Tag: Wet Wet Wet

NOW 21 – It’s got an ‘ology. A V-I-B-E-ology

Like 1988 before it, 1992 is not one of those banner years in the annuls of music. Flipping through the ‘1992 in music’ page on Wikipedia turns up such nuggets as Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love got married, Kylie parted company with Pete Waterman and Billy Idol punched a woman in the face. Three of pops darkest days I’m sure you’ll agree. Musically it is devoid of much worth commenting on. 1992 did see the release of Hiphoprisy Is The Greatest Luxury, Sugar’s Copper Blue and Take That and Party, but it also begat The Bodyguard soundtrack, still one of the biggest selling albums of all time. You idiots. The accepted wisdom is that 1992 (and to some extent, 1993) are the dark hinterlands between the grunge ‘explosion’, which generated just three top ten hits, and 1994’s birth of Britpop (copyright 6Music for the whole of this year), which ruined everything. And judging by NOW 21, those sorts of people who get asked to discuss the merits of Right Side Fred versus The Breeders on BBC Four filler shows are absolutely right: 1992 smells worse than teen spirit.

As seen on 'I'll Say I Love Any Kind of Music for £250 plus exees' — **As seen on ‘I’ll Say I Love Any Kind of Music for £250 plus exees’**

NOW 21 is the last NOW album I have any experience of in the real world. Whilst I was now fully ensconced in a world of John Peel, the NME and whatever my now-moved out brother was sticking on C90s for me, a friend of mine had NOW 21 on CD and insisted on putting it on whenever I was at his house. I hated it at the time, and was only interested in the Jesus and Mary Chain track mainly because it seemed so out of place. It wasn’t a patch on the JAMC stuff I was listening to at home, but I just couldn’t understand why Far Gone and Out was on it. My mate didn’t care and insisted on only playing Bohemian Rhapsody and Mr Big’s Be With You. I never did keep in touch with him when I left school. Can’t think why.

NOW 21 is top heavy with number ones, but sadly shoots its wad too early. It begins with Bohemian Rhapsody, re-released the previous Christmas as a tribute to the death of Freddie Mercury, making it the only song to score a Christmas number one twice, in the same version. You know this back to front so there’s little point in me discussing it further.

We Wet Wet’s Goodnight Girl does warrant a bit of further discussion. Like With a Little Help From My Friends, this is probably long forgotten as a Wets’ number one, but top spot it did reach. No idea why though. It’s a trite, piano-based soufflé of a song which features no drums whatsoever. That’s a no-no in my book. It also has, to my ears at least, some rather suspect lyrics: “I won’t tell a soul, I won’t tell at all, Do they have to know about my Goodnight Girl”… make of that what you will.

Far more wholesome, if nonetheless bonkers, is the triumphant return of Shakespeare’s Sister. Stay is just so wonderfully hat stand that you can’t help but love it. I’m sure most of those who pushed it to number one are the same kind of people who made Babybird’s You’re Gorgeous a hit, i.e. people who don’t really listen to music. Of course, Stay makes no sense without its video, which makes the fact it was so popular even more amusing. I wonder what cultural historians of the future will make of this one.

They’ll have far more fun dissecting that one than they will explaining the continued success of Simply Red, who offer us Stars this time round. That’s preceded by the albums token “song from a hit movie”, with the Temptations My Girl, and followed by The KLF’s Justified and Ancient, a re-recording of the final track from their White Room album, with new vocals from Tammy Wynette. As a fan of the original album version, I’m not keen on this, and see it as the KLF taking their joke to the extreme where it becomes irritating rather than amusing. The fact that it was in the running for the Christmas number one in 1991 was probably the point. The KLF will, amazingly, feature again later.

Madness provide the third re-release on side one. It Must Be Love is great, obviously, but it does make you start to wonder if there was anything new that was good about at the time. The fact that Genesis could score top ten hits in 1992 probably means the answer is no. I Can’t Dance is one of those songs that was probably more successful as a result of its (admittedly, through gritted teeth) amusing video, taking the piss out of Levi commercials, than it was for the inherent merits of the song itself. Julia Fordham’s Love Moves in Mysterious Ways is, possibly, the token act being plugged on side one. A fairly forgettable piano-based dirge, it’s not particularly memorable even given Fordham’s slightly odd vocal recalling Beverly Craven’s much better Promise Me, with hints of the heavy breathy type of singer that would become popular when Mariah Carey started selling millions. I’m amazed more X Factor finalists haven’t given this a pop; it’s right up their street as an example of fragile yet strong singing. Oooo-oooh.

The next half does get better, eventually, but takes its time getting there. Crowded House’s Weather With You is always embedded in my mind thanks to an impromptu sing-along on the last day of school, when someone decided it was a perfect way to say our goodbyes to everyone, whilst I was writing sub-Pixies lyrics in everyone’s ‘Farewell Journals’ or whatever the hell they called them.

