Soft Cell - Say Hello Wave Goodbye (1982/ No. 3/ 9 weeks/ Some Bizzare)

SOFT CELL

The arrival of Soft Cell into my world in 1981 is difficult to write about in some ways because it represents a point when I felt my understanding of pop music deepen, drifting further into frightening and ambiguous grown-up territory.

I think that that 'Tainted Love' must have been the most child-unfriendly number one for a long time. The sight of Soft Cell on Top of the Pops was a spectacle for which I was unprepared, and didn’t know how to process. With characters like Numan or Bowie there was clearly an element of dressing-up and costume, whereas the scowling likes of Kevin Rowland or Paul Weller looked like people you’d see on the street. But this weedy-looking character in bracelets and a black T-shirt without sleeves, he didn’t look like he was pleased to be on television, he didn’t look like he was enjoying dancing, but he didn’t look like he was particularly angry about something specific… Also, you could easily think that he was a woman, although he obviously wasn’t pretending to be one.

And then you noticed the other one, unsmiling, as stocky as the singer was spindly, looking morose, like somebody in a minor and taxing position of authority – a prison officer or a hospital orderly, say.

This wasn’t what pop stars were supposed to look like! But then again, to a boy who was overserious, solitary, weak and temperamental, there also seemed something rather uncomfortably personal about all of this.

And that was before I started to notice their song and their electronic music – clang! clang! And the singer’s voice was something rather slimy to listen to, not at all ingratiating the listener.

Wow, I love Soft Cell! They seem to be the group certain friends associate me with the most. Like a few bands of this time (The Beat, Altered Images), their career seems ideal to me – Don’t hang around too long, release a lot of singles, some of which everybody knows and some of which only pop people know but all of which are very good, knock out three very different albums, each of which show the same unique view of the world from a different angle, in three years.

SAY HELLO WAVE GOODBYE

A breakup song, and I can't imagine a more uneasy one. Its not showing us denial, anger, bargaining, sadness then acceptance, that's for sure. Instead, we get an internal view of a breathtakingly callous man, dumping a woman, tearing out her heart, then poking the empty cavity to make quite sure that she's dead. Marc Almond is playing a character here, adopting an unrelenting tone of sneering sarcasm, that he never makes sympathetic.

The all-electro instrumentation is vital to the understanding that the listener forms of the song. It's aiming for a cinematic sweep, but the lack of conventional orchestral arrangement gives it a made-up, inhuman and artificial, feel. Its quite funereally slow, dwelling on unpleasant feelings, rather than swiftly and gallantly moving on. The sweep comes in the washes of prolonged chords that dominate the single. The top notes are minimal, and so accentuated that they seem to form a commentary on the scene dramatised through the lyrics. The synth "beep beep!"s mock in the same way as Nelson the bully's mirthless "Haaaa Haaaa!"s in The Simpsons;

Standing in the door of the Pink Flamingo
crying in the rain (beep beep!)
It was a kind of so-so love
And I'm gonna to make sure
it never
happens again...
You and I
It had to be
The standing joke of the year (beep beep!)

It is a song, above all else, about control. The cinematic grandeur evoked by the song is a scene directed by the lover. The woman is given no voice, but told by the man who she is;

You were a sleep-around
A lost and found
And not for me I feeeeaaaar...

Then;

You're used to weeaaring less
And now your life's a mess
So insecure you see...

The man also presents a summary of the affair, making it seem as though he was always pandering to her delusions;

I tried to make it work
You in a cocktail skirt
and me in a suit
Well it just wasn't me...

Having told the woman how worthless she is, the director then assumes control, asserting and dictating;

I put up with all the scenes
And this is one scene
That's going to be played my way

And as he gives the instructions, his voice changes, moving from relentless sarcasm to prolonged pathos, dwelling on the emotions of the scene he's dictating;

Taaaaake... your hands... off meeeeeee - eeee!
IIIII... don't belong... to yoooooou, you see-i-ee-ee!
Take!
a look!
at my face
For the last time!
I nevah knew you!
You nevah knew me
Say hello goodbye
(bing-bing-bing-bing!)
Say hello
(bing-bing-bing-bong!)
wave goodbye

And then - Fuck me, there's another verse! And its yet more unpleasant. At six minutes this single really takes all the time that it needs to get under the listener's skin. The controlling man now sketches in some detail of the immediate scene;

Under the deep red light
I can see the makeup sliiiding down.

And adjusting it in a disagreeably condescending way;

Hey little girl, you will always make up
so take off that - unbecoming - frown

Some self-dramatising;

What about me? Well -
I'll find someone...

