Omargeddon #34: Ensayo De Un Desaparecido

Before the pandemic normalised my working week with most days spent WFH as standard, I’d often stream Spotify through the TV. I’m not entirely sure how I managed this trick, since the last time I tried, the TV wasn’t having any of it (or perhaps it was the app that was throwing a strop). Either way the solution wasn’t immediately apparent within three minutes, the maximum time I’m willing to give to troubleshooting IT problems before throwing in the towel with disgust. 

Though that habit feels like one from a lifetime ago, I have a distinctly clear memory of listening to Ensayo De Un Desaparecido on a Saturday morning, specifically, the moment I realised that it was a complete reworking of Xenophanes. I was moved to pull the lever of happiness* and nearly launched into a solo dance of joy. Unfortunately, that joy was almost immediately crushed like so many generic cornflakes pummelled into dust for crappy homemade granola bars, because I had no one to be the Larry to my Balki.

Since then, I’ve become accustomed to wearing headphones clamped on for the best part of the day. I’m either at home and noise-cancelling the ambient sounds of the washing machine, leaf-blowers and the like, or at the office and cancelling out the ambient sounds of chattering colleagues’ Teams calls. There are obvious cons to this self-contained aural bubble, but I do honestly believe that some music demands to be experienced via headphones for the intimacy and seclusion they afford that external speakers can’t provide.  

Ensayo is the epitome of headphones albums and one that I’ve been obsessed with for quite a while. It dominated my Spotify Wrapped to the point where I posited that my propensity to listen to it daily (and sometimes twice-daily) might qualify me for residence in some kind of a home. I remain firmly of the belief that Xenophanes cannot be much improved upon, but Ensayo reworks this material with crystalline attention to detail, delivering a sublime juxtaposition of stark and densely layered material. If forced to adhere to a traditional ranking system, I would mark this as one my shifting #1 ORL solo records.

MCFLY – “5 Colours In Her Hair”

#977, 10th April 2004

McFly were Busted friends and affiliates, and refreshed the earlier band’s ailing formula with sixties pixie dust – chanted do-do-doo harmonies and a sunshine disposition conjuring a spirit of Monkee business. But their retro aesthetic isn’t just designed to evoke teenage good times – there’s a hint of classicism in there too. McFly were boys, and they were a band, but they worked to give the impression that those two words’ proximity was just a happy coincidence and instead we were in the presence of Songwriting Talent.

That promise was occasionally kept. McFly’s hits lack the likable crassness of Busted, and mostly lack the energy too. But there’s a crispness to their power-pop borrowings, an easy, confident tunefulness most British bands struggle to access. The gap between McFly and, say, Kaiser Chiefs is social more than it is musical: different fans, different lyrical priorities, but a similar commitment to bouncy guitar pop like the stuff your mum danced to.

USHER ft LIL JON & LUDACRIS – “Yeah”

#976, 27th March 2004

We’ve got used to seeing R&B singers in command of their tracks – the beats and music arranging themselves around a star’s performance, discreetly ensuring the best possible setting for their voice. That’s especially been the case for male R&B performers, whose silky confidence or swagger generally gets a performance-enhancing shot from the producers.

“Yeah!” gives us something different. The production here dominates and intoxicates – that repeating pair of 4-note figures played on synths loud enough to be bullhorns; the slow hammer of the beat and whomp of the bass; the shouts of Lil Jon in his hypeman role. This is crunk’n’B, a hard, deep, minimal sound built for the club and built to turn any space where it’s played loud enough into the club. And on the floor of the club, stardom always has to be earned.

DJ CASPER – “Cha Cha Slide”

#975, 20th March 2004

“Land Of 1000 Dances” is not a census, it’s a promise – that as long as there is music and there are dancefloors, fresh dances will be found. The pleasure of so much pop lies in those new moves, the routines which attach themselves to songs by design or accident. You can’t usually work out the moves just by listening – there’s no clue in the grooves of Whigfield’s “Saturday Night” that the song has a special dance, but the dance is inextricable from the love so many people have for it. A bespoke dance, learned by seeing then doing, is the physical manifestation of the joyful communion pop creates simply by lots of different people loving the same thing at the same moment. It’s like the world’s easiest initiation ceremony.

