Space 'Neighbourhood (Radio Edit)'

Chart Peak: 11

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Space, in the form of Tommy Scott, Jamie Murphy, Franny Griffith and Andy Parle, brought forth more music from the city of Liverpool including the Top 20 hit 'Neighbourhood'. Their album Spiders was a platinum Top five hit and earned the band a nomination for the Best British Newcomer BRIT Award.

It's a long time since I've lived with my brother, and even longer since he played his copy of the album, so I can't really remember how this radio edit differs from the original version of the song. I do recall that this song had been their first proper single release, entering the Top 75, and was swiftly reactivated after their breakthrough success with the novelty hit 'Female Of The Species'. I also recall reading in the NME that at this point they were playing both their hits twice at every gig.

Having been deeply annoyed by 'Female Of The Species' I thought of this as an improvement at the time and it does at least lack the slightly sexist elements of their first hit. It's perhaps less of a novelty song, with something closer to the observational humour of Blur - but not closer enough, really, it lacks the well-drawn character studies of Albarn and settles for a set of unconnected and mostly unfunny one-line gags. At least it's vaguely listenable musically, although the bleepy production is surprisingly dated and Tommy Scott's Jamaican-Scouse vocal was annoying to start with. Not one I was that happy to come back to.

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Babybird 'You're Gorgeous'

Chart Peak: 3

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A contender for the BRIT Award for Best British Single, 'You're Gorgeous' brought Stephen Jones and his group a top three hit while their Top 10 debut album Ugly Beautiful, including the hit track 'Goodnight', also led to a Best British Newcomer nomination.

Our second dose of Stephen Jones on this album, after his co-writing credit on 'Sugar Coated Iceberg'. Babybird, initially just a solo project by Jones, was one of those names I recall reading about in the NME as he released a series of home-recorded albums - four within a year, funded by his publisher to launch his career. I didn't actually get to hear any of the music until he'd acquired a backing band, signed to a larger label and re-recorded a selection of highlights as Ugly Beautiful. I heard the first band single, 'Goodnight', and thought it was OK, but this hit proved to be the commercial high-water-mark. A song that was (doubtless intentionally) omitted from the early albums, this was everywhere for a while and remains surely his/their best-known hit.

You can see what Jones was trying to do here, contrasting the big pop-friendly chorus with a verse lyric from the perspective of a young girl being exploited by a sleazy photographer. The trouble is that the two parts don't quite seem to fit together, making it seem a bit too much the wrong sort of cynical, as if he's more interested in cashing in on people who don't listen to the words than in actually opening their minds. the lack of subtlety, and his grizzled vocal makes the joke too obvious to be subversive. He literally laughs at his own joke at the end of the wordless middle-eight; what he ends up offering is the opportunity to be smug about getting something you assume that other people don't.

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Ash 'Oh Yeah'

Chart Peak: 4

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Ash - Tim Wheeler, Mark Hamilton and Rick McMurray - put Northern Ireland's rock music back on the map when their debut album 1977 topped the charts in 1996. The contenders for the Best British newcomer BRIT Award co-produced the album which includes the Top 10 hit 'Oh Yeah'.

Bet you thought I'd forgotten all about this blog, eh? I hadn't, but I was struggling to fit it around the time I was spending on the Now blog. As I'm taking a couple of days off from there I thought I'd sneak a couple of posts on here in the meantime though.

'Oh Yeah' was no less than the fifth single from the 1977 album, though the first (and only) one to be released after it. A definite change of pace from the punk-pop singles that first got them noticed, it's a slow-building song about the "start of the summer", its teen-love subject matter implying both literal and metaphorical blooming; you can tell that it's a really significant moment when he sings that "her hair came undone in my hands" at the end of the first verse. Ironically, as an actual teenager at the time I didn't consider it one of my favourites, and I even neglected to buy the coloured-vinyl 7" of the single (a decision I soon regretted). Perhaps I was secretly disappointed that this sort of thing wasn't happening to me; or should I say "hadn't happened", since the song is clearly set in the past and the members of Ash aren't much older than I am. It was when I started seeing people born at the same time as me or later having serious chart success (as opposed to novelty hits) that I first started feeling old.

Anyway, I'm almost twice as old now as I was then and I've warmed to the song considerably, rather enjoying the luxuriant string arrangement and Lisa Moorish's (admittedly rather prominent) backing vocal which for all the hype she's had at various times in her career makes this her biggest hit single. Ash struggled to recapture the magic on later releases, although it's partly for want of trying as they seemed increasingly determined to prove themselves as a hard rock band. I think in some ways this plays better to their strengths, and even to their weaknesses - Tim Wheeler's slightly weedy voice suits songs about teenage fumbling better than more confident material - but I suppose it's not a direction they could have pursued indefinitely and some credit's due for not milking it for the cash.

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