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Prescient indeed that a genuine 'pop idol' should follow a media generated one, albeit an idol who had been dead over twenty five years. Indeed, it's been as long again since Mr Presley last troubled these charts and what odds would you have been given back then that his next number one would have been an obscure song from the soundtrack of an even obscurer (even by his standards)1968 film?* Ok, 'A Little Less Conversation' isn't a straight reissue and instead comes re-tooled via a Junkie XL (aka Tom Holkenborg) Big Beat remix (the first artist officially authorised by the Presley estate to do so), but instead of taking the lazy route of simply laying Presley's vocal over a brand new dance track, Holkenborg instead injects each of the song's original components with a shot of adrenalin with a result that's more celebration than sacrilege.
The original 'A Little Less Conversation' was already an almost funk, busy flux of moving parts back in 1968, albeit one kept in polite order by virtue of its inoffensive context. In contrast, Holkenborg's mix oils the joints and loosens the chains until they clatter and bang like stones in a saucepan, with Presley's own vocal boom stirring the mix with a kinetic force. Actually, it's fascinating to hear just how at home Elvis sounds amongst the whirl and it's tempting to speculate that this is the sort of effortlessly cool, bang up to date '2002 Comeback Special' single he might have launched had he not died in 1977, if only to show Tom Jones (who has tried much the same with much less effect) exactly how it should be done. Will someone be doing the same to an obscure Will Young album track in 2027? The odds on that one would be even longer.
* 1968's 'Live a Little, Love a Little'
It's more than slightly depressing to see such a freshly minted 'pop idol' falling back on a trusty cover version so early in a career of professional popular idolatry. And what's more, a cover version once removed at that; though originally recorded by The Doors (of course), Young's 'Light My Fire' has more in common with Jose Feliciano's 1968 lighter, Latin version than its actual source. What they have in common though is dwarfed by the gulf that separates them - Feliciano was Latin, and the sultry groove he adopted came as a natural par for the course. Young's crack at the same, however, is cardboard stiff and cardboard bland and his attempt to follow Feliciano's vocal guide is a strangled yelp that warbles with all the grace of a housebrick being forced through a sieve. Unimaginative, uninspired and more than a bit pointless, 'Light My Fire' is all these things and less (and the small print on the sleeve reads more as a threat than a promise). I'd like to believe that at the very least it meant a new generation would have been made aware that a group called The Doors did once exist, but to be honest, I don't think they'd have been interested - who needs Jim when you can have Will eh?
After the darkness of 'Stan', Eminem slips back into the light to delivers an update on what he's been doing since 'The Real Slim Shady' via a rolling rap of score settling, shameless self promotion and gleeful schoolyard smut. Yes, on 'Without Me' Eminem pushes his 'shady' persona into overdrive to wind up right thinking parents everywhere. Again, is this the real Eminem, or is the 'Mr Hyde' alter ego a throwback to the useful device prevalent in the blues that allowed the artist to refer to themself in the third person in a way that allowed them to get away with lyrical murder (for example, the way Ellas McDaniel adopted the 'Bo Diddley' persona to get away with bragging how he "walked 47 miles of barbed wire, used a cobra snake for a neck tie" when he obviously didn't and obviously doesn't) so that Eminem's stream of obscenities ("So come on and dip, bum on your lips fuck that, cum on your lips and some on your tits and get ready cos this shit's about to get heavy I just settled all my lawsuits FUCK YOU DEBBIE!") can be passed off as being from the Eminem's dark side while his own halo remains intact.
Kind of. Sort of. Oh I could (over) analyse all day, but there's not much I can add to my views on Eminem and his alter ego than those outlined back on 'The Real Slim Shady' other than to add that 'Without Me' has little purpose other than to perpetuate the cult of Shady and is too personal to brook any meaningful distinction between man and persona. True, the raps here are bitty and the targets less precise and blunter than previous ("Moby, you can get stomped by Obie, you 36 year old bald headed fag blow me. You don't know me, you're too old let go its over, nobody listens to techno"). But what the hell; Eminem's no pause for breath shit slinging is that of an infant in a mud pit and his bullish self confidence ("Now this looks like a job for me so everybody just follow me, cos we need a little controversy, cos it feels so empty without me") rings with the infectious joy of a peal of a bell largely because it's true. Dammit, these charts need Eminem.
'Every loser wins' - so sang Nick Berry back in 1986, yet though I was quick to take the mick, it seems that I'm the one left with egg on my face; Nick might have been right all along. Liberty X are another set of graduates from the Popstars shows, albeit with the twist that the five members were actually rejects eliminated from the show's latter stages in favour of the bunch that went to become Hear'say - even losers win on Popstars. And what's more, that egg on my face was actually double yoked in that 'Just A Little' is by far the best offering to date from anyone involved in any of these talent shows. True the hits from the so-called winners so far have been piss poor to a note, but 'Just A Little' more than holds its own against allcomers, not just reality TV stars. Ok, so its juddering R&B offers nothing new to the genre, but the clipped guitar that drives it and compressed crunch of its production recalls a mid-eighties Prince and gives it a genre credibility over and above what you might expect from a disparate bunch of talent show leftovers. At least, it does whenever Kelli Young takes the lead; being a democracy, the producers seem keen to give each a turn in the spotlight to see who shone the brightest and the tag team nature of the shared vocals splinters the effect somewhat. But not enough to spoil the pleasant surprise of the single as a whole.
