SLIK – “Forever And Ever”
Midge Ure is one of those pop figures who joins a bunch of dots, perhaps to a greater degree than his observed talent might suggest. From this boy band to New Pop to the charity records boom, via a tangential role (and almost much more than that, if he’s to be believed) in the Pistols story – he’s been around. That’s all to come: here and now he’s in Slik, chasing the last of the rollerbux with this preposterous and almost fantastic record. While some mid-70s boybeat looks forward to Westlife sluggishness, the flagrant gothy grandiosity of “Forever And Ever” nudges at more enjoyable futures: the Max Martin Backstreet Boys at their most epic, maybe? At the very least Ure himself remembered how effective a wash of sound and a muffled drumbeat could be in setting a mood.
That’s the story in the verses: the jump from there to the scarves-above-yer-heads pop on the chorus is a connection as odd as Midge ever made, and rousing though it is in a by-the-book way, you can’t help but feel a little bit deflated. I’m not sure pop technology had advanced enough to give “Forever And Ever” the monstrous refrain its intro demands, but this chummy compromise is a shift too far. Even so, there’s plenty to enjoy here and as cynical bandwagon-chasers go this is one of the classics. I particularly like the bogus outrage in Ure’s delivery when he asks how his girl could possibly have doubted his sincerity. You half expect Slik to come back in yelling “SUCKER!” a half-second after the song ends.
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Tom in FT / Popular • Pop • 1,969 views • Share/Save
When I was younger, and didn’t know my Glorious Whig Pop History, I had it in my head that “Forever and Ever” by Slik was actually “There’s a kind of hush” by the Carpenters – yes, I know, big error (quality song, though!).
Then I actually heard “Forever and Ever” by Slik, and crikey, it’s great. I particularly like the way the gothic verse rubs, sandpaperlike, with the big, anthemic, poppy chorus. Brilliant, Schitzophonic, song. Nine, at least, IMHO.
The Weekend World theme tune was, of course, “Nantucket Sleighride” by Mountain. Always conjures up the smell of roast beef in the kitchen, even now.
This Week was an intermittently long-running Thames current affairs series, half an hour on Thursdays, and the most infamous episode was the “Death On The Rock” one in ’87.
I can’t imagine the Westlifes or their various clones of today being allowed anywhere near something like “Forever And Ever” – these days, if you want mainstream pop success, you have to walk the walk, fit in, obey, sit up straight at the back of the bus.
Good call on “My Boy” – a big UK hit for Elvis in ’74, but I prefer the unadulterated yet touching cheese of Richard Harris’ version.
Slik were already popular in Scotland; they’d had a couple of local hits with “The Boogiest Band In Town” and, ahem, “The Kid’s A Punk” but essentially
WHOA!
this can’t be right. Certainly, Midge was embarrassed by “punk” which was given to him to do by Martin/Coulter. The record/song is fine, but bad timing meant this was issued just as the real punk was happening.
On thorough checking (i.e. I rang my mum) “The Kid’s A Punk” was indeed a later and probably the last Slik single in late ’76, so apologies for that uncharacteristic John Arne Riise slip.
.. and “The Boog” also.
So, what were those ‘early’ hits in Scotland?
Er, no, I was right about “Boogiest Band In Town”; Tiger Tim Stevens’ Record Of The Week in Nov ’74!!!!
Re:#27-Have to disagree, MC:the Harris version of MY Boy is obviously someone acting out a role(unsuprisingly really) while Presley’s heartbreaking rendition- recorded during his 70’s period when it seems if you wanted to guarentee he’d record one of your songs then make it about divorce- is such a genuine, unadularated cry of anguish and loss it almost feels uncomfortable and intrusive to listen to. As one review i read said if Presley is merely acting here then he should be acknowledged as the finest thesp of his generation.Along with the mighty If I Can Dream My Boy was my entry into Elvis’s mature work. To think that soulbearing of almost Plastic Ono Band levels was dismissed by so many for so long(including myself initially) as mere corny country schmaltz beggars belief now.
But we’ll have more opportunities to discuss the King’s final years anon, of course(spoiler alert!)…
To be truthful I can’t listen to “My Boy” in any version. At the time the Elvis one was in the chart it was too close to the bone and that’s all you’re getting here.
