Bravo is Germany's biggest youth magazine, active since 1956, apparently noted for its sex education expertise, banned in less than decadent East Germany. Going through its frontispiece archive on the excellent Coverbrowser, we note it started with a very clean and clear single image before some time early in the 80s exploding into a riot of as many images and text banners as can be fit onto A4 size. Their most recent cover makes us despair for what we've given the world. From happier times, a dozen examples of Bravo trying to work out what its audience will go for...
Unsure of which way their demographic will turn, Bravo put the Pistols on the cover and give away a Kenny poster (18/8/77)
An unnecessarily pecs-baring Telly Savalas acts as distraction from the unnerving fact Bravo is attempting to plug The Exorcist to kids (22/5/75)
(Actually it might have been for Airport 75. In fact Blair was on Bravo's cover three times, the next time just as smiley on a bike being promoted as a big young Hollywood star, then in pursed-lips close-up actually for The Exorcist II. A bit later, here she is being out-acted by some of S Club 7)
Cliff as medallion man, Kiss' autographs and for the kids, a Doris Day poster. All human life is catered for. (6/12/79)
Rick Parfitt. Hi, frauleins! (1/6/78)
A man called Gazebo throttles a kitten (9/2/84)
A horribly crowded cover and an attempt to launch Springsteen as an international dreamboat (5/6/85)
(Speaking of dreamboats, this comes in the wake of a period in mid-1983 where in 23 weekly issues nineteen featured either Nena or Kajagoogoo on the front. If there's one thing Bravo likes more than its home grown international successes, it's available himbos with soft hair. Speaking of the former...)
Falco recreates the Frank Hovis farting sketch from Absolutely (13/2/86)
Jason Donovan perpetuates German stereotypes (10/8/89)
(Wonder how Corey Haim's album for plants got on)
Melinda Messenger's secret past revealed (2/4/92)
(This of course is the semi-legendary Army Of Lovers, without whom the course continental Europop would have turned out quite differently. Chap on the right seems to be channelling Prince and Paul King simultaneously)
Strange that this look seems to have been airbrushed out of the band's history (29/12/94)
(That's not the most flatteringly designed trophy in magazine history, is it?)
Boy band formation desires mixed with rampant Anglophilia leads to this bandname (19/10/95)
New adaptation of Madness Nutty Walk prototyped; designer remains unaware of British capacity for sexual visual innuendo (2/10/02)
Tomorrow night the thirtieth Brit awards (first year: 1977) take place at Earl's Court. We will not be previewing or reviewing it, or if at all likely livetweeting it, as we pissed some people off last year when they saw their feed was full of obvious Fearne Cotton jokes for two hours and we can't be all that arsed.
Every year the Brits are advertised as "the event at which anything can happen", blithely ignoring that the things that do happen either occur off-screen (Chumbawamba and John Prescott), are missed by the main show director and much of the press until later (Jarvis) or are things you really wouldn't want highlighting for your own PR good (Sharon Osbourne last year). Still, at least they make the effort. Unlike the hosts of the awards that took place twenty years ago today.
Wikipedia: "The Samantha Fox/Mick Fleetwood show proved to be the single most important event in BPI/BRIT Awards history. It was just so disastrous that the British public's interest was revived and the BRITs became associated with risky live TV." Mmm. Except the following year the whole production ethos changed, ratings collapsed and the awards weren't shown on live TV again until 2007. Here's a more accurate point - why Mick Fleetwood? Sam you can just about see, even if she'd passed her prime as tabloid feature of the day and even her music career had stalled in the UK. Fleetwood? Tango In The Night had resuscitated Fleetwood Mac's career a couple of years earlier and our man in some know assures us it was with half an eye on selling it to an international audience, this being the first year of the Brits as opposed to the BPI Awards, but it's still not enough to throw the drummer in at the deep end, no matter how 'quirky' or how comical the whole size difference is. There were troubles after that - the rehearsal times went to arse, the autocue got moved out of the presenters' eyeline and, by his own admission, Fleetwood was pissed - but chiefly it all looked like a monstrous cock-up and small clips have only ever been excavated for pointing and laughing purposes.
