Gossip 'Standing In The Way Of Control'

Chart Peak: 7 [64 in 2006]

YouTube

Young, hip and full of attitude, US punk band Gossip blasted onto the UK music scene in early 2007 with their debut hit 'Standing In The Way Of Control'... The band thrive on delivering a fantastic live show and look set to impress at this year's summer festivals.

It's difficult now to think back to a time before Beth Ditto was a ubiquitous and often irritating media presence, the days when Gossip (the definite article was dropped in 2003, apparently) were actually more famous for their music than their lead singer. But I do actually recall hearing this song the first time it came out and quite liking it, a strong post-punk record with what I think of as a powerful bassline (though it may actually be a low-register guitar part - the band have no bassist). It's the sort of minimal arrangement that demands a lot from the players, and for four minutes they pull it off. I didn't quite work up the enthusiasm to buy it, but in the new year it began to take on a new lease of life, apparently thanks to use in a TV trailer.

Unfortunately this was soon followed by my getting tired of it, and of Ditto herself, so I still didn't buy the record, but I have to admit that she does put in a pretty powerful vocal performance though she might be disappointed that I didn't know what she was actually singing about until I looked it up (gay marriage, apparently). As time passed and the band drifted from the spotlight again I warmed more to the song and ended up being quite glad to find it on the Now album here. Of course, the band are still very much in existence, and have a new single out this very week, but have never really matched this level.

Available on: Standing In The Way Of Control

The View 'Same Jeans'

Chart Peak: 3

YouTube

Dundonian band The View are Kyle, Kieran, Peter and Steve. They formed from the ashes of a covers band from their school days (which aren't that long ago - their average age is just eighteen!)... They scored a Top 3 hit in January 2007 with the mighty smash 'Same Jeans'.

Indeed they went to top off that singles achievement (after two hits peaking at 15) with a Number One album in the form of Hats Off To The Buskers, a title which is almost a lyric from this very song. And then suddenly it was all over, with this proving to be their last Top 30 single and their two subsequent albums selling only to the faithful. Perhaps this is proof that fashion is what goes out of fashion.

Despite the above, time has been surprisingly kind to 'Same Jeans'. It's no masterpiece and edges towards the sort of self-mythologising rock I generally find tiresome; it's unsurprising that they worked with producer Owen Morris, best known for helming the first three Oasis albums. And there's no getting away from the fact that it sounds quite a lot like 'Brimful Of Asha' but isn't as good. I've never liked anything else they did and the band don't strike me as personally appealing either. But with hindsight, and out of the context of hearing hundreds of songs that sound like this all the time, 'Same Jeans' is just about sprightly enough to make up for its clichés. If only they'd started the disc with this instead of the Fray.

Available on: Hats Off To The Buskers [Explicit]

The Fray 'How To Save A Life'

Chart Peak: 4
YouTube

Denver 4-piece The Fray are one of the biggest bands of the moment in the U.S. and are fast becoming huge in the U.K. too thanks to their debut single 'How To Save A Life' - a soaring, heavyweight, guitar-driven pop gem... The band toured with The Feeling  in February/March 2007 and are set to headline a massive show in London at the end of March.

"Heavyweight"? "Guitar-driven"? Have they even listened to the record? I'm not saying I could blame them if they hadn't, mind you, but it's not exactly 'Ace Of Spades' is it? Little did I realise when I started writing about this album that when I started this particular post, the song in question would actually be back in the Top 40: luckily, in the time I've been putting off finishing it, it's slipped back and now sits at 51. Possibly for this reason, I post a wasn't exactly looking forward to in the first place has turned into even more of a chore. In fact repeated hearings have soured me on this song so much I even clicked the "dislike" button on YouTube, and I never do that.

I'm prepared, on my most generous days, to accept that this song might be meaningful to some people. To me, though, it's the worst kind of self-consciously earnest North American rock, as made by people who have heard R.E.M. but don't get them, and it's obvious that this particular song owes a good deal of its success to being tailor-made for hospital-based TV drama. I also find Isaac Slade's voice frankly grating. And that's even before I read this depressing sentence on Wikipedia:
"During Season 8 of American Idol 2009, "How To Save A Life" was played when finalist Danny Gokey exited the auditioning room and celebrated the passing of his first audition with his family and friends, in reference to Gokey's wife passing away of complications from congenital heart disease."
That just seems terribly wrong somehow.

Also appearing on: Now 67
Available on: How To Save A Life

Leona Lewis 'A Moment Like This'

Chart Peak: 1 (4 weeks)
YouTube

22 year old X-Factor winner Leona Lewis broke all records when her single 'A Moment Like This' was released in December 2006 - It was downloaded 50 thousand times within 30 minutes of being made available online... She has been described as the "Lovechild of Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey" due to her amazing soul-diva vocal range!!!

No, I don't remember when we decided that "soul diva" was a concept defined by vocal range either. But there's no denying that Leona Lewis does have one, and was an unsurprising winner of a contest judged by people who consider a lovechild of Whitney and Mariah was an appealing prospect (it was of course also a highly unlikely one). It's easy to forget now that Lewis was only the second X-Factor winner to score a Christmas Number One (and one of only five to do so to date, though all eight of them have topped the chart at some point), and as it turned out this single sold less than Shayne Ward's hit the previous year - its massive out of the gate sales first thing on Sunday morning owe more to the growth in the download market generally than any increased popularity.

