Tag: now

Blue Christmas: NOW 100 Hits Christmas (2019)

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

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

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

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

A bargain bin yesterday

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now, THAT’s What I Call A Christmas Compilation

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

December 14, 2019

They Sold Me a Dream of Christmas: NOW – The Christmas Album 2016 Vinyl

The world seems to thrive on revivals these days. Whether it’s dreadful sitcoms, the Gallagher brothers or Nazism, it seems we can’t go a week without something from the past being dredged up, brushed off and shoved back in our faces again. One such irritation the past few years has been the vinyl revival. Kickstarted by Record Store Day, a genuine attempt to revive the humble independent record shop which ended up getting hijacked by the major labels as a way of convincing £50 Man (remember him) to part with said amount of money for a limited edition 7” of a ropey live recording of a song he could probably find on Youtube if he could be bothered. The continued baffling success of the enterprise seemed to do more damage to those very retailers it was meant to promote, as they were starved of the product which was the very point, in favour of the resurgent high street stores. Well, HMV.

The Second Coming of HMV has been instrumental in the mass marketing of over priced vinyl for the ‘collector’s market’ and a whole new range of tatty players, the like of which used to be found cluttering up Woolworths (and Woolco) around this time of year.

(Full disclosure: Christmas 2016 saw me temping in said record emporium, and I was guilty of plugging players I knew to be substandard, mainly because customers would always roll their eyes in disbelief when I’d tell them they would probably need to spend over £200 to get a half decent player, while they were longingly stroking a Crosley Cruiser for £69.)

But, as is customary, I digress. This also led to an outpouring of re-releases for vinyl which had previously been widely available to those who were happy to hunt for them, for a quid or two in their local charity shop. £20 became the standard price for a record as, after years of complaining the industry had ripped them off over the cost of CDs, men of a certain age were quite happy to let the industry rip them off over the cost of vinyl instead. Vinyl of albums they most probably already owned in at least one CD format.

NOW were never going to let an opportunity like this pass them by. But just as when they fluffed the CD releases of the original series (only releasing the inaugural album and then… none of the others!) they made the baffling decision not to re-release the series on 180gm vacuum packed collectable gorgeousness. No, they decided to re-release the original Christmas album, but not.

The Christmas Album: 12 Songs of Christmas

Happy Xmas (War is Over)	John & Yoko/The Plastic Ono Band
Last Christmas	Wham!
Fairytale of New York (Feat. Kirsty MacColl)	The Pogues
Merry Christmas Everyone	Shakin’ Stevens
Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree	Brenda Lee
It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year	Andy Williams
I Wish It Could Be Christmas Everyday	Wizzard
Driving Home for Christmas	Chris Rea
Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!	Dean Martin
Merry Xmas Everybody	Slade
Do They Know It’s Christmas?	Band Aid
White Christmas	Bing Crosby

First up, I have no idea what this album is called. On the official NOW site it’s referred to (rather tellingly) as NOW Christmas Vinyl, HMV list it as The Christmas Album: The 12 Songs of Christmas, Amazon it’s NOW The Christmas Album (Vinyl). Who knows. What I do know is just a cursory glance at that tracklisting sets alarms ringing.

First off, there’s no way NOW could have done a genuine re-release of the original Christmas album. The presence of a certain Gary Glitter back in 1985 would have made it impossible. Another potential fly in the ointment is Queen. Thank God it’s Christmas was included originally, but has never appeared on any subsequent NOW Christmas release, for reasons I do not know. It’s a popular tune, gets loads of radio play, and Queen are on one of the NOW labels. I can only assume it’s a decision by the band.

Point two, there have been a fair few ‘classic’ christmas tracks released since 1985. Not many, I’ll grant you, but a few. And the lack of some of them on a NOW Christmas album (even a supposedly nostalgic one) would be sacrilegious. So out would go Shaky’s Blue Christmas in favour of Merry Christmas Everyone. The Greatest Christmas Song of All Time ((c) BBC4 and 6Music) Fairytale of New York also demands to be included, and neglecting Chris Rea’s Driving Home for Christmas would seem churlish. Mariah Carey’s absence, whilst irritating, is probably explained by the fact that she’s a bit too female and poppy for an album clearly aged at middle-aged men; see also The Waitresses’ Christmas Wrapping).

But then things get a bit murky, as you realise some of the original tracks missing are pretty huge: Elton John, Jona Lewie, The Beach Boys, even Lord thumbs aloft himself, Macca. But what’s odder is those brought in to fill the gaps. Brenda Lee, Dean Martin and Andy Williams were nowhere to be seen back in 1985, so why include them now at the expense of, probably, better loved and highly regarded tracks that were included on the original release?

The whole enterprise stinks of a cynical cash grab with little regard for its origins, its audience or, frankly, its artists. It’s no better than £3 cds you see in the petrol station with tiny print on the back cover stating “some tracks may have been re recorded without the original artists”. The lack of the original NOW logo on the front cover is the final cherry on the turd.

As I said before, a proper re-release it completely out of the question, but a partial one, omitting the two tracks mentioned, and possibly even with the Shaky substitution, would have been better than what was released. The fact that in my six weeks Christmas work in HMV last year I only saw one copy come through my till may tell a story, but the fact it’s back in the shops this year (and being plugged by said shops) would also suggest they still think somebody wants it. But then if it’s only going to be played on a Crosley Cruiser for a few weeks of the year, what does it matter?

December 17, 2017

30 Years of NOW – The Christmas Album Part 2 (2000-2015)

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

NOW Xmas (2005)

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

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

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

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

NOW That’s What I Call Xmas (2006)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NOW That’s What I Call Xmas (2009)

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

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

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

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

NOW That’s What I Call Christmas (2012)

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

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

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

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

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

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

NOW That’s What I Call Christmas (2013)

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

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

Which brings us bang up to date.

NOW That’s What I Call Christmas (2015)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Hello ladies…”

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

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

December 4, 2015

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tracklisting

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

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

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

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

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

Paul McCartney, Yesterday

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NOW! The Christmas Album (2000)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Note:

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

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

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

November 30, 2015

NOW 22 – Something good is gonna happen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NOW THAT’S WHAT I CALL MUSIC 22

Release date

27th July 1992

Biggest tracks

It Only Takes a Minute – Take That

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

Lost gems

I Don’t Care – Shakespear’s Sister

Something Good – Utah Saints

Don’t Worry ‘Bout a Thing – Incognito

Forgotten tracks

Days of Pearly Spencer – Marc Almond

One Shining Moment – Diana Ross

Joy – Soul II Soul

What’s missing?

The Life of Riley – The Lightening Seeds

Midlife Crisis – Faith No More

Track listing

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

July 1, 2014

NOW! 19 – Not quite the time of your life

1991 was to prove to be a game changing year for NOW. Hits was now dead in the water and to celebrate NOW would unveil an exciting, sexy new look. That, however, would have to wait, as the year began with a continuation of the dreadful pub wallpaper, shouty brash styling of its predecessor, but at least NOW 19 is a huge improvement. Oddly, although it contains five number ones, I suspect many people would struggle to remember them from the track listing, and would probably misidentify a couple of songs as chart-toppers that weren’t.

The advert, which chooses to highlight some odd selections, mentions six number ones. I wonder if they are cheekily including The Righteous Brothers’ You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling, which was a number one in 1965, but only number 3 on it’s 1990 re-release.

We start with one of the ones that DID hit the top spot at the time, with the peerless The Clash and their denim-flogging Should I Stay or Should I Go. A brilliant song, no doubt, but should such an old song (from an advert no less) be opening the album? What used to be the prime slot of a NOW album, usually reserved for the biggest track available, it was increasingly being used as brinkmanship and devoted to artists the labels wanted to plug the most. The fact that The Clash was licensed from WEA for inclusion makes this doubly strange as none of the NOW labels benefit from additional sales. Maybe it was considered a big enough hit to warrant a negotiation with WEA to get it front and centre.

Adding to the mystery is the fact that the rest of side one is almost exclusively dance orientated. But none of this is as odd as the second track, a tune I’ve spent 20 years trying to decide if I like or not, and I’m still not sure. Much like Candy Flip’s Strawberry Fields Forever, Scritti Politti’s take on the Fab Four’s She’s a Woman (a lesser known mop-top track, being the B-side to I Feel Fine) is a ridiculously contemporary take on a Beatles’ track, so over-produced, bleeding-edge and, frankly, camp, that you wonder if it’s not all some elaborate joke at the listeners’ expense. Add in everyone’s favourite homophobic rapper, Shabba Ranks (making his UK chart debut), and you have the perfect punchline. Seeing Green Gartside in the video looking like Richard Madeley doing his Ali G impression, wearing a very hot-looking tracksuit and baseball cap (right way round, thankfully) is something to behold. It’s not a bad track, not by a long shot; it’s just so wonderfully odd. I’ve had my doubts before about how seriously The Politti’s take themselves (see NOW 12) so I’m happy to assume that, like The Beautiful South, they’re happy for people to take their songs how they hear them and not sneer at them for ‘not getting it’. It’s one of the lowest charting tracks on NOW 19, reaching only number 20.

