Ballads

831. ‘When You Say Nothing at All’, by Ronan Keating

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I did warn you… Just because Boyzone’s chart-topping days are over, we’re far from hearing the last of Groanin’ Ronan.

When You Say Nothing at All, by Ronan Keating (his 1st of three solo #1s)

2 weeks, from 1st – 15th August 1999

Barely three months on from ‘You Needed Me’, and before his band had even released their final single, Keating launched a solo career, with immediate success. Of course, he was helped in this by having his debut single included on the soundtrack to the year’s biggest romcom, ‘Notting Hill’, but still. I’ll admit, quietly and grudgingly, that I’ve always quite liked this…

It’s got a nice country lilt to it, and a decent chorus. Some of the production is very late-nineties bells and whistles, and it could have done without the overpowering backing singers. Plus the tin-whistle chorus is better not mentioned. Still, I’d tentatively state that this is better than at least four out of Boyzone’s six number ones.

The worst thing about it is… Yup, you guessed it. The singer. Ronan Keating is not a bad singer. He hits the right notes, he holds them, and you can make out what he’s saying (a quality my late gran held above all else). But his vocal affectations, his growls and lisps, his insistence on pronouncing his ‘ch’s and ‘sh’s like Sean Connery… He doesn’t speak like that. It’s put on when he sings. It’s annoying! And it was a huge risk for him to tempt every comedian in the land by releasing a record with the crucial line: You say it best, When you say nothing at all…

I’ve had various people commenting on Keating’s voice in previous posts. One has suggested that he might have had an alternate career as a grunge singer, which I can understand. Another has suggested that he is better on upbeat numbers, a theory that his performance on ‘When the Going Gets Tough’ doesn’t hold up but that we can put to the test again with his next chart-topper. Further thoughts on his vocal stylings are always welcome.

This was the fourth time in just over a decade that ‘When You Say Nothing At All’ had been a hit. Keith Whitley took it to the top of the Billboard Country Charts in 1988, while Alison Krauss & Union Station took it to the lower reaches of the Hot 100 in 1995. Both of those versions are a lot rawer, and less polished. Frances Black then took it to the Irish Top 10 in 1996, which is when Ronan first heard it. He upped the Irishness – perhaps inspired by B*Witched’s recent dedication to all things Celtic – and scored the biggest hit of all.

824. ‘You Needed Me’, by Boyzone

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Yet MORE boyband balladry…

You Needed Me, by Boyzone (their 6th and final #1)

1 week, from 16th – 23rd May 1999

Following on from our last post, if I’d wanted an example of how drippy late-nineties boybands from the British Isles were compared to their American counterparts, then I couldn’t have planned it better. Straight after Backstreet Boys’ era-straddling classic ‘I Want It That Way’ comes Ronan and the lads’ final, and perhaps most insipid, number one.

‘You Needed Me’ was originally a Billboard #1 in 1978 for Canadian singer Anne Murray (it made #22 in the UK). If you ever want to listen to ‘You Needed Me’, then listen to her version. And you should want to listen to it, as in its original form it’s a nice slice of Carpenters-esque, late-seventies soft rock. There are no circumstances under which you should ever need to listen to the Boyzone cover instead, unless you find yourself writing a blog in which you force yourself to listen to every single number one single…

Ronan Keating takes lead vocals (of course he does), and he goes through his full repertoire of grunts, growls, and rasps, as if well aware that this is Boyzone’s last hurrah. And it’s not that he and his bandmates completely ruin the song. It’s more that nothing here is an improvement on the original: not the vocals, not the karaoke reverb ‘n’ tinkles production, not the extra backing singers chucked in at the end. My favourite bit of both versions, and which I’m happy Boyzone kept, exaggerated even, is the overstated ending.

