Another supersized AOR number one, but “Heaven” is more unashamedly bubblegum than Starship or T’Pau, and a great deal more effective for that. Its fat-free, chorus-led songwriting cuts out most of the portentiousness or instrumental high-fiving that often works against AOR’s pop impact. And it’s happy to let its roots show: behind the bombast are layers of pleasingly plasticky new wave keyboards and Flashdance-style synth-rock moves. In fact, beyond the echo and the heads-down chugalong rhythm there’s hints of the spirit of ’84 about “Heaven Is A Place On Earth” – that giddy season of American music when rock and pop and disco and funk all melted together under the MTV studio lights; what the US did instead of New Pop.
Maybe it’s just the singer that has me following those trails though – ex-Go Go Carlisle was a living link to New Wave (and further back – this is the only Number One hitmaker to have played in The Germs!). “Heaven” sets the tone for pretty much all her solo stuff – take care of the chorus and the rest will sort itself out. As a result her hits are hardly ever less than likeable: at the time, having no memory of the Go-Gos, I thought of Belinda C as broadly a Good Thing without ever crossing over into exciting, and I’ve never really changed my mind. And as a solo vocalist she fit the needs of the times – plenty of volume and passion papering over some very flimsy content, with “Heaven Is A Place On Earth” no exception: it feels like a lyric built to fit a title and a song built to fit a chorus. An undeniable, surging, chorus, one of her best, but still a record I can imagine being enjoyed by everyone while mattering to no-one.
Score: 6
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And the lasting memory of this is, surely for many people, Orbital’s Halcyon and on an on live – http://open.spotify.com/track/7xWwZvnBWARPIATQ34jwXd
Surprised you didn’t mention that the chorus is just a straight rip off of You Give Love A Bad Name…
Somewhat inspired by Orbital, might be the first #1 I’ve put the acapella from onto something else (the Kris Menace remix of ‘Ooh Yeah’).
I liked Circle In The Sand a lot more tho.
I’d never noticed it before! Rip-offs generally have to be very straight indeed for me to spot them…
you can’t call yourself a glasto-veteran and not heard the orbital performance that mixes the two up/together though! (see above)
No I have! I’d forgotten whatever Jovi elements there are tho. I probably just thought ooh good mash up.
When I started my PhD in 2006, I noticed that there was an eighties disco in the student union, and the internal irony of being the only person present at such an event who actually went to discos in the eighties was too rich to resist. It was an odd spectacle, especially when this came on and the dancefloor was rushed, and a lot of twenty year-olds put their arms around each other, jumped up and down and took photographs of each other – a poor substitute for proper dancing, I reflected.
The memorable nature of the chorus meant that I enjoyed this at the time when it came on the radio, but the mushiness of everything that surrounds the chorus and lack of much of a sense of Belinda having a specific individual personality, allied with the inescapable frequency with which it keeps on turning up on commercial radio have long since sucked any pleasure that I might derive from it away. A definitive five out of ten.
“Baby I was afraid before/I’m not afraid any more.”
The exultant growl of “baby” and the eager upwards leap of the second of the three syllables she makes out of the word “more” demonstrate just how right it was that Belinda Carlisle should finally become a mainstream pop star. Some alleged that she sold out, but there’s a difference between wearily yielding to corporate bar charts because you’ve just received a fresh tax bill and gaining stardom by right while retaining the essence of the personality which attracted people to you in the first place.
It is a shame that Belinda had to go solo to achieve her first real commercial success in Britain – since the Go-Gos deserved far better chart luck than they found here – “Heaven Is A Place On Earth” is a splendid example of how to do AoR bigness properly. She left the writing and producing duties to Rick Nowels and Ellen Shipley (who became her regular support team) and compared to the Brian Dennehy fist-shaking of something like “Livin’ On A Prayer,” the “ooh baby”s, the “ooh heaven”s and the thunderous drums are sensationally astral in their ambition. Beneath it all is a thoroughly professional, logically constructed song, rising on the aforementioned “baby” before readying itself for the chorus, with Belinda singing the praises of unity, both spiritual (“When I’m lost at sea/I hear your voice/And it carries me”) and physical (“And we’re spinning with the stars above/And you lift me up in a wave of love” – note the aqueous common metaphorical denominator). The record is full of near-miraculous touches, for instance the ethereal, distant “heaven” harmonies which loom up like the Sirens’ song near the end, as the drummer adapts some lessons from Trevor Horn, before hammering his way back into the final key change and chorus.
