UB40 and CHRISSIE HYNDE – “I Got You Babe”
An uncannily ill-chosen pairing, this: each manages to cast the other’s vocals in the worst possible light. Ali Campbell sounds, as ever, like a wrung-out flannel, and would be shown up by even a modicum of emotion. But listening to this song you also realise how Chrissie Hynde always gives the same performance too – smoky, world-weary, defiant, and so on. She’s a pro, of course, and still the best thing about the record, and yes, they’re only replicating the wood-and-flowers dynamic of the Sonny and Cher vocal team. But still there’s something vaguely offputting about the fact that she sounds exactly the same singing about missing her home or her dead friends as she does being vocally pawed by Ali Campbell.
Obviously, however pro forma her performance she doesn’t deserve this grim approximation of reggae backing it up. “I Got You Babe” is as stiff, thin, functional and inspiring as a sheet of building site plastic – the clumsy charm of the 1965 original absolutely vanished.
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Tom in FT / Popular • Pop • 1,788 views • Share/Save
piercing my eardrums with the nearest pointy object would be preferable to further listening
That’s next week.
Re 14: Just below Kate Bush at no.4 was a hit born from Live Aid – Drive by the Cars which was meant to symbolise famine in Africa/wealth in the west in the same binary “think about it!!” way as “thank god it’s them instead of you.” Cue much earnest dj comment every time it was played.
But, hey, it wasn’t all furrowed brows on Radio 1! Tarzan Boy by Baltimora was no.5!
Tarzan Boy >>>>>> everything else discussed here except Kate Bush.
#11 Punctum, I suggest you revisit some of Cher’s 70s output post-Dark Lady if you think she’s untouchable. Her covers of Fire And Rain and The Long And Winding Road are particularly hideous.
#27 In fairness to The Cars that was never their intention.Someone at BBC2 picked the song to accompany some harrowing footage from Ethiopia during Live Aid and Ric Ocasek himself expressed some bemusement at its inappropriateness.
Back to the record which is just dreadful. A totally vacuous cover from artists who should have known better. I think both Ali and Chrissie were recent parents which is the only possible excuse but I suspect it was more of a marketing ploy to boost their flagging profiles. Both UB40 and The Pretenders had recently seen excellent singles (“I’m Not Fooled” and “Thin Line Between Love And Hate” respectively) fall short of the Top 40.
Interestingly all the main players from the Two Tone era (apart from Fine Young Cannibals) were struggling at this time – Colourfield, General Public, Madness,Dexys, Special AKA – so the team up here made some commercial sense at least.
I hated ‘Drive’ so much back then. I totally wanted to be the Baltimora guy tho.
Re 29: Yes, sorry, I meant that it was appropriated, nothing to do with the Cars. You have to feel a bit sorry for an act in that situation – even if they felt their song had been used inappropriately they could hardly ask for it to stop being played in connection with Ethiopia footage.
Similar ‘hey, the lyric really fits’ stupidity with Oleta Adams’ Get Here, where “cross the desert like an arab man” (presumably escaping UK/US bombing) was deemed a suitable Gulf War anthem.
Re 2 Tone – Colour Field and Dexys aside, most of the acts were in an artistic dip which probably explains their commercial downturn – you can add the Style Council to this list. I’m thinking of Mad Not Mad (their weakest album) and In The Studio (hard work).
If only Dexys had released This Is What She’s Like BEFORE Don’t Stand Me Down…
“I wonder if there’s a parallel-universe Popular where all those who bought this and “We Are the World” are bemoaning the ones who bought “You Spin Me Round” and “Into the Groove”.”
Well if there are an infinite number of parallel universes, then… no, still none where that is the case.
Or escaping Iraqi invasion, maybe?
Surprised to see Fine Young Cannibals and Dexy’s described as 2Tone-era – it’s not a link that’s ever occured to me before.
Fair enough!
Dexys nearly signed to 2Tone, IIRC.