Just two songs in and we next get one of the best songs on the album with You Got the Love. The track has a massively convoluted genesis which I won’t delve into here, but needless to say the vocal is old (around 1986) and this arrangement was a re-working of a previous bootleg release (1989). Even this 1991 release appears in various different guises. The one on NOW 19 is the one I remember from the charts at the time, but has subtle differences to the one more commonly played on the radio now and heard on 90’s compilations (the track has been remixed and re-released so many times, it’s impossible to know which version you’re going to get).

So things are shaping up nicely, a drop must be due, surely? Well, not yet there isn’t. The KLF’s 3AM Eternal is next, somehow managing to sound like a perfect fusion of rap, dance and rock and simultaneously sound like it’s sending it all up. That’s followed by C and C Music Factory with Gonna Make You Sweat (still a pop-tastic floor-filler) and Nomad’s I Wanna Give You Devotion. In NOW 19’s only sop to the alternative scene we get EMF’s I Believe, a fine follow up to megahit Unbelievable, and 808 State’s In Your Face, probably the hardest track featured on a NOW album. It’s the kind of thing that people say isn’t music, it’s just noise. It’s not quite as teeth-shattering as Cubik from the previous year, but it gives the bass a good rattling. Amazingly this was a top ten hit. Good, because it’s great.

Side one has been pretty damn good, it has to be said, but it saves the best until last, with, in my opinion anyway, the best track featured in the whole series, Massive Attack’s Unfinished Sympathy. It’s simply one of the most perfect records released in my lifetime: a subtle sample, a wonderful vocal, great lyrics, and more atmosphere than the best of Russ Abbott’s parties. It still gives me chills and stops me doing whatever I’m doing when I hear it. It’s so perfect it’s hard to believe it’s actually on a pop compilation and had it not been for this blog I would never have known that it appeared on a NOW album. It reached a sorry number 13 in the charts, a fact I feel the country as a whole should hang its collective head in shame for. Its inclusion does however cement in history a moment of BBC craziness which has been long forgotten. As the single was released at the height of the Gulf War (part 1) Auntie took it upon itself to ban, edit and rename a whole list of songs and artists (including the Happy Mondays, whose track Loose Fit lost a line about blowing up an air force base and wiping out your race; they didn’t have a problem with the lines about getting stoned though). As such Massive Attack were persuaded, through their record company, to lose the ‘Attack’ or risk not getting any airplay, unfortunately making them Massive, and sounding like any number of generic Belgian DJs then cluttering up the lower reaches of the chart. It’s under that name that they appear here.

"Vindaloo! Vindaloo! Vindaloo! Vindaloo! ... and we all like vindaloo!" — **“Vindaloo! Vindaloo! Vindaloo! Vindaloo! … and we all like vindaloo!”**

So, as good as side one is, it’s inevitable that it would have a bad and evil twin. Side two is that twin. Well, to be fair, it’s more that the bad ones are SO bad, they taint the rest of the side. The only track on side two I would choose to listen to is Kylie’s What Do I Have To Do?, part of her sexy re-invention phase. It’s one of the weaker efforts from this period, paling in comparison to Shocked or Better The Devil You Know. Of the rest, Kim Appleby’s G.L.A.D. is fun without scoring as highly as Don’t Worry. Wiggle It, from 2 in a Room, just sounds creepy (and I could have sworn was released a couple of years later than 1991). McHammer’s Pray is poor and only here because if he had a single out it had to be included to make up for the fact that NOW missed out on U Can’t Touch This.

Vanilla Ice and Hale and Pace (featuring Brian May!) slug it out for worst track on the album. I hadn’t heard either Play That Funky Music or The Stonk since 1991 and a bloody good thing too. If any excuses can be made for these, at least Vanilla Ice’s was never meant to be anything other than a pocket-money grabbing, quick buck follow-up to Ice Ice Baby. The Stonk has no such excuse. I hate the idea that charity records, and particularly Comic Relief records, are allowed to be rubbish because the music isn’t the point. Don’t release a record then! Release a comedy video instead, release a book, do a comedy telethon (oh, for the days when Comic Relief actually featured comedy rather than just Children in Need with swearing). The Stonk is a foul, festering boil of a song. Badly written and with little talent on show, either comedically or musically, it is possibly the worst comedy record of all time. It’s certainly the worst one to get to number one. You bloody idiots.

Side two does finish off with a few interesting tracks (no doubt considered mere filler by the compilers of the day). Jesus Loves You was Boy George’s return to the charts, and Bow Down Mister is nowhere near as awful as I remember it from back in the day. In fact its hymn to Hare Krishna actually sounds much more worthwhile now. Enigma’s Sadness Part 1 is one of the oddest number ones we’ve seen so far, mixing monks, pan pipes and a dance beat. I’ve never liked it, for I blame it for introducing us to the endless stream of compilations of Pan Pipe Moods, Chill Out Moods, Moods Moods and Moods. If I want to hear Smells Like Teen Spirit played on pan pipes I’ll go back to University thanks.

The final track of side two is the real curve ball though, and perhaps best sums up how ephemeral the charts were becoming: Only You by Praise. Ring any bells? It didn’t with me, even though it was a top 5 single. No? Was featured in a car advert? Maybe that’s jogged a few memories. As soon as you hear the opening, ghostly female moan bouncing from one speaker to the other you’ll recognise it. In a similar vein to Sadness, but much more atmospheric, better produced and likely to still sound contemporary for many years, this is a tune ripe for rediscovery. Or is it an embarrassing mix of would-be spiritualism, dolphin noises and with a whiff of the Ikea catalogue about it. It’s one or the other.

The decision to top load the album with the dance tracks (with the odd exception of The Clash) does the job of making NOW seem trendy again and down with the kids. What it conversely does it make the second half incredibly dreary by comparison, filled as it is, once again, with old timers, covers and re-issues. A quick glance at the line up for sides 3 and 4 turns up just two tracks I’d choose to listen to, and one of them is Chris Rea!

We are definitely in black and chrome dinner party mode to start things off. Oleta Adams’ Get Here shows off her vocal skills admirably but it is a boring bank advert soundtrack (actually I think Royal Mail ended up using it in a TV commercial, with crushing inevitability). Rick Astley’s Cry For Help was an admirable attempt to demonstrate he could still operate without SAW pulling the strings (he grew his hair long and everything) and it’s nice, if uneventful. The public, of course, wanted the funny little dance, so this would be his last major hit. The cheese is supplied by Robert Palmer, this time wasting his talents on a dreary cover of Marvin Gaye’s Mercy Mercy Me and I Want You, combining the two songs to no noticeable effect.

Next is a bunch of old tracks: I’ve Had The Time of My Life gets the reissue treatment following Dirty Dancing’s TV premiere (!). Berlin’s Take My Breath Away had similarly gone stratospheric following Top Gun’s TV debut, but luckily that wasn’t included for a second time. The Righteous Brothers record company had followed up Unchained Melody (the best-selling track of 1990) with the infinitely better You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling to keep the Greatest Hits album sales ticking over. This was a double A side release with the even better, but less well-known Ebb Tide. The radio only ever played the more famous track though. Shame.

Seal then pops up to tell you the world is doomed in Crazy. I never quite understood why we have to get crazy in order to survive, but there you go.

Finally a good song arrives. It’s still a little on the maudlin side, but Banderas deserve to be better remembered than they are, at least if This Is Your Life is any kind of evidence. It hasn’t aged that well, but its left-field and dancey approach to the ‘state of the planet’ song so popular at the time is far more appealing than Seal’s diatribe. It’s one of the lesser known tracks on here and needs a wider audience.

It’s followed by a song I swear I had never heard before in my life, this despite the fact it reached number six at a time when I still had a vague passing interest in what was in the top ten: The Postman Song by Stevie B. It is bloody awful and genuinely sounds like it could have been a massive hit at any point in the past 20 years (I suppose that’s some kind of compliment but it’s not meant to be). Lyrically naive, as if written by a child, it’s also musically bland (horrible electronic piano abounds), over produced (quite odd considering how sparse it is) with far too much echo on the trying-too-hard vocal. Mr B (probably no relation to Derek or Radio 1 DJ Emma) clearly fancies himself as a successor to Jacko, but that rhotacism does creep in occasionally, making his cries of “because I love you” sound like Kim Jong Il in Team America. So ronery.

Side four, thankfully starts off well, with two solid songs. Chris Rea’s Auberge has always been a song I’ve had a fondness for because I’m a sucker for a good horn section (ooh, cheeky). No idea what it’s about but his gravelly voice suits it perfectly and I remember there was an amusing video which helped a lot too. Chris Issak’s Blue Hotel is the long-forgotten follow up to his massive Wicked Game. As good as that song was I’ve always preferred this. This kind of stuff was so rare at the time it was refreshing to hear someone who wasn’t ashamed of being considered old fashioned (Harry Connick Jr was breaking at the same time with his crooner revival). The charts were full of old songs at the time anyway, like Free’s All Right Now, clogging up the top 5 like so much swallowed chewing gum. Never understood the attraction of this sweaty slice of 70s cheese and that hasn’t changed with age.

The rest of side four returns to NOW standard and meanders its way home with the off-cuts, forgotten tracks and artists that needed a push (sometimes off the roster). And Queen.

