This Was... Cult Fiction Part 6: 'This Is... Cult Fiction Royale'

One of the big frustrations for soundtrack collectors of yore - and TV soundtrack collectors in particular - was that the commercially released versions of your top favourite theme tunes never quite matched up with what was heard on screen. The odd ill-advised funked-up abberation aside, they were by and large very close approximations, but were always sufficiently 'different' to cause the sort of frustration that could never be sensibly explained to anyone else; the guitar that came in just that bit further away from the beat, the shrill exotic wind instrument replaced with a more Pye Records-friendly session flautist, the abrupt ending jettisoned in favour of a repetitive and overlong fadeout, and so on and so on and so on and living in harmony they're the friendly enemies living in harmony they're the friendly enemies living in harmonOH JUST STOP. In some extreme cases, like that of Randall And Hopkirk (Deceased), the hapless punters wouldn't even have got any kind of variation on the original recording at all, with the few - and even in some cases lone - commercially available versions being shunted out by the yard by one of the many and unvaried faceless big bands and orchestras that specialised in such cheap and not always especially cheerful cash-ins.

One such cheap and not especially cheerful cash-in was the long-forgotten ramble through the theme from Randall And Hopkirk (Deceased) released as a latterly-dizzying-sum-fetching single by Norrie Paramor & His Orchestra. This alone was enough of a holy grail for collectors (don't bother, though, it's rubbish); the spectral harpsichord tingling of Edwin Astley's original on-screen version was so far beyond the realms of availablity that people didn't even bother wishing that it would come out, and instead just contented themselves with muffled and hissy recordings they'd made from VHS tapes. Like so many other similarly great yet elusive pieces of soundtrack music, it was destined to gather dust on a shelf in some archive where nobody actually knew where it was, tantalisingly just on the edge of continuity-announcer-hijacked consciousness but seemingly destined never to find its way onto CD.

Late in 1996, however, some enterprising soundtrack collector decided they'd had quite enough of this nonsense, and wrote to 'QAnswers', Q Magazine's authoritative rock itch-scratcher extraordinaire, asking the intrepid ask-arounders if there was any way in which the original recording could ever be made commercially available. Surprisingly, the answer came back that the compilers of the Cult Fiction series were looking into whether the original Edwin Astley recording of Randall And Hopkirk (Deceased), spectral harpsichord tingling and all, could be incorporated into a collection of TV detective themes pencilled in for the New Year. Needless to say, the mere suggestion that they were looking into the possibility of licensing otherwise unavailable original original original soundtrack recordings led to all manner of excitement and speculation. By the twin laws of averages and diminishing returns any compilation series onto its sixth volume should have long since started to run the already flimsy concept into the ground - and Trackspotting of course couldn't even manage a single volume without doing so - but this news suggested that they were all set to outdo all of their previous and indeed not inconsiderable achievements. Whatever the next Cult Fiction album ended up being called, it looked likely to be the album that a great many of the series' fans had always wished existed.

When This Is... Cult Fiction Royale duly appeared late in 1997, it wasn't exactly a 'detective themes' album as such, but neither was it the throwback to now-badly-outmoded Tarantino-worship that the continentally-skewed burger-scoffing title suggested. So... what exactly was it, then? Well, the cover artwork, showing an old-skool petrol-guzzler, a foxy chick in a Paloma Faith-esque wallpaper-pattern jumpsuit, and what experts believe to be Matthew McConaughey's character from Dazed And Confused as rendered by a court artist who'd just been fired for being slightly too accurate, was giving nothing away, and the tracklisting appeared, on first glance at least, to be bewilderingly all over the place. The 'theme', if there could be said to be anything resembling a tangible 'theme' at all, appeared simply to be 'being the best Cult Fiction compilation of the lot', and it's fair to say that this ambitious benchmark was one that they ended up vaulting with ease. Whether by accident or design - well, come on, it's going to be 'design' isn't it - they had managed to gather together just about everything that a Cult Fiction devotee might concievably still want in the one place. Well, technically two places, given it was a double CD set, but you get the general idea.

