GEORGE MICHAEL AND ELTON JOHN – “Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me”
There are fantastic number one records which are over and done with in two minutes thirty, which is how long “Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me” takes to hit its chorus. A streamroller chorus, to be sure, given a chest-thumping delivery, but it’s near impossible to care. George Michael at this point was a defensive, self-conscious sort of pop star. He was all-too aware he’d been a teen idol, desperate to be part of the pop establishment at the exact point – poor George! – when that establishment was going ironic or weird or getting cold feet about the half-decade of wholemeal soul-pop it had just served up. He’d catch up in the end, but meanwhile this is a grim trudge of a single: you can hardly hear the song through the sound of mutually slapped backs.
Tom in Popular • 140 Comments
There’s an odd symmetry between this record and “The Fly”: Michael Jackson, like U2, was stratospherically famous and looking to make a push for new-decade relevance. Also like U2, the idea he hit on was making darkly personal songs out of a blend of dance music and rock. But he came at it from the opposite direction – in “Black And White” it’s the rock elements which are grafts, clumsy-seeming attempts to toughen a sound. 
Student idol Vic Reeves teams up with student favourites The Wonder Stuff for a student disco friendly cover of “Dizzy” which – going to University a year later – I unsurprisingly became utterly sick of. It was inescapable, or at least if you didn’t get “Dizzy” it was only because you’d been treated to the wretched “Size Of A Cow” instead. 
The Wikipedia article on Achtung Baby is illuminating in unexpected and glum ways. For a start, the demands of Wiki-style are never kind to projects which centre on ambiguity and every last bit of knowingness gets flatly ironed out. But more, the behind-the-scenes material – a boil-down of dozens of books, articles, and retrospectives – suggests what a ghastly and drawn-out process Not Being U2 was for U2. (My favourite factoid: how one proposed album title was Man - as opposed to Boy, you understand – before someone noticed this would squarely poleaxe the whole ‘not pompous any more’ look)
Sixteen Listens For Sixteen Weeks: An Everything I Do Liveblog
Like – I suspect – an awful lot of kids born in the 70s or 80s, I have taken part in a production of Joseph And His Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat. I did not play the lead – the Hamlet of pre-teen stage roles – instead I was Potiphar, the Egyptian merchant who catches Joe in the clutches of his lustful wife. He gets one line in the show, as follows:
The best thing about “I Wanna Sex You Up” is its bounce – the first swingbeat Number One (and so the first modern R’n'B number one in some sense) is full of springy confidence. Compare it to the New Kids’ hits from a year or so before and this is an altogether slicker proposition – the boyband and street music elements on those records were awkwardly cut together, whereas “I Wanna Sex You Up” feels unitary. The beat and samples here mesh with the crooning and pleading, and the whole thing feels deliciously light. At its heart New Jack Swing was an updating of doo-wop – groups of kids standing on imaginary corners, harmonising, playing off each other, serenading passing girls. And “I Wanna Sex You Up” has some of the weightlessness of doo-wop – that repeated “woo-oo-oo-oo-ooOOoo” hook an anti-grav belt round the song’s waist. 
The best of the year’s many film-tie ins, Cher goes at this girl group classic like a charging rhino. On the original – more restrained than this, obviously, but still a belter by 1964 standards – Betty Everett plays a self-righteous teen, convinced that a snog is the only way to prove her beau is The One. Cher, on the other hand, is singing this at least partly in her Mermaids character, an eccentric single mom (apparently – like most people, I didn’t see it). 
A treatise on individualism from Nik Kershaw, the pop philosopher who brought us “The Riddle”? Expectations raised! And “The One And Only” absolutely does not disappoint. “No one can be myself like I can / For this job I’m the best man / And while this may be true / You are the one and only you.” 
When I tell people I’m doing this blog they usually ask me what my favourite ever number one is. I have a stock answer – “Come On Eileen” – which is true often enough to pass muster. They also sometimes ask me what the worst number one ever is. No shortage of candidates, here! We’ve seen some of them already: the mawkish horror of Saint Winifreds, the gross precocity of Little Jimmy, the pathological bonhomie of Mallett. But “The Stonk” holds a special dread for me – it’s the only number one whose badness induces a reflex physical response, a kind of skin-creeping sensation of shame and repulsion. In the age of the Internet, your disgust reflexes can harden pretty easily – I’ve seen goatse and tubgirl and met them with a jaded shrug, but something about this forgotten little record just gets me in the guts. 