David Sylvian 'Red Guitar'

Chart Peak: 17

YouTube

I'm going right to the wire here, posting this on the last day of the second month of writing about Now 3, even though it's only a 30-track album. I thought it was going to be one of the easier ones (Glitter aside) but a lot of delays have got in the way for various reasons.

Anyway, we wind up at the end of Side 4 with the only series appearance by the former lead singer of Japan, an act who seem to have become anomalously big pop stars for such high-minded art rockers. I say "seem" because I know very little of the band, they were around just a little too early to have made an impression on me at the time and seem largely overlooked by 21st-century radio programmers so my knowledge of them is basically 'Ghosts' and a couple of other tracks I have on compilation albums somewhere. My knowledge of Sylvian's solo music, as much as I've always been aware that he's around, pretty much boils down to a few plays of this. It was his biggest solo hit, presumably still aided by the Japan fanbase, but I'm given to understand that it's one of his most commercial recordings anyway. Certainly, it's a song with a conventional pop structure and a recognisable melody, although it has a very sparse arrangement. It is as usual topped off by David Sylvian's distinctive vocal style, which sounds like Bryan Ferry being forced to sing at gunpoint. Now, I know this is supposed to be important and influential music and everything, but I must admit that I find it somewhat unengaging and not much of a gateway to his back catalogue. Perhaps it's even a victim of its own influence, as the experimental elements have been rendered commonplace but it still not a wholly convincing pop song. You never know, it might grow on me in a decade or two.


So, here ends Now 3. But if the audio tracks aren't quite enough, here's my first ever YouTube playlist, a reconstruction of the VHS equivalent of this album. I managed to find all the songs (many of which aren't on the album), though not all the actual videos.


Back next month...

Available on: A Victim Of Stars 1982-2012

Madness 'One Better Day'

Chart Peak: 17

YouTube

One of a few acts to have appeared on all the first three volumes, a run that ends at this point as they're not on Now 4 (or Now 5 for that matter). 'One Better Day' was also the last Madness single to be released on Stiff records, and indeed one of the last big hits on the original version of that label before it ran out of money a couple of years later; it's presumably for this reason that there was no video budget available and the band had to fund it themselves, and they saved a few bob by using Bette Bright (aka Mrs Suggs) to play the part of the homeless woman. It's good that they bothered though, because there's something rather sweet about the finished clip which amplifies the song's sentiment, a reminder that the poor and dispossessed are still humans with feelings.

In sound only, this is probably the furthest of all their singles from their most famous Madness sound, although it does occur to me that if all the Madness songs you'd ever heard were the ones on Now albums you'd get quite a different impression of them from their best-known songs. The title (buried in a middle-eight) is of course a play on the phrase "seen better days" and there are no laughs to be had here as such, just a sympathetic depiction of life in and out of hostels. Of course, anyone who really knows Madness and their music will realise that the undercurrent of sadness and social commentary has always been there, but rarely did they foreground it as much as here. Though somewhat of its time, the track is brilliantly arranged and the soon-to-depart Mike Barson is particularly impressive on percussion and piano, with that quotation from 'Dancing Queen' (possibly via 'Oliver's Army') providing an additional hook. And even as an agnostic when it comes to saxophone solos, I can't fail to notice Lee Thompson's versatility - his bluesy lead-sax part here is completely different from 'One Step Beyond' but feels totally natural. It's a good record, but it's not what people expected or wanted from Madness, hence the relatively disappointing chart position: their lowest ever peak at the time though each of their next three singles did progressively worse.

Also appearing on: Now 1, 2, 6, 8, 21, 43
Available on: Total Madness

The Art Company 'Susanna'

Chart Peak: 12

YouTube

Another track I heard for the very first time when I was timing Now 3, so unfortunately I have no hilarious anecdotes about calling them The Fart Company when we were kids or anything. Apparently they were a Dutch act, known in their homeland as VOF de Kunst, who topped the charts in the Netherlands with the original of this song in 1983. After a translation of band name and lyric (and a slight spelling change of the title from 'Suzanne', they somehow took this number into the British Top 20, presumably appealing to people returning from holidays. The version on the album (and presumably the original single) does include that crowd noise and sounds as if the song is already familiar to the audience, who are playing along anticipating the punchlines. Perhaps it was funnier in Dutch, or in the 1980s, but it just leaves me baffled now.

The song was later covered in Spanish by Ricky Martin and in Italian by Adriano Celentano, which I mention as an excuse to post 'Prisencolinensinainciusol'.

Gary Glitter 'Dance Me Up'

Chart Peak: 25

YouTube

I admit this wasn't a post I was in any hurry to write. In fact, if I'm really honest the knowledge that this song would be coming up was one reason I made the decision more than four years ago not to continue this blog in chronological order: at the very least I wanted to wait until I had my own copy of Now 3 to refer to. At one point I contemplated not posting a YouTube link on this post, though I ultimately decided that would be going too far; the fact that one of my other online hobbies is posting old charts and making up playlists of them which include Glitter's tracks where necessary would have made it pointlessly inconsistent.

