Pop music
Pure pop
Marcus Berkmann
The semantic differences between 'rock music' and 'pop music' have often troubled many people, not least because both terms seem to go in and out of fashion faster than conical bras. But as music has gradually fragmented into any number of mutually exclusive genres (heavy metal, hip-hop, house etc.), it has become clear that rock and pop are now quite different things. Rock requires an 'attitude' — or at least a leather jacket. It's serious. It's rebellious. It doesn't clean its teeth quite as often as it should. Pop, by contrast, requires only tunes. The rock audience is steady, loyal and relatively small. The pop audience is fickle and huge. Rock acts like Bruce Springsteen and U2 will always sell to their rock audiences, but they only sell in truly vast numbers when they also engage the attention of the pop audience. With The Joshua Tree and Born In The USA respec- tively, they managed this; with their latest albums, they haven't. The pop audience aren't interested: they have all bought Sim- ply Red's Stars and are now all buying Annie Lennox's Diva.
Lennox's album is one of three superb new(ish) releases that have made 1992 one 'What a fantastic view!' of the most interesting years in British pop for a long while. With Eurythmics finally dissolved, and her erstwhile partner Dave Stewart apparently launched on a success- ful solo recording and production career, many people seem to have expected Lennox to disappear from sight — perhaps to record one or two dull solo albums in the meantime, but essentially to accept that her better days are past.
Wrong again. While Stewart's work so far has been uniformly dull, Diva (RCA) is a triumph, as beguiling, beautifully crafted and packed full of tunes as anything in Eurythmics' long and bountiful history. Much of the credit for this must go to pro- ducer Stephen Lipson, a graduate of the Trevor Horn school of luscious sound- scapes. But this is very much Lennox's album, and its success is a testament to her talent and self-belief. My only real gripe is a slight lack of instrumental colour: a song like 'Cold' could have benefited from some sort of guitar or piano solo, but, perhaps reacting to Stewart's excesses in the past, Lennox won't leave room for one. The voice is firmly in charge throughout.
No less impressive is the Beautiful South's 0898 Beautiful South (Go Discs), an album that doesn't seem to have followed up the chart success of its two predecessors but unquestionably deserves to. It was Microdisney who pioneered the combina- tion of sweet pop tunes and viciously barbed lyrics; now the Beautiful South take it a step further, with their most musically mainstream and lyrically biting collection of songs yet. Produced by Jon Kelly, who so flattered Deacon Blue on their first album Raintown, the album is lusher than Beauti- ful South fans will expect, and for once sounds better on record than on radio. A song like 'Old Red Eyes Is Back' sounded disappointing when I heard it on Radio 1; on record, it's magnificent, one of those rare perfect pop songs that fits everything it needs to into three-and-a-half minutes and could scarcely be bettered.
But possibly the best album of the three is the one that has received the least atten- tion, the Lightning Seeds' Sense (Virgin). The Lightning Seeds are, in fact, a man called Ian Broudie, who has an unfashion- able respect for pop at its purest. In fact, his greatest moment before now was a song called 'Pure', an ingeniously simple number that ludicrously was only a minor hit in 1989. That song, though, was the highlight of a dull album; this time round, he's got it almost completely right. I count eight out of ten quite magnificent tunes on Sense, Which, after half a dozen hearings, makes it sound like a greatest hits package: fresh but familiar at the same time. Broudie mixes old instrumentation with new, and even asks Terry Halt to co-write three of the tracks — as sure a sign of good taste as you get in pop music. This album should be a huge success; if it isn't, someone at Virgin should do the decent thing. Save a life buy it today.
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