Doing 1985 on this has made me realise that my enormous residual fondness for the era is not because of the music (mostly), but because it was a really excellent period for Smash Hits – due partly to the vast number of dug-up fossils and newly sanctimonious and out-of-their-depth pop stars suddenly back on the scene…
33, I think FYC contained some ex-members of The Beat, which is a 2-Tone connection of sorts I suppose
It was also a pretty good period for the renamed and rescheduled Whistle Test, having its last hurrah in a mid-evening slot before it was taken off the air, with Andy Kershaw prominent among the reporters. I associate Kate Bush’s music of the time with Whistle Test, as they featured her quite a lot.
Earlier that summer, too, came the moment when they featured a new band and I was looking at the singer thinking his face looked familiar. When they came to interview him my jaw dropped at the sight of my old schoolmate (though “mate” is putting it a bit strongly), Mick Hucknall.
Re 35: Tom Hibbert was setting the agenda by now, wasn’t he? Can’t remember if they had a line on UB40.
Re 37: It seemed cosy but one of the few decidedly unsafe acts on was James King & The Lonewolves who, as J Hendrix did on It’s Lulu, decided to play two songs, REALLY fast, instead of one. Nobody – least of all a terrified looking David Hepworth – was going to stop him.
In spite of their level of underground fame, ie unquestionably the biggest new act in Britain, The Jesus & Mary Chain weren’t on any of the various pop TV shows (video on Max Headroom excepted)… which puts my perspective on 1985 in a nutshell. Smash the system!
#36 They did, and The Beat’s first single was on 2-Tone so it’s more than a connection of sorts. Did General Public ever have any hits?
“Tenderness” got to #11 in Canada. (Yes of course I looked that up.)
and to #27 in America, where they also had a very late hit in 1994, when their cover version of ‘I’ll Take You There’ got to #34.
In Britain they could do no better than the #60 achieved by ‘General Public’ in 1984. (Which I remember as being pretty good, though I haven’t played it for about 10 years)
#36 Yes that’s why I mentioned them but only because I expected someone to point out that they were the exception if I didn’t.
I agree Smash Hits was at its best around this time just before their best writers decamped to Q. Then Barry McIlhenny (that might not be spelt correctly) took it down the teeny bop route and it was Bros on the cover every other week. Actually both Vic Reeves and myself (to borrow some glory!) unsuccesfully applied to work on SH around this time.
I had a very brief spell at Smash Hits in ’87 but was told quite sternly that they no longer wanted reviews written in “ver Hits” vernacular. The clots!
#43 I’ll have a flick through my archive and see if I can identify you ! :-)
re the Mary Chain – I once got the entire run of 1985 NMEs out of a respected university library, and what leapt out at me is how big a deal the JAMC were: I had been only very dimly aware of them. To be honest though they sum up the ’85 doldrums for me too – back to the 60s with one-size-fits-all production: the mainstream gets the enemies it deserves I guess.
Running up that hill was just awesome, relentless, otherworldly, enigmatic and timeless. Too good for number one.
Re 45: I’d still stand by the first 4 singles, and You Trip Me Up’s disorientating industrial noise with a strong (60s, if you like) melody underneath effectively opened the door for MBV and shoegazing. The J&MC also gave Creation a profile it hadn’t had with its first 10 or so releases (Primal Scream’s It Happens came out in summer ’85). They were unquestionably EXCITING at a time when pop’s counterculture was at a low ebb: reduced circumstances, I know, but Upside Down was a New Rose for generation of guitar bands. The latter part of ’85 brought a promising debut single (Wedding Present, Meat Whiplash, 1000 Violins, Primal Scream, Razorcuts) on a weekly basis.
Production-wise, I agree. Joe Foster vs the Phil Collins gated snare. Trebles all round!
