exists in many incarnations, and unpicking the history is a bit fraught. The original, single version from 1982 is the most commonly heard. It’s the one with the windy fade-in intro, with the sexy backing singers crooning “stranger, stranger”. It also features Idol’s bellow of “New York!” later in the song. In 1985, the ‘Exterminator Mix’ of the track appeared on a compilation album entitled Vital Idol, featuring selected songs and remixes from his early work, presumably to cash in on his new success with Rebel Yell and a re-released White Wedding. This version is almost 2 minutes longer, features a much longer intro, each instrument coming separately, has an increased and thoroughly re-worked instrumental break, and loses the “New York!” in favour of a clumsy record scratch effect. This version has a clear end rather than fading out. The version released in 1988, as evidenced by this rather risqué video, which was allegedly banned by MTV, features a cut down version of this remix, reinstates the “New York!”, and has the abrupt ending. Now it gets more complicated: the version on NOW 11 includes this same cut down remix BUT has the scratch effect rather than the “New York!”, and fades out as per the original recording! I’ve not found this version anywhere else. Every other compilation version I’ve found, on Idol’s own compilations and on loads of 80s compilations, all use the original 1982 version, even if they sometimes bill it as the ’88 (and sometimes ’87!) remix. The version on NOW 11 appears to be utterly unique.

As an alternative to all that train-spottery, there follow two rather good, if rather forgotten tracks, at least by the greater public. Sinead O’Connor is probably thought of as a bit of one hit wonder whose career was kept going by making controversial comments about the Catholic church and the treatment of women. People who think this may be right and it is a fact that she only had one BIG hit (which we will of course address in good time) but she was also far more talented than a mere Prince cover version gave her credit for. Mandinka, her first top 40 hit, would have caused minor ripples throughout polite middle-class living rooms had she appeared on Top of the Pops. In my house it was the sight of a shaven-headed woman, screaming out of her Doc Martens on The Chart Show that caused a fluster and bluster not seen since the days of Boy George sashaying across the nations TV’s in 1982. Mandinka is a storming way to introduce yourself to the public: angry, enigmatic, tuneful, and emotional. Everything good pop should be, but a bit shoutier.

The Mission would no doubt hate to be called ‘good pop’, but when your lead singer used to be in Dead or Alive, and you would later record a cover of Blondie’s Atomic, maybe you do have a sense of humour. I can’t imagine Wayne Hussey and Pete Burns in the same room, let alone the same band! Tower of Strength will be unfamiliar to many outside the goth and crusty communities (or people who like to hang around record shops on a Saturday afternoons) and that’s understandable. We’re not in Def Leppard territory here; this is the bridge between Led Zeppelin and The Sisters of Mercy. Handily, not being a huge fan of either, I love Tower of Strength’s overblown theatrics (provided by Led Zep’s own John Paul Jones on production knob-twiddling duties) and rate this as The Mission’s best song Obviously the super dedicated fans would no doubt swoon in horror at such a suggestion, like The Cure fans who hate anyone who says The Love Cats is their best song, because it’s so accessible and popular, and you should go and listen to A Forest or Killing An Arab, you ‘pop’ fan. Alternative music fans do have a tendency to take themselves rather too seriously.

Just like Whitesnake, whose tight leather trousers you can smell coming a mile away. You won’t remember Give Me All Your Love, and you’ll be grateful you don’t, but in case you care, it sounds exactly like Fool For Your Lovin’ from 1980, but worse. Now you’ve got that song in your head instead. Sorry.

I swear, you’ll never be so pleased to hear I Should Be So Lucky as you will be listening to NOW 11. I’m fully aware that most people still hate this song. I hated it when I was the audience for it. I was wrong, and everybody else who still hates it is wrong. It’s one of the most perfect pop records of all time and if you disagree with me there’s a comments section at the bottom of this page. But really you shouldn’t be reading this blog, as you clearly hate pop music.

The second of three Stock, Aitken, Waterman tunes on side three is Mel and Kim’s That’s The Way It Is. Not a patch on Respectable, which was snagged by Hits 6 the previous year, this is pretty forgettable, but the pair are still fun enough to make it listenable. Much better is Bananarama’s I Can’t Help It later on side three. For some reason I can’t my finger on, this is right up there with Venus and Only Your Love as my favourite Nanas song. SAW’s influence is really showing now, and would eventually lead to this being Siobhan Fahey’s final Nana appearance, but it’s much ballsier and sexier than the tracks given to Kylie (or what was to come from the girls) and the video is an absolute scorcher too! It’s a great track, woefully underappreciated at the time, and probably still is.

Between the SAW tracks there’s Come Into My Life, by Joyce Sims. A massive hit at the time, it now sounds like a brasher, shoutier version of Sade. I was surprised to discover it was produced by Mantronix, who were a couple of years away from their own chart success, though Got To Have Your Love would prove far more long-lasting than this New York disco crap. And there’s more where that came from too thanks to the return of the never-popular Jellybean. Who Found Who is as massively bland as his track on NOW 10, which I can’t even remember the name of, and really can’t be bothered to back and look up. Seriously, does ANYONE reading this have ANYTHING by Jellybean in their record collection?

