1994 - It's got nothing to do with Vorsprung durch technik you know

There were some momentous events happening around the world in 1994. Rwanda and Yugoslavia were experiencing horrendous civil wars, yet the IRA announced a cessation of hostilities and Jordan and Israel signed a peace treaty. Nelson Mandela achieved the unthinkable by becoming President of South Africa but Labour’s new leader John Smith died of a heart attack, clearing the way for Tony Blair to mould the party in his image.

It wasn’t significant at the time but the first new number one of the year was D:Ream’s ‘Things Can Only Get Better’, used three years later as the signature tune for New Labour’s successful election campaign. D:Ream are now probably better known for boasting current science broadcaster extraordinaire Professor Brian Cox on occasional keyboards. Tough on Peter Cunnah, who pretty much did everything on the recordings.

John Major’s Tory government was spouting platitudes about getting ‘Back to Basics’ and that seemed to be what was happening in the charts, too. Suede toned down their rockier sound and introduced some sweet strings on ‘The Wild Ones’, performed live here - sans orchestra - on Jools Holland’s then groundbreaking BBC2 show ‘Later with…’. I thought it simply had to soar to the top three in the footsteps of the band’s ‘Stay Together’ but it stalled at eighteen. Never mind, Brett, it was the first (and only) cassette single I ever bought.

Around the same time, Madonna’s ‘Immaculate Collection’ became the first CD album I purchased, too, so my new flat at 30 Radford Court must by then have been adorned by a new-fangled CD player. Although I was busy hiring CDs from the library for selective taping, I felt the bachelor pad deserved the foundation of a proper music collection beyond my tapes of miscellaneous tracks largely nicked off the radio over the previous decade.

Earlier in the year I had bought a cassette of Erasure’s Greatest Hits compilation. Pop! However, it had been released before ‘Always’ gave them what felt like a comeback hit. It had a fresh sound, but nevertheless unmistakeably a Bell/Clarke synthpop production. Rather too many extraneous beeps and electronic twirly bits for my liking but definitely one of their best slow numbers.

An Eighties electro classic was re-mixed in ’94 to accompany another singles compilation, this time by New Order. I don’t think I bought it until the following year, but it did allow me to become better acquainted with ‘True Faith’. For some reason it didn’t leave an imprint in 1987 but in November its rise to the top ten catapulted it into my list of all-time faves. My arms still sprout goosebumps when listening to the melody and lush production. Forget the new video: the original is peerless!

One cassette album I did buy at Christmas was Blur’s 'Parklife'. I know the date because for some reason I still have the receipt from Billericay High Street’s claustrophoblic little ‘Slipped Discs’ shop. £8.49. Sounds quite a lot these days. I should have waited twenty years and paid a fiver in HMV. The band’s ‘Girls and Boys’ and title track (featuring Phil Daniels’ delicious delivery of those witty Damon Albarn lyrics) had wormed their wily way into my head, and I splashed out. It was, and remains, a wonderful album, totally different from anything else I’d heard. They were all terribly ‘cheeky chappy’ faux Londoners, accentuated by the Walthamstow greyhound stadium images on the album cover. There was other, less knees-up, material to enjoy, too, such as ‘To the End’ and ‘This is a Low’.

The whole Britpop rivalry with Oasis had yet to be manufactured. Back then, I don’t recall being particularly impressed by the latter’s singles from Definitely Maybe. Only the Christmas song ‘Forever I’ fared particularly well, but the song I remember most distinctly was ‘Cigarettes and Alcohol’. Not totally in a good way. In particular, the message of nonchalantly-dipped fags as ‘cool’ has never chimed with me. I’ve never developed a taste for booze either, but that’s by the by! In spite of my lack of vices, I couldn’t help a sneaking admiration for this dollop of grunge guitar rock, but wouldn’t become a fan for another twelve months or so.

Talking of alcohol (!), Guinness ads were beginning to take on a marketing life of their own. They tended to mine the past for musical accompaniment and the 1994 ‘Pure Genius’ commercial had the winning idea of taking a minute-long excerpt from Louis Armstrong’s gorgeous Bond song ‘We Have All the Time in the World’. The ad propelled the original to number three in December. The following year saw Perez ‘Prez’ Prado’s Orchestra do even better with ‘Guaglione’ thanks to an engagingly quirky ad.

Levi ads had already spawned chart hits but in ’94 the jeans megabrand adopted a different approach of featuring music from new artists. As a result, Scottish grungesters Stiltskin stormed to number one with ‘Inside’, whose rocky intro formed the unexpected backing to this ad entitled ‘Creek’. The rest of the song was quite good, too!

