Tag: Enya

NOW 20 – Giant Floating Letters in Space

One of the fun things about this blog is the amount of misremembering I’ve been doing; you know that weird feeling you get when you are utterly convinced of something from your past despite all the evidence to the contrary. Like me thinking the NOW pig lasted for years rather than just three albums, that Bros’ I Owe You Nothing was on NOW 11, or that NOW 16 was any good. The biggest mis-memory (if that’s a real word) on my journey so far is the 1990s changing of the guard at Radio 1, that glorious time when Matthew Bannister came in and did away with the Smashie and Nicey brigade. He decided that the station that’s y’know, for kids, should really appeal to, y’know, kids and it was time for The Hairy Cornflake to pack up his Quack Quack Oops and Batesy should concentrate on his video certificate introductions (which are there to help you make the right choice, thanks for listening). Regular readers may have noticed I’ve been building up to it for quite a while, the first mention coming way back on NOW 8, and the inclusion of Queen’s Innuendo as the last track on NOW 19 seemed to perfectly dovetail in my mind with the changing of the guard over at NOW Towers as well, with the GIANT FLOATING PERSPEX LETTERS IN SPACE replacing whatever you called that abomination that had adorned the previous two covers.

But it transpires I was wrong. TWO YEARS wrong. It wasn’t until 1993 that the axe was swung and Radio 1 changed forever. So, for at least another two years, the charts, and consequently NOW, would continue to lead strange pot pourri lives, despite the best efforts of Belgian techno producers eyeing the charts like so many Bond villains eye killer missiles.

NOW 20 is nothing if not eclectic. Dance is not as prominent as it had been on the previous few releases, there’s some absolute corking tunes, and there’s no Bryan Adams. This may not seem like a big deal to younger viewers, but 1991 saw the Canadian axe man take the number one slot hostage for four months. Yes, MONTHS. As a Warner Brothers release it would have needed licensing, but for whatever reason it was not included (maybe they were aware that by Christmas that year how utterly sick of the thing the public were, a trick sadly not repeated with Wet Wet Wet’s Love is All Around a few years later). So for once the Christmas NOW release would not feature the biggest hit from its release window and not one person cared.

As with the previous couple of releases, the opening is a bit of a surprise given the calibre of acts on show, but it’s great to have Vic Reeves and the Wonder Stuff kicking things off with their spirited version of Dizzy. As a huge fan of both at the time this was one of the best singles of the year as far as I was concerned and it’s still a great party record. It is however not the best version of the song with that honour falling to Kurt Russell. Yes, that Kurt Russell.

NOW stalwart Belinda Carlisle contributes Live Your Life Be Free, coming soon to a cruise liner advert near you. The song I mean, not Ms Carlisle. It’s an odd beast; repetitive, with a throat ripping vocal which Carlisle is clearly not enjoying and a strange, seconds-long, hip-hop breakdown towards the end for no apparent reason other than to make it sound a bit more immediate. A bit like U2’s The Fly. The song which finally ended Bryan Adams top spot occupation it divided listeners more than probably any song of the period. It’s difficult to imagine the commotion this thing caused on release. U2 had become every Dad’s favourite band, and The Joshua Tree was almost as ubiquitous as Brothers in Arms had been a few years previously. Then The Fly happened. I think the fact that it pissed off so many Dad’s made it more appealing to teenagers than it would have been otherwise. It certainly did for me. It doesn’t sound like much else that was around at the time (though their time in Berlin had obviously been spent listening to a great deal of Industrial music). It could be argued (as I have done) that the seeds had been sown for this kind of thing with Simple Minds’ Kick It In back on NOW 15, but U2 made it commercially successful and, more importantly, listenable. It heralded a gear change for the then biggest band in the world and would prompt similar about-turns from acts like INXS in the coming years. Reinvention for the 90s became de rigeur.

Except possibly for the Pet Shop Boys. They decided to once again prove themselves as masters of the cover version with their wonderfully wry mash up of U2’s pompous Where The Streets Have No Name and the standard Can’t Take My Eyes Off You. If this had come out after The Fly you could have made a case for it being a brilliant pastiche of U2’s new direction (also arguing from the benefit of hindsight that it looks forward to the ridiculousness of the Pop-era of Discothèque and The Edge’s Village People moustache). But it came out six months before, making it the oldest track on the album. It had, however, been double A-sided with How Can You Expect To Be Taken Seriously, a critique of pop stars jumping on the charity/humanitarianism bandwagon at the drop of a cowboy hat. The Pet Shop Boys themselves are no strangers to this kind of thing themselves of course, but Bono is a particularly loathsome example, worthy of their ire.