If only there was some sort of service to which people could upload things previously videoed, eh?
The BPI have been quick in the past to take down awards clips but this has been up for five months at time of writing so fingers crossed. Scary thing is, given the little and large aspect you'd be forgiven for thinking the standing in wrong place business halfway through was planned, but then Sam goes and comments on it in such a way that it blows the gaff. First comment of the night and they've already blown it. It's also odd, given the more loose interpretations in recent years of the hosting business, how stilted those opening remarks seem even though they're essentially just setting a scene where "anyone who's anyone in the record business is here tonight". Then Mick goes and removes his hat while off camera, which buggers up continuity too. This was the first year they had ver kids in the audience, and the deceleration from jet engine volume to near silence as Fox namechecks Michael Jackson and then Bruce Springsteen really is something. Then there's Phil Collins turning up without Julian Lennon, and then Julian Lennon sheepishly showing up in lieu of the first award winner, and then four grown adults standing around sheepishly. Live on BBC1.
To stop this being a forest of embeds, here's the other nine parts with synopses:
Two: The winners eventually show their faces, get horrible mike feedback, scream and try to piss off early. The tone is set. The Christians are nominated for Best British Group, which leads to the celebrated Four Tops introduction, where Mick ploughs on regardless ("they're totally compos mentis, whatever that means") of Sam having introduced them too early and indeed trying to introduce them again throughout, and then having to admit "you don't look like 'em, George!" Brilliantly, they come on to present the next award instead but Mick starts introducing Boy George anyway as bringing "a touch of class, and a touch of culture... which is not the case". You said it. It's as this point they lose an exclusive video message from Michael Jackson, meaning the show underruns, leading to all sorts of malarkey come the end.
Three: Fourth award: Sam completely loses her place mid-introduction and has to glance off to the wings to get assurance, and following the nominees video package comes this mightily effective piece of crosstalk: "Who's it gonna be, Sam?" "I dunno, because I can't see..." "Wind away!" "OK. *pause* Only one award, Mick." Then she seems to completely lose composure and turns away while still on camera. The Pasadenas and Steve Winwood are nominated for Best British Album, Fairground Attraction win it, and with that ringing endorsement of the future of British music it's just as well nobody makes a cock-up around it at last.
Four: Mick spectacularly misses his cue while personal grooming takes place. The director gives up and puts the next nominations VT on while Mick is still introducing it. Godley & Creme - Godley & Creme! - present the award, about which Mick makes a completely baffling joke about postmen. Yazz, inventing Agyness Deyn's hairstyle, performs a song that we have never consciously heard before. Mark Knopfler and - hello, teenagers! - Alan Price are wheeled on to announce the formation of the Brits School, and how prescient this anniversary suddenly seems. Price points out then Education Secretary Kenneth Baker, who nearly gets booed out of the building. And they wonder why things had to change.
Five: The first minute of this might be the greatest minute of broadcasting ever committed to the electromagnetic spectrum. Bill Wyman, Ronnie Wood and an unannounced Gary Davies, who from the way he belatedly walks on clearly isn't sure whether he's supposed to be there yet, arrive on stage to announce Best Newcomer. Everyone chooses this moment to look at each other like lemons ("prompt!") until Wood ventures "do you want me to tell you who's won?" - it's also worth noting that nobody has actually said what the award is - at which Davies suggests "are you not going to have a look at the possibilities first?" Possibilities unforthcoming, a full minute after their introduction Wood seizes the initiative despite a late prevention attempt from Davies, still pining for his possibilities. Brilliantly, winners Bros have their feet up on the dais in front of them when the camera cuts to them. Next one's fine, apart from Fox stumbling all over her intro, but introducing the next live band the pair only succeed in falling over each other. "I reckon we're talking heavy heavy metal! Woo!" "I see. How heavy is that, I wonder?" "Well, pretty..." "We're talking heavy metal, here is Def..." "Leppard!" "Leppard!"