Jellybean... insert your own joke here — **Look, I’m sorry, but I’ve STILL got no idea who you are**

I’ll actually be more surprised if you have anything by Dollar, early 80s “are they/aren’t they” duo (they were… for a bit) who had only mild success. Oddly, they reformed towards the end of the decade, recorded Oh L’Amour, a flop when released as Erasure’s first single, and found themselves back in the top 10, before disappearing as quickly as they had reappeared. On paper the song choice is sound, but David van Day’s voice pales in comparison to Andy Bell’s, and musically it’s identical to the earlier version. Pointless. Van day would later gain infamy by dumping a girlfriend live on TV’s The Wright Stuff, and advertising insurance. Classy fella.

Speaking of classy, Vanessa Paradis provides the first non-English hit on a NOW album. Joe le Taxi is pretty boring and dreary, but that was hardly the point. The point was that Mme Paradis was French, sexy and…um…14. In today’s climate it all seems a bit unsavoury, and, to be fair, it was. Thank goodness she went on to continued success as an adult. She’ll return later in our journey.

Side three finishes with one of the more troubling aspects of the NOW series: the comedy record. Thankfully rare, sadly there are still enough of them dotted throughout the albums to make their presence more than known. The Stutter Rap is skin-crawlingly bad, but, thanks to main man Tony Hawks (not the skateboarder) it’s also witty, clever and astonishingly well produced. It’s an enigma, wrapped in a mystery. The vocals are a wonderful parody of The Beastie Boys, the problem being that they, of course, were themselves a parody anyway. It’s the musical equivalent of Scary Movie spoofing Scream; you’re spoofing a spoof! Despite this, Morris Minor and the Majors snagged a top ten hit and a Saturday night kids show to boot. Sadly, the infinitely superior follow-up, This Is The Chorus (a note perfect spoof of SAW, which featured Queen’s John Deacon as Rick Astley in the video) failed to make the top 40. I can only assume that SAW fans didn’t buy it because it was taking the piss, and everyone else didn’t buy it because it sounded like a SAW track. There’s no justice like pop justice.

Despite this ludicrous oversight by the record buying public, they did somehow manage to buy enough good records to make side four of NOW 11 an absolute joy from start to finish. As we’ve seen on previous editions, themed sides are rarely a success, often resorting to one or two tracks which seem tacked on, or crow barred into the theme, and don’t quite fit. Not so here. Say kids, what time is it…?

Bomb the Bass, Coldcut and Beatmasters are the names that leap from the track listing, of course. Beat Dis still stands proudly alongside Pump Up The Volume as a genre-defining track. Amazing considering Tim Simenon created it, allegedly, in his bedroom for £500. Doctorin’ the House would launch the career of Yazz (though I’m still baffled as to who exactly the Plastic Population were) and was an amazing way for the pioneering Coldcut DJs to launch themselves at the public at large. Their contemporaries, the Beatmasters, would join them on an attack on the charts over the next 18 months, drafting in, and making stars of, a succession of guest vocalists including Lisa Stansfield and Betty Boo. For Rok Da House Beatmasters employed London female rap duo The Cookie Crew. Sassy, ballsy and not a little aggressive (like most of their male counterparts) they blazed a trail for successful female rappers in the UK (Salt n’ Pepa were just about to, finally, have a hit with Push It), but would never again reach the heights of the top five. Still sounds great today.

Between Coldcut and Beatmasters are two one off tracks which, while still good, do betray their vintage and have a slight whiff of bandwagon-jumping about them. Krush’s House Arrest was another huge top five hit and proved that this House music malarkey was probably here to stay. One half of the production team behind the track would go on to form Moloko in the late 90s, fact fans. Jack n’ Chill’s The Jack That House Built reminds me of the Italian film producers of the 70s and early 80s (bear with me) that would rip off anything that was commercial and just put familiar words into the titles, like Zombie Holocaust or Alien Contamination. And like both those films, The Jack That House Built is perfectly good entertainment. I’ve been unable to find out anything about Jack n’ Chill though, which simply adds to the fly-by-night nature of the exercise and suggests the sharks were probably moving in on the House scene already.

The greatest side of music in NOW history closes with two excellent, if unexpected, tracks from artists not normally associated with this kind of thing, one of whom manages to pull off a shameless cash-in with their dignity intact. First up is Two Men, A Drum Machine and a Trumpet (surely the best band name on a NOW album ever) the two men in question being Fine Young Cannibals without Roland Gift, who was off trying to be an actor at the time. They were no strangers to dance music and knob twiddling really, so it’s no surprise that Tired of Getting Pushed Around is so good. What is surprising is that it wasn’t more successful, only reaching number 18 when, as we’ve seen, just about any track featuring a House beat and samples would at least go top ten. It could, possibly, be explained by the fact that Tired of Getting Pushed Around is far more laid back, and stripped back, than its contemporaries. Whereas most tracks were layering sample upon sample, often to the point of incoherence (like mixing all your plasticine together to make one amorphous lump, a shade of brown not normally found in nature), Tired… relies on a couple of film dialogue snippets, a guitar thrash, and a light jazz trumpet and bass accompaniment. It’s refreshing, like an after-dinner mint.