While INXS didn’t really need a push, the album X wasn’t selling as well as anticipated. Disappear was a weak track and the chart position it reached reflected this. Falling by the wayside for a second time was Belinda Carlisle, with the dull Summer Rain. Also rans in attendance also include The Railway Children (the odd Every Beat of My Heart drifts between Aztec Camera, House of Love and Johnny Hates Jazz without coming close to any of them, not even the latter) and Thunder (one of those bands, like Runrig and Wildhearts, who always seem more popular than their record sales suggest, failing to score big hits but selling out Wembley for a week).

But the strangest song is saved for last: Queen’s Innuendo. It’s probably their most successful attempt to recreate the template for Bohemian Rhapsody (something they’d been trying to do since 1975) but that does not make it any good. It ain’t. In fact it’s one of their worst singles ever, so quite why it became only their second number one after Rhapsody is completely beyond me. Radio 1 certainly helped. The old guard were still holding court but were faltering and most (DLT especially) just seemed to doing whatever the hell they liked by this stage. I remember Simon Bates, who had the mid-morning show, was going to give the record its first airing. Not only did he play the whole song (all six and a half minutes) with a reverential silence unheard of other records, he then declared it a masterpiece and played the whole thing again! It’s no masterpiece: it sounds like the darker cousin of their 1989 minor chart fancier, The Miracle, with an added Spanish guitar and castanets wig-out halfway through, and a truly odd rock opera interlude. It’s the kind of thing Muse aspire to now, but at least you think they are aware of their own ridiculousness. At least I do.

A few years earlier, Innuendo would have opened a NOW album, but Queen (number one or not) were not relevant to the NOW buyers anymore. Despite the abundance of re-releases on show, dance music now dominated the teenager’s music choice. NOW, the charts and Radio 1 were going to have to adapt to the new order.

The other thing to change, for NOW, would be look of the thing. The new 90s look needed a refresh and after just two outings the brash, gaudy look (along with the exclamation mark) would be ditched in favour of something far more refined, stylish and NOW.

NOW THAT’S WHAT I CALL MUSIC 19

Release date

25th March 1991

Biggest tracks

Should I Stay or Should I Go – The Clash

You Got The Love – The Source feat. Candi Stanton

Unfinished Sympathy – Massive

Crazy – Seal

Lost gems

This Is Your Life – Banderas

She’s A Woman – Scritti Politti feat Shabba Ranks

Forgotten tracks

Only You – Praise

Because I Love You (The Postman Song) – Stevie B

Worst Tracks

The Stonk – Hale & Pace and The Stonkers

Play That Funky Music – Vanilla Ice

What’s missing?

Grease Megamix – John Travolta & Olivia Newton-John

Bring Your Daughter To The Slaughter – Iron Maiden

Hippy Chick – Soho

Track listing

Side one
Should I Stay or should I Go	The Clash
She’s A Woman	Scritti Politti feat. Shabba Ranks
You Got The Love	The Source feat. Candi Stanton
3 a.m. Eternal	The KLF feat. The Children Of The Revolution
Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now)	C+C Music Factory pts. Freedom Williams
(I Wanna Give You) Devotion	Nomad feat. MC Mikee Freedom
I Believe	EMF
In Yer Face	808 State
Unfinished Sympathy	Massive Attack

Side two
Pray	M C Hammer
G.L.A.D.	Kim Appleby
What Do I Have To Do (7 Mix)	Kylie Minogue
The Stonk	Hale & Pace & The Stonkers
Wiggle It	2 In A Room
Play That Funky Music	Vanilla Ice
Bow Down Mister	Jesus Loves You
Sadness Part 1	Enigma
Only You	Praise

Side three
Get Here	Oleta Adams
Cry For Help	Rick Astley
Mercy Mercy Me/I Want You (Medley)	Robert Palmer
(I’ve Had) The Time Of My Life	Bill Medley & Jennifer Warnes
You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’	The Righteous Brothers
Crazy	Seal
This Is Your Life	Banderas
Because I Love You (The Postman Song)	Stevie B

Side four
Auberge	Chris Rea
Blue Hotel	Chris Isaak
All Right Now	Free
Disappear	INXS
Summer Rain	Belinda Carlisle
Every Beat Of The Heart	The Railway Children
Love Walked In	Thunder
Innuendo	Queen

Note: NOW 19 was the first album not to have an accompanying VHS release.

March 11, 2014

NOW! 18 – The pompatus of love

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Legend — **Utterly utterly utterly utterly brilliant**

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

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

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

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

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

NOW THAT’S WHAT I CALL MUSIC 18

Release date

19^th November 1990

Biggest tracks

Nothing Compares 2 U – Sinead O’Connor

It Must have Been Love – Roxette

Unchained Melody – The Righteous Brothers

Forgotten tracks

Little Brother – Blue Pearl

Missing You – Soul II Soul ft Kym Mazelle

Hidden gems

Hold On – Wilson Phillips

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

To Love Somebody – Jimmy Sommervile

What’s missing

King of Wishful Thinking – Go West

Kinky Afro – Happy Mondays

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

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

Track listing

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

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

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

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

August 1, 2013

NOW 17 – Just what is it that you want to do?

As the first NOW album of the 90s NOW 17 promises much and delivers little, but it points the way to another world far removed from the Wet Wet Wets, Jellybeans and Johnny Hates Jazzes (?) of the late 80s. In terms of looking forward, NOW 17 gives over a whole side to the fast emerging indie-dance scene and almost all of sides three and four are dance orientated. Classic pop is curiously thin on the ground. There’s also the first computer-generated cover design. Yes… um… I’m sure in April 1990, this cover looked shockingly futuristic, reminiscent as it is of the first Doom, or Castle Wolfenstein video games; you can imagine it popping up as an end of level reward after you’ve mown down another 4,000 monsters. Also, intriguingly, “That’s What I Call Music” is almost an afterthought in the design. Had they finally cottoned on to the fact that nobody ever used the full title, so what was the point?

The featured artists on the cover are a curious mix as well. For a hip, happening pop compilation released at a time when the charts were filled with ecstasy-laden folk in Global Hypercolour t-shirts and tie-dye flower strewn hoodies, the big draws on NOW 17’s cover still include Phil Collins, UB40 and Tina Turner. His Satan-ness Cliff is on here too, but that keep that one as an evil little surprise.

Side one provides your pop injection. Erasure’s Blue Savannah has always been on my hate-list for reasons I’ve never quite fathomed; it remains there still, a dreadful way to start the album. Rebel MC’s Better World is, um, better, but is a poor follow-up to the superior Street Tuff. It only just scraped into the top 20, and only one more hit was forthcoming (Tribal Base in 1991; no, me neither). Paula Abdul’s Opposites Attract is brilliant however, and may have actually improved with age. A wonderfully upbeat rap number for the masses, it has got a small tinge of 1989 about it (but far less than some other tracks on show here) but as a party tune it’s damn good.

**I’m sure there is a joke about his name, but I’m not making it**

Also damn good is Beats International’s Dub Be Good To Me, which should have opened the album. It’s one of only two number ones on NOW 17, but also one of the few outright classics. Still sounding refreshing today, its brilliance lies in the ability to find disparate samples which somehow work together (a trick Norman Cook would continue to have enormous success with as Fatboy Slim) and combining that with a wonderful vocal from Lindy Layton. I’m baffled as to why her solo career never took off, despite Fatboy’s help. I’m also baffled by karaoke kings UB40’s continued chart success into the 90s. By 1990 they were only capable of having hits with other people’s songs, so they continued to churn out a succession of their Labour of Love albums at a rate of about one a month. Kingston Town has been performed worse at your local pub, but not by much.

Thankfully the world was about to be saved by Candy Flip and their Funky Drummer-led version of Strawberry Fields Forever. I’ve never been able to make my mind up about this track. Not then, when I was no doubt the target audience for it, or now when I’m a cynical, dried up husk of a man writing a sarcastic blog about how crap pop music is. I’m supposed to say how depressing it is that a group of fly-by-night kids and (no doubt) a producer with his eye on a quick buck desecrated a classic song in a trendy and wholly inappropriate way. But of course that’s utter nonsense. I’m not a fan of the Beatles’ original version anyway, which in itself was a cynical pocket money grabbing exploitation of the burgeoning late 60s drug scene, so I don’t really give a toss about Candy Flip ruining a great piece of art, because it wasn’t a great piece of art to start with. So the only concern is, is it listenable? Well, just about. It flip-flops from crass to genius with just about every drum beat, but it is a slice of 1990 that says a lot about the record industry’s desire to cash in on what the Stone Roses/Happy Mondays had started the year before. Candy Flip wouldn’t be the last act to be seduced and abandoned by the industry chasing the batik and loon-pant wearing pound, and Manchester and baggy burned out almost as quickly as it started (see also Flowered Up, The Soup Dragons, Mock Turtles et al) and at least the band had a successful afterlife, going on to work with the likes of The Charlatans and Robbie Williams, and two of them went on to form the criminally underrated Sound 5.

Drug addled pop for ver kids, man. Or something. — **We never had Twitter and the Facebooks. We had to make do with this.**

To follow that, we get sensible, but dull, tracks from Tina Turner and Phil Collins, who tries to perk up I Wish It Would Rain Down by chucking in a gospel choir and an axe-wielding Eric Clapton. It doesn’t work.

