Pop music
A question of timing
Marcus Berkmann
They're in the shops now. The brand new greatest hits packages, the best-sin- gles-of-the-year CDs, the live Oasis videos, the not-very-good new REM albums. The run-up to Christmas is upon us, and the tills are jangling. Few of us will reach the new year without buying several things we don't want.
Biggest money-spinner of them all should be Simply Red's Greatest Hits (East- West). Anyone who has even a passing interest in current pop music will know half of these songs, and will probably turn out to own at least a third of them. I inter- viewed Mick Hucknall once, and he seemed very pleased with things. Who can blame him? After five multi-million-selling albums over 12 years, Greatest Hits is his reward for long service. No work is required, and people will queue up to give him their money.
The real stroke of marketing genius, though, was to wait until now to release it. If Greatest Hits had come after Stars, Huck- nail's best and most lucrative album, it might have seemed as though the record company were cashing in on his success when there was still more to come. But Life, last year's follow-up, showed that there isn't much more to come, which has made this retrospective thoroughly timely. People will buy a 'Greatest Hits' package if they suspect the artist may be washed up, but not if the artist actually is washed up, because then he will have fallen out of fashion and no one will be interested at all. You have to strike while the iron is luke- warm.
For this reason, and several others, this would also probably have been the Christ- mas of Michael Jackson's Greatest Hits. It's odd to think it now, but until the past couple of years no putative release would have been so feared and dreaded in rival record companies as this one. Thriller, at a trickle over 50 million, remains the best- selling album of all time. Off The Wall and Bad didn't do too badly either. His fame knows no boundaries. Deep in the unchart- ed wilds of the Amazon basin live people who know little of Western civilisation and care even less, but who wonder exactly what happened to Michael Jackson's skin. His Greatest Hits would have broken all records.
After the child-abuse allegations, of course, this no longer applies. Terrified that this 1994 set HiStory would not sell in appropriately world-beating quantities, his record company Epic tacked on the Great- est Hits as an afterthought and sold the whole package as a double CD. It was an act of the grossest cowardice, and made no business sense at all. Fans interested in the new album felt disinclined to cough up for a double-priced double-CD containing lots of tracks they already had, while people like me didn't want to buy the useless new songs just to get hold of the wonderful old ones. So not many people bought it at all.
You can see why his record company panicked. For the same reason that the new Simply Red package is so well timed, so the child-abuse allegations irrevocably ruined the timing of Michael Jackson's Greatest Hits. The best moment to put them out would probably have been after 1991's Dangerous, Jackson's first album to show a noticeable downturn in quality. Unfortunately Epic, showing greed remark- able even in a record company, were still extracting singles from this two years after its release. Of the 14 tracks on Dangerous, ten were released as singles — another Michael Jackson world record. So Epic decided to wait a little longer, squeeze another album dry, sit on the Greatest Hits until the last possible moment. They blew it. Such a package, released after the alle- gations, would have seemed like the ulti- mate admission of defeat, a sign that Jackson's career was effectively over. Overnight this most valuable commodity became essentially worthless.
So as Mick Hucknall pays ever huger cheques into his already bulbous building society account, let's think also of Michael Jackson, whose Christmas this might have been. Instead he sits alone in his fortified mansion, with only zoo animals, videos of his old hits and $300 million to keep him company. It's a sad story indeed.
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