Ultimately, that doesn't matter much because this isn't the song she's remembered for anyway - in fact it was already shop-worn, having been recorded by Kelly Clarkson when she won American Idol a couple of years earlier. That version was never a single in Britain, but Simon Cowell could hardly have failed to spot that it was almost tailor-made for a contest winner, with all its talk of "journeys", as shown by the old audition footage in the video too, of course. It's a narrative that doesn't totally fit with Lewis, who was clearly always going to have a career one way or another, but the bigger problem is that it's just a dull song. Perhaps surprisingly, it was co-written by John Reid of Nightcrawlers fame, but it's probably too late to do a "not fit for purpose" joke now. Either way, the track was always destined to sell well in the short term, but even though she's one of the few long-running stars to emerge from the show, and her album Spirit is by far the biggest seller connected with X-Factor, this was never likely to be more than an apologetic bonus track at the end.

Also appearing on: Now 68, 70, 72, 80 (with Avicii)
Available on: Spirit

JoJo 'Too Little, Too Late'

Chart Peak: 4

YouTube

It's over two years since US teen sensation JoJo first hit the charts with the No. 2 hit 'Leave (Get Out)' and a multi-platinum selling album... Now, at the ripe old age of 15, JoJo is back with the heart-felt ballad 'Too Little Too Late', a track which is "A timeless message about getting over your first love".

Bearing in mind that she was only 15, I did find what I saw of that video a bit creepy, TBH, but I guess they were trying to sell this to teenage girls and they knew what they were doing. Apparently Disney-affiliated radio stations insisted on removing the lyric "stay the night" from the first verse, and I think they had a point for once.

If you don't Camille Jones vs Fedde Le Grand a few tracks ago, this is the first wholly original composition on the album since Calvin Harris. That's "original" in the sense that it's not covered or sampled, it's not the most imaginative or unprecedented composition I've ever encountered, as you might have predicted seeing the cavalcade of standard-issue songwriters involved in composing it. Indeed, there's a bit of a mismatch between the rather 80 AOR nature of the song itself and the early-2000s RnB production laid over it. The fact that this ended up as a JoJo record only adds to the confusion - as noted above, the lyric doesn't really suit somebody so young and her eager-to-please stage-school vocal performance doesn't really fit either style especially well. With a disparate set of ill-fitting elements, none of which is anything special in its own right, it's no wonder that this song seems to fade so abruptly after the obligatory long high note. It's as if that's the last box to be ticked before everyone can clock off and go down the pub.

In fairness, this was a significant hit at the time, but it was to be her last. A third album seems to have been caught up in red tape for a long time but is finally due to emerge in the US next month.

Also appearing on: Now 59, 60
Available on: The High Road

Gwen Stefani 'Wind It Up'

Chart Peak: 3
YouTube

The sassy lady from Orange County took her original version of 'Wind It Up' and mashed it together with a sample from the Sound Of Music to score a No. 3 hit in December 2006... It was the first release from Gwen's album The Sweet Escape, which is dedicated to her "best project", her son Kingston.

Having successfully established herself as a solo artist with her first album, Stefani might have been expected to go back to No Doubt. At least, I'm pretty sure that's what the rest of the band expected, but in the event she made a second album, apparently because she wanted to use up some of the unreleased tracks from the first one. You might not expect a masterpiece from that rather desultory premise, but even then few would have guessed that how clumsy the lead single was going to be. Even the original track - recorded for a fashion show, hence the references to her own clothing line - can't have been up to much, with its half-baked rapping and the odd way she gulps the title (if the song wasn't called that, I don't think I'd ever have guessed what she was saying). So what better way to top it off than by sampling, er 'The Lonely Goatheard' for no apparent reason. The finished item is so bizarre that the first time I heard it on the radio, I couldn't tell whether it was a joke or not. Possibly it was, but if so it seems to have been at the record-buying public's expense. It's a testament to star power that something as weirdly dreadful of this reached the UK and US Top 10.

Also appearing on: Now 50 [with Eve], 60, 61 [with Eve], 62, 67
Available on: The Sweet Escape

Jamelia 'Beware Of The Dog'

Chart Peak: 10
YouTube

Jamelia mashed up a sample of Depeche Mode's 'Personal Jesus' until it was almost unrecognisable in 70s style dance stomper 'Beware Of The Dog'... The "hard-edged" track gave her her 6th consecutive UK Top 10 single on its release in December 2006.

I don't find it that easy to imagine that many people who've heard the original Depeche Mode track would find it that hard to recognise the riff in here, even though it has been played about with slightly: the effect is a actually slightly more akin to Marilyn Manson's cover version of the songs, which may have been where the idea came from. Whoever thought of it, though, was onto a winner, smartly spotting the best thing about the original but removing Martin L. Gore's pompous lyric and Manson's awful joke. It's replaced by a suitably forceful warning about a bad boyfriend, which could be perceived as a sequel to her highest-charting single 'Thank You', if a lighter-hearted one. Indeed the two-track CD single of this even used 'Thank You' as the B-side, so I can't have been the only one who had that thought. The only real flaw in the songwriting is the knowing use of the phrase "reach out and touch me" in the middle-eight; an obvious allusion to the similar phrase in 'Personal Jesus' but at odds with the sense and mood of this song.

Jamelia doesn't always get the best press, and is often dismissed as a one-hit wonder, but among the couple of dozen singles she's released there are a handful of real gems, and this is one of them. Whilst not especially showy, her performance here strikes the right tone: hard-edged and forceful but with a sense that she's enjoying herself. Maybe she already suspects not all her audience will take the advice. Irrespective of my wild speculation, this was a deserved seventh Top 10 for her, though also her last: it was possibly a strategic error to follow up with another song based on an 80s sample, but whatever the reason the aptly-named 'No More' fell short of the entire Top 40 and effectively ended her relationship with EMI. Though she reportedly signed a new deal as long ago as 2010, little has been heard of her since.

Also appearing on: Now 45, 46, 56, 57, 58, 59, 65
Available on: Walk With Me