Ah, it was “Don’t take your love away” I was thinking of.
@13 ‘Summertime’ by The Sundays (1997) also uses it – I think the context is something like “Some people wind up with the one that they abhor/In a distant hotel room in the third world war”.
As for ‘F&E’ or whatever we call it, I think I heard it once but have no recollection of it. So off to YouTube.
DJ Punctum,
Rather than cluttering this thread up with what could be a lengthy debate, would it be possible for you to start a thread in “Popular” about “Guilty Pleasures”.
Although I used the term myself, I agree it’s not particularly accurate semantically…. but you all know what I meant, so perhaps it serves its purpose.
At the time that “Forever and Ever” and “Requiem” came out I was a fifteen year old boy in Glasgow. I may not have become a sixteen year old boy if I had let it be known that I liked Slik songs!
I’ll reserve further comment and my own suggestions for the aforementioned requested thread.
I’d prefer debates to roll on across individual threads actually – it’s good to have these arguments in a specific context that can become wider, and goodness knows there’s a lot of appropriate material coming up!
A 36-post Popular comments thread is relatively uncluttered, anyway ;)
I’ve watched that linked clip now. I’ll resist the obvious response to “Why is there a giant penis on stage?”.
Even after reading the review I’m not sure this was what I was expected. It sounds a bit like the turntable hasn’t got up to full speed until the end of the first verse. But for that oddness alone it’s not my least favourite Midge moment.
vinylscot – if you look up the Popular thread on Gilbert O’Sullivan’s “Get Down” from ’73, you’ll find it’s a lot more about Guilty Pleasures than it is about Gilbert!
As for this one, I’m another punter who kind of lost interest once it got to the chorus. A stranger combination of image and opening gambit would be hard to find. These days you’d think it was a mash-up of two tracks that didn’t go particularly well together.
“Abhor” – until Cliff has a Christmas hit with a cover of “O Come All Ye Faithful”, that’s as many as you’re getting.
A fleeting search reveals these songs that contain the word ‘abhor’;
‘Hardset Head’ – Skinny Puppy
‘Behold Judas’ – Hate Eternal
‘Licksore’ – GWAR
‘Mentally Aborted’ – Caedere
‘Abyss Behind My Gaze’ – Drawn & Quartered
‘Goddess Gagged’ – Protest The Hero
‘Just Drop Dead’ – Limp Bizkit
- I’ll stick with Eddy Grant, thank you.
The only one I know out of that lot is the Skinny Puppy one. Not too bad (“it was a bit unusual”) but Eddy is better.
vinylscot – well, I wrote a major post on one of my old blogs re. “Guilty Pleasures” (before I became aware of Sean Rowley’s interest in the same area – this was in 2003) and I’ve regretted it ever since!
No real reason to talk about it here until Popular reaches 2003 or thereabouts so I’ll shut up about it for now.
I just thought you might like to know that last night, in my fevered condition with yet another streaming cold and asthma-inducing chest infection, I had some very strange dreams indeed. Amongst them, there seemed to be a number of aging rock critics poring over their old writings and competing with each other to be the first one to spot punk coming.
No, I don’t know what it means, either, nor where it came from… ;)
The Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy’s hit “Television, The Drug Of The Nation” also uses the word “abhor”.
Having read the Gilbert “Get Down” thread I have to say that most of the posters who object to the term and the concept of “Guilty Pleasures” are taking themselves a little too seriously. Enough people understand and accept the GP concept for it to be valid, whatever the narrow-minded views of these few. (I can accept that the word “Guilty” should possibly be replaced, but really, it doesn’t matter that much)
Tom, in the “Get Down” piece, you condemn GPs because of the concept’s “chummy appeal to assumed experience – the creation of a shared narrative”. Your piece unfortunately falls into the same trap – “Guilty Pleasures” to me does not mean Sean Rowley and his CDs and/or radio shows – it’s just a term which conveys the very meaning intended. A quick straw poll around the office confirms that – nobody had heard of Sean Rowley, but everyone understood the term.