In fact, This Is... Cult Fiction Royale was such a mighty collection of tracks that it was easy to miss the fact that a good thirty percent of them had already appeared on previous Cult Fiction compilations. And indeed sufficiently mighty that even when you did notice this, it hardly seemed to matter, though admittedly the fact that many were also appearing in full this time around did help a bit. Joe 90 (with 'wow' reassuringly intact), Hill Street Blues, The Return Of The Saint, The Professionals, Man In A Suitcase, Get Carter, The Champions, Avenues And Alleyways from The Protectors, Mission Impossible, Danger Man, The Man From UNCLE, Strange Report, The New Avengers and Tales Of The Unexpected (the only one of them still to be suffering from early-fade-out-itis) all show up for a repeat performance, but they're all such great pieces of music that you really don't mind hearing them again in a new context. On top of which, there's a couple of welcome surprises amongst their fellow returnees; the James Bond Theme is in its original Connery-era single-version guise as credited to (cough) 'Monty Norman', there's a thundering funked-up take on The Sweeney as recorded for mysteriously undiscernible purposes by library music mainstay Simon Wallace and alternative comedy's own piano-pounder Simon Brint (and yes, the alarming drumming may well be courtesy of Rowland Rivron), and as an entertaining white elephant there's the 12" extended version of a partially successful 'Big Beat' reworking of the original The Professionals theme by Blue Boy, which as you're probably suspecting by was indeed the less successful follow-up to the still-fantastic earlier-in-the-year hit Remember Me.

And what of that much-vaunted 'new stuff' that allowed for this equally much-vaunted 'new context'? Well, the two-disc set gets off to a barnstorming start with two previously-neglected instrumentals that had then recently been dusted off for renewed advert-fuelled popularity, Lalo Schifrin's car-bigging-up main title theme from Bullitt and Jean-Jacques Perrey's Lucozade-proffering early Moog gurgle-out E.V.A., alongside - more impressively still - the single version of John Barry's oddly ill-fittingly Cold War-evoking theme from ITC's most entertainingly ludicrous series of the lot, The Persuaders, which up until then had been eluding compilers on account of headache-inducing rights complications, with many a collection having to opt to use a dreary orchestral rendering in its stead. Yer Schifrin also makes everyone's day with Dirty Harry's scorching opening title accompaniment, which rumbles on ominously far longer than it has any right to before losing control and going wildly overboard with the blaring brass, yodelling backing vocal ladies and wah-wah disobedience, along with the more subdued On The Way To San Mateo from further along in the Bullitt soundtrack, while John Barry performs much the same honours with his oft-overlooked recurring Bond incidental instrumental 007. On the more obscure and televisual side, there's not only the shrill flute-driven funk workout that introduced a corduroy-clad post-Doctor Who Jon Pertwee grilling a team of b-list celebrities about an extended ripoff of Cluedo in Whodunnit?, Laurie Johnson's close-but-no-final-verse-trumpet-voluntary single-length reading of The Avengers, the surprisingly tuneful 'gritty' urban eighties orchestra-hit-driven intro from Dempsey & Makepeace, and The Les Reed Brass' top drawer cover of The Saint, there's also the Simon Park Orchestra's it's-a-lager-not-a-tune-tastic theme from Van Der Valk - probably one of the most frequently forgotten chart-toppers in top forty history - and even better still its even more regularly overlooked b-side; Distant Hills, better known to school-averse perusers of pre-daytime TV daytime TV schedules as the closing theme from Crown Court, and which is arguably worth the price of admission alone.

Yet amazingly, if we're extending the 'price of admission' analogy still further and indeed beyond the point where it really makes any logical or cogent sense, all of this above-alluded to musical fantasticness is really only sitting in those dusty display cases in the foyer that people just sort of wander past without taking much notice of, and what everyone really wants to see (or, erm, hear) is the main attraction; or, in less ridiculous terms, those excitement-arousing themes taken directly from the soundtracks of TV episodes. And they really are 'taken directly' - in the absence of easily sourceable master tapes, a deal was struck with the then-present rights holders of ATV/ITC's televisual output whereby they were literally dubbed from master copies taken directly from the archive, with the opening and closing themes as heard on screen bolted together into something at least approximating 'full length'. While this does mean that they're unavoidably presented here in trebly flat mono and there are some jarringly shoddy bits of editing on display - someone was clearly labouring under the misapprehension that Gerry Anderson's 'Century 21' ident was actually part of the UFO theme, whilst a butterfingered fragment of the sponsor message from the US broadcasts somehow found its way into the theme from The Baron - mere words alone cannot adequately express how much of a thrill it was to finally have high quality as-heard-on-TV copies of those two along with The Prisoner, Randall And Hopkirk (Deceased), Department S, Jason King, Stingray, Fireball XL5, Supercar, Space: 1999, Tiswas and Sapphire & Steel (or, as the back cover tracklisting has it, 'Steele'), complete with chattering teleprinters, screeching car u-turns and Patrick McGoohan thumping a desk crudely sellotaped over the top. Of course, dilligent detective work has since led to a great many compilations using the original tapes of all these and many more besides and in glorious properly mastered stereo to boot (yes, alright, and mono in quite a few cases too, but you get the general idea), with the result that in retrospect they make This Is... Cult Fiction Royale feel like a bit of a disjointed listen as a whole, but at the time it was a massive step up and indeed step forwards from the home-made cassettes that hapless soundtrack fans had been trying and failing to put together to their satisfaction for far too long.