All that silliness if followed by Erasure’s brilliant Love To Hate You, probably my favourite track of theirs, but one which never seems to get its dues. OMD’s Sailing on the Seven Seas marked something of a comeback for them and continues the knob twiddling mini-theme. It was a huge hit but listened to now it’s pretty weak tea, with a pink wafer on the side. Andy McClusky would apparently become disillusioned with the pop industry shortly afterwards and decided to get his revenge by creating Atomic Kitten.

Breast — **“Are these whole again chicken fillets?”**

Then it gets weird. Simple Red’s Something Got Me Started contains the most chilling intro to a song I’ve ever heard, especially if you know how about the randy exploits of the ginger-bonced one (or you would if your parents bought the News of the World as mine did). It’s not a bad tune for Hucknall, but it’s still Hucknall, and that’s still an issue. Lisa Stansfield is far more palatable (and like Hucknall, a buy-in from the currently AWOL Hits stable). Change is a beautiful song, and I rate it far higher than the all-conquering All Around The World, but it makes the fatal error of being low-key with a less memorable chorus. She acts now. Been in Miss Marple and everything.

(At the time of writing, I’ve just seen her on The One Show. I don’t know what she was plugging because it was The One Show and I’d rather pour concrete into my eyeballs than actually pay it any attention.)

Also lovely on the ears is Zoe’s Sunshine On A Rainy Day. The echoed drums and incessant hi-hat date it slightly, but it’s one of those irresistible “punch the air and sing along” tunes, guaranteed to put a smile on your face.

Less lovely are the next two tracks, as NOW 20 goes all sexy. Well, not sexy exactly. Just um… sex, really. Just talking about sex isn’t particularly sexy, is it? As with the earlier Push It, on NOW 12, what was once considered sexy and daring now comes across as crass and sleazy, and sadly for Salt n’ Pepa once again, Let’s Talk About Sex is a bit like a kid who has learned a new swear word. There’s none of their former sass and attitude on show here. I’m not sure if Color Me Badd ever had attitude as such, but they certainly had suits based a packet of Opal Fruits. Frankly they look a child grooming gang. They hit number one with the foul I Wanna Sex You Up, and they all must be in their late 20s, if not older, singing a song that would only have ever appealed to teenage girls who probably felt equally threatened and excited at the same time by those green suits, styled facial hair and Vanilla Ice quiffs. It just turns my stomach. Have a listen to Faith No More’s Edge of the World and tell me that’s not an intentional sound-a-like.

Oddly, the other ‘sex’ song on offer here, Prince’s Gett Off is bumped a track further on, to make way for the oddly inoffensive Kenny Thomas. You might remember he had a couple of hits, but don’t worry if you don’t; you are missing nothing. Gett Off itself is pure filth, but you already knew that. Prince knows it too which is probably why he wrote it. The man just has so much sex coursing through his body he has to channel it somehow. Rozalla’s Faith In The Power of Love is not as well known, or as good as, Everybody’s Free. She played at my work’s Christmas party a few years back performing all (both) her hits. I don’t think many people knew who she was.

And then… Holy shit…

The intro is misleading, probably you haven’t heard it very often. Oddly, the exact same intro was heard on Jesus Jones’ bizarre cover version of Hendrix’s Voodoo Chile a year later. But once that deceptive few seconds have passed there is no denying what you are listening to. You could almost Name That Tune in one. It’s cheap, nasty, repetitive and nausea inducing. It’s the musical equivalent of a four year old bouncing on your head and feeding you Tootie Frooties, whilst a mysterious black suit and shades sporting gentleman injects heroin into your ankle. Your brain gets confused; the signals are all distorted and crossed. Am I angry? I want to die but this is soothing, this is warm, this is pop. You submit, just momentarily, and that’s it. You’re caught, like a fly in a web, you can do nothing but struggle. But struggling only makes its grip tighter. So you resign yourself. Wait. Maybe the end will be painless. You half hope it won’t be, and it will be so quick you won’t feel anything at all. Your head is being torn off by a big fluffy kitten; it strips your limbs from your torso one by one, like a team of ants with tiny scissors. And as you finally go into convulsions, your brain can’t quite shut off the incessant noise. A few more seconds more as you finally fade away into nothingness. Then, relief. You catch the final beat and it disappears, echoing away into the distance. It’s over. You made it. You listened to an entire 2 Unlimited track. Then, horror, as you realise it wasn’t No Limits and you still have to deal with that another day…

Side two rounds off, thankfully, with 3 very listenable tracks. Moby’s Go is a one trick pony, taking a sample from the Twin Peaks soundtrack, adding someone shouting “Go! Yeah!” and occasionally “alright”, but it is good at what it does. As are The KLF, this time appearing as The JAMMS, with Its Grim Up North. A brilliant attempt to get any old crap into the charts, this runs off a list of northern towns and cities over a heavy industrial noise-based musical arrangement. The whole thing is, once again, a massive joke, and no doubt a pun on the then emerging industrial music scene coming out of Europe), even finishing with a synthesised version of Jerusalem mixed with a cacophony of noise. I love it.