I say that this is Boyzone’s most insipid number one but it of course has competition. ‘No Matter What’ is their best by far, ‘A Different Beat’ at least had some interesting, world music elements, while we were simply glad that their cover of ‘When the Going Gets Tough’ was NOT A BALLAD! Maybe then ‘You Needed Me’ can tie with their cover of ‘Words’, and ‘All That I Need’ as their dullest. The video to this one, though, is worth noting as it features lots of different couples in lots of different picture frames, at least two of whom appear to be same-sex, which feels very progressive for the time. It was probably tied to the fact that Stephen Gately had just come out as gay.

Many didn’t expect ‘You Needed Me’ to make number one, as it was up against Geri Halliwell’s highly anticipated solo debut ‘Look at Me’. Boyzone, though, edged the race by a narrow 748 copies, which many put down to the fact that they released two different CD versions compared to Geri’s one. Ginger Spice would have her day at the top of the charts, but was made to wait a few months longer than she might have wanted.

Boyzone meanwhile had one final Top 10 hit after this before calling it a day for the best part of a decade. We will of course hear Groanin’ Ronan’s unmistakeable tones again at the top of the charts, as he was quick to launch a successful solo career. Stephen Gately and Mikey Thomas also tried it alone, with less success, while Keith Duffy and Shane Lynch had a go as a duo. They reformed in 2008, returned briefly to the Top 10, and have released several albums in the years since. Gately tragically died from a heart condition in 2009, aged just thirty-three.

822. ‘Swear It Again’, by Westlife

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Here we go, then… Our most successful boyband’s reign of terror begins…

Swear It Again, by Westlife (their 1st of fourteen #1s)

2 weeks, from 25th April – 9th May 1999

As tempting as it is to go in two-footed on Westlife from the start, they do have a hell of a lot of number ones to get through (only Elvis and The Beatles have more). So can I imagine a world where ‘Swear it Again’, their debut single, was their only hit, and find something good, or at least interesting, to say about it?

I’ll give the verses the credit of having a hint of ‘80s Elton John about them, in the confident piano lines. Beyond that though, it’s a struggle. This isn’t just Westlife’s debut single, it’s their Manifesto. The template through which they’ll be dominating the charts for much of the next decade. It’s bland, it’s MOR. It’s soppy. It’s crap.

This sounds so much like every other song they’ll release between now and 2006, that as I listen I can clearly picture them rising from their stools, through clouds of dry ice, for the final chorus. There is no key change, however, no matter how much one is teased. Perhaps we’ll find that a Westlife trademark key-change wasn’t as common as we think? Maybe they actually did very few, like how Sherlock Holmes hardly ever said ‘elementary’…? The truth will be revealed, slowly, one syrupy ballad after another.

Westlife are usually seen as taking the baton from Boyzone as Britain’s favourite Irish boyband. They shared a manager, Louis Walsh, and Ronan Keating was also involved in their early days (they had supported Boyzone and the Backstreet Boys on tour before releasing any music). It wasn’t a clean transfer of power, though, as Keating’s gang still have one more #1 to come. Westlife had formed a couple of years earlier, as a six-piece, but were rejected by Simon Cowell, who claimed that they were “the ugliest boyband I have ever seen in my life”. Three members were promptly sacked – the ugly ones, we can presume – two new ones hired, and off they went.

Off to score fourteen (yes, one four) number ones in seven years. Interestingly, though, ‘Swear It Again’ did something that only four of their chart-toppers managed: more than a single week at number one. Their fourteen number ones will amount only to twenty weeks in total at the top, a phenomenon that we can perhaps explore in more detail in a later Westlife post, once we’ve lost count of the key-changes, and run out of synonyms for ‘bland’.

821. ‘Perfect Moment’, by Martine McCutcheon

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If ‘Levi’s #1s’ is a niche chart-topping genre – see Mr. Oizo last time out – then this next chart-topper falls into an even rarer category…

Perfect Moment, by Martine McCutcheon (her 1st and only #1)

2 weeks, from 11th – 25th April 1999

Not just ‘TV stars’ (alongside the likes of Telly Savalas and David Soul) or ‘Soap Stars’ (alongside Kylie and Jason), both of which would be niche enough. No, after Nick Berry, this is just the second ever Eastenders number one.

