Category: Saturday Flashback

Saturday Flashback: Britney Spears – My Only Wish (This Year)

“Like all the clichés got mixed together.”

Tim: Of course Britney’s done a Christmas track. Way back at the start of her career, her label thought it’d be a good idea. Upsettingly there’s no video for it, but let’s have a listen…

Tom: Wow, they pushed the Christmas dial up to maximum on that from the very start, didn’t they?

Tim: They certainly did, and, while I’ve certainly heard worse, that’s a good minute and a half longer than it needs to be.

Tom: It’s like all the Britney and Christmas song clichés got mixed together. There’s even a “bay-beh, bay-beh” in there.

Tim: It is early Britney, recognisably so, and it pains me to say it’s not done all that brilliantly. It didn’t chart anywhere for the first eight years of it’s existence, and when it finally got going in 2008 it got to 34 in Denmark and 41 in Sweden. It finally hit the big time in America in 2011, sort of, climbing to the heady heights of 49 on the Holiday Charts, and the highest it’s ever climbed was 24, in, erm, South Korea.

Tom: That’s a resounding “meh” if ever I heard one, particularly for an artist of that scale.

Tim: So yes. Entirely generic Christmas muzak, really, which no-one would ever really choose to buy but might just make it onto the occasional compilation. Eight of them, in this case.

Finally, speaking of compilations, there are a lot of Christmas ones out there, but I don’t think I’ve every come across one where I didn’t know a single song. Until this one. And since there’s not a lot on right now, shall we explore it? Yes. YES WE BLOODY WELL SHALL.

Tom: Oh dear. Brace yourself, reader.

Saturday Flashback: Safri Duo – Samb Adagio

“Everything that’s good about that sound.”

Tim: Ah, you bring the Other Safri Duo track.

Tom: Bit of a rough version of the radio edit on YouTube here, but let’s head back to the early 2000s, and remember two percussionists who were originally intending to do classical music.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QADrAXVaqSA

Tom: They were the biggest Danish musicians since Aqua, and still one of the biggest trance acts to break through to the mainstream. This is everything that’s good about that early 2000s euphoric trance sound.

Tim: It is, it really is.

Tom: I still want to spend hours in a club dancing like a loon to songs just like this. I just wish they hadn’t mixed ridiculous crowd noise in, though.

Tim: Yeah, but if you’re spending hours in a club, you won’t notice it, will you? Unless it’s a very poor club, I suppose.

Saturday Flashback: Friends – Lyssna Till Ditt Hjärta

“Good grief, that sounds a lot like ABBA.”

Tim: In a couple of days time, we’ll know the performers who’ve made it to next year’s Melodifestivalen; shall we celebrate with another trip to the Best Of?

Tom: Good grief, that sounds a lot like ABBA.

Tim: It really does, yes. The year is 2001, and this stormed to victory, favourite of both jury and viewers, despite a slightly sloppy hand-against-the-waist clapping at the start. And it’s not a bad track, is it?

Tom: It’s not at all, but that’s because it sounds like an ABBA track, even down to the piano. That’s a compliment, by the way: it sounds like a decent ABBA track.

Tim: Immediate hefty introduction, big singalongable chorus (if you fancy an English version, have Listen To Your Heartbeat, the translation that placed 5th at Eurovision) and while a key change might have been welcome, it works well enough for me without one.

Tom: I’m still of the opinion that any song like this works better with a key change, but yes: it’s a good enough melody that it works without one.

Tim: I say jury and viewers, it was also Belgium’s favourite back in 1996, or at least the writers of Belgium’s Eurovision entry for that year certainly thought so, and if you listen to the chorus of that you may think they have a point.

Tom: It’s certainly close, but surely you’d have to be particularly thick to plagiarise a Eurovision song from Eurovision?

Tim: Yes, and given the prolificness of the songwriter involved I’m inclined to doubt it; whether it was or not we’ll actually never know, though, as when the Belgians threatened a court case in 2003, a financial agreement was swiftly agreed.

Tom: I wonder if ABBA thought about doing the same thing.

Saturday Flashback: Charlotte Qvale – The Beginning of the End

“I couldn’t bring myself to look away from the video”

Tom: I think I first heard this while boarding a plane back from Norway at the start of this year.

Tim: I found myself quite thirsty just after the video started, but I couldn’t bring myself to look away from the video – it’s lovely, it really is.

Tom: Well, that’s a strange compliment. I can’t work out whether that odd, staccato instrumentation is an actual electric guitar, or a synth. Either way, it’s a brilliant riff, and it’s stuck with me, for some reason.

