FAIRGROUND ATTRACTION – “Perfect”
This record really enrages me without my being easily able to work out why. It’s not the tune – when I’m not listening to it “Perfect” bops around my head quite pleasantly, or at least the “beey-ee-ee-ee-ee-ee-ee” hook does. Of course, that in-head version lacks Eddi Reader’s stridency, which really surprised me when I listened to the track again: I had this memory of it as a very breezy, light, record, a sort of skiffle Bobbie Gentry deal, and it might have been but her blaring voice buckles the song, and she makes her romantic idealism sound a little smug.
Not to mention that she sounds like she’s yelling in your ear, and here’s where I think I’ve worked out what really bugs me about “Perfect”: the production. It’s intimate, but impeccably intimate, crispness and echo deployed too neatly, like somebody has spent a great deal of money on trying to sound like they hadn’t. This is probably intensely unfair – the song was apparently self-produced and I’ve no doubt the band’s rootsiness was genuine: maybe 80s recording studios were just set up in such a way that it was hard to trespass off more clinical paths.
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I think the thing’s that’s so peculiar about this song is indeed the unusual degree of difference in tone between when you vaguely half-listen — and it seems amiable and unremarkable — and when you actually listen closely.
haha there’s a thurber short story where he breaks his spectacles and describes the rich and bizare world he finds himself in — “why is an admiral in full regalia pushing a wheebarrow along that rooftop?” — and how much he misses it when he gets them fixed. The world of half-heard pop is perhaps similarly floridly compensatory…
@74: Exactly. If you don’t listen too closely to the words – which many people don’t – then they all evoke the same upbeat message: don’t worry, you’re in luck, everything’s perfect. It’s all simply irresistible! What a wonderful world. I’ve had the time of my life.
The UK’s number ones in ’88 weren’t quite as overwhelmingly upbeat (at least on the surface) as Australia’s, but there are similar candidates ahead.
swanstep @65 – Annie Lennox has a good voice, and when it is coupled with the right material it can sound very pleasant and quite effective. But she’s not THAT special, and, as has been discussed on a number of other threads, it’s the whole package that grates – it’s not ALL her fault; the (popular) media rather deified her, and let’s just say she wasn’t exactly reticent about playing along. Forced weirdness or “kookiness” rarely sits well.
Neither of these bother me in themselves, but one of my big problems with AL is that she usually sings as though pop is slightly beneath her. Interestingly the current Eurythmics album at this time was Savage which IIRC she said was about their going back to doing the sort of music they wanted to make. Along with In The Garden it’s the only Eurythmics album which I feel keen to revisit.
@vinylscott, 78. OK, thanks, I sort of see where you’re coming from. I do remember Lennox getting very some reverent South Bank Show-like attentions around the time of Diva, which is the sort of thing that can be irritating (I got all of this very secondhand tho’ in the US). Great record tho’! She and her handlers can perhaps be forgiven for milking that moment of stars coming into alignment. I do at any rate.
Here I am, late again…
#6, I have it that Beth Orton won Best Female in 2000, beating 2 spice girls and the tabloids reporting it as ‘spice girls fail to win award’.
I liked this record, purely because it sounded like my grandad’s old wooden radiogram. Big thing, 4 ft high, 8 feet wide. The radiogram was pretty big too. I thangyew.
Still loathsome. The musical equivalent of that ghastly hopping scene in Truly Madly Deeply.
Found this irritating and twee at the tender age of 17. I’ve mellowed now but it’s still a three… two points for the leggings on top of the pops
Sorry for the offence caused – it wasn’t intended. My original comment allows that “some sane and decent people might like it for particular reasons” and I would certainly class Rosie, Rory et al in that group, in fact it was in deference to Rory’s opinion that I included the caveat at all.
My too-blunt statement was a summation of what is, actually, my critical opinion – that a piece like this, calculated and buffed smooth for maximum appeal, really IS offensive to me. Music is really important, and when it becomes light fodder for people unwilling to engage with something deeper, a part of me dies.
This is of course not the ideal mindset to bring to a discussion of number 1 pop hits.
I really am genuinely sorry that a bit of hyperbole caused offence to people whose opinions I have enjoyed reading for several years now. Hope it’s not a lasting impression.
Light fodder can sometimes prove the deepest art. Not the case with this record, admittedly, but the watchful writer has to be careful not to fall through the shallow/deep critical trapdoor.
Isn’t the bulk of pop music “calculated and buffed smooth for maximum appeal”? And wasn’t that always so? It seems to me it goes with the territory.
