Everything But The Girl 'Wrong'

Chart Peak: 8

Last.FM

Yes, this is another one that's fallen foul of Warner Music Group, although at least in this case they actually did release the record in the US. Not in Britain, though, where they'd just left for Virgin when their last Blanco Y Negro single, the Todd Terry remix of Missing, became the biggest hit of their career. 'Wrong' was the second Top Ten single from their label debut Walking Wounded and reflects their conversion to dance music, albeit a relatively low-key form thereof. It's an interesting idea to combine the beats of Drum & Bass with the typically mellow sound of the band and the distinctive voice of Tracy Thorn, but in practice something doesn't totally seem to gel: there isn't quite enough drama or tension to make it really count. A bit less good than I remember it really.

Also appearing on: Now 21, 32
Available on: Walking Wounded

Tina Turner 'On Silent Wings'

Chart Peak: 13

YouTube

Ah yes, Tina Turner. It felt a bit weird doing Now 10 without her...

'On Silent Wings' was the third of six singles from the album Wildest Dreams, although the version that became the hit is edited down from the six-minute album cut, apparently with some extra overdubs. Even so, it's not what you'd call a concentrated burst of nervous energy.

It's obviously supposed to be a sort of dry-eyed look at the failure of a relationship. Not the panicked reaction, but a sort of resigned recognition that that's how life goes; "You never see it coming, you just go separate ways..." It's perhaps fitting for a veteran performer like Turner, but the trouble with this sort of approach is that it's inherently undramatic, so you have to come up with something pretty special to make it work. The Beatles managed it on 'For No One', but few others seem to have got there. This one ends up feeling slightly aimless, (and that sense is only exacerbated by the video which eventually resorts to setting off fireworks). It goes downhill in the final minute with the sudden arrival of Sting, who makes his first appearance on this blog, who turns up singing along as if there were some extra lyrics left over that Turner forgot to say. Needless to say, they're a bit of a mistmatched pairing and he sounds like a complete afterthought: there's no space in the arrangement for him so he just seems like a DJ singing over the end of the record.

It's not unpleasant by any means, and it gets some small credit for ambition, but it doesn't make a great impact.

Also appearing on: 1, 4, 6, 16, 17, 18, 21, 25, 26, 32, 44
Available on: The Platinum Collection

Lighthouse Family 'Ocean Drive'

Chart Peak: 11 (34 in 1995)

YouTube

Maybe the trouble with the Lighthouse Family wasn't so much that they were actually that bad. They just seemed to be utterly inescapable in the second half of the decade, although their career barely made it into this one.
In fact, I seem to remember hearing 'Ocean Drive' around the time it became their first Top 40 hit in late 1995 and actually thinking it was OK. But this re-release followed their breakthrough hit 'Lifted' and paved the way for what felt like an endless run of indistinguishable, glossy, self-consciously uplifting anthems that all seemed to sell in huge quantities to people who didn't really seem to like music. Was I being a snob here? Well, maybe, but I wasn't making it up.

'Ocean Drive' is, I think, their least bad single, distinguished by a soaring trumpet solo. And whilst it's never going to be my favourite record, in a different universe I might have been able at least to appreciate it as well put together. It suffers a little from the comparison with the above Crowded House track though - there's none of the complexity in this one, so all you get is the platitudes. The sound is too slick, and it never really seems to recognise the darkness of the situation it's trying to talk you out of, so it feels like an empty gesture, just telling you you'll get over it without persuading you.


Also appearing on: Now 33, 38, 39, 40, 41, 50
Available on: Ocean Drive

Crowded House 'Instinct'

Chart Peak: 12

YouTube

For possibly the first time in the history of this blog, looking this track up finally prompted me to replace my cassette of the best-of album where this track first appeared with a download. So you can probably guess which way this is going to go.

'Instinct' was one of a few tracks tentatively slated for a fifth Crowded House album, but ultimately became one of the three new tracks on the Recurring Dream best-of, their last recordings with original drummer Paul Hester. For about a decade they were their last recordings of all, since Neil Finn announced around this time that he was folding the band. And on this track, you can almost hear why. Not that it's anything other than good, but it does hint that Finn was looking for a new direction; there are traces of the mildly more modern production sound that he'd explore as a solo artist. Even his vocal is pushed beyond his typical range.

Even after all these years, I've never really been able to grasp what the song is supposed to be about. Parts of the lyric ("Laughing at the stony face of gloom", "Your instinct can't be wrong") sound like they might belong in an upbeat fist-punching anthem, but as usual the music resists this, presenting an oddly bewildered, slightly bleary-eyed confusion. It's this darker side of Crowded House that is often overlooked, rather to the detriment of their reputation, though presumably not their bank balances. 'Instinct' is surprisingly worthwhile for a new song on a best of album, if not up with their finest work: I prefer the other hit from the album, 'Not The Girl You Think You Are' but that never made it to a Now album.


