Pop music
Second time around
Marcus Berkmann
With summer holidays inexorably approaching, this is the time of year at which I rifle through the year's records in search of potential tunes to be taped for my hunky Sports Walkman (appalling hissing noises audible from 50 yards). And, having rifled and rerifled and failed to come up with much, I am beginning to suspect that 1990 may turn out to be the dullest year in pop music since the heyday of Duran Duran.
True, there has been a certain amount of excitement in Manchester, where groups like the Stone Roses and the Happy Mondays briefly threatened to rehabilitate that now deeply discredited instrument, the guitar, until they too inevitably suc- cumbed to the lure of dance music and its most fearsome and irresistible weapon, the 12-inch rembc. Elsewhere, though, there has only been disappointment, as acts who should know better have consistently failed to produce anything worth listening to. So far we have had to endure a dreary, tune-deprived follow-up LP from Tanita Tikaram (which not surprisingly has sunk without trace), an over-sleek offering from the Christians (ditto), a hopelessly mis- calculated comeback from Lloyd Cole (again, no tunes) and, most frustratingly of all, an uncharacteristically ordinary album from Aztec Camera. What's wrong with everybody?
Perhaps our expectations are too high. After all, much pop music is lavishly praised not for any intrinsic merit but because the fashions of the day demand it. No album by Prince or U2 could ever be anything but a work of genius, however mundane (Batman) or self-indulgent (Rat- tle and Hum) it may actually be. Such idolatry seeps down to even the lowest levels of fashionability, as fans of different kinds of music seek to defend their almost indefensible tastes.
But genuinely good records, I suspect, are extremely rare — not just because so much pop music is simply not very good, but because, even for the most skilled and inspired of musicians, there are so many things that can go wrong in making a record. When, for once, nothing does go wrong, it's hard not to assume that the artist concerned has found the secret for- mula and will carry on making flawless records for ever and ever. Such optimism is inevitably misplaced.
Paul Young's career is a good example. His first two albums, No Parlez and The Secret of Association, were wondrous pieces of studio trickery, cleverly struc- tured by his producer Laurie Latham. But Latham is long gone, and Young's new album Other Voices (CBS) is all over the place — a poor selection of songs (the worst co-written by Young himself) flatly produced and dully performed. The whole project sounds embalmed in the juices of its own enormous budget, and CBS execu- tives are no doubt banging their heads against the wall with frustration.
At the other end of the scale are the B-52s, whose album Cosmic Thing (WEA) I raved about when it first appeared last summer and who, finally, have now had a couple of hits from it. They have never done anything as catchy, assured and well-judged as this, and they may not again — certainly we shouldn't expect it. Again, much of the credit must go to the produc- ers they chose: Nile Rodger for six tracks, Don Was for four.
But collaboration is by its nature a tricky experience, and even apparently perfect partnerships are fragile. It's hard not to believe that Fairground Attraction had a glorious future ahead of them — now they have split up. Mark Nevin's songs and Eddi Reader's voice may have complemented each other perfectly, but Nevin and Read- er themselves weren't such a happy com- bination, and we have just their first album and the newly released Ay Fond Kiss (RCA), a surprisingly durable collection of B-sides and unreleased fripperies, with which to remember them. It's not really enough.
Happily, though, there is one new(ish) album that I can recommend without hesitation, and which will probably be lodged in my Walkman when someone finally rips it angrily from my ears and flings it into the sea. Martin Stephenson's Salutation Road (Kitchenware) has been produced by Pete Anderson (of Michelle Shocked fame), and a superb collaboration it is, giving Stephenson's intimate folky songs a jazzy, sometimes brassy feel that brings out their underlying strength and tunefulness. But it's all we've got at the moment, and with a new Duran Duran album on the way, it could be all for the foreseeable future.
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