Deeply Dippy, the final number one on the album, has survived pretty well, I think. It’s a cracking pop tune which never seems to get any respect. If Ian Dury had written and performed that exact same song, everyone would say it was a masterpiece. I think it’s almost a masterpiece, with only the slightly weedy brass section holding it back.

The afore-mentioned Mr Big is next with their horribly hand-clappy sing-a-long-a-barnyard Be With You. An unbelievable hit at a time when grunge was supposed to be ruling the charts, this recalls the worst of the likes of John Cougar Mellancamp and other US country-rock acts that you only know the names of if you ever watched America’s Top Ten. We Brits can conjure up our own insipidness though, thanks to Everything but the Girl, once again scoring a surprise hit with a cover version a few years before they had their trip-hop renaissance which they were working on at the same time as Tracey Thorn was providing vocals for Massive Attack. Honest. Just as forgettable is Roxette’s Church Of Your Heart. You know this is a duffer because the bloke sings it.

I said things got better. Well not quite yet. Bryan May’s Driven By You stinks up the speakers next. With this May makes his second appearance on a NOW album. Just like he did on NOW 19. Christ. Driven By You, younger viewers may not know, was especially written for a Ford car commercial (no doubt to one up Vauxhall who had been having great success using the riff from Eric Clapton’s Layla for a few years). In the ad, it sort of worked, as a Top Gear, petrol-head, greasy overalls theme to shots of jets, R and D departments, Transit vans and the like. As a song, it fails miserably mainly because May seems to have forgotten to change the lyrics from ‘everything WE do’ to ‘everything I do’ for huge sections of the thing, even confusing matters by saying ‘we’ and ‘I’ in the same sentence. So is he singing to Anita Dobson about how together, everything they do is driven by her? Or is he suggesting that the Ford Corporation of America are responsible for the continued married bliss they share? I’m none the wiser.

So, to the good stuff, and there’s very little. The Wonder Stuff appear for the second NOW in succession with the jolly Welcome to the Cheap Seats (with uncredited Kirsty McColl on backing vocals).The incongruous Far Gone and Out follows it, to the bafflement of a nation of teenage NOW buyers. It’s C-grade Jesus and Mary Chain (as was most of the album, Honey’s Dead), but it’s still miles better than most of the crap on offer here. JAMC were on a Warners subsidiary, so one can only assume this was a potential sop to grunge, having failed to snag a Nirvana or Pearl Jam track for inclusion. I’m speculating wildly here, but you have to but this makes no sense at all.

James’ Born of Frustration is a bit more at home, its rallying warble still sounds great. It’s better than Sit Down anyway (though most James singles are). The first half finishes off with one of the rare appearances for The Cure. High sounds like pretty much every Cure song, with that twangly guitar, lyrics tumbling from Robert Smith’s gob, and mention of a cat. Textbook stuff.

Textbook could also describe the running order of CD 2. Apart from the now standard ditching of some odds and ends at the finale, and one hilarious hand grenade of a track, it’s dance all the way, kicking off with Shanice’s I Love Your Smile. Even a cold hearted cynic like me can appreciate how nice this is, but that’s also its problem: it’s sickeningly nice. And you hum it for hours afterwards. The Pasadena’s cover of I’m Doing Fine follows, bringing banality to the niceness of Shanice to produce a horribly soul-less version of the soul classic. I never got on with these guys at the time, finding their reappropriation of soul legends for their own ends cheap and tacky. My opinion has not changed.

Next up, one of Kylie’s forgotten hits, despite it reaching number 2 at the time. Like The Pasadena’s, Give Me Just A Little Bit More Time is a drab soul cover with uninspired SAW production (without the A this time) and a horribly strained vocal from Ms Minogue, who by the year’s end, would be finally stepping out from under the Hit factory’s wing. On this evidence, not a moment too soon. The cover versions continue with East Side Beat’s Ride Like The Wind. It’s a surprisingly listenable track, sounding every inch the forefather of the likes of D:Ream and similar chart botherers who would go on to litter the charts (and NOW albums) in the coming years. It’s an Italian DJ re-working a Christopher Cross non-hit (in the UK at least) from 1979. The original is a late era disco track from the time when everyone was releasing disco records (i.e. when they got rubbish). ESB’s version adds a slightly ballsier vocal and more bass, but essential they aren’t that different.

The Daddy Mack'll make you... JUMP! JUMP! — **The Daddy Mack’ll make you… JUMP! JUMP!**

That’s followed by the Fisher Price hard house of 2 Unlimited with the forgettable Twilight Zone, which doesn’t even sample the Theme from The Twilight Zone. Idiots.

Thankfully, all that nastiness is firmly blown away by the musical equivalent of a photobomb thanks to the compiler dropping KLF’s America (What Time Is Love) into the mix and showing everyone else on the record how to produce ball-busting dance music. Yes, it’s another cover version on a side filled with them, but at least it does something different to the original chart version (which in itself is only one of various versions of the track). Featuring the riff from Ace of Spades and the singer from Deep Purple, along with a hellish choir, a ludicrous prologue…you need to hear the full 9 minute version to appreciate this tune’s almighty power, but even the truncated radio version here is enough to satisfy. It’s also crying out for someone more talented than me to mash it up with Neil Diamond’s America.