It’s odd to think that side two of NOW 17 is probably the most defining side of NOW in my musical education. I didn’t realise it at the time (probably because I didn’t own the album) but pretty much every track here would point forward to the next decade of my record buying. In terms of legacy, it’s probably second only to the House/Hip hop side of NOW 11 as being about as zeitgeisty as one side of a pop compilation can get. They screwed it up a bit by including The Quireboys, but there you go. In my head this was the sound of summer 1990, yet every track was released between January and April. The opening trio of Step On, Loaded and Enjoy the Silence is about as esoteric as NOW had ever been since Dr Mabuse on NOW 3. These are classics that still stand up today; yes, Step On may be a bit hoary now, but at least it will still get you dancing. The version on NOW 17 is the 7 inch single version. It’s notably different to the most commonly heard version now, the one found on Pills, Thrills and Bellyaches, and all their compilations, which is over a minute longer.

Don't do drugs kids, etc... — **National Treasure**

Following those three titans of indie-dance, we find a minnow of the form, Jesus Jones. Now pretty much forgotten in their native UK, they did hit it big in the USA when Right Here Right Now was used to soundtrack SCUD attacks on Iraq on CNN during the first Gulf War. Classy. EMI had high hopes for the group, seeing them as their meal ticket into the alternative scene, at the expense of several other acts, including a new group they had just signed called Blur, who are notable by their absence from NOW albums for quite a while… Real, Real, Real is a fair track that sounds like a watered down version of something Pop Will Eat Itself may have been knocking out a few years previous, or a cleaned up Carter USM track. Inoffensive chart-friendly unit shifter and nothing more.

The Inspiral Carpets were drifting into similar territory after a few years in the indie salt mines. Pretty much every group from within 30 miles of Manchester, with a pudding bowl haircut and jeans the size of a tent, was getting offered a record contract. The Inspirals at least stayed with an indie label and had a sound of their own. Clint Boon’s Hammond organ was much imitated, but he was the one who brought it back from obscurity. Hitting number 14, This Is How It Feels remains their most popular hit, even if it was surpassed, in chart terms anyway, by Dragging Me Down a few years later. On NOW 17, the track appears in its radio-friendly version, replacing the explicit lyric about the ‘guy from the top estate’ chucking himself under a train.

Chucking yourself under a train is, coincidentally, the thing that Guy Chadwick most sounds like he wants to do when singing for The House of Love. Often lumped in with the shoe-gazing crowd who found themselves sucked into the baggy vortex for a while (see also the exceptional Ride, and the not quite so exceptional Birdland), House of Love are one of the more unusual acts to grace a NOW album, a bit like seeing Tom Waits on a chill-out compilation. Shine On is a brilliant tune, probably their most well-known, and a remix of their debut single from 1987. Such wonderful song writing and talented musicianship would ultimately lead to internal fighting, booze and drugs, and everything else that stops greatness from pushing through into mainstream success. Shame.

Faith No More’s From Out of Nowhere comes from out of nowhere (sorry) and is a bit of a barn-storming relief after all that depression. It’s never been my favourite Faith No More track, but I’ve learned to appreciate it over the years and it’s certainly impossible to ignore. I’d rather ignore The Quireboys, who close off side two though. You know those bands that make a career out of ripping off another band, like Oasis did? Well, The Quireboys did that with The Faces, seemingly just because the singer sounds like Rod Stewart (and he does a bloody good job of it, too). They had a ridiculous name which ensured no kid could admit to liking them (at least at my school) without being accused of liking ‘queer boys’. They did have one good song, 7 O Clock, but that’s not the track here. Here we’ve got Hey You, and it’s a dreary, pub piano dirge that’s all roll and no rock. Imagine Rod Stewart singing a Chas n Dave number, and you’ll be almost there.

The leather trouser makes an ill-advised comeback to the charts. — **No caption I write can be funnier than this image is on its own**

After giving us a taste of where NOW would go later in the decade, with what is probably best described as the “Indie Ghetto” (which of course, would end up redefining the term ‘indie’ to mean a sound rather than music from independent labels; acts as diverse as Kylie Minogue, The Prodigy and Bjork were all strictly indie), the second half of NOW 17 gives us the more troubling path for the series. Or to put it another way, it’s the reason why everyone, except some absolute die hards, ultimately abandon the series to seek pleasures elsewhere: pop music becomes annoying.

For reasons unknown (probably money, most things are), or better discussed by people who know about this kind of thing, pop music changed in the 1990s. I know they say that about every decade, but the status quo that had been in place since the early 60’s was pretty much abandoned by the decade’s end. Pop bands were replaced by pop producers. Pop has always had its svengalis from Brian Epstein and Andrew Loog Oldham, through Mickey Most, Pete Waterman all the way up to Simon ‘666’ Cowell. But now, the knob fiddlers were coming to the fore, thanks to cheap equipment and a succession of cheaper guest vocalists. They became the new pop stars, and groups were pushed into the shadows again. Think about it: pretty much any guitar-based band now is classed as an ‘indie’ band or an ‘alternative’ band, even if they are as successful as Muse or Coldplay. The only exception to this are bands aimed specifically at kids, like McFly and Busted, but that boat sailed swiftly by and now we’re back to pretty, non-threatening boys sitting on stools singing about kittens. Just like Garage (a term from the 60s), Indie and Alternative would soon no longer mean what they used to, and soon they would be followed by R n’ B and House too. Faceless (or anonymous faced) dance music would soon rule the roost. Sides three and four of NOW 17 are almost exclusively like this. That in itself isn’t necessarily a bad thing. We are, in 1990, a few scant years away from the Superstar DJ era, where Carl Cox, Chemical Brothers and Norman Cook were as popular as the boy bands they battled with for chart supremacy. But this is the start of that path, so instead we get a very rum bunch indeed.

Ya Kid K and MC Eric. You remember them, don't you? — **Ya Kid K and MC Eric. You remember them, don’t you?**

Take Technotronic… please! (boom, boom). This Beat is Technotronic is just Pump Up the Jam Part Two. In fact it IS Pump Up The Jam, just with different lyrics, sung by someone called DJ Eric. At least Lonnie Gordon’s Happening All Over Again is a great tune, one of Stock, Aitken and Waterman’s last big hits, but also one of their best. It’s probably their most successful attempt at recreating that classic disco sound for the 1980’s, sadly a year too late. Unsurprisingly the song had been written for Donna Summer, with whom they had a brief collaboration, but they had a falling out with the disco diva they did the next best thing and got a younger (and no doubt cheaper) looky-likey. I was convinced as a teenager that Gordon, like Summer, was in fact an old disco songstress that SAW had rescued from obscurity, but no; she was a just your standard session singer who happened to get noticed by the Hit Factory. As is so often the case, Gordon never capitalised on the top 5 success of this excellent track and the dumper beckoned.

Disco morphs into Hi-NGR with Jimmy Somerville and Cliff Richard (separately, sadly). Read My Lips is a much better plea for sexual tolerance than the awful There’s More To Love (featured on NOW 12) and continues the brash fabulousness of Somerville’s earlier cover of Sylvester’s You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real), a top 10 hit which would have sat much better on this album. In a similar vein is Cliff’s Stronger Than That, the best track from the album of the similar name. That doesn’t mean it’s any good, because it’s not, but it doesn’t make you want to murder people who were to play it like you did when you heard I Just Don’t Have The Heart (see NOW 16).

The anonymous side of things come into play next with the 49ers forgettable Don’t You Want Me, Jamtronik’s awful dance version of Phil Collins’ Another Day in Paradise, and the strange, if not exactly pleasant, JT and the Big Family’s Moments in Soul.

Jamtronik represent a virus that spread across the charts in the 90s and is a throwback to the days of the Top of the Pops and Hot Hits albums: the cheap, nasty cover version knocked together, probably, in a couple of hours. The difference between these bikini-clad clones and those the 1970s (apart from the fact that quality dolly birds like Mary Millington and Caroline Munro were absent) is that they were dance versions, sounding like they’d been knocked up with a £50 Casio keyboard and an Atari ST computer, so they didn’t even have to sound that much like the original. Another Day in Paradise is one of the most offensive singles ever recorded anyway: multi-millionaire pop stars should not make more millions by exploiting other people’s problems, not unless they are prepared to do something about it. This wasn’t a charity record, remember. So, a dance version, for pilled up clubbers, of a trite, opportunistic ode to Britain’s disposed, written by a man who could solve problems like this with a quick waft of his tax-avoiding chequebook? Sorry, got nothing spare, mate.

**This image really needs a funky house beat. Ah yeah.**

Moments in Soul is slightly odd though and that makes it worth a listen. A kind of dance megamix of recent hits, it manages to combine Art of Noise’s glorious Moments in Love, Soul II Soul’s Back to Life and Milli Vanilli’s Girl You Know It’s True into something listenable. Moments in Love seems an odd basis for the track, being 8 years old by this point, and strangely never a top 40 hit despite several rereleases. Side 3 does close on a high note, thanks to the still brilliant Got To Have Your Love from Mantronix. The production may date this a bit (particularly the horrible synthesised horns) but it’s a pretty great track all the same.

Side four is a similar hotchpotch of the good, the bad and the ugly. The good is supplied by Adamski’s Killer, featuring, or course, a very uncredited Seal; Orbital’s Chime, giving little indication of the influence they would have over UK dance music for the next two decades; and Electribe 101’s Talking With Myself. Add in E-Zee Possee (sic) featuring MC Kinky (!) with Everything Starts With An E, which sounds nowhere near as dreadful as I thought it would, despite loving it in my teens, and side four looks like it might be shaping up pretty well. But deep and frightful horror awaits.

