Tuesday 24 July 2012

Bjork and David Arnold 'Play Dead'

Chart Peak: 12

YouTube

'Play Dead', the haunting single featuring the vocals of ex-Sugarcube Bjork and the lush production of David Arnold, charted at No. 12 after just one week on release.
After that run of makeweights by people who can do better, it's rather a relief to come to one of the real classics on this album; we seem to get roughly one per side here. I don't actually remember the film Young Americans but Arnold's sweeping string melody was everywhere in the mid-1990s (it was also used in a car advert in 1995). Jah Wobble, incidentally, gets a co-writing credit alongside Arnold and Bjork for the bassline he composed and performed, making him the second ex-member of Public Image Limited to contribute prominently to Now 26.

Curiously, one of the copies of this song on YouTube has a comment describing it as "very emotional" - and yet it's really a song about the repression of emotion (thus the title). Apparently this is based on the lead character in the film, but it works well enough out of context anyway thanks to Bjork's admittedly screechy vocal, which seems to prove that she can't really keep it in. The single was a major breakthrough for her commercially, her first Top 20 single since the Sugarcubes (it was added to later pressings of her Debut album as well) but to me it's as much Arnold's show as hers, his gorgeous tune and arrangement being the building block. As it was presumably written before the lyric, it doesn't necessarily reflect its content, but taken together it's possible to hear the suggestion that emotion is a beautiful thing as well as a painful one.

Arnold's career has of course gone from strength to strength as much as Bjork's - perhaps even more so if you account for the number of people who've heard his soundtracks to James Bond and other films. He's had other chart hits too - most notably his collaboration with Propellerheads - but this is all we get of him in Now terms, unfortunately.


Bjork also appears on: Now 27, 35
Available on: Bjork - Greatest Hits

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