1985 Shaking Stevens: Merry Christmas Everyone

It comes as an eye rubbing shock to see that Shakey was still having number ones this far into the decade, but it's Christmas time and so different rules apply. 'Merry Christmas Everyone' was also the first Christmas song 'proper' to take the seasonal number one spot since 'Mary's Boy Child' in 1978.

I've always thought that the best way to judge how 'good' a Christmas song is by how often it's revived in future years. For example, Slade's 'Merry Christmas Everybody' is a genre classic that's everywhere from about November on while Chris Hill's 'Bionic Santa' isn't. On both counts. The fact that 'Merry Christmas Everyone' entered the charts again in 2007 and managed to reach number 22 shows that someone must like it, but I can't say I'm one of them.

In truth, 'Merry Christmas Everyone' is a pretty anaemic, one key affair that plods where it should bounce and has precious little of the rock and roll enthusiasm of his previous output; endlessly repeating the title and clichéd Christmassy observations ('Snow is falling' 'time for presents' etc etc) don't by themselves get the party started or make it any more festive. They just irritate. A wildly inappropriate (in this context at least - it sounds like an outtake from Gary Glitter's far superior 'Another Rock & Roll Christmas') saxophone solo and a monster key change at 2.24 try their damndest to keep things interesting, but they only serve to highlight the lack of basic imagination that's gone into this.

Christmas songs, like Christmas cards, are a means to an end. Some Christmas cards are ornate affairs with sparkle and gold leaf that sit proudly on any mantelpiece while others come in a box of 100 and are printed on thin, flimsily cardboard that won't stand up on their own without flopping over into the fire. I will leave my dear readers to decide which of these best describes 'Merry Christmas Everyone' and I'll just add that it's a fitting end to what must be one of the worst years for number one singles since records began. Bah humbug.

1985: Whitney Houston: Saving All My Love For You

The vantage point of hindsight can reveal some terrible landscapes. Take Whitney Houston. "For the next generation there's a singer who combines the fiery gospel of Aretha Franklin with the stunning elegance and the beauty of lyric phrasing of Lena Horne and she is Whitney Houston". Clive Davis said that, and though as President of Arista records (Whitney's label) he could be said to be biased, he also makes a good case.

There is no doubt that Ms Houston can sing. Daughter of gospel singer Cissy Houston, cousin of Dionne Warwick, niece to Thelma Houston and godchild to Aretha Franklin, there's is no way any of that line up would have let her near a microphone if she was going to embarrass herself. And on 'Saving All My Love For You' she doesn't.

It's a strange song for any 22 year old from a gospel background to tackle at the outset of a career, based as it is on the viewpoint of the 'other woman' in an adulterous relationship:

"A few stolen moments is all that we share
You've got your family and they need you there
Though I've tried to resist being last on your list
But no other man's gonna do
So I've saving all my love for you"

It's heady stuff, and by trying to make a virtue of horsing around with another woman's husband (made more explicit in the video), Houston risked the wrath of wronged women the world over and a negative backlash that could have sunk her career before it had properly started. And yet as soon as she opens her mouth to sing the opening lines, all thoughts of Houston as possible being a 'bad girl' melt away with her hypnotic delivery.

Forget the singer she became, running through the scales simply because she could and hanging on to every note until it died on the vine, Houston's phrasing on this is immaculate. There's restraint where restraint is needed and when she soars, it's because she is emphasising the depth of her love and devotion in a way that the song demands and not showing off in a 'look at me' way.

For once, Houston is singing the song instead of trying to steamroller it flat and the fact that 'Saving All My Love For You' has a lyric by Gerry Goffin means it has a depth that much of the later flim flam she was given to record sorely lacked. It's an adult song with adult themes and yet Houston tackles it with a confidence and assurance that belies her age. Michael Masser's subtle musical backing and production wisely remains muted, almost to the point of slipping into muzak, in order to play second fiddle to Houston's delivery which he knows is the true star here.

For a while at least it seemed that Davis's comments would ring true, that a baton had been passed from those illustrious members of her extended family and that a new chapter in this dynasty was about to be written. Sadly, it was not to be. Houston would go on to have incredible musical success and more number ones would follow, but the brash and over the top road she would follow was at the expense of the raw emotional honesty she displayed on this recording and it always reminds me of some rich kid with the best car money can buy but not the first idea of how to drive it properly.

