Time has not been especially kind to Enigma: “Sadness Part 1” sounds today like an almost parodically generic chillout track. Its mysteries have evaporated – what remains is a ponderous mix of particularly banal elements. Gregorian chant? Synthesised pan pipes? Give over!
Were the group more impressive at the time? Are they a victim of their success? After all, juxtaposition relies for its effect on the idea that its components don’t generally fit together – if they slot in place too well then everyone does it. The worst thing that can happen to a track like “Sadness Part 1” is that it starts to sound natural – and this is pretty much what’s happened. Back in 1991 though, with ambient a buzzword again, there was a sense that even if Enigma weren’t touched by genius they were operating at least within shouting distance of credibility.
What sunk them back then is curiously what redeems them a little now, when their music feels so threadbare. Everything on this track is naff, but the breathy vocals – “Sade, dis-moi!” – are at least a different kind of naff, putting the single into a tradition of low-budget Euro-schlock as much as a New Age lineage. (The track was called “Sadeness” – as in the Marquis – in its European releases). Chains, cowled figures, monkish chanting, a damsel gasping – this is an old-school Gothic sensibility, and always welcome. But as with all Enigma’s other aesthetic borrowings – the track reminds me a bit of Lil Louis, of Dead Can Dance, of The Orb – there’s something reserved and half-hearted about the execution, and “Sadness Part 1” peters where it ought to peak.
Score: 4
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I can never for the life of me remember how this goes until I play it, at which point I instantly recognise it. If that make sense…
That said, I enjoy it for the curious little chart topper that it was. I like Return To Innocence a lot more.
The female vocals on Sadeness Pt 1 are provided by German pop diva Sandra, whose solo material is cut from a very different cloth indeed. Her signature tune (I’ll Never Be) Maria Magdalena should really have crossed over here, it’s fantastically ridiculous.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qw-h2VvUE4Q&feature=fvst
I *really* disliked this at the time. It sounded like the laziest record in the world, formed – as Tom says – of interesting elements taken from other recent records, the Wetherall mix (IIRC) of the Monday’s Hallelujah, especially.
Even so, that doesn’t quite explain its capacity to have enraged me. I think that I felt in some way that the monks deserved better than to be turned into background music. Sampled into something ecstatic or disturbing, fair enough, but not this watery puddle of nothing.
#2 Watch: A week of Seal’s ‘Crazy’. A bit overly smooth, perhaps, but it still carries an epic, romantic, charge within it.
I remember there was a lot of talk around this time of the 1990s being a more ‘spiritual’ decade, after the materialistic 80s and this along with a few of the songs before and after might be cited as evidence of the British public willing this to be the case – albeit in a somewhat superficial fashion.
The drum pattern which had seemed so fresh on ‘Back to Life’ and other productions sounds like a bontempi organ preset by this stage and really drags this down. I quite enjoyed the video though.
In full agreement with both review and score.
A lot of pop singles might be turned into muzak at some point but this is one which frankly just is muzak. Simply a load of things that are suppossed to signify ” atmosphere ” shuffled together and offering little in sum bar a biege flatness.
As you can see from the picture included with the article, this song is actually called “Sadeness part 1”.
I agree this is a weak #1. Got all the way up to #5 in the USA too.
Shave the beard off and stick a knife in his hand and that monk could be in Don’t Look Now.
This track has been slightly ruined for me by the fake trailer for Satan’s Alley at the start of Tropic Thunder (Robert Downey Junior and Tobey Maguire play homosexual Gregorian monks). I don’t think it was used to soundtrack the trailer – but with the monk chanting and so on, all I can think of when I hear this is Tobey Maguire fondling Robert Downey Junior’s rosary.
With this faux-ecclesiastical outing on the coat-tails of Iron Maiden’s Number One of the Beast, immediately preceded by Harry Webb’s thirteenth number one you’d surely be forgiven for thinking there was some sort of spiritual war being raged for the souls of the UK record buyer going on at the time?
