Yeah Yeah Yeah

by Bob Stanley

  The swinging London of 1996 was quite different from the London of 1966, where newness had been at every turn. Ultimately, Britpop was a reaction against new ideas; it was against rave, hip hop and R&B, wrapped in a Beatles/Stones comfort blanket. So wrapped up in an ultraspecific past – the 1966 World Cup and the Second World War; The Italian Job and, always, the Beatles – it had no distance left to run. Why did it become such a dead end? One explanation is that Radio 1 and Top of the Pops had always previously been at odds with the music press, and this tension had been healthy; it may have seemed like a triumph when Matthew Bannister and Ric Blaxill embraced the underground but it turned out to be a disaster. It led to a narrowing of influence and, with no opposition left, bands turned on each other. Worse, without a big enough pool of high-quality British guitar bands, the charts became filled with third-rate acts: Sleeper, Echobelly, the Longpigs, the Bluetones, and York four-piece Shed Seven, who had fifteen Top 40 hits, not one of which has remained in the collective consciousness. Ultimately, there was Menswear.7

  Post-post-modern Britart had bridged the great divide between popular culture and high culture – by the late nineties the split was formally a dead issue. In Britpop, to the contrary, it was revived. By the time Blur had kissed Jo Guest goodbye, pulled their pants up and started toying with gospel on ‘Tender’ (UK no. 2 ’99), neither they nor Oasis were calling the shots. A group called the Spice Girls had set a new tabloid-friendly agenda with ‘Wannabe’, which went to number one in the summer of ’96. It was clumsy, almost DIY, and had a lyrical gimmick (‘zig-a-zig-ah!’) that meant once heard it could never be forgotten. Their loose connection to Britpop was that the girls echoed the big British stars of the sixties – Dusty, Sandie, Cilla, Lulu, Marianne – only this time all in one package. None was spectacularly good-looking, none was ugly. Their songs were catchy, none was a masterpiece, but almost no one hated them and they had the hottest hit run in UK chart history – nine singles were released over the next two and a half years and all of them got to number one, except the Motown-esque ‘Stop’, a relative failure that reached number two.

  In the wake of the Spice Girls, 1998 saw a bubblegum breakthrough with Billie Piper (‘Because We Want To’) and B*witched (‘C’est la vie’) topping the chart, modern pop that celebrated a new youthful optimism with a new Labour government and a buoyant economy. S Club 7 and Steps were just behind; All Saints provided a West London, R&B influenced alternative to the Spice Girls; in the US, Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera raised the stakes. Set against this unabashed glee, the curtain fell on Britpop with Pulp’s 1998 album This Is Hardcore. Detailing a band’s virtual (and artistic) disintegration in the spotlight, it was in stark contrast to the high gloss and chipperness of Spiceworld: The Movie. Did the British public want to listen to a singer moaning about how many bukkake videos he’d watched while bored in an Amsterdam hotel room? No, it did not. It wanted to see sixteen-year-old Billie Piper’s unfeasible, United Kingdom-sized smile.

  1 In 1993 the NME coined ‘the new wave of new wave’ for a rash of acts who made a concerted attempt to get sharpness and angularity back on the agenda. Championed by the NME’s Paul Moody, S*M*A*S*H, from Welwyn Garden City, had a punk/mod hardline ethic, as well as an endearingly awkward take on feminism (their second single was called ‘Lady Love Your Cunt’). They toured heavily, and opened up a gig circuit for other, younger bands coming through: acts who supported S*M*A*S*H included Echobelly, Catatonia and Sleeper. Brighton’s These Animal Men were similarly rough and ready. Both groups anticipated what was around the corner but, unlike Suede, they lacked any good tunes.

  2 John Robb of Sounds and Melody Maker’s Paul Lester both claim to have coined the term first, though Robb used it in the eighties, which is a little like Crawdaddy’s Paul Williams claiming to have christened punk rock.