I don’t mean to be rude about it, but I think those of you getting sniffy about the use of the term “GP” are being a little snobbish and elitist, attaching rather more to the term, in its general usage, than is necessary.
I suspect those who disagree with GPs as a concept are rather looking back at the past through rose-tinted spectacles.
Depending on your age, any pop/chart fan will always have encountered some favourite songs they don’t want everyone to know about, whether that is because of parental disapproval (or approval), fear of ridicule, fear of violence, or some other reason.
We weren’t born as fully-rounded individuals with the strength of our convictions, and the ability to objectively consider things on their merits alone. Peer pressure has an enormous effect in our consumption of popular culture.
Rant over – keep up the good work; I am very much enjoying these articles, and chipping in my tuppence worth!
Don’t know whether I’m convinced by a “rant” about Guilty Pleasures which early on admits that “the word ‘Guilty’ should possibly be replaced.” Whereas I would replace “replaced” with “deleted.”
Provided that individual or collective pleasure does not result in harm, injury and/or death to others I see no reason why pleasure should warrant the adjective “guilty” which by definition is pejorative.
I object to Rowley’s appropriation of the term since it seems to me a convenient excuse to forget that punk ever happened and we are all supposed to be “truthful” and say yes Supertramp and ELO were right all along and not that tuneless noisy rubbish we pretended to like at the time; the New Right’s excuse to erase troublesome realities from future histories.
Seventies music was a complex and multidirectional thing which cannot be conveniently boiled down to 36 “party classics.”
Speaking for myself, you’re right that just about everyone has gone through that, and we do know what it means, but personally I oppose the use of it because I think it enshrines the idea that it is appropriate to feel guilt about taking pleasure in something that your peer group or the critical establishment or general public or whatever thinks is rubbish. I agree with Tom that using it in regard to (to take myself as an example) loving a lot of hip hop expressing attitudes I despise would seem more useful.
Exactly – the only way it could be applied is on a Larkin’s Law basis.
I like Supertramp and ELO a lot more than “that tuneless noisy rubbish” and I don’t feel in the least guilty. There will be opportunies to discuss this further, but looking ahead at the number ones to come I don’t see very many, even if one questionable one is squeezed in. I think that says a good deal, actually. And yes, from the autumn of 1976 to the end of the decade I had my finger on the pulse of teenagers in not-exactly-booming Hull. There were a couple of them who bought bondage gear from Zanzibar in Spring Bank, but even they would have been quick to admit they were striking a pose rather than making a profound political statement.
As an American, to me the idea of a ‘guilty pleasure’ being associated with music is unheard of – I’ve never been made to feel ‘guilty’ over anything I’ve liked (nor here in Canada, for that matter). True, Americans are puritanical at heart and will destroy music once in a while (the Disco Demolition riot, the Sinead O’Connor/Dixie Chicks cd-destructions) but that’s different and I don’t know if something like those events could happen in the UK. In the US food is the main source of guilt, I think…
The covers of Rowley’s compilations connect music, food and guilt by being illustrations of models eating cream cakes, by the way.
I must confess that I bought the first two volumes – because I thought that they’d probably have some good songs on with which I was unfamiliar, rather than especially because of the concept. Ought I to feel guilty about this?
I was glad when Fox’s second album was finally reissued on CD since the only other way of getting “S-S-S-Single Bed” on CD at the time was on the second volume of the Guilty Pleasures TM Cameron-caressing cesspit of a compilation.
Otherwise – a triple retail mark-up for tracks easily available on cheaper and less up-themselves compilations and a gap in the market filled, rather than a new gap being created. And politically and aesthetically dangerous as well as numbing (inuring oneself against the pain of the past and the fear of the future in one smug, swallowing bound).
My initial kneejerk would be against Rowley and his GP cult – simply because I never feel “guilty” about liking any manner of pop no matter how naff it might appear to my peer group.
But, really, the idea’s sound. It is about peer group, peer pressure. One’s expected to feel guilty about veering from the proscribed path, so you might as well give it a name and accept that the name’s a bit of fun.