We continue with two pretty good tunes: Civilles and Coles’ Deeper Love sounds like the kind of thing that would have inspired a fair few people. It’s got some swing to its standard house beat and a really good sassy vocal to add some grit to this particular oyster, not sure about that protracted ending though. It’s not one I particularly liked in the day, but sounds pretty good now. As does Opus III A Fine Day. What both these tracks have is the inability to date them. Deeper Love could be from anywhere between 1987 and 1995. A Fine Day, too, is fairly impossible to pin down. I was genuinely surprised to see it on this album, thinking it at least a year younger than 1992. This has turned up on at least two Pete Waterman compilations even though he had bugger all to with it, other than it was released by his PWL label.

Erasure’s Breath of Life seems a little out of place in this kind of company, and it’s clear from their lowly position midway through CD2 that their star was starting to wane for the record company. Including them was still obligatory because they were still having top 10 hits (and would continue to do so for another decade) and it’s a great tune, it’s just unfortunate that former album openers now found themselves in the pick n mix bin, next to McHammer, stinking up the charts with the god-awful Addams Groove. Produced to promote the Addams Family movie, it desecrates the original famous theme, but at least has the grace to bury it in the mix so much you can barely hear it. By this point he’d dropped the Mc, so this was credited as just Hammer on the single, which would prove to be his last top 10 hit, with only one further single (something called Do Not Pass Me By, hopefully a cover of the Ringo Starr composition) even breaching the top 40. And no one cared. The pop-rap vibe continues with Salt n’ Pepa’s Expression. Clearly inspired (i.e. ripping off) Madonna’s Express Yourself, this is all about getting the sisters to do it for themselves and “believe in me”. I’m not quite sure how “come on and work your body” fits into this proto-Girl Power theme, but there you go. It’s not aimed at me so I’m not meant to get it. By this point any innovation S n P may have once showed has long gone, and they are now sounding like almost every other ‘new jack’ R n’ B act starting to occupy the UK charts at the time. Like Ce Ce Penniston who followed up the wonderful Finally, with the bland and by-the-numbers We Got A Love Thang (god, even typing that made me cringe). Meh.

The next track is thankfully odd enough, if not necessarily any good, to elicit some interest: Paula Abdul’s Vibeology. It’s a little strange that such an odd thing would turn out to be her best track since Straight Up. I suspect it’s the result of some studio off cuts that didn’t quite make a whole song, being handed over to a producer to slap together. It’s a world away from the dreary ballads she seemed to have made her stock in trade, and pointed to a new direction she could have taken. If Madonna had recorded this, it would still be the subject of academic studies. As it is it’s left as a curious mix of sex, funk, juvenile humour, schoolgirl excitement and Paula’s Bart Simpson impression (“Let’s do it!”). I like it but I’m not sure why, as it’s not good in any sense of the word as I understand it.

The final dancey track is Alison Limerick’s Make It On My Own. This is one of those tracks that seemed to be forever laying in the ‘fun’ pubs and would be wine bars of my home town, at the time when I was first experimenting with fake IDs. It’s very good and worth having a new listen to.

But it’s all downhill from there: Tina Turner’s Way of the World starts off sounding like Let’s Stay Together… just like Be Tender With Me Baby did on NOW 18! It’s as a beige as a newly refurbished flat on Homes Under the Hammer, and just as mercenary. Ms Bullock had ceased to be relevant to NOW and its listeners for a while now so her inclusion with a number 13 hit, from 5 months previous, that barely anyone remembered at the time, let alone now, seems like unnecessary padding. At least Curtis Stigers’ I Wonder Why was a big hit. Its inclusion is at least understandable, even if the song is all kinds of wrong. Lounge-jazz sax invades this penthouse ballad with all the subtlety of a thrown brick and with even less charm. It sounds like the theme to a long forgotten yuppie soap opera about people who stare out of their high rise apartment windows across a city that doesn’t understand them anymore, high paid jobs they hate but which they can’t live without and relationships so convoluted you end up marrying yourself. Twice. Stigers has a very strange voice too, like he’s got a permanent bit of phlegm vibrating in the back of his throat he’s long since given up trying to dislodge. Listened to on headphones, there’s a constant rattle in the background that convinces you your Sennheisers are bust. Again.

NOW 21 breathes its last with one of the most insipid ballads, in a long history of insipid ballads, which the series has served up so far. Diana Ross’ When You Tell Me That You Love Me sounds like it was released in the early 80s, like it was a rejected song from a Lloyd Webber musical. She sounds like an X Factor finalist rather than one of the most successful soul singers we’ve ever had, and with its pointless key change, synthesised orchestra and choir filled finale, it has all the charm and heart of a Michael Bay movie. This managed to hold off KLF in the battle for Christmas number 1991, but its huge sentimentality was no match for the death of a national treasure. According to Wikipedia it missed the top shot by only a couple of hundred units. Ross tried to rectify this a decade later by re-recording it with Westlife, of all people, but that also stalled at number two. Oops.