And then he tells her how shit she is again. Really, this song makes me want to cry, too...;

That's not going cheap!
in the sales (beep beep!)
A nice little housewife!
Who'll give me -
a steady life
and won't keep going
off the rails...

Another verse of this horrible scene might be unbearable. If he had more sense, the man ought to shut his mouth by now. But he can't resist saying one more line, and gives himself away, attempting a more reflective tone that soon sours into malice;

We've been involved
For quite a while now
And to keep you secret - has been hell!

Keeping her secret! That's not trying to make it work by anyone's standards!

There then follows the final farewell and walk away, a process that takes up the last two minutes of the single. One last director's note;

We're strangers meeting for the first time, okay?
Just smile and say hello
Say hello then wave goodbye

Ten "Goodbyes" then follow, including the would-be operatic;

Good-byyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy-iiie-iiie-iiie-iiie-iiie-iiieyye!

- which still isn't the climax. The music, swelling up, holding notes for longer and longer, makes the listener visualise the camera movement as a mass ive panning shot that ends the scene, as the unfortunate dumped woman walks further and further away from The Pink Flamingo down the street. We hear a few terser and more sarcastic "good-bye"s from the singer, now that she's out of his earshot.

Fade out and fade away. Roll credits. You fear for both what's going to happen to her next, and for what he's going to do next.

Roberta Flack - The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face (1972/ No. 14/ 14 weeks/ Atlantic)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Knh9pV4EB3k&p=32E972CA7D2B845D&playnext=1&index=14

 I always get a tremendous sense of darkness from this performance. When I say darkness, I don't mean darkness as in it being edgy or disturbing but a literal, dead-of-night-in-the-middle-of-the-countryside, darkness. Roberta Flack's voice seems to appear out of a velvet black nothing, allowing the listeners' imagination to see the beloved face for the first time. It is a privilege for the listener to be sung to as this lover, and time seems to stop for as long as the record lasts.

 The folk origin of the song (written by Ewan MacColl, who hated Flack's version, the old curmudgeon) gives it a sense of simplicity that befits the intimacy and importance of the material. This isn't a song that you can perform clever multiple readings of, or one filled with funky allusions. Every metaphor (barring one, the only similie) relates the sense of love and wonderment to the natural world; the sun rising, moon, stars, sky... eventually leading to a love as natural as the movement of the earth and the passing of time.

 With such unadorned and easily-assimilated lyrics, the music can take its time to build up a mood of devotion and be extraordinarily quiet. For the first two and a quarter minutes the instrumentation in its entirety consists of Flack's piano, an acoustic guitar, and some brushed cymbals, creating a still and contemplative sound-picture - a rocking cradle in an otherwise silent room. Roberta Flack certainly knew how to hold a note gloriously, and like Isaac Hayes - her 1969 contemporary on Atlantic Records - she gives herself the time to emphasise every single word of the song;

The first time
ever I saw your face
I thought the sun
rose in your eyes

(indeed, like the sun, her whole voice rises with hope and vulnerability in that "rose in your eyes"...)

And the moon
and stars
were the gifts you gave

(note the particular echoing cadence on both "sun and "moon")

To the dark
and the endless skies... my love.
To the dark
and the endless skies.

 As the second verse moves from seeing the lover to being with him, new details are added, implicating the listener deeper into the singer's feelings;

And the first time
ever I kissed your mouth

(Appropriately enough, there's something particularly oral about Flack's phrasing of "kissed your mouth")

 To signify this deeper and indelible involvement, some new instrumentation comes in here in the form of an enormous brooding cello chord;

I felt the earth
move in my hand
Like the trembling heart
of a captive bird

(a little haze of violins make themselves heard here, upon the mention of the bird. I sometimes find that line slightly jarring - but in a purposeful way - iterating just how much of herself the singer is giving)

That was there
at my command... my love

 In the third verse, of course, the love is consummated. You really appreciate the time and care that the song has taken to reach this point, as the emotion is so intense and personal;

And the first time
ever I lay with you
I felt your heart
so - close to mine -
And I knew
our joy
would fill the earth
And last till the end of time... my love
It would last till the end of time... my love

 And so the two lovers not only become one, but become at one with the world, losing their fear of mortality. Although Roberta Flack's tender reading of the song carries an immense, cumulative, sense of developing drama within it, Johnny Cash's almost unbearable deathbed version reminds us that it is sung in the past tense and is about memory - albeit uncannily true and right-seeming memories.
Such a recording carries about as great a sense of intimacy as is possible in a song (and is, of course, open to abuse, as the single's use by a stalker in the Clint Eastwood film Play Misty For Me reminds us). This vulnerable realisation of sensations of devotion, awe, and a sense of place in the world, makes 'The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face' feel as humble - and as true - as any love song in the canon to me.

