Instead Clarke and Moyet had to record the album in the early mornings with studio. Turning up around 5 or 6 a.m. And working through until 11 a.m. At eric's rar, yazoo upstairs at eric's cd, yazoo upstairs at eric's youtube, yazoo. Yazoo upstairs at eric's amazon, yazoo upstairs at eric's zip, yazoo upstairs at.
(#308: 19 January 1985, 1 week)
Track listing: Love Resurrection/Honey For TheBees/For You Only/Invisible/Steal Me Blind/All Cried Out/Money Mile/TwistingThe Knife/Where Hides Sleep
The watchword for 1985was: put away childish things. We must all act like adults. Play pop responsibility,even if you wake up one morning and find that it’s not pop at all. Watch theChristmas 1985 edition of Top Of The Popswith its endless procession of lacquered, mulleted ballads and just two uptemposongs and wonder how any of it would have appealed to anybody under thirty.Childish things were discouraged and even kept out of the charts when possible.
And so were genuine art andemotion, or maybe they were just cleverly suppressed. I enjoyed listening toAlison Moyet’s recent Desert Island Discs,in which she was more than candid about her agoraphobia, her bipolar disorderand her near-complete lack of self-esteem. She is the greatest female whitesoul singer Britain has produced; anybody could listen to “Invisible,” the onetrue song on “Alf”, and know that –her roars and growls (“BOIL-ing mad!,” “It RINGS and RINGS!”) put her in theBrel/Joplin class and it is easy to see how the song’s composer, Lamont Dozier,could as easily have given it to Levi Stubbs.
But I also note that thesolo Moyet chose to go with CBS because she liked how neat their offices were,and “Alf” is for most of the time too neat (those inverted commas are assoaked in meaning as “Heroes”). Thereis nothing wrong with her singing and lyrics, both of which are magnificentthroughout, whether they deal with impotence (“Love Resurrection”), politics (“StealMe Blind,” “Money Mile”) or emotional betrayal (everything else). They deservefar better, however, than the wall of plasticity that is Swain and Jolley’smusic and producing. All too often we get rejected backing tracks forBananarama (“Resurrection,” “Twisting The Knife”), Imagination (“Honey For TheBees”) and Spandau Ballet (most else); “For You Only” begins with promisingdarkness, but that soon dissipates into bland light.
There isn’t the symbiosisthat Moyet had with Vince Clarke; she sounds as if she is fighting to be heard,wanting to be touched and believed but knowing that the only way that will happenis if her music sounds like everything else on the radio in 1984-5. “Steal MeBlind” is moderately appealing gospel – the phrase “my friends” has rarelysounded more sinister – but the closing “Where Hides Sleep” summarises the record’scentral problem; a minor-key waltz in the same vein as 1982’s “Winter Kills”but with delicacy and poignancy replaced by boring, impact-free drums andkeyboards. “You’re tormenting me,” she sings as the song and record fade out,but I suspect her main constituency was women, the female equivalent of thedisillusioned Phil Collins fans, who sensed her own sense of inadequacy, felther pain and could identify and empathise with her. So begins a rather glum Then Play Long year of mocksophistication and ingrained conservatism disguised as modest adventure. It wasenough to make anybody want to act like a child and turn the feedback up todistortion point.