So, is the perceived wisdom right? Is 1992 a dark, post-apocalyptic wasteland of pop nothingness? On this evidence, the answer is definitely yes. NOW 21 isn’t the whole story of the year (it’s not even the whole NOW story of the year) but as a snapshot of where things were it seems the public loved their cover versions, corny love songs and re-releases. But, there’s nothing resembling grunge here and no sign of the great British backlash to come, so what exactly are all these commentators banging on about on 6Music at the moment? 1992 is simply shaping up to be one of those forgettable years. Isn’t it?

Yes, that is the then voice of the Official Top 40, Mark “Goodie Bags’ Goodier, replacing ‘The Kid’ as the voice of NOW, where he remains to this day.

NOW THAT’S WHAT I CALL MUSIC 21

Release date

13th April 1992

Biggest tracks

Bohemian Rhapsody – Queen

Stay – Shakespeare’s Sister

Lost gems

America: What Time Is Love? – The KLF feat. The Children of the Revolution

Vibeology – Paula Abdul

Forgotten tracks

(Love Moves In) Mysterious Ways – Julia Fordham

We Got a Love Thang – Ce Ce Penniston

Make It On My Own – Alison Limerick

Way Of The World – Tina Turner

Worst Track

Addams Groove – Hammer

What’s missing?

Everybody In The Place – The Prodigy

God Gave Rock n Roll To You – KISS

Movin’ On Up – Primal Scream

Track listing

CD1
Bohemian Rhapsody	Queen
Goodnight Girl	Wet Wet Wet
Stay	Shakespears Sister
My Girl	The Temptations
Stars	Simply Red
Justified And Ancient	The KLF featuring Tammy Wynette
It Must Be Love	Madness
I Can’t Dance	Genesis
(Love Moves In) Mysterious Ways	Julia Fordham
Weather With You	Crowded House
Deeply Dippy	Right Said Fred
To Be With You	Mr Big
Love Is Strange	Everything But The Girl
Church Of Your Heart	Roxette
Driven By You	Brian May
Welcome To The Cheap Seats	The Wonder Stuff
Far Gone And Out	The Jesus & Mary Chain
Born Of Frustration	James
High	The Cure

CD2
I Love Your Smile (Driza Bone Remix)	Shanice
I’m Doing Fine Now	The Pasadenas
Give Me Just A Little More Time	Kylie Minogue
Ride Like The Wind	East Side Beat
Twilight Zone	2 Unlimited
America: What Time Is Love?	The KLF featuring The Children Of The Revolution
A Deeper Love	Clivilles & Cole
It’s A Fine Day	Opus III
Breath Of Life	Erasure
Addams Groove	Hammer
Expression	Salt ‘N’ Pepa
We Got A Love Thang	Ce Ce Peniston
Vibeology	Paula Abdul
Make It On My Own	Alison Limerick
Way Of The World	Tina Turner
I Wonder Why	Curtis Stigers
When You Tell Me That You Love Me	Diana Ross

April 24, 2014

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NOW THAT’S WHAT I CALL MUSIC 12

Release date

11th July 1988

Biggest tracks

I Think We’re Alone Now – Tiffany

Theme From S-Express – S-Express

Love Changes Everything – Climie Fisher

Lost gems

Get Lucky – Jermaine Stewart

Bad Young Brother – Derek B

Forgotten tracks

Don’t Go – Hothouse Flowers

With a Little Help From My Friends – Wet Wet Wet

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

Worst Track

Nothings Gonna Change My Love For You – Glenn Medeiros

What’s missing

Heart -The Pet Shop Boys

Got To Be Certain – Kylie Minogue

Loadsamoney (Doin’ Up The House) – Harry Enfield

Track listing

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

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

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

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

May 21, 2013

NOW 11 – I know you gonna dig this

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NOW THAT’S WHAT I CALL MUSIC 11

Release date

21st March 1988

Biggest tracks

Always on My Mind – The Pet Shop Boys

Heaven Is A Place On Earth – Belinda Carlisle

I Should Be So Lucky – Kylie Minogue

Beat Dis – Bomb the Bass

Lost gems

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

I Can’t Help It – Bananarama

Forgotten tracks

Mandinka – Sinead o’Connor

Tower of Strength – The Mission

Rise to the Occasion – Climie Fisher

Worst Track

Give Me All Your Love – Whitesnake

What’s missing

Got My Mind Set On You – George Harrison

There Ain’t Nothing Like Shaggin – Tams

Track listing

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

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

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

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

May 12, 2013

Now That’s What I Call Music 10 – Designed to satisfy your soul

Like your first kiss, the first time you got drunk, or the first 18-rated film you see (or X-rated if you’re a tad older than me), your first NOW album is special, and never forgotten. It may not be the best one (unless you’re very lucky) but it’s yours, and that makes it special. Of course the fact that probably around 50,000 also think it’s special is by the by. Since I’ve been writing this blog I’ve spoken to a few people about the NOW series and the one thing people always want to tell you about is the first NOW album they owned. They will then go to talk about the best ones (and sometimes the worst), but they always start with the first one, the important one. Mine was, you may have already guessed, NOW 10. Trouble is, I’ve got no idea why.