The whole package of 'Saving All My Love For You' is an American Tragedy in microcosm, an observation hammered home with that sleeve image of the fresh faced Houston ready to conquer the world as another Aretha or another Dionne. Hindsight reveals she followed a much different path, one less concerned about soul and more about substance, be it purely fiscal or the 'more is better' attitude. The most frustrating thing was how quickly she got sidetracked down these roads that, although were wide and straight, never led anywhere particularly interesting. And certainly not to anywhere you'd want to visit again. Shame.

1985 Wham!: I'm Your Man

At this point in time, Wham! were at the pinnacle of their popularity. Fresh from conquering China, 'I'm Your Man' was highly anticipated as their first new material in almost a year. Despite this gap between releases though, 'I'm Your Man' is struck from the same mould that formed 'Freedom' to the extent that it's almost a re-write.

Yet again, 'I'm Your Man' is driven by an upbeat R&B thump with blasts of good time saxophone to add flavour, but whereas 'Freedom' flowed naturally through it's verses from A to B, 'I'm Your Man' is fuelled by a bonhomie that by virtue of its sheer relentlessness sounds forced and contrived.

It builds quickly enough into the tension releasing 'Baby, I'm your man' chorus refrain, but then a needless key change into 'If you're gonna do it, do it right' serves to pull on the handbrake of the song's natural progression, ultimately making it an awkward and unsatisfying listen. Which is apt, because 'I'm Your Man' literally has nothing to say for itself beyond George's bragging about how good he is in bed.

Further, the whole meat of the song is contained in its first minute and the remaining three are wave upon wave of repetition of the above that bludgeon you into thinking you're listening to some forgotten Stax B side in attempt to paper over the fact that 'I'm Your Man' is really quite an uninspired track that bores where it tries to invigorate, rather like a parent trying to kick-start a birthday party by some compulsory game of pass the parcel when all the sulking kids want to do is eat jelly till they're sick.

Unfortunately, Michael was fresh out of jelly in 1985. With more than one eye on his imminent solo career (the accompanying video showing Michael with his shirt open to the waist and designer stubble is telling), 'I'm Your Man' is writing by numbers that gives the overwhelming impression Michael was bored with the band and the restrictions it brought and to that end, 'I'm Your Man' sounds written to order for an uncritical audience. On that level at least it succeeds, but its sheer ordinariness means it falls far short of the songs he'd already written and those he would come to write.

1985 Feargal Sharkey: A Good Heart

'A Good Heart' was written (but not recorded) by Maria McKee in the aftermath of the breakdown of her relationship with Benmont Tench of Tom Petty's Heartbreakers. Sharkey, of course, was the former vocalist with The Undertones, now forging a solo career.

With a lyric detailing bravado in the face of loss and an underlying bitterness that comes from experience, 'A Good Heart' is a good song. Sharkey, however, isn't the singer to do it justice. His distinctive yelp worked well when he was singing about Mars Bars and getting his teenage kicks, but it's ill suited to more serious matter; there's an ever present smirk in his delivery that implies he's not taking things as seriously as he should, despite the studious pose on the sleeve.

This flaw was the weak link in the later, more mature Undertones albums, in the Assembly's 'Never Never' single and it's the weak link here too. It just doesn't ring true. Sharkey may have grown up since 'My Perfect Cousin', but his voice has stayed behind in perpetual adolescence and it will forever root him to his past. His aim for the rafters on the 'a good hearrrgghht' refrain on the chorus makes him sound more like a man gargling Listerine than a man in emotional torment and it undermines the heartfelt message of the lyric which isn't claiming 'A good heart is hard to find, but I don't care because I'm off to play football with my mates', which is a lyric the Sharkey of 1978 vintage would have sang and sang well.

