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I'm not sure whether I have any Irish readers on this blog. I'm even less sure whether they'll be pleased that St. Patrick's Day is marked by this particular representative of their nation's music.
As if to emphasise how unreliable my memory is for this era, the first thing I thought of when I saw this title was that it had been the song that kept Geri Halliwell's first solo single off the top. Of course it wasn't - that happened (with another Boyzone song) almost exactly a year later. In fact, this dethroned an incumbent chart-topper by Run-DMC which had itself kept the united Spice Girls from a perfect record of Number Ones.
I did rightly remember a certain amount of surprise about this though, as their previous two singles had been two of their least dislikeable (the upbeat charity record 'Picture of You' and the not-as-bad-as-it-could have been cover of 'Baby Can I Hold You?') but neither of those had made it to the toppermost: somehow this greatly inferior track was the one that went all the way.
By this time they seemed to have given up the pretence that they were anything other than a launchpad for Ronan Keating's solo career, and the other four members are accordingly relegated to barely-detectable backing vocals. And the material itself has shrugged off most of the trappings of teen-oriented boybandnessin favour of a much more middle-of-the-road sound. Indeed, barring the following year's Comic Relief single they didn't have another hit with a song that you could call fast until their recent comeback. The closest any part of this comes to sounding spontaneous or unexpected is the slightly odd way Keating sings "playing a game" in the second verse. Pretty much nothing else happens for the rest of the four minutes or so of your time that this record takes up.
Also appearing on: Now 30, 31, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 41, 42, 43, 45, 71
Available on: Ballads - The Love Songs Collection
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