Anyway, as far as ‘Sadeness’ goes (I can understand the pun in the title even if it does put me in mind of Sade the smooth operator rather than the celebrity kink), I’d sooner have this than the too too numerous knock-offs that followed in a rapidly-growing New Age music market, bleeding effortlessly into the Ambient sections of the music shops with their various Gregorian-a-longa trance cuts. What irks me about Enigma’s track is the clumsy cutting of it; it has the sound of a track being retrofitted into a single by way of an awkward fade out at the end. Was follow-up ‘Mea Culpa’ any better?
The classic sign of a genre coming to its natural end is the novelty record, whether it’s Monster Mash (Twist/dance craze) or Jilted John (punk), and this was the fag end of Movement 98. Keep On Movin’ and Sadeness were its bookends. It wasn’t awful, just weak, definitely pretentious, and detached from the Balearic beats that made 98bpm an event.
It sounds thoroughly lifeless now. I wonder if it was meant to be a 90s version of Je T’Aime? Sex with a sadistic monk??
As for the early 90s ‘spiritual’ thing, there were lots of eco-aware ads on tv for the first time; this record is a musical equivalent of Simple soap.
This seemed very much like an accidental number one having been around the Top 5 for quite a while before Cliff and Iron Maiden’s interventions.
I think it’s alright and Michael Cretu is the only Rumanian to make number one just over a year after Ceaucescu’s demise. He did bleed the formula dry with their subsequent releases though.
Actually, I can easily explain why I hated this record at the time – it was played endlessly on the radio to the point where any charms it had died a steady death (my parents listened to Essex Radio at this point, and that station loved it, with the morning jock Gavin McCoy bragging that he always knew it was going to be a hit). A record being heavily playlisted is not a sin in itself, obviously, but in the middle of January with the dark early mornings, this felt depressing and somnambulant, and got the day off to an appalling start. If the track is anything, it’s a midnight cocoa moment, not an “Out of bed and off to work with you” piece of pop.
Clearly not everyone agreed, however. A friend of mine shared a house with somebody who used to insist on playing it full blast every morning to “wake her up in the right mood”. After a few months he had a temper tantrum and whilst she was out, knocked the offending piece of vinyl off the cupboard her stereo sat on and down the back of the radiator. Looking back that seems a bit unnecessary and harsh, but I can almost understand where he was coming from.
Listening to it again, I’m struck by how downright inoffensive it is. It sounds like the soundtrack for a luxury chocolate bar advert rather than a proper single, and my main feeling is one of total indifference. I suspect it was bought largely by people who felt they were buying into something new and unusual, people who might not otherwise have been aware of The Orb or The KLF’s “Chill Out”, let alone Eno. It is to ambient what “San Francisco (Be Sure To Wear Flowers In Your Hair)” was to psychedelia.
What fascinates me about it now is the fact that it seems like a genuine freak one-off chart topper. I can’t think of a number one which even comes close to it. Robert Miles’ “Children” was, I suppose, almost close enough in style to count, but that only reached number two, and I do actually have a soft spot for that one.
I dunno, call me perverse, but I quite liked the idea of having a song about the death of the Marquis deSade being the christmas number one (and it nearly was)…
Alt: “Hey, it certainly reminds me of the last time I had Sex in a church”
I assume Sadeness was influenced by records like this, which was a big summer 1990 tune. Still sounds rather rich and chocolatey, though, unlike Enigma’s dry packet of Cadbury’s Options.
Another thumbs up for Robert Miles’ Children. Didn’t that also have some rather pretentious ‘meaning’ to it, beyond mere new age twiddliness?
Is this the first ever foreign language number one? Even if it isn’t, it’s certainly the only one in two foreign languages.
Wish I’d known about the existence of the Sandra song mentioned by #1 before – I’d have tried to sneak that through when I was managing Romania in Europop 2008
Re #14. No, that would be ‘Je T’Aime… Moi Non Plus’.
