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From the burned out vestiges of a second rate punk band, Stuart Goddard reinvented himself as 'Adam Ant' in body and mind before taking the whole 'ant' persona as literal interpretation and running with it all the way to the bank with a series of singles and albums that celebrated image over substance and gave the eighties its first true icon. 'Stand and Deliver' was their first number one, but they had previous in the form of four top ten singles the previous twelve months.
Looking back, each of the 'Ant' singles was a self contained manifesto that set out what they were about and what they were going to do. Taking the Gary Glitter glam rock two drummers approach, but playing in a Burundi style, Adam rapped about his 'Antmusic' and how to live the good life. In this at least, 'Stand and Deliver' is no exception; "I'm the dandy highwayman who you're too scared to mention I spend my cash on looking flash and grabbing your attention". By this time though, a far more buffed sound replaced the thin white tunes of the 'Kings Of The Wild Frontier' era, and hearing 'Stand and Deliver' for the first time was akin to the moment in 'The Wizard Of Oz' where the film stock switches from black and white to colour.
From the opening horn salute, 'Stand and Deliver' gallops along like the horse Adam rides in its accompanying video, where his self knowing flirting with the camera walked a fine line between danger and camp. That he pulled off superbly swelled his fanbase considerably, making this a single that both the punked up lads and heart struck girls (and vice versa) would be happy to be seen buying. (The video also features a glammed up Marco Pironni as the least convincing band bloke in make up since Steve Priest of The Sweet. Unlike Steve, he doesn't look like he's much enjoying himself to compensate).
Song, video, image - the whole thing can be seen is a self contained package and, lyrically, Adam is again grandstanding as to why he's so much cooler than everyone else and how wonderful it is to be young, while the band play catch up with some gloriously chunky, fuzzy guitar and tribal chants/Indian whoops and yelps that intersperse the frantic drumming, building to an unstoppable crescendo of whoops and "Da diddley qa qa da diddley qa qa's" that build like a latter day Lisa Lashes hardcore house workout. Like all the best pop songs, 'Stand and Deliver''s longevity wasn't built on the need be taken seriously; the whole thing is shot through with a playful verve that would gradually, sadly disappear from Ant's future output. In a few short months the white stripe would be gone. Next it would be the band. After that the hits then the career and, with nothing left to lose, he would lose himself too, leaving this as a gleaming, immovable testament.
At certain points during my journey through the number ones it's sometimes been hard to know exactly what I'm writing about. Like here. Is it about the band? What band? Bucks Fizz were an artificial creation brought together specifically to sing this particular song at Eurovision. The song? Normal reviews are 'about' the band playing the song, but this is a clear case of the song playing the band. Again, the song was written specifically to represent the UK at the contest. 'Making Your Mind Up'
could have been sung by virtually any number of people in a male/female
'remember it worked for Abba' combination and Bucks Fizz hardly stamp
their own seal of identity on it vocally. I can imagine Brotherhood of
Man tackling it and it sounding exactly the same.It won, so job done. Is there anything more that can be said?
Maybe; 'Making Your Mind Up' is a disco lite, bubblegum tune that sprints along its busy way with a grin permanently glued to its face. You can't help but think that the whole song was written with one eye on a memorable dance routine to catch the judge's eyes on the night, and the "And try to look as if you don't care less, but if you want to see some more" lines look written solely as cabaret so that 'the boys' could whip the skirts off 'the girls' to reveal an extra bit of flesh in case those judges were wavering and thinking of giving full points to the Germans. And that's this single in a nutshell - four good looking, young blonde people in co-ordinated colour clothes singing a bright, bouncy tune that sacrificed meaning for singalongability (Stock, Aitken and Waterman would go on to make a killing from the same formula later in the decade). It came as a package stamped 'Eurovision Winner', and that's exactly what it did. As I said, job done. Next.