Inevitably, with a compilation and indeed an archive-scouring endeavour on this scale, there are a couple of moments where This Is... Cult Fiction Royale doesn't quite hit the Century 21 Productions target. The perfectly decent but all-too-familiar single versions of Thunderbirds and Captain Scarlet And The Mysterons show up instead of their superior on-screen readings - quite why they didn't take the opportunity to include the much-sought-after mock-bubblegum-psych oh-no-some-boxes-are-falling-quite-near-me closing song from the latter really is a mystery - although on the other hand we should be grateful they averted the weedier onscreen original of the Joe 90 theme in favour of the hefty Northern Soul-favoured single version, 'wow' or otherwise. Presumably because the rights were then owned by the same people as the erstwhile ATV/ITC shows, we get the horrendous beefing-up of the theme from The Magic Roundabout from the now quietly forgotten Nigel Planer-narrated episodes, though the most jarring plot-straying is saved for right at the end, when listeners get to 'enjoy' all seven bastard minutes of the the are-they-still-going-on-about-that-am-I-still-on-that-fecking-island moping-sax main theme from the show they could never quite stop trying to convince you that you liked, Twin Peaks, and more incongruously still Vangelis' complete and unedited Blade Runner Blues, which may very well be an astonishing piece of music but is not really one that should be taking up several decades at the end of two discs' worth of walloping drums and swaggering brass. Though if you did give up halfway through, then you'll have missed the suspiciously prolonged blast of silence at the end; 'hidden tracks' at the beginning and end of CDs were all the rage back then - indeed, it's quite possible that some have still never even been stumbled across - and what better way to end this collection than with the inattentive-listener-alarming actual literal binging and indeed bonging ATV 'zoom' jingle, blaring out as if an episode of Pipkins is about to start? Actually, why wasn't the theme from Pipkins on here? Yes, alright, moving on...

Although whether they were actually that good at going out on a high as individual compilations is open to question, This Is... Cult Fiction Royale really did end the Cult Fiction series on a high; presumably it was a commercial rather than artistic decision to finish the series here, but even so it drew a pretty satisfying line under two years and nine discs' worth of expertly-chosen tracks that most of the target audience had probably never even imagined they'd get to own on CD. And that wasn't even the end of the story; in 2004, Virgin saw fit to release The Best Of Cult Fiction, which collapsed highlights from the earlier volumes (though frustratingly no Eurovision stuff) onto two discs alongside a handful of newcomers and a couple of selections from Tarantino's later offerings, and a revised This Is Easy, replacing a couple of the original's more obscure selections with contributions from the likes of Serge Gainsbourg and Mike Flowers (and yes, they did take the opportunity to upgrade those horrendous re-recorded Burt Bacharach and Sandie Shaw tracks). Meanwhile, there was no updated Trackspotting.

So, This Was... Cult Fiction. A series of compilations that may not have had the era-defining cultural cachet of Now That's What I Call Music, the slick combination of chart hit crowd-drawing and collector-friendly obscure 12" mixes of Anthems: Electronic 80s, or the sheer FOR THE SAKE OF ALL THAT IS DECENT AND HUMANE HIT IT WITH A BIN of Summer Chart Party, but which still make for interesting and enjoyable listening today, and which more importantly went very well with your Britpop, your Loungecore, your unironic love of Eurovision, your alcopops, your liking for the sort of films that the 'cineastes' seldom enthused over, your back issues of Loaded that you couldn't bear to throw away, and your falling off a chair while attempting to impress 'That Becky'. Significantly, the exotic jazzy stylings and tendency towards chilled-out extended album-closers also went surprisingly well with an unexpected various-reasons-prompted shift in musical mood that happened shortly after This Is... Cult Fiction Royale came out... but that's another story.