Frank Ifield - Lovesick Blues (1962/ No. 1/ 17 weeks/ Columbia)

He's barely even a footnote in pop history now, but Australian yodeling sensation Frank Ifield was the biggest pop star in Britain for about a year before the ascent of The Beatles turned him into yesterday's man, a descent that seemed to happen overnight. Bad Beatles! He was ace!

Lovesick Blues is probably the most extreme example of his singing technique. An old Hank Williams tune, Ifield turbo-charges it, speeding it up until it becomes the jauntiest blues imaginable.

It starts with an blast of brass (DANG! DA DANG! DA DANG! DANG!) which is so frenetic that it jolts the listener into noticing that this record is playing. Then Ifield himself appears, alternating between singing most of the words as fast as is humanly possible and extracting the maximum yodeling potential from them;

I godda feelin' called the BLUE-UUE!
Oh lawd, sinzemybabysedgoodbye...
And I don'know what I'll DOUOOEHUOOEH!
Allidoissitand CRI-EEE!
OW-WOH lawd, thatlas'longdayshesaidgoodbye...
Lawdy, wellithoughtigownna CRI-EEE-I-EEE-I!
Shedome!
Shedoyew!
She's got dat kinda lovin' -
Lawd, Iluvdahearah when she calls me sweet BAIY-AIY-EEE-BEE! -
Such a bewdiful dream!

This unhappy state of affairs has left Ifield so "Lowowownsome I got the lovesick blues"

But that's not all. A bridge then follows, a comparatively reflective section of the song - you can tell that it's reflective because it's underscored with a xylophone. Ifield interprets this bit in what Vic Reeves would call "the club style";

Wheni'minlove I'minlove with a preddy diddle gal!
That's what's the matter with me...
Wheni'minlove I'minlove with a preddy diddle gal!
But she don't care about me!

This comparatively restrained moment is concluded by Ifield telling us that "now she is a leeaeeavin' this is all I can say" returning us to (DANG! DA DANG! DA DANG! DANG!) a slight variation on the first verse and chorus; a description of the symptoms that form - and a subsequent self-diagnosis of - the lovesick blues that afflicts him.

At only two minutes long, its not a recording that outstays its welcome.

As a man who knows lovesickness perhaps more intimately than any other emotion, I suppose that you could make a valid criticism that it generally doesn't feel much like this single sounds. A brief, feverish, manic episode of lovesickness, perhaps... The reaction that hearing Lovesick Blues really inspires in this listener is a desire to jump up and down and try to sing along, like a toddler who has eaten to many Jelly Tots and is starting to make a nuisance of himself. Praise indeed!

M - Pop Muzik (1979/ No. 2/ 23 weeks/ MCA)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FabM1RJTkrY

"n reification. materialisation, turning into an object; depersonalisation (esp in Marxist terminology)"

"Now...
Listen...
Talk about!
Pop pop pop pop musik!"

Its perhaps the ultimate punk record, if you understand punk to be something more than the superficial signifiers of youngish men in black leather jackets and ramalama three chords, but as meaning a certain playfulness of approach, political awareness, and do-it-yourself aesthetic.

Robin Scott was an old 1968 art school co-conspiritor and flatmate of Malcolm McLaren's, and 'Pop Muzik' shares a situationist intent with McLaren's work: showing how the spectacle operates and defines our lives through disrupting the spectacle, hopefully with an ironic, colourful, sense of playfulness. So 'Pop Muzik' acts as a critique of the act of listening to pop music, and demonstrates how this functions as a process of consumption.

Consumerism works through persuading us that our sense of self, and self-value, is bolstered through buying things. 'Pop Muzik' suggests how we as consumers co-opt pop music to form our identities - "Listen to the countdown! They're playin' our song again!" - and in turn, become further in thrall to the process of capitalism;

Let's do the milkshake sellin' like a hotcake
Try some! Buy some! fee-fi-fo-fum

Pop music, of course, also offers the consumer the attractive prospect of escapism;

You're livin' in a disco!
Forget about the rat race!

And creates a sense of identity ("I wanna dedicate it!") and community ("Everybody made it!") for the listener, adrift in an overwhelming and unsettling global system of commerce and communications;

All around the world...
wherever you are...