Long before his cabaret style persona, Stevens fronted a hardcore R&R revivalist band 'The Sunsets' and had been recording since the early seventies. Success was a long time coming, but Shaky hit paydirt in the early eighties with a succession of cover versions of more obscure 1950's tunes, like this one. Originally a country fused with pop 1954 number one hit for Rosemary Clooney, Stevens knew his history well enough to be able to get under the skin of the track and make it move to his will. His heritage and passion for all things rock 'n' roll ensured that he wasn't going to re-interpret this to gloomily emphasises its morbid subject matter. Not on your life; rather, his attack is shot through with a vigour and verve that puts many of the contemporary 'new wave' acts to shame and raises it a few notches above karaoke. As if punk never happened indeed! Stevens may have later become a caricature of his own persona that belied his traditionalist past, and this may be just a another cover version, but it's a highly competent one that updates and revamps rather than just lazily (re) paint by numbers. And you can't ask for much more than that.
As the sleeve says - a tribute' to the murdered John Lennon by way of a cover of one of his better and better known solo songs. In theme, 'Jealous Guy' covers much the same ground as 'Woman', but it's everything that the later song is not in that it asking a woman to forgive a wrong in a simple, direct style that is obviously from the heart:"I didn't mean to hurt you, I'm sorry that I made you cry. I didn't want to hurt you, I'm just a jealous guy" Honest too - Lennon is admitting the flaw in his own character that has caused the hurt, but he's not so deceitful as to make the age old promise of "I promise I'll change"; it's a case of love me, love my jealousy, even if it takes us down the road to ruin.
A good song then, and a hard one to mess up. Roxy Music are far too professional an outfit to trip over their own feet in their presentation of this, and the languid synth washes are very much of the band at that time and it's almost a dry run in style for Roxy's own 'Avalon' album that would appear the following year. The main problem here is Ferry himself. Despite a latter day reputation as a lounge lizard type ballad crooner, there is always something of a sneer in his voice that has never been quite erased. It worked fine, was a virtue even, on Roxy's more cynical, discordant early output, but the straight ahead love songs that made his fortune just don't ring true and puts me in mind of a top drawer soul singer a operating Ferry like a ventriloquist's dummy, but with the lack of lip movement putting the brakes on the true soul and emotion coming out. In Ferry's hands, the "I'm sorry that I made you cry" sounds more like a distraction than truly heartfelt, almost as if he's singing it to that sex doll from 'In Every Dream Home A Heartache' rather than to a living person, rendering the performance more art for art's sake than anything else. This version of the song is fine as far as it goes, and they meant well, but why would anybody want to listen to it when you can have Lennon's original?
'Shaddap You Face' is now probably better known as the answer to the classic pub quiz question 'What Song Kept 'Vienna' Off The Number One Spot', as if some noteworthy injustice had been done which, like the antics of the Nazis, must never be forgotten.* Whether or not you agree with that is a moot point, but anyway - what exactly do we get with the Joe Dolce Music Theatre? An American born, Australian dweller who a tooka onna da Chico Marx faux Italian character but forgot to steal the humour to go with it. That's what. Fair play, I can imagine Chico telling Harpo to 'Shaddap You Face' in any one of their films, but he'd justa sayit da once and then move on to other business. Dolce, on the other hand, stretches his one non joke rather too thinly with the effect that the song actually gets less and less amusing as it rattles on, and the intervening years have not added anything to the party; merely a vehicle to poke fun at foreign stereotypes, it wasn't funny then and it isn't funny now. Still, Midge's face was a picture.
* 'Vienna' was voted Britain's favourite single to ever peak at number two in the charts in a 2012 poll run by the BBC and was awarded an honorary number one by the OCC. What is conveniently forgotten though (or perhaps never mentioned) is that John Lennon's 'Woman' was number one for the first week of 'Vienna's runner up residence.The inference here, of course, is that there's no shame in being beaten by a dead former Beatle. Again, whether or not you agree with that is another moot point.
Lennon's first posthumous single release and another number one, though you could be forgiven for thinking it sounds pretty much like the last one; speed up the backing track to 'Imagine' and you could happily sing 'Woman' over the top of it. But whilst the latter is a solid enough effort, 'Woman' is a rather lame and insipid affair.
