About This Time 30 Years Ago… It’s The Hits Of April-ish 1995!

The Hottest Hit On The Planet:

It has become a truism that America doesn’t care about Robbie Williams.

So true it is, that I just Googled “America doesn’t…” and the second autofill option was “America doesn’t care about Robbie Williams” (the first was “American doesn’t have kings”). This autofill may have been influenced by my Googling ‘“Back For Good” by Take That’, less than a minute earlier. But it still feels as though it means something.

I think I understand why, though.

For most pop stars – most celebrities in any field of endeavour – you need to buy into their myth.

In the case of Robbie Williams that defining aspect is: an egotistical party animal, a chart conqueror that no heterosexual woman can resist, a pop star with a license to do whatever he wants.

You can’t pull this persona off unless you are already a chart conqueror. You’d look like a tool if you tried.

If you are down with the Legend Of Robbie Williams, something like “Rock DJ” is an 8 (at the time it almost felt like a 9). If not, then, the only rational reaction is “Who is this tool? And what the f*ck is this mess?”

Robbie’s discography is full of such, “I-can-do-whatever-I-want-and-you’ll-love-me-because-I’m-f*ckin’-Robbie-Williams” moments. In 2001, he decided to follow-up “Rock DJ” by going Michael Buble, and took a cover of “Something Stupid” to Number One in the UK.

Having Nicole Kidman singing it with him probably helped, although it didn’t make it better (it’s a 3.)

There was a time, however when Americans did know who Robbie Williams was. Or at least who his boyband was. The boyband called Take That. Not all Americans perhaps, but enough for “Back For Good” to make the Billboard Top Ten. Also Number One in Australia, Canada, Ireland, large chunks of Europe, and, it almost goes without saying, the UK.

Even then you couldn’t really call Take That famous. As member Gary Barlow put it, “Take That didn’t break America, ‘Back For Good’ broke America.”

In the aftermath of “Back For Good”, Take That would be too busy with their own problems: namely Robbie leaving the group, and the entire group dissolving a year or so later. Maybe if Robbie hadn’t left things might have been different: maybe Take That could have become as big in the US as they were in the UK; the defining boyband of the mid-90s.

It’s not as though they had any competition. The years between the demise of New Kids On The Block and the rise of the Backstreet Boys were a barren wasteland for boy bands.

Take That could have had the market to themselves. Then again, they were British. No British boyband had cracked the US market since Wham! a decade earlier. Even Bros had failed. Why, were Bros, were Bros, not fam-ous (in the US)? I can’t answer. I can’t answer that. (“When Will I Be Famous?” is a 9; those lyrics about reading Karl Marx and teaching themselves to dance? Genius!

That bit where it suddenly turns into a carnival ride? Priceless!!)

There was another problem: research showed that American purchases of “Back For Good” were almost entirely derived from the over-30 demographic. Not a great foundation for building a boyband brand.

This turned out to be a solid plan. For when New Kids faded away post-“Step By Step”, and with Smash Hits magazine desperate for good looking young lads to put on the cover, Take That were ready to take their place.

Savvy business sense may not have been Nick’s only motivation: he probably also liked having good looking young lads hanging around.

Gary Barlow was an unconventional choice for a boy band member of the singing-dancing put-together-by-a-svengali-type-manager school of boy bands.

He wrote all their big hits – “Pray”, “Everything Changes”, “Sure” – or at least the ones that weren’t covers. And they recorded a lot of covers. Disco covers mostly: “Could It Be Magic?”, “Relight My Fire”… Gary was also an unconventional choice because he couldn’t dance.

It wasn’t too difficult to get into Take That. Nobody really wanted to be in a boy band back then, so only a handful auditioned. A couple were rejected for being too hairy, but it wasn’t too hard to whittle the candidates down to five.In addition to Gary and Robbie, Nick found:

Mark was also Robbie’s favourite. After Robbie got dumped from Take That, for:

• (a) almost having an overdose the night before the MTV Europe Awards, and,

Robbie would think about Mark every day. Some days he would cry. It was a tough time for Robbie, but not as much as it was for his fans: one German fan tried to take her own life. A helpline had to be set up to help Take That fans talk through their feelings.

Sorry, I’m talking about Robbie again. Remember, DJ Professor Dan, there were others…

Also the one famous for showing his arse in public, leading to one Dad banning his children from going to the concert because it was too sexy.

Whereas the other four members of Take That took out the entire Top 4 of Smash Hit’s “Most Fanciable Male” category – beating Keanu Reeves in the process – Jason came in at a lowly and embarrassing No.8. He was quite a mean breakdancer though.

Most Fanciable Male? Really?

