- The Bangles: Eternal Flame
- Simply Red: If You Don't Know Me by Now
- Madonna: Like a Prayer
- Paula Abdul: Straight Up
- Kon Kan: I Beg Your Pardon
- Jason Donovan: Too Many Broken Hearts
- Transvision Vamp: Baby I Don't Care
- Donna Summer: This Time I Know It's for Real
- Holly Johnson: Americanos
- Soul II Soul featuring Caron Wheeler: Keep on Movin'
- Coldcut featuring Lisa Stansfield: People Hold On
- U2 with B.B. King: When Love Comes to Town
- Guns 'N Roses: Paradise City
- Pat & Mick: I Haven't Stopped Dancing Yet
- Bobby Brown: Don't Be Cruel
- INXS: Mystify
- The Reynolds Girls: I'd Rather Jack
- Fuzzbox: International Rescue
- Fine Young Cannibals: Good Thing
- The Cult: Fire Woman
- Cookie Crew: Got to Keep On
- Paul Simpson featuring Adeva: Musical Freedom (Moving on Up)
- Yello: Of Course I'm Lying
- Brother Beyond: Can You Keep a Secret? [remix]
- The The: The Beat(en) Generation
- Gloria Estefan & Miami Sound Machine: Can't Stay Away from You
- Roy Orbison: She's a Mystery to Me
- T'Pau: Only the Lonely
- Ten City: Devotion
- Alyson Williams: Sleep Talk
- Aswad: Beauty's Only Skin Deep
- Chanelle: One Man
- Midnight Oil: Beds Are Burning
- Then Jerico: What Does It Take?
- De La Soul: Me, Myself and I
- Jody Watley: Real Love
- Bananarama/Lananeeneenoonoo: Help!
- London Boys: Requiem
- The Blow Monkeys: This Is Your Life
- Barry Manilow: Please Don't Be Scared
~~~~~
No matter the era, genre or artist, nothing guarantees a hit single like a love song. And, typically, they make for massive hits. Career defining hits. Quite whether their popularity translates into quality is, however, another matter. Somehow or other there are people, overwhelming numbers of people, who prefer ABBA's I Had a Dream to Lay All Your Love on Me, would take Elvis Costello's Allison over Oliver's Army and reckon U2's With or Without You beats the pants off of Even Better Than the Real Thing. Of course, there's no accounting for taste but the numbers favouring a love song to a standard pop song are frequently overwhelming.
(Quite what to call them can be an issue I might as well get out of the way at this point. Many call them ballads but I refuse to accept that lexical bastardisation. Love song, which I opened the previous paragraph with, is better but still not satisfactory; implies gentle, slow moving weepy but there are uptempo rockers and lively disco anthems that have also been about love so that one doesn't quite work either. In Junior High we called them slow songs and that's my preferred label to this day: it gives them the gravitas that can only come from finishing off a teenage dance. Slow song it is then!)
This week's top two spots are occupied by two of the most popular and better remembered slow songs of the age: The Bangles' Eternal Flame and Simply Red's If You Don't Know Me by Now. I don't dislike either, in fact I have such a soft spot for the former that I chose to have it played at my wedding party a couple years ago, but they make me wonder why they did so well while other numbers were swiftly forgotten. It's telling that neither was the lead-off single from their respective albums: The Bangles had barely squeaked into the Top 40 with their previous hit In Your Room while Simply Red managed a respectable but underwhelming placement for It's Only Love. In both cases the slow songs had to wait.
Eternal Flame was the kind of thing I could go either way on. It was nice enough but meant nothing to me. Being much older and more experienced in the world of loves found and lost now, it's touching in a way it could never be to a preteen who was just hoping to find a girl who might give him his first snog. (Yeah, the girls weren't exactly lining up for that task) For its part, If You Don't Know Me by Now doesn't manage to hold up so well, even though I was similarly lukewarm towards it at the time. Mick Hucknall's vocal quirks, particularly his penchant for speaking many of the lyrics, grate and give it the feel that he's trying to have it both ways: he wants to stake claim on the morally superior high ground in the song's verses yet he acts so pathetic and so defeated when he gets to the chorus. Maybe the thing with slow songs is that they're the ultimate tunes that command the listener to relate to them. The audience must decide if they can relate to them or if they're even interested in doing so.