**Obvious illustration of the point made in the previous paragraph**

The coffee course is supplied by Climie Fisher, a pair of successful, and highly respected, songwriters and session musicians who decided they fancied a bit of this fame thing for themselves. They didn’t really look the part, but in the 80s that didn’t really matter. What did matter were the tunes, and by golly they had them coming out of their arses. Rise to the Occasion was originally a slightly bland ballad until some bright spark decided to perk it up a bit with some samples and a House beat. Released as the “Hip Hop remix” (though not credited as such on NOW 11) it quickly found its way into the top ten. Mercenary? Cunning? Cynical? Thrice, yes. Great pop? Undoubtedly. And it was thanks to the success of such a scheming piece of work that would ultimately lead to their finest hour, but you’ll have to wait until NOW 12 for that.

NOW 11, side four, still sounds brilliant all the way through, and even today I think it still stands as the series finest achievement. But of course I’m biased. This was one of the defining periods of my musical education where I was absorbing absolutely everything that crossed my path. Combined with the fact that I know little of the NOW series beyond 1990 and maybe you could argue I’m jumping the gun on that assumption. And you may be right.

I don’t think I’ll find a quarter of a NOW album where every song is still listenable, thrilling and generates that feeling that great, pure pop can create. But I hope I do, because otherwise the remaining 70 odd albums are going to be one hell of a chore.

NOW THAT’S WHAT I CALL MUSIC 11

Release date

21st March 1988

Biggest tracks

Always on My Mind – The Pet Shop Boys

Heaven Is A Place On Earth – Belinda Carlisle

I Should Be So Lucky – Kylie Minogue

Beat Dis – Bomb the Bass

Lost gems

Tired of Getting Pushed Around – Two Men, A Drum Machine and a Trumpet

I Can’t Help It – Bananarama

Forgotten tracks

Mandinka – Sinead o’Connor

Tower of Strength – The Mission

Rise to the Occasion – Climie Fisher

Worst Track

Give Me All Your Love – Whitesnake

What’s missing

Got My Mind Set On You – George Harrison

There Ain’t Nothing Like Shaggin – Tams

Track listing

Side one
Always On My Mind	Pet Shop Boys
Heaven Is A Place On Earth	Belinda Carlisle
Get Outta My Dreams, Get Into My Car	Billy Ocean
Say It Again	Jermaine Stewart
Gimme Hope Jo’Anna	Eddy Grant
C’mon Everybody	Eddie Cochran
Suedehead	Morrissey
Candle In The Wind	Elton John

Side two
Angel Eyes (Home And Away)	Wet Wet Wet
Turn Back The Clock	Johnny Hates Jazz
Valentine	T’Pau
Hot In The City	Billy Idol
Mandinka	Sinéad O’Connor
Tower Of Strength	The Mission
Give Me All Your Love	Whitesnake

Side three
I Should Be So Lucky	Kylie Minogue
That’s The Way It Is (7” Version)	Mel & Kim
Come Into My Life	Joyce Sims
Who Found Who	Jellybean featuring Elisa Fiorillo
I Can’t Help It	Bananarama
Oh L’Amour	Dollar
Joe Le Taxi	Vanessa Paradis
Stutter Rap (No Sleep Till Bedtime)	Morris Minor & The Majors

Side four
Beat Dis	Bomb The Bass
Doctorin’ The House	Coldcut featuring Yazz & The Plastic Population
House Arrest	Krush
The Jack That House Built	Jack N Chill
Rock Da House	The Beatmasters featuring Cookie Crew
I’m Tired Of Getting Pushed Around	Two Men A Drum Machine & A Trumpet
Rise To The Occasion	Climie Fisher

May 12, 2013

Now That’s What I Call Music 6 – Re-election day

Christmas 1985 would see NOW reclaim its crown, in some style. Not only did NOW 6 indicate a return to form, but they also had the trump card of the Now Christmas Album. I’ll discuss the Christmas album (and its various incarnations) elsewhere, but it was a cunning one-two, releasing both within a fortnight of each other, that Hits just didn’t see coming. Released the same day as Hits 3, NOW 6 won out. It had a stronger line-up, better design, and the now all-important brand loyalty. What better way is there is to make people feel all warm and fuzzy about your brand than selling them a lovely, festive collection of classic Christmas hits?