One trick pony samples continue with PM Dawn’s massive Set Adrift on Memory Bliss, which would be extremely dull without its Spandau Ballet nugget. That sample makes the tune memorable and listenable. This idea of building a whole track out of one seconds long sample from somewhere else would eventually become a goldmine for lazy producers, with many people not knowing that tunes like Groove Is In The Heart, then later monsters like Beyoncé’s Crazy in Love, would be nothing without those snippets of genius from elsewhere.

So, the first half has been quite a mixed bag, and part two struggles to fill a whole CD with enough tracks and as a result includes a few rum suspects indeed. Things start blandly with Paul Young’s long forgotten cover of Crowded House’s Don’t Dream It’s Over. Young hadn’t darkened a NOW album for a while but the single did manage to broach the top 20. Recorded as the token ‘unreleased’ track on his greatest hits album, it’s no doubt included to increase sales of that album, though quite why NOW would want to plug the Greatest Hits of an artist on a rival label is unclear (Young was signed to CBS at the time). Perhaps some negotiation was involved to get other artists included? If you want those you have to take this too?

Also unclear, to me at least, was the success of Enya, whose dreamy soundscapes I’ve never understood. But at least her Caribbean Blue is in good company (relatively) sitting alongside such dull ballads as Paula Abdul’s Rush Rush and Mark Cohn’s Walking in Memphis. Cathy Dennis and Alison Moyet also contribute tunes no one remembers either. Any Dream Will Do demonstrates how weak Jason Donovan’s voice was when removed from the SAW production grinder, and then there’s Glass Tiger’s My Town. I saw this in the track listing and had absolutely no idea what it sounded like, but recognised it instantly as soon as it started. A rugby club anthem in the making with guest vocalist Rod Stewart, this was a favourite of the old guard Radio 1 DJs at the time, but not with the public, as it only limped to number 33. The Canadian diet rockers only had one other top 40 hit, in 1986, with the aptly titled Don’t Forget Me When I’m Gone. We can’t make any promises, guys.

Then there’s the perennial problem of Julian Lennon. I’ve always felt a bit sorry for the older Lennon Jr because he had to work a lot harder for himself (younger Lennon Jr, Sean, was always daddy’s favourite) and Julian has been picked up, dropped, praised, ridiculed, loved and despised perhaps more than any other rock star spawn. I’ve no idea why his 1989 single Now You’re In Heaven wasn’t a hit, but I suspect its scary ventriloquist doll video kept it off the telly, and the lack of a proper chorus kept it off the radio. With Saltwater, the track up for display here, he took the easy option and finally caved in to do what everyone wanted him to do: he ripped off his dad. And, it pains me to say, the results are absolutely tragic. It makes so many mistakes it’s almost a test case in bad song writing. Lennon was, it’s fair to say, a committed environmentalist who has used huge amounts of his own cash to fund projects and causes; that doesn’t mean we want a heart-tugging, guffaw-inducing song about how everything makes you cry. With the ‘worthy’ box tick, let’s move onto the lyrics: rhyming ‘crying’ with ‘dying’ is as hackneyed as using sub-George Harrison guitar noodling for your instrumental break. Oh you did that too. Harrison did in fact scribble some chords for Lennon but declined to actually appear on the record making him the only Beatle to maintain a modicum of dignity come the 90s. Anyone familiar with The Rutles will recognise Saltwater under a different title, Cheese and Onions, just with nonsense lyrics of a different kind. “What will life think of me the day that I die?”, he asks. Sadly this will be the soundtrack to the epitaphs, which will no doubt contain the phrase “failed to reach the heights of his superstar father”, which is a genuine shame. Saltwater, however, is just shameful.

"Imagine all the dolphins, eating all the fish... oo-oo..." — **“Imagine all the dolphins, eating all the fish… oo-oo…”**

Shameful heart-tugging kicks off the final terror that is side four of NOW 20. The Scorpions are probably now more famous in the age of the interwebs for their dubious 70s album covers (NSFW) than for their music. The sexist German rock that made them millionaires with drink and drug problems was forgotten as they attempted to dethrone Bryan Adams from number one, with a hymn to the newly reunified fatherland. It comes across as a little odd, to say the least. This kind of thing had not troubled the upper reaches of the charts for a few years, so why this struck a chord in 1991 is anyone’s guess. It was stuck behind Adams for weeks so the record company even launched a press campaign to get people to buy it and topple the Robin Hood botherer, but to no avail. Thank Christ, because it’s bloody awful. Yes, even worse than Bryan Adams.