  3 Apparently this didn’t go down well with Suede’s drummer Simon Gilbert, who was gay.

  4 ‘Disco’ was used as a catch-all insult for house and techno by indie purists – the Wonder Stuff’s ‘Who Wants to Be the Disco King’ was a dig at guitar groups attempting to expand their horizons by getting remixes. I always found it sad that no late-eighties or -nineties guitar bands tried to adapt their classic fourpiece beat-group set-up to tackle house, techno and garage singles, as beat groups of the sixties had assimilated soul and punk groups had adopted reggae. Hats off to the Style Council (Joe Smooth’s ‘Promised Land’) and the Pet Shop Boys (Sterling Void’s ‘It’s Alright’) for giving it a go, but it seems like a missed opportunity for a younger generation.

  5 Bowie, having overcome the baying critics with his Sound and Vision ‘greatest hits’ tour in 1990, then gave the world exactly what it wasn’t asking for – Tin Machine II – in 1991. Morrissey called on Mick Ronson to produce his musically feisty though lyrically out of sorts ’92 album Your Arsenal: ‘We look to Los Angeles for the language we use,’ ran ‘Glamorous Glue’: ‘London is dead.’

  6 Britpop’s nerve centre was Smashing, a London club hosted by close-cropped DJ Martin Green and his louder sidekick Adrian Webb. Starting in 1991, with a musical policy that ran from X-Ray Spex to Burt Bacharach to Bowie and Blur, it typified the mid-nineties with its reappropriation of twentieth-century high points, effectively creating the fin de siècle in exactly the same way that filmmakers and fashion designers of the fifties and sixties had imagined it would be. By 1993 Smashing was based in the unreconstructed sixties cellar club Eve’s on Regent Street; superstars in waiting Damon Albarn and Jarvis Cocker would be sat next to Leigh Bowery and Damien Hirst.

  7 Menswear – managed by Smashing DJ Adrian Webb – were, in their way, Britpop’s defining band. Caitlin Moran nailed their meteoric rise in a Melody Maker piece called ‘You too could be famous the Menswear Way’:

  1. Go up to members of famous bands in pubs and start chatting to them. Flatter them endlessly. Say that you’re in a band too, and ask for advice. Hang around with said famous person until closing time, whereupon famous person will announce his intention to go on to a club, say Blow Up or Smashing. Say, ‘Oh, I’m meeting my friends there – the trouble is, I appear to have eaten all my money. Could you get me in on the guest list?’ Famous person gets you in on the guest list. Famous person gets exceedingly shitfaced. You bond. Repeat every night for three months.

  2. With famous person now your ‘mate’, you can approach other famous people and say ‘I’m a friend of Graham Sparkly Trousers, gizza drink.’ Famous people buy you drinks. You get shitfaced together. You bond.

  3. Form a band.

  4. Use your famous mates to get you into after-shows, backstage at festivals and record label Christmas parties. Wander drunkenly up to record label managers and say ‘I’m Chris from Menswear, we’re ace.’

  5. Get the owner of Club Smashing – celeb hangout – to be your manager.

  6. Observe with glee the way you’re using the music industry’s machinations to your own advantage; witness the Chinese Whispers at parties along the lines of, ‘How you heard of this band Menswear?’ ‘Menswear? They sound familiar.’ Gloat that this is because of successful employment of 4.

  7. Get pop-star girlfriend using Step 2.

  8. Get top press officer using Step 2.

  9. Get on people’s tits everywhere you go using Step 2.

  10. Get front cover of Melody Maker. It’s so easy!

  65

  A VISION OF LOVE: R&B

  As the nineties spluttered to a close, one pop genre sped up and overtook all comers, one that had barely been breathing a few years earlier. Kicked and punched and beaten down first by disco, then by hip hop, then by house and techno, soul – reborn under its older, Jerry Wexler-invented name R&B – had an unlikely and glorious golden age that ran from the mid-nineties into the middle of the following decade. Some of the most experimental, thrilling and just plain weird music of the whole modern pop era emerged just as pretty much every other genre – hip hop, rock, techno – was running out of creative jui
ce. A swathe of auteur producers emerged, happy to take the most oblique rhythm, the most exotic instrumentation, and deliver the most outré chart hit. ‘Milkshake’ by Kelis placed a lyric about her sex appeal, delivered with deadpan cool, over what sounded like a Radiophonic Workshop soundtrack to a film on dairy-farm automation. It reached number three in the US and number two in the UK. How did this happen? By blending R&B with other genres, a habit R&B had lost once disco imploded, and one it didn’t regain for almost two decades. In effect, it had been held back, allowing its final creative burst to happen just as everyone else had filled in all the white space on their canvas.