The record launched a very smart and astute sequence of hits which have arguably weathered better than those of Madonna’s over the same time period; cheerful cheerleading bubblegum-AoR anthems (“We Want The Same Thing,” “Live Your Life Be Free,” the fantastic “Leave A Light On”) alternating with moodier musings – “Circle In The Sand” in particular captures the chill of the abandoned beach with considerably more acuity than “La Isla Bonita.”
Number two watch: A week of Terence Trent D’Arby’s Sign Your Name. Interesting, but never as good as I remember it being.
TOTPWatch: Belinda Carlisle performed Heaven Is A Place On Earth on the edition broadcast on December the 17th 1987. Also in the studio that week were; Wet Wet Wet, Simply Red and The Pogues & Kirsty MacColl. Gary Davies and Mike Read were the hosts.
I have a lot of time for Carlisle’s solo career. Shipley-Nowels work wonders around her vocal limitations; she sounds believably in love and human.
“Circle in the Sand” is almost as good.
“A song built to fit a chorus” – that neatly sums up the Belinda experience. ‘Leave A Light On’ always gave me that impression, although I must say I prefer it to ‘Heaven…’
Light Entertainment Watch: Belinda is clearly prepared to tour the TV studios of Britain to promote her albums and tours;
BOBBY DAVRO’S TV WEEKLY: with Jessica Martin, Alyn Ainsworth and his Orchestra, Belinda Carlisle (1988)
DES O’CONNOR TONIGHT: with Jimmy Tarbuck, Thelma Barlow, Peter Baldwin, Belinda Carlisle, Uri Geller (1989)
DES O’CONNOR TONIGHT: with Neil Diamond, Stephanie Beacham, Tina Turner, Belinda Carlisle, Frank Skinner, Mike Osman (1991)
HIT ME BABY ONE MORE TIME: with Shakin’ Stevens, Jaki Graham, Belinda Carlisle, Haddaway, Doctor And The Medics (2005)
THE HYPNOTIC WORLD OF PAUL MCKENNA: with Belinda Carlisle, Leslie Grantham, Jon Pertwee, Elizabeth Richard (1993)
IBIZA 92: with Steve Earle, Belinda Carlisle, Breathe, Robert Palmer, Spandau Ballet, Prefab Sprout, Natalie Cole, Brian Wilson (1988)
THE KUMARS AT NO.42: with Gary Lineker, Melanie Brown, Claire Sweeney, Belinda Carlisle (2001)
THE NATIONAL LOTTERY LIVE: with Bob Monkhouse, Alan Dedicoat (The Voice of the Balls), Bob Monkhouse, Jeremy Clarkson, Belinda Carlisle, Adventures In Motion Pictures (1996)
ROCK STEADY: with Eric Clapton, Belinda Carlisle (1990)
SHOOTING STARS: with Ulrika Jonsson, Mark Lamarr (Team Captain), Matt Lucas (George Dawes), Tim Brooke-Taylor, Belinda Carlisle, Paul Kaye, Reg Presley (1996)
SUNDAY, SUNDAY: with Belinda Carlisle, Jimmy Greaves, Lenny Henry, Penelope Keith, Patrick Macnee, Andrew O’Connor, Suzi Quatro, Saint and Greavsie (1986)
SUNDAY, SUNDAY: with Shirley Bassey, Belinda Carlisle, Clive Barker, Judi Dench, Michael Parkinson (1989)
WOGAN: with Aztec Camera, Belinda Carlisle, Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies, David Mason, Bill Wyman (1988)
WOGAN: with Belinda Carlisle, Morgan Freeman, Jack Lemmon, Jessica Tandy (1990)
i’m certainly with punctum and others on the excellence of ‘circle in the sand’ – “the chill of the abandoned beach” is a great phrase, though there’s a good dollop of frys turkish delight-style eastern exoticism in there too i think.
i’m much less sure about ‘heaven is a place on earth’. at the time i think i mentally filed it alongside the bangles as fresh and sparkly and an all round good thing, but the more i’ve heard it over the years (and i’ve heard it a *lot*) the more the horrible AOR bludgeoning side of it has come to dominate. if everyone would just stop playing it for the next five years, then i’m sure i would come back round.
what we need to hear more of, on the other hand, is jane wiedlin’s glorious ‘rush hour’.