It does set the tone for the rest of the side though, being the usual odds and sods that don’t fit neatly anywhere else, but with a definite lean towards your Dad’s side of the market (maybe manoeuvring itself into a potential last minute Christmas gift for Dad for a change). There’s two good songs still to come. James’ Sit Down, finally a hit on its 47^th re-release, is the sound of 1990s student common rooms and indie discos. It’s still a good tune despite that sentence, though far from their best. Also great is the surprise return of Voice of the Beehive. I hinted on NOW 12 that they would return but I’m sure many would have struggled to remember what with. Their cover of I Think I Love You is fun pop, just what they did best. It doesn’t pull up any trees, but is a perfectly fine cover version of a throwaway bubble-gum pop hit, that puts a smile on your face and doesn’t outstay its welcome. In pure pop terms, I suppose Roxette’s Joyride delivers too, but it’s not very memorable and hasn’t aged well.

The rest of the side is frankly shocking. INXS toss away the live-album-flogging Shining Star, surely little more than a B-side beefed up to single status to help shift Live Baby Live (where it appears as a studio track in the middle of a concert album!). There’s the basis of a song here, but we only get one verse and one chorus, yet it still lasts over three minutes. Slade’s final top 40 hit (bar endless re-entries for Merry Xmas Everybody) has the indignity of featuring Mike Smash, sorry, Mike Reid making an appearance doing a dreadful American DJ accent. Radio Wall of Sound is utter bilge with only Noddy’s bellowing over the chorus to rescue it. He hated the thing apparently.

Monty Python’s Always Look On The Brightside of Life got a re-release thanks to Simon Mayo continually playing it on the Radio 1 breakfast show after hearing it at a Tottenham football match. It probably helped that there was a Monty Python compilation album that needed flogging too. You all know this so I’ll just leave you to consider how on earth the most chillingly bittersweet comedy moments in cinema history has now been reduced to Eric Idle’s pension plan, and a cheap gag to roll out for the Royal Variety performance. Of sole interest is the fact that NOW 20 includes the radio version (not commercially released) which features a re-recorded outro by Idle. That might make it worth one more listen if you can be bothered.

NOW 20 contains 35 tracks, the most in the series so far. What is odd is that it could have had at least two more but for the fact they decided to close the album with a song lasting a ball-busting eight and a half minutes! And it’s not even a good song. Well, it’s one of those that people say they like, and occasionally drunkenly bellow out at karaoke (always forgetting how long the bloody thing is and getting bored halfway through). I hate American Pie. I hate its pomposity. I hate its length. I hate the slow intro, the jaunty middle and the ridiculously protracted ending. I hate Don McLean’s stupid stars and stripes thumb. I hate the fact that Don McLean has the same name as a 70s comedian and Summertime Special stalwart. I hate Madonna’s cover version, I hate that it’s never explained what the bolloclks lyrics are all about. (Yes, I know it’s about Buddy Holly, but how? Why? Where?). And I hate the fact it got re-released in a full version for no good reason in 1991, reached number 12 and ended up on NOW 20.

So the second half of NOW 20 has hit a quite stunning low. But no one cares. No one cares either that NOW 20 was the last NOW album with an accompanying VHS release. All anyone cares about when it comes to NOW 20 is it was the first album to feature the still-going GIANT PERSPEX LETTERS… IN SPAAAAAACE!!!! Design. And in a single stroke any sense of innovation, charm and individuality that the series had was lost forever.

I’m fully aware that for anyone buying a NOW album between 1991 and today this is what a NOW album looks like; that doesn’t make it right. Maybe Don McLean was right after all: 23^rd November 1991, the release day for NOW 20, really was the day the music died. Moving into 1992, my NOW odyssey is getting harder.

NOW THAT’S WHAT I CALL MUSIC 20

Release date

18th November 1991

Biggest tracks

Dizzy – Vic Reeves & The Wonderstuff

The Fly – U2

Wind of Change – Scorpions

Lost gems

It’s Grim Up North (Part 1) – The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu

Love to Hate You – Erasure

Forgotten tracks

My Town – Glass Tiger

Shining Star – INXS

Worst Tracks

I Wanna Sex You Up – Color Me Badd

Get Ready For This – 2 Unlimited

What’s missing?