Isn’t the appropriation of the term “guilty” an admission of subservience to the herd, the final denial of any scrap of individualism in the individual? Isn’t it the equivalent of Christ knows how many former “radical” musicians or artists or politicians now parade themselves, in the manner of a Stalin show trial, to beg for penance for their alleged previous misdeeds to be spared the butcher hook?
Furthermore, who exactly mapped out and constructed this “proscribed path”? Who defined its route and parameters? Why do children of the seventies – not quite Thatcher’s children, but not that far removed – feel the need to whitewash (with the emphasis, I notice in general, on the “white”) a past which they know they experienced? Who exactly “pressured” them?
The things now “accepted” as Guilty Pleasures were the bread and butter of my schooldays; virtually everyone in my year or above or below it was into post-Gabriel Genesis or Rush or ELO or Supertramp and I frequently (i.e. daily) suffered the beneficent stamp on the head: YOU ARE ABNORMAL. HENCE: YOU ARE INFERIOR.
The Guilty Pleasures “phenomenon” is the equivalent of those same smug people coming back a lifetime later, sticking their tongues out and going NYAH NYAH I TOLD YOU WE’D WIN. And I resent that. I resent my history, my experience, being denied or nullified in the presumed interest of proposed demographic unity of thought where “opinion” is reduced to an expression of the tenor of the majority and is thus worthless.
I don’t want a processed, subtext-suffocating “bit of fun.” I want the truth.
My problem with the term isn’t that it’s exploring the idea of peer pressure: of course peer pressure has a massive role in shaping and controlling most people’s tastes – sometimes acquiesced to, sometimes pushed back on.
My argument vis a vis assumed shared experience is simply that the selection of stuff that gets put in the GP category – melodic 70s pop by and large – is such a thin slice of music, and reinforces the idea that the guilt is always felt by people liking ‘uncool’ music instead of ‘cool’ music. (While also reinforcing the idea that we all know which is which.)
But actually the guilt (which is just ‘conflictedness about ones own taste’) can work in all sorts of directions – the other way round, or “indie” people liking “pop” or vice versa, or white people liking ‘black’ music, or whatever. The ‘guilty pleasures’ idea is a weak version of that, reducing everything to a kind of I-heart-the-70s “what WERE we thinking?” or “they don’t make em like that anymore” response.*
I don’t know exactly how someone is feeling when they say Slik is a ‘guilty pleasure’, but I think it’s kind of similar to how I feel about, say, “Airbag” by Radiohead or “Where The Streets Have No Name” by U2: I’m kind of embarrassed by liking something by this band cos I think what they do is a bit lame, but this is a terrific record. But the idea of Radiohead as a ‘guilty pleasure’ doesn’t seem to make sense within the framework of guilty pleasures as used by Rowley, Radio 1, etc. And that seems to me a weakness in the framework, because it takes the reasons for the conflictedness as a given rather than opening up ways to explore them.
Incidentally though we both don’t like “GP” as an idea, Marcello and I don’t agree at all as to why!
*something I like about Popular is the way the serious intellectual responses to apparently flimsy pop, and the personal memories, and the bits of trivia and god-do-you-remember stuff can all mix up together in the comments boxes and bounce off each other. So I don’t think these are BAD responses, just that they shouldn’t muscle other kinds of response out.
The “proscribed path” is mapped by the stunted drones who seek the least resistance.
My feeling is, I see no need to get het up about it – hence I don’t worry about the title. I mean, the supposed “cool” set in this model are the real losers, because they’re the ones panicking about looking “right”.
Then again, I don’t get het up because I didn’t really live through the era Rowley plunders, so have nothing to protect. I like your speech though.
No.54 there was of course to DJ Punctum, and the last sentence is sincere!
I’m startled that this is the first “track that I hadn’t known before Popular” since Frank Ifield’s Confessin’ – I was around four years old, but had later devoured Ultravox (and liked Ure cuz he fed the world innit), during whose time I’d read about Slik – but had misfiled them in the same brainplace as Visage and never got around to hearing (even in large-scale music acquisition in the 1990s, the single never appeared in second hand shops and I’m sure I’m not alone in never having seen the video on TV – maybe it was in a missed TOTP2 with some wiseacre remarks by St*v* Wr*ght?).