Surprised you didn’t mention that the chorus is just a straight rip off of You Give Love A Bad Name…
Always seemed more like “Livin’ On A Prayer” to me.
Video directed by Diane Keaton. (Apologies if this is something of a Frank Beard.)
@14 – great call on Rush Hour.
#14: Yes, the trouble is robot oldies radio and its proscribed list of 200 songs to be sequenced and re-sequenced into hellish eternity, where Stevie Wonder only ever had three songs and Belinda just the one. “Rush Hour” thirded.
Yes, “Rush Hour” is terrific – a staple whenever I do an ’80s set’, never fails to provoke a thrill of delighted recognition. There’s also a great happy hardcore version, it having a title lending itself to such.
That this is not a 10 is a crime against pop music. And not a crime like shoplifting or small time drug possession. The kind of crime pop music puts you before military commissions for.
Talking of Jane Wiedlin, still trying to work out if ‘Cool Places’ ft. Sparks is Any Good At All.
I knew there was something this was reminding me of; thanks to #2, it’s almost comical how much more like Bon Jovi it sounds with every passing play!
Something interesting is the “ooh”s; they seem very pronounced in this song, less an outpouring of emotion than a word in itself. Strange.
I agree with the 6 in this case. “Likeable” is exactly the word to describe it.
“The exultant growl of “baby” and the eager upwards leap of the second of the three syllables she makes out of the word “more” demonstrate just how right it was that Belinda Carlisle should finally become a mainstream pop star. ”
Yes. This. This this this this. The chorus is wonderful, yes, but it’s actually the verses that sell “Heaven Is a Place on Earth” for me, it’s where you can hear Belinda’s voice more. Unlike the largely terrible last single (yes, I AM being that pedantic!), the joy of someone who actually believes every word that she sings.
I much preferred TTD’s track to this at the time, but oddly enough I find myself liking HIAPOE more than SYN today.
I can only put this down to the fact that SYN has a shorter shelf-life. I love the use of strings in pop, and SYN is no exception but that doe-eyed Levi Stubbs/Prince Rogers Nelson-lite delivery by Terry T Darby stinks like last month’s yoghurt.
Whereas, Belinda has a more assured and confident approach. Ok, she’s upsetting no applecarts and it’s safe, bankable AoR, but that chorus… everything else hangs off it like that toy Buckaroo saddle. Overload it though and it falls apart. I think here, they just managed to keep it together before the back legs buckled too much.
Good to see such enthusisam for “Circle In The Sand” here which was my favourite single of the year. Also a punctum review that I can 100% agree with.
#22 Yes, Belinda’s conviction is genuine because she’d had a bad time with drugs, the acrimonious split of The Go-Gos and her weight problems and had come through the other side and recently married. So the title has a double meaning for her one that she’s enjoying her hard- won marital bliss and two, life improves when you get your feet back on the ground.
The kind of song that makes classic pop sound easy to do. I’ve very fond memories of this, especially the little guttural edge she gives to the occasional line which takes away some of the gloss to great effect. And she was somewhat easy on the eye too.
this is great exuberant energetic pop – and I agree with Tom that it succeeds because of that suggestion of ‘rock and pop and disco and funk all melted together’ – a 7 for me
I always assumed ‘Rush Hour’ WAS by Belinda! Oh dear, I loved Jane in Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure. Definitely prefer that and ‘Sign Your Name’ to HIAPOE. That second repeat of one of the chorus lines with the extra “OOOOOH” tacked onto the beginning really gets on my wick, and the verse has that awful chugging guitar that crops up on ‘Shut Up And Drive’ as well. Add in the student disco factor and this makes for a v annoying song. Bah!
The part of “Rush Hour” where Wieldin’s voice goes into falsetto (“OOH you send ME”) is pure gold. What she does here reminds me of what Christine McVie did on her Fleetwood Mac: she conveys the elation of a bruised older sister who’s found happiness.
Also: you can hear the aural similarities between “Rush Hour” and tracks from Pere Ubu’s Cloudland, both projects produced by Stephen Hague.
