CHICANE ft BRYAN ADAMS – "Don't Give Up"

We’ve talked about artists getting number ones one single too late – e.g. the Manics with “If You Tolerate This…” rather than “A Design For Life” – but that’s not the sort of thing that should happen to trance acts.

And yet, playing Chicane’s glorious Clannad-sampling “Saltwater” then this, it seems impossible to conclude very much else. First 30 seconds of this sound like a cheap sports TV theme tune, and the rest doesn’t get much better. It’s such a production downgrade from “Saltwater” I can’t believe it’s the same people behind it, and even less that this came second.

This idea does indeed get done rather more in 2010s EDM, and that doesn’t help my view of the production on this – but it really does sound like a sketched-out cheap idea, a #fitspo soundtrack a decade before that was a thing and sounding even older than that.

I’d have given “Saltwater” a 9. The square root of that for “Don’t Give Up” is absolutely fair.

This song is representative of what tended to happen when an Ibiza-grade dance producer would have 2-3 hits over a short period – generally the production ‘hook’ that made the first record memorable would be redeployed over and over, with mild variations and diminishing returns. So that short staccato synth riff here has been semi recycled from Chicane’s previous hits Offshore and Saltwater, the same way ATB would constantly wheel out the pitch-bend guitar synth and (albeit earlier) all Robert Miles’ early hits use barely-distinguishable dream piano melodies.

I guess it’s the incongruity of Bryan Adams here that made this a number one over Chicane’s earlier outings – they’re all pretty bland, but at least Saltwater’s Clannad samples conjure up a sort of new agey atmosphere that this lacks.

I guess I’m in the minority here, as I had to YouTube “Saltwater” to be reminded of it. “Don’t Give Up”, though, was still embedded in my memory. Doesn’t mean it amounts to much, sadly.
Bryan Adams had had a last sniff of a genuine hit a year previously with that Mel C duet (and that was most probably why it was a hit in the first place), so having him on an Ibiza-grade trance record was certainly a coup. But as others already said, that’s pretty much what the song seems built upon. Enough to give it a #1 nonetheless, if only because the new release schedule was so meh – Tom Jones feat. Kelly Jones of the Stereophonics tearing through “Mama Told Me Not To Come” or a totally unremarkable single by Five weren’t exactly the biggest of contenders. Still, #’s 11 & 35 present us with true future jewels; Moby’s “Natural Blues” and Coldplay’s “Shiver”, respectively. Yes, the week Chicane was #1 was also the one where Chris Martin and his chums would have their first taste of the Top 40 circle.
Oh, and there’s also Kraftwerk’s “Expo 2000” theme tune at #27. But that’s not really one for the ages, is it?

The presence of Bryan Adams wasn’t enough to make this a US hit, although apparently it did reach #3 on the dance chart. Despite the digital treatment of Adams’ voice, it’s still recognizable to me, and I’m often one who doesn’t recognize voices as well as others. Of course I had already seen the credit before listening to the record, so who knows whether I would have recognized Adams otherwise.

The record does seem a bit understated for a number one, but I liked it enough to go back to it a couple days after first listen, so that makes it worth at least a 6/10 from me.

@#10 – Well, Bryan Adams’s career was already pretty much on autopilot in America by then. Besides, dance music wasn’t yet exactly big business there, even though I remember Basement Jaxx, Daft Punk and Faithless making some pretty serious moves towards America at the time. Daft Punk’s “One More Time” actually got to #61 on the Hot 100 in 2001, with some actual Top 40 airplay contributing to it. But that was as far as it got.

Agree that this was surely only a no 1 on the coattails of the vastly superior “Saltwater”. This, while not unpleasant, and in places even hypnotic, is eminently, completely, forgettable.

Best thing Bryan Adams did in the 2000s IMO -in 2002 in fact – play a walk-on part in a rather fantastic Russian film, “Dom Durakov” (House of fools), where he arrives in a storm at a lunatic asylum near the border of Chechnya to sing “Have You Ever Loved A Woman” to a female inmate who is obsessed with him and believe she is, in fact, his wife.

This, though – bland, bland, bland. 3

Saltwater is indeed amazing. “When you’re gone” (the duet with Mel C) is – not amazing, but a lot of rollicking miserable fun, the pop end of the country end of rock.

Am I right in thinking Bryan Adams has mostly given up music now and become a photographer?

I remember seeing a picture I liked somewhere, checking the photo credit and thinking: “Poor guy. He must be like Michael Bolton from Office Space.”

But no, it was the very same Bryan Adams, it turned out.

I agree with #3 regarding this being a hit of good band with less good track, but that said I did like Don’t Give Up at the time.

I first heard Chicane on a Cafe del Mar album before (in my experience) I felt the various Ibiza styles were completely commercialised.

(I felt a lot of good artists stopped being interersting in the late ’90s and started producing tracks for Ibiza compilations rather than their tracks being picked for Ibiza compilations).

I loved Offshore so I felt Don’t Give Up was just reward for previous work. Plus there was a lot of trance and house around in 2000, and similarly a number of good dance DJs at my radio station so it was all around me. Don’t Give Up just matched the vibe.

So yeah, a strong memory of this one.

When You’re Gone was a classic, despite the unusual approach of having both duetters sing every line of the song. I could easily have seen it as a number 1 record, and I’m sure it must have had a longer chart run than the average number 3 hit.

This, though, doesn’t seem very good. Maybe should have been called I’ve Given Up. The chorus lyrics aren’t so far away from Free by Ultra Nate, but where that was imperious, this is feeble.