Tim: The vocals are lovely, the production is suitably deep and layered, and it all combines to make a track that, for me at least, manages to be pleasant and entertaining without getting stuck in my head on repeat.

Tom: Yeah, it is very nice. It reminds me of Still Alive, the theme from the game Mirror’s Edge – not musically, or lyrically, or stylistically, or really in any way to do with the song, but I think it’s because the best way to describe that, too, is ‘lovely’. And this is as well.

Saturday Flashback: Panetoz – Dansa Pausa

Tim: This here, a track I was going to write about when it got released two and a half years back but which got buried in a background tab until it was way too late, and eventually found its way into my Future Flashbacks pile. Let’s have it now, because it’s really quite fun.

Tim: Panetoz are a five-piece band from Sweden, originating variously from Gambia, Ethiopia, Angola, Congo and Finland, so that’s fun, isn’t it?

Tom: Mm. It’s certainly trying to be fun, but it seems a bit more like the kind of enforced ‘fun’ that follows after a teacher tries to start a singalong on a school coach trip.

Tim: This track, a very enjoyable party number, got to number one in Sweden, deservedly so – it’s almost what you’d get if Pitbull actually made listenable music, and almost makes me resent him even more, for not doing so.

Tom: Whoa, whoa, really? Pitbull makes extremely listenable music, if you just remove Pitbull. And I’m astonished this made it to number 1 – it just doesn’t seem, well, good enough.

Tim: I said this topped the charts in Sweden – elsewhere in the world, an English version entitled (perhaps unsurprisingly) Dance Pause got to number 53 when it was released in Belgium; I don’t really know what the thinking there might have been, but there you go.

This isn’t, incidentally, the only time they almost appeared here – they got to the final of this year’s Melodifestivalen with Efter Solsken, which almost made the cut as a Saturday Reject. But then it didn’t. Oh well.

Saturday Flashback: Lis Sørensen – Brænt

“I… wow. I had no idea.”

Tim: Every day, round about five o’clock, Tom Petty’s Free Fallin’ comes on the music system at work, and every day, round about five o’clock, I expect to hear Natalie Imbruglia’s Torn, because of that identical opening guitar strum, and somehow I never learn. Except it’s not Natalie Imbruglia’s Torn, because that’s a cover of an American rock band’s song.

Tom: What. What?! I… wow. I had no idea.

Tim: Except even that’s a bit weird, because there’s also this: probably the only song in existence where a cover version was released before the original.

Tim: Let’s have a timeline, because this could get confusing:
– 1993, the song is written and recorded as a demo by Scott Cutler, Anne Preven, and Phil Thornalley; they didn’t think much of it at the time, but the recording lingered.
– Later in 1993, Lis Sørensen met Thornalley, who played her the song, and thought she might have a crack at it. She translated it (ish – Brænt actually means Burnt, but the gist remains the same), kept it musically largely the same, released it, and became the first artist to make money off it.
– 1995, the band Ednaswap (formed of Cutler, Preven and a few others) finally got a recording deal, and released the song in English, reworked to be a bit rockier. By all standard counts – original authors, singers, lyrics – this became the original, two years on from its foreign language cover.
– 1997, Natalie Imbruglia recorded it, became the only act to have much chart success with it (according to Wikipedia, it’s ‘considered an “All Time Pop Hit”‘, though there’s no mention of by whom), and if you ask most people, basically became the owner of the song.

Tom: Blimey. Thanks for the lesson. I still think Natalie Imbruglia’s version is the best, but then, I suppose I would.

Tim: Well, quite. And there you go. Chronologically, we’ve a cover, then the original, and then a cover that basically became the original. Along the way, there came a vast number of other versions, in a variety of other languages and genres – without exhausting the list, we’ve a Brazilian girlband’s O amor é ilusão, a Slovenian band’s On, an American punk rock version, an Uzbek soloist’s Sogʻindim ishon, and, perhaps inevitably, the Almighty Records take on it. And people say covers are boring…

Tom: You’re forgetting the very best version: David Armand.

Tim: Oh. Oh, that has made my afternoon.

Saturday Flashback: Jo O’Meara – Relentless

“It wasn’t just as a group that they could come up with a lovely ballad.”

Tim: This week’s big music news: a S Club 7 reunion! Initially just for Children in Need, but, well, that was what McBusted said and look at what’s happened since. But we all know their tracks. What of the individuals in the meantime?

Tom: If I remember rightly, Bradley was turning up anywhere that’d pay him, and Jo was accused of bullying on Big Brother.

Tim: Ah, but it wasn’t just bullying:

Tom: Oh. She also did that, then.