And hasn’t the meme of “I take x very seriously therefore I deplore y” been with us for generations? Isn’t it at the very root of youthful rebellion, and hasn’t it always been? I noted in a comment to a much earlier entry my primary school head’s remark “who will remember the Beatles in twenty years?”.
I don’t think Hermann Hesse is read as much now as he was, but Matthew K reminds me a little of Harry Haller, the protagonist of Der Steppenwolf. It’s a book I commend to Matthew. Reading it does not, of course, preclude his choice of light reading, any more than my own appreciation of, say, James Joyce in any way impedes my huge appetite for trashy crime fiction.
I don’t know about “the bulk” — I think I would argue that from around the 1920s (the era of hot jazz), pop falls into two camps, “buffed smooth” and “buffed rough”, if you like. The relative sizes — and fashionability — of the camps vary from decade to decade (indeed from month to month): this season smooth will be in, next season rough — and very few of us (I suspect) cleave only to one camp all our lives.
As for calculation, well sometimes the honest blurt will get you further than the prepared speech, and sometimes it will wreck all hopes and plans! The problem with “Perfect” isn’t that it’s smooth, isn’t that it’s calculated — plenty of great songs are both of these. It’s that — well, lots of suggestions above, including from me, and none of them quite hitting the nail on the head yet, I don’t think. What a strange song it is…
@87: Some might call it quirkiness. For all its many faults I count that in its favour. Funny how I feel a great deal better disposed towards it than I did three days ago!
It’s ersatz, isn’t it? It’s a fake thing. It’s one thing for an old track such as Reet Petite to reach the top, but Perfect is a lie. It’s like one of those faked old-style posters that says “Keep calm and carry on”. That’s why it rankles – for me, anyway.
Please note that I’m not in any way saying that music has to be “authentic” (urgh!) or anything like that.
A somewhat similar vein of nonspecific nostalgia was mined a couple of years earlier in The Colourfield’s Thinking Of You , to rather more satisfying effect. Obviously, with the involvement of Terry Hall, the message couldn’t be further from “it’s got to be perfect”…
Matthew K @84, no offence taken on my part, just a momentary tinge of “hey, what?”, now passed. It’s one of the joys of this place that we can get so spirited about any particular number one, when so many people would be wondering what all the fuss is about.
@89: Ersatz, exactly. But that was the late 1980s to a T. “Perfect” was perfectly of its time.
Back in the early ’80s there was a fashion piece in The Face about a micromovement called The Young Fogeys. Basically it meant dressing like your Grandad, but it was a means to an end as the magazine was able to focus on traditional tailoring and grooming. I’m not really sure who opted in to this movement except maybe Mick Hucknall, but it seemed to represent a backlash against the Soccer Casual and his expensive foreign designer sportswear labels. The point being that when the shock of the new is too much, we sometimes over-react and return to traditions of the past as some sort of safety blanket. Not always, mind, but sometimes.
So “Perfect” also can be seen as such a reaction. Not executed with great aplomb as most will agree, but I can see why a certain group of people would adopt “Perfect” when faced with Acid House, if they were unwilling or uable to embrace that.
Maybe a similar demographic might be attracted to the music of The Baseballs today as opposed to I dunno, Lady Gaga maybe…although I suspect it’s perhaps more to do with faux-nostalgia?
We had The Baseballs in the eighties; they were called Big Daddy.
Maybe the song sums itself up a bit too neatly? It doesn’t leave anything open to question, so it doesn’t particularly let you in.
It’s also more heavy-handed than the version in my memory. Great twangy guitar break, though. That’s the best bit.
Assuming for a moment that “ersatz” is a fair comment on Perfect (I’m not saying it isn’t a fair comment, just that it’s not a comment I would make), then hasn’t ersatzness been a feature of the whole pop process? We’ve seen things like it before in Popular – The Temperance Seven come to mind from the early sixties, and Manhattan Transfer from the seventies. Both of those were obviously retro to me (Manny Tranny’s offering, as I said at the time, is not the best example of their work to my mind) and I found them immensely likeable. Similarly there was an outfit in the sixties called Harpers Bizarre who put Cole Porter into the charts.
Perhaps I miss something here because I can see that for some contributors who were in their teens in 1988 this might sound like ‘parent’ music. To me its the workaday pop of my own youth and it’s not inconceivable to imagine, say, the Honeycombs doing it. Would it annoy in 1964?