Re: Guilty Pleasures, this is the sound of my mind boggling at the very idea.
Also, re: true Guilty Pleasures, Sean and I had a list for the ACME blog of music you might really feel guilty about: Skrewdriver; Peter Wyngarde’s “Rape”; Prussian Blue etc etc. Must republish.
I’m broadly with Tom here. There is plenty of music that people have an ambivalent (personal) relationship to. There is also music that people are ashamed to admit to liking, although I’ve never cared much about that, and certainly don’t now. The idea of Guilty Pleasures (as opposed to secret pleasures or pleasures you couldn’t possibly explain to anyone else in terms they would understand or stuff that is crap according to your aesthetic but rocks anyway) seeks to squash that into an easily marketable package. Rowley has explained by saying he got sick of seeing the same Clash albums in everybodies’ record collections and thought there was something they were hiding. This just makes me think that he was hanging out with a staggeringly small close-minded bunch to begin with – hence the false liberation of guilty pleasures. On the Gilbert thread somebody talked about music denied to people by the Official Rock Canon. But most people – as opposed to readers of music magazines – never bought into the canon anyway.
Sean Rowley’s project has but flickered across my consciousness, I must say. Maybe it’s my age. But I know what it means and I don’t take it too seriously.
I know as well as anybody what peer pressure can do. It happened in the sixties too and it happened a lot to me. Rosie’s got a funny accent (Wirral, in Hertfordshire). Slap. Rosie enjoys Latin. Twist. Rosie doesn’t support Arsenal. Spit. Rosie likes Motown. What a hoot! Rosie hangs out in funny places like the Mid-Herts Musicians Club and the Barn Theatre. Well, what do you expect.
Being a teenager is terrifying. I empathise with Marcello in his feelings of being out on his own, and I applaud his guts for being true to himself. I still feel the pressure from time to time. As part of another project I recently sent a CD mix to an unknown recipient. I thought I’d put some pretty edgy stuff in there, but mellowed it with some Manhattan Transfer, some Peggy Lee, some Peter Skellern (who I always name when pressed to identify a guilty pleasure). My recipient liked the edgy stuff, though he drew the line at a bit of Beefheart, but his reaction to the mellower stuff was quite aggressive. Of Manny Tranny (against whom I won’t hear a word) he says Aaaargh! Make it stop! Peggy Lee, he said, made him violent. And for about five minutes I felt like hiding under a stone. But I learned one big life lesson from my dad, bless him. He didn’t give a hoot.
Sometimes, in here, I feel that not being an Accredited Pop Pundit makes me a lesser person in the eyes of others. I try not to let it get to me, but just occasionally I fail…
Alan @ 57: Good article, you say eloquently what I have been struggling with.
I think everyone here broadly agrees about the GP concept; it’s the level of reaction that differs.
Is everyone else an Accredited Pop Pundit? I’m a really amateur one…
And the things that I bought the first compilation for – ‘Oh Lori’, ‘Pinball’, ‘Say You Don’t Mind’, ‘Dancing in the City’, etc – admittedly, I was too young to be a pop consumer at the time, but surely these are all obscurities by now? A real album of guilty pleasures would be full of ‘Whispering Grass’, ‘The Streak’ and ‘Grandad’, things that are generally still well-remembered, and usually with derision.
I’d LOVE to see someone compile an album of that – if we’re going to have this sort of thing then I think we ought really to go to the extremes and not just settle for the fairly meh stuff that has been “rehabilitated.”
(and just to clear up the ELO side of things, “10538 Overture” and “Mr Blue Sky” are two of my favourite singles by anybody; it’s the “repositioning” of them as a kind of derriere-garde that I object to)
Interestingly a LOT of the tracks on the first GP comp (including “Oh Lori” which is fab but NOT the anti-Pistols) came out on A&M as a standard budget-priced thing called Labelled With Love a year or two earlier…no argument about the quality of any of these records but “Pinball” as a guilty pleasure? 1974 – the agony of Nick Drake urbanised and turned only slightly pop? Isn’t this to an extent debasing both song and artist by equating them with tosh like “Afternoon Delight”?