This Was... Cult Fiction: Part 1 'This Is Cult Fiction'

If only Quentin Tarantino had known what he was starting.

Think back, if you will, to a time before cinema's Jimmy Dimmick was a millionaire megastar director who prefers to spend most of his time making the same film again and again but with different hats interspersed with getting a bit shirty on What The Papers Say, and when he was, quite simply, potentially the most exciting movie-maker ever. He was someone who - not unlike certain figures in the independent music scene around that time - appeared to have seen the good, the bad and the just plain weird in any and every area of 'underground' cinema from the forties onwards, and had decided that the time had come to put a nice new shirt on it and send it 'overground'. At a time when the concept of postmodernism itself was the stuff of postmodernity, Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, True Romance and Natural Born Killers arrived like a pop cultural call to arms (well, maybe not Natural Born Killers), simultaneously pointing the way into cinema's future and into the more weird and wonderful (though mostly just plain weird) corridors of its past.

Part of the reason for this, of course, was his revolutionary approach to soundtracks; ignoring the tradition of the Oscar-courting original orchestral score in favour of employing a similar sort of pop culture archaeology to his visuals, which was probably more inspired by American Graffiti than by any Polish art film with a stop-motion goose tapdancing to a slowed-down-then-speeded-up version of The Night Has A Thousand Eyes, and using the parade of non-stop half-remembered hits to actually emphasise something about the characters or setting; the tacky seventies pop radio sounds in Reservoir Dogs, for example, give an indefinable extra sense of definition to the sharp-suited career criminals addicted to oldies stations, while the sparse and trebly forgotten pre-Beatles chart smashes in Pulp Fiction do much to underscore the empty fringe-of-society netherworlds in which its various protagonists variously operate. Hardly surprising, then, that both films should have inspired soundtrack albums that bothered the upper reaches of the chart for years on end, to the extent that it's now impossible to venture into a charity shop without spotting one or the other of them. And then there's True Romance with its tongue-in-cheek reuse of existing film scores, and the blues-hollerin'-driven original script of Natural Born Killers. By the time of Kill Bill he really was just playing back-of-the-bargain-bin Top Trumps, though.

Needless to say, those top-selling soundtrack albums inspired a brief but prolific outburst of me-too soundtrack albums, and indeed me-too themed soundtrack compilations, all of which spectacularly missed the point of why those Tarantino efforts had been so popular in the first place (and of course Trackspotting, which missed the point of just about everything ever). Most of these efforts, as you can imagine, or indeed may well have been trying to forget, simply bolted together a couple of blatant borrows from Tarantino and Tarantino-affiliated (seriously, remember when we were supposed to regard Killing Zoe and Threesome as somehow relevant?) soundtracks with a handful of de facto Britpop-era hits and some seventies rock stuff that Loaded had said it was OK to like, which is why you'll now find them all lurking in their hundreds in the 58 CDs For £1 section at That's Entertainment.

There was one album, however - well, series of albums to be strictly accurate - that somehow managed to get this least get-right-able of approaches right, and would then subsequently go off on all manner of obscure and esoteric tangents that would have caused all those people whooping at Stuck In The Middle With You at the student union to shudder like they'd been forced to watch a single minute of The Magic Fountain on a loop for forty eight hours. It started off with both feet planted firmly in Tarantino-land, yet six volumes later it had taken in Count Indigo, Bardo, the 'wrong' Magic Roundabout, and plenty more besides. And, what do you know, they all still stand up well today. So join us, if you will, as we take an album-by-album relisten to... the Cult Fiction series! Beginning with...


