The Bluebells 'Young At Heart'

A new month and I'm not going to bother with the jokes this time (especially as I'm posting in the evening) so we drop straight into Now 24, an album I was pleased to find for a decent price because it plugged some gaps in my collection. Of course any Now album I buy plugs its own gap but I must admit there have been one or two that's I've picked up more out of duty than excitement. It's our second visit to the music of 1993, give or take a few tracks from late 1992, but I have a slight preference for the spring Now albums because they often have some of the more interesting hits from early in the year. 



Chart Peak: 1
YouTube

'Young At Heart originally reached No. 8 in 1984... the use of the track on a VW advert sent it racing to No. 1 in late March '93... Bobby Ken, David, Lawrence and Russell split up some years ago and are now pursuing different careers.

For topicality's sake, I've included the Top Of The Pops performance of this track from 22 years ago today. I think more people might actually remember the previous week's appearance, with the camera attached to Bobby Valentino's violin bow. I guess that caused too much motion sickness for them to repeat the experiment. I did link to the original video in my previous post on this song, if you want to hear what the original 1984 vocal sounded like. As an aside it was pretty rare for the same act to be allowed on TotP two weeks running, although of course the Number One single was always an exception. It's particularly remarkable that the Bluebells made two consecutive in-person appearances considering that they had split almost a decade earlier. Though they seemed to enjoy these appearances they didn't do as you'd expect a band in a similar situation to nowadays and persist with the reunion; as far as I know it was another fifteen years before a partial lineup returned to live work as a support band for Edwyn Collins.

As to the song itself, well I don't think my views have changed much in the last two years although it might be worth noting that I remember the song more from this release than its original appearance, and that it seemed very old at the time even though it was only from nine years earlier. Hard to imagine a song from 2006 seeming out of place now, although in fairness 'Young At Heart' was already retro even when it was new. Overexposure of this song seems to have put paid to anyone remembering their other material, though. It means too that I don't go out of my way to listen to the song unless I'm doing this and it tends to wash over me when I do hear it, though I realise it's actually a good song.

Also appearing on: Now 3 [same track]
Available on: The Singles Collection

The Bluebells 'Young At Heart'

Chart Peak: 8

YouTube

Charted at No. 54 on 19th June - sped to No. 36 the following week.

Including this song when it hadn't gone Top 30 at time of going to press seems confident (especially since the front cover of the album promises "30 Top Thirty Hits") but it was the follow up to a Number 11 hit. In the event the confidence was justified when this swooped into the Top 10 and effectively overshadowed anything else they ever recorded. And whilst I don't normally throw forward to appearances on volumes I haven't yet written about, it seems dishonest to overlook the fact that this single was Number One twenty years ago this week, having been re-issued off the back of a TV advert: it was thus promoted to become the opener of Now 24.

Not bad for what started out as an unimpressive Bananarama album track, co-written by Bobby Bluebell (not his real name) and thus borrowed for his own band's debut album. The Bluebells version is heavily re-written; even more, as it turned out, when violinist Bobby Valentino successfully sued for a share of the writing credits. He seems to have used the proceeds to sue the RnB singer of the same name who appears on Now 61. Anyway, this version is a definite improvement in arrangement and performance, and plays up the gypsy-folk element which had been made trendy a couple of years earlier by Dexys Midnight Runners. It's a bit jollier, and the lyrical changes actually play down slightly the original meaning of the song, which in the Nanas version is clearly about the grown-up child of a divorcing couple. The Bluebells drop the section about not taking sides, and the song becomes more of about nostalgia and growing up, as the narrator wonders aloud why he now feels the love for his parents when as a teenager he only wanted to get away from them. Only the line in the first verse where marrying young "was their only crime" really foregrounds the original intention, but the vibe has its own merit and this is in fact a good single, though so overplayed nowadays that it's only for this sort of thing that I really take the time to listen to it properly.

The band seem to have tired of this success too, splitting not long after. They did however reform to promote the re-release.

Also appearing on: Now 24 [same track]
Available on: Take On Me - 80's The Collection