I’d been a music fan for years building a steady collection of LPs and singles procured as presents or when big brother forgot to send back the recommendation of the month to Britannia Music (one of the least lamented casualties of the record buying slump), but never a NOW album. My other other brother, who has far too many Simply Red CDs to have any taste in music, was always bringing home Hits Albums that he’d borrowed off schoolmates for home taping (which killed music, kids), but even as a pre-teen, I could tell they were an inferior product. Honest. To be fair this was probably down the fact that they didn’t have Duran Duran or Culture Club on them, and little else.

So, it’s odd that around Christmas 1987, a TV ad for NOW 10 suddenly got me excited…

Why this particular ad piqued my interest I’m not sure. MARRS and The Communards were definitely draws, but maybe, at the delicate age of 12, it was Carol Decker. Now, I should add Ms Decker never held a position in my affections like Debbie Harry, and later Belinda Carlisle did, but at the time I liked China in Your Hand. So a few nudges when the ad came on (as they did relentlessly in the run-up to Christmas) and that cold, and no doubt very damp, Yuletide morn, I was the owner of my first NOW album. Or rather, NOW tape… Records were still the order of the day for me and my brothers, though the parents had long since abandoned them for the magnetic strip, all the better to terrorise us with endless Kenny Rogers and Crystal Gayle in the car. But this was also the year of my first Walkman. Well, unbranded personal stereo at any rate. But unlike today’s youth who go bawling to Twitter on Christmas morning declaring their life ruined because their latest piece of £500 technological wonder is the wrong colour, I disappeared to my bedroom to absorb the wonders within, and my dad wouldn’t even have to tell me to turn that racket down… (The bloody thing did, however, require six (6!) batteries, which were quickly worn out by tea time.) Ironically, NOW 10 was the first to be released as a double CD, containing all the same tracks as on the album and tape. It was released in what is now referred to as a ‘fatbox’, rather than the double folded CD cases of today.

NOW 10 is a curious beast, and as you’ve already seen by me prattling on for three paragraphs and barely mentioning it, it’s very difficult for me to review. There’s a lot of nostalgia wrapped up in every track, so even some of the awful songs (and there are a few) still generate that giddy excitement from back in the day. Others still sound amazing, while others still must have been skipped to the point of breaking the tape, so unmemorable that they are.

Fabulous was the first word that sprang to mind listening to side one again for the first time in what must be two decades. Freddie Mercury, The Pet Shop Boys and The Communards carry on camping for an opening salvo of brazen bravado. All three still sound wonderful; Barcelona particularly has an amazing timeless quality that makes it sound like it could have come from any time in the past 60 years. That horrid 80s production of The Great Pretender is successfully ditched in favour of sweeping, Cinemascope strings and a couple of truly lung-busting performances.

Rent is not one of the Pet Shop Boys better remembered tracks, and it’s surprisingly seedy for them, at least as a single (although that fits in with the very odd, sleazy backwater motel sign design used for the cover). This was of course all lost on a young me who was just confused as to why it had been included over It’s A Sin, or the then chart-topping Always On My Mind. I’ve already mentioned my preference for The Communards version of Never Can Say Goodbye over Don’t Leave Me This Way, when discussing NOW 8, and that still remains.

From there, the sheer brilliance of NOW 10 continues with the first of its three number ones, the simply amazing Pump Up the Volume. I think this could be released today, in exactly the same format, and it would still be a massive hit, even if, at the time, it was simply a chart friendlier version of what other people (notably Cold Cut) were doing. It still sounds incredibly fresh today, maybe because this kind of cut and paste sampling has died out, in favour of stealing one hook and building a song around it. Whereas, say, Jack Your Body from NOW 9 sounded like it had been beamed in from the future, Pump Up The Volume sounds like it’s ALWAYS been here, no matter when ‘here’ might be, or when you first hear it, similar to I Saw Her Standing There, or Groove Is In The Heart. These songs were new once, but they sound like they’ve always been with us, and everybody knows and loves them.

Pop perfection continues with another of my all time favourites, Labour of Love. Hue and Cry never achieved massive success (despite the record company’s efforts to plug them on every NOW album, as we’ll see in due course) and this always baffled me. Now, I see it may have simply been bad timing: the image of soulful, jazzy pop groups was being tarnished by fly-by-night pretty boys and the ‘alternative scene’ that rejected people like Level 42 or The Blow Monkeys. So to be a new act in that milieu (no matter how good) was always going to be a tough challenge.