Six: Our hosts try some comedic intechange, veteran comedy writer Geoff Atkinson given the unenviable task of scripting all this that will never properly be used due to circumstance. That it's to introduce the Best Classical Recording award suggests it's long been abandoned to deaf ears. Someone called Trevor Pinnock wins and gets the shortest award winner shrift you've ever heard. The script for Best Film Soundtrack has Mick inform us that without due "the whole show might grow to an abysmal halt", which he creditably delivers without irony. Sam introduces Justin Hayward and Belinda Carlisle only for a third gentleman to join them. Sam is then given the line, regarding Tanita Tikaram, that "it's still possible for a female to sell her songs and not her image". How the producer must have laughed at that one.
Seven: Ken Russell co-presents Best Video. There's a routine about the height difference that we're not entirely sure was in the script going on Sam's reaction. Phil Collins, having apologised for Anne Dudley's absence when picking up Best Soundtrack, sheepishly admits she was there before a worryingly manaical laugh and a speech that threatens never to end. Mick, who keeps rubbing his hands together, makes a joke about Rick Astley that nobody picks up on (he'd been cut off from picking up an award the previous year because the event was overrunning).
Eight: Tina Turner has to stop Annie Lennox walking off stage the wrong way. The silences are getting longer. Bros perform. The chairman of the BPI tells Mick he's "done a wonderful job for us tonight". Presumably that was on the autocue. With a script in eyesight he's better. Not by much, but the improvement is there.
Nine: Cliff Richard, who actually runs to the stage, picks up the lifetime achievement award, but he's been introduced too early. Obviously. Cliff looks like he's going to give it some in his big moment, except it turns out to be the extended build-up to giving the entire audience a dressing down for booing Kenneth Baker. Their reaction is notably less enthusiastic after that, as we suspect is the director's after he walks right across the front of the presentational podium in shot. And who's closing the whole shebang? Er, "a unique combo", Mark Knopfler and Randy Newman plus everyone else they could think of.
Ten: And the fantastic thing is, it's just Newman - that's a British youth pop culture extravaganza closed by Randy Newman, everyone - doing his new single as the centrepiece of everyone they could round up. Once it's staggered to a barely acknowledged finish our hosts bid farewell, only for Mick to be handed a card telling him to introduce some Bros videos, only to completely go back on it and get Newman and co to reprise. Falling off the air is an understatement, especially as it's still underrun and BBC1 has to show the Drop The Boy video to hit the news on time, but fitting nonetheless.
To conclude our extended qualifications on the ability of the Now! series to capture a moment no matter what its quality, we had a look at the compilations from as near as possible to its fifth, tenth and fifteenth anniversaries. Not the twentieth, as even by our 00s-cauterising standards 2003 is too recent to properly make something out of in retro nostalgia terms and even then the attraction of Joe Budden and D-Side palls.
Fifth anniversary
The last Now! number one before compilations were harvested off to their own chart and there's a curious duality going on. On the one hand, in those Levi's/inception of Q times there's a rush of elder statesmen and stateswomen with Womack & Womack, UB40 and Chrissie Hynde, Robert Palmer, Phil Collins, Art of Noise featuring Tom Jones, Bryan Ferry and the summarily advert-aided Hollies on Disc 1 alone, plus 38 year old Bobby McFerrin standing out like a sore thumb before Trevor, Anne and JJ met Tom. And then disc two kicks off with Chubby Checker! And there's the other part, as all this new music from American youths and British DJs starts flocking into the mainstream too, as the track here is the Fat Boys' The Twist reworking, and if that's understandably not what you were strictly after the whole thing opens with the Coldcut-produced The Only Way Is Up and showcases Bomb The Bass, Wee Papa Girl Rappers, Salt n Pepa and, er, Milli Vanilli, plus a none more Vicks-friendly segue of Yello, Inner City, D-Mob and Beatmasters. Changes are afoot which not even a slew of AOR - the Christians' version of Harvest For The World, Hue & Cry, Breathe's ever dreary Hands To Heaven, Level 42, T'Pau - can stop. The compilers even get clever towards the end, following Transvision Vamp's snottiness by committee I Want Your Love with the now slimmed down Duran Duran's explosion in a Fairlight factory I Don't Want Your Love followed by the Human League's not particularly dignified Love Is All That Matters, which didn't even make the top 40. And it all closes with Martha's Harbour, to throw a bone to just about everyone. Verdict: there's a revolution happening, but we'll just idle away over here with our CDs and basic rediscoveries while you work it all out.