Just as things were starting to bubble along quite nicely, here comes dour old Ronan again with an entry that applies the 'party over' dampeners with the force of an anti-lock braking system. He didn't write it of course (that honour goes to Garth Brooks), but I can just imagine how the po-faced gravitas of that title alone would have appealed to Keating and his team on his quest to become a 'serious' artist - you could never imagine him doing a 'Kiss Kiss' now could you?
As you'd expect from a Brooks song, the original 'If Tomorrow Never Comes' is a country ballad of overloaded sentimentality with the underlying homespun philosophy of 'do it now because tomorrow is too late' at its core. Brooks doesn't trowel any of it on too thickly and his simple structure conveys his simple message with an effect that, if I'm being honest, is the sort of thing that always appeals to the glum in me. Job done.
Keating wisely stays away from trying to pop it up and instead heats Brooks' dry sugar into a treacly paste of sincerity that he uses to smother the song by the panful in a suffocating, schmaltzy sap until Brooks' observational whimsy becomes a mantra for a way of life - no 'cheer up it may never happen' for Ronan. In fact, for the final seal of approval as to how deathly seriously everybody is taking it, the overly-literal promotional video provides an unintentional hoot as Keating deadpans the "If tomorrow never comes will she know how much I loved her" directly at the camera while cartwheeling in slow-mo in front of a speeding car as his angsty partner/lover writhes back in their bed like a live wire in a bucket of water. Did he trip or did he jump? Or was he pushed into the car's path by a pissed off passer-by fed up with all his whinging? I know where my money would be.
Since the late eighties, Australian soap opera 'Neighbours' has been something of an institution here in the UK and has been a launch pad for more than one wannabe musical career. By far the most famous graduate of this particular school is Kylie Minogue, with Jason Donovan in second place a few lengths behind. Natalie Imbruglia, Craig McLaughlan, Dan Falzon, Stefan Dennis etc have all had a crack to greater or lesser effect (usually lesser) but it took Holly Vallance (aka Felicity "Flick" Scully) to become the third of the alumni to score a UK number one.
'Kiss Kiss' started out in life as 'Şımarık', an Eastern flavoured pop song by Turkish singer Tarkan. American Stella Soleil added an English lyric and title and gave it a rap/hip hop makeover in 2001 and now Vallance neatly takes the middle ground by keeping the Anglophile styling of Soleil but cutting back on her urban beats and grit to highlight the Eastern twang of its origins, albeit keeping the pop fizzing and not straying too far into the ghetto of 'world music'. All of which makes the resultant hybrid....something and nothing really, a watered down version of both worlds that takes without giving and doesn't leave Vallance a whole lot to do other than pout and preen in the video. Less 'Turkish Delight' and more 'Turkish Indifference', 'Kiss Kiss' is a harmless diversion but it's nothing that leaves the world in a better place with its passing.
Out of all the girl/boy bands we have met, are meeting and are going to meet during this and the last decade, a Sugababes 'Best Of' is the one compilation from any of them that I'd most like to find in my Christmas stocking. Why? Well because I admire their consistency; as a band they manage to surprise with almost every release by pulling rabbits out of a hat I'd long thought was empty. Which is strange really, considering the 'Babes' themselves have been a moveable feast with more line-up changes than Spinal Tap have had drummers, but that adds ammunition to my assertion that a 'good' pop song will always out regardless of who's fronting it; sometimes it's the people behind the scenes who are the most important.
'Freak Like Me' is a Richard X production that, while not quite a 'mash-up', is nevertheless a mutant hybrid that splices fistfuls of DNA from Tubeway Army's 'Are 'Friends' Electric?' to Adina Howard's 1994 hit 'Freak Like Me'.* The result, on paper at least, should have been a stone cold headshot to the R&B sass of Howard, but not a bit of it - this 'Freak Like Me' is three minutes of wired and jittery, alien urban electronica where Numan's once cold slabs of synthesiser stomp are tweaked until they throb with the sensual slow burn to the metronomic rhythm of an imaginary soft red light switching on and fading off, while the girls themselves pull off the attitude of sexy disinterest that's always so damn attractive. Making Numan sexy and danceable has to be a work of some kind of genius, but even if you're not prepared to go quite that far, it's hard to deny that 'Freak Like Me' is earcatching and arresting. Particularly amongst the indifferent company it's keeping.
* X originally created a mash-up of the two songs under his 'Girls On Top' alias called "We Don't Give a Damn About Our Friends". Sugababes were drafted in to provide the vocals when Howard refused permission for hers to be used for a commercial release.
Prescient indeed that a genuine 'pop idol' should follow a media generated one, albeit an idol who had been dead over twenty five years. Indeed, it's been as long again since Mr Presley last troubled these charts and what odds would you have been given back then that his next number one would have been an obscure song from the soundtrack of an even obscurer (even by his standards)1968 film?* Ok, 'A Little Less Conversation' isn't a straight reissue and instead comes re-tooled via a Junkie XL (aka Tom Holkenborg) Big Beat remix (the first artist officially authorised by the Presley estate to do so), but instead of taking the lazy route of simply laying Presley's vocal over a brand new dance track, Holkenborg instead injects each of the song's original components with a shot of adrenalin with a result that's more celebration than sacrilege. 