Ironically, having been sceptical about Marcello’s claim of an intrinsic visual element of pop, my attitude to Perfect has been significantly altered by seeing the video. I warmed to Eddi Reader, whom I now understand to have been born and raised in the Anderston area of Glasgow and is therefore hardly a smug middle-class boho. As well as having a beltingly good voice she’s also the total antithesis of the clone hot pop chick, somebody who is never going to be glamorous in any age and who doesn’t give a toss. I can admire that!
Surprised by all the antipathy. Maybe in another era, it’d be more appreciated.
There are two vivid memories attached to this song for me – one is the Asda advert already mentioned, the other is of a boy in my class at school announcing he was listening to the Fairground Attraction album on what might well have been the first real-life Walkman I ever saw (this was when I was seven years old).
I couldn’t give ‘Perfect’ any more than a 4/10 although that’s mainly because I find the chorus hook incredibly annoying – I’ve never given it any more thought than that so the negative comments here regarding other aspects of the record make an interesting read. I can certainly see it suffering from the same problem as most other sophistipop-type music of the time which is that it comes across as rather lifelessly professional. I think the word I’d go for is ‘businesslike’.
I’m not opposed to “ersatz” if there is some merit or value in it’s usage (irony, comedy etc). But “ersatz” as a cheap gimmick or temporary method just seems to undermine the product’s own integrity, hence the negativity surrounding this.
Depends what you mean by “integrity.”
I suppose it’s a case of did Eddi and co. say “I know, let’s do a rock ‘n’ roll number!” or did they say “I think this arrangement suits this lyric”?
Gosh, you’re a moaning lot, apart from Tim, Sandy and Rosie.
For me (notoriously unimpressed by 80s music) this is easily the best chart-topper since West End Girls.
I don’t get this Thatcher’s Child stuff about it at all. The first time I heard this I was driving between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, and it knocked my socks off. When I listen I hear a woman of my own age (I am four weeks older than ER) stating categorically that she won’t settle for second best – and I don’t think that has anything to do with acquisitiveness. At that stage in my life I watched several of my friends (lawyers to a woman)as they inched towards 30 marrying men who were never going to quicken anyone’s pulse, because they were kind, decent, solvent, reliable plodders and would make good fathers for their (future)children. This wasn’t what I wanted (I have only recently realised that theirs was not necessarily an ignoble ambition) and I cheered when Eddi banged the drum for the no compromises set – I wanted a man who was roguish, handsome, brilliant, witty etc etc. Not bothered about money. I found one who ticked all those boxes and – yup – just about then it was perfect. Right now going through the “in sickness and in health thing” and finding that base note of perfect from 20+ years ago very sustaining.
I was working in London from 1987 onwards, and I didn’t see Fairground Attraction as part of that metropolitan smugness sect at all (and I loathe Peter’s Friends and the Em ‘n’Ken thing with a passion). I heard a girl with Glasgow consonants saying she wanted someone to make her heart sing, and I agreed.
Eddi Reader’s voice gives me goosebumps and “Sings the Songs of Robert Burns” is one of my top five albums ever (so Rory should investigate it). As for her ‘royalty’ status. Even the Queen had to applaud the ancient then modern renditions of Auld Lang Syne at the opening of the Scottish Parliament. Just watched it on Youtube, and found myself in tears.
Sorry vinylscot.
Ah…so that’s where I went wrong with my ex-missus. I was the kind-hearted plodder-type, but she really wanted the rogueish, witty type. What she actually ended up with was the younger, slimmer plodder type. Oh well!
“Sings the Songs of Robert Burns”… I’ll keep an eye out. After I’m done with the half dozen Kylie albums I picked up last month to plug that particular blind spot.
On “ersatz” (which I would still agree with, although I don’t think inferior to the originals implies bad in this case): DietMondrian, your example of the “Keep calm and carry on” posters isn’t the best analogy, because they’re not fakes, they’re reproductions. About as fake as a CD release of “Songs for Swingin’ Lovers”.
I heard ‘Dance the night away’ by The Mavericks today and it’s twangy guitar and ‘ersatz’ qualities reminded me of ‘Perfect’. Somehow, `i don’t imagine that DTNA would get the same level of dismissal as P.
Interesting watching this thread develop… Is it perhaps finally a question of whether Reader’s voice (maybe together with fine points of production) does it for you? Near nursery rhymes from Feist and from Lily Allen in recent years have been huge hits because enough people have found their voices and personalities engaging, but those same voices and personalities drove significant minorities of folks up the wall! Reader’s voice doesn’t grab me (it reads to me as kind of a blank) but if it did I’d probably be happy to go along with the ultra-naive backing at that point. I confess to adoring Feist counting to 4 on Sesame St, and I can imagine Reader similarly saluting 3 along with Elmo and Grover ‘got to be-ee-ee-three-ee-ee…. perfect’. It wouldn’t be my thing because I wasn’t charmed by R’s voice in the first place, but if you were, then it would probably be fab.