Side four begins with Bizz Nizz (an act who somehow managed to be one of the featured artists on the cover) with Don’t Miss the Partyline. Like many dance artists who would appear on NOW albums, this was Bizz Nizz’s only hit, and it did well reaching number 7. But it’s utter crap. And not in a novelty record kind of crap. It’s lazy, money-grabbing, soul-less crap. You think Simon Cowell has the monopoly of conning the kids out of their paper round cash with insipid rubbish (and I do)? Well, he’s only doing what Euro-dance producers (and a few UK ones) have been doing for years before. Partyline features a very basic keyboard melody of about three notes, crowd noises, and a bloke (presumably, a DJ) shouting about the Partyline (this was the golden age of late night TV-advertised chat lines, maybe that was the market they were tapping) and the occasional “are you ready?”. Techno was still in its infancy, so this kind of Diet Techno cleaned up on the charts at the time, being much easier listening (and radio-friendly) than the likes of LFO. And you know what else makes this so dreadful? The guys behind it went on to create 2 Unlimited. Be afraid…

The rest of side four is never as downright nefarious as that, but is a showcase of where 1990’s dance scene was at: in the toilet. Well, that’s the impression given here anyway. I can’t really say how representative it is.

D-Mob’s Put Your Hands Together sounds a year too old to be in this company; Tongue N’ Cheek’s Tomorrow is so utterly forgettable I’ve listened to it at least ten times preparing this review and still can’t remember a thing about it; and the least said about Sydney “Who?” Youngblood’s awful cover of I’d Rather Go Blind the better, except it’s probably the worst cover version NOW has featured thus far. And the worst album closer so far, to boot.

It must be said, NOW 17 does do a great job of capturing the chart mood of the first third of 1990. It’s as disparate and confused as the charts themselves, as maybe it should be. If the kids were strating to buy into the ‘alternative’ (both indie and dance) then where was that going to leave the pop staples like Stock, Aitken and waterman, Cliff, Tina Turner… maybe even Erasure?

As I said earlier, pop was changing, becoming more fractured than ever before, with more genres and sub-genres. NOW was never going to be able to provide an accurate cross-section of the popular movements as it tried to here. A break was once again required, and there would be no new NOW album in the summer of 1990. Christmas would see its return, along with a bold, and potentially disastrous, new look. It was time to wave goodbye to NOW’s balls.

NOW THAT’S WHAT I CALL MUSIC 17

Release date

23^rd April 1990

Biggest tracks

Dub Be Good To Me – Beats International

Killer – Adamski

Step On – Happy Mondays

Loaded – Primal Scream

Forgotten tracks

Got To Have Your Love – Mantronix

Opposites Attract – Paula Abdul (MC Scat Kat is not credited…!)

Track listing

Side One
Blue Savannah	Erasure
Better World	The Rebel MC
Opposites Attract	Paula Abdul
Dub Be Good To Me	Beats International feat. Lindy Layton
Kingston Town	UB40
Strawberry Fields Forever	Candy Flip
I Don’t Wanna Lose You	Tina Turner
I Wish It Would Rain Down	Phil Collins
Side Two
Step On	Happy Mondays
Loaded	Primal Scream
Enjoy The Silence	Depeche Mode
Real Real Real	Jesus Jones
This Is How It Feels	Inspiral Carpets
Shine On	House Of Love
From Out Of Nowhere	Faith No More
Hey You (Live)	The Quireboys
Side Three
This Beat Is Technotronic	Technotronic featuring MC Eric
Happenin’ All Over Again	Lonnie Gordon
Don’t You Love Me	The 49ers
Read My Lips (Enough Is Enough)	Jimmy Somerville
Stronger Than That	Cliff Richard
Another Day In Paradise	Jam Tronik
Moments In Soul	J T & The Big Family
Got To Have Your Love	Mantronix Featuring Wondress
Side Four
Don’t Stop The Partyline	Bizz Nizz
Everything Starts With An ‘E’	E-Zee Possee
Put Your Hands Together	D-Mob & Nuff Juice
Killer	Adamski Featuring Seal
Chime	Orbital
Tomorrow	Tongue N Cheek
Talking With Myself	Electribe 101
I’d Rather Go Blind	Sydney Youngblood

July 29, 2013

NOW 16 – Not The Man You Used To Be

NOW 16 signals the end of an era. Not only was it the last NOW album of the 80s, the decade of its birth, but it was also the last NOW album I owned. 1989 proved to be, pretty much, the end of my love affair with chart music. I’d been dabbling with big brother’s records for a while, but his imminent departure out on his own would mean I’d have to start buying my own copy of the NME now, and my meagre pocket money was not going to stretch to that, Smash Hits AND saving for NOW albums. Something had to give, and it proved to be all things pop that bit the dust.

Looked back from a remove of two and a half decades, NOW 16 confirms a lot of what had been happening over the previous couple of years: dance music was now very much part of the mainstream; Stock, Aitken, Waterman had half the charts sewn up; pop bands were being replaced by pretty-boy ‘manufactured’ acts; and any attempt to create something meaningful would result in the kind of overblown, overwrought and over-long musical pot-pourri that produces the likes of Sowing The Seeds Of Love. Amazingly, opening the compilation in a near full version (just 30 seconds shy of the album version, but still much more than they’d play on the radio), it’s a huge, expensive mess, but I still love it, because it’s a huge, expensive mess, and it’s easily the most interesting song on NOW 16. The rest of the album is mostly a display of pop blandness at its most beige, and was indicative of the severe lack of ‘top chart hits’ EMI, Virgin and Polygram produced in ‘89, but also how dreadful the public’s tastes had gotten.

With the exception of Tears for Fears, side one is fairly ordinary, without being particularly bad. Belinda Carlisle’s Leave A Light On is strating to demonstrate her lack of variety (or rather that of her writers); Erasure’s Drama is good, but not a classic; and Debbie Harry’s I Want That Man similarly pales in comparison to the best of Blondie, or even French Kissing in the USA.

“What about Sydney Youngblood?” absolutely no one cries. If Only I Could is a sickly sweet “can’t we all just get alone” ode to world peace with a weedy, hand-clap-heavy, dance beat nicked from Raze’s Break 4 Love, with added funky wah-wah AND Spanish guitar, for no reason other than they had to add something to make it more interesting. It didn’t work.

The only picture of Sydney Youngblood you're likely to see anytime soon — **The only picture of Sydney Youngblood you’re likely to see anytime soon**

Fondly remembered, but pretty dated is the return of Curiosity Killed The Cat with Name and Number. It’s much better than their earlier stuff; it’s got a neat line in synthesised saxophone and provided the inspiration for a De La Soul song, so not all bad. But people only ever remember the chorus, which everyone my age knows verbatim, and it goes on forever. The Beautiful South and Wet Wet Wet both provide lesser-loved tracks, with You Keep It All In and Sweet Surrender, the latter of which sounds like it was written for some god-awful US teen drama.

Side two does not improve things immediately, but eventually springs a few surprises. Queen’s Breakthru is among their weaker efforts (though conversely, is one of the better singles off of The Miracle album), but that is followed by the only true ‘classic’ track on NOW 16: Tina Turner’s The Best. It’s not a favourite of mine, but it’s the closest thing we have to a legendary, iconic song here and I don’t think you have to like a classic to appreciate that it is one. To this day, there are people who can’t hear it without doing Ms Bullock’s crazy horse/Tommy Cooper impression dance.

Far from classic is Transvision Vamp’s Born To Be Sold, a forerunner of the ‘list’ song that would become ubiquitous in 1990 (Madonna’s Vogue, The Beloved’s Hello etc). It’s pleasant, nostalgic and different to the raucous, scream-a-thons that made them stars (alright, made Wendy James a star). It also demonstrates that Ms James did not have the best of voices, and this single was the start of their relatively swift decline. Oddity number one appears with the long forgotten Wendy and Lisa with Waterfall ’89, the ‘89 indicating this was a remix of an ‘87 track about their leaving The Revolution, Prince’s old backing band. Released as a follow up to the chart-dodging Lolly, Lolly, and minor hit Satisfaction, Waterfall also failed to reach the top 40. It’s a good tune, though different to the funky grooves of those other singles, and worth a listen.

A top 40 hit was probably the least that was expected of Kate Bush, whose The Sensual World appears here to baffle and confuse unsuspecting teenage listeners. I’d forgotten how good this was even if it doesn’t scale the wondrous heights of her classic work. Certainly, only she could have created it and that, in my book, makes it worthwhile.

Oddity number two comes from the fact that NOW 16 was the subject of some format fiddling. The CD version contained three bonus tracks dotted across, and the first of these appears mid-way through side two, with the Fine Young Cannibals and the wonderful I’m Not The Man I’m Used To Be. I think this qualifies as the best track on the album; I’ve always loved this and never really understood why. It’s fairly basic, even monotonous, melody-wise, but somehow that works in its favour. The thoughtful lyrics seem to resonate with me much more now perhaps than they did all those years ago. It would sadly prove to be The Cannibals’ final chart hit, bar one minor, greatest hits-flogging new track, The Flame in 1996.

