KYLIE MINOGUE – "Hand On Your Heart"

I often think – well, instinctively feel, really – that the rhyme and build between the three lines – (put your hand on your heart and tell me) that we’re THROO-UUGH!/ OOO-OOH!/ OO-OO-OWOH! – reaches a level of inarticulate emotional truth that a thousand more clever songs could never hope to reach.

And I love that housey middle-eight bit, too!

Falls into the guilty pleasure category as well for me.

Great momentum and showed that there was a charm in kylie for all the naffness

I wouldnt go as high as 7 though.I feel a 6 would do it justice.

there is also a distinctly “neighbours” vibe to that sleeve.

I’ve listened to it again, and still don’t really get it. It just seems like a single reasonably-ok hook padded out to song length – an unremarkable filler from midway through the second side of an album. And there’s something slightly annoying about the way the lyrics are so full of doubt but she sings them like she hasn’t noticed it.
Actually this is the only hit of hers from this period that I didn’t remember, so perhaps it’s a case of unfamiliarity breeding contempt.

apart from the by-the-yard SAW production this is the definition of anonymous for me. The rhythm clatters along incessantly, the instrumentation lacks colour and the vocal rarely strays beyond the same few notes. I’m sure there are songs I’d love that had all those same qualities but this isn’t one of them.

I like single covers that feature hats

Agree with #6 here – just not feeling this. I can tell it’s put together far better than ISBSL, but there was an enthusiasm in that that’s missing here.

I think it might be better if it was a bit higher.

When this came up, all I remembered was the chorus. The verses just seem to be one-dimensional, non-melodic gap-fillers. Dentist’s amalgam. Harmless, but unengaging. I can’t bring myself to hate it, or like it either. Pop beige, I’m afraid.

Another vote on the “don’t like” side of the ledger I’m afraid – that stomping rhythm track just distracts after a while, the verse is a means of passing time and the chorus is fine but not that memorable, while the video just repeats the cute-Kylie tricks which worked well on ISBSL. Much more of this and her career would have drifted.

Like Tom and a few others, I have little memory of this from the time. Possibly in my case because my other main obsession was taking so much of everyone’s attention over the past month or so that there was little room left to absorb this – as we will be discussing when we turn to the next number one.

re 15. Oh, of course, from the inaccurately-titled ‘No Limits’! She attracted some lascivious classroom comment, as I recall. I don’t remember her in relation to Radio 1 or Top Of The Pops, though.

New to me (at least as of a week ago when I ear-peeked ahead)… and not at all the pleasant surprise that I found Especially for You a few weeks back. This just sounds completely formulaic to me. I mean, call that a chorus hook if you want, but it’s essentially the same jolly chorus SAW have been peddling for years at this point (it’s almost precisely Astley’s ‘Whenever I need somebody, I’ll send my love to you’ isn’t it? which was….). At any rate I prefer the (I assume later) more william orbit-ish mix of the song used in this youtube vid, and looking at some later live peforms. of the track it seems clear that Kylie and her handlers did the right thing and worked on adapting the song away from its (aversive) SAW production roots:
4 (5 or 6 for some of the remixes/do-overs)

Whoops, that more william orbiti-sh mix link should be this.

Not one of her better singles. As others have commented, it’s a decent-ish chorus but not much of a song.

Another vote here for the follow up, Wouldn’t Change A Thing. An absolute peach of a single and the one that changed my whole view of SAW. Even this dyed-in-the-wool indie kid couldn’t resist the breakbeat and ‘I-I-I-I’ hook.

By 1989, SAW’s work had divided fairly easily into two camps; there were records like “This Time I Know It’s For Real,” “I’d Rather Jack” and “Ferry ‘Cross The Mersey” which represented the music in which they really believed, the songs for which they put out that extra ounce of effort and inspiration, and then there was the workaday stuff, the teenpop fodder they provided by rote for Kylie and Jason (and later that year, Big Fun and Sonia) to keep the kids happy and the business wheels turning.

Like “Too Many Broken Hearts,” “Hand On Your Heart” – do you see a theme emerging here? – uses its bright and breezy surface to mask a song about trying to stave off imminent loss. But when Kylie sings “put your hand on your heart and tell me that we’re through” there’s an ineradicable wink in her eye which suggests that he doesn’t have the heart (and there’s another clue – is Cliff’s 1989 SAW-produced single a reply to Kylie?) to let her go.

Then again, the couplet “I thought that we were just beginning/And now you say we’re in the past” may represent some premature fear about losing her record-buying constituency; Enjoy Yourself, the second Kylie album from which this was the lead single, is the kind of cautious, minimal advance made by people who aren’t quite sure whether there’s going to be a third album. The production and arrangement are more expansive than before, with greater depth at the bottom, a slightly more three-dimensional layering of sounds, some Deep House influence in the rhythm – all tentative moves towards sophistication. But essentially “Hand On Your Heart” represents business as usual, another day in the Hit Factory clocked up, and as ever, just two payslips away from homelessness.