And if this were a competition, then Martine McCutcheon wins the Battle of the Eastenders Pop Stars hands down. That is more to do with how crap Nick Berry’s effort was than any particular strengths that this record has, but still. A win’s a win. And ‘Perfect Moment’ starts off interestingly enough, with a grandiosely old-fashioned intro, and some early-eighties, Ultravoxy synths.

Yes, it’s a gloopy ballad. But it sounds quite out of place against the late-nineties pop landscape. This sounds like it could have replaced Nick Berry at the top back in 1986. I don’t want to use the word ‘experimental’ on a record as average as this, but at the same time McCutcheon’s producers were clearly trying a couple of things out.

By the second verse, though, order has been restored. That pre-set late-nineties drumbeat has kicked in, while the middle-eight (And if tomorrow brings a lonely day…) sets a template to be followed by every X-Factor winner’s single from here to eternity. Blandness wins, but for a minute or so something a little more interesting was threatened.

And what of Martine McCutcheon, AKA Tiffany Mitchell, who a few months earlier had been mown down in Albert Square by Frank Butcher’s car? She has a pretty decent voice here, on her solo debut, and by the end is trying her best to compete with the big ‘90s divas. She is ultimately, though, no Whitney Houston. She had made earlier attempts at a pop career, as part of failed girl-group Milan in at the start of the decade, and on a minor dance hit not long after she had joined ‘EastEnders.

‘Perfect Moment’ had originally been recorded by Polish singer Edyta Górniak in 1997, and this cover set McCutcheon up for a couple of years of chart success. Colour me surprised to discover that she managed four more Top 10 hits! None of which I have any memory of… She has gone on to acting success on stage and screen – perhaps most famous to an international audience as Natalie in ‘Love Actually’ – while the fact that she was killed off and unable to return to EastEnders has apparently always rankled with her.

808. ‘Goodbye’, by The Spice Girls

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Managing a Beatles-matching three Christmas number ones in a row, it’s the Spice Girls…

Goodbye, by The Spice Girls (their 8th of nine #1s)

1 week, from 20th – 27th December 1998

Could we argue that this is a more impressive feat than that managed by The Beatles, as the Fab Four’s three festive chart-toppers came before the Christmas Number One © became a thing? Perhaps. But that’s a discussion for another day. On to the ballad at hand.

For it is, of course, a ballad. My favourite of their three Xmas #1s, by far, is ‘Too Much’, because it desperately didn’t want to be a ballad. But this is much more traditional fare. Listen little child, There will come a day… To be honest, I’m not sure what this is about. A break-up, I guess? With children involved?

Of course, with lines like Goodbye my friend… and I never dreamt you’d go your own sweet way… many at the time saw this as the remaining Spice Girls making their peace with Geri, after she’d abandoned them several months before. It was, after all, the first song they recorded as a four-piece, and wouldn’t appear on an album until two years later. Others saw it as the Girls bowing out entirely, which wasn’t a strange assumption given that Mel B had already enjoyed a solo chart-topper.

Musically this is lush and atmospheric, though perhaps a little more predictable sounding. coming straight after B*Witched’s Celtic-influenced ‘To You I Belong’. I like the squelchy bass – a little out place at first – while the beat is very American R&B, very Destiny’s Child. I can’t find too much to love, though. And coming two years after I’d outgrown my tweenage passion for the Spice Girls, I’m not sure I’ve ever properly listened to ‘Goodbye’.

It’s not as good a ballad as ‘Viva Forever’, that’s for sure. But you can tell that they had access to the best songwriters of the day, as evidenced by Mel C’s genuinely memorable chorus-within-a-chorus: So glad we made it, Time’s never, ever gonna change it… She always did get the best parts… I also like the fact that none of their Xmas number ones have gone down the cliched sleigh bells and choirs route (although the video to ‘Goodbye’ does involve a lot of snow, and people frozen like ice sculptures).