Tenth anniversary
Actually, things evidently didn't get better that quickly, as five years on Now is starting with UB40's version of (I Can't Help) Falling In Love With You, followed by the Pet Shop Boys' version of Go West, followed by Frankie Goes To Hollywood's actual Relax (a best of was out, see). And from then it's into... well, when we covered the 1992 Christmas chart last month we noted the preponderance of novelties and covers, as if there was a recession on or something, and 1993 was clearly the year of Eurobeat. Stakka Bo is a shot across the bows, but when Disc 2 opens with Cappella, Haddaway, 2 Unlimited, Culture Beat and last vestige of rave The Goodmen, with Urban Cookie Collective, Captain Hollywood Project and 80s jazz vocalist chancing her arm Juliet Roberts following soon behind, you realise this isn't really a period in post-rave dance music's evolution, Open Up or no Open Up, that many would be proud of, although you know as well as we do that come the mid to late 2010s scores of self-consciously 'wacky' 21 year olds will be telling the BBC entertainment section that "I discovered all that early 90s music in my parents' attic, I really think it was inventive, happy music and it's not given the credit it deserves..." (Mind you, the 80s revival hasn't bothered with Sade/Matt Bianco/Working week jazz-pop, so there's hope yet) The presence of SWV and Eternal suggests the R&B girls are about to arrive, and there's some Brits with guitars attempting to make the leap in the form of the Levellers, James and, good lord, Radiohead's Creep - shame this isn't number 25, we'd have had to consider Kingmaker - but in a period when pop hadn't yet seen the potential in proper boy bands and guitars weren't being let back in the club yet it seems full of passing fads like Chaka Demus & Pliers (ah, the summer of reggae, if that's what you really must call it), the Spin Doctors (the 90s' least fondly remembered hitmakers?) and the Shola Ama of 1993, Lena Fiagbe. Plus, the whole month of release saw I'd Do Anything For Love (But I Won't Do That) at number one, and if that's not indicative of confused times we don't know what is.
Fifteenth anniversary
So somewhere along the way marketing arrived, and with CD:UK having just started the dancers and stage school kids are appearing, Billie and 911 opening disc two. Yet extraordinary how potent cheap music is, and by 1998 dance music was pretty cheap. And successful, which is why we have a whole host of chancers, from T-Spoon's easy column inches Sex On The Beach to Deetah to Touch And Go (Would You...?, a favourite of the people who put music behind home improvement shows to this day), plus Sash! - 39th in the 2008 album sales list, his best of, nearly selling 300,000 copies - and The Tamperer's non-chimney related hit If You Buy This Record Your Life Will Be Better. Here Gangster Trippin' and Music Sounds Better With You seem like the 1812 Overture. Plenty of R&B influenced stuff too, UB40 are back, and a good period for the sort of light radio pop of the type that flits by the listener without their hardly noticing. Jennifer Paige was never going to be more than a one hit wonder, the Meredith Brooks of that year, and Alisha's Attic always seem to be coming and going but it's alarming how little Lutricia McNeal made an impact despite three top ten singles, rising without trace and disappearing quietly. Space probably don't even remember covering We Gotta Get Out Of This Place, but here it is. The overwhelming thought is it all seems very sandpapered off and acceptable, not necessarily a bad thing in itself but it was all settling for "will this do, Robbie our liege?" a little.
And Mel B and Missy Elliott's I Want You Back is, B's shot at gossamer soul singing aside, much better than you remember it.
Yeah. While other blogs and music writing outlets have been celebrating the fiftieth birthday of Motown, we're commemorating a chart pop compilation series. We're not that proud.