There’s No Other Way – Blur

I’m Too Sexy– Right Said Fred

More Than Words – Extreme

NB: Last NOW release to have an accompanying VHS release

Track listing

CD 1
Dizzy	Vic Reeves & The Wonderstuff
Live Your Life Be Free	Belinda Carlisle
The Fly	U2
Where The Streets Have No Name (I Can’t Take My Eyes Off You)	Pet Shop Boys
Love To Hate You	Erasure
Sailing On The Seven Seas	Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark
Something Got Me Started	Simply Red
Change	Lisa Stansfield
Sunshine On A Rainy Day	Zoe
Let’s Talk About Sex	Salt ‘N’ Pepa
I Wanna Sex You Up	Color Me Badd
Best Of You	Kenny Thomas
Gett Off	Prince & The New Power Generation
Faith (In The Power Of Love)	Rozalla
Get Ready For This	2 Unlimited
Go	Moby
It’s Grim Up North (Part 1)	The Justified Ancients Of Mu Mu
Set Adrift On Memory Bliss	PM Dawn

CD 2
Don’t Dream It’s Over	Paul Young
Caribbean Blue	Enya
Saltwater	Julian Lennon
Rush, Rush	Paula Abdul
Any Dream Will Do	Jason Donovan
Too Many Walls	Cathy Dennis
This House	Alison Moyet
Walking In Memphis	Marc Cohen
My Town	Glass Tiger
Wind Of Change	Scorpions
Shining Star	INXS
Joyride	Roxette
Sit Down	James
I Think I Love You	Voice Of The Beehive
Radio Wall Of Sound	Slade
Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life	Monty Python
American Pie (Part I)	Don McLean

April 2, 2014

The Hits Albums 1-10 – Two tribes go to war

Batman needs the Joker. Tottenham Hotspur need Arsenal. Jerry needs Tom. But I suspect NOW could have done without the bother of the Hits Album. Having seen EMI and Virgin come together to dominate the charts over Christmas 1983, and perhaps more importantly, repeating the success in the early months of 1984, it was perhaps inevitable that the other big boy record companies would think “we want some of that”. And so it was that two more of the major labels, WEA and CBS, joined forces to take NOW on, head on, for Christmas 1984. And, briefly, they would take over as top dog. But thanks to mismanagement, poor marketing and NOW upping its game, it would be a short-lived victory.

The Hits Album copied NOW’s template so slavishly it could be accused of plagiarism. The cover design is, for the 80s, relatively under-designed, with the slight whiff of a rush job. The giant capital lettered HITS in the centre tips a hat to the NOW brand, almost egging it on into a fight. The spiral background being the slightest concession to the swirly, garish design favoured by its rival. Yuppie minimalism seems to be the order of the day here, with the Monopoly style outer edge giving it to us straight: star photos, names and, unlike NOW , the song titles too. No messing here, they were so confident they were not going to leave anything to your imagination. You want the hits? Well you can have ’em: Thriller, Ghostbusters, Drive, I Feel for You, Freedom, Purple Rain… this was as strong a line-up as any NOW album, and probably bigger than all of theirs bar NOW 1. The back repeats the formula, but with a weird star shaped thing replacing the spiral, and the actual track listing taking centre-stage.

The gatefold inner apes NOW’s look to a tee (photo, mini bio on the song, album details and catalogue number), but because the layout is simpler, it allows space for a vital photo of the artists current album. This was bound to make things easier for lazy or stupid people in Woolworths the following Saturday when they wanted to buy Chicago’s Chicago 17 or Shakey’s Greatest Hits.

While I’m not going to go into too much detail here (after all this blog is about NOW not HITS!) it’s note worthy how Hits did differ from NOW in one area which probably went completely unnoticed by the buyers of each series. Due to the labels involved, there is an unavoidable bias towards American acts on the Hits albums. Now when those artists include Jacko, Prince and Madonna, you can’t really complain. But when you’re trying to persuade ‘the kids’ of the relative merits of The SOS Band, The Cars or Deneice Williams, it looks a bit more like filler, to make up those precious 32 top chart hits, which, incidentally would have been two more than NOW had had on an album up to that point. But with NOW 4, they decided to go for two more as well. Not that it helped.

Incidentally, I’ll just quickly quash a vicious rumour about NOW that has been repeated ad nauseum by lazy journalists over the years: the reason Madonna never appeared on NOW albums has got nothing to do with her being a huge megastar who wanted nothing to do with compilation albums, it’s simply that her record company didn’t want her to. She may have been able to appear on the first NOW with Holiday; Warners were happy to license other artists to the album, and Madonna was nowhere near big enough to throw her weight around about not wanting to appear on dirty old compilations. She obviously had no such qualms appearing on most of the first 10 Hits albums, and even on the first Monster Hits compilation, which I’ll come to later.

The Hits Album was released in direct competition with NOW 4, and trumped it in the number one stakes, racking up three (Freedom, Careless Whisper and I Feel For You) and just about every number two that got stuck behind Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s Two Tribes for nine weeks, including Hole in my Shoe by neil (sic) which looks very odd finishing off the album, following in the footsteps of such giants on side four as Van Halen, Meatloaf and Shakin’ Stevens.

The best track is obviously Kenny Loggins’ Footloose. By a mile.

Hits 2 followed quickly, in April 1985, possibly the reason why NOW refrained from releasing an Easter collection, and instead diverged into the first of a series of NOW Dance albums. (NOW 5 would eventually arrive in the summer.) It’s a very strong line-up again, featuring three massive chart toppers (I Wanna Know What Love Is, You Spin me Round, Easy Lover) and one that no one remembers (Jim Diamond’s I Should Have Known Better). There were other good tracks on there, too, with Kirsty MacColl’s excellent cover of Billy Bragg’s A New England, Prince’s 1999 and Close (to the Edit) from Frankie label mates, Art of Noise.

Maybe as a sign of the design chaos to come, there seems to be much confusion over the correct title of the release. It’s commonly referred to as The Hits Album 2, or simply Hits 2, but the spine refers to it as Hits 2 The Album… catchy.

Phil Collins appearance here, on Easy Lover, indicates a little tit-for-tat game that would happen a lot over the next few years, due to the fact that EMI/Virgin (NOW) and WEA/CBS (Hits) were not likely to license their own acts to the rival series, at least not when they were releasing albums at the same time. Every so often an opportunity would arise where an artist broke ranks to record something for another label. We saw how on NOW 4, they took advantage of a rogue Motown album to include a Michael Jackson song, and on Hits 2, Phil Collins duet with Philip Bailey appeared on Bailey’s label, CBS, so Hits were able to include it. Even if it hadn’t been a number one, it would probably still have been included just for the sake of including a track from one of the rival series’ artists.

Another example of this is the inclusion of The Pet Shop Boys on Hits 4. Although signed to EMI subsidiary, Parlophone, West End Girls had originally been released on CBS in 1984 when it had not been a hit. By 1986 it was a massive number one, and The Pets were big news. And no doubt CBS still held some rights. Odd that the Pet Shop Boys aren’t one of the featured acts named on the cover though.
Hits would continue to be successful throughout the mid 80’s, relying on a dependable bunch of stalwarts (Madonna, Prince, Eurythmics, Paul Young) and a succession of huge number ones (The Power of Love, I Wanna Dance with Somebody, Eternal Flame). They would, like NOW, sometimes struggle to fill the quota, leading some truly odd appearances for people like ELO (the massive number 28 hit, Calling America… no, me neither), The The (the brilliant Infected on Hits 5 would, amazingly not be their only appearance) and The Jesus and Mary Chain (April Skies). The last two are great songs and you could argue it’s laudable that they were brought to a wider audience, but they just seem so out of place. Drive by The Cars would shamelessly appear on The Hits Album AND Hits 3 just a year later! Somehow, for reasons history does not record, the song made the top ten twice; number 5 in 1984 and number 4 in 1985. That doesn’t excuse its inclusion twice in such a short space of time.

Hits did often seem to be the slightly edgier cousin of NOW’s pure pop factory, but the fact is their respective track listings were probably interchangeable. Many ‘free agent’ artists not signed to one of the major labels would appear on both series’, sometimes if the albums were out at the same time, an artist would appear on both albums with different tracks (the same track by the same artist was rare, but not out of the question).

For me, what eventually did for Hits was, ultimately, having no faith in the strength of the content, leading to a series of horrendous marketing decisions which led to customer confusion, and eventually, apathy.

Just like NOW, Hits took a while to find an established look, or ‘brand’, and it’s arguable they never did. Ask old farts like me to describe a NOW cover, or the NOW logo, and most will have a stab at the balls (as it were) or the giant floating capital letters still in use today. Some might even mention the pig. Ask those same old farts about the Hits albums and you are likely to receive a shrug, or the kind of blank-faced look more commonly associated with my stupid cat.

My stupid cat

The first three Hits albums all used some form of giant letter and Monopoly board approach, which was very distinct and stood out. it also gave the feeling of being a bit brash, sure of itself and just a tad cocky. And when you’re featuring such luminaries as Strawberry Switchblade, Matt Bianco, or Frankie by Sister Sledge, six months after NOW had included it, cocky doesn’t sit too well. Also, by this point, NOW had employed a new design team and the artwork had more of a whiff of cryptic cigarette adverts about them, which to mid-80s teenagers was always going to appear much cooler than an album emblazoned with “As advertised on TV”, like the old K-Tel and Ronco albums used to.