Also disappearing over the pop horizon was Then Jericho. Sugarbox is the kind of overblown balladry that gave rock a bad name back in the 80s. A million miles better than the likes of Whitesnake, it may be, but it’s still got that stadium pomposity, massive orchestrations and barely-concealed naughtiness of the title. Their collaboration with Belinda Carlisle, What Does It Take?, was much better, but failed to make much of a dent on the charts. Also saying farewell to NOW was Living in a Box, whose final hit (and joint best-seller with their eponymous debut single) really sounds like they’re taking the piss. Always good pop song writers, Room In Your Heart sounds like a parody of the kind of heart-tugging ballads so popular at the time. It’s completely beige and inoffensive bar the bizarre ‘other-worldly’ opening, but once we hit the third chorus and Richard Darbyshire is bellowing his head off like a man possessed, you know we’ve entered a whole new realm of scariness altogether. It’s probably the same realm where Richard Marx lurks, awaiting unsuspecting teenage girls to bump off and dump in the river. But that was the other song he sung. Right Here Waiting is the song he sings AFTER he’s bumped them off, and he’s sitting in his bedroom crying over a photo of them, slowly rocking back and forth.

A boy's best friend is his mother — **A boy’s best friend is his mother**

Bizarrely, things don’t immediately pick up on the start of side three, and these things normally do. By now, this was established as the opening of the dance (and pop pick n mix) party. Technically, yes, Milli Vanilli were a dance act, but Girl I’m Gonna Miss You is a dreary, 2 am, “this one’s for the ladies” sad sack track and is an awful way to start the second half of the collection. Given that the track listing (and programming) of a NOW album involved a certain amount of brinkmanship, you have to wonder what favours were done by ‘Vanilli’s’ people to get them such a prominent spot on the album with a wholly inappropriate song. Thank god for the Rebel MC, returning with Street Tuff. A much bigger hit than Just keep Rockin’, I’m not sure it’s as good though, sounding much more chart friendly and commercial than the earlier track. Still good fun though.

Bobby Brown’s dominance of 1989 continued with On Our Own, one of the oldest tracks on show, hailing from July. It sounds like exactly what it is, an old, unreleased track, dusted off and given a new verse about the Ghostbusters thanks to its inclusion in that summers’ Ghostbusters II (along with Brown himself, who pocketed a cool half mill for opening a door and asking Dan Aykroyd for an autograph). One of his better tunes, it has dated horribly and anyone not around in 89 will wonder what all the fuss about Brown was all about. Technotronic’s Pump Up The Jam on the other hand is one of those tracks that you know would be a hit pretty much whenever it was released in the past 25 years. While not the most nutritious of jams, it’s pop reduced to its bare bones, being almost an alchemic as 2 Unlimited’s No Limits, while never being quite as irritating.

The second bonus track on the CD is L’il Louis’ truly odd French Kiss. What begins as a bassy, sexy, stripped down dance track descends into pure filth around the 90 second mark with the arrival of a lady who certainly sounds as if she is enjoying herself. I still vividly recall first hearing this track in the family car one Sunday evening on the top 40 chart show. I’m not sure who was more embarrassed me or my mum; dad took it in his stride, declared it “a load of crap” and calmly switched to radio 2 with little fuss, returning to the charts a few minutes later. I’ve no idea how many times it was played on Radio 1 but it can’t have been many. To hear it on a NOW album is a truly disturbing experience (especially on a packed commuter train, as I did this morning, wondering if anyone else can hear it).

**A rather obvious, but not rude illustration of French Kiss**

Sanity is restored, to an extent, with Adeva’s I Thank You, which is a huge disappointment following on from her barnstorming Respect from NOW 14. D-Mob’s only just-about-listenable track, Come On And Get My Love is up next, made palatable by the astonishing voice of a then just 20 year old Cathy Dennis, but the voice sounds at least ten years older than that. Briefly a star in her own right, Dennis is now best known as a writer of other people’s massive hits, including Kylie’s legendary Can’t Get You Out Of My Head. Come On And Get My Love would be nothing without her contribution, which says a lot about her talent. Two cool, late night tunes finish off side three, with De La Soul’s lovely Eye Know, and Inner City’s Watcha Gonna Do With My Lovin’, a brief return to form for them before they slid into obscurity.

The final side of NOW 16 is possibly the best example of everything that was wrong with pop, circa 1989. The last side was often used a dumping ground for the cast offs and filler tracks, and on NOW 16 it’s no different. Two tracks stand out: Shakespeare’s Sister’s wonderful You’re History was a brilliant breath of fresh air on its original release. Now surpassed by the massive success of Stay a few years later, it shouldn’t be forgotten how exciting this sounded. To think this was from someone who was in Bananarama, and who was this crazy falsetto-bawling woman in the background? It’s got the now-familiar Sister’s oddness sprinkled all over it and I still love it. The other stand out is Neneh Cherry’s Kisses On The Wind, which severely underperformed on its original release, reaching just number 20. I find this truly odd, as it’s on a par with her previous singles. A sexy, hot summer tune it seems a tad out of place on this winter release, but its quality cannot be denied.

So what of the rest of side four? Well, there’s a double dose of SAW, with Big Fun’s Can’t Shake the Feeling, which no one remembers, and an unholy alliance with Cliff which resulted in the god-awful I Just Don’t Have The Heart, in which The English Elvis (pfft) continues a loveless relationship and strings the ‘partner’ along because he hasn’t got the balls to tell them he doesn’t love them anymore, if ever. The bastard. Former SAW poster boys, Brother Beyond attempted a comeback without the axis of evil, with Drive On, which reached the dizzy heights of number 39 (and was the final CD only track, at least with this one you can understand why it was only included on the CD). Jimmy Somerville’s Comment Te Dire Adieu (a tentative first solo single, duetting with June Miles-Kingston) just sounds odd. Singing in French is perfectly fine if you’re French. When you’re a wee Scottish guy who looks like a potato it’s a tad off-putting.

The final few tracks pick up the quality a bit, even if they are now all but forgotten. There have been worse cover versions in the NOW series so far, but Oh Well by…err… Oh Well is certainly among the strangest. Who thought a cover of a bluesy Fleetwood Mac weirdy-beardy track from 1969, given a dance beat, would be a good idea? Well, a German producer did, roping in some UK musicians to assist him. To be fair, the track has been covered several times, by the likes of Joe Jackson, Tom Petty and Steve Marriott, but never like this. Euro-dance-tastic, but not camp, it’s a truly once in a lifetime experience, as proved by the failure to follow it up with a similar sounding version of Radar Love. It’s got a certain charm to it but smells of the end of the end of the 80s.

Redhead Kingpin (and the FBI)’s Do the Right Thing seems to be looking forward, rather than back, and sits in a strange middle ground between De La Soul and Public Enemy. Not featuring in the Spike Lee film of the same name (from no doubt where the title came from) it WAS featured in the film People Under The Stairs! It was their only UK hit but still has a certain something that conjures up a late 80s vibe. Unlike Fresh 4 featuring Lizz E (!), whose dreadful cover version of Wishing on a Star finishes off the album and is possibly the worst closing song of the series. Whilst it features that weird, ubiquitous hollow waste bin drum sound which seemed to feature on every other dance track for a couple of years, this also features an awful, out of tune vocal performance and layer upon layer of noises. There’s no melody, just odd trumpet noises, dolphin (or bird) noises, whistles; anything they could slap over it to cover up the singing, which is also passed through about 6 echo chambers at the same time. And I haven’t even mentioned the dreadful Cockney rap that appears out of nowhere towards the end. An absolute, sorry mess.

And that was the end of the eighties.

Just a week before NOW 16 hit the shops, The Stone Roses and Happy Mondays both appeared on the same, epoch-making, earth-shattering edition of Top Of The Pops. At least it was for my generation. The odd alternative act may have snuck into the charts before, but since new wave died out in the early 80s, the charts were definitely pop’s domain. Soul II Soul and Inner City had breathed fresh new life into British dance music, and De La Soul and Public Enemy was doing it across the pond. I think it’s telling that the TV ad focusses on the dance tracks rather than the pop stars.

The mainstream of 1989 was in a sorry state, leaving NOW in a state itself, so much so that the revived Hits series (now rebranded as Monster Hits) had nicked all the number ones from the second half of the year, including Black Box’s Ride on Time and Lisa Stansfield’s All Around the World. They even managed to snaffle a Madonna track (Cherish) for inclusion. NOW 16, by comparison, looked out of date. Y’know, for kids.

1990 was around the corner, bringing with it a fresh approach from the compilers. It was time for NOW to follow the public and embrace the left field like never before. It may be another half decade before ‘indie’ dominated the charts, but for now, and for NOW, 1990 would signal a change of style, mood and attitude. Sadly, it would be doing it without me…

NOW THAT’S WHAT I CALL MUSIC 16

Release date

2nd December 1989

Biggest tracks

The Best – Tina Turner

Sowing The Seeds Of Love – Tears for Fears

Lost gems

I’m Not The Man I Used To Be – Fine Young Cannibals

The Sensual World – Kate Bush

Forgotten tracks

Kisses On The Wind – Neneh Cherry

Waterfall ‘89 – Wendy and Lisa (youtube only has the original version unfortunately)

Oh Well – Oh Well

What’s missing?

Personal Jesus – Depeche Mode

You can’t really blame the compilers for failing to include Stone Roses’ Fools Gold or Happy Mondays’ Hallelujah as both were released far too late for consideration.

