Pet Shop Boys - Actually
The relationship I have with this album was forged on unseasonably warm September nights in the first week of its release, being driven around the then-quiet streets of West London, and that link has stayed with me ever since. I can’t listen to these songs without those visuals coming to mind.
Actually, for me, is synonymous with that period just before Black Monday, just before the big storm of 1987, before Always On My Mind, before the silly film It Couldn't Happen Here…before my own life went in a crazy and unpleasant direction very quickly. It actually pulls me back to the world before all of that.
Their sequencing of the LP remains a curious thing to me after all these years; it opens with the Twelve-Inch mix of an album track (One More Chance), and the big hit single (It's A Sin) doesn’t appear until the second half. I never felt tempted to fiddle around with the order, despite CD technology giving me the chance - the way Actually actually is, means that its two weaker moments get buried at the end of Side 1 and near the end of Side 2 so maybe it’s for the best!
How would I define my favourite Pet Shop Boys music? Think of Two Divided By Zero, basically, with a bit of Love Comes Quickly thrown in (so you could say it’s all been downhill since the debut album Please!). That’s why I love Actually, it has more of that essence (cf. Shopping, Rent, Kings Cross, I Want To Wake Up) than even Please itself did.
"Reality TV
is not for me."
Girls Aloud - Chemistry
Reality TV is not for me. The X-Factor type talent shows even less so, which means that I never saw Pop Stars: The Rivals, the TV show that created Girls Aloud in 2002. I still haven't ever seen any footage from it. Their debut single Sound Of The Underground didn't impress me at the time. It was the follow-up, No Good Advice, which got me hooked. Completely hooked.
It was, at least until Gwen Stefani’s solo career began 18 months later, the best slice of thrilling pure pop I’d heard in ages. The rest of the debut album was surprisingly good, despite running to about 15 songs and having a cheap-looking sleeve. I bought the repackaged version as well, although the original was absolutely fine in my opinion. My only annoyance with the era was Some Kind Of Miracle being pulled from release as the third (or fourth) single release. To this day I'll never understand the thinking behind withdrawing it in favour of the dreary, Wonderwall-rip-off that was Life Got Cold.
Fast-forward through 2004 and there were more great singles but a weirdly underwhelming second album in the shape of What Will The Neighbours Say?, which arrived in a staggeringly dull and unimaginative sleeve. Some of the tracks were amazing (Graffiti My Soul), but too many felt like fillers. By the time of album number three - Chemistry - the crap artwork concept hadn’t been addressed. The uniform quality of the material, however, had.
Girls Aloud were without equal in terms of singles output during the Noughties, but this felt like the first of their albums to do justice to the brilliance of Xenomania’s brand of hi-octane, inventive modern pop. Cracking 45s like Biology were almost a given by this point, but the weird and wonderful likes of Wild Horses? The sublime chords of It’s Magic? Waiting’s evocation of The Cure’s Lovecats? If anything, the most workmanlike efforts were two of the singles lifted from the album; Long Hot Summer and a rote cover of See The Day (for the Christmas/Charity market).
Xenomania’s approach has something in common with Mutt Lange’s way of fashioning those ridiculously catchy soft-rock anthems for Def Leppard, Bryan Adams and Shania Twain. Everything has a hook, a purpose. It’s wave after wave of pre-choruses, choruses and post-choruses, with ever-changing melodic tricks thrown in for good measure. On Chemistry, it is relentless. What the album may lack in one of their signature monster hits, it more than makes up for with one perfectly-crafted gem after another.
EG And Alice - 24 Years Of Hunger
This is the album which defies all my notions of what a perfect record should be. It's got 11 tracks, rather than 10 or 12, and sounds like it was made in quite an informal setting. My collection isn't noted for an abundance of lo-fi, free-form music! Every once in a while, though, you hear a record by a new act or by someone obscure which stops you in your tracks and makes you think “I simply HAVE to get this!”. In the late summer of 1991,
Indian was one such record. The best thing, however, was once I had the whole album, it wasn’t even the most sublime thing on it. Eg & Alice were the unlikeliest of major label propositions, an ex-member of Brother Beyond and a sometime model teaming up to create an inspired journey through soulful pop, funk and folk (think Prince’s Sign O The Times or peak period Gil Scott-Heron mixed with Rickie Lee Jones plus a dash of Talking Heads).
24 Years Of Hunger is impossible not to love. There is a slightly woozy vibe hanging over the album as it takes in a myriad of styles and influences. Eg White sounds alternately like a helium Prince or a coked-out Lindsey Buckingham, while Alice Temple brings some beautiful harmonies and her own laissez-faire vocal style to proceedings.
The early 1990s was a period when such records could be on a major label (in this case, WEA, who were attempting to position themselves as the home of quality new artists and signing everyone in sight) and get airplay on Radio 1. Success sadly eluded them (Eg going on to be a major player in the post X-Factor world of songwriting) but for this one LP alone, it was worth it.
"what a perfect record
should be."