Whenever the public at large are given cause to reflect on a piece of British pop culture ephemera from a shared growing up past – the end of Smash Hits or Top Of The Pops, say – the default setting is to ignore how it changed from our youth to that of today’s youth and lionise the way that it left such an indelible mark almost as if it’s always been like that. Even aware of all the arguments about the lack of social awareness and recognition of modern pop music in a post-TOTP world, we’re hesitant about joining the calls to bring it back because we’re recalling the party atmosphere of the Michael Hurll era rather than the public wake atmosphere of Andi Peters’, and we all know which would be easier for a cash strapped BBC to organise, especially as hiring Cotton and Yates for the Christmas shows smacked of returning to the scene of the crime.
In the case of the Now That’s What I Call Music compilations and their twenty-fifth anniversary such selectivism would be impossible. It was always straight ahead crassly populist; a cherrypicking of the hits since the last volume then, the same now. Maybe one could get nostalgic about the blithely matter of fact sleevenotes for each entry, or when the artwork was based on more than stylised balloons, or perhaps even the pig (“Philip Oakeeee!”), but the content is presented the same now as it was then, ubercommerciality and chart quirks treated just the same, nothing more than a snapshot of the previous two or three months.
And you can see that in the actual tracklisting for the reissued Now! 1, which does indeed have the pig/flower poster reproduced on the back. There's Total Eclipse of the Heart, Karma Chameleon and The Love Cats, but for the most part it's thoroughly disjointed. Why, it's almost as if Ashley Abram never envisaged 1980s nostalgia cheap thrills twenty five years in the future. So we meet Duran Duran heading over the crest of popularity's hill and others (Human League, Madness) comfortably heading down the other side, artists who really turned out to be not much up from brazen chancers - Kajagoogoo, Howard Jones, Men At Work - and tracks that nobody would put on even the most desperate 1983 compilation now, either for being too hackneyed (Peabo Bryson & Roberta Flack's Tonight I Celebrate My Love, Mike Oldfield's Moonlight Shadow, Genesis' That's All, a solo Limahl) or too of their time - The Rock Steady Crew, Double Dutch, the fabulously bizarre while simultaneously none more American 80s MOR sounding Kissing With Confidence by Will Powers, a song which includes co-writer credits for Nile Rodgers, Todd Rundgren and Steve Winwood and with Carly Simon on uncredited vocals. Plus Culture Club's then new Victims is appended to the end, the sleevenotes famously venturing it would be "certain No.1 by the time you have this LP" (it wasn't).
In other ways, it's a fascinating document suited for far more than hen parties wearing deely boppers. Here's Tina Turner's first single back from the brink with BEF, who also turn up in their Heaven 17 day job with the simultaneously of its era and forward looking Temptation. Here's UB40's Red Red Wine, the single with which they took the leap from socially conscious heavy dub/roots experimentalists to wine bar soundtracking covers act. New Edition, an end in themselves but arguably the beginning of much more in the long run. Tracey Ullman, when you could still have a parallel career as TV comedian and semi-serious Stiff Records solo artist, tackling Kirsty Maccoll's unimpeachable They Don't Know, the sort of song no TV star with pop aspirations would be let anywhere near, or indeed desire to go towards, now. But ultimately this is what became of early 1980s pop as it shrugged off its desire to investigate and invent largely in favour of freeze-dried production and appearing on whichever variety show was coming from the Palladium on ITV at the time. Let this act as a signpost to stop, La Roux.
Next week, we take the contemporary musical temperature of further Now! anniversaries. It's the pig one!
As part of the series' 25th anniversary the original Now That's What I Call Music is issued for the first time on CD today, and nobody mention that it actually came out in December 1983. Hope they've acknowledged the pig somewhere in the artwork (legend has it that the title came from the slogan on an advert for Danish Bacon Factories which was in Richard Branson's office, hence the porcine mascot, voiced by Brian Glover in the adverts, for the first five volumes). Sadly they've updated the advert, which is a shame as nothing says 1983 more than Tracy Ullman over floaty screens:
