Tag: Morrissey

NOW 14 – On and off and on again

1989 was a year of major upheaval for NOW. They’d been turfed out of the official album charts into the compilation top 20, a chart no one ever saw, referenced or cared about. It looked like they’d seen off their biggest rival, the Hits Album series, whose disastrous rebrand around Christmas 1988 had seen sales plummet, whilst NOW’s corresponding NOW 13 had gone on to be one of the biggest selling albums of the year. (Hits would not die quickly however, but a series of rebrands, reboots and revisions would mean it was never a serious competitor again.)

Although they probably never noticed, or cared, NOWs 12 and 13 had been pretty dreadful, at least looked at from a distance of 25 years as I’m smugly doing now. Honestly, could these people not see that two and a half decades later their obsession with Jellybean and Johnny Hates Jazz was going to look ridiculous? This is why I should be running a major record label, rather than being all picky and sarcastic about them from the comfort of my computer.

NOW 14 feels much fresher, more exciting, than the turgid NOW 13. Ballads are few and far between, and a couple of tracks qualify as outright classics. There are also a couple of huge hits that have certain “huh?” factor about them. Cover versions abound again, but at least this time they are interesting and, more importantly, good. This may also be the first NOW album to feature a shockingly blatant piece of product placement. I was never entirely sure what was going on with that cover though. Any ideas?

As usual, the opening to a NOW album is pretty good. Marc Almond’s brilliantly overblown cover of Something’s Gotten Hold Of My Heart (duetting with Gene Pitney, who despite rumours to the contrary was NOT the original artists to record it; that honour falls to David and Jonathan (?)) was perhaps a surprise hit, but history tells us it was an appearance on Terry Wogan’s chat show what won it, and sent hordes of baby boomers to Our Price to buy it. When you think of the crap that Wogan has plugged on his Radio 2 show over the years and turned into hits this kind of lets him off the hook. The nostalgia continues with Phil Collins’ Two Hearts, the second track to be released from the Buster soundtrack, a film where he gave a reasonable performance as an actor portraying a vicious East End gangster with a heart of gold (and probably loved his dear old mum). Two Hearts was an even bigger hit than its predecessor, A Groovy Kind Of Love. Well, it was everywhere except in the UK. Although an original composition, it shamelessly riffs on 60s Motown, sounding exactly like his earlier cover of You Can’t Hurry Love, a fact acknowledged in the video for this, where he again plays every member of a band. It’s a pop song you dearly want to hate but can’t. Unlike Erasure’s Stop! Which is a fantastic pop song which, had it not been released at Christmas, would have easily been a huge number one.

Surprisingly not a number one was Bananarama’s Help! The band never had a number one in the UK, not even with this charity record at a time when anything charity related would be top of the charts in pre-orders alone. Backed by French and Saunders (and Kathy Burke) as Lananeeneenoonoo, a good natured pastiche of the band they’d performed on their TV show, Help! Is a reasonably shoddy treatment of a great song, with humour that doesn’t translate without the video, and even then it’s not particularly funny.

Hue and Cry’s Looking for Linda is much better, a nice surprise given it’s a song (I think) about an alcoholic woman fleeing an abusive relationship. Yeah, go pop! It does signal the inevitable drift towards the centre of the record, which continues with Yazz’s lovely, dreamy Fine Time. Her last top ten single, it’s very far removed from the Hi-NRG dance of her earlier hits, and it shows there was more to her than smiling and punching the air. Sadly, the public wanted her smiling and punching the air. Kim Wilde’s late 80s comeback continues with the anonymous Four Letter Word, before the side ends with the still amazing Stop from Sam Brown. The first time two different songs with the same title have appeared on the same NOW album, fact fans.

Side two is again an attempt to collect together rock tunes, so of course it starts with Roy Orbison. You Got It is still pretty good, though to be fair, The Big O could sing Crazy Frog and make it sound great. Fine Young Cannibals returned in style with She Drives Me Crazy, a song that has now, very rightly, achieved legendary status, and another song on NOW 14 that you won’t believe didn’t get to number one. Like INXS’ Need You Tonight, which the foolish British record buying public needed TWO attempts to get it into the charts; it had originally stalled on number 58 when released in 1987. In one of the sloppiest errors on a NOW album ever, the end of the song (“You’re one of my kind”) is rather ignobly chopped off chopped off and the anticipation of the payoff is replaced by the introduction of Status Quo’s horrible Burning Bridges (On and Off and On Again). I’ll never understand why this track was such a big hit, but it’s becoming clear to me that the 80s record buyer would buy any old crap with a dreary, repetitive chorus that sounded like something from the terraces at Stamford Bridge. Interestingly, the song would gain a second life, in 1994, as a football chant, when the famously Spurs-supporting band took a big sack of Old Trafford cash to re-record the song with different lyrics for Manchester United, scoring a number one in the process. Unforgiveable.

I never thought I’d say it, but thank God for Then Jericho. Big Area was one of only two top twenty hits the band had (The Motive (Living Without You) being the other), and frankly, they should have been massive, managing to combine hard rock, pop and stadium sized tracks to surprisingly good effect, the best bits of Big Country, U2, Simple Minds and countless other bands they often get confused with (Cutting Crew, The Alarm). They had an added touch of glamorous sex appeal from lead man Mark Shaw, whose ego got the better of him (hey, sleeping with Belinda Carlisle will do that to the best of men) and he left the band in the lurch for a (no doubt) hefty solo contract with EMI. Where for art they now? The Butlins nostalgia tour and Shaw sometimes performs in an 80s ‘supergroup’ that includes Tony Hadley, Paul Young and Fish!

(As a side note, while preparing this review I happened to catch a dreadful piece of TV about talent shows, which featured clips from Reborn in the USA, a show where 80s pop stars were sent on a tour of the States to try and revive their careers. Mark Shaw was one of the participants and was, undeniably, an arse. It seemed his only ally was one Tony Hadley, so maybe their supergroup fortunes were forged on that fateful and, for Shaw at least, truncated road trip.)

Morrissey’s Last Of The International Playboys seems thoroughly out of place in this testosterone-fuelled, denim-clad company (though I’m sure many would argue he could challenge Mark Shaw in a “being an arse” competition). It’s a song I loved as a kid but now sounds very Second Division in Moz’s discography. Poison were always a bit Second Division in everything, and Every Rose Has It’s Thorn is an utterly dire attempt at a rock/country knock off of Guns n’ Roses.

The first half of NOW 14 closes with possibly the most forgotten number one in the series so far. Even telling you it was Simple Minds’ only number one will not nudge your brain any. Belfast Child is, frankly, odd. This song has no business being a single, let alone a chart-topper. It’s trite, depressing, mawkish, of questionable judgement and, for the first half, almost listenable. I just don’t get it; maybe someone who bought it can enlighten me.

Thankfully, side three brings back some fun to proceedings, providing our dance tunes for this episode. Neneh Cherry’s Buffalo Stance is still great, and Inner City’s Good Life sounds a lot better to my ears now than it did back in the day. I wasn’t a huge hit in 1989, but it’s aged well and still sounds surprisingly contemporary. Sadly, I can’t say the same for S-Express’ Hey Music Lover which is still good fun, but is let down by cheap 80s production far removed from the slickness of Theme from S-Express or even Superfly Guy (which failed to appear on a NOW album, sadly). Quite what Living In A Box are doing mixed up on this side is anyone’s guess, but here they are. Blow The House Down is a good, efficient, pop-dance track but is instantly forgotten long before it finishes. Thankfully this would be the last appearance for the Paul Weller imposter, as The Style Council sign off with their farewell single, Promised Land. No, I didn’t remember it either.

Two brilliant, and very different, songs follow. Adeva’s stunning cover of Respect is up first, and it is bound to polarise opinion. Made famous (but not originally recorded) by Aretha Franklin, I must confess I hated this back then, really despising it. I now feel I was too hasty. If there’s one thing I can’t stand it’s cover versions which just replicate the original song. Adeva’s version of Respect is as different from Aretha’s version, as Aretha’s version is different from Otis Redding’s version. It certainly doesn’t replicate anything, though I’m not sure exactly what it does do, but it’s one of the most radical cover versions I’ve heard for a good long while. As brave as Scissor Sister’s version of Comfortably Numb, but without the camp theatrical winks, this is an artist saying “I’ve got the balls to take this classic track, and do it MY way, and screw you all!” It’s got a bit of a strange time signature and no melody, Adeva changes the lyrics, scats over parts of it… Bar the late 80s tinny drums this would be considered a classic. I love it.

I also love Tone Loc’s Wild Thing. Not a big hit in the UK (it only reached number 21) it still kills with its drumbeat and sparse guitar stab melody (mostly stolen from Van Halen’s Jamie’s Cryin’), it also manages a nice line in self-depreciation: in two verses, Mr Loc fails to do the wild thing. The song feels like a humorous jibe at some of his contemporaries’ obsession with sex, but probably ended up becoming a template rather than a warning.

Side three finishes rather oddly with Natalie Cole’s dreadful, turgid I Live For Your Love, which I hadn’t heard since I bought this album 24 years ago. It features a rather strained vocal performance from the talented Ms Cole, and is nothing to write home about. On the CD version of NOW 14, I Live For Your Love provides the stepping stone from the dance tracks into the balladry to follow, another indicator of the programming more for CDs than just the album and cassette versions.

The biggest track on NOW 14 is not very well remembered now, but in 1989 Robin Beck’s The First Time was huge (or at least it was when it came out in late 1988). You may be struggling to remember it now, so why not have a sit down and pour yourself a brand-leading cola beverage and have a think. NOW 14 even provides you with a handy little advert next to Ms Beck’s mugshot for said fizzy, brown, tooth-rotting liquid. Having been played in Coke ads relentlessly for six months prior to release (and it seemed for months afterwards too!), I’m not sure it was necessary for NOW to include the product logo in the inner sleeve to remind listeners where it was from, but then it’s more likely it was Coke’s decision rather than NOW’s: “You want one of the biggest, most globally recognised songs of the year? Fine, but stick this half inch ad in your sleeve or no dice” was probably the conversation had between two fat men in pinstripe suits smoking cigars. It doesn’t matter whether The First Time is any good or not, but for the record it’s not. The fact that Ms Beck would never have another single (or even release an album in the UK) leads me to suspect she may have had a sex change and become a global superstar all over again, as Beck, though that may be a lie.

Another track impossible not to include was Paula Abdul’s Straight Up. Now best known as a Simon Cowell hand puppet, Abdul had been THE go to choreography for the great and the good in the 80s (including Whitney and Madge). Straight Up was a surprisingly edgy debut single which still sounds great, and was wildly different to most mainstream pop-dance at the time. It had only just been released at the time of NOW 14’s appearance in the shops, so this was THE hot track on the album, so why it was buried away here god only knows. She never successfully followed through on this though, becoming a less-popular Gloria Estefan (flitting between forgettable pop and dreary ballads; come to think of it, pretty much like Jon Bon Jovi too). There was Opposite Attract, which we’ll come to on a later album, but we all know that MC Scat Cat was the true star of that one.

Sam Fox’s I Only Want To Be With You is a Stock, Aitken, Waterman-produced abomination which warrants no further coverage here. But it does lead us into the pop-dumping ground of the remainder of side four. The biggest surprise here is, again, Brother Beyond. As with their appearance on NOW 13, I was shocked at how un-dreadful Be My Twin is. It’s teenage pop for sure, but it’s a bit more sophisticated, and shows a lot more pop nous, than the over-produced TV pop the kids get served up nowadays. What I’ve realised about Brother Beyond is, although the guiding hand of SAW hangs over their shoulder (the Hit Factory viewing them as a Bros sized meal ticket), they wrote all their own material. Be My Twin is therefore more reminiscent of, say, The Blow Monkeys than Bananarama, and as a result has aged much better. It’s a shame that they are now considered boy band has-beens as they, on this showing at least, had far more to offer than the Brothers Goss (and Ken). One of the band is now a massively successful writer, working with the likes of Adele, and won an Ivor Novello for Will Young’s Leave Right Now. What’s Matt Goss written recently, apart from his housing benefit application?

Those perennial writers Climie Fisher return for the last time with the disappointing Love Like A River. It seems odd that the same pens that write Love Changes Everything could also write this, but you can’t win them all. It would appear their star was fading faster than anticipated. Duran Duran’s star had faded more than most, and All She Wants Is would prove to be their last top ten hit for a long while (they would manage just two more over the next two decades). A truly great song that sounded unlike anything else they’d ever done, and, to be honest, anything else tearing up the charts at the time. Looked at with modern ears (if you can look at something with your ears) you could argue it pointed the way to the likes of Curve and Nine Inch Nails, with its crunching guitar and industrial beat. Duran Duran, the forefathers of Industrial? I’m sure they’d rather that title than ‘the band The Killers wish they were’.

The Duranies appearance on Celebrity Masterchef did not go well

80s survivors Level 42 are still hanging around with Tracie, a jolly but uninspiring midlife crisis ditty, before we reach the bitter end of NOW 14, Michael Ball’s Love Changes Everything. No relation to Climie Fisher’s epic pop anthem, the title was pilfered by Andrew Lloyd Webber for his latest blockbuster West End show, Aspects of Love. Despite the song being one of his biggest chart hits, the show itself was a huge flop, remembered more for the fact that Sir Roger Moore was meant to be in it, but pulled out at the last minute. All is, of course a massive star (if you like that kind of thing; personally I’d rather do something unpleasant to my private area than ‘take in a show’) and a huge talent, but this song is so dull you can almost hear Ball sighing “really, this is the best you can do, Webber?” at some of the lyrics. He doesn’t sound as if he’s particularly interested in the song at all, or even bothering to make an effort, perhaps a result of having to reign in a big theatrical voice in the confides of a tiny recording booth. It’s a sorry end to NOW 14. Show tunes have no place on pop compilations (but this won’t be the last) and makes you forget the hard work the album had already put in to try and make up for the poor quality of its predecessors.

NOW 14 to an extent, does redeem the series, but the same nagging doubts remain. What is pop doing? Where is it going?

Two more NOW’s in 1989 would attempt to answer those questions and neither gets any closer to answering them. Speaking of answers… it’s supposed to be an art gallery

NOW THAT’S WHAT I CALL MUSIC 14

Release date

20th March 1989

Biggest tracks

The First Time – Robin Beck

Need You Tonight – INXS

Somethings Gotten Hold Of My Heart – Marc Almond and Gene Pitney

Lost gems

Respect – Adeva

Be My Twin – Brother Beyond

Forgotten tracks

Fine Time – Yazz

Promised Land – The Style Council

What’s missing?

Angel of Harlem –U2

Especially For You – Kylie Minogue and Jason Donovan

My Prerogative – Bobby Brown

I Don’t want A Lover – Texas

Track listing

Side one
Something’s Gotten Hold Of My Heart	Marc Almond & Gene Pitney
Two Hearts	Phil Collins
Stop!	Erasure
Help!	Bananarama
Looking For Linda	Hue And Cry
Fine Time	Yazz
Four Letter Word	Kim Wilde
Stop	Sam Brown

Side two
You Got It	Roy Orbison
She Drives Me Crazy	Fine Young Cannibals
Need You Tonight	INXS
Burning Bridges (On And Off And On Again)	Status Quo
Big Area	Then Jericho
The Last Of The Famous International Playboys	Morrissey
Every Rose Has Its Thorn	Poison
Belfast Child	Simple Minds

Side three
Buffalo Stance	Neneh Cherry
Good Life	Inner City
Hey Music Lover	S-Express
Blow The House Down	Living In A Box
Promised Land	The Style Council
Respect	Adeva
Wild Thing	Tone Loc
I Live For Your Love	Natalie Cole

Side four
First Time	Robin Beck
Straight Up	Paula Abdul
I Only Want To Be With You	Samantha Fox
Be My Twin	Brother Beyond
Love Like A River	Climie Fisher
All She Wants Is	Duran Duran
Tracie	Level 42
Love Changes Everything	Michael Ball

May 29, 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