Of course the sensible, high-minded thing to do would be to write about the record without taking any account of Glitter's (or, more accurately, Paul Gadd's) crimes, as I've tried to do with other controversial acts. But the reality is that it's almost impossible to do that because we all know about it, and because his arrest effectively removed his music from the airwaves indefinitely. Not that I remember hearing this one on the radio before 1997, indeed it probably didn't get many plays after about 1985, but it's still a surprise to hear his voice now. And it's hard to resist finding unfortunate double meanings in lyrics and song titles (if this title isn't bad enough, the B-side was called 'Too Young To Dance'). There s something faintly disturbing now about hearing him sing "Bring on the dancing girls!", especially if you see the video on YouTube where he's at a Radio 1 Roadshow with actual children dancing on stage.

This song does at least reduce any moral dilemmas about endorsing it by not being any good at all. Producer Mike Leander (who was also responsible for all the Seventies hits, and who died not long before Gadd was arrested) does a serviceable job of aping mid-80s production values, in what must have been one of the last attempts to sell Glitter as a contemporary star before he became the ironic nostalgia act I remember him as. But the song itself is utterly woeful, a mix of clashing and not very strong hooklines with rotten lyrics that can't even do innuendo properly. And Glitter's vocal is surprisingly poor as well, however did he pass the audition for Jesus Christ Superstar? The song succeeded to the extent that it was his last "normal" Top 40 hit (his last ever was of course 'Another Rock N Roll Christmas') and earned him his only appearance in the main now series, but I've just listened to it in full for the second time in my life and I'm not planning a third.

Weather Girls 'It's Raining Men'

Chart Peak: 2

YouTube

I know reading YouTube comments isn't generally wise, but there's a comment on the Now 3 TV commercial where somebody suggests that it must be the gayest Now album ever, and as the advert flashes through video clips of 'Smalltown Boy', 'Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go' and this, you can kind of see what they mean. If only it had been 'Relax' instead of 'Two Tribes' we'd have had a full set. That said, 'It's Raining Men' obviously doesn't have quite the same relationship with gay culture as those other songs, being fronted by a female duo; a pair of former Sylvester backing singers known as Two Tons Of Fun until this single. The song was co-written by Paul Shafer, later better-known as the bandleader on David Letterman's TV show and possibly not a regular at Studio 54. Indeed I've seen at least one person on a web forum criticise this as an outsider's version of gay culture.

To give credit where it's due, though, it's a strong pop record, though as previous and subsequent versions of the song have proved, it's quite dependent on the vocals and personality of the Weather Girls themselves. They have good voices but they also get credit for entering into the spirit of things, embracing the silliness and  innuendo with gusto. They really make this the camp classic it is, even at the price of encouraging a lot of inferior cover versions. Amazingly, this never even went Top 40 in America.

Available on: 100 Hits Of The '80s

Thompson Twins 'You Take Me Up'

Chart Peak: 2

YouTube

Second of the trio's three appearances in the series, though actually their latest song to show up as this song was a hit after 'Doctor Doctor', which appears on Now 4. Unfortunately, we leave them just as they're hinting at becoming interesting then, as the intro hints at a slightly more imaginative arrangement with harmonica and melodica laid over the insistent beat. Things revert to type a bit more once Tom Bailey's vocal starts and we're back into the realms of silly songs sung seriously, although unlike 'Hold Me Now's endless milking of the chorus this one keeps you waiting quite a while. Even when the chorus does arrive it doesn't quite seem to fit with the verses, although it's OK in its own right, and could possibly have done with a more expressive singer than Bailey. I'm sure I remember it showing up in a coffee advert at some point, though a long time on YouTube when I should have been writing this post turned up nothing.

Peaking at 2, this represented the peak of their commercial success although Bailey and his then-partner Allanah Currie kept the band going into the 1990s. She later married one of the KLF.

Also appearing on: Now 2, 4
Available on: Love, Lies And Other Strange Things: Greatest Hits

Wham! 'Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go'

Chart Peak: 1 [2 weeks]

YouTube

At about the 1:14 mark in this video, George Michael is wearing a pink shirt, tight shorts, fingerless gloves and ear-rings and singing "You make the sun shine brighter than Doris Day." 14 years later he announced he was gay, whoever would have guessed etc.

'Wake Me Up' was Wham!'s first Number One and marks the start of their hugeness: presumably its placement as track 24 on Now 3 represents an attempt to spread the big songs throughout the album, rather than an attempt to bury the song. It's a turning point in their career too, as they moved away from the political and social commentary of early songs like 'Young Guns' and 'Wham! Rap' in favour of glossier, more straightforward lyrics allied to a Sixties musical pastiche - or at least what George Michael would have thought was a Sixties sound at the time, it's now rather obviously of its time. Despite the presence of a drummer in the video, the drums on the track are synthesised, just as Pepsi and Shirlie are clearly miming to Michael's backing vocal for most of the song. And as much as I realise that the video isn't really part of the remit of this blog (it doesn't even have the excuse of being on the VHS version of Now 3) it's hard not to notice it, because it seemed so much a part of the success of the duo, and seemed so emblematic of the times: even I can remember people wearing those CHOOSE LIFE t-shirts and variations on them, although I don't recall that Andrew Ridgeley's Foreign Legion-style helmet ever took off in the same way. The song and video seem to have fixed most people's idea of what they were, much to Michael's later annoyance but the more pompous and self-regarding his solo career gets the more time I have for daffy little numbers like this one. Not a song I'd go out of my way to listen to, but I can at least admit to its qualities now.

Also appearing on: Now 7
Available on: The Final