So, after two and a half years, two albums, eight singles yielding seven number ones, the Spice Girls… went on a break. There was still a tour, and solo projects to invest in. But there were also still plans for a third album, that will come about eventually, and give them a final footnote of a number one. It would have been cleaner, somehow, if they’d just bowed out with ‘Goodbye’, their record-matching third consecutive Christmas #1. Pushing them all the way in the charts that week was an animated chef, voiced by a soul legend, who would have his moment in the sun soon enough…

807. ‘To You I Belong’, by B*Witched

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A blast of Celtic pipes meets our ears, heralding the arrival of our next number one. Because heaven forbid we forget just for one second that B*Witched. Are. Irish!

To You I Belong, by B*Witched (their 3rd of four #1s)

1 week, from 13th – 20th December 1998

Girl group rules dictate that the 3rd single must be a ballad, especially if said single is being released at Christmas. So in some ways, ‘To You I Belong’ is a fairly predictable, low-tempo, pop smoocher (with a strangely old-fashioned sounding title, grammatically speaking). In other ways, though, it’s actually quite interesting.

For such a generic girl group ballad, there are plenty of touches that I wasn’t expecting. The tin whistles and strings give it a New Age feel, with hints of Enya even, and the girls’ floaty, trembly voices are quite soothing. Turns out that B*Witched could properly sing, something that was lost amongst all the bubble-gum silliness of their first two singles!

It’s unexpectedly classy, and even if I don’t automatically love all the Celtic flourishes at least it’s something a little different from what the other girl groups of the time were offering. I would say, though, that it could have done with a more stripped-back production – maybe just the girls’ voices and a couple of guitars – as all the layers of computer generated synths and tinkly bits make it sound cluttered.

Three #1s from their first three singles catapulted B*Witched into exalted company: Gerry & The Pacemakers, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Jive Bunny and The Spice Girls. And they’ll go one better than the first three of those acts, by making it four out of four. Speaking of The Spice Girls, B*Witched sensibly released ‘To You I Belong’ a week before the festive number one race, rather than going up against the Queens of Christmas. However, with this giving the Irish girls their third chart-topper of 1998, compared to the Spice Girls’ one (so far), it could be argued that at this point B*Witched were the bigger group…

Finally from a chart-geek angle, this record kicks off a run of ten one-week #1s in a row, through until late February 1999, as the chart-topping turnover continues to ramp up. (The previous longest run of one-weekers was five, in early 1997.)

797. ‘Viva Forever’, by The Spice Girls

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The Spice Girls return, after missing #1 for the first time behind Run-D.M.C, with their first Geri-less single…

Viva Forever, by The Spice Girls (their 7th of nine #1s)

2 weeks, from 26th July – 9th August 1998

I can still remember where I was when I heard Geri had left the group (some generations had JFK…) I was in a minibus, on my way home from a Scout camp, when news broke on the radio. But of course, ‘Viva Forever’ had been recorded months before, so Halliwell still features both in the song and in the video – as much as any of the girls ‘feature’ in the video as animated fairies – and in fact was credited with writing most of the lyrics.

There are some lovely strings ‘n’ harmonies in the intro, then a cool Spanish guitar to bring some drama. The verses have a sense of melancholy, and the lyrics – originally about a summer romance – have a real yearning to them. The bridge even has some Spanish, for that touch of class. The verses too have a timeless quality to them, even if the chord progressions are a little predictable.

Of course, by the time Geri had left, the lyrics had ceased to be about a summer fling and seemed to fit perfectly as her ‘goodbye’ to the band. And this is a very solid pop record. In fact, it’s almost adult-oriented soft rock. And I’d put it down as the group’s best ballad, miles ahead of ‘Mama’, and pretty far ahead of ‘2 Become 1’. The fact that they had gems like this up their sleeve, two years into their career, sets the Spice Girls apart from most other pop fodder of the time.

The only thing that slightly lets this record down is the vocals. And we know, of course, seven chart-toppers in, that people didn’t buy Spice Girls’ records for the quality of their voices. But it’s on songs like this, where they can’t rely on boisterous, girl-power energy, that you can hear how reedy a couple of them were. Luckily, Mel C is on hand to do most of the heavy lifting as the song reaches its climax.

I can’t remember ever seeing the full music video for ‘Viva Forever’ before, but it’s a trip. Set in the 1970s, two boys follow an animatronic bouncing chicken into a forest where they meet the Spiceys as slightly demented looking fairies. One of the boys disappears into a Rubik’s cube with the girls, leaving his friend lost and confused… It apparently took longer to film than the entirety of ‘Spiceworld – The Movie’, and adds a ‘loss of innocence’ interpretation to the song’s lyrics.

So, Geri had left, citing exhaustion and depression. The drama was that she didn’t tell the other girls to their faces, causing a rift for many years… It wasn’t the only crack to start showing, though. Before the Girls return for their penultimate number one, their solo careers will have started, with predictably chart-topping results.

752. ‘I Feel You’, by Peter Andre

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After partying all night on ‘Flava’, Peter Andre aims for the flip-side of ‘90s R&B: a sickly slow-jam…

I Feel You, by Peter Andre (his 2nd of three #1s)

1 week, from 1st – 8th December 1996

I assumed that by late-1996, as we near my eleventh birthday, there wouldn’t be any number ones that I’d never heard before. But I reckoned against the fact that, as chart-topping turnover increases, there will be lots of one-week wonders to contend with. Like this.

‘I Feel You’ has some nice Boyz II Men style chord changes, a funky bassline and, if you squint your ears (you know what I mean…) you could just about mistake Andre for Michael Jackson. It also has, as most songs of this ilk do, some unintentionally stomach-turning lyrics: I’m thinking about the bedroom, baby, We’d be making love…Making love! As well as a very steamy video featuring, naturally, Andre’s six-pack as one of the main characters.

By and large, though, this song is dull. Spotify only hosts an extended five-minute mix, which is a slog when it comes to a song of this quality. And it’s sexiness is so forced, that anyone who isn’t Pepe Le Pew will be turned off. It’s custom made for horny teenagers to put on their make-out mixtapes, and they were presumably one of the song’s main customer bases in getting it to the top.

This should have been the last we hear from Peter Andre. His star shone brightly, but briefly: seven Top 10 hits between 1996 and 1998. Fate had different ideas, however. It does mean that, in seven years or so, he will reappear, and his best single will belatedly make #1… But at what cost?

Since this is looking like being a very short write-up, I’ll mention something that I’ve hinted at in earlier posts. Late-’96 is the moment that the singles chart became the chart I grew up with – not just in terms of the songs sounding like modern pop, as I’ve discussed before, but in the way they started entering at #1, and staying there for just seven days at a time. As I said above: ‘one-week wonders’, like this one, and the next song we’ll be featuring…

748. ‘Words’, by Boyzone

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We wake up, post-Chemical Brothers, with a bit of a headache. Bleary-eyed, we reach for the play button on our next #1… And it’s one hell of a comedown.

Words, by Boyzone (their 1st of six #1s)

1 week, from 13th – 20th October 1996

Not for the first time this year, a boyband reaches for the Bee Gees songbook. ‘Words’ was one of the Gibb Brothers’ first chart hits, their third record to reach the Top 10 back in 1968. The original is a very much a late-sixties ballad, drenched in strings and heavy piano chords, but it doesn’t feel overblown, with Barry Gibb’s voice right out at the front of the mix. Boyzone’s producers decide to up the drama, up the rolling drums and the layered vocal tracks, and drag a full extra minute out of the song.

It’s a bit stodgy, a bit lumpy. On their cover of ‘How Deep Is Your Love’, Take That stripped things back, and I was also a bit sniffy about it, so maybe I’m just picky. Or maybe it’s just very hard to do justice to a Bee Gees original. This take on ‘Words’ isn’t terrible (and Boyzone have some real crimes against pop to come), but that’s because the quality of the source material shines through.