A year later however he’d “win” “Sad Loser Of ‘95”, probably in response to his car-crash of a cover of “Freedom ‘90” – although Robbie, realizing that “Freedom ‘95” would have looked stupid, just called it “Freedom”– George Michael’s classic about how he didn’t want to be a pop star anymore; a bizarre and totally misguided choice of song to cover, given that being a pop star is all Robbie Williams has ever wanted to do.

Robbie’s version of “Freedom” may be the most pointless cover ever recorded (it’s a 2.)

Robbie may have decided to record “Freedom” after meeting with George in San Tropez to ask him for advice over whether to quit Take That or not. Naturally George, as a professional leaver-of-boybands, told him to do what he thought best. Robbie also asked Jarvis Cocker, who told him to stay.*

“Back For Good” apparently took 15 minutes to write, and I guess I’m supposed to say something snarky here about how it sounds like it.

But no: “Back For Good” is full of poetic imagery. Not so much the “lipstick marks still on your coffee cup” line, that one had been done before – even if it’s difficult to pinpoint exactly what “a fist of pure emotion”, or “unaware but underlined”, or “in the twist of separation, you excelled at being free” means; a sure sign that we are dealing with a true poet.

“Back For Good” was a song so catchy that a whole bunch of people insisted that someone other than Gary must have written it. Specifically, that Barry Gibb had written it. He hadn’t. Although he had written their last post-Robbie UK Number One (until their inevitable 00s reunion): another cover of a 70s classic, “How Deep Is Your Love?”

And that’s how Take That ended: tied up and dumped into a lake as punishment for what they’d done to Robbie.

“Back For Good” was a song so catchy that when they debuted it at the 1995 Brit Awards, weeks before it was even released, I’m pretty sure that Sharon-Osbourne was already singing along before it was half over! Here’s that performance, with Gary trying to be sensitive, and Robbie undermining him by goofing around.

Actually, that’s pretty much what all the non-Gary members of Take That do in the proper video as well… there is some serious slow-motion goofing about in that video… c’mon lads, Gary is trying to sing a sad and sensitive song here!

Well, maybe not everyone. In the next years Smash Hits Poll they won “Worst Group”, and Howard won “Most Tragic Haircut,” an award he well and truly deserved.

So, those of you who hate Take That – or just hate boybands on principle – take some schadenfreudesque pleasure in learning that, after making the “Back For Good” video in the rain, a bunch of them came down with the flu.best

“Back For Good” is a 9.

* Robbie was also partying with Bono and Michael Hutchence a lot, but I have no sources on what their position was.

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Meanwhile, in Trip-Hop Land:

It was all just a coincidence. That’s what we were expected to believe.

That a moody deep cut from an old Isaac Hayes’ album – “Ike’s Mood II” from Black Moses – would be sampled by two artists, in the same city, operating in the same genre – although they would quibble about that, about the name of the genre, or whether the genre even existed – within a couple of months of each other.

That scene, of course, was trip-hop. AKA, The Bristol Sound; a sluggish, almost-comatose version of hip-hop/R&B – sort of – inspired by Bristol’s Caribbean and African communities, themselves a legacy of the 18th century slave trade, when the city sent half a million Africans to America in chains. T

Whilst Bristol is a decent sized city, Portishead was a small town on the coast nearby.

A port. A “port at the head of the river”, as it translates to from the original Olde English. Geoff Barrow, Portishead’s resident cut’n’paste-sampling crate digger described Portishead as “a place you can go to and die.”

He was right, although for most people, Portishead’s music wasn’t creepy and dreary. For most people, Portishead was music to have sex to. As was Massive Attack. As was Tricky.

On a certain level that totally makes sense. On another level, these people need to get their heads read, pronto.

Melody Maker asked Tricky about his music being sexual. Tricky denied it, demanding lyrical confirmation that his music was sex-music. Melody Maker pointed out the lyric, “when we f*ck we hear beats” from Massive Attack’s “Karmacoma” – a track that Tricky loved so much that he re-recorded it solo, retitling it as “Overcome” – so surely case closed? Tricky insisted the lyric was “funk”, although he did admit it kind of sounded like the other word. It always does. But hey, judge for yourselves (“Karmacoma” is a 9, so is “Overcome”.)

Melody Maker could also have quoted the NSFW lyrics by 18-year-old Martina Topley-Bird, on “Abbaon Fat Tracks”, as part of her role to provide some feminine charm to Tricky’s war-correspondent from the suburban wasteland approach to rapping, not to mention providing something at least vaguely approaching melody. For Tricky’s vocal technique was… well it wasn’t singing, obviously. It wasn’t rapping exactly.

It also sounded like no-one else. Back when he’d been in Massive Attack, Tricky’s voice would stand out – the most paranoid voice in the world’s most paranoid band – making the parched mumbles of 3D sound about as anonymous as Banksy in comparison.