Grove Armada - Black Light
The last time I was really into current music would have been around 2010; it was the era of Ladyhawke, Little Boots, MGMT and that “80s Reimagined” style, where acts barely even born during that decade were tapping into the spirit and sounds, fashioning electronic pop which made me feel nostalgic in a futuristic way. Or something.
Black Light is a truly epic album….in length, in scope, and in its ability to slip in euphoric key changes or synth breaks when you least expect it. Take “Cards To Your Heart”, an initially unpromising EDM shouter that, from nowhere, takes a turn into the most glorious, hairs-on-the-neck stadium dance anthem when the keyboards kick in.
The best way I can describe it when Groove Armada hit the bullseye, which is on almost every track, is the evocation of an Eighties Pop that never actually existed. This is really hard to articulate! It’s like the best remembered micro-bits of all your favourite music, put into a blender and then turned into a brand-new, original piece of music in the 21st Century. As I said, I’m struggling to make sense now…
There's something very visceral about Black Light which never seems to diminish with repeated listens. There are nods to clubland on Just For Tonight and Warsaw. I Won’t Kneel is Texas via Prince on the Sign O The Times album. History even sneaks in a heavily-treated Will Young vocal (this was the moment I really changed my mind about him), and Shameless drags Bryan Ferry into the modern world without sacrificing his trademark desolate, windswept class. Look Me In The Eye Sister is a monster of an opening song, taking a while to develop (a common theme among many tracks) but once it’s got hold of that riff, it isn’t letting go.
Some records are mood albums; Black Light is the album which I can turn to whatever mood I might be in, or whatever kind of music I think I might want to listen to. Everything else going on just gets obliterated when it's playing.
"my album of the
1990s"
U2 - Achtung Baby
Oh Achtung Baby, you blew my mind. What times we shared. It was, in so many ways, my album of the 1990s. And it was, unquestionably, the album which helped me forget about the 1980s. Or at the very least allowed me to move on and embrace the changes that had paid dust to so many of my favourite acts of the previous decade.
I had been such an ‘80s kid; all ten of my personal Top 10 albums are from the Eighties, with this coming in next at #11. I'd cottoned on to U2 with The Unforgettable Fire (its title track, to be precise) and followed The Joshua Tree era from day one (if not with quite the zeal of others). It was obviously a classic record but Achtung Baby was the one for me.
You can almost hear them starting from scratch, as they find new ways to avoid sounding like the old U2, and that coincided with me trying to do the same with my own life, my own body, my own mind. By distancing themselves from everything they were associated with, it felt like anything was possible. Reinvention and recovery could be painful and protracted, but it might just be achievable. This was an album, a mood, a way of approaching different sounds and means of expression, that I could lose myself in time and again.
U2 became my favourite band for the next few years, until Pop pushed the envelope a little too far and I could no longer stomach Bono's monstrous ego. It was a great ride while it lasted, though.
Stevie Nicks - Rock A Little
I hadn't noticed at the time, but this would have been only the second album by a solo female artist that I'd ever bought (coming hot on the heels of Kate Bush's Hounds of Love). Eurythmics were a big favourite of mine, and the debut Propaganda LP (A Secret Wish) was a summer 1985 purchase, but discovering that distinctive husky croak of Steve Nicks seemed to set something off in me.
I hadn't really responded to music on an emotionally visceral level before, I had been living in the Smash Hits universe and the very male, academic pop of Tears For Fears, Blancmange, OMD, ABC and Nik Kershaw. Suddenly, I was hooked on this whole other world of American AOR with huge choruses, dramatic synths and layered female vocals.
(Finding myself helplessly smitten with a girl from the school next door possibly also had something to do with it, I would imagine).
I'd started to become more interested in the US charts than the UK Top 40, hence the exposure to Rock A Little's big American hit, Talk To Me. Back in 1985, I wasn't really aware of Fleetwood Mac at all (vague childhood memories of some songs notwithstanding) and I got heavily into this album by hearing Talk To Me every Saturday afternoon in the build up to Christmas on the Radio 1 US chart show with Paul Gambaccini. I didn’t connect the singer with her band, I just heard something that made me want to investigate some more.
In a number of ways everything in my life seemed to get very intense all of a sudden; some good, some not so good. But it all somehow tied into the couple of months when this album was never out of my Walkman. I'd even carry it around with me during school lunchbreaks, shutting out the tedium around me with these amazingly dramatic and evocative songs that suggested a world out there which I was only just beginning to get my head around. It was the middle of winter, too, which only added to the whole experience.
The follow-up single I Can’t Wait, which I think debuted in the US while Talk To Me was still around, just increased my desire to get this album. A completely over-the-top production, but very much in vogue, I would eventually realise that Stevie Nicks’ usual style was a lot less frenetic and croaky. The nearest thing I compared it to back then was someone like a Kim Carnes or Pat Benatar.
Each side was uneven in length, so listening on cassette required some fast-forwarding at the end of Side A to avoid a long silence before Side B kicked in (ah, the annoying things we used to have to deal with). EMI cassettes were also notorious for their muffled quality, and I used to assume the album was meant to sound that way. It certainly did Stevie’s ravaged vocals a favour!