Not much to add to what’s already been said beyond that the vaguely world music/ambient cross-over track was kind of a fixture throughout the ’90s – every new chain store from Anthopologie down to Starbucks did a roaring trade in related compilation cds. I’d count Enya’s #1 before this as part of that emerging nexus, and weren’t Mysterious Voices of Bulgaria stuff big in a kind of novelty way around this time too? At any rate, Deep Forest’s Sweet Lullaby was probably the popular peak of it where I was in the US a few years later. It always helps to have a good vid – the Deep Forest one by Tarsem (of Losing my religion and The Cell semi-fame) was astounding and was in v. high rotation on MTV. Sadeness’s vid. is new to me, but it’s pretty slick – pretty good for the time cgi sets etc. and calvin klein model monks. Not as good as AiC’s grunge monks with sewed-shut eyes from the time, but they’ll do (haw haw). Agree:
4
Ambient and chillout were watchwords for the ’90s and this was neither of those things. “Sad(e)ness Part 1” suffered from being a euro-facsimilie of the kind of groove that Soul 11 Soul and Neneh Cherry had made their own.
This is the kind of music that would have been background music at the wrong kind of dinner parties, long before the swingers and the chattering classes could sink their teeth into Portishead’s “Dummy”. Enigma are the somewhat tenuous link between born again New Pop casualty, Sal Solo and Songs Of Praise favourites, Libera. Libera’s eponymous 1995 debut single borrows heavily from “Sadeness Part 1”, and some of that same choir were recruited for Solo’s sickly-sweet “San Damiano” in ’87. So in essence, this is sandwiched between Heaven and Hell, as it were. Yup, Paradise is truly lost.
As #10 hints, this got to the top of the pile here simply by being the top seller in a soft market. Its 6-4-4-2-1 ascent repeated that of Dreadlock Holiday, which was another that found itself atop when the old #1 declined too sharply and – for one week and one week alone – there was nothing else to step in.
Lots of chart oddities here, but apparently at the time this had been the “fastest” selling single of all-time in Germany. (“Chart Book 1991”, Spotlight Publications, London, 1991).
Not that I ever watch softcore porn, but if I did, I’d notice that this tune is still frequently ripped off as background music in sex scenes.
This is a 3 for me, it was funny to pronounce it Shadayness but that’s about it. The itchy synth sound is unpleasant. I can’t imagine anyone ever needing to put this on autorepeat, it plays and it ends and that’s enough.
Re #13: I don’t know about its deeper meaning, but I’m pretty sure TOTP censored (i.e. blotted out) the title of the song during its top 10 round-up – “and at number x, it’s Robert Miles”, no song title – in the wake of the Dunblane massacre. Seems like an early example of “POLITIKUL CORRECTNESS GONE MAD!!1!” in the light of the internet-driven era we’ve enjoyed since then, but hey. Does anyone else remember this or is it just my imagination playing tricks on me?
Re: #6 – The song was called ‘Sadeness’ on release in Europe but was changed to ‘Sadness’ for release in the UK, for some reason (as mentioned in Tom’s review) – The record sleeve must be the release from another country, and we should really call it “Sadness” as that’s the name of the record people in the UK bought. Anyway, it’s not an important point really.
The song itself is a clear victim of the process where exotic sounds become tedious and predictable through repeated exposure, in this case through a million massage CDs and lazy soundtrack compilers. What I’m wondering is whether it sounded much fresher at the time, or whether this process was well underway already. Unfortunately I was only 11 so can’t remember.
I love a lot of ambient music (it’s one of the few genres I can share with my wife) but it’s a rare artist who can avoid sounding cheesy without veering into discordant sounds. Hammock and Eluvium are the only post 2000s examples I can think of right now.
