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UK Top Forty Singles, This Week's Big New Release:
Marilyn Manson reminds me of Jonathan King. There's a logic here, but
it'll take me a while to get to it. Younger readers will only know Jonathan
King as the old-time record producer who ended up in prison in 2001 for
fiddling about with teenage boys in the '70s, but anyone over twenty-five
will remember that during the '80s he insisted on presenting himself as a
"pop pundit", appearing on every entertainment show on TV and radio to
explain where REO Speedwagon were going wrong or to claim that he'd invented
Manchester. (Wait: the thought of '70s boy-fiddling has distracted me. For a
very good reason. When I was a kid, I used to live in a flat in a town
called Walton-on-Thames. My brother - a teenager who later grew up into the
very embodiment of '70s man, complete with wavy red hair, moustache,
medallion and Joanna Lumley poster - was an aspiring rock guitarist with one
Thin Lizzie album too many, and often used to spend his nights at a place
called the Walton Hop, which was the only nitespot in town. I remember this
well, because I didn't know what a nightclub was when I was four and judging
from the posters outside I thought it was some kind of Ghost Train for
grown-ups. Now, in the flat next to ours lived a songwriter called Keith
West, who sang on a record called "Grocer Jack" that used to get played on
Radio 1 a lot in the Dave Lee Travis era. For obvious career-based reasons,
my teenage musician brother used to drop in on Keith West. And so did
Jonathan King. And after the 2001 conviction, it was revealed that the
Walton Hop was King's main stalking-ground for underage boy-skirt. The
answer to your next question is: I have absolutely no idea, but it's a
terrifying thought.)
To resume. The problem with the '80s "pundit" version
of Jonathan King was that he was clearly an irritation, but liked to market
himself as a man who wanted to be an irritation. He worked on the
assumption that he was The Man We Loved to Hate, and whenever anyone
suggested that he wasn't really any good at anything at all, he'd claim that
it was his purpose to get under the skin of the music industry and act as if
we should be glad to have him around as a Great Character. Which was a huge
misapprehension, of course: we didn't love to hate him, we just wanted him
to die of herpes. You can see the connection to Marilyn Manson, hopefully.
Manson is clearly awful, yet he's spent so much time and money pretending to
be the enemy of Western civilisation that even to point out how rubbish he
is runs the risk of becoming part of his marketing thrust. In my day we bred
goths to be tougher, blacker and plumper. Still, if you need one decent
piece of ammunition against him then it's easy enough to find. In the summer
of 2001, Manson played various festival dates at which he insisted on
burning the American flag, an entirely meaningless gesture - especially in
the south of England, for fuck's sake - designed to give him that smack of
controversy without actually alienating any potential record-buyers. Then,
just a month later, the World Trade Centre came down; America went on the
warpath; the new empire of in-bred lard-faced gun-toting Christians was on
the rise; and the burning of the flag became suddenly, unexpectedly potent.
Manson's reaction, naturally, was to stop doing it. Because that might
jeopardise CD sales. Weak, pathetic little man.
As for this single… weeeeell. It's obviously meaningless next to the once-grand Depeche Mode
original, and you get the feeling it's been chosen just for its title,
another way of looking vaguely anti-establishment without saying anything in
particular. But naming is important. "Personal Jesus" was the first single
from Depeche Mode's Violator, an album whose title was intended as a joke,
the most ridiculous, excessively heavy-metal name the band could think of.
If one of Manson's generation made an album called Violator, then they'd
actually mean it.
34. "Everything I've Got in My Pocket", Minnie Driver
So very tempting to describe it as "fluff". But not for the last time
this month, here we have to head into the realms of boy-lust. I, like many
of my age, have clear and distinct memories of Minnie Driver's debut as a
lead actress in Mr Wroe's Virgins on BBC2. Not least because I used to have
it on video. If you've never seen it, then you may not believe how shameless
it truly is, but the quick version is that she strips off in front of
Jonathan Pryce and gets one of the most gratuitous full-frontals in the
history of British television. Bear in mind that she was heftier in those
days, so the top half was quite impressive, but it's the bottom half that
sticks in the minds of most. Suffice to say that the production required
Jonathan Pryce to wear an enormous costume-drama beard for his role, and
that for one terrible moment we thought it'd been glued to the wrong actor.
Since then, Ms Driver has betrayed her early promise by losing weight,
adopting professional American accents and now - finally - making bleeding
pop records. The fact that this single has a name almost as ridiculous as
her own isn't enough to excuse her, especially not when she's swanning
around the place telling everyone that music was always her first love (nice
that she's remembered it now, after ten years in Hollywood). Annoyingly, this
is still the most acceptable new record in the Hit Parade, and - in a world where
Donnie Osmond can impregnate the Top Ten without warning, while Natasha
Bedingfield can go straight in at number one for no reason that anybody can
work out - the chart position of number 34 actually makes you feel quite
sorry for this spoiled, Atlantic-hopping traitor to the nation.