@27. Thanks for that. I’m not a huge fan of the PSBs, but It’s Alright (which I never realized was a cover/version) is pretty jolly great… spooky at the time too with all its upfront gloominess while everyone else was partying like history was ending in 1989, or something. I’ll have to check out IA’s bassline…

@25. Your invocation of what ‘pure pop should be’ encouraged me to look down the charts to see whether there was anything much better at the time… and lurking around #90 is XTC’s King for a Day. XTC’s precious album Skylarking was close to perfect, and really grew on people and by word of mouth over a couple of years. Their 1989 follow-up Oranges and Lemons was pretty good too, and it got some serious push for a change – vids and the like – for its two brilliantly poppy singles, Mayor of Simpleton in addition to King for a Day. In a sane pop world these tunes would have at least threatened some of SAW’s minions at the top of the charts, but alas it wasn’t to be.

I adored this when I was twelve. Still do. Mainly because I’ve never got over the pre-chorus line – it’s great – but also that video. THOSE FROCKS: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FfNaRnuFbsE I want all of them. And the shoes. In a size 16. Now. Thanks.

This is what I hear on the chorus – a melancholy tug created by running an almost Jobim-ish monotone vocal line over shifting chords. I love it. It makes Kylie sound confident that the response to looking her in the steely-blue eye will be “I just don’t have the heart” (nice spot, Punctum), but there’s just enough doubt stirred by the downward arc of the chords. I really should know the technical term for this. It’s probably all explained in This Is Your Brain On Music. Certainly, from the comments above it doesn’t like everyone hears it this way at all!

The whoa-oa-oa at the end of the chorus puts me in mind of Sam Cooke, a trick he deployed first on You Send Me. Has anyone noticed the similarity of the opening instrumental hook to Little Star/Fight For This Love?

Oh, and – as I read another barbed reference to them – am I really on my own in considering Big Fun’s Can’t Shake The Feeling amongst SAW’s best?

Fair comment. Though it sounds like it’s only the one ‘Fun, sounding like Lou Christie on horseback (in shakiness and pitch rather than Milk Tray gallantry) – the bulk of the vocals are by more than competent femme sessioneers. Vox for me are overridden by the house piano build and the post-chorus Psycho-string sweep. It careers ever upwards, thrillingly, like the Hollies’ similarly maligned I’m Alive.

So, still just me is it?

Why is she grinning her way through the video when the lyrics are about a break-up? Mindless.

This is just ok. Personally I think S/A/W were long beyond their peak by 1989. Big Fun* were a travesty (and partly a forewarning of the Jedwards of this world), The Reynolds Girls sole hit carried a worthy sentiment but sounded not just disposable but disposed-of and a certain red-haired singer we should shortly be encountering was even more of a personality star than Kylie.

* In a similar vein to Big Fun were the duo Yell. A blond one and a dark-haired one whose cover of Instant Replay did rather well and then it turned out the one with dark hair was about 32 and had like a whole football team of children or something like that.

@39, “Does anyone prefer the Manics or Nick Cave collaborations to HOYH?”

Ooo, me, me! I only heard “Some Kind of Bliss” a few months back and it was stuck in my head for weeks. As for the Cave collaboration, it’s neither’s finest hour, but it’s fine. This, on the other hand, I couldn’t remember at all, and a week after watching the YouTube video I still couldn’t tell you how it goes; I gave it 4.

I handed over real money to Tower Records for ‘Some Kind Of Bliss’, which is a cute little pop song for all its indie clothes. The only quibble I ever had was its stringing out of the final chorus for about four minutes.

‘Hand On Your Heart’ was a bit plain for me. 1989 was only about fancying Kylie; 1990 I fancied her AND bought all the records.

I think you are on your own re: Big Fun, Wichita Lineman, dear. Even as an 11-year-old cauldron of SCREECHY HORMONES JORDAN KNIGHT LOOK AT ME SCREAM, I didn’t get the song, and I still don’t get it. Utterly spot-on dissection of the HOYH chorus and how it works, though – it’s incredibly melancholic, desperately, even, and that’s something I sensed back then that only gains power over time.

Certainly nothing wrong with Select, Anto. In fact if anyone has a run from the start to around ’96 I’m in the market for buying them.

I’ll quietly put my copy of Can’t Shake The Feeling away in my drawer of ‘secret’ things.

The Britpop years were the golden age of giving away free sweets with magazines. Smash Hits seemed to have some sort of deal going in promoting experimental brands at the time. By far the worst were a sub-TicTacs version of peppermints that tasted of soap and carried a warning on the label that they had laxative properties. I still ate them, though.

#31 on the hook, yes, now you mention it.

On Big Fun. Oh no. Truly atrocious (although I almost had a soft spot for one of their singles, was it called “Handful of Promises”, that was so so so terribly bad that it was almost, but not quite, good). Their duet with Sonia was at least semi-listenable, I suppose.

But who would have guessed at the time that the fluorescent jackets that they sported would 20 years later be adopted as a sign of authority by police officers and general elf-and-safety-conscious types