...the I.R.A. has claimed responsibility for the attack...
"Dad," I inquired as the CBC Radio News continued, "why do they always claim responsibility for bombing people?"
I could never wrap my young mind around the I.R.A.'s tactics. I was a strange kid who liked watching the news and I understood that killers always denied what they'd done. Colin Thatcher went to prison for murdering his wife and everyone was certain of his guilt but he claimed he had nothing to do with it. That's what they all said. But the I.R.A. was a different breed: a bomb would go off and the next thing you know they were admitting their guilt. I didn't get it. Dad said they were taking responsibility because it was part of their fight to get England out of Northern Ireland. I still didn't get it. And I never dreamed we'd end up in such a place.
Eternal Flame was the kind of thing I could go either way on. It was nice enough but meant nothing to me. Being much older and more experienced in the world of loves found and lost now, it's touching in a way it could never be to a preteen who was just hoping to find a girl who might give him his first snog. (Yeah, the girls weren't exactly lining up for that task) For its part, If You Don't Know Me by Now doesn't manage to hold up so well, even though I was similarly lukewarm towards it at the time. Mick Hucknall's vocal quirks, particularly his penchant for speaking many of the lyrics, grate and give it the feel that he's trying to have it both ways: he wants to stake claim on the morally superior high ground in the song's verses yet he acts so pathetic and so defeated when he gets to the chorus. Maybe the thing with slow songs is that they're the ultimate tunes that command the listener to relate to them. The audience must decide if they can relate to them or if they're even interested in doing so.
...the I.R.A. has claimed responsibility for the attack...
"Dad," I inquired as the CBC Radio News continued, "why do they always claim responsibility for bombing people?"
I could never wrap my young mind around the I.R.A.'s tactics. I was a strange kid who liked watching the news and I understood that killers always denied what they'd done. Colin Thatcher went to prison for murdering his wife and everyone was certain of his guilt but he claimed he had nothing to do with it. That's what they all said. But the I.R.A. was a different breed: a bomb would go off and the next thing you know they were admitting their guilt. I didn't get it. Dad said they were taking responsibility because it was part of their fight to get England out of Northern Ireland. I still didn't get it. And I never dreamed we'd end up in such a place.
Living in England and having already taken in Scotland and Wales, we were just one territory away from completing a clean sweep of visits to the Home Nations. Our first trip to a place that felt scary, Northern Ireland was one of the world's most notorious regions and place names such as Belfast, Ulster and Derry were all synonymous with terrorism, religious division and sectarian violence. Still, as we boarded our British Midlands flight from Heathrow, I didn't feel apprehensive. It probably helped that my parents were doing their level best to keep their concerns to themselves, assuming they had any to begin with. Mum may have been a bit worried but Dad didn't seem to care all that much; the way he must have seen it, if it was such a dangerous place they wouldn't have organized an exchange teacher conference in the heart of Belfast.
The taxi from the airport confirmed that it wasn't so bad. One small truck filled with armed soldiers passed us which we all took note of but it says a lot that we only saw the one; naturally, we would have been far more alarmed had they been all over the place. Our expectations for Belfast weren't especially high so the fact that we were pleasantly surprised should be taken in the light of context. Nevertheless, Belfast had a rough stateliness to it that was not unlike the lovechild of Dublin's grimy, street savvy glamour and Edinburgh's noble importance.
Unfortunately, this was lost on my sister and me as we were placed with a kind woman who took us, along with a pretty annoying but kind of nice brother and sister from New Jersey, skating, bowling, to the new Arnold Schwarzenegger-Danny DeVito picture Twins, while the adults were, uh, getting their convention on and visiting local schools. We didn't get to do much sight seeing the first couple days but the chance to try my hand at ten-pin bowling for the first time in my life was a treat. (One of the great oddities of being Canadian is our steadfast devotion to five-pin)
The taxi from the airport confirmed that it wasn't so bad. One small truck filled with armed soldiers passed us which we all took note of but it says a lot that we only saw the one; naturally, we would have been far more alarmed had they been all over the place. Our expectations for Belfast weren't especially high so the fact that we were pleasantly surprised should be taken in the light of context. Nevertheless, Belfast had a rough stateliness to it that was not unlike the lovechild of Dublin's grimy, street savvy glamour and Edinburgh's noble importance.
