YouTube
Dr. Hook's 1976 hit 'A Little Bit More' was given the 911 treatment in January '99 and gave the boys their first No1 single... Their current album is a collection of their favourite songs which, according to Jimmy "appeal not just to our fans, but also to music lovers who remember them first time around!"We'll gloss over the implication in that quote that "911 fans" and "music lovers" were two separate groups of people, shall we? As I said last time, 911 were a band who had a certain charm so I find it hard to dislike them, but do also find it hard to persuade myself that much of their music is any good. By the time of this eleventh single, they (or at least the record company) were clearly desperate for a Number One single; there's an infamous story that when their cover of 'More Than A Woman' was at the top of the midweek charts, they posed for photos with a massive 1, only to be pipped at the post by Spacedust. Evidently somebody at Innocent thought the best thing to do was more covers, so we got a whole album of them and this addition to the barrage of Number One singles in early 1999. The sleeve of Now 42 takes no chances and shows them posing with Casper the Friendly Ghost instead.
Apparently, 'A Little Bit More' was already a cover when Dr Hook did it, having originally been recorded by its author Bobby Gosh. In any version though, it's a pretty hideous song, sounding more like an ode to date rape than the romantic anthem it was probably intended to be. It neither deserves nor gets a good performance from the boys, and the whole thing comes over as a box-ticking exercise. Although it succeeded in topping the chart, it was so late in their career that they had no momentum left, and this was the propenultimate single of their original career. Don't worry, there's a new album coming out in 2014.
Also appearing on: Now 35, 36, 37, 38, 41, 43
Available on: There It Is
No comments:
Post a Comment