Also appearing on: Now 21, 22, 23, 26, 35
Available on: Recurring Dream: The Very Best of Crowded House

Joan Osborne 'One Of Us'

Chart Peak: 6

YouTube

I'm not sure that YouTube is exactly the original single version, but it's the only copy of the record I could find on there that hadn't been forcibly silenced by WMG (even though it was released by a different label). There are a lot of covers on there though, including one by the artist formerly known as Prince. Sometimes this sort of thing might tempt me to give the record a bad review, but fortunately that doesn't apply in this case: I hated it already.

I recalled 'One Of Us' as one of a rank of one-off hits around this time by female singer-songwriters that were supposed to be really thought-provoking but, as the comedian Jim Tavare once put it, made you think, "Who put this rubbish on?" It hasn't improved much with age, although I did learn that this wasn't actually written by Osborne but by Eric Bazillian; he'd previously been a member of The Hooters, whose only British hit 'Satellite' had a similar vaguely religious theme. It's not clear whether this song is supposed to be funny or important but either way it seems to miss the mark completely, raising a series of dull questions in a dull way that invites derision long before the infamous rhyme "Nobody calling on the phone/'Cept for the Pope maybe in Rome". Maybe there's a good song to be written about the idea of God travelling incognito in the human world, but this certainly isn't it. On the positive side, her voice isn't as bad as I remembered it.

Available on: Relish

Suede 'Trash'

Chart Peak: 3

YouTube

Suede's first A-side without Bernard Butler: their biggest-selling single, apparently, and the first of five Top 10 singles from their Coming Up. My brother had that album and I spent quite a lot of 1996 making fun of various aspects of the record, from the horrible scrawl on the cover to the frequent lyrical howlers, but above all Brett Anderson's whiny Mockney vocal. And yes, I am aware that I've just written a glowing review of a Blur song, but even I have my limits. My brother used to join in with all this too, but then he's always appreciated music in more dimensions than I have.

The bald fact is that I never really liked Suede: not that I'd ever really listened to them pre-1996, but I looked up them pretentious, self-important, overhyped, whingy and prizing style over content. Despite its status as their great commercial breakthrough, 'Trash' just seemed to comfirm all my prejudices about them: right the way down to the cliche of the title. Not unusually in pop, it presents itself as an anthem for outsiders but gives the distinct impression that it's really only interested in the right type of outsider and if you don't conform to exactly their brand of nonconformism they're going to look down on you. Over the years, I've warmed to the band somewhat, possibly because I'm now more appreciative of The Smiths and David Bowie. But I still don't like this track much. Thirteen years on, the production sounds shrill and tinny: I'd suspect this of being intentional except that the band seem to have agreed with me, as they used a partially re-recorded version on their Singles album.

Also appearing on: Now 35
Available on: Coming Up (European Release)

Blur 'Charmless Man'

Chart Peak: 5

YouTube

Yes, I've had to fetch the camera again to capture my original CD single of this. Alas it no longer has the gold sticker that sealed the case shut, but I think you can probably grasp the concept from here.

With all due respect to Bon Jovi (ahem) if you'd asked me in 1996 who my favourite band were, the answer would have been Blur. If any pop group ever changed my life, it was them: not only was the first record I ever bought one of theirs, but they introduced me to a lot of music that it might have taken me longer to find out about. There was certainly another rush down to the shop after school when The Great Escape came out.

My own teenage life aside, this was the fourth and final single from that album, and in retrospect seems like the end of an era for Blur. When they played the singles tour in 1999, they took a break after this song. Even listening to the three low-budget B-sides (one of which is even called 'A Song') seems like a trail for the next album; but of course those B-sides aren't on this album so I should probably get round to the point. And the point is that 'Charmless Man' is no less than a great pop record, whether Blur care to admit it or not. They may have been right to feel that there was no further to go in this direction, but that's really because this is the peak of a particular style. It's a Ray-Davies-styled character sketch of an unappealing upper-class twit with a cocaine habit ("He talks at speed/He gets nose bleeds"), the sort of person Damon Albarn must have met a lot of at this time, and possibly even feared becoming; I wonder how Alex James might have felt about it. As with so many great records, the bitterness is blended with the sugar-rush of pure pop, something that Blur seem to have been able to do much more convincingly than a lot of other art-school types, and abetted by the seamless production of Stephen Street. There's even a hook outside the chorus, when the first verse strips down to Albarn's single-finger piano.

The video is quite funny too, and possibly intended as a swipe at the stardom they were beginning to dislike. In fact, it's only the lead vocal that I could single out as a weak point, and that's when I go looking for flaws. I'm glad they chose to draw a line under this record, because a longer career of this sort of thing would have become annoying - but this still stands as a classic of its time.

Also appearing on: Now 28, 29, 32, 33, 36, 37, 42, 43
Available on: Gift Pack 2CD+DVD