Track listing

Side one
Sowing The Seeds Of Love	Tears For Fears
Leave A Light On	Belinda Carlisle
Drama!	Erasure
I Want That Man	Deborah Harry
If Only I Could	Sydney Youngblood
Name And Number	Curiosity Killed The Cat
You Keep It All In	The Beautiful South
Sweet Surrender	Wet Wet Wet

Side two
Breakthru	Queen
The Best	Tina Turner
Born To Be Sold	Transvision Vamp
Waterfall ’89	Wendy & Lisa
The Sensual World	Kate Bush
I’m Not The Man I Used To Be	Fine Young Cannibals (CD Only)
Sugarbox	Then Jerico
Room In Your Heart	Living In A Box
Right Here Waiting	Richard Marx

Side three
Girl I’m Gonna Miss You	Milli Vanilli
Street Tuff	The Rebel MC & Double Trouble
On Our Own	Bobby Brown
Pump Up The Jam	Technotronic featuring Felly
French Kiss	Lil Louis (CD Only)
I Thank You	Adeva
C’mon And Get My Love	D-Mob & Cathy Dennis
Eye Know	De La Soul
Watcha Gonna Do With My Lovin’	Inner City

Side four
Can’t Shake The Feeling	Big Fun
I Just Don’t Have The Heart	Cliff Richard
Comment Te Dire Adieu	Jimmy Somerville Featuring June Miles Kingston
Drive On	Brother Beyond (CD Only)
You’re History	Shakespeare’s Sister
Oh Well	Oh Well
Kisses On The Wind	Neneh Cherry
Do The Right Thing	Redhead Kingpin
Wishing On A Star	Fresh Four ft Lizz E

June 7, 2013

NOW 15 – Cruel Summer

For the second year in a row, NOW’s summer release would take the season as the inspiration for its cover. Sadly the content is about as anti-summer as it’s possible to get. When I think of summer pop I think of breezy, twangly guitar tunes, repetitive dance beats and swoony ballads. What NOW 15 gives you (at least to start off with) is one of Queen’s worst singles ever and an unlistenable Simple Minds track. In terms of opening moves, NOW 15 stumbles out of the traps like a three legged daschund at a greyhound race. I Want It All stands very far away from I Want To Break Free, whilst Kick It In is at least better than Belfast Child (and suggests The Minds were a year or two ahead of U2 in the obtuse, angular re-invention stakes) but it’s just not very well executed. I vividly remember Danny Wilson guest reviewing the singles in Smash Hits, and saying they would have taken the record back to shops thinking it was scratched. Their single of the week was the theme to the Batman TV series which had been re-released in the wake of Tim Burton’s Batman movie. That’s nice.

Pop salvation arrives in the form of the majestic Good Thing by the Fine Young Cannibals. Its 60s vibe (a nostalgic theme runs through many tracks on NOW 15, oddly) was the result of its original appearance being in the underrated film Tin Men, which was set in the Mad Men era Baltimore. It works brilliantly in the song’s favour, as it’s now impossible to date, and is still wonderful.

Almost as underrated as Tin men is Holly Johnson’s solo career. Eschewing Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s raw sex and aggression, his solo debut Blast! is a wonderful pop record, producing the huge hits Love Train and Americanos, which appears here. A supposedly jolly tune, again evoking nostalgia for 50s/60s apple pie America, it is also covered in barely concealed cynicism (“everything’s organised, from crime to leee-zure time”) hidden underneath a killer tune and a chorus which introduced a generation of kids to the joys of Oreos. Transvision Vamp’s Baby, I Don’t Care and INXS’ Mystify are solid, as is Roxette’s The Look, even if it fails to suggest just how big a deal they would become (at least everywhere else in the world; the UK tended to keep them at arm’s length, only allowing It Must have Been Love to break ranks and become a huge hit).

We next get two very odd selections from a couple of dinosaurs, Stevie Nicks and ‘Thumbs Aloft’ Macca. I’d forgotten how odd Rooms on Fire was, or that it was that big a hit. Yes, Fleetwood Mac had been, maybe surprisingly, successful in the late 80s with the album Tango In The Night, but was Nicks really that big a draw to the kids? It only reached number 16 but was a radio mainstay for months, probably saying more about Radio 1 DJs at the time, than what the listeners actually wanted, and remains Nicks’ only significant solo release.

Paul McCartney ceased to be significant as a solo artist around the time of The Frog Chorus, so it was a surprise to see him kicking off side two of NOW 15 not once, but twice! My Brave Face is the first, co-written by Elvis Costello of all people, it appears to be some kind of dirge about the perils of fame (oh woe is me and my millions). It’s not really important, as the man who made more money than God just for fluking a song writing goldmine with Yesterday still continues to churn out this guff on an annual basis, whilst his contemporaries like Bob Dylan, Ray Davies and even, to an extent, The Rolling Stones, continue to evolve and create new, interesting music. McCartney’s guff cloud hangs over Ferry Cross The Mersey. Joining Holly Johnson (also making a second appearance), The Christians and original ferry passenger Gerry Marsden, this charity release was recorded in aid of the families of the victims of the Hillsborough disaster which had happened earlier in the year, and was produced by the now ubiquitous Stock, Aitken and Waterman. The far more fitting, in my opinion, You’ll Never Walk Alone, had been appropriated for the charity single for the victims of the Bradford City fire in 1985 (and also featured Marsden and McCartney), and this should also not be confused with the dreadfully named Ferry Aid single, a cover of The Beatles’ Let It Be, from 1987, in aid of the Zeebrugge ferry tragedy (also featuring Macca; for Christ’s sake, he gets about). Thankfully they resisted the urge to come up with some awful punning band name this time. Johnson has already covered this track once before, on Frankie’s debut album, and it’s a far better, and emotional, reading than this, a typically empty SAW production, with uninspiring vocal performances, topped by Macca screaming his head off towards the end and trying to pretend the song was his all along.

The Beautiful South make their NOW debut next, with the wonderfully sardonic Song For Whoever, a song which confuses a lot of people, not least Philip Schofield, who in his capacity as presenter of the Smash Hits Poll Winners Party in 1989, picked it as his choice for worst single of the year. The idiot. Kirsty McColl’s lovely version of The Kinks’ Days is next, and an attempt to create a real summer feel is carried on with Danny Wilson’s Second Summer of Love. Their only non-Mary’s Prayer top 40 hit, and probably not very well known, it’s actually pretty good; a nice-foot-tapping number having a pop at the acid/ecstasy/rave generation then clogging up the motorways and charts at the time. It’s like an upbeat Mumford and Sons, so should be a due a revival by the Dalston hipsters soon. But only ironically, of course.

"Yeah, I was like into Danny Wilson years ago, like, when the First Summer of Love came out" — **“Yeah, I was like into Danny Wilson years ago, like, when the *First* Summer of Love came out”**

Next comes the big forgotten track on NOW 15, at least by me, but sadly not an undiscovered gem: Cry by Waterfront. This is a truly odd piece which seems to have a slightly dodgy undercurrent. Any song which features like about “I know that you are not a child” and “your Daddy would kill for you” just conjures up images of a teenage girl being seduced by a (much) older man, who gets his jollies then dumps her because “of course, we’ve done nothing wrong but THEY won’t understand that”. The addition of a sleazy, Walk on the Wild Side riffing saxophone just adds to the sleaze. Uncomfortable. These guys were EMI’s big hope for ’89 and Cry was a big hit in the USA, hitting the top 10 (slightly worse in the UK where it only reached number 17) but they never followed it up and didn’t trouble the charts again.

Side two then proceeds to fade into dreary obscurity with hue and Cry’s pleasant but unremarkable Violently and Cliff Richards’ The Best Of Me, a dreadful dirge of a ballad which managed to snag a number two spot thanks to a huge marketing campaign (and massive radio support) due to it being Cliff’s 100^th single. Thanks to Jason Donovan’s Sealed With A Kiss, it still didn’t get to number one though, HAH!

Sides three and four are dominated by dance tracks, and a few oddities that wouldn’t fit on the first half, reflecting the charts shifting away from pop to dance, both mainstream and underground varieties. We get the only absolute classic track on the whole compilation with Soul II Soul’s Back To Life, a song which seems to just get better and better with every passing year (back in ’89, I much preferred Keep On Moving or Get A Life). Neneh Cherry’s Manchild still sounds great too, and was a perfect follow-up to Buffalo Stance. Equally confident as it’s predecessor and infused with John Barry-esque strings, I’ve no idea what it’s about but it still sounds brilliant. The video features her young son, who was still, famously, unborn, when she appeared on Top of the Pops for Buffalo Stance.

Neneh Cherry might be having another baby in this photo, I'm not sure — **Neneh Cherry might be having another baby in this photo, I’m not sure**

So with things picking up, it’s inevitable that the quality will dip, and it does quite spectacularly. Former New Edition singer (who had appeared way back on NOW 1) Bobby Brown’s Every Little Step sounds like a discarded B-side hastily promoted to single status in the wake of his enormous, and rapid, success. Unbelievable as it may sound now, Mr Brown was the most successful chart act of 1989, and managed just two weeks of the whole year not to feature in the top 40, and amazing feat, especially when you consider not one of his singles got to number one. Every Little Step is pretty poor compared to earlier hit My Prerogative (or even Don’t Be Cruel) and only features one verse and chorus, repeated throughout. That’s just lazy.