This Is... Cult Fiction (1995)

As the Pulp Fiction-riffing title suggests - though as we shall see, within a very short time 'Cult Fiction' seemed almost to become an original name in its own right - this inaugural offering came very much in the slipstream of the initial outbreak of Tarantino-mania; something that was in turn very much reflected in the cover art, featuring as it does a stocking'n'suspendered and unfeasibly-chested blonde in a bleak motel having recently discarded a wine glass and the world's smallest record. Meanwhile, lord alone knows that that TV show's supposed to be. Doubtless this was intended as some sort of non-copyright-troubling homage to Uma Thurman's iconic pose from the Pulp Fiction poster, only commissioned from an artist that was briefed to not to watch the film, nor to learn anything at all whatsoever about what might possibly happen in it. If anything, it's closer to being a homage to the cover of Tony Hancock's favoured page-turner Lady Don't Fall Backwards, although sadly you won't find Spying Tonight anywhere on this tracklisting.

Needless to say, said Hancock-deficient tracklisting leans very heavily towards the Tarantino-weighted end of the scale, and yet somehow, rather than seeming like yet another cash-in stroke rip-off, it manages to hit all the right notes and throws in a few impressive suprises to boot. The opening double whammy of film-openers Little Green Bag and Misirlou still sounds amazing, the over-familiar but still great Stuck In The Middle With You rubs shoulders with the lesser-heard Jungle Boogie and You Never Can Tell, and the compilers have also found room for Rumble, the menacing crumbly-toned Link Wray instrumental that was inexplicably left off the Pulp Fiction soundtrack album in favour of Maria McKee whistling about a sodding dress for twelve years.

As you might well be deducing from that rather left-field inclusion (well, relatively), the compilers of This Is... Cult Fiction seem to have been keen - as would rapidly become a trademark of theirs - to put that extra bit of effort in and come up with something that would both warrant and withstand repeated listening; no mean feat when you consider that many of the similar efforts it was jostling for space with in the HMV Soundtracks rack were a slog to get through even just the once. The only problem is, when you've exhausted the Tarantino soundtracks and incorporated as much of them as you feasibly can without your target audience feeling royally ripped off, where do you go next?

And this is where This Is... Cult Fiction starts to get interesting. Initially they seem to have opted to reach for the nearest recent films with similar (if far lesser) 'cult' credentials, meaning that we get Bjork's still-astonishing theme from Young Americans and the original Lalo Schifrin version of Mission Impossible (as opposed to that miserable angle-grinding reworking by Larry Mullen and a bin, which was virtually inescapable at the time but thankfully barely heard now), though on the less appealing side we also get Here Comes The Hotstepper from Pret A Porter, a film that the media appeared to decide appealed to the 'Tarantino set' without actually canvassing any of them for their opinion on the matter, and - stetching the definition of 'recent' slightly - the never-entertaining Blue Velvet by Bobby Vinton. The latter had in fact been a barely explicable Twin Peaks-affiliated reissued top ten hit late in 1990 (and that's not the last that we'll be hearing from Dale Cooper and company), and indeed room is made for a couple of further then-recent Revived 45 chart-vaulters; Perez Prado's Guaglione, as featured in the first of several thousand Guinness adverts that apparently 'everyone' thought was amazing apart from anyone at all that you actually knew, and the similarly beer-propelled We Have All The Time In The World by Louis Armstrong.

The latter's James Bond associations provides a convenient route in for the James Bond Theme, here in one of its later elaborated-up John Barry re-recordings rather than the twisted beat boom twangings of the original (though - spoiler alert - that's something we may well end up touching on at some point in the future), and while there aren't really that many big name big screen big themed spies or detectives worthy of a place alongside him on such a commercially minded compilation, there are nonetheless many of a more televisual persuasion who are eminently suitable for the task, and indeed that's the next major port of musical call. Laurie Johnson's single version of The Avengers is joined by a couple of judiciously chosen top-drawer covers, The Les Reed Brass' take on The Saint and The Bob Leaper Orchestra's frantic rattle through Danger Man (which was then also doing a stint as the theme music for Mark Radcliffe's 'Graveyard Shift' Radio 1 show - which you can read all about in my book Fun At One), while from across the 'pond' come the barnstorming original black-and-white-era arrangement of The Man From UNCLE and, rather less impressively, a pedestrian trot through Hawaii Five-O by a struggling post-psychedelia The Ventures, twanging politely through an arrangement that does neither them nor the tune any favours.

