Pop music
Seeds of joy
Marcus Berkmann
The perfect pop song is a rare and beautiful thing. It’s probably the reason I wanted to call this column ‘pop music’ rather than ‘rock music’, for although ‘rock’ describes the mainstream more accurately, and that’s where we are usually swimming, ‘pop’ harks back to simpler times when the tune was the thing. Maybe those times never ended. The news that ‘Crazy’ by Gnarls Barkley (great name) had reached number one on downloads alone, without a single CD being sold, shocked and appalled many old pop fans, but the registered young people who bought it were just doing what we all used to do: hear the tune, like it, buy it. What they are experiencing is the instantaneous sugar rush of a great pop single. It might not be very good for you, but who cares? There are many things that could do them far greater harm. I made the mistake of buying the new Sigur Rós album, and I’m sure my physical and mental wellbeing were drastically compromised as a result.
Perfect pop, of course, has little critical credibility (unlike the new Sigur Rós album): no one ever gives anyone any credit for making music that, somehow, everyone manages to like. Too often, though, it is of the moment: hear it too many times and it dies in your ears. Pop dates fast, and, the more contrived it is, the quicker the mould starts to grow. Stock, Aitken and Waterman singles started to smell a bit whiffy after about the eighth hearing, and, 20 years later, need to be buried at the bottom of the garden under a layer of concrete. But then no pop music, possibly ever, flaunted its artifice so shamelessly. The truly perfect pop single is better than that: stranger, more singular, more wholly of itself. ‘Wuthering Heights’ qualifies, as do ‘Stayin’ Alive’ and ‘No More Heroes’ and a surprising number of other singles released during my teenage years. (Did I mention that this is also completely subjective? Does it need to be said?) But even your favourites begin to pall after a while. I heard ‘Song 2’ by Blur on the radio the other day, a Desert Island Disc for me, and I realised with a jolt that I was thoroughly sick of it. Even the most perfect pop must be left alone for a few years, allowed to lie fallow, ready for rediscovery when ... well, who knows when?
Which is where children come in. Mine recently spotted the computer-generated image of a giant strawberry that adorns the cover of the Lightning Seeds’ third album, Jollification. No no no, I said, you don’t want to play that. Hadn’t heard it for years, but couldn’t imagine listening to it again. They insisted, as children do. (My parents used to have the final word, now it’s my children. Spot the difference.) And in full breathing technicolor, Ian Broudie’s perfectly realised pop poured out of the speakers. The children loved it and so, strangely, did I. Later I delved into the back catalogue. Broudie made five albums with his main collaborator, Simon Rogers, under the Lightning Seeds’ name. Rogers looked after keyboards and programming, Broudie wrote the songs, sang them in his weedy Scouse tenor, played guitar. The first album (1990) has one perfect song, ‘Pure’. The second, Sense (1992), has ‘The Life Of Riley’, the title track and other good songs, but is marred by clattery 1990s percussion. Jollification (1994) is the masterpiece: studio wizardry at its most confident, applied to terrific pop songs. One or two are co-written with Terry Hall, who shares Broudie’s English gloom and predilection for uplifting melody. Another is a duet with Alison Moyet, who has never sounded better. In its ten tracks there isn’t even a momentary dip in quality. Dizzy Heights (1996) is more varied in style Broudie was now employing a proper rhythm section — but the songs are less distinctive. Tilt (1998) aims at dance music half a dozen years too late and misses completely. And that was it: a five-album career, which did everything it needed to and ended before things got messy. What the Lightning Seeds did was never remotely fashionable, but it was bold and colourful and, at its best on Jollification and half a dozen other tracks, utterly of itself.
And listening to their records this past fortnight has been completely uplifting, in a way only perfect pop can be. Farewell, Sigur Rós, weird Icelandic bores who wouldn’t know a tune if it bit them on the bum. Hello, computer-generated giant strawberries, and smile on my face. To quote Broudie himself, ‘It all makes sense.’
Previous page