For a NOW album to begin strongly and then tail off is nothing unusual, but NOW 10 struggles to recover for the next 20 odd tracks. Once Hue and Cry were out of the way, I would generally be done with side one, and fast forward to the end to indulge in the hair rock on side two. Unfortunately I can’t do that now, and instead I have to talk about how bland and forgettable Jellybean (who?), Johnny Hates Jazz and The Style Council are.

For the record, Jellybean was a producer for the likes of Madonna and Whitney who somehow snagged himself a record deal, where he brought in guest vocalists to perform his turgid, appallingly bland New York disco soul tunes, all of which have that weird ‘bubble’ sound and synthesised hand claps all over them. I think the arrogance of producers crediting themselves as the main artist, with a “featuring” credit for the singer is appalling. It’s like Never Gonna Give You Up being billed as Stock, Aitken and Waterman featuring Rick Astley. But then I suppose sleeping with Madonna does tend to give people an inflated sense of self-worth. Well, it would, wouldn’t it? He appears on the next two NOW albums too, but I may not mention them as they are sooo tedious, you won’t even notice. And he’s got crap hair.

Johnny Hates Jazz next (representing everything bad I was talking about in relation to Hue and Cry) singing some weak soul-jazz pop tune about Vietnam, two years after everyone else had got bored of the whole thing. And speaking of boring, there’s The Style Council, with their most tedious tune ever. It’s actually so tiresome, I’d forgotten it was on the album. As a kid I hated The Style Council for the simple reason that they weren’t The Jam, but listening to Wanted in adulthood, I feel I was perfectly justified (with the exception of Walls Come Tumbling Down). Maybe out of sympathy, NOW 10 omits the tracks’ subtitle Waiter, There’s a Soup In My Fly… this is the man who wrote Town Called Malice for Christ’s sake.

**The imposter, left, who stood in for Paul Weller for several years in the 1980s**

Side two takes us into the Soft Metal arena. Soft Metal was all the rage in the late 80s, even acquiring their own compilation series, but it seems oddly alien now being one of the few genres that hasn’t been revived over the past decade or so. Or has it? Thinking more about it I think Soft Metal lives on, but not in the obvious places. Surely the children of T’Pau and Heart are the X Factor winners and, even more disturbingly, the so-called alternative acts who regularly fill Wembley Stadium (Clodplay (sic), Snow Patrol and their sordid, twisted demented inspirations)?

China In Your Hand is clearly the titan of side two, a massive hit, and still loved by drunken women, and a few men, country-wide. I have a preference for the earlier hit, Heart and Soul, but as we’ve previously seen, that’s probably just because I’m awkward. Heart’s Alone is also a skyscraper of a song, which can still generate fist-pumping impressions given the right amount of alcohol. When watching this on The Chart Show, I had no idea they had been successful in the USA for a full decade before their break in the UK, and the same goes for Kiss. Crazy Crazy Nights was their biggest ever UK hit (equalled by God Gave Rock n Roll To You a few years later) and listened to now, it’s got a wonderful touch of nostalgia to it, far removed from where heavy metal was going at the time. Kiss had been the wild men in the 70s, but by the late 80s that crown had well and truly passed onto to the likes of Megadeth or our own Iron Maiden. Lyrically, Crazy Crazy Nights is pretty good, but musically there’s more than a whiff of fromage about it. They’re not even wearing the make up on the publicity shot on the album!

Billy Idol’s Mony Mony was, I should confess, a favourite of mine in my youth, and was the only track on side two I’d regularly listen to. The version here is the live version, which was a re-release in 1987. He’d originally recorded it in 1981 in an attempt to break America, but it didn’t fare very well. That version is now more common, but is incredibly insipid compared to the live version on offer on NOW 10. Incredibly insipid in ANY version is Whitesnake’s Here I Go Again, another track re-recorded after an initial airing earlier in the decade. Whitesnake’s brand of leather-trousered, big-haired (not to mention big-shouldered) rock has never appealed to me. They are the kind of band that should have disbanded in shame, once Spinal Tap had come out. At least with Def Leppard you never felt they were taking themselves too seriously. Whitesnake take themselves VERY seriously. And when you release albums called things like Slide It In, Slip of the Tongue and Lick My Love Pump, you really shouldn’t.

(Lick My Love Pump is, of course a Spinal Tap album, but I bet you didn’t notice straight away…)

The surprise, for me at least, on side two is The Alarm’s Rain In The Summertime. Often dismissed, by lazy bloggers like me, as the Welsh U2, The Alarm are remembered now pretty much as one-hit wonders, with the floor stomping, and still great, drunken shouty classic, 68 Guns. Rain In The Summertime is much mellower than that, but it’s also really good. Even the blurb on the album expresses surprise that it only reached number 18. It does sound like good U2 though.