Wichita did you see JAMC? Then, I mean — I saw them years later, but not at the time, and frankly felt, on record, they were meagre given the end-of-all-art claims being routinely made for them.* Also I hugely distrusted the nexus of complicity that Creation seemed to have set up with the press (I was a bit outside it, and doubtless merely jealous — plus i’m not sure my own subsequent relationship with Blast First was any healthier in retrospect…)
*Probably I knew too much about noise and anti-art and anti-music and etc, and was jaded. This is the year that Attali’s stupid book was published in English — not that we really grasped how stupid it was at the time! We liked it!
I first saw JAMC at Night Moves in Glasgow in spring ’84. They were supporting a bunch of no-marks called Rhythm System and got canned off after about ten minutes. Great stuff, and there was a long ‘phone-in debate about it on the Billy Sloan Show on Radio Clyde that night, the callers’ gist being JAMC being talentless poseurs who couldn’t play their instruments unlike Real Musicians e.g. Rhythm System oh the irony. I rang up and quoted AMM at them and B Sloan went ???????
A couple of years later I bump into Eddie Prevost at Bethnal Green Library and he’s fuming about grrr Mary Chain ripped us off something rotten heheh.
Re 48: Yes, at the Electric Ballroom in ’85 and it wasn’t very good. One ten minute racket with “fuck” and “Jesus” shouted over the top. No riot (people had clearly gone expecting one which must have made for a very different experience to Punctum’s), just a disappointing sense of a non-event. Alan McGee spotted a gap in the market for a McLaren-ish figure that the press could love/hate, ditto for his charges.
They didn’t seem like anti-music to me. Personally, I like a good tune. So while I tried quite hard to listen to and appreciate Test Dept, Swans, and other highly praised noiseniks, the JAMC were always going to appeal to me more. That said, their bad hair, semi-goth gear and lack of charisma stopped me from really loving them.
Also they broke one of pop’s golden rules by carrying on way too long. Taking out the feedback so you could hear they really could write a tune (on Darklands) seemed such an obvious, boringly rockist move.
well they always basically wanted to be mid-doors depeche mode AND THEY HAD THEIR WISH GRANTED
JAMC were infamous for chaotic 20 minute gigs as I recall.
I loved the first two JAMC singles (Never Understand in particular) which I discovered while working as a volunteer on a kibbutz incidentally.
But by the time of their album I felt they’d said all they had to say on those two singles and the LP was a bit of a let down.
edit – just read the above few posts, so this is rather repeating the point…
I just had a peek at the rest of the year and wow we have surely entered the worst run of #1s in Popular history to date (later years may yet top it)…
Och, I don’t think it’s that bad. Not the worst crime against reggae, by any means. One of its problems, in this humble listener’s opinion, is that it suffers by comparison with the Sonny and Cher original. Ali Campbell’s voice is better than Sonny’s and Chrissie’s is, frankly, not a patch on Cher’s so it all sounds a bit wrong.
The follow up though, as one other lovely contributor has pointed out, was lovely. If memory serves me correctly(And it frequently does not) it came ‘free’ with the ‘Baggariddim’ album but was still a sizeable hit when released on its own.
Worse crimes against reggae? Yes, but they’re all by UB40 as well.
Re assorted points above: Never Understand was a proper dizzying pop moment for me – I knew nothing about the Mary Chain before I heard it on the radio and went “what the hell was that?” I was 14, which I guess was about the right age for that reaction, and although I was deeply versed in classic rock, they sounded pretty new to me. They indirectly became my gateway to all sorts of cultural things that the Reid brothers may not (or may) have known about. And as it happens, I still like the production on Psychocandy. I do think, though, that pretty quickly I wanted them to be something other than what they were (ie no leather trews).
From Upside Town to Sidewalking the Mary Chain were frequently astounding. I would hold up Psychocandy* as one of the best debut LPs by anyone, not to mention one of the most appropriately named.
By the way JAMC did breifly straddle the gap between NME cred and pop fame. They appeared on the cover of Smash Hits and popped up on TOTP to perform the glorious “April Skies” in 1987. They were also chucked off ITVs pathetic competitor The Roxy for either taking it too seriously or not seriously enough???? The show was axed soon afterwards.