Grunge was going especially strong at the time. Even The Cranberries, whose light, ethereal ‘Linger’ had lingered for months in the chart, ventured into the fuzzy guitar territory on the dark, brooding anti-terror anthem ‘Zombie’. However, when it came to grunge, there really was nothing to surpass Nirvana. I know many hold up Pearl Jam as kings of the genre but frankly I couldn’t name a single song of theirs. Mind you, at the start of the year, Kurt Cobain’s trio certainly wouldn’t have been my Mastermind specialist subject either but a single BBC2 broadcast was about to change all that.

In November 1993, Nirvana had followed the release of their third album In Utero with a performance on MTV’s Unplugged show. I didn’t record the date I watched it on TV here but it was probably early ’94. I recall Dad staying up to watch it with me and he also seemed to approve. Of course, his reaction may have been different had they had been fully electric and blasting out the boisterous ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’. 

It wasn’t as if I knew most of the songs they played; I was familiar with only ‘Come As You Are’. However, it was heartwarming for me (and maybe John Major) to see a rock band going back to basics, and hearing something different in Cobain’s voice. From the raucous rock roar I knew from their singles, here was a cracked bluesy moan which worked really well. Not sure about his scruffy outsized jumper. My favourite track was ‘All Apologies’, the acoustic version trumping almost anything I had heard from the band.

‘Come As You Are’ features repetition of the line “I don’t have a gun”. Unfortunately, Kurt was lying. He did have a gun. And in April, having succumbed to heroin once more, he turned it on himself. I came home from work one night and Dad told me that some pop star had committed suicide. I had no hesitation in guessing the Nirvana frontman. Dad was impressed. I was just rather sad. To me, he wasn’t a rock god. I was no part of the Generation X for which he was supposed to speak so eloquently through his music. I just felt it was such a waste. The Unplugged gig was released as an album later in the year, and I bought it. I also picked up Nevermind, but I only really liked the first half. The rest sounded far too angry and discordant for me. Yes, I’d already turned into my dad!  

Or had I? After all, I don’t think Dad ever expressed any approval for dance, trance or disco. Apart from his Sixties impression of Tom Jones, I can’t even recollect seeing him actually dance. It may have been my last year in Rotaract but there were still some new anthems to get me going at village halls around the county. Identifying my three favourite dance singles of the year, by coincidence they all had ‘night; in the title. The Real Thing did well with ‘Another Night’ but surely one of the highlights was Corona’s eternally uplifting ‘Rhythm of the Night’. 

A song which divided opinion like few others was Whigfield’s ‘Saturday Night’. However irritating the song and cheesy the blonde Danish singer, it was undeniably catchy. It went straight in at number one in September and became the second biggest seller of the year. 

The song it displaced at the top had been there an interminable fifteen weeks so a change was overdue. Indeed, the song had been all around us for a few months longer. Back in May, I went to see the new hit film ‘Four Weddings and a Funeral’ with Elaine from Rotaract. An excellent ‘date movie’, not that anything came of it. As for the film, it became huge, made a star of Hugh Grant and made it OK to say ‘Fuck fuck fuckity-fuck’ (but not at home). It also revived the career of Wet Wet Wet, whose cover of ‘Love is All Around’ dominated the soundtrack.

After hearing it back in the Seventies on the Savile show, I’d loved the Troggs original. It was a cute, sweet love song adorned with subtle guitar and strings. Fast forward 27 years and Reg Presley’s Summer of Love composition had been transformed into a Big Ballad for the Nineties multiplex generation. It was perfect for the romcom and, once released, it topped the charts throughout the summer, shifting almost 2 million copies and eclipsing even Bryan Adams’ effort two years earlier. It was not, as Robbie Williams proclaimed in his TOTP intro, the biggest seller of all-time but had the band not insisting on deleting the single while still number one, who knows what it could have achieved? 

There were other huge love songs, but most just sounded over-bombastic crap to sell cinema tickets and soundtrack albums. Bon Jovi’s ‘Always’ is a case in point. All-4-One’s R’n’B dirge ‘I Swear’ was pinned at number two for a record-breaking seven weeks by Marti Pellow and the boys, but a true legend went all the way in April.  

Amidst his infamous falling–out with Sony, Prince was no longer Prince. He wasn’t even officially ‘The Artist Formerly Known as Prince’. No, he had reduced his brand to a ‘symbol’ which defied pronunciation. No matter. He still took his falsetto-laden ‘The Most Beautiful Girl in the World’ to the zenith. I couldn’t understand why. I daresay he wooed and bedded countless beauties with it but, unlike most of his stuff, it just sounded mind-numbingly boring. Another example of me missing the point, as it proved to be Prince’s only number one single in the UK. Well, not Prince exactly, but – er – the Artist/Symbol. Whatever. 

