Quite a few major acts have a song in their catalogue that sets my teeth on edge, not particularly because I don’t like it but because I don’t trust the motives behind it. It’s the song where they play to the balcony, one that’s written intentionally as an encore. It’s the song that presses the right buttons for the kind of people that Mark Perry referred to as “the straights” in Alternative TV’s How Much Longer. We can see what you’re doing! We know what you’re up to! The straights don’t know nothing!
It’s partly a self-parody, but there’s more to it than that. The songs always have a lighters-in the-air feel to them, or worse – you can imagine the fans in the crowd waving those troublesome
half-and-half scarves.
Let me give you an example.
No one talks about Viva Hate very much these days, for obvious reasons. But even at the time of its release, when it had a kind of McCartney DIY feel to it – a bunch of demos that Morrissey had quickly worked on with the Durutti Column’s Vini Reilly after the demise of The Smiths – Every Day Is Like Sunday stood out. Not for any good reasons. If Reilly was involved you couldn’t hear him, and Johnny Marr’s hand was, of course, no longer on the tiller. Every Day Is Like Sunday sounded like someone going for the shilling, a singer who had just left the hated (by him) Rough Trade, signed to shiny multinational EMI, and wanted to show them just how crowd-pleasing he could be. Suedehead still stands up as an excellent single and, since Vini Reilly had a heavy presence on it, it hasn’t been excised from my collection like every other solo Morrissey record.
Every Day Is Like Sunday, on the other hand, sounds and feels like every record he has made since, with a sniffy, snippy lyric about the kind of rundown town Morrissey had pretended to love for the five years he was in The Smiths. I’ve heard that it’s about Borth, a seaside town on the West Wales coast which looks like a long strip of nothing sandwiched between two ranges of hills – if you stand on an orange crate and look inland, beyond Borth, the view is quite spectacular. There. I’ve been driven to defending Borth.
Friday I’m In Love is slightly different in that it’s intentionally facile, taking the piss out of common or garden pop music because The Cure are clearly a cut above it. In general, I have no problem at all with The Cure as a singles band, and things like A Forest or The Caterpillar pushed them onto Top Of The Pops with actively experimental music that had a catchy chorus. Three cheers! (This is pretty much my favourite kind of music.) But with Friday I’m In Love, you had Bob Smith doing that eye-rolling Edinburgh Fringe Festival poster thing that he does in the video, his implication being, “It’s a silly love song, isn’t it? Silly me!” Of course, not long before this The Cure had released a wonderful single that was actually called Love Song, which they followed with a single called Lullaby. Fun fact – Lesley Duncan had released equally wonderful consecutive singles called Love Song and Lullaby at the tail end of the 60s.
We have to talk about R.E.M. here, guilty on several occasions. I can clearly remember buying Automatic For The People and taking it home, very excited. Me and Pete Wiggs had a flat together in Tufnell Park and, back from the record shop, we decided to sit down and listen to it from start to finish – they were one of our favourite groups, and people used to do things like this in the olden days. Anyway, we got three tracks in, and it was all sounding pretty good. The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite? With that chorus about Cheryl Baker? That was great! The fourth track started and it was a waltz-time ballad; Michael Stipe was sounding a little insincere, maybe, and the chorus was a little pat…
But it wasn’t until two minutes 17 seconds in, when it cranked up the schmaltz a gear or two, that me and Pete both looked at each other and both of us were frowning. I can remember Pete saying, “Oh, come on!” angrily. Pete Wiggs is not a man easily roused to anger.
When Everybody Hurts was released as a single, nobody was surprised, and with half a billion plays on Spotify who am I to knock it? Looking back, I’m pleased for Bill Berry as the song was his pension, but it still stinks like rancid bacon fat.
Going back a very long way I can remember when Elvis Costello was taken seriously. I’ve been at parties where an earnest girl in the corner would narrate the lyrics to Pills And Soap, slowly and deliberately in case we missed his zinger about the royal family. No one really talks about Elvis Costello these days, which is fine by me. But there are plenty of other people lining up to be the serious artist du jour. There have been acts since whose entire oeuvre is based around their own Everybody Hurts or Every Day is Like Sunday. I’m looking at you, Elbow! Nick Cave has made a career out of this kind of glorified power ballad in recent years, albeit in character as a 17th-century trawlerman, and seeing the venues he plays in London have moved from Hammersmith Palais to two consecutive nights at the Albert Hall it’s obviously working.
You can’t argue with success. But when Barry Manilow did big tear-jerking ballads, much the same just without the black clothes, no one took him very seriously. Nor did I, but I’ll take I Made It Through The Rain over Murdery Moneybags Nick any day of the week.
Bob Stanley writes about 20th-century pop music at patreon.com/bobstanley
