![]() The 7 (almost 8) year old me, much like the 21 year old me today, was known to them and other as being a ‘music boy’ with my vast array of CDs and Now compilations, so when we were having a BBQ, I was the “DJ” (playing random songs I wanted to hear on the CD player from my and my parents’ collection). But the other side of that coin is that every style finds the same lazy ways to disappoint.Īugust 2005, our family from Sheffield had come down for a few days to where I live in Wiltshire, for the first time in my then living memory. Every new style of pop finds new ways to be better than it needs to be. ![]() The “get the feeling” break is too innocuous to even count as defacement, so this record is the definition of generically bad, the pop that people who hate pop assume all pop is like.īeing an honest critic of pop isn’t about excusing dreck: it’s about exploring how records made for the same people – and sometimes by the same people – as “Get The Feeling” fail to become it. Long ago I said that when I gave a 1 to a record there should be something outstandingly bad about it – the just generically bad wouldn’t do. But as everyone else who had a hit with it knew, the song doesn’t need variety: it’s got a hook, a groove, and enough space for a vocalist to mix sweetness, yearning, and determination. It probably does make this pallid walkthrough of it better, just by creating a bit of variety for an audience raised on key changes which yank a song into higher gear. But I remember the sometime administrator of I Love Music putting up the claim that the addition made this the best version of “The Tide Is High”. Cue sucking of teeth, shaking of heads, muttering about right cowboys. There’s one curiosity, of course – that “Get The Feeling” parenthesis, a middle eight appended to the song like a poorly built extension. ![]() There’s no long term plan, no devilishly clever marketing scheme – in fact the marketing is as transparent as the rest of the record. There’s nothing here to get your head around: it’s a bad cover version, in an era of bad cover versions, performed mechanically by a band whose character was deliberately bleached out of them when success hit. “The Tide Is High (Got The Feeling)” is indeed terrible, but its wretchedness is banal, readily apparent. You might think that’s the case here: it’s not. Sometimes when this project stalls it’s because there’s a song too tricky or terrible to write about.
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