Despite being released earlier, The Christmas Album didn’t hit the top until the week before Christmas, being kept off by NOW 6, but also by another pretender to the throne: Telstar’s Greatest Hits of 1985. Telstar had been set up a few years previously, and specialised in compilation albums, usually accompanied by a heavy TV marketing campaign. The Greatest Hits of… series would continue into the 90s, but were never a serious threat to NOW as with only one release a year, most of the tracks would have already featured on either of the competing series’ offerings, and those that were exclusive to the album would rarely warrant an additional purchase. 1985’s release did feature Paul Hardcastle’s 19, a rare number one which neither NOW or Hits had included; however it also featured several songs from 1984 including Everything She Wants, Ghostbusters and Do They Know It’s Christmas. It managed a solitary week at number one before the big boys moved back in, NOW 6 and NOW The Christmas Album racking up 6 consecutive weeks between them.

Speaking of number 1’s, NOW 6 manages to include four, the most since NOW 2, whereas Hits 3 managed only two, one of which, Frankie, had already appeared on NOW 5. (The other was Jennifer Rush’s The Power of Love. Hits 3 also featured Huey Lewis and The News’ The Power of Love, but not Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s The Power of Love. 1985 was a confusing year for pop fans.) Things like that don’t go unnoticed. At least not by people like me.

With the pig now sent to the slaughterhouse, a new team brought a more sophisticated look to the album. For this, and the next 10 releases, NOW’s look and feel would be more commonly seen on contemporary cigarette ads than the brash, strutting, look of the Hits series. The NOW! Logo would find itself in various strange locations and scenarios, but never appear out of place. Here it appears as a label inside a leather jacket (this may not be immediately apparent, but the TV ad makes it explicit). It’s a nice idea, and very understated compared to its predecessors. No more Max Headroom-a-like, eye-straining, gut-wrenching, lasers and stripes and whatnot. Simple, clean, efficient. Much like the content, which, after an astonishingly good start, stumbles a bit, before regaining its composure to throw up a few pleasant surprises. As the tagline on the back exclaims: Feel the quality.

You really can’t argue with side one, at least until the final two tracks. Kicking off with Queen’s One Vision, through Nik Kershaw’s first flop single (but also probably his best), the Maria McKee-penned A Good Heart, the absolutely stunning There Must be An Angel (for me, the best song on a NOW album so far) and Simple Minds perennial Alive and Kicking, it’s about as good a start as a NOW Album has ever had. The final two tracks hint at the mood change to come (Empty Rooms and Lavender both being examples of the overwrought balladry far too popular with rock acts of the time; too well-made to be labelled as ‘soft rock’ they don’t particularly warrant multiple listens unless you’ve got a bottle of whiskey and some paracetamol to hand). The Bryan Adams and Tina Turner collaboration which straddles the gap between the good and the dreary, manages to be both at the same time, featuring a cracking opening riff which dissolves into a deathly dull, well, Bryan Adams song, which just happens to have Tina Turner on it. She pops up again on side two, singing about her thunderdomes.

Dreariness continues on side two where Phil Collins, Cliff Richard and Elton John battle it out for the prize of most insipid ballad ever on a NOW album, while Kate Bush valiantly delivers Running Up That Hill amid the gloom. Level 42 seems a welcome respite in the midst of this, and Something About You stands up pretty well.

Side three is a very odd assortment. Whilst it features two number ones (If I Was, and UB40, in collaboration with Chrissie Hynde on I Got You Babe), it’s also possibly, the worst charting side of tracks so far. Of the rest, only one made the top ten. The fact that that one track is Arcadia’s none-more-80s Election Day probably has more to with the fact that they were a side project for Duran Duran than for the fact that it’s a good song. It’s not. It’s stupid, nonsensical, pretentious claptrap which, to make matters worse, features an uncredited cameo from Grace Jones. But, dammit, it’s got something I can’t put my finger on.

Eighties, by day we run, by night we dance! — **Eighties; by day we run, by night we dance!**

Of the remaining 5 tracks, Lost Weekend was the only one to make the top 20; Uncle Sam and Cities in Dust both stalled at 21, The Communards rather lovely, and under-valued, You Are My World only hit 30 (though their time would come soon enough), and the Fine Young Cannibals make history as Blue is he first single to feature on a NOW Album not to make the top 40. The anti-Tory declamation is no Ghost Town, but it’s a pretty good tune, to be fair, and puzzling that it did so poorly after the top ten success of Johnny Come Home (this may be explained by it appearing, in a different version, on the b-side of that single). The inclusion of Lloyd Cole and a rare appearance for Siouxsie suggests the compilers were still keen to get some exposure for less mainstream acts, but it always feels more like tokenism than because the artists warrant inclusion on the basis on chart performance.

Incidentally, going back to UB40, as on NOW 1, they make two appearances, with the dreary, repetitive Don’t Break My Heart fitting in right at home on side two. And is just me, or does Ali Campbell sound just like Jim Davidson doing his horrible Chalky voice on I Got You Babe?

