Alison Moyet 'Love Resurrection'

Chart Peak: 10

YouTube

Yes, I managed to resist posting this on Easter Sunday, despite the obvious temptation of the title. Not that this song is really about Easter of course; at the time if I'd thought about it at all I'd have guessed that "we need a love resurrection" was a lyric about the need for people to be more caring about each other and create a more sympathetic society; and the song must really be about that to some extent. Those sort of ideas were especially common in pop at the time, and it's certainly a sentiment that crops up elsewhere on the Alf album. But then again, I must have been a teenager when I started investigating charity shops (a habit that persists to this day) and bought the album on vinyl. Reading the lyric printed in the inner sleeve, I must admit another interpretation did cross my mind, looking at lyrics about a "warm injection" and "I want you to grow in my hand"... and what do you get if you elide the first syllable of the word "resurrection"? Exactly. That sort of innuendo would not, it seems, be out of place with Moyet's sense of humour, and might even contribute to the joy with which she sings the song.

Like most of the album, 'Resurrection' was written by Moyet and producers Swain and Jolley, with whom there was apparently something of a falling out after the album's release, and they never worked together again. Heard as a showcase for her vocal talent, it's a total success, giving her a melody with plenty of scope to sing the heck out of it. And it is catchy, with that vaguely Arabic motif that presumably inspired the Bedouin imagery in the video (although I always suspected it was actually filmed in Eastbourne or somewhere). The production has dated badly though, and it must be said that all the soul is really in Moyet's voice. It was still a good start to her solo career, good enough for it to be a slight disappointment that from this point onward she was co-opted to the rival Hits Album series and crops up only once more on a Now album. So far, anyway.

Also appearing on: Now 20
Available on: Singles

Alison Moyet 'This House'

Chart Peak: 40

YouTube

One of only two appearances from the former Yazoo singer in the series, presumably because CBS preferred to save her biggest songs for their own Hits series. And somehow we end up dealing with a song not often mentioned, though it is her first hit of the 1990s; the song itself, however, doesn't originate in the decade but is a re-recorded version of a B-side from her 1987 non-album single 'Love Letters' (the original version can be heard here). The decision paid off to the extent that this outcharted the first two singles from her comeback album Hoodoo, though this still remains possibly the least-known phase of her career.

More's the pity, because much as I like some of her earlier solo work, it suffers often from heavy-handed production and a slight lack of personality. Whilst I wouldn't exactly call the soundscape of 'This House' subtle, it's a lot easier on the drum machines and fretless bass and is rightly constructed as a space for her voice to work in. And it's a brilliant voice, but you knew that - what works especially well here is that she was (by her own telling) allowed for the first time to work up to the most powerful parts of the performance rather than going at it full-tilt, which is devastatingly effective in this epic of loss. The wordless start to the chorus sounds as if she's literally speechless, and even the verses are satistfyingly haunting. Though I have wondered whether the opening lyric "Whose sticky hands are these" is a reference to what the protagonist might have been doing in her vanished lover's absence, and that's no joke. She certainly isn't laughing. We never know where he's gone or why, although it doesn't matter: it really doesn't sound like he's coming back.

I don't know, and wouldn't necessarily want to know, whether there's any basis in personal experience for this song, but either way it's in a different universe from the competent but rather anonymous performance of Cathy Dennis and the sort of record that leaves me a bit overawed (hence the late post): there's nothing really complex about it but it's so powerful it hardly seems possible.

Also appearing on: Now 3
Available on: The Best Of...