* Does anybody else find it odd in ” High Fidelity ” when Jack Black recommends JAMC as complimentary to Echo and the Bunnymen when in reality the two groups sounded nothing like each other?
re 53: Vaguely relatedly, 1984 was the top average (#4 median) Tom-score year so far (without reweighting for time hits spent at the top). Regression to the mean has been a bear after other peak Tom-score years: 1958, 1966, 1979 (and near-peak 1971), and so far 1985 is following that trend, even without the horrid year end dip that appears to be coming! I hope Tom thinks about producing some stats posts at the end of this year (i.e., to cover up to end of 1985 as a true ‘first half’ of Popular break-down) with proper weighting of hits, and various sorts of moving averages.
A graph of yearly averages and medians so far is here if anyone’s interested.
Re 57*: Hair.
re #59, as things stand then, 1985 was officially, statistically, a better year for pop than 1967. luckily there’s a good chance that the next few weeks will change that.
“I hope Tom thinks about producing some stats”
what are the chances? ;-)
#61 – for number ones at least there’s not a lot to choose from – and generally ’67 was a weird year in Britain: everyone trying to make albums, not many actually good at it yet, our mostly twee take on psychedelia, hitmakers taking their eye off the ball singles-wise and bubblegum, reggae, etc not in place yet to take up the slack…
Like ’81 and ’82, a great year ill-served by its number ones – 1967’s number twos were much better.
Re 48 (by way of further avoiding thinking about UB40), I found that most of the much vaunted noise of the time sounded “meagre”, not just on the Peel show via a £25 radio/cassete player, but also on vinyl or tape. Swans, for example, to me sounded more like a sullen plod (not so different from UB40, then) than the march of the apocalypse* promised in the press. Live, obviously, was a different matter, but sheer volume is cheap trick.
*Thouhgh like the Lineman, at point 50, I realised I wasn’t looking for a sonic end of the world, anyway.
Test Dept’s big theatrical spectacles were often excellent, except on record; Einsturzende made sense once you realised their real shtick was delicacy not (as billed) collapse; Swans — hmmm, yes, I will have to work on this. I believe at the time — ie in about a year’s time, popular-timetable-wise — I could be found arguing that Swans worked best if you played their records at the same time as someone (anyone?) else’s. In an interview with Herbie Hancock: I bet he was pleased when he read it back…
Test Dept worked once on record: 1986’s The Unacceptable Face Of Freedom is one of the records of its decade, in every sense. Visually I concur they were absolutely spectacular and truthful.
Swans were 1968 Michael Mantler relocated in mopey hell kitchen and all the better for it.
Incidentally I ran into Eddie Prevost once on an entirely separate occasion from the one mentioned above and he was moaning about TD having ripped AMM off…
Chrissie: ‘Neither of us have had a hit for a while. The record-buying public suddenly can’t get enough of the 60s after watching Live Aid. If we team up and record a 60s cover we’ll be quids in.’
Ali: ‘Last time we did an anaemic cover version the record-buying public fell for it. No reason why they shouldn’t again.’
If people are going to be as nakedly careerist as this, why can’t they at least produce something worth listening to instead of this turgid waste of vinyl? 2 is about right. Dull, dull, dull.
If the existence of dreary Student Union mediocrity like the Jesus and Mary Chain and their ilk isn’t a very good reason for why Rave had to happen I don’t know what is…
I recall a huge amount of hype surrounding JAMC in the music press. I suspect the source of this was Alan McGee himself. I also recall his quote: “I like leather trousers, I think they’re cute”. Psychocandy also featured in Pete Nash’s long running “Striker” comic strip in the Sun(recently ended BTW). It appeared in young Nick Jarvis’ record collection. Odd considering Jarvis was styled after a mid 80’s soccer casual.