Probably the best place for him to find his female alter-ego, one whose voice his could effortlessly segue into, as though they were one and the same person, drifting in and out of consciousness. Is this really what people wanted to have sex to in the 90s?

And did they really want to have sex to Beth Gibbons? A woman with the saddest voice in the world?That’s the impression that Beth somehow gave, although in person she was apparently just shy. And anxious.

Holding onto a cigarette for dear life. That Beth would smoke makes perfect sense…

Not exactly a recipe for emotional stability or mental health, and yet people still used “Dummy” as a sex soundtrack.  Beth was able to make any song sound like the end of the world, even those songs in which the lyric sheet really isn’t that miserable: “give me a reason to love you, give me a reason to be-e-e-e… a woman, I just wanna be… a woman. All I wanna be is a… woman.”  Well Beth is a woman, so there’s no reason for her to be sad on that account.

You may not have noticed it before – possibly you were distracted by the overall over-acting in the video – but the characters in the “Glory Box” video are in drag. Some of them are extremely convincing. They are also from some antiquated era that may or may not be the 50s. This is an era that Portishead appear to be especially big fans of, largely because it was an era full of spy movies with creepy spy movie soundtracks. “Sour Times” for example used as sample from Mission Impossible (“Sour Times” is a 10.)

Portishead loved old movies and their creepy soundtracks so much that they named their album – Dummy – after the 1970s made-for-TV movie about a deaf girl who becomes a prostitute (this is the UK 1970s made-for-TV movie called Dummy not to be mistaken for the American 1970s made-for-TV movie called Dummy in which a deaf and dumb man is accused of murdering a prostitute).

The inspiration for “Glory Box” was similarly retro, named after an Australian term for a hope chest, a word and concept so antiquated that I was barely aware it existed. “Glory Box” is a song so oblique that it has been interpreted both as a plea for sexual equality – or at least empathy – and a return to more traditional gender roles. Obviously, it’s the former.

Which brings us back to that Isaac Hayes’ sample: what exactly was going on there? Was it all a coincidence? Who used it first?

Portishead used it first, and there is some evidence that Tricky was aware of it. His manager had handed him some rough demos of “Dummy.” When she first heard “Hell Is Round The Corner” she was not happy. But that was just Tricky being tricky.

Bristol – if “Hell Is Round The Corner” hasn’t already tipped you off – is a tough place.

This sort of thing was also, Geoff Barrow seemed to accept, a part of hip-hop: “if you sample a beat, that record’s out there, so what happens is, a week after, someone else might use it.” And indeed they did.

So who wore it best?

But still completely off-kilter for all of that. Suddenly, out of nowhere, comes a dirty distorted guitar solo. And then, later, even more abruptly, as though to wake you from your string-drenched slumber, the entire thing breaks down into a series of industrial thunks. And then it all loops back to the beginning again, a sign that the battle of the sexes will never be resolved.

It’s the work of the kind of paranoid genius who might, when interviewed by David Bowie for Q Magazine, spend the interview urban climbing – climbing up the sides of tall buildings for fun – and smoking some giant spliffs. This may explain the paranoia.

Both records sounded like the future even as they ransacked the past – unlike a lot of Brit Pop, which sounded like the past as it ransacked the past -as though, with the end of the millennium fast approaching, time meant nothing no more. As if this was the beginning, of forever, and ever… Portishead were so retro-futuristic that the main instrument on Dummy might be the crackle of vinyl.

“Hell Is Round The Corner” is a 10. “Glory Box” is a 10, but “Roads” is clearly the best song on Dummy, and I’m irrationally upset that it was never released as a single, even after featuring in Tank Girl. Beth may have described herself as being too easy-going to be a rabid feminist, but she was perfect for a Tank Girl soundtrack…

Curiously enough, the Tank Girl soundtrack was curated by none other but our next guest: Courtney Love.

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Meanwhile, in Grunge Land:

“This song is about a jerk.” Courtney famously introduced “Violet” on Later… With Jools Holland. I hexed him. Now he’s losing his hair.”

That jerk, in case you don’t know, was Billy Corgan.

Courtney Love, Billy Corgan and Kurt Cobain spent much of the early 90s in a self-destructive love triangle, one of the great rock’n’roll soap operas of all time.

In one key, can’t-miss episode of this rock’n’roll soap opera, Courtney goes to Chicago to see Billy, whilst pretending that she was actually there to see Nirvana play at The Metro. Kurt and Courtney had definitely met before, Kurt definitely had a crush on her, there’s some debate about how Courtney felt… particularly given that she was in Chicago to see Billy.