One thing I do find particularly annoying about this is Ronan Keating, Boyzone’s main man, on lead vocals. He just has an annoying voice, like he’s constantly trying to add gravitas to each and every syllable rather than just singing the damn song. Alas, it’s a voice that we’ll have to get used to on top of the charts for the time being.

For all the fuss I made about Take That as the boyband of the ‘90s, for folks of my age group they were just a little too old. No, it was Boyzone that the girls in my Primary 6 class were obsessed with. To this day I remain conditioned to hate them, after getting into trouble for sending a classmate into floods of tears just because I told her how terrible they were…

But honestly, they weren’t a patch on Take That, who had some genuinely good pop songs, many of them originals. Boyzone relied too heavily on bland covers, that cynically targeted both the tweens and their mums. ‘Words’ was the group’s first number one but their sixth Top 5 hit, and they’d already had their wicked way with the Osmonds’ ‘Love Me for a Reason’, and Cat Stevens’ ‘Father and Son’.

Robson & Jerome gave us our introduction to the chart crimes of Simon Cowell, while Boyzone were managed by his henchman in the vanilla-isation of ‘90s and ‘00s pop, Louis Walsh. Not that Boyzone were the only Irish five-piece that Walsh unleashed on the world, but we’ll try not to think about them until we have to….

732. ‘Jesus to a Child’, by George Michael

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1996 kicks off in the most understated way imaginable – with a slow, slinky, seven-minute bossa nova from George Michael.

Jesus to a Child, by George Michael (his 6th of seven solo #1s)

1 week, from 14th – 21st January 1996

I listen to it, properly, for the first time ever I think, and try to pinpoint the musical reason for this making number one. It’s not catchy – there’s no identifiable chorus – it meanders, weaves its smooth spell, then eventually departs. My thoughts are cast back a decade, to Michael’s similarly understated ‘A Different Corner’. He has a knack for taking unlikely songs to the top. But ‘Jesus to a Child’ makes ‘A Different Corner’ sound like the most instant, bubble-gum pop.

The reasons for it making #1 may have been largely to do with the power of the name. It was his first release for three years, since the ‘Five Live E.P.’, or for four if we only count original material. It was the lead single from ‘Older’ – his first studio album in nearly six years – though he had been performing the song live for over a year. You have to admire the sheer disregard for commercial success he showed in picking this as the first single.

The reasons for George Michael wanting to release this are now well-known, and very sad. ‘Jesus to a Child’ was written as a tribute to his late boyfriend, Anselmo Feleppa, who had died in 1993 after an AIDS-related brain haemorrhage. Michael had been unable to write anything for eighteen months after Feleppa’s death, until he wrote this elegy in under an hour. He set it to a bossa nova beat as a tribute to his lover’s Brazilian heritage.

The lyrics are beautiful: Sadness, In my eyes, No one guessed, Or no one tried, You smiled at me, Like Jesus to a child… and it sounds churlish to call this song ‘boring’. I imagine writing it was powerfully cathartic, and so perhaps we should view it as a poem, or a reading at a funeral. One that just happened to become a chart-topping hit, thanks to the enormous star power of its singer.

What is worth noting that is that even though the song is so clearly about a lost lover – The lover I still miss, Is Jesus to a child… – Michael couldn’t mention anything explicitly. There was rumour, and innuendo, like Freddie Mercury before him; but it would be another two years before he would come out (or be brutally outed, let’s be honest). 1996 is within my living memory, but the idea that a pop star nowadays wouldn’t reveal that a song was about their gay lover seems thankfully unlikely.

In my previous posts on George Michael, I’ve admitted that I don’t quite get the adoration for his music. A lot of it is good; but a lot of it is a bit too glossy, a bit too smooth, for me. Like this, even though many sources class it among his very best work. If this had been his last UK #1, I’d had to have written it of as a bit of a flat ending. Luckily, he has one more chart topper to come very soon, his 7th, and it’s probably my favourite of the lot. What’s not in doubt about George is that he seems to have been an incredibly warm and generous person – it was revealed after his death that all the royalties from this single had been donated to the charity ChildLine, a fact kept secret at his insistence.