New York London Paris Munich
Everybody talk about - Pop muzik!

And presents us with a sense of pleasurable - sexy, even - consumer options we can customise for our personal gratifications;

Dance in the street!
Anything you like!
Do it in your car!
In the middle of the night!

The single shows us some possibilities for how to engage and function within with this world of mass consumption. Revolutionary action is briefly alluded to ("Mix me a Molotov!"), but achieving something more lasting within the spectacle seems the more genuinely challenging option;

(Shoobie doobie do wop!)
Infiltrate it...
(Pop pop shoo wop!)
ACTIVATE IT!

'Pop Muzik' is thankfully a lot more than a tract, though. Pop culture - dancing, fashion, romance - is often tremendous fun, after all! 'Pop Muzik' wouldn't work if it wasn't a beguiling five minutes of stream-of-consciousness rock'n'roll nonsense, and wouldn't have had so much effect if it hadn't become a bona fide massive global hit (number one in America, two in the UK, behind Art Garfunkel's 'Bright Eyes'). While looking ahead to the bright, shiny, clever new pop of the early eighties, it simultaneously evokes the joys of pop of old through some shorthand allusions; the guitar line sounds like The Shadows' 'Apache'; the skwarking saxophone reminds me of Jr Walker.

Its both a brilliant pop single and an amazingly successful piece of pop art.

"Do you read me?
Loud and clear!"

Nina Simone - To Love Somebody (1969/ No. 5/ 9 weeks/ RCA)

There's a light
A certain kind of light
It's never shone on me...

Much as I admire the Bee Gees, I do often find their records emotionally problematic, encouraging me to respond to them as diverting pop artifacts rather than as songs. Frequently a line will stop me in my tracks, and I'll get lost in thinking "Well, what on earth was that supposed to mean?", and I'll then lose my thread of emotional engagement for a little while.

I want my whole liife to be
Lived with you
Lived with you

Which is emphatically NOT the case with this cover version. Could any performance ever be more direct? Nina Simone reduces the song to its bare bones, transforming it from a crafted structure of verses and choruses into what feels like an elemental force of want and need.

There's a way
Everybody say
Do each and every little thing
But what good does it bring?
If I ain't got you?
BACKING SINGERS: If I ain't got you!
If I ain't got you?
BACKING SINGERS: If I ain't got you!

In the unlikely event that my mother was ever introduced to Nina Simone, I am in no doubt that her verdict would have been that she had met what she would classify as "a difficult woman". There's a degree of life experience that goes into this performance that you don't need to know the biography to get (though the biography is worth reading!) But, crucially, it's the voice of a middle-aged woman who knows how to deal with suffering. The singer's tone is always slightly unexpected here. You think that you've heard an angry record, but then when you return to it, the moments where you thought that the anger erupted then turn out to be something else;

In my brain
See your face again...
I know my frame of mind
You ain't got to be so blind...
And I'm blind so blind

(The delivery of every line here manages to anticipate the way that the feeling is then developed in the next one. The voice opens up with "See your face again", but the infection is also one of bitter self-knowledge, a mood then accentuated in the self-deprecating "I know my frame of mind", the rather cumbersome expression phrased ironically. "You ain't GOT to be so blind" turns a slightly knowing scorn onto the unattainable other, but the suffering intonation is then turned inwards with redoubled force on the repeated "blind". This is acute stuff!)

But I'm a woman
Can't you see what I am?
I live and breathe for you
What good does it do?

The arrangement of this is very strange. Although it has to act primarily as support for the singer, if you heard this as an instrumental, you wouldn't call it pop at all, more like improv-jazz. Its led by great heavy drum rolls, crashes and occasional tinkles. All other instrumentation comes in broken shards, bobbing up to the surface and then disappearing. The elements of pop orchestration, the strings and brass, are only an erratic presence, making this operate as a pop ballad while reminding you that it doesn't sound much like one.

You don't know
What it's like

There's a paradoxical discrepancy between the two versions. If somebody spoke to you as they do in the Bee Gees original, you'd find them rather trying company, their words in part a strategy, hamstrung by a self-conscious awareness of the impression that the speaker must be giving to the listener, the pleading tone likely to make you snap "Oh, just get over yourself!" Put the same words in Nina Simone's mouth, however, and they start to become actively intimidating, something that you'd have to deal with immediately, and unless you were of equivalent strong-will - and I'm not sure that anybody else is! - probably submit to.