BRITNEY SPEARS – “Toxic”

#974, 13th March 2004

The first thing you notice about “Toxic” is the strings – urgent, stabbing, a shock of treble. The string bursts compress a riff into a couple of seconds, turning its curling snatch of melody into a red alert, a warning sign on a system out of control. Something is happening. Something is wrong. But it doesn’t feel wrong.

PETER ANDRE – “Mysterious Girl”

#973, 6th March 2004

The history of number ones is a history of answers to the question – “Who has the power to make hit records happen?” The labels? Radio stations? TV? The fans? Balances shift this way and that, but some constants remain, and one of them is light entertainment. British pop is a body in a long, irregular orbit around the sun of BBC Light Entertainment and its commercial imitators.

BUSTED – “Who’s David?”

#972, 28th February 2004

Busted’s success belied an identity crisis. This manifested most obviously in Charlie Busted’s visible discomfort at playing the early funny stuff (let alone the later funny stuff), but it ran deeper than that. Were they a British boy band who happened to play diluted pop-punk rather than diluted R&B? Were they an actual pop-punk band who happened to be hot and fun and appeal to girls? Were they maybe even serious rock songwriters – well, as serious as Ash or Feeder – trapped in a Smash Hits and CD:UK world? “Who’s David?” – comfortably their worst ever single – feels like the product of these conflicting impulses.

SAM & MARK – “With A Little Help From My Friends”

#971, 21st February 2004

Sam Nixon and Mark Rhodes are one of the genuine success stories of reality TV pop. From the neutral’s perspective a large part of that success is that after this brief fling pop and ‘Smark’ left one another well alone. Instead theirs is a charming story: two young hopefuls enter Pop Idol, come second and third, and are smooshed together into a duo by a Simon Cowell needing a plan B after the Michelle affair.

Cowell’s instincts were half right. There’s no detectable on-record chemistry between Sam and Mark, but the two got on well enough to turn a moment into an 18-year career as kids TV presenters, DJs, celebrity contestants, and whatever else you need two likeable Northern lads for… assuming you can’t afford the other ones. Yes, Sam and Mark are very much the Leopard From Lime Street to Ant & Dec’s Spider-Man, but they’ve set their shoulders to that wheel unstintingly, and good for them.

LMC ft U2 – “Take Me To The Clouds Above”

#970, 7th February 2004

Legend has it that when U2 were finished making The Joshua Tree, they went to Kirsty MacColl, and asked her how the album should be sequenced. MacColl put the tracks in the order she liked them best, from her favourite to the worst (we don’t know where, or if, she drew the line between the good and the bad ones). “With Or Without You” came in third.

I like this story, not just for MacColl’s winning pragmatism but because she got it largely right. The Joshua Tree became U2’s breakthrough from stardom to megastardom partly because it opens with a trio of shimmering desert mirages which are somehow also stadium rock bangers, as fine a statement of “This is what we’re doing now” as any band has managed.

MICHELLE McMANUS – “All This Time”

#969, 17th January 2004

Each reality TV show number one so far asked and answered different questions about the format, as it grew and mutated well beyond its originators’ designs. Hear’Say were a dramatic proof of concept – lash a story to a record and it could sell millions. Will and Gareth showed you could trust the public and maybe even get a viable career artist out of it. Sneddon ran up against the limits of artistic freedom. Girls Aloud showed maybe those limits weren’t binding.

But it’s Michelle McManus, the second and final Pop Idol, that brings the first phase of reality pop to a close. She was a plump Scots twentysomething with the kind of unflashy belting voice that delights pubs up and down Britain – an approach to singing and performance which became the Achilles heel of reality pop. The public tended to love it on stage a hell of a lot more than the judges did. But they broadly shared said judges’ opinion on whether it was worth buying.