Even just using a picture of Jim Davidson for witty illustrative purposes made me sick a little in my mouth, so here's a kitten instead. — **Even just using a picture of Jim Davidson for witty illustrative purposes made me sick a little in my mouth, so here’s a kitten instead.**

The ghettoised dance side finds itself closing out the album this time, instead of the more usual maudlin closing numbers, and things start off with Paul Hardcastle’s ridiculous For the Money. This was one of the tunes that I had no recollection of until I heard it again, and suddenly it all came flooding back. A truly ‘of its day’ affair, it combines sub-Herbie Hancock synth twiddling with Laurence Olivier talking about ‘money being the root of all evil’, while Bob Hoskins tries to convince another cock-er-nee geezah (Hardcastle himself!) to pull a blag with him, with the persuasive line “Just fink abaht the moneee!” and “it’s the life o’ luxury!” over and over and over again. It’s a bit like an 80s version of Sexy Beast, with Hoskins in the Ben Kingsley role, but slightly less frightening, particularly with his clichéd “just don’t mess it up or the only place you’ll be gahn is dahn the Scrubs!”. All this, plus two badly accented bit part actors pretending to be 1920’s Chicago gangsters (one of whom turned out to be Hollywood bit part actor Ed O’Ross; he dies in nearly every 80s action movie), and some swooning backing singers making the whole thing sound more like one of the song parodies from Alexei Sayle’s Stuff. Though it’s worth it for the sound of Lord Larry having his voice scratched.

Jan Hammer’s Miami Vice Theme is the perfect antidote to all that nonsense, being a brilliant example of how electronic music (still sniffed at in most quarters even in 1985) can be evocative, exciting and somehow timeless too. Three things that most certainly DON’T apply to Maria Vidal’s Body Rock, a shameless rip-off of Madonna’s Borderline (though also oddly sounding like Open Your Heart, six months before its release), or Baltimora’s horrible Tarzan Boy.

The long-forgotten Mai Tai make a return with another nice, fun, dance track. Heart and Soul is another of those songs that you know you’ve heard countless times before but can never remember its title or who it’s by. It seems odd they only had the two hits (this and History, which featured on NOW 5), as they were certainly no worse than some comparable acts who achieved more success at the time. Like Cameo. Now I like Word Up as much as the next person, but there’s something extremely icky about Single Life. From the opening, which is EXACTLY the same as Word Up, this tells the story of some guy, who you know has a penthouse apartment with black chrome shelves, metal chairs and a Playboy bunny quilt cover. Hearing the giant codpiece singing about the single life just creeps me out, and like the aural equivalent of rohypnol, it’s liable to send you to sleep and when you wake up you’ll feel utterly violated.

This brings us disgustingly onto Mated, a second duet betweenJaki Graham and David Grant. Even as a ten-year old, this title seemed wrong, just a bit too animalistic for what sounds like a sickly, sweet love song about finding your soul-mate. It’s not my cup of tea at all, and hearing them croon “We are mated” at each other just turns my stomach. I’d argue it’s one of the least romantic romantic songs ever, and a disappointing end to the album.

An interesting design choice was taken on the inside this time, in a rare case of NOW taking a nod from Hits. On the gatefold, the blurbs are now accompanied by album covers rather than the standard star photos, at least in most cases. Level 42 miss out, presumably, because the artwork for World Machine wasn’t ready, though the album is mentioned, but poor old Mai tai’s album had been out since June, and since it only got to number 91 they probably could have done with having it plugged better than it is here!

The rear cover also, teasingly, says “You’ve heard the record, now buy the book”… The book? Now That’s What I Call Music Mastermind, a quiz book compiled by Ashley Abram himself, was available at the time for “a steal at £2.99”. A scurry round the interwebs finds there only appears to be two copies left in existence, both going for over £60! I did find a picture of the cover though, which in a rare case of branding inconsistency, still features the pig. It also looks incredibly cheap compared to the albums.

So, NOW was back on top. For the next couple of years, an uneasy cold war between the two compilation behemoths would see them only releasing one album each during the year (Hits at Easter, NOW in the summer) with both going head-to-head at Christmas. It was their biggest, most lucrative, time of the year so neither was willing to yield that, and there was always the possibility that a strong line-up could see Hits go back on top. In a years’ time they would get the chance, but until then NOW had seven months to prepare its next chart attack.

NOW THAT’S WHAT I CALL MUSIC 6

Release date

25th November 1985

Biggest tracks

One Vision – Queen

Alive and Kicking – Simple Minds

There Must be An Angel (Playing with my Heart) – Eurythmics

Lost gems

When a Heart Beats – Nik Kershaw

You Are My World – The Communards

Forgotten tracks

Blue – Fine Young Cannibals

She’s So Beautiful – Cliff Richard

Just For Money – Paul Hardcastle

Single Life – Cameo

What’s missing

Money for Nothing – Dire Straits

White Wedding – Billy Idol

Dancing in the Street – David Bowie and Mick Jagger

(A case could also be made for West End Girls, by The Pet Shop Boys, as it does appear on the accompanying video, but to be fair to the compilers, it only charted at number the week that NOW 6 was released, and, as a first single, there was no indication of what a huge hit it would be, except for the fact that it was brilliant.)