(Plus it sounds better in the context of the excellent ZigZag compilation album which came out on Cherry Red around the same time)
And “Say You Don’t Mind” HAS to be heard in its original context as the closing track on Blunstone’s One Year album which is readily available for about a fiver.
Peter Skellern! Always to me a hugely underrated talent; find a decent compilation, go beyond the admittedly fantastic “You’re A Lady” and it’s the Randy Newman of Bury. Better still, harass Universal to reissue his brilliant Hard Times album from ’76.
My whole fear is that punters are going to come up and think “well, this was the seventies” and not feel inspired to delve any further or deeper – so that groups like Slik get forgotten about or never remembered in the first place. And the aesthetic Berlin Wall continues; witness Stuart Maconie on a recent weekend show fading Aznavour’s “She” after less than a minute and apologising to his listeners.
Alan – excellent and well argued piece.
That Peter Wyngarde album and especially THAT track…the missing link between Telly Savalas and Throbbing Gristle…
sod all this GP talk, the big news is “Larry Marder is back at work on Beanworld” oh em gee!
Some cogent points about the whole GP thing.
My view is that Peer Pressure is EXACTLY the reason for the whole concept. Although there is the qualifying moments of hypocricy from the peers.
An example from my personal experience: In the Metal scene in about 2000/2001ish, Limp Bizkit were the most shunned, disdained and generally loathed band there was. Yet every rock club’s floor would get packed by “Take a look around” and “Rollin’”
I’m sure there are other examples…
The whole GP thang seemed a bit of a backwards step to me. The great thing about the 90’s(when i was in my 20’s and my radar for popular music and musical trends was at its most active) was there was an opening of the floodgates in terms of what was seen as “acceptable” or “cool” to listen to- you could easily appreciate hits by, say,Oasis, Portishead and the Spice Girls equally and dance at clubs to everything from Led Zep to Public Enemy to Kim Wilde without worrying about peer pressure or worrying how it suited your selfmade “image”. The musical tribalism that existed in the preceeding decades was gone and there was a liberating sense of “anything goes”.
With the MP3 revolution at the end of the decade this became for a while even more the case – practically all popular music became available to own at the click of a mouse and (at first,anyway) for absolutely free and, as a result restrictive concepts of “cool” were out-eclecticism was in.
What the GP boom did was change this level playing field and reinforced the notions of what the “correct” music to listen to was-
As a result,by the time the concept of GP had arrived it was already redundant.Young people who had discovered, for example, ELO, and enjoyed their music simply because they thought it was GOOD music were suddenly being told that ELO were terribly ‘unhip’to listen to, but that they could still listen to them providing they did so through a veil of sniggering irony(admittedly this notion was present in the 90’s too but never to such a patronising or blatant degree) and treated it all like a big joke.I (and many,many others) had already acquired a large amount of music by artists deemed to fit in the GP bracket, enjoyed it hugely and felt no need whatsoever to have them ‘validated’. We had already done this ourselves on OUR OWN TERMS. GP helped bring back the idea of having to second-guess what music was ’suitable’ for a person according to their class, age, race etc and as such stifled for many the democracization of musical appreciation that had became around in the period previously.
As for my theory of what a GP is- a record that you know,according to your own values and critical opinion, is terrible, truly musically without any redeeming merit and yet for some inexplicable reason you can’t help loving it. It certainly is NOT loving a track you think is amazing, moving, exciting etc but which the critcal media consenseus has decided is a “bad” record. As Jerry Dammers once put it “theres no such thing as good or bad music”.If you think its good then it IS good. Its not called having a ‘Guilty Pleasure’- its called having your own taste.
Oops-ignore the 3rd paragraph in the above post-meant to edit it out but forgot!
heres how #65 should have went-sorry!
The whole GP thang seemed a bit of a backwards step to me. The great thing about the 90’s(when i was in my 20’s and my radar for popular music and musical trends was at its most active) was there was an opening of the floodgates in terms of what was seen as “acceptable” or “cool” to listen to- you could easily appreciate hits by, say,Oasis, Portishead and the Spice Girls equally and dance at clubs to everything from Led Zep to Public Enemy to Kim Wilde without worrying about peer pressure or worrying how it suited your selfmade “image”. The musical tribalism that existed in the preceeding decades was gone and there was a liberating sense of “anything goes”.
