(Yes, yes, not only pedantry but out-of-date pedantry and not only that but out-of-date pedantry regarding the ’80s indie chart. Impressive work.)

*I’m not sure how this works given that it reached at #1 in the actual chart…

Years since I’ve heard that b-side and cripes it’s terrible; rinky-dink forced jollity, only the merest whiff of a tune and so non-descript and un-rock it calls to mind some of the weaker number ones from the early days of Popular – it’s like something from 1958, not ’88.

SHAME OF THE BLUE PETER BABY

WHEN the parents of 14-week-old Daniel Scott called Blue Peter in 1968 suggesting they “adopt” him and chart his progress, bosses loved the idea.

Up until the age of two, cute little Daniel made several appearances to teach viewers how a baby develops and how to care for one.

Sadly, BP’s chubby-chopped adopted son turned into something of a black sheep. Daniel’s parents split up and he became a teenage tearaway. After pulling himself out of a life of drugs and petty crime, he admitted: “I was a look-out man in a burglary and I was caught. I got a minor fine and two years’ probation.”

Auntie Val would have been disgusted. Mind, you, Daniel’s not the only Blue Peter personality to have fallen from grace. Remember, for example, what they used to grow in the Blue Peter garden one time?

Although Jason Donovan is responsible for one of my favourite SAW tracks, it’s hard to justify his performance on this one. This is supposed to be a frivolous, romantic tune, and yet his vocals are akin to listening to a groaning cow with its neck caught on some barbed wire. I know love can sometimes end in a similarly bloody and unpleasant way, but the noise hardly seems appropriate in this instance. Call a vet sharpish, there’s something horrible going on at Pete Waterman’s farm.

The common criticism hurled at SAW at the time was that with their magic studio gadgets, they could make even a terrible vocalist sound competent. Jason Donovan is living proof that, for the most part, this wasn’t an accusation which held much water.

Come to think of it, it reminds me a little of Daniel the Blue Peter Baby. By which I mean… Blue Peter had its own pets, garden and even a baby so that kids who had pets, a garden or a baby sibling could identify with the programme’s features on them, and those who didn’t could have the ones on TV as surrogates. This was Kylie and Jason the Blue Peter Relationship – two such beautiful people that the Neighbours audience could watch them, emotionally adopt them as their own and get through the tissues on their wedding day. I’m not saying this scornfully, but recognising that the pair of them played a valid role in the adolescent (or younger) days of a lot of people – just look at the comments on the YouTube page on Tom’s link for examples of how fondly people look back on this. And like many a SAW song it’s hugely effective at what it sets out to do – with the harmonies Billy enthuses over and the drum track holding it together while stopping just short of plodding.

Mind you, the build-up to the chorus seems as long as a Tour de France mountain climb and almost as exhausting.

Another brilliant Poptimist column, Tom. I’ve been working my hardest to bust apart the idea of genre for a while now, but your simple and elegant reflection does so much more than all my little scribblings put together will ever manage.

Your Pitchfork column is easily my most eagerly anticipated reading on the web — not that it would look like it, given that I’ve only just worked out it’s a four-weekly piece and not a monthly one…

So thanks, and keep up the intelligent intervention.

Cheers

I enjoyed it actually. I’d read it twice before I realised it was controversial.

@5 Hello Jude.

I remember many moons ago joining Marcello in agreeing how wrong it was that Donnie and Marie used to sing love duets to eachother. EFY is precisely the sort of thing they would have leapt at. Instead the song was gifted to a pair of tv actors, which for me drops it into the same basket as “Whispering Grass”. In other words, it would have sunk without trace without the telly link. Inoffensive teen fun. But not of my period, really.

Terrible shame about ‘Stop!’ though, as I think I said last time. That’s an absolute blast, in fun-times and sonics.

There were frequent weekend parties once the mews cottage was inhabited, but we weren’t invited to any of them. It was only several years later after I was no longer living there that I learned that it was set up as Jason Donovan’s London pad, but Jason himself didn’t live there in the beginning. Instead he had a famous tenant, a well-known Pakistani author living undercover while under a well-publicised death threat from a religious-zealot autocrat.

You heard it here first!

Didn’t SAW admit at the time that this was consciously based on Peaches And Herb’s Reunited?

The song sees them reunited after an unspecified spell apart, and it is handled with such delicacy; on TV they performed a courtly little dance routine to accompany it, and the overall air is one of a Christmas pantomime duet between the two romantic leads. Kylie clearly takes the lead; her “mmm”s and “ooooh”s leading into the build-up to each chorus are skilful and emotionally connective and there is an audible smile on her face while she is singing. Double tracking and varispeeding disguise Jason’s rather lesser voice, but they drift agreeably enough through the song, constructed as only seasoned professionals could construct it (twenty years previously it might have been a hit for Jackie Trent and Tony Hatch, authors of the Neighbours theme tune) with that question mark of an augmented minor underscoring the eighth bar of each chorus (under “oh so true” as though questioning “how true is this, really?”) which punctumises it to some degree and makes it SAW’s most successful attempt at a ballad to date. “Especially For You” charms so much that it dares you to hate it, and while the next Popular entry demonstrates the chasm between the solid and the inspired, as another SAW production from later in 1989 would put it, I just don’t have the heart.