(part 4 of a suddenly far less occasional series)

ROACHFORD - Cuddly Toy

Right, that last bugger took me through from 1 a.m. to a quarter to six of this, on initial appearances, reasonable enough Friday morning. So, why not?

What you have here is 80’s Brit-soul hopeful Andrew Roachford coming up with a chat-up line that, depending upon personal opinion, is either genius or fucked. Put simply, Roachford is trying to entice his intended by getting her to sympathise with the fact that when he’s at home “a cuddly toy, that’s my only joy,” i.e. ROACHFORD IS SICK OF WANKING. “Feeeeeeel for me baby!”

What you also have here is the greatest single Pharrell will NEVER make. In a fight between the way Roachford goes “Wum-awwwn” and the way Pharrell goes “Sexy!”, Jamie Cullum’s New Best Friend is getting the kicking of a lifetime. And there’s the guitar and the bass going just that bit too fast, so Roachford, he’s a bit surprised, but no, he’s Roachford, he’s a professional, so he’s just going to have to hurry it up a bit to keep up is all, so he does, and cos he’s going faster, he’s getting more urgent, more and more urgent, and the song’s not fucking slowing down! Everytime Andrew thinks he can have a breather, it doesn’t notice, so he’s away again! “Feeeeeeeeeel for me baby!”

There is no tempo change at all. It starts fast. It ends fast. In between, it’s fast, and there’s a really big synth guitar solo somewhere along the line too, just in case you haven’t quite realised how very much in need Roachford is. If she wasn’t feeling for him before, one can only hope that’s changed now. Poor bugger had seven hits after this, none of which got top ten, never mind #4 (this got there in January 1989, as a re-issue, but Everyhit doesn’t have any notes other than that). As to whether any of them were ever quite as wonderful as this… no idea. For some reason, I’m not holding out much hope.

I went to a club night the other night, which played alternating songs from the eighties and the noughties. This wasn’t played, but ‘Hands Up (Give Me Your Heart)’ was. Feel for him, baby. FEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEL!

(n.b. it was a good night apart from that, mind)

(n.b. also - I am very much aware there’s loads of songs that are better than Pharrell will ever be, but this one seems closest to what he reckons he sounds like but is just not great enough to sound like, so there. If Pharrell ever decides he’s going to try and sound like The Delgados, though… fucker is going DOWN!)

(part 3 in what is becoming a seriously fucking occasional series)

MINT ROYALE ft. LAUREN LAVERNE - Don’t Falter

First things first - I have finally purchased a Pop Will Eat Itself record. And I do indeed think it’s very good. It’s the best of, entitled ‘Wise Up, Suckers’, and it’s currently retailing at the dead reasonable price of �6.99 in an excessively big music monolith near you (in Britain).

Which in no way links to our third subject. But hey.

In their own little way, we find ourselves confronted by a pairing of chronic underachievers here. Mint Royale could be described as the archetypal bog-standard late-nineties-early-noughties British coffee-table dance act, except that’s Groove Armada. In fact, Mint Royale aren’t even that high up in the pecking order, being as they are even less famous than Zero 7 or Lemon Jelly or that bloke you see in the town centre sometimes who says that he likes Kruder & Dorfmeister as if that in some way makes him The Shit. Might want to reconsider the definitiveness of that article there.

To illustrate - The Royale have achieved no top 40 albums, and three top 40 singles. One, ‘Blue Song’, I can’t remember a single thing about. Before that we have ‘The Sexiest Man In Jamaica’, which sampled Prince Buster singing “Round about now… I Am The Sexiest Man In Jamaica… and the girls all love me…” and seemed more than destined to be a gigantic smash hit. It charted at number 20 in September 2002, quite possibly behind 3SL’s cover of ‘Touch Me, Tease Me’ and Nickelback’s Second Single.

And then we have Our Sainted Lady Of The Laverne. Ah man… has anyone this great ever associated themselves with so many things that are so rubbish? To illustrate, this is a quote from an interview with the face that’s been put on this page here:

Lauren, for the last 15 months, has been courted by The Terrifying World Of TV Presenting. Number of programmes desperate for her dextrous verbal gifts: “at one point, four a day” (including The Big Breakfast after Denise Van Outen’s getaway). Reaction to destiny as tooth-licious Media Celebrity: “I would fucking kill myself.”

Johnny Vaughan’s house band. XFM ‘drivetime’. Loves Like A Dog. This Week Only. Whatever the fuck this is meant to be… Why, Laverne, why?

Throwing these two together, then, could only have had two possible outcomes - XFM C-List cannon fodder designed solely to be sandwiched between A Red Hot Chilli Peppers Single and ‘Bittersweet Symphony’…

… or arguably the best thing either of them had ever done.

‘Don’t Falter’ charted at #14 in February 2000. Course, at that time none of the stuff I mentioned above had happened - Mint Royale were actually more famous than Groove Armada, after their remix of ‘Tequila’ had propelled Terrorvision to the previously unthinkable heights of #2 the month before (kept off #1 by ‘Pretty Fly For A White Guy’), whereas Laverne was still (to some extent) The Flopsies’ Sweetheart, having not really done anything since Kenickie had split to sour the memory that much.

The song’s about Laverne’s then-boyfriend, Malcolm Middleton of Arab Strap (”And as long as we’ve/Got each other/It’s gonna be/Officially summer”). In the back, it’s Big Beat Dunn Rite, it is properly sunny and light and bouncy/floaty, as opposed to “Hey! Afros!” Plethora of distorted strings and trumpets, with one line of them (can’t tell if it’s strings or trumpets, so we’ll go for synths instead) mirroring Laverne’s springy “ba-dooh ba-ba” hook in the chorus, like rabbits bouncing along in the fields of the Cadbury’s Caramel advert in heaven. Twee? Nah, d’you reckon?

And up front, putting the bums on seats, it’s Our Lauren, demonstrating what people regularly forget to point out about her - she has actually got a really nice voice. She tries singing falsetto in the chorus and she sort of stalls a bit, which makes her sound like Lush, WHICH IS A GOOD THING (people keep telling me it isn’t, people are stupid, it’s in capitals, jesus h…). Plus, she sort of rounds the end of her words every now and then, so it feels like they’ve dropped from her mouth, and that works just beautifully here. She basically sounds like that picture of her with the cream cake all the way through, and it’s bloody marvellous. She skips through the daisies with her Wee Beardie Man, the sun is out, the buttercups are ludicrously yellow, sparrows look at each other approvingly, children play football in accordance with the spirit of the game and don’t get all arsey about the offside rule… if they’d put this song as the closing number of Grease 2, it would’ve been enough to make it vaguely watchable.

From then on, their futures didn’t quite pan out, but it wasn’t that terrible. Mint Royale, when they’re not busy being shit, are more than capable of putting together a decent single, particularly their collaboration with Pos from De La Soul, ‘Show Me’. And Laverne, when she’s not busy being the Steve Buscemi to British twentysomething media’s Major Motion Picture, found time to do her lovely soft cooing on the chorus to the Divine Comedy’s new single ‘Come Home Billy Bird’, which is also rather good and in with a shout of charting in the top 20 this week. Go out and get yourself a copy, and while you’re at it, get ‘At The Club’ too. Cos when she was good, she was fantastic…

A Very Good Site About Kenickie