  The complex evolution of R&B, and its place in pop, is distilled in the changing names of Billboard’s relevant singles chart. In Britain, soul had been a catch-all term from the mid-sixties until the nineties, but America was more nuanced; Billboard had divided up the different eras like this:

  1942–45 The Harlem Hit Parade

  1945–49 Race

  1949–69 Rhythm & Blues (abbreviated to R&B 1958–63)

  1969–82 Soul

  1982–90 Black

  1990–99 R&B

  1999– R&B/Hip Hop

  We can see that when disco was finally buried in 1982, R&B reverted to being purely ‘black music’, something that hadn’t happened before in the progressive modern pop era. Disco had allowed everybody in, but in the eighties it seemed that either racial stereotyping was back or the tastemakers had a guest list.

  Though the Hot Hundred may have suggested it was in decline, disco hadn’t killed off soul. There were plenty of soul acts who became UK chart regulars at the tail end of the seventies: among the biggest were Odyssey, who could switch from Latino rave-ups (‘Use It Up and Wear It Out’, UK no. 1 ’80) to Thom Bell-like woozy balladry (‘If You’re Looking for a Way Out’, UK no. 8 ’80), and Kool and the Gang, a JBs-styled funk act of the early seventies who hit a winning formula with brassy party anthem ‘Ladies’ Night’ (US no. 8, UK no. 9 ’79) and stuck with it. With the novelty elements of disco off the menu as the decade turned, and with the fizzing hi-hat replaced by electronic handclaps, the early eighties – rather than being devoid of floor-friendly pop – became something of a golden age. Quincy Jones killed time waiting for Michael Jackson to write a new album by producing the Brothers Johnson’s towering ‘Stomp!’ (US no. 7, UK no. 6 ’80). Fine singles that failed to register at all in the American chart but fed Britain’s pop soundtrack include Quincy’s own ‘Razzamatazz’ (UK no. 11 ’81), the chilled desperation of Odyssey’s ‘Inside Out’ (UK no. 3 ’82) and Stacy Lattisaw’s ‘Jump to the Beat’ (UK no. 3 ’80), which anticipated Madonna’s style by four years.

  The clearest evidence that the discotheque wasn’t dead came from Solar (Sound Of Los Angeles) Records, which had been set up in 1978 and began to pour out crisp R&B hits in 1980 – the New York Times even claimed it ‘could be the Motown of the eighties’. In-house producer Leon Sylvers had previously been part of a post-Jacksons family act called the Sylvers; he was in love with Chic’s clipped, rhythmic guitar lines, handclaps on the beat and the same synths that would soon inform new pop in Britain: Sylvers and Solar’s squiggly, melodic electro-funk productions provided hits for Shalamar (‘I Owe You One’, ‘The Second Time Around’, the magnificent Friends album in ’82), Dynasty, Midnight Star and, a holdover from the last days of doo wop, veteran Philly vocal act the Whispers (‘And the Beat Goes On’, UK no. 2 ’80; ‘It’s a Love Thing’, UK no. 9 ’81).

  In 1980 British soul fans also looked to the untainted, though disco-related, world of jazz funk for salvation: Tom Browne’s ‘Funkin’ for Jamaica’ (a chattering block-party update of Gary U. S. Bonds’s ‘Quarter to Three’) and Rodney Franklin’s ‘The Groove’ (a piano instrumental just a few steps away from the cocktail lounge) became unlikely UK Top 10 hits in 1980; stranger yet were Top 20 jazz-instrumental hits for Spyro Gyra (‘Morning Dance’) and Mezzoforte (‘Garden Party’) which sounded like the incidental music from Moonlighting. Kool and the Gang’s run of seventeen Top 40 hits came to an abrupt end with ‘Cherish’ (UK no. 4 ’85), by which point Shalamar and Odyssey had been off the chart for over a year.