Track listing

Side One
One Vision	Queen
When A Heart Beats	Nik Kershaw
A Good Heart	Feargal Sharkey
There Must Be An Angel (Playing With My Heart)	Eurythmics
Alive And Kicking	Simple Minds
It’s Only Love (Live)	Tina Turner With Bryan Adams
Empty Rooms	Gary Moore
Lavender	Marillion

Side Two
Nikita	Elton John
Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God)	Kate Bush
Something About You	Level 42
We Don’t Need Another Hero (Thunderdome)	Tina Turner
Don’t Break My Heart	UB40
Separate Lives	Phil Collins & Marilyn Martin
She’s So Beautiful	Cliff Richard

Side Three
Election Day	Arcadia
I Got You Babe	UB40 Featuring Chrissie Hynde
Blue	Fine Young Cannibals
If I Was	Midge Ure
Cities In Dust	Siouxsie & The Banshees
Uncle Sam	Madness
Lost Weekend	Lloyd Cole & The Commotions
You Are My World	The Communards

Side Four
Just For Money	Paul Hardcastle
Miami Vice Theme	Jan Hammer
Body Rock	Maria Vidal
Tarzan Boy (Original Version)	Baltimora
Body And Soul	Mai Tai
Single Life	Cameo
Mated	David Grant & Jaki Graham

Video version

The video version contained five tracks not featured on the main album (marked with *)

Queen – One Vision

Fergal Sharkey – A Good Heart

Kate Bush – Running Up that Hill (A Deal With God)

UB40 featuring Chrissie Hynde – I Got You Babe

Madness – Uncle Sam

Marillion – Lavender

Bryan Adams & Tina Turner – It’s Only Love

Pet Shop Boys – West End Girls*

Thompson Twins – King for a Day*

Simple Minds – Alive and Kicking

Depeche Mode – It’s Called A Heart*

David Grant And Jaki Graham – Mated

Gary Moore – Empty Rooms

The Cult – Revolution*

Baltimora – Tarzan Boy

Ian Dury – Profoundly In Love With Pandora*

Cliff Richard – She’s So Beautiful

UB40 – Don’t Break My Heart

Arcadia – Election Day

March 31, 2013

Now That’s What I Call Music 4 – Hello, is it twee you’re looking for?

Whilst NOW 3 may have given us the wonderful NOW! balls logo, it also gave us another, less welcome taste of 80s design: wacky, wavy neon lines. So 80s, so Max Headroom, so The Roxy, so ‘bank advert trying to ensnare teenagers paper round money when they should be spending it on compilations of top chart hits’. That rather ghastly theme continues on the cover design of NOW 4, and no doubt onto the bed linen of many teenagers who bought the thing. NOW 4 adopts a slightly less obvious, but more vomit inducing, green background, over its predecessors’ standard black background. Sadly, vomit-inducing is the order of the day for 1984’s NOW! swansong, released just in time for the Christmas, last minute panic present buying market.

From Boy George’s local chicken shop promotional outfit on the cover and the first stirrings of Arthur Baker’s utterly dreadful “Special Dance Mix” of Paul ‘Macca’ McCartney’s No More Lovely Nights, you get the distinct feeling this is not going to be a particularly comfortable ride. And to make matters worse, the only number one on offer here is Lionel Ritchie’s plasticine head singing the turgid Hello. Incidentally, Lionel, no, it most certainly not you that we were looking for.

Most of the good stuff on show here are songs that are usually remembered for their 80s kitsch value, rather than an inherent ‘greatness’. A good example of this is displayed early on side one with the appearances of Together in Electric Dreams and Never Ending Story, two theme songs from mildly successful films (even if Electric Dreams is now long forgotten, that whole boy-meets-computer rom-com sub-genre never did catch on). To be fair, Electric Dreams is a much better song than Limahl’s last hit, and deserves more credit. Both Phil Oakley and Giorgio Morodor are too talented to be dismissed, it’s just unfortunate that so much of their art is based around 80s synthesisers, an area which doesn’t travel well.

Staying with the synthesisers, Oakey’s former cohorts Heaven 17 (born from an early incarnation of Human League) also appear with the now forgotten Sunset Now. The Thompson Twins make their ubiquitous appearance with Doctor, Doctor, a song released a whopping ten months before NOW 4, and before the band’s track that had appeared on NOW 3. The Twins current release, Sister of Mercy, appears to have been snagged by the incoming Hits Album, so NOW! must have figured an old Thompson Twins track was better than none at all (tellingly, a glimpse of the video appears in the TV advert, but the song doesn’t).

This raises the question of what impact The Hits Album was going to have on NOW!, particularly this edition. I’ll cover Hits in more detail in another post, but in short the creation of the rival series would see the end of NOW! being able to feature artists from the CBS and WEA labels, two of the biggest labels in the world, and home to such legends as Michael Jackson, Madonna, Prince, Wham and soon George Michael. It seems almost a massive two fingers to Hits that Jacko appears here, his only NOW! showing, with a track recorded over a decade earlier. Part of a series of ‘lost tracks’ found in a dusty vault at his old label, Motown, some bright spark decided to dust them off, remix them to sound more 80s and release the album in the wake of the phenomenal success of Jacko’s Thriller album. The album did OK, but hardly matched its big brother, probably as the public started to smell a rat that this wasn’t an official release. The single Farewell My Summer Love is a lyrically suspect tale of meeting a girl who’s on summer holiday and maybe meeting her again next year when school is through, or some such nonsense. Compared to Thriller or Billie Jean, this is pretty ropey stuff, but somehow scraped into the top 10. NOW! were obviously not going to turn down the opportunity to have the world’s biggest artist appear, no matter how crap the material, as it was the only chance they were going to get.