#102 Och, you’re *clearly* not a git at all! When I was 45 I belatedly realised that plodders are heroes. But I’m not really sorry I didn’t realise that in my twenties.
A neutral observer would say my mates who made the compromises probably got the better deal. I wasn’t selfless enough for that; to go somewhere else entirely I wanted
“my sun-drenched, wind-swept Ingrid Bergman kiss
Not in the next life
I want it in this”
I guess I just think everyone deserves to experience love at first sight. At least once.
Good call at #1 referencing Patience of Angels and Kirsty McColl’s Dear John (especially the latter) on the Eddi Reader album. Perhaps it’s where you end up if you keep demanding the ‘Perfect’?
“My eyes have seen the glory
There’s more to life than my life story
And I’ll probably never find him
But I have to keep on looking
And I’m very, very sorry dear John.”
I fell in love with 2 women in my life. The first was a little younger than me. She had blue-grey eyes I could drown in. It was a passionate, thunder and lighning kind of love. We were in some ways on the same level, but in many other ways we were completely incompatible, which led to many rows. Sometimes she would drive me to utter distraction, but I loved her. It got to the point where I had no choice, so I ended it. I had to for the sake of my sanity and hers. It took me a long time to recover from that relationship.
The second was the woman I was to marry. Again, striking blue eyes (I’ve always been attracted to beautiful eyes) but we just fitted together nicely. It was a different kind of love to the first. The kind where you feel that together, you can get through anything, no matter what life has in store for you. We could talk about utter nonsense and make each other laugh. We spent so long together, I thought it would be for life.
But cracks began to show and eventually the things that had kept us together were driving us apart. To cut a long story short, seperation and divorce followed.
So I guess the real problem I have with this song, is through bitter experience, I have not found perfection and perhaps never will. I’m not convinced it exists. We’re only here once, so if I fall in love again, I’ll do my best to hold on to it, accept the imperfections and get on with life. Isn’t that the best anyone can do?
swanstep @ 65: A belated afterthought apropos Annie Lennox:
I know her main contribution to music is just her voice
That’s Aloysia Weber, Joan Sutherland and Cathy Berberian put into perspective then!
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@rosie, 108. Yikes, my remark reads poorly doesn’t it? I was honestly just trying to find some way to concede something to a Lennox skeptic for the sake of the argument – I in fact officially want to give Lennox a lot of credit as a writer (she wrote almost all of the songs on Diva I believe) and for much of her image/visual performance stuff. And, as you rightly suggest, even if someone *is* just a voice, that can easily be more than enough for greatness (to your list I’d add Ella Fitzgerald). I was trying to get my interlocuter to agree with that last point and apply it to Lennox, but my own phrasing perhaps obscured that that was my goal.
Somewhat catchy, but oh so slight. Which means forgettable. I’m surprised this peaked at #80 here in the U.S.
“I heard ‘Dance the night away’ by The Mavericks today and it’s twangy guitar and ‘ersatz’ qualities reminded me of ‘Perfect’”
–for even an closer match, try FA’s follow-up Top-10 Mexi-smash Find My Love.
nb I suggested to Mark E Nevin that his was a song that wouldn’t be much different if it had been written with sync licensing in mind. He didn’t mind.
(edit oops me not code html so good)
@ 103 – thanks Rory, I didn’t realise that. Maybe a better example would have been something like this:
http://artfiles.art.com/5/p/LRG/12/1286/V1BO000Z/beer.jpg
Blimey – just been doing a little research and it seems that Simon Edwards – the chap playing the guitarón – is the same Simon Edwards who played squeezebox with Bristol cajun/folk-rockers K-Passa when I lived there in the 1990s. A K-Passa gig would sell out a venue within hours of the first whispers getting out and they were always memorable occasions. At least for us wrinklies!
Really disliked this at the time, then inexplicably won the follow-up Find My Love in a Record Mirror competition. Inexplicably in so far as “why did I enter?” – winning was more explicable; I was probably the only entrant.
In 1993, as a student, and for whatever reason, I bought the LP for tuppence in a secondhand shop and spent a happy evening sitting on my bedroom floor listening to it. My housemates thought I was nuts.
DietMondrian, if you’re still out there: saw this just now and thought of this thread: the IT support version of ‘Keep Calm’.