Baby you don't know
What it's like
To love somebody
To love somebody
The way I love you

An astonishing, unavoidable performance.

Jerry Lee Lewis - High School Confidential (1959/ No. 12/ 6 weeks/ London)

Now, to me, this sounds so much more authentically wild and untamed than pretty much any rock record made in the last 25 years or so...

Why should this be so? Perhaps its the primitiveness of the recording technology of 50 years ago. It certainly sounds as though every instrument in this song (especially Lewis' voice) is being bashed to pieces, with no life beyond the essential moment of recording. Particularly impressive is the rudimentary beat, an amphetamine heartbeat FUMP! that seems to be tearing up your speakers every single hit of stick on drumskin. The rough tune is certainly tight, and is best experienced as an alternating aural battle between piano and guitar to see which can make the most noise;

PLINKAPLINKAPLINKA!

RRANGGRRANGGRRANGG!

Frantic and enraged though the guitarist's contribution to this scrap is, there can only be one victor as Jerry Lee is ultimately running the show, hence the brief bridge - you'll never be made more aware that the piano is a percussive instrument!

This aural talk is all subsidiary, when we start to consider all of this this as an actual song;

"You better open up honey!
Its your lover boy ME that's a knockin'!
You better listen to me sugar!
All the cats are at the High School ROCKIN'!
Honey get your BOPPIN' shoes!
Before the juke box blows a fuse!
Got everbody HOPPIN'!
Everybody BOPPIN'! -

BOPPIN'! at the HIIIGH School HOP!"

This High school hop sounds like quite an event, even without such a remarkable consort. But just in case we were going to take him for granted, he lets us know;

Come ON little baby!
Llet me give a piece good news! Good News! GOOD NEWS!

JERRY LEE is going to rock away all his blues!

My hearts BEATIN' RHYTHM! and my SOOOUL is SINGIN' the BLUES!

Furthermore - WOOOAH! - he "gotta get with you sugar gonna shake things up tonight!"

Although the picture Lewis paints is unforgettably vivid, if you want added authenticity he was marrying his 13-year old cousin at the time...

This is both genuinely unhinged and genuinely astonishingly good. And how rare is that?

Roxette - It Must Have Been Love (1990/ No. 3/ 22 weeks/ EMI)

Hurray! A POWER ballad - Maybe nobody did rock-styled Europop better than Roxette in the 1990s. The reason for this is found in the title of their first greatest hits album Don't Bore Us! Get To The Chorus!, a sentiment which I can only wholeheartedly endorse.

Everything in this single serves to build up the listeners' anticipation to hear - and participate in - a great vast singalong, wave your hands in the air, communal eruption of choric pleasure.

We start with a prefiguring of the chorus' motif, in restrained tones from the male supporting voice;

It must have been lorve
But its ovfer now...

There are just two verses here. They serve their purpose well enough, in establishing that this is a lost love song (as if we haven't gathered that already). They range from being effective in a sketchy scene-setting functional manner;

I wake up lonely.
Is there a silence?
In the bedroom

- To being a bit tongue tied in a rather charming sort of way;

In and outside
I turn to water
Like a teardrop
In your palm

The chorus, however is the type of thing that you think that you already know the first time that you hear it (and if you remember 'I Know Him So Well' by Elaine Paige & Barbara Dickson, that might be part of the reason...);

It must have been lorve!
But it's OOO-VFER NOWE!
It must have been GOOD!
But I lost it some-how!

Having hit upon this definitively strong passage, what Roxette do with it is fabulous; The prefiguring before the first verse, then the first appearance of the chorus, and then - quite magnificently - the second time that we get the chorus it doubles in size, with a slow middle-eight bit;

It's where the water flows...
It's where the wind blows...

That takes up less time than another verse would and means that, having come up for air, we can immediately immerse ourselves in more chorus, this time with the ending that we'd been led to expect ("From the mo-ment we TOUCHED! Till the time had RUN OUT!"). Then having gone though it again, the logical next step occurs. We hear it again, but bigger, with backing vocals, echoing the lyrics and adding an exciting new harmony to the tune.

That was fun! I'd like to hear that again!

A word of praise about the singing, which manages in its full-heartedness to be lusty without resorting to caterwauling. And no horrible guitar (or even worse, saxophone) solos weigh the thing down with leaden emoting, as is often the case in inferior works of this kind.

If you wanted to criticize this, I suppose that you could say that its a pretty generic portrait of lost love, and doesn't exactly tell any sort of story. But really, who cares, when Roxette achieve four minutes of relentless catharsis?