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Sunday 20 July 2008

Capricious buyers

Marcus Berkmann on the tough world of pop.

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It’s tough out there in the crazy world of pop. Two years ago The Feeling were the most played act on British radio. Their debut album, Twelve Stops and Home — almost certainly the only album in history to be named after a late-night Tube journey from Leicester Square to Bounds Green — sold 1.5 million copies and inspired several other bands to start playing plinky-plink 1970s pop. In turn, as previously discussed here, this has provoked Radio One into announcing that Rock Is So Over and shifting its entire daytime programming policy in a plinky-plinky popward direction. So you might have thought that a second album by these pioneers would be greeted with foaming adoration by the pop-loving masses, and that Asda and Tesco, our new favourite record shops, would sell out in seconds. Not a bit of it. The current single was at 53 last week, the album at number 30. As Alexis Petridis pointed out in the Guardian, the supermarket record buyer is capricious. Just because they bought your last record doesn’t mean they’ll even remember your name in two years’ time. Last year the Scissor Sisters’ second album, Ta-Dah!, didn’t quite live up to expectations. As singer Jake Shears put it, ‘It stiffed. It tanked. It flopped.’ I must admit that I too played both The Feeling’s and The Scissor Sisters’ first albums a lot and liked them, and never play them now, and don’t feel the need to buy another one. Maybe millions of people just happen to feel the same way.

In The Feeling’s case, though, I fear hubris may be involved. One innovation on this record is their occasional use of saxophone, because ‘it was the least fashionable thing we could think of’. Maybe they’re joking — maybe they’re always joking, and none of it is supposed to be taken seriously at all. But if there are better reasons for throwing in some sax, there can’t be many worse ones. And it’s strange, because in the past The Feeling have proved such adept magpies of late 1970s and 1980s pop conventions. For those years were the heyday of the saxophone in chart pop, when, for a short while, sales of the instrument actually exceeded those of guitars. Can you imagine it? Maybe it was Clarence Clemons parping away on all those Bruce Springsteen albums, or those session horn players who could be found on more than half of all singles released in the early 1980s. Probably more influential, though, was Raphael Ravenscroft’s sax figure on Gerry Rafferty’s ‘Baker Street’. Some years later an urban myth went round that this had actually been played by Blockbusters host Bob Holness, a tale that had been invented by Stuart Maconie in the NME in an obviously fake ‘Did You Know?’-type column. (Among his other revelations were that Neil Tennant was a qualified rugby official, David Bowie had invented Connect 4 and Billy Bragg could breathe underwater.) Poor old Ravenscroft, deprived by corrosive rumour of his greatest achievement. The last time I heard, he was said to be running a restaurant in Cornwall. (When someone disappears out of public life for a while, they are almost always said to be running a restaurant in Cornwall.) Another iconic pop sax solo was that by Wesley McGoogan on Hazel O’Connor’s ‘Will You’, which, let’s face it, was the only reason I bought the single, and I don’t think I was alone in that. O’Connor only sings for half the song, then there’s a classic, portentous 1970s drum break, and Wesley takes over for the last two minutes. It’s cheesy and it’s magnificent. My girlfriend of the time lived above a bloke who had just started saxophone lessons — one of the great environmental hazards of the early 1980s. She was (and remains) a kindly soul, but when she threatened to murder him in cold blood if he practised after 10 p.m., we all knew it wasn’t an idle threat.

In The Feeling’s case, though, their sax comment gives the game away. If they truly had a feeling for 1970s pop, they would give us proper tuneful sax solos because they liked them, and because their listeners might like them too. Irony in pop only gets you so far. That’s the thing about successful pop: it has to be bold and fearless and happy to be thought ridiculous. The Feeling obviously are ridiculous, but that doesn’t seem to be enough. A tough world indeed.

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