To counter NOW’s new look, Hits 4 featured a Mondrian inspired elaborate ‘4’ on its cover. Truth be told, the style was probably more likely inspired by the then current Studio Line range of hair-gunk products, which also used Mondrian as a ripping-off point (as did a LOT of things in the 80s), but we’ll give them the befit of the doubt. With no NOW album in direct competition, Hits 4 has a strong line-up. I mean REALLY strong. Side one is as strong as NOW 6’s opening salvo, but it sustains the quality much better, only finally stumbling on side four, which still manages to include Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love (See the full track listing here.)
nowmusicfanblog.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/The_Hits_Album_5.jpg”>Hits 5 featured a giant red die, of course, where all the sides have five on them. I’ve no idea what the thinking behind this was. It’s very silly. There was some continuity on the branding though, with the Hits strap at the top of the design retained from Hits 4. Hits 5 went head-to-head with NOW 8 at Christmas 1986, and would see Hits first CD compilation (it would be the start of NOW regularly releasing a CD as well, after the abortive NOW 4) and it fared badly in comparison.

Hits 6, potentially, hit on something unique and special with its spectrum of criss-crossing lines on the sleeve. Not as garish as the early NOW albums’ attempts to mimic Max Headroom or the horrible Paintbox graphics that used to appear on-screen on Top of the Pops. Although it’s not immediately representing a ‘6’, once you know that’s what it’s meant to be, it makes perfect sense. That, along with the more elegant ‘Hits Album’ rather than just ‘Hits’, should have set the series up in the style stakes. it’s simple, minimal, adaptable, everything a successful brand should be. So of course, they ditched it.

Maybe it was because Hits consistently came in second place that the parent labels, CBS and WEA, felt it was the designers who were letting the side down rather than the content. It must be very difficult for two of the world’s biggest record labels to admit that, maybe, they haven’t quite got as much good content as they would like to fill just 64 tracks a year over two compilation albums (Hits would never release more than two per year). If you, Joe Public, aren’t buying it, and are instead going for their rival, then it stands to reason that the designers are rubbish. Obviously.

So between Hits 4 and 8, the only design constant was the font used for the title (and even the title would change from Hits back to The Hits Album). Whilst this, in itself, shows a surprising continuity, the ‘Big Idea’ of each sleeve is so radically disparate and that title almost an afterthought) it’s no wonder the public could be confused that this was actually a series. the NOW balls was an instantly recognisable logo, so much so that they could have been placed in almost any scenario and people would still know this was a NOW album. Hits would never have that.

Hits 6 had seen the giant BMG record label join the fray. They, along with MCA, had made a shameless attempt to get on the compilation bandwagon with two Out Now! albums (I may try and analyse these at some point, if I can hold of them). The track listings may have been good, filling in many of the blanks left by both Hits and NOW, but clearly this was a cash-in rather than an attempt to launch a serious rival. It’s possible they simply wanted to test the water with a view to a potential link up with one of the rivals. BMG would add little to the table, beyond exclusivity for a few more artists, potentially making NOW’s job slightly harder, but by this point NOW had lassoed Polygram into their stable.

A giant 7, and an odd building block design for 8 continued to show that, frankly, Hits didn’t have a clue. Maybe the bosses were right, and the designers WERE clueless. It must have been frustrating to see album after album throwing away the promise that line-ups including Prince, George Michael, Madonna, a-ha (when they were still huge) were failing to top NOW. Hits 7 would feature such stone cold classics as Eric B and Rakim’s Paid in Full, I’ve Had the Time of My Life and Never Gonna Give You Up. But it also featured utterly forgettable one hit wonders from the likes of LaVert, Scarlet Fantastic, Desireless (which reached the dizzy heights of number 53, but their story continues below) and as well as a Ray Parker Jr song that ISN’T Ghostbusters! It’s this “throw enough mud and some will stick” approach that makes Hits seem cheaper and more ‘fly by night’ than NOW. NOW’s line ups always betray a certain amount of thought and preparation. Hits track listings generally work like this: All the big songs on Side one; maybe keep back a number one for side three; everything else in no particular order.

As an example, Hits 8 features Bros. Largely forgotten today, in the summer of 1988 they were the biggest thing around and were on their way to a massive Wembley appearance (topping the bill at a kind of one-day Glastonbury for screaming teenagers that you could get the tube home from) just months after their first single. I Owe You Nothing (ultimately their only number one) is easily the biggest track on Hits 8 and should open the album. It’s track 5, halfway through the first side. The album actually opens with Stay on These Roads, by a-ha, a top 5 hit, but not the hottest of ‘Hot Hits of Summer ’88’ advertised by the album cover. Hits 8 also featured Desireless again. I did say on Hits 7 that they were a one-hit wonder, with Voyage, Voyage. Well, that still stands because it’s the same bloody track (albeit in a very mildly remixed form, though it doesn’t say that on the track listing). Putting Drive on two on the first three Hits albums is one thing, but putting the same track on two consecutive releases? That suggests either incompetence or such a lack of respect for the punters it almost makes you glad the series would ultimately fail.

