- Strange Little Girls
- Abnormally Attracted to Sin
- Unrepentant Geraldines
James Blake - Overgrown
Incubus - If Not Now, When?
Nik Kershaw
- Human Racing
- The Riddle
- Radio Musicola
- The Works
John Mayer - Heavier Things
Joni Mitchell - For the Roses
Katie Noonan and the Captains - Emperor's Box
Radiohead - The King of Limbs
Sting - The Dream of the Blue Turtles
Talk Talk - The Colour of Spring
Wilco - Star Wars
The revival of my interest in pop music led to another purchase, Wendy Matthews' Cafe Naturale. I also finally unearthed something I purchased very cheaply a while ago, the Baby Animals' self-titled debut album.
A small rant: the latter is a re-release with their second album (not yet listened to), and is missing one track compared to the original CD release. Why? Why do record companies do things like that? It makes absolutely no sense to perform that kind of alteration.
However, what really needs to be talked about is the fierce revival of my interest in Nik Kershaw. The interest has always been there, in fact he was one of the very first musicians that I became a fan of at a young age. I still remember listening to "Wouldn't It Be Good" and thinking how much I liked it. It's perhaps the first time I ever heard a song and thought it was clever.
It was also very successful. What's striking about listening to that song, though, and to Human Racing as a whole is how unlikely that success was in some ways. Sure, Nik Kershaw had the looks to be a pop idol in 1984, but his music was quirky and unconventional by the standards of mainstream pop. When there aren't surprising harmonic or rhythmic twists, there are things like background yelps or chipmunk voices.
And lyrically, the album is highly dystopian. The songs are filled with people dissatisfied with their lot, dreaming of a better life, suspicious of authority, or just giving up on the world. Opening track "Dancing Girls"starts with: Cold and lonely and tired and bored, just like the day before.
I don't remember enough about what was going on in 1984 culturally to know whether this tapped into the zeitgeist (other than being aware that it was the era of Thatcher in Kershaw's native UK), but listening to Human Racing now it's slightly surprising that something like this was rather popular.
The Riddle was released only 9 months later and is basically more of the same, only better - probably the best of his 1980s albums (yes, did you even know there were albums after the 1980s?). Whereas on Human Racing it's clear that the singles are the strongest songs, The Riddle is a lot more consistent. There are fewer attempts at being quirky just for the sake of it, and more of Kershaw's innovations are at the service of the song. (Note: the first 95 seconds of this video are NOT part of the song, which is a strange decision given that they edited out about 96 seconds of the original music to create this single.)
Thematically, it's much the same, although this time there's perhaps more of an emphasis on people that are not just disillusioned but delusional, and a more overt concern for the environment (hard to miss with a song called "Save the Whale", but "Roses" is also along those lines).
When Radio Musicola followed a couple of years later, Kershaw was also producing. The album is just a little grander, with longer songs; on the first 2 albums, at least half of the songs are under 4 minutes, whereas on Radio Musicola half the songs are over 5 minutes.
The degree to which it succeeds is... just a tiny, tiny bit variable. The album was nowhere as big a success as its predecessors, and personally I'm not sure whether the singles were chosen well (although any of the longer tracks would inevitably have been edited down). The only song I ever saw on music shows was "Nobody Knows", which is a song I'd describe as pretty good but not memorable, which is a description for a couple of others as well. And yet, there are also wonderful moments. One I'm always amazed by is the bridge of "Life Goes On", a miracle of compression where on 2 occasions Kershaw makes the end of one line into the start of the next one, both lyrically and musically.
And then, in 1989 came The Works. Kershaw went to America to make his 4th album, and it ends up sounding exactly like what you would expect when a quirky Englishman goes to America to make an album. Everything is smoothed and flattened and made nice, and frequently rather dull.
It's not all bad. The opening track (and first single) "One Step Ahead" is a fine example of Kershaw's qualities, with seamless harmonic changes.
But things go downhill after that. The music is always reasonably competent, and frequently displays his gift for melody, but rarely does it have distinctive qualities - for me "Cowboys & Indians" is probably the only other track that I'd label as something only Kershaw could have done.
And the lyrics... well the lyrics get pretty bad, frankly. "Elisabeth's Eyes" is a very sweet song with a nice sentimental melody, but it's also the most inappropriately jaunty song about being on death row you've ever heard. The absolute nadir is "Don't Ask Me", an uninspired list of random lines which are supposedly things that Nik would like to know, but doesn't. Let's just take a look at the second verse, shall we?
The origin of species
The date of Waterloo
Oppenheimer's shoe size
And the latitude of Timbuktu
The square root of thrity-eight
Why they call he-goats billy
The weight of Colonel Sanders
And the whereabouts of Chile
When he sings in the chorus "I just don't know what to do", it sounds like a sincere confession of his helplessness as he witnessed what was emerging from the recording sessions. The album deservedly bombed, and Nik retreated to writing songs for other people for about a decade...
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