Mariah Carey never needed to resort to falsetto. Her destruction of ‘Without You’ also went all the way in February. Singer of the original, Harry Nilsson, had died only a month earlier, so he must have been spinning in the proverbial at what Mariah’s excesses were doing to his 1972 classic. 

Marcella Detroit’s soprano was similarly in the canine auditory scale but she seemed to know when to rein it in. Having been booted out of Shakespear’s Sister, she wrote and sang ‘I Believe’. Had it been used for ‘Four Weddings…’ instead of ‘Love is All Around’, I reckon it could have been almost as popular. However, it wasn’t, and it reached only eleven here. One of the better ‘big ballads’, in my book.

If anything I preferred Lisa Loeb’s ‘Stay’. No superfluous trills and runs, no grandiose production, no self-indulgent promo, just a simple romantic message, beautifully delivered. Apparently it was featured in a film but for me it was the young American’s own performance in the video that won me over. Sadly, Loeb became another ‘Outstanding Newcomer’ Brit winner who barely troubled the chart thereafter. 

Bruce Springsteen also showed his sensitive side in his ‘Streets of Philadelphia’. Appropriately sombre in mood, the song accompanied the groundbreaking AIDS movie Philadelphia. Tom Hanks won the Best Actor Oscar but Bruce cleaned up in the Academy Awards, Grammys and everywhere else with this elegiac track, one of my Springsteen favourites.

Anther artist to re-appear in the top three was Kylie Minogue. ‘Confide in Me’ shared a basic trip-hop beat with Bruce’s hit but the rest was a smorgasbord of dance and Eastern rhythms. Her S/A/W days were long behind her, but somehow, like Madonna, she seemed to hook up with the right people at the right time, record the right song and be re-born. 

It was a good year for solo female singers. Gone were the days when the Brits nominee lists consistently consisted of Madonna, Kate Bush and Annie Lennox, plus a few extras plucked from the inside pages of the music press. I enjoyed hearing Tori Amos performing ‘Cornflake Girl’ and at the end of the year, Sheryl Crow brought an agreeable brand of Country to the charts in the form of ‘All I Wanna Do’. She sang of a Los Angeles world I didn’t know, nor particularly wanted to know, but did so in such a way that even the Santa Monica Boulevard sounded exotic. And then there was Dawn Penn. Amongst another crop of reggae hits, her re-working of an old song ‘You Don’t Love Me (No, No No)’ stood out. The nine-beat tattoo intro suggested something more lively but it morphed into a summer slice of rock-steady, perfect for the June-July heatwave.

There was still space in the charts and my heart for the more offbeat. The Beautiful South had for several years been prize purveyors of light-hearted yet perceptive pop. Ready for the Christmas market, they released their first compilation album Carry On Up the Charts. In barely a month it became the second biggest seller of the year, and went on to be five-times platinum. The band was commonly described as everyone’s second favourites, and I succumbed to temptation the following year. 

Located further along the oddball scale were The Crash Test Dummies. My diary notes that I didn’t like their number two hit ‘Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm’ at first but it certainly grew on me. The strange baritone voice of Brad Roberts may well have grated with many, but it has a unique aura about it, an archetypal slow-burner. Strangely it wasn’t hugely popular in their native Canada, but trust the Aussies to celebrate the bizarre! 

Well, I’ve got this far into 1994 without mentioning Take That. Not that they weren’t successful. Far from it. They toured extensively, garnered more hits and, had ‘Love Ain’t Here Anymore’ not faltered at three, would have delivered an impressive sequence of eleven consecutive number ones. Their success was inevitably spawning competitors in the new ‘boy band’ market. 

Boyzone debuted with a limp version of the Osmonds’ ‘Love me For a Reason’ but Let Loose re-released the far superior ‘Crazy For You’. I had designs on Lois, the PA to the head of department at work. We had a few sort-of dates in London but we weren’t really suited. However, I do remember that she quite liked Let Loose (as well as Jimi Hendrix) but I didn’t need her to tell me that ‘Crazy For You’ was a cracking single. 

East 17 were a different beast. They were the Stones to Take That’s Beatles, the boys your parents wouldn’t really want you to consort with, unlike nice wholesome Gary, Mark et al. They weren’t dancers and to my untrained eye, they just looked ridiculous in back-to-front baseball caps. I know they cultivated a mean, moody image but I’d bet they were about as hard as jelly!  Their career hit a highpoint at Christmas when ‘Stay Another Day’ topped the chart. It wasn’t even a Christmas song but add a few bells and dress up the drongos at the back in white furry snow suits et voila! I was no fan but had to concede that Tony Mortimer could write some decent stuff.

Could the boy band era last, would synths take over the world or, just possibly, could guitars make a prolonged comeback? I may have reached my mid-thirties but there was still new music to entertain a dinosaur like me.