And failure was but a short step away, thanks to Christmas 1988, and Hits 9. Except it wasn’t Hits 9. Well, it was Hits 9 but it just didn’t say it was Hits 9. For some reason it was decided to drop the number, releasing it as simply The Hits Album, but the catalogue number confirms that this is in fact Hits 9 (if you are the sort of sad case who looks at album catalogue numbers and then writes blog posts about them). That horrible cover is a still from the dreadful, hugely irritating, and more importantly, cheap-looking, Bruno Brookes-narrated, TV commercial.

If this was their idea of a re-launch, or in modern parlance, a re-boot, of the series then it would turn out to be an utter disaster. there is zero brand recognition here, and going up against NOW 13 in the crucial Christmas market, this would prove utterly suicidal for the series. it didn’t help that the track listing was dreadful, with an over reliance on including tracks that were as up to date as possible, rather than what was necessarily popular (Yazz’ Stand Up For Your Love Rights is a great song, but The Only Way is Up was the earlier, massive hit, and found itself opening NOW 13). When big hits were included they seemed to be the wrong ones: Orinoco Flow and One Moment in Time may have been number ones, but would ‘the kids’ really want them on their Christmas double album of top chart hits from the year? And I don’t care how high in the charts Chris de Burgh got, he shouldn’t be anywhere near this album.

This insistence on being more ‘now’ than NOW may have also scuppered the chances of three of the labels’ artists in the Christmas charts. It’s extremely rare for Christmas songs to appear on Hits or NOW, but Hits 9 featured TWO songs released specifically for the ’88 Christmas chart, and another which was in the running. One of these was a genuine contender for the Christmas number one, Bros’ Cat Among the Pigeons. It’s traditional for the biggest act of the year to make a play for the festive top spot, and they rarely achieve it, often being humiliated by a kids TV character or some cloying novelty song championed by a DJ who sees it as his duty to “inject some fun into Christmas”. Bros’ single (a double A-side with an unlistenable version of Silent Night) had been released just a week before The Hits Album, so surely some kids who would have bought the single thought, sod that, I’ll get Hits 9 instead and get that other pant-wetting teenage tune of ’88, Angry Anderson’s Suddenly, the soundtrack to Kylie and Jason’s wedding in Neighbours, which was also vying for the Christmas number one!

Another Christmas casualty included on the album was Chris Rea. Driving Home for Christmas is now, rightly, regarded as a Christmas classic. But back then it failed to even make the top 40. With all these festive tunes gathered on one album, it’s no wonder everyone went out and bought Mistletoe and Wine instead. Yes, Hits 9, or whatever you want to call yourself, I blame YOU for Cliff’s Christmas onslaught.

As a final indignity, Hits 9 never came close to even threatening NOW 13, only reaching a dismal number 5 (all previous Hits had reached at least number two). It would also be the last to compete in the ‘proper’ album charts, as from January 1989, compilation albums were siphoned off into their own chart.

June 1989 would see the swansong of the series in this form, with the release of Hits 10. The spectrum design from Hits 6 was regenerated, cleverly re-worked into a record design which also doubled as a 10. It’s great, and shows the possibilities there could have been had there been more faith in the original idea. The collection is a typically hit and miss affair with some absolutely huge hits (Eternal Flame, Sweet Child of Mine), massive flops (Luther Vandross’ Come Back, anyone?) and some forgotten gems (Robert Howard and Kim Mazelle’s Wait, Alyson Williams’ Sleep Talk). The reliance on current hits again results a generally dreary collection over all with the likes of Mike and the Mechanics’ The Living Years and 1927’s That’s When I Think of You prompting the fast forward button. It does however, feature The The and Pop Will Eat Itself back-to-back, so it’s not a total bust.

What was a bust though, was the series. Hits 10 managed an impressive six weeks at the top of the compilation chart, going platinum, much better than its predecessor, and not too shabby considering its release two months before the school summer holidays. Despite this, another re-vamp was in the offing. It would appear NOW was just too big, and too trusted a brand to be taken on in this manner. Hits had been number two pretty much since day one (but for the brief moment of glory with the first release) and for these boys number two just wasn’t good enough. Getting to number one would, however, remain out of their reach, though it wouldn’t stop them trying.

For Christmas 1989, they would take a leaf from NOW’s book and adopt a cool animal as their ambassador. A new direction was needed to take them forward into the new decade, and quickly… make it snappy.

April 2, 2013

Tag: Enya

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