Then there's a bit of a lurch forward into seventies urban funk hipness, with Theme From Shaft (which, weirdly, sounds like an inferior re-recorded version even though it isn't), The Harder They Come, the overquoted monologue-enhanced All The Animals Come Out At Night from Taxi Driver, and - letting the urban funk quotient down slightly - Everybody's Talkin' from Midnight Cowboy, as then recently pushed back into the charts by The Beautiful South though anyone with even the slightest bit of sense should prefer this reading by indie nearly-men Moose. And once again there's some small screen contemporaries for this lot, with a reading of The Sweeney by the dreaded Power Pack Orchestra (an eighties studio ensemble that specialised in microscopically close approximations of original film and TV themes, virtually indistinguishable from the genuine article but just about mechanical and workmanlike enough to be detectable, which in a way is actually worse than a ludicrously inauthentic bash-it-out-after-lunch job), and the throw-some-notes-at-the-wall funk-jazz of The Streets Of San Francisco, a show that has blithely ignored repeated attempts to artificially build up any kind of cult following around it. Meanwhile, from completely the other end of the seventies comes Francis Monkman's alarming theme from The Long Good Friday, a suitably nasty-sounding reminder of the days when library music started to get just that bit unsettlingly antiseptic in a slap-bass-and-sequencer reflection of the dockland redevelopments that the in-character Bob Hoskins so despised.

And that's just about it, apart from three notable fishes out of big-poster-bought-from-the-Student-Union water. An all-too-familiar four-note twang signifies it's time for Twin Peaks, a show which has since disappeared from the 'cult' map in a manner that you really wouldn't have predicted from the endless conversations about the latest 'clues' back in 1990 (most of them conducted by people who claimed not to understand The Prisoner when it showed up on Channel 4 a couple of years later), Great Big Giant Of The Cinema Horson Welles shows up to show these young upstarts how it's done with the beatnikky bongo freakout from the start of A Touch Of Evil, and then... there's... Joe 90. Yes, Joe 90. The least marketable of any Gerry Anderson show (and yes, that does include The Secret Service), and with about as much in stylistic and thematic common with anything else on the album as Here Come The Double Deckers. And yet Barry Gray's spectacular transistory Hammond and speaker-rattling guitar theme music is quite simply the best track on here by a very long distance indeed. Yes, Sam Loover and company may lack the cult credentials of the collar-turned-up sax-accompanied types that make up the bulk of the rest of This Is... Cult Fiction - let's face it, they even lack the cult credentials of a country-yowling Supermarionation cowboy with an oversized head - but end up showing them all by virtue of having the best theme music. Even if it does appear here with the dreaded 'wow' intact (if you have no idea what that might possibly mean, have a look at this highly amusing rant on the very tape-warbling subject).

One place that you won't find the Joe 90 theme though, 'wow'-equipped or otherwise, is on the little-known American edition of This Is... Cult Fiction, a heavily truncated affair in the tradition of the early Now That's What I Call Music CDs that dispenses with the less hoagie-scoffing friendly selections in favour of... well, a lot of tracks that we'll be coming back to in the near future. And to know what did show up on those future volumes, well, you'd need to have a police box that travelled in time or something. Or be Belgian.

Yet one thing that the American edition does do is highlight just how diverse, even within its own narrow and limited self-imposed parameters, This Is... Cult Fiction really is. Rather than stick to entirely safe and predictable choices, there's at least an attempt to suggest to people who had bought it on the back of Pumpkin and Honeybunny's jabbering that there's a lot more out there that they might like, from gritty urban gangland thrillers to sub-psychedelic sixties private eyes to, well, Joe 90. Whether this actually had any effect is another question, but it's a question better suited to future instalments. For now, it's worth highlighting just how well this seemingly all over the place selection of soundtrack excerpts hangs together, disregarding what 'fits' in a humourless berk HERNing on a forum sense and concentrating on what 'fits' musically and indeed as just stuff you might be into. Something that The Tarantino Connection never quite managed.

So, that was This Is... Cult Fiction, a relatively by-the-book yet eminently listenable compilation that by ignoring its original theme developed a whole new theme of its own, and which, whether by accident or design (and it was probably a bit of both), managed to avoid falling into the usual small-minded post-Tarantino 'YER LIKE THIS' trap, and took the time and trouble to say 'ACTUALLY YER MIGHT QUITE LIKE THIS AS WELL'. Though when it came to a second volume, they changed what yer might quite like completely...