Obviously dedicated to Ono (though Lennon has said it was meant for all women), 'Woman' simpers for forgiveness and understanding at the foot of a female wronged, though the repeated use of 'woman' (with a clear full stop after it) to start each verse as a means of getting her attention sounds rather derogatory and patronising and only serves to undermine whatever contrition that's being expressed, making the whole thing sound hollow with any emotion at least two steps detached.
Unlike Lennon's own previous declaration of love for his wife in 'Oh Yoko', there is nothing intimately playful about this po-faced dirge that so obviously aspires to high drama yet crashes and burns in a welter of pretentious phrasing and forced rhymes that makes it sound like Lennon is reading directly from a 'How To Win Your Wife Back' manual; "Woman, I can hardly express, my mixed emotions at my thoughtlessness. After all I'm forever in your debt. And woman, I will try to express, my inner feelings and thankfulness". For God's sake man, just tell her you're sorry and be done with it.
Let's be honest, any review of 'Imagine' in 1981 is a review of sentiment rather than the song. As a single, 'Imagine' only managed a number six position on first release in 1975 and it was only the tide of grief after Lennon's murder that put this back in the charts at number one - to the record company's credit, it wasn't re-issued as a cash in but was bought in sufficient quantities to put it there by itself. Saying that, it was re-issued in 1999 where it managed to get to number three - this may have been a cash in, but it's a pretty impressive history for one song.
'Imagine', like Dylan's equally iconic 'Blowing In The Wind' before it, is a simple, stripped down tune on which is hung a narrative of imagery vivid enough to both disguise the underlying naivety of the content and also to stick in the mind on first listen. 'Imagine there's no heaven, it's easy if you try ' - a simple enough statement of intent, but in the hymnal context of the song it generates enough gravitas of cod philosophy to make you think you're listening to something profound, yet similar again to the Dylan song, the first impressions tend to be the deepest and neither gain in depth with repeated plays.
And what of the much mocked 'Imagine no possessions' - how can a multi millionaire sing that and still keep a straight face? Yet remarkably it was Bono who (in 'God Part 2') seemed tuned in to Lennon's predicament when he sang: "I don't believe in excess, success is to give. I don't believe in riches but you should see where I live". Then again, just as where Proudhon's 'All property is theft' statement has been misunderstood from the almost the second it was written, Lennon himself defended the line in his 1980 Playboy interview by saying "The Buddhist says 'get rid of the possessions of the mind'. Walking away from all the money would not accomplish that. It's like the Beatles. I couldn't walk away from the Beatles. That's one possession that's still tagging along, right? If I walk away from one house or 400 houses, I'm not gonna escape it."
But it's pointless to debate lines in splendid isolation here; 'Imagine' is bigger than that and can defend itself* When all the dust has settled though, it matters not a jot what I or anyone else says about it now, it has transcended all that and no amount of bad press or hissy criticism is ever going to make it go away - 'Imagine' has now become a Gothic Victorian marble headstone replete with (depending on your stance) ornately carved angels or gargoyles, a single point of reference to mark the fact to later generations that a man called Lennon had once been alive. If I have to wrap this up with some kind of conclusion, then let it be that It's a solid song and nothing more, occupying a mid-table spot in Lennon's output; he produced far better and far worse songs than this in his lifetime, and since his death the track has deserved neither the extreme plaudits or scorn it has garnered.
* A far bigger stick to
beat Lennon with would be the accompanying video that saw him all in
white, a Christ-like figure at a white piano in a white draped room
with Yoko moping around five paces behind him like a concubine. A scene
just crying out for Jarvis Cocker to burst through a window and start
shaking his arse.
From the burned out vestiges of a second rate punk band, Stuart Goddard reinvented himself as 'Adam Ant' in body and mind before taking the whole 'ant' persona as literal interpretation and running with it all the way to the bank with a series of singles and albums that celebrated image over substance and gave the eighties its first true icon. 'Stand and Deliver' was their first number one, but they had previous in the form of four top ten singles the previous twelve months.