Still, despite losing a couple of their more reliable fillers, NOW! still had a couple of aces up its sleeve: EMI still had Duran Duran, the biggest band in the world, who were two singles away from splitting up, and Virgin had the unstoppable Culture Club, here showcasing the song that Boy George described as a ‘stupid’ and that probably killed his career. Oops. Despite reaching number 2, The War Song would be Culture Club’s last big hit until their late 90s reunion. (And to add insult to injury, it was kept off the top by Stevie Wonder’s I Just Called To Say I Love You and seems to have been the inspiration for the ITV Schools music which would appear later in the decade.)

Speaking of stupid songs, there’s a fair few on show here: there’s Elton John’s deeply annoying Passengers, the Eurythmics over-produced, and near unlistenable mess Sexcrime (1984) and Julian Lennon’s irritating Too late for Goodbyes, yet another example of the trend for horrible white boy reggae pop fusion which blighted the charts for far too long during the decade. Culture Club and maybe (maybe!) The Police were the only acts who ever managed to pull it off successfully.

At least side three looks like it might rock things up a bit. Queen appear for the third album in succession, and are backed up by The Quo, Big Country and the first appearance from a little Irish band who were pulling up trees in America, U2. It would not be their last. Yes, it might all be a bit stonewashed jeans and white t-shirt (or leather vest in U2’s case) but the guitar-fest is a bit of respite from the endless bleeps and bloops of the first two sides. It’s short-lived.

808 — **“Without you I’m nothing”, said the Now albums of the 80s**

Fergal Sharkey’s silly Listen to Your Father bridges the gap between axe-wielding and a return to the 808s, with OMD’s ludicrous Tesla Girls. But before the album disappears into the vacuum of nothingness that is Nik Kershaw’s dreary Human Racing there is a treat, supplied by the lovely Kim Wilde. Not a massive hit, The Second Time is a bit of a corker, and not a little bit rude. Or rather, suggestive. It’s pretty bloody obvious what Ms Wilde is singing about, and most blokes at the time would find it hard to resist a line like “Look in the mirrors and see the heat of something new, Why don’t we do it, just do it once again”. Oh my. I think it’s better than Kids in America.

The first track on Side Four is interesting for two reasons. Firstly, Ray Parker Jr’s Ghostbusters not only appears here, but was also on The Hits Album. Arista, the label concerned (and also home to The Thompson Twins), were not tied to any of the major’s responsible for the compilation albums, so were technically free to license their tracks to whomever they saw fit. The fact that Ghostbusters appears on both would suggest a desire from both camps to have one of the biggest hits of the year on their records (though surprisingly, it never made number one, stuck for three weeks behind that immovable object that was the bloody Stevie Wonder song. The second notable fact is that the track is incorrectly credited. The title is listed as Ghostbusters (Searchin’ For the Spirit). Oh, thinks I, maybe that is in fact the full title of the track. Bracketed suffixes are often left off song titles for space, or simply because they are pretentious toss and are best forgotten. In this case however neither is true; Searchin’ for the Spirit is in fact the subtitle given to an extended version of the track which featured on an alternative single release (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWMEncznDvI). But not here. This is your common or garden single and radio version, identical, bar fading out a few seconds later, to the version on The Hits Album. Was this a deliberate attempt to deceive purchasers into thinking the version on NOW 4 was a different one to that on The Hits Album? Was the incorrect version used on the album, and the extended version was meant to be included? Or was it just a mix up over the title? We will probably never know. And you probably don’t really care.

Side Four then sort of drifts away. Jump remains a fun, feel-good song, we get the first of many appearances for the slap bass of Level 42, Rockwell’s attempt to be both Ray Parker Jr and Michael Jackson at the same time on Somebody’s Watching Me, and Malcolm McClaren’s Madam Butterfly is a great musical experiment (of a kind which would become ubiquitous in the charts towards the end of the century) once he stops wittering on over the first minute. The final track by Eugene Wilde is a now forgotten piece of fluff of the “ooh baby, let’s go have sex” variety, the inspiration here being Sexual Healing, but looking forward to people like R Kelly and Keith Sweat. Take away the 80s production and this could have been released at anytime in the past 30 years.

It’s a disappointingly bland finish to an album which has an air of going through the motions about it. With Hits already in the shops consumers weighed up the pros and cons, and went with Hits. NOW 4 is the only album in the series not to reach number 1, and it’s easy to see why. There’s one serious problem with NOW 4, and that’s, ironically, a lack of hits. Take away Ghostbusters, Jump and Hello, and this is a very dull, uninspiring collection. Brian Glover does his best in the advert but you suspect even he thinks this is all a bit thin.