  Part of the reason for post-disco soul’s rapid demise was the rise of hip hop, which was happy to ransack Solar’s back catalogue for samples. The influence and inspiration was all one way – borrowing, even in part, from hip hop’s backpack was still almost entirely frowned upon in eighties R&B circles. Hip hop and electro were seen as kids’ stuff by British DJs like Chris Hill and American writers like Nelson George – they had no ‘soul’. The trouble was that ‘soul’, by the mid-eighties, had become extremely watery, little more than shorthand for bedtime; Luther Vandross (‘Never Too Much’, US no. 33, UK no. 13 ’81) and Alexander O’Neal (‘Criticize’, US no. 70, UK no. 4 ’87) were singers in the Teddy Pendergrass mould, but the likes of Eugene Wilde (‘Gotta Get You Home Tonight’, UK no. 18 ’84) and Atlantic Starr (‘Secret Lovers’, US no. 3, UK no. 10 ’86) represented a quick spin around a pink satin bedroom with fur trim, as the ubiquitous Yamaha DX7 tinkled away in the background like a cheap greetings card. It seems extraordinary that, at a time when Run-DMC and the Beastie Boys were crossing hip hop and the bluntest of white heavy rock – not obvious bedfellows – so few people attempted to integrate soul and hip hop.

  Why was this? Possibly because kids were fully absorbed in hip hop – now entering its golden age with an almost monthly innovation in rhymes, beats and samples – while the older black fans were quite happy with the smooth, lifestyle sound of Atlantic Starr. The route to R&B’s glittering future would be slow and complex, mostly B roads and back streets, yet by the end of the century it would be the only strand of modern pop which seemed forward-looking.

  Unsurprisingly, Prince had a lot to do with the initial turnaround.

  Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis were Paisley Park protégés, initially pretty-boy hoodlum types in cartoon-funk pop act the Time.1 They emerged, with a bang, as producers of the SOS Band’s ‘Just Be Good to Me’, an electronic waterfall of sound, intense and incredibly refreshing. Recorded on a day off from the Time’s support slot on Prince’s 1999 tour, it had the hardest electro pulse to chart in 1984 (UK no. 13, US no. 55), with an almost tearful vocal from Mary Davis. When Prince discovered Jam and Lewis’s infidelity, he sacked them, but they kept hitting that 808 cowbell on a string of SOS Band hits over the next couple of years – ‘Just the Way You Like It’, ‘The Finest’, ‘Tell Me If You Still Care’.

  Highlights of their hard, shiny, beatbox-led productions included Cherrelle’s ‘I Didn’t Mean to Turn You On’, which was denied a chart placing by Robert Palmer’s well-timed cover (US no. 2, UK no. 9 ’86). Their greatest success came with Janet Jackson’s 1986 album Control, on which she made her big brother Michael sound wheezy and arthritic: ‘What Have You Done for Me Lately’ (US no. 1, UK no. 3 ’86) showed that Jam and Lewis could not only compete with Prince and Michael Jackson, but sound one step ahead. Even now, the perfectly named Control has precision and poise; in 1986 it sounded like a sunshower, so light on its feet. Also in ’86, Jam and Lewis breathed new life into new pop by recording and co-writing an album with the Human League; the first single off it was a gently ticking ballad called ‘Human’. ‘On the first Human League LP we did “You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling”,’ Phil Oakey told Q’s Tom Hibbert, ‘and we sort of said, “Why can’t we write a great ballad like that?”’ The answer was because they had been too busy bickering. But Jam and Lewis hadn’t, and ‘Human’ gave the League a US number one in ’86.