But… bad news for Courtney, Billy had gotten back with his librarian girlfriend, with whom a fight ensued. Shoes were thrown.

Courtney was all like, “fine I’ll go see Nirvana… which way to The Metro?”, and because Billy Corgan is a petty little man he gives her directions to – to quote Courtney Love: The Real Story by Poppy Z. Brite – “a burnt out crack ghetto.”

She asks Kurt if she can crash with him, mentioning that she’d been dumped by Billy: “Oh, God, that’s so gross that you go out with him” Kurt says, echoing pretty much everyone else’s opinion.

Courtney starts crying: “I don’t think anyone’s ever gonna love me.” Kurt’s like “No-one’s ever gonna love me, either” and their eyes met, and there’s not a single character in this rock’n’roll love triangle that’s not totally pathetic is there?

So, fast forward a few years – to about this time 30 Years Ago – and Kurt was gone, having kiled himself on the 5th April 1994.

The first single – “Miss World” (it’s an 8) – had been out a few weeks before that. Then there’s a whole six months or so, until the second single: “Doll Parts”, a song that Courtney wrote with a Sharpie on her arm whilst she was locked in the bathroom, and which would lead to a subculture of Courtney Love fans dressing themselves like dolls (“Doll Parts” is a 9.)

Perhaps the huge gap in single releases was out of respect. Perhaps Geffen didn’t want it to look as though they were capitalizing too much on a tragedy. Perhaps it was because Courtney was going through a lot. And by “a lot,” I mean “drugs.” Also a teenager in Poland was writing her letters in blood (addressed simply, “Courtney Love, Seattle, USA,” and the Post Office was still able to deliver them!). And other letters accusing her of keeping Kurt alive in a cellar somewhere or something. And the stalker who lived in the park across the street…:

Or maybe it was because there was another death, one within the band:

Kirsten had lived on the same hill in Seattle as Kurt and Courtney, which turned out to be a very convenient place to live if you wanted to score heroin. All the heroin dealers were within walking distance. Kirsten died in June.

It’s amazing that Hole ended up putting out singles, with videos and tours and everything, at all. But you can’t release an album packed with potential hit singles and not release them, so…

Actually, given everything that Courtney had lived through, it’s kind of amazing she’s still with us at all. Incredible really that she didn’t die first.

Courtney Love had lived the rock’n’roll lifestyle since she was a child.

Presumedly she believes she’s the girl in the shawl. That’s not her, but her father did write a book “The Dead: A Social History of the Haight-Ashbury Experience”, and also gave her LSD when she was four years old.

Courtney’s mother was a “New Age therapist” – Courtney’s description – who was heir to the Bausch & Lomb eyewear fortune. This is why Courtney was able to spend her youth galivanting around the world – everywhere from New Zealand to Japan– she was a trust fund kid.

She ended up in Liverpool in the 80s, stalking Echo & The Bunnymen, squatting in Julian Cope’s flat, taking more LSD, and basically just being a loud-mouth American.

At some point in 1986 Courtney auditioned for the role of Nancy in Sid & Nancy – obviously the role for which she was born – and threatened to move to Guam if she didn’t get it. She didn’t get it. She moved to Guam. Where she became a stripper.

She went to L.A. to form a band with future members of L7 and Babes In Toyland. Even there – in L.A.! – everyone thought she was a loud-mouth American. People just tended to take an instant dislike to Courtney. It feels incredible to me that she and Billy didn’t work out. At the very least, they had that in common: “I’m generally mostly attracted to dickheads and f*ckers” she explained “People that I really should like, that I wish I could like, guys who are really good and nice, don’t hold my interest.”

And they drank cheap wine in Chicago and watched the sunset together: the sky was made of amethyst, and all the stars were just like little fish…

Billy bid in the auction, and – because he is a petty little man – claimed that he wrote “one of the heart-rending couplets contained therein.” Presumedly he means the the “amethyst”/”little fish” rhyme since that’s about the only thing pretentious enough.

We started by quoting Courtney on Later… With Jools Holland. Courtney’s other famous performance of “Violet” was on SNL:

Let’s just assume that “Violet” is about what it seems to be about, and that’s being used for sex in a series of one-night stands… and loving it. Because – and here’s another thing that Courtney and Billy apparently have in common – “they get what they want, and they never want it again.”

“Violet” may be the greatest example of the slogan-screaming school of grunge-songwriting:

Come up with a catchy couple of lines to perfectly express your self-loathing, howl them into the wind, then repeat – “GO ON! TAKE EVERYTHING!! TAKE EVERYTHING!!! I WANT YOU TO!!!!” – until you can’t scream no more.

Don’t worry Courtney, you have. “Violet” is one of them.

“Violet” is a 10.

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