I make it a point to listen to Belinda Carlisle’s greatest hits at least once a month and this song is still amazing and not even in the top five songs on it. Shame it was her only Number One, “Leave A Light On” deserved no less. In Australia, her star dimmed quite quickly but “Summer Rain” gave her a fluke smash, oddly, since it was a flop everywhere else. That, too, is immense and such an odd topic for a pop single. “Heaven” is probably a bit too surprise-free, too straightforward, but god, bits of it still give me tingles – her trembling on the initial “ooh”, “WEB OF LAAAAHHHHHV!”, “baby!”, the break down… magic.
fantastic call on Rush Hour which I loved already but was thrilled by its inclusion at the denouement proper of This Life as the adverts for flatmates wanted followed Warren’s succinct one word summary of wedding proceedings: ‘Outstanding’.
‘Heaven Is A Place On Earth’ isn’t anywhere near outstanding. The review pretty much nails it for me. But I enjoyed the singles from Runaway Horses so much I bought the album – the singles were by a distance the best thing on it. But what a cracking trio of singles
another vote for Rush Hour – I’m not so sold on ‘Sign your name’ – I had a ‘limited edition’ 10in version of the song remixed by Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry which featured a crying baby sample repeated ad nauseum which seems to have soured my memory
Rush Hour is fantastic of course, but always reminds me of its use as the theme for Capital Radio ‘flying eye’ traffic reports throughout most of 1988. I have the same problem with ‘Somewhere In My Heart’ by Aztec Camera, “Summer in the city where the air is still” heralding every weather forecast at the same time.
Apropos of nothing really except they’re both acts who never quite (to use a currently fashionable phrase) “sealed the deal” w/me – I wonder if people who really like B Carlisle also really like Roxette?
I really like Roxette! – but am indifferent to Belinda. The Look, Joyride, It Must Have Been Love – all would have been worthy Popular entries.
I find an appealingly eccentric, scatty, enthusiastic quality in Roxette, that I can’t hear in Belinda’s more classically styled pop.
I’ve always preferred her first solo hit, “Mad About You” to this rather generic track. A U.S. number 1.
re: 34
Yes, yes, yes, oh god yes.
#2: How could anything be rip off of You Give Love A Bad Name, when that itself is an obvious rip off of Bonnie Tyler’s If You Were A Woman And I Was Your Man?
Yet another big fan of Rush Hour here – it’s a song I can’t imagine ever getting bored of.
Circle in the sand is lovely too – but can’t believe no-one has mentioned the song that came between this and that, ‘I Get Weak’, which is my favourite Belinda song. Absolutely lovely
The revenge of youtube: here’s Belinda C.’s unsuccessful demo of Waiting for a Star to Fall from 1987. The writers of that song eventually did it themselves of course.
Anyhow, I saw Billy Bragg around this time stop a concert for a 5-10 minute rant about HIAPOE. I forget the details of his objections – the vid. took some abuse I suppose (‘those f-ing batboys’) – but the core of it was just a general lament about how it sounded like an ad.. Bragg and his pianist improv’d a few quick parody ad jingles based on it for Mastercard and Revlon – some of which basically came true right?) and how generally depressed he was that it had become this huge hit, how much he hated anyone who’d bought it, how he was losing the will to go on in this business, etc.. Good times.
So… Ooh baby, you’re worth it. Come to the Galleria. It’s Heaven. It’s not the mall where the White people used to shop at. It’s like a wave of love. It’s everywhere you want to be. Oh… just go to the literal version (fitting perhaps because this vid – -diane keaton wtf? – was infamous in some of the same ways that Total Eclipse’s was).
Probably Tom’s score is about right I guess. But, yeah, Sign Your Name was robbed!
More thoughts on Carlisle’s performance here — a friend noted that there are probably a billion covers of this song, and out of curiosity I listened to as many as I could find on Youtube, and they were all measurably worse for not being by Belinda Carlisle. I really don’t think she gets enough credit, and if you want to see what it sounds like when someone tries and fails to imitate what Carlisle does here, you only have to wait for Tom to review the next song on the list…
OK, I just checked and HIAPOE had a beautiful upward parabola in the charts: 43, 19, 8, 5, 2, 1. That used to be the norm (and prima facie makes a lot of sense), but after about 1994 that sort of chart behavior ceases, and almost everything (prima facie bizarrely) enters the charts at its peak. What happened to create the ‘In at peak’/no upward parabola phenomenon in the UK charts? (I’ve been dying to ask this for some time.) I confess that it seems like a very depressing change to me: apparently almost no song connects with a qualitatively larger group than its original insider group of fans. Relatedly, chartwise Gaga looks truly exceptional in modern terms. Her hits have really won people over and have the glorious upward trajectories to prove it.