It's notable too that 'A Good Heart' is driven by the same (albeit slower) relentless, monotonous 4/4 drumbeat and backing keyboard shimmer heard only recently of Midge Ure's 'If I Was', itself borrowed from a Queen song. This highlights both the sheer paucity of imagination that went into the production on this track (hang down your head Dave Stewart) and also the predictable banality of the record buying public. It also makes this version of 'A Good Heart' a bland and uninteresting four minutes, far removed from the abrasive cowpunk Americana genre that McKee operates in. Not to put too fine a point on it, the song deserves better.

On a note of trivia, Benmont Tench wrote a response to this to tell his side of the affair and generally have a pop at Maria. This song, 'You Little Thief', would be Sharkey's next single. The same criticisms would apply.

1985 Jennifer Rush: The Power Of Love

The biggest selling single of 1985 was this power ballad imported from New York via Bavaria and sung by a woman known to her mother as Heidi Stern. Built almost entirely around a structured sequence of electronic percussion, 'The Power Of Love' drifts into being via a breeze of vaguely ambient, Eno-type synth washes that noodle away in the background as Rush carefully intones the opening 'The whispers in the morning, of lovers sleeping tight. Are rolling like thunder now, as I look in your eyes'

Yet common sense dictates this sparseness can't go on to the end and the anticipation of change generates a underlying tension in that, although there's no form or structure to what you're hearing, you just know that it's leading up to something. In the common parlance of the power ballad, a drumroll or crash of power chords usually shifts the gears to get things going and so it comes as a genuine surprise when Rush carries the momentum herself by skyscraping her voice up a few octaves to deliver the chorus payload "Cause I am your lady, and you are my man."

And its sheer unexpectedness provides a welcome frission of excitement in a genre mapped by blandness that still makes me smile every time I hear it. The problem is of course that you can only pull a rabbit out of the hat once before the novelty wears thin, and when the surge comes round the second time then you're put on guarded anticipation for it's arrival. Unfortunately, that first peak comes in at around the sixty second mark and, with another good four minutes left to fill, 'The Power Of Love' soon falls into a rut of repetition and predictability with the chorus milked for all its worth.

And in so milking, finally adding those crashing drums serves less to create an aura of heightened drama and more to diluting the purity its original appearance, kicking the song down to MOR soft rock hell. By the time of it's third go round, Rush's voice seems to have lost all the confidence she showed at the start, making it not so much a statement of fact of the strength of her love but a questioning plea that needs affirmation from her partner and it ends the song on a downward trajectory that negates the uplifting force of the opening minute.

Nevertheless, 'The Power Of Love' is undeniably distinctive and memorable, largely because of Rush's warm vocals that have the exotic hint of her Germanic upbringing. Power ballads may have come to have the aura of the wretched throughout the eighties but the total absence of guitars or over production here comes as a breath of fresh air and all the purpose, power and drive of the song comes from Rush and Rush alone. I can't begin to imagine how many marriages, funerals or last slow dances this must have soundtracked since 1985 and, as I type this, I can pretty much guarantee that someone somewhere in the world is belting it out at a Karaoke session. 'The Power Of Love' demands some seriously heavy lifting though and I can pretty much guarantee 'they' are making a right old mess of it.

1985 Midge Ure: If I Was

I've always seen the post John Foxx Ultravox as the 'Alan Partridge' of the electronic movement, totally un-self aware in the bland pretension of their po-faced output. Perhaps not unexpectedly, Ure cracks open no new moulds for his debut solo single, quite the opposite in fact. 'If I Was' 'borrows' Queen's 'Radio Ga Ga' for its basic rhythm track and a walking in treacle version of Ultravox's own 'Hymn' for the chorus; there may be nothing new under the sun, but these lifts are blatant, not less through the Queen song being barely a year old. Put them all together and you have a low key plod built around an ascending chorus that's Ultravox in all but name.

Lyrically, it's torturous. Midge's lines are shoehorned into some Procrustean bed of rhyme to force them to scan, but they end up running as smoothly as a car with square wheels:"If I was a leader, on food of love from above I would feed her". And "If I was a poet, all my love in burning words I would show it". And "If I was her lover, her eyes in kisses I would cover". The Grammar Nazi's may want break out the arrest papers over the "If I was etc" when 'If I were' etc would more correct usage in this context too. But let's not go there.