I have heard the Pamela version. You’re right to be afraid.

I kind of enjoy this, but very much in a passive way. I found the video quite striking at the time. It was set in some kind of dystopian futureverse where identically dressed people performed mundane, repetitive tasks amid slogans like “eliminate imagination” and “repetition is education”. The story was that one of the drones furtively listens to the song and dreams of a better life. I always felt like it was a strange fit because lyrics aside the song sounded exactly like the sort of flavourless muzak that you’d be encouraged, if not forced to listen to under an oppressive regime.

My favourite Bryan Adams song is ‘I’m Ready’, incidentally.

This entry has really surprised me. I’d been harbouring under the illusion for years that “When You’re Gone” actually did get to number one, and that we’d be discussing it in due course (if it hadn’t slipped by unnoticed already). Instead, we’re talking about a Bryan Adams record which I not only didn’t know climbed to the summit, but actually have no memory of whatsoever.

Checking the date of its peak, however, it all makes sense. This marks the week of my return to London, to do an admin/ project buying job for an internet business connectivity company (a job, incidentally, I was so clueless at that I still cringe thinking about it now. I quit after five months ahead of the inevitable boot). Not only had I finally tuned away from Radio One at that point, my mind was also almost certainly almost entirely on other things, though I’m surprised the idea of a Trance record fronted by Adams didn’t at least grab my interest.

Listening to it now, I have almost nothing to add, apart from to say that it does sound like the template for the very worst of EDM that presently dogs the mainstream. It might sound wonderful to anyone who genuinely gets a buzz out of that material, but it’s not for me.

I have to wonder how often I’m going to be thrown by number ones in future. I started playing the online music shares game Popex (anyone remember that?) for a long while at this point, so I still watched the charts like a hawk – but there’s every chance I only heard some of the forthcoming one week number ones a few times, if indeed at all.

Oh, Silence was fantastic. And I own more albums by Sarah McLachlan than any other artist, which I can directly trace to the performance by the theatre director I mentioned before (and her being a fan of McLachlan’s work generally). I’d go on to sing McLachlan’s work in a singing lesson, but it was with a different teacher (in fact, it was Afterglow lead single “Fallen” that I did – by then McLachlan’s voice was lower, and/or she was writing lower in it, than before, to the point that “Fallen” caught out my classically-trained teacher).

This digression is far more interesting than “Don’t Give Up.”

Adams lost it as early as 95’s 18 Til I Die album, a plodding and disorganised mess which took five years to produce. It did, at least, produce several hit singles for him, albeit not ones the public would really be able to recall now. I remember be severely embarrassed by ‘Lets make a night to remember’, which bore moe similarities to the aforementioned Michael Bolton.
This was pleasant enough, but sounds woefully of its time today.
Adams released a covers album last year, along with a remaster of ‘Reckless’.

Perfectly pleasant trance track. A listen to Saltwater confirms that it’s much better, a listen to Offshore confirms “oh, THAT one” – I’m just impressed that I’m able to give Bryan Adams, in 2000, a ‘5’.

During one of his many pub-closing visits to London, Adams heard a remix which Chicane – a.k.a. dance producer Nick Bracegirdle, a.k.a. Disco Citizens – had done of one of his recent rocktastic hits, “Baby Put Your Sock In My Dregs” (oh all right then, it was “On Cloud Number 9”) and fancied having a go at making a dance record. This was an apt choice for Adams, since Bracegirdle specialised in ponderously gloopy trance anthems; the previous summer had seen him in the top ten with “Saltwater,” a collaboration with Maire Brennan Out Of Clannad. “Don’t Give Up,” which not only has nothing to do with Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush but also bears a title which Adams repeatedly mis-sings as “Don’t give it up” (of course he never specifies the nature of said “it”; perhaps he meant “buying up and shutting perfectly decent pubs”), gloomily goes around the standard trance treadmill with equally predictable memes (“Every day’s an uphill climb,” “You gotta do what you wanna do,” “Sale now on at a Land of Leather store near you,” &c.). Curiously, Adams’ heavily electronically-modified vocal – when it initially appeared on white label Bracegirdle deliberately kept the singer’s identity a secret – makes the record sound more like a belated Howard Jones comeback single. It’s enough to drive anyone to drink, provided you can find a pub he hasn’t yet bought up and/or boarded up.

You could probably do worse that the MoS to start with.

#37 https://www.allmusic.com/faq/bryan-adams

I’m no fan of Bryan Adams – I find him to be one of the most obnoxious artists of the 80s / early 90s and “Everything I Do” is a hideous record. However I do find his collaborations particularly enjoyable and as someone who has always loved dance music, was just starting to go clubbing regularly and also learning to DJ, I’ve always thoroughly enjoyed this record. It’s definitely one of Chicane’s cheesiest productions, and I doubt it would have come close to being a number one without the novelty of being a Bryan Adams collaboration, but it’s a favourite of mine from that era.

It’s also aged a lot better than many of Chicane’s commercial hits. It’s most definitely better than “Saltwater” which, although it was great at the time, always seemed like a lazy mash-up of the Clannad sample with Lucid’s “I Can’t Help Myself” – and feels even more so now. Certainly not one of Nick Bracegirdle’s better productions.

Showing my terminal uncoolness yet again, but I do have a lot of time for Bryan Adams – I loved When You’re Gone and The Only Thing That Looks Good On Me Is You as a kid, Reckless is a terrific album and even the Robin Hood song is very good, if overplayed.

This, though, is just dull and I keep forgetting it exists. And in Chicane terms, it’s no Saltwater. 4.