  Teddy Riley had been pronounced a musical prodigy aged five, a new Thom Bell in the making, and he was given the run of his uncle’s Harlem studio. In 1985 he had scored a UK Top 10 hit with human beatbox Doug E. Fresh’s ‘The Show’, which sampled the Inspector Gadget theme; a year later, aged seventeen, he was sole producer on Kool Moe Dee’s hip-hop novelty ‘Go See the Doctor’ – a sniggering teenage confection in the age of AIDS – and
scored himself a minor Hot Hundred hit. At eighteen he had his own group called Guy, and quickly got to work piling Philly soul harmonies onto hip-hop beats and Jam and Lewis’s electro sharpness. Their biggest hit, ‘Groove Me’, sampled the Mohawks’ ‘The Champ’, previously used by Eric B. and Rakim. Before Guy broke down the wall, explained Riley, ‘rappers and singers didn’t want anything to do with one another … singers were soft, rappers were street’. Riley created a boom: Guy’s ‘Groove Me’ was the blueprint for Keith Sweat’s ‘I Want Her’ (US no. 5 ’88), Al B. Sure!’s ‘Nite and Day’ (US no. 7 ’88) and Babyface’s ‘It’s No Crime’ (US no. 7 ’89). In 1989 Riley produced a Wrecks-n-Effect single called ‘New Jack Swing’, and his blend of street hip hop and sweet R&B had a name of its own.

  ‘I define the term as a new kid on the block who’s swinging it,’ said Riley. But much of new jack swing, also known as swingbeat, didn’t really swing – hits like Bobby Brown’s ‘My Prerogative’ (US no. 1, UK no. 6 ’89) and Color Me Badd’s ‘I Wanna Sex You Up’ (US and UK no. 1 ’91) incorporated the hard, hammered precision of the beatbox but lacked litheness. A batch of girl groups, quickly tagged ‘new jill swing’, appeared in the wake of this new breed, of which Atlanta’s TLC were easily the best.

  Growing up, Tionne ‘T-Boz’ Watkins had been a tomboy who hung out at the same roller disco as producer Dallas Austin on Saturday and sang in her Atlanta church choir on Sunday. She was neighbours with producer Rico Wade – who ended up producing TLC’s multi-million-selling CrazySexyCool in ’95 – and copied his baggy dress sense so closely he called her his ‘little brother in lipstick’. Lisa ‘Left Eye’ Lopes had arrived in Atlanta having followed a boyfriend–manager down from Philly on a promise that he knew a group looking for a female rapper. ‘I didn’t trust him, but I trusted myself,’ she told Rolling Stone. ‘I knew I could take care of myself because I’d already been out on my own all this time without a stable place to live.’ She was possibly the fiercest-looking girl in all pop. Rico Wade got T-Boz and Left Eye to audition for a girl group; the quite beautiful half-black, half-Indian Rozonda ‘Chilli’ Thomas was a dancer who rounded out the group vocally and visually. Crazy, sexy, cool. They harked back to the bitchier end of the girl-group sound – Little Eva’s ‘Keep Your Hands off My Baby’, the Cookies’ ‘Girls Grow Up Faster than Boys’ – but broke new ground by picking on boys rather than other girls. What’s more, they were far from an anonymous harmony act: musically, each had a distinct vocal style, so TLC blended funk (Watkins), hip hop (Lopes) and R&B (Thomas). On their ’92 debut album Ooooooohhh … On the TLC Tip they looked like Salt-n-Pepa’s kid sisters and wore condoms as jewellery. By ’94 Lopes was in and out of rehab, and the mood was a lot more subdued: still, all four singles from that year’s CrazySexyCool reached the Top 5 in the US, with ‘Creep’ and ‘Waterfalls’ peaking at number one. ‘I seen a rainbow yesterday but too many storms have come, leaving a trace of not one God-given ray. Is it because my life is ten shades of grey? I pray all ten fade away’: ‘Waterfalls’ was the best anti-drug song since Curtis Mayfield’s ‘Freddie’s Dead’.