I don’t know why NOW persisted with Marillion, but they did. Here Fish talks his way through something called Sugar Mice. We’re all just sugar mice in the rain, apparently. What are sugar mice anyway? Does he mean chocolate mice that you used to get in 10p mix ups? Who knows what goes on in his poisson brain?

We’re back in the pop zone on side three, and that’s pretty much where we will stay for the duration, as the collection ends on a surprisingly upbeat note compared to the usual slow crawl to the end of side four.

Wet Wet Wet’s legacy, sadly, will be that bloody Four Weddings song, but they were always better than that. Sweet Little Mystery is a great pop tune, though they would end up doing better. Curiosity Killed The Cat continue to disappoint me though. I thought I loved this tune, but it is in fact only slightly less boring than Down To Earth, even if that keyboard riff is a killer. And all I can see when I hear it is a smug bloke in a beret in an alleyway. Try that round my way mate and you’ll end up in a wheelie bin being identified by dental records.

frank_spencer — **“Misfit, freak out on the street. I can see sorrow in your eyes…”**

If you’ve seen the track listing before reading this, have you guessed what the third number one is, after Pump Up The Volume and China In Your Hand? Well if you saw the track listing but couldn’t work it out, it should surprise you not one iota that it’s the next track on side three. Yes, long forgotten now, but Los Locos’ La Bamba hit number one for a fortnight in that long hot summer of 1987 (was it a long, hot summer, or do people just say that about summer’s when they were a kid?). Even less remembered now than the track itself, is the fact that it was from a film version of Richie Valens’ life, who had the original hit with hit. Lou Diamond Philips did a good job as Valens, but the film is a TV movie with added boobs and swearing. The tune is like all those horror film remakes littering up cinemas for the past few years: efficient, well-done, pointless.

I thought I’d hate Wipeout, the Fat Boys’ first UK hit (yes, they had more than one). I don’t get on with comedy records at the best of times, so the idea of a comedy rap record, and one featuring the Beach Boys no less, adding lyrics to one of the finest instrumental surf epics of all time… let’s just say, it’s not as bad as that sounds. The Fat Boys can clearly rap (though I’m no expert) and it’s got the same raucous energy that The Beastie Boys were currently sending shockwaves round Middle England with, but much more friendly. Teaming with a Brian Wilson-less Beach Boys obviously helped their credibility somewhat and probably did the Beach Boys’ credibility no harm either. It’s fun. Pop is supposed to be fun. Also fun is Bananarama’s Love In The First Degree, but it’s an absolute pop puff that vanishes as soon as it’s finished.

I wish I could say the same for Cliff Richard. The man is like the Terminator: it can’t be bargained with, it can’t be reasoned with, and it absolutely will not stop… ever. My Pretty One has probably been forgotten by everyone except Cliff and his accountant, and just as well, despite Cliff briefly showing the kind of emotion not seen since Carrie Doesn’t Live Here Anymore.

Words cannot express how this picture is making me feel. You can feel it to, can't you? — **Words cannot express how this picture is making me feel. You can feel it too, can’t you?**

Also probably long forgotten is Karel Fialka. His Hey Matthew is the curveball of NOW 10, a truly odd sonnet to his young son, featuring his young son, about what his son sees on TV, and what he wants to do. I’m not sure what the purpose is, beyond showcasing his son, but it’s not unpleasant. Just odd. Hearing a kid repeating “I see the A Team” is an experience never forgotten. Thanks to my boyhood experiences of NOW 10, Hey Matthew will forever be associated with Crockett’s Theme. usually played in Miami Vice when Don Johnson was speeding his Ferrari round Miami after seeing another girlfriend gunned down by bad guys. It’s a marvellous piece, and did even better in the charts than the Miami Vice Theme. For future generations after mine, it’s after the music from them bank adverts, or the best song to just drive around to in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City.

For the first time since Ghostbusters, NOW 10 found itself sharing a song with a rival Hits album, as Nina Simone’s rereleased My Baby Just Cares For Me appears here and on Hits 7. I had to check why this had been released, and it turns out it had been used in a perfume advert. This completely passed me by as a kid, being more enamoured with the Aardman-directed stop motion video of a stray cat nightclub. Of course, the song is brilliant. Also brilliant is Erasure’s The Circus, which gives me the sense of being one of their few overtly political songs, a feeling I get with the Housemartins’ Build as well. Maybe it’s the timing of this review (Thatcher has just been buried) but I feel there were a lot more sly songs about the times than outright protest songs, and I’d put both these songs in that bracket.

Level 42’s It’s Over is in no way political, but what it shares with the 80s is its cold, hard cynicism and downright callousness. I’m not a huge fan of Level 42, but I like them. But this… this is unbelievable stuff. From the first line of “I won’t be here when you come home…” it’s intended to be an 80s version of By the Time I Get To Phoenix, but this is on another level entirely. “I would never leave if I thought you couldn’t stand the pain” sings bass thumper Mark King. Well, if that’s the case sunshine, why then admit that not only are you breaking her heart, you are also tearing her world apart? This is really harsh stuff, and frankly, it’s not a pleasant listen, particularly as King’s co-conspirator, Mike Lindup, is the son of David Lindup who wrote some of the most glorious library music of all time, including this. And don’t give me any of this “I can feel the tears” bollocks either. It just isn’t gonna wash now.