The irony to note here is that New Age muzak, and other New Age paraphernalia, are principally, if not exclusively, consumed by the kind of person for whom spare time is an ample luxury, namely, amply rich people. Those who really need stress relief tend to find it in other, more destructive ways. “Sadness” indicates the benign, vacant tabula rasa which would become, in spurious and gratuitous misreading of the KLF, “chillout” music, the equivalent of an ice cube being gently lowered into a less pink Martini. Enigma was Romanian synth musician Michael Cretu, who had been around since the seventies, and “Sadness” sets it all up – the soon-to-be-obligatory Gregorian chants and whalesong, the polite Soul II Soul beat (though who would dance to it?), the prettiness which could only arise from a profound misunderstanding of “Moments In Love,” and a modest attempt to “subvert” expectations as a Dire Straits guitar revs up, synth chords pile up in a “threatening” manager and a Stars In Your Eyes Gainsbourg wannabe mumbles “Sade, dit moi…pourquoi le sang pour le plaisir…le plaisir sans l’amour?…/Sade, es-tu diabolique ou divin?” “Sade-ness,” you see – and the triple deep breaths which the female singer takes immediately after that question answer it…this is shag pile music masquerading as enlightenment, and about as enigmatic as Ernest Saves Christmas.
At the time, i thought this was the greatest song i’d ever heard, being 6 and Catholic to hear the monk stuff on it was amazing. Also how weird it was and not knowing what the words were. It was replaced three years later when i heard Return To Innocence and thought once again that it was the greatest song in the world.
Re 18: more freaky chart stats, please!
Re 20: I don’t remember this (can Billy help?), but IIRC Children was meant to be “about” orphans in the Yugoslav wars.
Replying to myself, after having a quick compare and contrast on Youtube, it is actually Sadness used on the fake trailer at the start of Tropic Thunder.
I should probably be ashamed that I bothered to look that up.
This track isn’t much cop though is it? The comments pointing it out as bland, beige, muzak, etc, are all pretty much spot on for me – though I’ve never really been able to wrap my head around ambient. I think the most ambient I have ever understood is Autobahn (and I dare say someone will be able to explain to me that Autobahn is not really ambient).
Ahhh, Enigma. This is taking me right back to my first online music discussions, where this band and this track in particular featured far too heavily. That was because the venue was the Mike Oldfield mailing list, and the early ’90s was the moment Oldfield’s musical quality fell off a cliff – or a second cliff, if you were the sort who believed that it fell off a first cliff a decade earlier, like a stepped waterfall. And Michael Cretu was partly to blame.
Cretu produced a track on Oldfield’s 1987 album Islands, and the two were (and presumably still are) friends. In fact, when Enigma first appeared, there was some speculation that it was an Oldfield pseudonym until the facts emerged. Some of us found that notion questionable, though, because Oldfield’s then-current album was an hour-long track of heavy-rock instrumental world music in the same vein as 1976’s Ommadawn; and his next, in 1991, was full of mutant Jazz, with Courtney Pine making a guest appearance. No particular sign, then, that he was about to head into the land of mellow.
Then came 1992’s Tubular Bells II, which started well in the demo stage but had the rough edges stripped off by producer Trevor Horn and ended up a bit too smooth for some tastes, though it still had its moments. Where things really went wrong was with its 1994 successor, The Songs of Distant Earth, a concept album based on an Arthur C. Clarke novel, which featured… whalesong. And Gregorian bloody chant. Monks in space!
For the first time, Oldfield sounded like a follower of musical fashion, which whatever one thought of his previous work was not a charge that could easily have been made before. The rip-off was too obvious, especially given the known friendship between the two. The album had its charms, and I preferred it to Cretu’s, but as a sign to of things to come it was a worry; and, with one or two exceptions in the late 1990s, a worry borne out by his subsequent work. No more heavy-guitar world music from our Mike; just lots of chillout with occasional techno flourishes.
So as the years went on I bore an increasing grudge against Curly M.C., as Cretu styled himself, as if he were solely to blame for Oldfield’s cosy musical choices. At some point I had actually succumbed to peer pressure (the peers being that mailing list) and picked up a second-hand CD of the first Enigma album; but at some later point I realised that I couldn’t stand it, and sold it on. I don’t even have an mp3 of Sadeness lurking on my hard disk any more.
That said, it wasn’t the most offensive of tracks; it was more that a whole album of it was about 45 minutes too much. I should give it another listen, but I’m too busy enjoying the new Elbow album right now, so I’ll come back a little later to give it a score.