I agree with TomLane (usually do) about preferring Mad About You. I was a Go-Go’s fangirl in high school and still feel affectionate toward Belinda, even after all those late 80’s talk show appearances where she babbled about her green-haired past and her Reaganite present.
I vaguely remember Jon Bon Jovi saying some rather unkind things about this along the lines of “we’ve sold a billion more records than this rip off!” and I think the “sell out” accusations that someone mentioned above might have had something to do with Belinda’s weight, as being a chubby tomboy was more Punk Rock but now she’d gone all glam and slim like any other airhead pop singer.
Think I’d give this an 8 now, one of those I like a lot more than I did when I felt like I had a dog in the fight. The general consensus of the boys down the pub at the the time was that the record was decent enough but Belinda did look very fetching.
Re 40. I’m not particularly keen on HIAPOE myself, but that story just confirms my feeling that supposed good-bloke-man-of-the-people-salt-of-the-earth Billy Bragg is actually a monsterous egotist. A theory which may be further supported in 1988.
#42 I lament that change in the same way as you Swanstep. I think there were a number of interlinking factors involved.
1. The changes at R1 from the playlist in 1986 to the Bannister blitzkrieg in 1993 ending its role as tastemaker.
2. Record companies switching their attention to re-selling classics on CD rather than finding lasting new talent.
3. Falling single sales as “the kids” switched to computer games leading the charts to fill up with acts who had a considerable fan base but couldn’t cross over. This was already happening in the 80s with Gary Numan and The Jam who tended to peak at their entry position.
4. Record companies seeing all the above, started using singles as tools in a marketing campaign where first week sales were all important.
Other factors, I’d argue more important than 1 & 2 on your list:
– The lead time between a single being released to radio and released into the shops increased, so more people had made up their minds ahead of time if they liked it or not. (Not sure WHY this happened – playlisting wars?)
– It became common practise to put 2 CD Singles out for one release. So the hardcore fans would buy both and the rest one or the other, creating a first-week sales spike.
So what’s happening isn’t a lack of crossover a la #42, but a shift in the terms of crossover – you measure how much a record crosses over by how little it declines from its first week peak and how long it hangs about. This does indeed make for a very different kind of ‘chart-watching’ experience but I don’t think it reflects a massive shift in public perception of pop’s quality or universality – it happened to Oasis singles as surely as to one-hit dance wonders.
I also wonder if the shift in format from vinyl to CD mattered – I definitely remember “this week’s new releases” becoming a lot more prominent with CD singles.
I’m also not sure those Lady Gaga curves show the kind of crossover effect you’re talking about – the factor that has changed things yet again since the 90s is iTunes. Those Gaga songs were available to download as album tracks before they were promoted as singles, and so people were able to buy them as soon as they heard them – whereas in the days of CD singles only all that demand would be held back until the single came out.
This was probably my least favourite of Belinda’s string of solo hits – there’s something about the phrasing of the title which makes it seem “clunky” and un-natural to me. Would someone ever say “Heaven is a Place on Earth”? – I don’t think so…. and the whole song seems to follow that awkwardness.
Also big thumbs-up to Jane Wiedlin, the hottest Joan of Arc (please avoid the burnt-at-the-stake comments)…. and Steve at #20 – yes “Cool Places” is brilliant, but unfortunately comes from a time when Sparks had more than a little problem finding a decent producer; the likes of Moroder and Visconti had passed them by and they weren’t quite ready for Fini Tribe, or to do justice to themselves, which is what they tried here. A decent producer to sort out the lame ending, and a bit of proper marketing, and there’s no reason why it couldn’t have been a hit.
Thanks 46-48 for suggestions about how to understand this big change in singles charts. Those chartstats graphs are so fascinating…. Looking again at them now it does seem as though things have shifted again perhaps just in the last few years with downloads and that, yes, that’s what Gaga’s track-record really reflects.