Thompson Twins - Into The Gap
The first album I ever bought has to make this list. Well, I didn’t actually get to buy it myself, as I got struck down with a vicious flu bug that week and had to ask my trusty Mum if she could go into town on the Saturday and get me the new Thompson Twins on tape. So the first two dozen times I heard Into The Gap was through a slightly hallucinatory haze, which might have added to the surreal experience of listening to an album I’d bought with my own pocket-money (4.49…the WH Smiths price card was still in the case, and I kept it for years…).
Quite why should Into The Gap have been the album to capture my imagination enough to do something I'd never even considered before? I'd recently bought my first-ever single about a month earlier - the 12" of What Is Love? by Howard Jones - but hadn't felt the urge to part with £1.35 for either Hold Me Now or Doctor! Doctor!, Into The Gap's two hit singles.
I remember a full-page advert in Smash Hits magazine (or possibly No.1, I was an avid reader of both by then) that announced the album's release, mentioning a cassette edition with a whole extra side of mixes and extra tracks. That could have helped sway me, but I was often prone to spontaneous, some would say erratic, decisions about what music to buy in the early years of my pop obsession. Many's the time I've looked back at what I chose, and what else I could have opted for at the time, and been unable to rationalise it.
Howard Jones' debut Human's Lib followed three weeks after Into The Gap, and could have easily been one of my choices here. It had more of an impact on me personally, containing the track which basically started me off on a lifetime of addiction to (pop) music - New Song - and also the album whose lyrics struck the greatest chord with a kid on the threshold of being a teenager. If you'd asked that very impressionable boy who he would most like to be, Howard Jones or Tom Bailey, there would have been absolutely no hesitation in naming the former. Yet as I get older, I find myself in awe of Tom's sheer pop craftsmanship, the ability to fashion the kind of perfect pop that never misses a beat or falters on a cringeworthy lyric or unnecessary arrangement.
The Blue Nile - Hats
My favourite album of all-time. Never has a record made such a strong impression on me, as Hats did the first time I got to play it on 10th October 1989 (a day after its UK release because my local HMV hadn’t got it in stock on the Monday).
I was perched, as they say, right from the moment I had heard The Downtown Lights on Radio 1’s Singled Out show a month or so earlier. To say the track blew me away is probably understating the fact; one of those moments when a piece of music so absolutely perfect and evocative enters your life unexpectedly, and you just know it’s a game-changer.
The weeks until Hats’ appearance felt like an eternity; the glowing 5-star review in Q only adding to the exquisite agony of not being able to listen to this masterpiece yet. In the meantime, I satisfied myself with hunting down a copy of their debut LP from 1984, A Walk Across The Rooftops. Which wasn’t as easy as I’d thought, even by late 80s record store standards when extensive back catalogue stocks still existed. Luckily, a nearby Public Library came up trumps and I made do with playing that.
What’s bizarre about the whole Blue Nile thing, and how they have been by far and away my favourite artist in the 27 years since, is that A Walk Across The Rooftops made very little impression on me in 1984; I’d seen the video for Stay on Saturday Morning TV, and heard Tinseltown In The Rain several times on the radio (Mike “Relax” Read was an unapologetic champion), but nothing in my reaction to those singles had suggested what they were going to mean to me in the future. Even when Q released their first Compact Disc in league with Virgin Records, “A Q CD” in 1986, and the title track from …Rooftops was featured, I was more interested in hearing Scritti Politti, XTC, The Big Dish and China Crisis.
No doubt the 5-year gap between albums created an extra mystique around the band; a (sadly mythical) image of three reclusive, intellectual perfectionists operating on a higher plane than the rest of us mere mortals, living solely in the pursuit of minimalist musical perfection. A “big music”, as one of the reviews at the time contemplated, that had a grandeur and impact almost inversely proportional to the (lack of) bombast in the sounds and style itself….the opposite of Simple Minds, U2, Deacon Blue and company.
Also, I was now 18 and not 13. And I no longer had my health, as my body failed me and developed serious autoimmune issues. The soothing, plaintive, reflective sounds of Hats were juxtaposed with lyrics full of weariness, longing, heartache, regret and hope….and brought to life by the unique voice of Paul Buchanan. It was easy to imagine this “Glasgow Sinatra” as a deep-thinking, wildly romantic, rather tortured man of the world, beaten but defiant… soundtracking a twilight city; windswept, rain-sodden, with darkening skies and lit by neon. A place where imperfect but decent people aspired to live perfectly normal and loving lives. A perfect place for someone like me, in my living nightmare, to surrender their imagination to time and again.
Hats’ magic was further heightened by arriving as Autumn approached, proving the ideal soundtrack for encroaching winter evenings (although, technically, my days were spent in enforced darkness whether it was summer, winter, day or night). I lost count of how many times I listened to the CD in its first few months, but it was at least three times more than anything else (even the long-awaited new Tears For Fears album which had narrowly preceded it a fortnight earlier). I still default to the music of The Blue Nile whenever I feel in need of the particular comfort and sonic balm only they seem capable of.
Bio
Eric Generic has been writing about pop music for more than 25 years, despite showing little interest in either writing or pop music before the age of thirteen. These days he can be found at:
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