Thankfully, ABC make a triumphant return to the charts with When Smokey Sings, which, shockingly, failed to make the top ten. For shame. A glorious tribute to Smokey Robinson, even cheekily nicking a few riffs from his hits, this is the kind of pop pomp that Martin Fry can pull off in his sleep, and it’s amazing to me it didn’t happen more often. The version here is the single version, now rare, with a different instrumental break, and no shout outs to other artists found on the version on the album, Alphabet City, and their various greatest hits compilations. Similar great pop is provided by Squeeze’s Hourglass. It’s unusual for a NOW album to sequence tracks like this so close to the end of the album, preferring to slow things down, or include some lesser known, or less successful tracks. Not here.

They do finish the album with, simply, one of the greatest songs ever included on a NOW album, if not one of the finest songs ever, Fairytale of New York. Released the very same day as NOW 10, they couldn’t possibly have known how well the single was going to do, or the legacy it would have. Neither The Pogues or Kirsty MacColl were regular chart botherers, and Christmas songs were never included on NOW albums, at least not up to this point. As I discussed with reference to the Hits albums, including Christmas songs on a NOW album, could potentially impact on the single’s sales, as people plump for the value for money option. It’s easy to speculate that maybe Fairytale… (or A Fairy Tale… as it’s incorrectly named here) may have done better than a very respectable number three had it not been included on NOW 10, so I will. Including it on NOW 10 buggered up its chances of Christmas number one. Yes, it was beaten by a better song (Pet Shop Boys’ brilliant cover of Always On My Mind) but it’s the better Christmas song, as countless polls annually tell us.

For once the final track doesn’t send you to sleep, it instead makes you realise how odd it is to listen to Christmas songs in April. And why including Christmas songs on NOW albums is a bad idea. I’ve spotted a couple more on a brief recce of the first fifty albums, but they are still very rare. It’s a fine send off for the album too. For half a side at either end it’s absolutely spot on. There’s few actual duffers (except maybe Marillion and Cliff) but the good stuff just goes to highlight how bland and slightly embarrassing most of the rest is.

But it’s mine, dammit, and you can’t take that away from me.

NOW THAT’S WHAT I CALL MUSIC 10

Release date

23rd November 1987

Biggest tracks

China In Your Hand – T’Pau

Pump Up The Volume – MARRS

The Final Countdown – Europe

Lost gems

Rain in the Summertime – The Alarm

Hey Matthew – Karel Fialka

Forgotten tracks

Wanted – The Style Council

Sugar Mice – Marillion

What’s missing

True Faith – New Order

What Have I Done To Deserve This? -Pet Shop Boys and Dusty Springfield

It’s A Sin – Pet Shop Boys

Track listing

Side one
Barcelona	Freddie Mercury And Montserrat Caballe
Rent	Pet Shop Boys
Never Can Say Goodbye	The Communards
Pump Up The Volume	M/A/R/R/S
Labour Of Love	Hue And Cry
The Real Thing	Jellybean Featuring Steven Dante
I Don’t Want To Be A Hero	Johnny Hates Jazz
Wanted	The Style Council

Side two
China In Your Hand	T’Pau
Alone	Heart
Crazy Crazy Nights	Kiss
Mony Mony	Billy Idol
Here I Go Again (USA Remix)	Whitesnake
Rain In The Summertime	The Alarm
Sugar Mice	Marillion

Side three
Sweet Little Mystery	Wet Wet Wet
Misfit	Curiosity Killed The Cat
La Bamba	Los Lobos
Wipe Out	The Beach Boys & The Fat Boys
Love In The First Degree	Bananarama
My Pretty One	Cliff Richard
Hey Matthew	Karel Fialka
Crockett’s Theme	Jan Hammer

Side four
My Baby Just Cares For Me	Nina Simone
The Circus	Erasure
Build	The Housemartins
It’s Over	Level 42
When Smokey Sings	ABC
Hourglass	Squeeze
Fairytale Of New York	The Pogues Featuring Kirsty MacColl

Video version

This is the first NOW video edition where every track is from the accompanying album.

Barcelona	Freddie Mercury And Montserrat Caballe
Rent	Pet Shop Boys
Never Can Say Goodbye	The Communards
Pump Up The Volume	M/A/R/R/S
China In Your Hand	T’Pau
Here I Go Again (USA Remix)	Whitesnake
Sweet Little Mystery	Wet Wet Wet
Alone	Heart
Misfit	Curiosity Killed The Cat
La Bamba	Los Lobos
Love In The First Degree	Bananarama
My Pretty One	Cliff Richard
My Baby Just Cares For Me	Nina Simone
The Circus	Erasure
It’s Over	Level 42

April 18, 2013