I’m going to have to agree with 4. I wanted to nudge it to 5 for being the blueprint for so much other music in the 1990s… but it’s not a blueprint I can stomach, really, and not a track I want to listen to again for a while.
By the way, the sidebar link to the “On Marks Out of Ten” post has broken in all of the site reorganising you chaps have been doing. It’d be handy to have that back again.
While this song leaves me cold and nothing much besides, I think I actually hate Return To Innocence. Whatever kind of singing it is they sampled is nails-down-a-blackboard excrutiating. This may be my problem rather than Enigma’s though.
@16 Deep Forest – I liked that at the time, and even bought the CD single; better than this, although it’s also probably dated quite badly. [One YouTube visit later… yes, it has.]
The trouble with those world/electronic hybrids was that they always left me wishing for the original world music, not the standard synth guff laid over the top of it. There were a couple of Pacific Islands-inspired Deep Forest knock-offs in the late 1990s, which I bought hoping they would capture some of the feel of music I had encountered as a postgrad student that decade; but in the end I realised that what I really wanted was a whole album full of Cook Islands drumming or Maori hakas, not a few minutes of each padded out with white Aussie/Kiwi blokes on synths.
To “Sweet Lullaby”‘s credit, the last few seconds do feature the original sample unadorned.
To hear this sort of thing done properly, listen to Kate Bush’s The Sensual World, full of the Bulgarian voices so popular at the time, but wonderfully blended with her own musical sensibility. My first KB album, and possibly still my favourite.
I liked R Wayne’s version of “Return To Innocence.”
When I first heard Sadness/Sadeness some time during the arse end of 1990 my reaction was one of hilarity. It truly seemed as if someone was taking the piss. Over the previous 18 months ‘that’ Soul II Soul beat had appeared on virtually everything – good records..bad records..indie bands’ records..shite Phil Collins’ covers. Now some bright spark had used it as a backdrop for a load of Gregorian chanting! Twenty years on, I still find it hard to take this seriously.
That said, I’m sure that if Sadness had been a one-off I would regard it now as an fondly-remembered freak hit. The pity is that it became a blueprint that Cretu (and others) would make careers out of.
As far as I can tell this record has not even been reclaimed by nu-Balearic which is as good an indicator of its quality as anything.
# 24 I thought it had something to do with out-of-their-tree youngsters getting mown down on a busy road outside one of the main clubs in Ibiza. I found it difficult to muster up much sympathy to be honest.
It appears to have been inspired by both.
Again, a little bit of thought before posting would not have gone amiss.
Not having been exposed to much in the way of “ambient”, and hearing this for the first time in nearly 20 years, I have to say I don’t find it bad at all. No doubt because I’m not so familiar with the genre as to recognise its clichés. Yes, the Soul II Soul beat had been greatly overused – maybe as much in three years as the Bo Diddley beat in as many decades – but the combination with the Gregorian chant that isn’t anchored in anything to do with the beat and is carrying on in its own world while the beat goes on in this world, works nicely for me. Great as a single dose, and different enough to be a classically “January” number one but, as Rory says, maybe even a whole album would be 45 minutes too much of it.
So Cretu was the first Romanian at number one? Pity it wasn’t Gheorghe Zamfir back in ’76, but a blessing that a couple of more recent Romanians haven’t emulated him, if you know what I mean. (Wouldn’t have minded the leather-clad lovely who represented them at Eurovision last year, mind you.)
maybe even a whole album would be 45 minutes too much
There was an album, and it got to number one, so there’s another burden on my forthcoming old age.
I am inclined to disagree with people a little about this record: too busy to say what I’m fond of it today, but will try and remember to scribble something during the week.
Unless the “synth chords piling up in a threatening manager” that punctum mentions scare me off! Is this threatening manager you, Marcello?
urgh I meant to say “manner.” Or maybe I meant “manor” as in Midsomer Murders with *episode’s most famous guest star* up to no good in the pantry.
Don’t talk to me about bloody Midsomer. That place had a higher murder rate than Johannesburg. A stockbroker’s daughter on a pony? Deadly, man! Only Cabot Cove, Maine was more dangerous than this place.