Do You Love What You Feel is the least remembered of Inner City’s four top 20 hits, and with good reason: it’s desperately dull. Is this really the same act that recorded Good Life? Equally forgettable is D-Mob’s irritating It’s Time To Get Funky, a piece of toy town-rap crap that has the nerve to criticise rave culture, after D-Mob made a mint of off We Call It Acieed months before. Somehow this also went down a storm with the same kids who had made the previous single such a hit. At the same time Public Enemy couldn’t buy a top 30 hit. A massive club hit in its day, but horribly dated now, Donna Allen’s Joy and Pain only stuck in my mind because it seemed to be on the Chart Show’s Dance Chart for about two years before it reached the top 10. It’s got that summer ’87 sound down to a tee, so maybe it was that old; cheap production, but with a big chorus that no doubt helped it become a hit, because the rest of it is massively forgettable and generic.

Being generic is not something you could accuse of Gladys Knight, but her long overdue promotion to the ranks of Bond theme chanteuse is just that. It’s not that Licence To Kill is a bad Bond theme (there are plenty worse) it’s just bland and, like a-ha before her, it’s totally infused with the sound of its time. The whole thing is based around the trumpet sting from Goldfinger, so, like many of the worst Bond themes, it sounds like a Bond parody. Add to that the horrible twinkly synth noise all US dance music had at the time, and it becomes impossible to love. Knight’s vocal performance is great though. Equally good vocals come from Natalie Cole on I Miss You Like Crazy. Sadly that song is also horribly bland.

**An old, and horribly dated, Viz Crap Joke**

With NOW 15 threatening to stumble into dullsville, it’s left to side four to salvage some dignity, which thankfully it does, with some style, despite it featuring Jive Bunny. The Pet Shop Boys’ It’s Alright may be their least played track, but it’s great. A cover of Sterling Void’s club hit, it failed to match the success of many of their earlier hits, as did other releases from the album Introspective, despite them being among their best work. Then there’s Jive Bunny. Now regarded as a bit of a joke and providing endless material for low rent comics and nostalgia clip shows, were they really that bad? What exactly is so wrong about a couple of producers talking loads of old songs and stringing them together under a dance beat to make a simple four minute party song? And then doing it again? And again? It’s essentially harmless, if not exactly an example of high art. I think people’s opinion of Jive Bunny is just based around the fact they were SO successful and SO omnipotent that summer (and on to Christmas 89) on the radio, that you couldn’t escape it. But people were buying the records! At the time Jive Bunny became only the third act in history (after Gerry and the Pacemakers and Frankie Goes to Hollywood) to have their first three singles go to number one. Even The Beatles didn’t do that. Now, of course, any act with a decent marketing budget can do it, and most do. But back in the 80s that was a big deal. Swing the Mood (based around Glenn Miller’s In The Mood… geddit?) is listenable to a point and at a party would probably still make a few grannies get up for a shuffle. Is it any worse than say, Coldcut’s Beats and Pieces? At least you can sing along to Swing the Mood. We-we-well-well…

More oldie time fun is supplied by a returning Swing Out Sister, channelling Burt Bacharach on the grin-inducing You On My Mind, one of the few songs here that actually takes me back to the summer of ’89. There’s a lovely feelgood feeling to this that once again makes you wonder why they were never able to have sustained success. Bananarama managed to sustain for a good few years, but the tide was starting to turn on them by 1989. What better way to commemorate the sun going down on your career than by re-recording a song about how crap the summer is. Cruel Summer ’89 would be their last top 20 single, sadly, and it’s a sad epitaph to their career. One of their best early songs, it was re-recorded with new member Jacqui, and slathered with SAW production, limping its way to number 19. If you like the original steer clear of this; it’s bloody awful.

The rest of NOW 15 is thankfully much better, and contains the best tracks on the whole album, a rarity when side four is so often the dumping ground. De La Soul’s anti-drug anthem Say No Go may not have won them any fans from the hardcore rap community, but they were a real breath of fresh air for the slightly awkward kids who were never taken seriously when they said they liked Public Enemy (yes, I’m talking about me). I mean, who samples Hall and Oates and hopes to retain their credibility? These guys didn’t give a stuff. Real innovators and the songs are still charming, witty and damn good to dance to. Fatboy Slim was still using his real name, Norman Cook, when he released Blame It On The Bassline (a double A-side backed by his version of Billy Bragg’s Won’t Talk About It) with vocals provided by the ludicrously named MC Wildski. The track would later appear on Cook’s Beats International album, Let Them Eat Bingo, along with the smash Dub Be Good To Me, but the version on NOW 15 fades out about 45 seconds early. Another cracking, fun, rap tune with heavy sampling (mainly from the Jackson 5, you wouldn’t get away with that nowadays without the lawyers coming a knocking) it’s refreshing to hear two fun rap tracks back to back. So how about three? Luckily Rebel MC is just crazy enough to pull it off. Introduced to the world by producers Double Trouble, Just Keep Rockin’ is another sample-heavy dance track, with fun running through it like a stick of rock. I don’t think rap was ever this much fun again, so I really love this snapshot of when it wasn’t all about beating 5-0, girls and bling. If I was as rich as some of these rappers I’d be going on about fun stuff, like buying a kitten or building a funfair in my back yard, rather than how hard life is in the ghetto that I wouldn’t been seen dead in now I’m rich and famous.

A grumpy rapper. Probably MC Scat Kat. — **A grumpy rapper. Probably MC Skat Kat.**

I’m sure Robert Smith has a funfair in his back garden, but he has to wear a hair net just in case he gets his barnet caught in the workings of the waltzers. Quite why the NOW compilers decided to place The Cure directly after all that jollity, and closing the album to boot, I’m not entirely sure. Lullaby remains one of my favourite Cure tracks and can probably still give kids the willies (I will test this theory once my own are old enough to experiment on) but to finish off a summer compilation? Maybe it’s the grit in the oyster that NOW 15 needs, but that would suggest that NOW 15 is an oyster. It’s more of a limpet. Even “The Kid” seems to be struggling to drum up enthusiasm for this one.

Oddly filled with nostalgic tracks and sugary blandness, when it pops it’s superb, but it’s not exactly memorable. This may explain why, in my teenage years, it was the album that signalled my defection (briefly) to the Hits series, and the far better Hits 10. Two albums in and 1989 is shaping up to be NOW’s most disappointing year so far. There’s nothing new on offer here at all, it’s just regurgitating what’s gone before. It sounds ridiculous but the refreshing track here is Kick It In. It’s completely unlistenable, but at least it’s different.

There are three number ones on NOW 15, but I bet most readers would be hard pressed to remember which tracks they are, that’s how forgettable most of this is. Side four rescues it from being a complete dead loss, but things need shaking up. Would NOW 16 provide that? If it was going to, it would have to do it the hard way, as NOW 16 was to become the only album in the series to contain not one single, solitary number one hit…

NOW THAT’S WHAT I CALL MUSIC 15

Release date

14^th August 1989

Biggest tracks

Back To Life – Soul II Soul

Good Thing – Fine Young Cannibals

Lost gems

You On My Mind – Swing Out Sister

Blame It On The Bassline – Norman Cook ft MC Wildski

Forgotten tracks

Kick It In – Simple Minds

It’s Alright – Pet Shop Boys

Just Keep Rockin’ – Double Trouble ft Rebel MC

What’s missing?

The continued absence of Jason Donovan and Kylie Minogue is telling. Both signed to PWL, maybe Pete Waterman didn’t want NOW appearances to take away from their own album sales?

Another PWL absentee was the one hit wonder that was I’d Rather Jack by The Reynolds Girls. Maybe NOW didn’t want to include a song which criticised the kind of artists who still constituted a large proportion of their roll call.

Track listing

Side one
I Want It All	Queen
Kick It In	Simple Minds
Good Thing	Fine Young Cannibals
Americanos	Holly Johnson
Baby I Don’t Care	Transvision Vamp
Mystify	INXS
The Look	Roxette
Rooms On Fire	Stevie Nicks

Side two
My Brave Face	Paul McCartney
Ferry Cross The Mersey	Gerry Marsden/Paul McCartney/ Holly Johnson/The Christians
Song For Whoever	The Beautiful South
Days	Kirsty MacColl
The Second Summer Of Love	Danny Wilson
Cry	Waterfront
Violently (7″ Version)	Hue And Cry
The Best Of Me	Cliff Richard

Side three
Back To Life (However Do You Want Me)	Soul II Soul Featuring Caron Wheeler
Manchild	Neneh Cherry
Every Little Step	Bobby Brown
Do You Love What You Feel (Duane Bradley Remix)	Inner City
It’s Time To Get Funky	D-Mob & LRS
Joy And Pain	Donna Allen
Licence To Kill	Gladys Knight
Miss You Like Crazy	Natalie Cole

Side four
It’s Alright	Pet Shop Boys
Swing The Mood (Medley)	Jive Bunny & The Master Mixers
You On My Mind	Swing Out Sister
Cruel Summer ’89	Bananarama
Say No Go	De La Soul
Blame It On The Bassline	Norman Cook & MC Wildski
Just Keep Rockin’	Double Trouble & The Rebel MC
Lullaby	The Cure

June 2, 2013