Unfortunately, this was lost on my sister and me as we were placed with a kind woman who took us, along with a pretty annoying but kind of nice brother and sister from New Jersey, skating, bowling, to the new Arnold Schwarzenegger-Danny DeVito picture Twins, while the adults were, uh, getting their convention on and visiting local schools. We didn't get to do much sight seeing the first couple days but the chance to try my hand at ten-pin bowling for the first time in my life was a treat. (One of the great oddities of being Canadian is our steadfast devotion to five-pin)
Saturday the 15th was that rarest of Ulster days: it was sunny with plenty of blue sky to spare. Our tour bus took us outside the grit of Belfast towards to serene yet rugged County Down to the southeast. Somewhere en route we stopped at a wooded area and went pony trekking. While others on our group had less than reliable steeds, I enjoyed myself and found it to be a much more agreeable experience than when I went horseback riding a year earlier on the muddy Alberta plains and was still feeling it in the crotch for the next three days. We then headed to the seaside town of Newcastle where we walked along the beach, with a cool, refreshing breeze from the Irish Sea hitting our faces.
It's one of those memories which is both clear and vague. Lots of people were out enjoying the beautiful afternoon. At some point a hubbub began to build, although it feels like my mind has invented that scene in order to magnify the impact. I think we were still on the beach - although we may have been just about to board the bus - when someone told us that something terrible had just happened at a football match in Sheffield. We didn't get many details but we were already hearing that some fans were killed.
Hillsborough. Britain's last and greatest football disaster. I thought of seeing the horrific footage of both the Bradford City stadium fire and the Heysel Stadium incident which I had seen on the Saturday afternoon news between Stampede Wrestling and Hockey Night in Canada. Hillsborough, however, seemed different - and not simply because we were now much closer to the scene. It's interesting to observe how differently we take things based on whether we see it occur or hear about it. I may have been far away in Canada in May of 1985 but I became aware of England's other great football tragedies of the age by seeing the footage; with Hillsborough I heard about it and I think I made myself not watch the news from that point on. I didn't want to see what happened. Our bus glumly made the trip back to Belfast and, once back at our hotel, I put a tape into my walkman as if to ignore the awfulness.
We had dinner that night and shared a table with a very polite guy on exchange from - I think - The Bahamas. We had a moment of silence for the victims of Hillsborough. I was just a kid, still just eleven, and, of course, I could only make this thing about myself. I thought about the brief human jam I experienced with my mum and dad at Oxford Circus while Christmas shopping, as if this came remotely close to the hundreds of unfortunate Liverpool supporters crushed to death or serious injury. I thought about how only two weeks earlier I had attended a football match in Wimbledon with my dad and my uncle and how much we enjoyed being in the standing terrace and how it had been such a lively, joyous environment.
Slow songs and disasters: it's often about how we relate to them.
~~~~~
young Paul's favourite: This Time I Know It's for Real
older Paul's retro pick: Keep on Movin'
We had dinner that night and shared a table with a very polite guy on exchange from - I think - The Bahamas. We had a moment of silence for the victims of Hillsborough. I was just a kid, still just eleven, and, of course, I could only make this thing about myself. I thought about the brief human jam I experienced with my mum and dad at Oxford Circus while Christmas shopping, as if this came remotely close to the hundreds of unfortunate Liverpool supporters crushed to death or serious injury. I thought about how only two weeks earlier I had attended a football match in Wimbledon with my dad and my uncle and how much we enjoyed being in the standing terrace and how it had been such a lively, joyous environment.
Slow songs and disasters: it's often about how we relate to them.
~~~~~
young Paul's favourite: This Time I Know It's for Real
older Paul's retro pick: Keep on Movin'
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