They Could Have Been A Bit Like The Beatles: Jason Donovan 'I'm Doing Fine'

7. Jason Donovan 'I'm Doing Fine'

 

Sing This All Together (See What Happens): The very definition of 'whirlwind', and accompanied by a hairstyle that looked like it was caught in one, Jason Donovan's unplanned yet massively successful singing career was barely twelve months old when he started expressing frustration with his output and mentioning his love of The Beatles and The Stone Roses in interviews. True, a lot of it had been anthemic radio pop with too much treble, but there was also a higher smattering than usual of vaguely strange sixties pop covers (including the shimmering Rhythm Of The Rain and a spooky, semi-menacing take on Sealed With A Kiss), lending weight to his apparent desire to be seen as a modern day Russell Morris rather than just That Bloke In The Coat That Cost The Wrong Side Of Three Hundred Pounds. I'm Doing Fine marked the moment when he finally convinced Stock, Aitken and Waterman. EIGHT POINTS.

Brought His Mellotrode And Freaked 'Em All Out: On first glance you'd be forgiven for thinking this was just another standard issue exercise in Beatle-emulation, albeit a much catchier than usual one, but listen more closely and you'll notice a couple of subtle touches that elevate it a fair few notches above Noel Gallagher. There's a Byrds-y jangly guitar intro, 'submarine' vocal reverb, toy piano, a flourish of Penny Lane trumpet that through the miracles of eighties recording studio 'EQ Level' botherishness ends up sounding like an escaped bit of the Joe 90 theme, and absolutely tons of near-Todd Rundgren-worrying lengthy blasts of phasing. Yes it's all still very trebly and compressed and clinical-sounding, but let it never be forgotten that Stock, Aitken and Waterman did make some genuinely corking records that sounded great on local commercial radio, and this was one of them. EIGHT POINTS.

On The Bus Or Off The Bus? Well, there's nothing really profound to remark on here, just a lament-tinged rejoinder to a 'difficult' lady friend that comes across as something akin to Pet Sounds retooled for Big Fun, but there's a nice undercurrent of introspective angst, and, given Mr Donovan's enthusiastic preference for 'certain substances' around the time, the 'Doing Fine' could well have been achieved with the assistance of psychotropic means... SIX POINTS.

The Green And Purple Lights Affect Your Sight: Wigged-out dancing girls, flying semi-acoustic guitars, and Jase appearing as all four Beatle Boys (including a 'Ringo' doing comedy spinning around antics on his drumstool) in the style of a black and white TV pop show are the order of the day here, looking uncannily like those surviving stray fragments of the small-screen appearances of the likes of The Remains and The Vogues. Unfortunately - presumably out of fear that unsuspecting pop fans might get confused and explode - someone's seen fit to superimpose a modern-day Mr Donovan doing his best bare-chested Jim Morrison poses over the top. The nicest thing you can say about it is that he was trying to copy Tim Booth. The least nicest thing you can say is that it ruins an otherwise fun video. SEVEN POINTS.

I'm Picking Up Bad Vibrations: I'm Doin' Fine was nothing if not optimistically titled, as a recent nosedive in fortunes (not helped by, let's be blunt about this, rotten songs like Hang On To Your Love) propelled it to the lofty heights of number 22. More or less abandoned by the pop fans, unlikely to be welcome with open arms by the indie kids doing that head-shaking shuffle and shouting "Fishes Eyes will watch your lies", and without a ratings-grabbing TV show to fall back on any more, this was a commercial bad trip like few before or since. Keep away from the brown acid, Jase! EIGHT POINTS.

Ha Ha Ha... We Blew Your Mind! Amazingly, this Woolworths' Bargain Bin-bound calamity didn't result in a 'carpeting' from the 'suits', unless the carpet in question was a flourescent yellow and green one. I'm Doing Fine was followed into the lower reaches of the Top Twenty by the similarly-inclined, if more funk-riffing, RSVP, and by a decent cover of Happy Together which did at least get him back into the top ten. Then, of course, musical theatre came calling and that was that, but for this brief if startling diversion into Nuggets-For-The-Gameboy-Generation territory he nets a more than creditable NINE POINTS. Which brings him to a rather fine-doin' total of FORTY SIX POINTS.

 

Next Time - Roland Orzabal, a kangaroo, and the final reckoning...