'If I Was' is an agreeable slice of middle aged angst aimed at those who like to sort out their worries and stress by reaching for the kettle rather than the razor blades. Unchallenging, unthreatening and unimaginative - there will always be a nodding audience for songs that seem to be making profound statements on the human condition. 'Real music' they like to smugly call it, but 'If I Was' is more Fraud than Freud in those stakes. Or should that be 'In stakes of those, more Fraud than Freud is 'If I Was'? Or should it be 'In stakes of those, more Fraud than Freud was 'If I Was'? Enough.

1985 Mick Jagger & David Bowie: Dancing In The Street

In February 2009, Mojo magazine put Martha and the Vandellas' version of 'Dancing In The Street' at number one in their '100 Greatest Motown Songs' list saying: "the song is a proud embracing of the in-the-moment experience carried forward on a surge of thrillingly emphatic playing by the Funk Brothers studio band and the exuberant singing of Martha Reeves". I can't argue with that, so I won't. And while it's not my favourite Motown song, it's top five. So with such a definitive version already in the can, what do Messer's Bowie and Jagger bring to the table? Well......

Opening with a harsh whistle, a frantic drum beat and Jagger's camp holler of the of various world city names, the casual listener is led to believe they are in for a radical deconstructive re-working of the song whereas it in fact only leads us up the garden path; after all, this was for charity, a sphere where it's never wise to take too many risks and it soon settles into the recognisable stomp of the Vandella's cut.

Recognisable maybe, but only in the way that a large, round, smiling face with four sticks coming out of it in a child's drawing is recognisable as a human being. A lot has to be inferred. The 'thrillingly emphatic playing by the Funk Brothers' that Mojo emphasised is replaced by a synthesiser led wooze of plastic soul that farts along in the background while the 'exuberant singing of Martha Reeves' is replaced by the nasally honks of Jagger and Bowie - Jagger honks the opening, Bowie honks back and then sometimes they honk in unison and all the while a gaggle of faceless harpies screech along in the background as the wailing counterpoint of the damned.

You see, 'Dancing In The Street' was never conceived as a duet, and the way each try to outdo the other in the alternate lines is comical: "There'll be swingin', swayin' and records playin' and dancin' in the streets'" moans Bowie with the sardonic delivery of a nightshift worker trying to get some sleep. Exuberant it is not. Bowie has never done exuberance. But that's the iceberg's tip I'm afraid - there are plenty of other things I could pick up on, but you kind of lose the will after a while. Yet despite all this aural pornography I'm still happy to cut the two lads some slack, albeit the kind of slack you would cut an Alzheimer's riddled pensioner who wets the bed.

For a start it's for charity; 1985 was the year of Live Aid so let's get that out of the way. Alvin Lucier could have re-released 'I Am Sitting In A Room' this month and as long as it had the African guitar logo on it then someone would have bought it. Secondly, whatever its faults, this has to be better than any version of song they originally wanted to cover - Bob Marley's 'One Love'. Try as I might, I simply cannot conjure up in my mind what this would have sounded like, but instinct screams it would have had to have been far, far worse.

But apart from all this, the 1985 incarnations of both Jagger and Bowie were drunk on a heady brew of their own egos, a burning desire to still appear down with the kids and fuelled by the abject terror of their own irrelevance. 'Dancing In The Street' is not some minor inkblot on their CVs - Bowie and Jagger, both solo and with the Rolling Stones and Tin Machine, produced enough crap during the eighties to clog a two foot diameter sewer pipe; 'Dancing In The Street' is a turd, but it's not the biggest turd that either of them produced that decade (think Jagger's 'Let's Work or 'Bowie's 'Glass Spider' for bigger, smellier examples).

The real villains here aren't even those who bought this wretched thing and took it home (it's for charity - remember? Though my goodwill on this argument has now reached the point of no return). No, my ire is aimed four square at the subset of this group who saw merit in the recording and actually listened to it for the sake of enjoyment whilst having no inkling a singer called Martha Reeves even existed. I know from experience that there were rather a lot of these in 1985. I was at school with most of them. Whether they still exist I do not know, but if they do then they should be lined up and shot. In the face. And I'd pull the trigger myself.