And I thought Stockwell was dodgy…
I have spent all these years thinking that “Sadeness” was an annoying typo!
#23 a couple of other odd chart runs I remember – Björk’s “It’s Oh So Quiet”, which went 9-8-9-8-4-4-4-8-19-29-39. And very recently, Katy B & Ms Dynamite’s “Lights On” which went 4-11-4-4-9-11-etc.
#18 – that’s interesting, I’d somehow convinced myself that this wasn’t a one-week wonder, and spent at least a couple of weeks at the top. This is obviously either the ITV Chart Show or the Network Chart playing tricks with my brain. (Well, possibly a combination of that and the song’s ubiquity at one point). I wonder where it finished in the list of best-sellers of the year? It seems to have slumped to number three the week after its little breather at the top, so I suspect that it may not even have sold enough copies to pick up a silver disc.
Also, it’s likely to be of interest to nobody, but I’ve just remembered that there was a heavy metal band based in my area at this point called Enigma. They were all in their early twenties and I remember them being grossly offended at the name clash, which they seemed to take incredibly personally, especially as they’d only recently got some art college student to design a logo for them when this went to number one. I think they changed their name in the end, presumably to avoid the kerfuffle which might have been caused by people turning up to Essex pubs expecting to see some Gregorian monks and Peruvian pan pipers on stage.
@36, Punctum. More burdens: I just checked, and Enigma’s second album also made #1. I’ve actually got that 2nd album on cd (picked up somewhere 2nd hand for almost nothing), but have hardly listened to it – it’s really dreadful. The cd includes a foldout card for Official Fan Merchandise. T-shirts, sweat shirts, bomber jackets (but no monk hoodies!), caps, and wristwatches (black, full color artwork) yours for only $US 48.99. Let us pray.
Whatever his other crimes, Cretu — a Romanian — is surely deploying ROMANIAN panpipes, rather than Peruvian. As Erithian points out above, the panpipes were brought to the world at large in the 70s by fellow-Romanian Gheorghe Zamfir.
And they were invented by goatfoot Pan at the dawn of time: the ancient Greeks called them the syrinx: the fact that its sound has so dwindled in referential oomph is really our parochialism, not the instrument’s.
#41. Indeed, ‘Sadness’ was top of the other (ILR/ NME) charts for three weeks.
There was a previous Enigma, who had two hits in 1981, ‘Ain’t No Stopping’ (No. 11) and ‘I Love Music’ (No. 21). I’m guessing that they were funk or soul, and I’d bet that I’d prefer them to the nineties Enigma.
@19 I think it was Holly Johnson who used to refer to the singer of ‘Smooth Operator’ as the Marquis de Sade.
You had to hear him say it for the full effect, of course.
#41. It was 37th in the year end chart of 1991, which made it appear like a pretty poor-selling number one … though not the lowest ranked of the year. Add to that the facts that it had appeared at #80 in the year end for 1990, and achieved the unheralded status of Christmas no.4 in 1990 and its overall sales will have been ok.
#45. How much would you bet you’d prefer Enigma 1981 to Enigma 1990? The 1981 hits were medleys of disco hits in the heyday of the medley … They are very hard to acquire (or at least they were in the immediate pre-download days) because they never make it onto retrospectives and did not make it on to (m)any Ronco and K-Tel compilations at the time. So if you want to own the recordings, you have to find the original singles.
#34 Mr P, I think most of us do know where to find wikipedia but it’s actually more fun and healthier to give our memory cells some exercise.
# 47 If I remember rightly those Enigma medleys were awful and not worth acquiring. Wasn’t the main guy from Shakatak involved with them (deliberately not consulting wikipedia to find out) ?
I’ve found the 1981 Enigma, who did indeed have Skakatak connections –
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wONfE8cUy44
– Wow, this is poor stuff! The segue between ‘Hi Ho Silver Lining/ Jump To The Beat/ Baby Love’ is perhaps the lowlight, though the sessionwoman approximation of Debbie Harry’s ‘Rapture’ rap is also striking.
Thanks Billy