25. "This is the World We Live In", Alcazar
The chorus of "Land of Confusion" by Genesis, slapped over the disco riff
from "Upisde-Down" by Diana Ross and performed by four Swedes with perms and
cowboy hats. I'm sure this is a joke of some description, but I'm not sure
who's responsible. That bloke who plays Ali G? Roger Cook, doing another one
of his exposés on the pop world by proving how easy it is to have a hit?
Who?
24. "You Should Really Know", The Pirates ft. Shola Ama, Naila Boss and
Ishani, from a record by Mario Winans and P. Diddy, based on a sample by
Enya, rostrum camera by Ken Morse
You may vaguely remember that two editions ago, I pointed out how much
better this sounded than the "original". I also assumed that it was a
version of "I Don't Wanna Know" where the girl slags off the boy, and not
the other way around. Both of these things now turn out to be untrue. This
actually has the girl sort-of-apologising to the boy instead, and promising
him that she's not getting shafted by anyone else in the toilets of the
local Cinexplex, something she does by taking the tune of the boy's song and
desperately stretching out the sentiment "You Should Know" to five syllables
in order to fit the chorus. Technically this should make it vastly more
romantic and acceptable than any of the gender-hate records we've heard this
year, but the cover of the CD bears the proud slogan THE ANSWER BACK TO "I
DON'T WANNA KNOW", which makes the whole thing stink of rotting pop-flesh.
It also means, of course, that the people who sell ringtones can sell the
same one twice. And you still find yourself singing "Ready or Not" after
it's finished.
23. "Dumb", The 411
It's been pointed out to me that the problem with this video / single
isn't the token honky (see last edition), but the line 'I gots to get home',
making it sound as if the lyrics are either being written by Popeye or
delivered by grizzled nineteenth-century gold prospectors. They am what they
am.
22. "That Girl", McFly
As time goes on, the "their faces cause less offence than Busted's"
judgement starts to look shaky. The video is unpleasant. Working at an
all-night garage, the McFlies (funny how it looks a lot less appetising when
it's written in the plural; as if McDonald's are pressing insects into
burger-meat, as if the members of the band are wriggling, swarming things by
their very nature) do their best to impress a pretty girl who's apparently
old enough to drive. The objectionable part comes when one of the boys - you
know, the fat one who looks a bit like a young Les Dawson - makes sure he's
ready to go out into the forecourt and face the girl by sniffing his armpits
and cupping his hands to smell his own breath. Yes, you see the problem.
It's bad enough having to look at them, without being primed to imagine what
they smell like. As Keisha from the Sugababes has demonstrated, sweat is an
important factor in pop music (see also number 1), but sweat on a pallid,
sponge-bodied teenage boy is… God, no, I'm sorry. I'm about to gag.
21. "Breeze On By", Donnie Osmond
Wait, let me figure out the maths of this. "Puppy Love" was released in
1972 (Donnie Osmond augured my birth, as we learned in the very first
edition of this Countdown), and the optimum age for girls to buy into
boy-bands and boy-stars is… say… twelve. So the target demographic for this
record is… forty-four-year-old women? The video still doesn't seem to have
been played on any music channel that I might have seen, but I'm guessing
it sounds like the sort of thing forty-four-year-old women would like.
19. "You Had Me", Joss Stone
Now, when I was in my late teens and didn't know better / didn't have as
many principles / didn't have the internet, I used to read a certain
pornographic magazine. Nothing too hideous. Just pictures of women with
unnatural amounts of upholstery. This magazine was American, but used a lot
of models from Britain, and what was interesting was that after a while -
and even though they were all shot in exactly the same way - I could tell
the American girls from the ones who came from Swansea. Because the human
face (I looked at faces…?) is so subtle that even if there's only a couple
of generations of difference between two ethnic groups, you can see it in
the details. The odd thing, though, is that I've now lost this ability. Now
that British culture's been swallowed up by the manky American kind, it's as
if everybody's been given an instant Yank DNA infusion to go with the insane
belief that any US sit-com is in any way watchable (and see also the next
entry). I would have sworn unto God that Joss Stone was American. I would
have laid money that Maroon 5 were Scottish. JoJo, as we'll soon see, left
me puzzled. I'd also like an explanation as to why Gillian Anderson is now
wholly, convincingly, impossibly English, although apparently she was
Canadian to start with so I won't argue too hard.
But no, Joss Stone turns
out to be a slightly posh seventeen-year-old from Devon. Should someone who
can't legally drink vodka in pubs really be making a record called "You Had
Me"? It's also worth noticing that in a culture where factory-built pop
starlets generally can't sing and aren't pretty ('and their legs are thin,
oh well'), Joss Stone is preternaturally attractive and has lungs like a
buffalo, yet still makes very dull records. And she's now released two
albums in a row with "soul" in the title, almost as if someone wants her to
prove how desperately serious she is. Is her insistence on performing in her
bare feet a Derren-Brown-style linguistic trick, to force us to
subconsciously make the sole / soul connection? Certainly, the poster for
her new album - the one that's all over London, and possibly lots of other
places - makes sure that her naked foot is suggestively touching the word
"soul". I know this, because I got over-excited at Feltham station and tried
licking it.