Historically, NOW 4 is important for one reason (and without it, it would probably have been forgotten altogether) being the first of the series to be released on CD. It wasn’t a conventional CD release however, containing just 15 tracks, and being a mix of tracks from the three albums released in 1984. (The cassette version makes reference to The Best of Now 1984 Compact Disc, but the record makes no reference to the CD at all.) The experiment must have been far from a success as it wasn’t attempted again until Now 8, two years later. The CD itself is considered a rare collector’s item now. At the time of writing one copy is on eBay for over £300, with 19 bids, and rising…

Now that NOW! wasn’t the only game in town, and its compilation crown had been toppled, it seemed a serious re-think was in order, and it be a long nine months before NOW! would return.

NOW THAT’S WHAT I CALL MUSIC 4

Release date

26th November 1984

Biggest tracks

Hello – Lionel Ritchie

Ghostbusters – Ray Parker Jr

Jump – The Pointer Sisters

Lost gems

The Second Time – Kim Wilde (a truly bizarre video in which Ms Wilde battles an exploding hotel room, a multi-coloured Mummy, and some of the worst 80s fashion ever seen in a music video)

Sunset Now – Heaven 17

The stinker

No More Lonely Nights (Special Dance Mix) – Paul McCartney

Forgotten tracks

Warning Sign – Nick Heyward

Gotta Get You Home Tonight – Eugene Wilde

What’s missing

Wild Boys – Duran Duran

(possibly not ready for inclusion, the track was released two weeks before NOW 4, but seems in retrospect to be a massive omission)

Blue Jean – David Bowie

Track listing

Side One
No More Lonely Nights (Special Dance Mix)		Paul McCartney
Together In Electric Dreams		Philip Oakey & Giorgio Moroder
Why?		Bronski Beat
The Never Ending Story		Limahl
Warning Sign		Nick Heyward
Missing You		John Waite
Farewell My Summer Love		Michael Jackson
Hello		Lionel Richie

Side Two
The War Song		Culture Club
Passengers		Elton John
Too Late For Goodbyes		Julian Lennon
Shout To The Top		The Style Council
Doctor Doctor		The Thompson Twins
Sunset Now		Heaven 17
Respect Yourself		The Kane Gang
Private Dancer (Single Edit)		Tina Turner

Side Three
It’s A Hard Life		Queen
The Wanderer		Status Quo
East Of Eden		Big Country
Pride (In The Name Of Love)		U2
Listen To Your Father		Feargal Sharkey
Tesla Girls		Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark
The Second Time		Kim Wilde
Human Racing		Nik Kershaw

Side Four
Ghostbusters		Ray Parker Jr
If It Happens Again		UB40
Jump (For My Love)		The Pointer Sister
Hot Water		Level 42
Sexcrime (Nineteen Eighty-Four)		Eurythmics
Somebody’s Watching Me		Rockwell
Madam Butterfly (Un Bel Di Vedremo)		Malcolm McLaren
Gotta Get You Home Tonight		Eugene Wilde

CD Tracklisting

Duran Duran – The Reflex

Ray Parker Jr – Ghostbusters (Searchin for the Spirit)

Culture Club – The War Song

John Waite – Missing You

O.M.D. – Locomotion

UB40 – If It Happens Again

Tina Turner – What’s Love Got to Do with It

Bronski Beat – Why?

The Style Council – Shout to the Top!

Phil Colins – Against All Odds (Take a Look at Me Now)

Giorgio Moroder & Philip Oakey – Together in Electric Dreams

Julian Lennon – Too Late for Goodbyes

Status Quo – The Wanderer

Thompson Twins – Doctor! Doctor!

Queen – Radio Ga Ga

Video edition

The video version this time around did feature mainly tracks from the accompanying album. Only four tracks were not on NOW 4 (indicated with a *).

Meatloaf’s Modern Girl and The Thompson Twins’ Sister of Mercy did feature on The Hits Album, further muddying the waters over the various licensing deals that were needed to put these albums together.

Queen – It’s a Hard Life

Tina Turner – Private Dancer

Giorgio Moroder & Phil Oakey – Together in Electric Dreams

UB40 – If It Happens Again

Limahl – Never Ending Story

Culture Club – The War Song

Julian Lennon – Too Late for Goodbyes

Ray Parker Jnr. – Ghostbusters

Thompson Twins – Sister of Mercy*

John Waite – Missing You

Nik Kershaw – Human Racing

Meat Loaf – Modern Girl*

Kim Wilde – The Second Time

Malcolm McLaren – Madam Butterfly

Nick Heyward – Warning Sign

OMD – Tesla Girls

Iron Maiden – Aces High*

Fergal Sharkey – Listen to Your Father

Heaven 17 – Sunset Now

Depeche Mode – Blasphemous Rumours*

March 24, 2013