With the MP3 revolution at the end of the decade this became for a while even more the case – practically all popular music became available to own at the click of a mouse and (at first,anyway) for absolutely free and, as a result restrictive concepts of “cool” were out-eclecticism was in.
As a result,by the time the concept of GP had arrived it was already redundant.Young people who had discovered, for example, ELO, and enjoyed their music simply because they thought it was GOOD music were suddenly being told that ELO were terribly ‘unhip’to listen to, but that they could still listen to them providing they did so through a veil of sniggering irony(admittedly this notion was present in the 90’s too but never to such a patronising or blatant degree) and treated it all like a big joke.I (and many,many others) had already acquired a large amount of music by artists deemed to fit in the GP bracket, enjoyed it hugely and felt no need whatsoever to have them ‘validated’. We had already done this ourselves on OUR OWN TERMS. GP helped bring back the idea of having to second-guess what music was ’suitable’ for a person according to their class, age, race etc and as such stifled for many the democracization of musical appreciation that had became around in the period previously.
As for my theory of what a GP really is- a record that you know,according to your own values and critical opinion, is terrible, truly musically without any redeeming merit and yet for some inexplicable reason you can’t help loving it. It certainly is NOT loving a track you think is amazing, moving, exciting etc but which the critcal media consenseus has decided is a “bad” record. As Jerry Dammers once put it “theres no such thing as good or bad music”.If you think its good then it IS good. Its not called having a ‘Guilty Pleasure’- its called having your own taste.
Aren’t the only people who would even understand the concept of Guilty Pleasures just the tiny proportion of people (obviously including most of us on here) who take music thuis seriously. The average person in the street just likes what they like with no interest in or even knowledge of what some self-appointed arbiter of “taste” says its ok to like. I take my own tastes in pop music as seriously as the next person but far more embarrassing than any person who gets their rocks off to James Blunt or whoever else is the subject of tastemakes ridicule is the 30 or 40 something that still has the mind of a juvenile and thinks that it matters what music someone else likes…
i’ve now read the “Get Down” posts.Couldn’t agree more than with the poster who ridiculed this Rowley bloke and his friends with “the same old Clash albums in thir collections” the amazing thing is that Sean Rowley fails to see that all this phenomenon shows is that he and his coterie haven’t got a clue about just how ridiculous most people would think the blinkered attitude of him and his other fanboys is.
I also noticed someone mentioned that they didn’t like the Orb because of Pink Floyd tendencies. Well surely their music wasn’t really for people who had the slightest interest in tedious rockisms as wether Pink Floyd were ok to like. Of course it was Pink Floyd influeced The Orb originally coalesced in the chillout room at Spectrum where “Echoes” by Pink Floyd was one of the biggest tracks.And the Orb were meant for clubbers to chillout not for tired rock Hipsters to get earnest about.
That was an amazing thing about the acid house/rave scene back then as we didnt just not subscribe to tired NME/rock media ideas about what it was ok to like but ignored or for many didnt know about them in the first place (with many of the ravers never having come from a rock background anyway).Hence if you heard any rock at all it would very likely be such G***** P******* as Fleetwood Mac “Big Love”, Chris Rea “Josephine”, or Jethro Tull “Living in the Past” to name a few I remember hearing on the dance circa 1987-90.
My God, this is an awful song. Have I downloaded the wrong mp3 or something here? This is such a plodding nothing of a tune, there is NOTHING here that could possibly register as far as I’m concerned. I really and truly do not understand what the hell you guys are talking about. There’s not even a fucking hook.
I mean, seriously, what makes this any different from its surrounding hits? Minus the first few seconds, how is this any distinguishable at all from the Bay City Rollers crap? I simply do not understand it. This would get an automatic 2 from me.
Is this Kenny Hyslop by any chance?
@Ken # 70: “There’s not even a fucking hook.”
You clearly aren’t listening. Like it or not; it’s rammed with hooks. And the organ intro as well as the dirge-like monkish singing gives it an odd unique sound.