15. "Yours Fatally", Big Brovaz
The best possible demonstration of how rubbish British bands are when
they're trying to be American. You would have thought, from their early
releases, that Big Brovaz might actually have the potential to turn into
quite a creative Brit-rap group. Then came the "Baby Boy" video, which was a
parody of Friends. Note that: not a parody of sit-coms like Friends, but a
parody of Friends, complete with the typeface and the set-design. Imagine an
American rap band performing an homage to Keeping Up Appearances and you
realise what's gone dreadfully wrong here.
It's like watching a small child dress up as her older,
uglier slapper of a sister, in the misguided belief that it makes her
grown-up. The Brovaz followed this with a track for a Major Motion Picture
Blockbuster which involved them dancing with a CGI version of Scooby Doo,
which really is the most crap thing that any band has ever done, ever. This
new single is a more sombre offering, but it's much too late for dignity
now. The video sees them splitting up into lots and lots of Big Brovaz -
this month's theme, as we're about to see - but they look more like ghosts,
or like the overlapping psychedelic children you used to see on '70s
Sesame Street, than like fashionable android doubles. And the band's most
interesting element, namely the Fat One with the Big Wubblers, is now
covering herself up and being shot in such a way as to make her look normal
pop-star-sized. Which I consider a betrayal, obviously.
14. "These Words", Natasha Bedingfield
One thing about this video that wasn't mentioned last month: part of it
involves Natasha splitting up into multiple versions of herself, a popular
theme in video now that everyone's worked out how piss-easy this sort of
thing is with digital effects. But mass-produced robot-people are clearly in
vogue, and there's probably a political subtext there if you want to go
grasping for it. After the androidginghamcleavagewomen from "Baby Cakes"
came the video for "Chewing Gum" by Annie, in which Annie herself (another
contrived pop star of the "if anyone can do this job then couldn't they have
got someone interesting, or at least better-looking?" design) forms a gang
with fourteen identical copies of herself and performs gimbling, mechanical
dance-moves to the gimbling, mechanical music. Most of these moves involve
her bending over. These days the word "surreal" is misused to describe
anything remotely strange, but this is genuinely like something that might
have been envisioned by Max Ernst in the 1920s: a machine whose only
function is to show you its own arse. Nor did the trend end there. Candice -
yet another contrived blonde female solo artiste - has been bothering music
television for some weeks now, and her video also involves an army of
duplicates, probably built by Russians during the 1960s if you believe in
The Avengers. But Candice's record is called "Hello", so it's at least nice
that she's trying to formally present herself to us. (I like the fact that
there are so many records called "Hello" in the world. I like the idea of
some great pop star party at the Centre of Time, where Candice, Lionel
Richie, The Beloved and many, many more can eternally go around introducing
themselves to each other as if they were Peter Cook.)
12. "Sunshine", Twista
Formula rap over the backing-track of Bill Withers' "Lovely Day", and
further proof that you never have to write anything new if you've made sure
that the current generation has no cultural memory of any record more than
eleven years old. Ah, Bill Withers: there are few things in
life as satisfying as someone with an amusing verb for a surname. Bill
Withers (but that's his problem); Leanne Rimes (but not with much); Lynne
Faulds-Wood (because she's got robot hands); and Alex Parks (but badly, 'cos
she's a girl). Googie Withers, too, apparently.
11. "Baby Cakes", Three of a Kind
The last frame of the video, after the music's finished, is a dedication
to a dead friend / relative. This would seem perfectly reasonable if the
video were a U2-style affair, shot in black-and-white with slow-motion
footage of dying buffalo and plaintive shots of ugly people looking sad, but
if you were a corpse then would you want to be remembered with three
minutes of android gingham-women smearing each other in cakes? If the
answer's "yes", then I want to be your friend. Following last month's
comments it's been pointed out to me that although "Three of a Kind" might seem
like the least-apt name imaginable for a band consisting of a hip black
bloke, a chubby white bloke and a Chav girl, it might in fact be a tribute
to early '80s BBC comedy series Three of a Kind, starring Lenny Henry, David
Copperfield (not the pish-poor American
magician, nor the Charles Dickens one) and Tracy Ullman. I have fond
memories of this series, as my family had just hired its first video
recorder at the time, so one particular edition of Three of a Kind was the first
programme I ever watched over and over and over and over again. Just because
I could. This means that I almost certainly have a better memory of the
script than anyone else still living, including the writers and performers,
which makes me wonder if I can nick all the good gags without anybody
noticing.
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