Tim: Yes, and I think this clearly goes to show that it wasn’t just as a group that they could come up with a lovely ballad. Obscure, I’ll grant you: it’s the title track off basically-the-lead-female Jo’s single solo album, from which there was one top twenty single. This never got a release at all, what with the solo campaign being pulled after the album peaked itself just inside the top 50.

Tom: That’s a harsh response from the public. You’re right that it’s not actually a bad ballad – it’s a bit generic, but there’s nothing wrong with it.

Tim: So yes, it’s obscure; why here, then? Because – everyone remembers S Club 7 for the big ones like Reach and Bring It All Back and S Club Party. But they weren’t the best ones, they were just the party ones.

Tom: Ooh. Now, I’d say there’s a strong crossover between “best” and “party”. What else did they have?

Tim: For the true musical talent, you have to look for the ballads. The Have You Evers. The You’re My Number Ones. The Never Had A Dream Come Trues. That’s where the talent lies, and that’s where this comes into it.

Tom: Hmm. The public, it seems, thought otherwise.

Tim: Upsetting. But still, TWENTY DAYS TO GO.

Saturday Flashback: Krassimir Avramov – Illusion

“The epitome of ‘Eurovision WTF-ery'”

Tim: Last week, Bulgaria announced they wouldn’t be taking part in next year’s Eurovision Song Contest. That’s sort of a shame.

Tim: I say ‘sort of’, I’m not really sure.

Tom: Crikey. Did they decide to just freestyle it? Could they not agree on a key?

Tim: I think there’s a song in there somewhere, but I can’t be entirely sure. It certainly not what I, or most likely anyone else, ended up focusing on. We have fire in the background, we have capes, we have countertenor singing, we have ludicrous floor decoration, and we have dancers on stilts swinging each other around in what appears to be a direct attempt to fly off into the crowd. This is, basically, the epitome of this ‘Eurovision WTF-ery’ that people occasionally mention.

Tom: Only without a decent tune attached to it.

Tim: There is of course an official video, which features a medieval battlefield, two women kissing, a child clutching a doll with its head caved in, a pair of dwarves, the grim reaper and some softcore porn for good measure.

So yeah, we may well not see this ever again. Not sure I’m complaining.

Saturday Flashback: Herreys – Diggi-Loo Diggi-Ley

Contains SPOILERS for Eurovision 1984

Tim: I got listening to my Melodifestivalen Best Of album again earlier.

Tom: Of course you have a Melodifestivalen Best Of album.

Tim: Of course I do – it’s brilliant. This is the winner from 1984, and I challenge you to listen to it without wanting to click your fingers in the chorus.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-RRXHG00GY

Tom: Oh heavens, that’s astonishingly 80s right there. Matching white trousers.

Tim: SPOILER if you’ve got Eurovision 1984 on Sky+ and haven’t got round to watching it yet: this came first, as you can probably judge from the crowd’s reaction there, and why wouldn’t it? These guys are up there singing about the glories of being laughed at for their choice of shoes.

Tom: Ha! Somehow that elevates the song from ‘kitsch’ to ‘brilliance’ in my head, but I’ve no idea why.

Tim: Well good, because it should. Of course, since the vast majority of Europe didn’t know that, the lesson we can take is that the best tactic for victory is jumble a few singable syllables that don’t make sense to anyone and trust that they’re catchy enough to be remembered. And here: oh yes.

Tom: Plus a key change. Always a key change.

Tim: Always. This is catchy, nonsensical, and entirely JOYOUS, because that comes across even if the details don’t. LOVELY LOVELY TRACK.

Saturday Flashback: MAGIC! – Rude (Zedd Remix)

“I couldn’t remember the original, but this is much more likely to stick in my head.”

Tim: Sort of a flashback, this: you may or may not remember the reggae-inspired original from last year, which as far as I’m concerned was a bit take-it-or-leave-it. This here is a little bit different.

Tom: Bloody hell, Zedd knows what he’s doing, doesn’t he?

Tim: He really does. It’s a lot bit different, in fact, because it’s been turned from something people would sing around a campfire once some bellend with a guitar has made his way through all the standard Oasis/Robbie Williams/Bryan Adams necesseties into a proper four to the floor banger, and it doesn’t sound completely and utterly wrong. It does, in fact, sound like it could have been written like this originally.

Tom: Agreed: I couldn’t remember the original, but this is much more likely to stick in my head.

Tim: Right, and if you’re going to judge a remix, I think that would be a decent criteria to start with, so this is basically top notch stuff, and a good example of why Zedd is gradually becoming one of the biggest DJs around. Top work.