A fortnight ago tomorrow, we didn't quite get the first performance on that week's edition. Oh, there he is, at the piano, ready to bore us with respect. But not quite; his ascending keyboard figures became more dissonant the higher they went...
...and then a cut away to a singer we couldn't quite place, with a sky-blue gown and silver tears on her left cheek, very slowly and patiently singing the first line and melody of "Puppet On A String." The first verse and chorus were played as a pained gospel ballad - well, the song is about an angel, that is, if you wish it to be - but before it could really be resolved, a Hoover sample roared up in the distance and the paternal, smiling eyes of Holland followed the singer as she quickstepped and sashayed her way to a larger stage, and she and her band dropped a bomb.
She sang about loathing, betrayal, selling her soul to a psycho, although she made that last word sound a lot more like "SYCO" - who is this "JADE," we wondered? We agreed it wasn't Jade Ewen, late-stage Sugababe and Lloyd Webber-sponsored Eurovision entrant, before suddenly blinking and realising, oh feck it's Jade Thirlwell, formerly of Little Mix, with a song which had already been a big hit! Well, it doesn't get played on the radio stations we generally have on, which condemn us to a life sentence of "Build Me Up Buttercup" and "Ain''t No Pleasing You" and would prefer not to acknowledge that the 21st century has happened. And we're far too old to be listening to the stations which do play it (which is kind of those stations' point).
We knew enough, however, to recognise a "von dutch" influence - complete with JADE threateningly crawling across the floor, towards camera (a.k.a. us) - and should have been thinking, wow, this is what any Girls Aloud comeback single should be sounding like, a gigantic, BRATty fuck-you to the pop-strangling corporatism of the last quarter-century. But the song is an ambiguous one - the industry, can't live with it but hey, what would I do without it? - and concluded with JADE and her three backing singers crouched together, tactile, stage-front, intoning "I will always love you" as though it's their, or more likely your (her eyes) last words.
I initially thought JADE was trying a little too hard. Me and my little, or belittling, thoughts. But it stuck with me, and the next afternoon, while Lena was at work, I watched the video for the song itself:
Holy fecking moley. There are apparently eleven different JADEs in this video, including I suspect the harassed diva P.A. who gobs into said diva's coffee at the beginning. We cut to a JADE cast adrift on what is recognisably Deptford High Street - another clever connection with Jools Holland - wheeling her busking speaker which at the time is playing the aforementioned "Puppet On A String" before the first ballad chorus arrives instantly without due notice.
There is no real need to analyse the video in detail - you can assess it for yourself here - but the song's essential ambiguity is not shaded. She clearly abhors the "life" of pop puppetry almost as intensely as she adores it. She makes references (both lyrical and visual) to a grotesque, manipulating industry mogul who may or may not represent Mr Cowell, yet Cowell must have given his permission for that X-Factor footage to be used; perhaps he too now realises a certain futility of purpose.
Alternatively, there is the inconvenient but unavoidable hint that, with Little Mix, One Direction, Will Young, Girls Aloud and others, Cowell might actually have been right about pop music all along. Little Mix I found extremely annoying when they were in their "imperial phase." This may be due to having been bombarded by their third album, at top volume, in two separate branches of HMV when, to paraphrase Kenneth Williams, one was searching and trying to concentrate.
Yet, as with most pop phenomena when they're not being rammed down my throat by the over-reactive media or dogmatic online fundamentalists, I found I enjoyed Little Mix's music far more when it was ushered out of the publicity spotlight. All five of their albums are actually funny and inventive, and a lot more consistent than Girls Aloud's own studio quintet (critics hitched on to the GA wagon two albums too late; it was Chemistry that was the classic, you doughnuts).
But JADE - and I'm still spanking myself for not knowing "Angel Of My Dreams" when it was literally in my face - looks as though she's going to push the envelope out a lot further, more so even than Perrie Edwards' own excellent singles. Watching the video for "AOMD" - directed by Aube Perrie, who was also responsible for the video of the song's unlikely double, "Starburster" by Fontaines D.C. (Grian Chattan cameos in JADE's video, and she in his, at the same dance studio location and wearing identical clothing) - not only is it impossible to avoid the suggestion that this forms part of a NEW New Pop resistance which spans everyone from A.G. Cook to KNEECAP, yes you ageing lot this is a NEW BRATTY SHINY YELLOW THING happening (mind you, I said as much to my student peers at university in the spring of '82 apropos the first wave)...
...but also - and what REALLY got (to) me about the video, and therefore by extension also the song - I watched the carefully-assembled footage of a younger, if not necessarily happier, JADE, seemingly singing the song itself and found myself weeping because...well, if you're a misdiagnosed child prodigy, as I was, you know in your heart and bones (hi, Paul Simon!) where it might end...
(*not entirely irrelevant detour: in the summer of 1982 I kept listening to Too-Rye-Ay by Dexys and was scared crapless by the track "I'll Show You," in which Rowland pitilessly iterates the downward spiral awaiting those who were thought "different" at school. I thought I might end up like that, and at times it has been close...)
...and secondly because you feel...betrayed by the world and by other humans and above all by their deadening system; you did everything by somebody's book (usually the wrong one) and discovered that no, you sucker, it was never going to work, the book was cooked, the dice loaded against all of your hoped-for rolls, and so you end up purposely excluded from the common discourse of human beings.
If you're JADE, however, you FIGHT BACK, fighting your own self if you have to, and who's wronger at video's end - the bartered/(self-) battered bride, the outraged lady in red, the second-hand gum-chewing dork reporter? Actually her eyes do not change - those of the beaten, but not killed, redwigged first-class-of-the-second-class pop star, those of the girl who used to be one of the girls of Little Mix (there's a great nod to the Spice Girls - to whom I will presently be returning in another blog, ahem ahem - when the echt-LM parade down a moonlit city street, daring the camera to stop them) who is left, on her one, at the back of the stretch limo, without words or hope, those of the ordinary Jade from South Shields in the crowd, observing her own reflection, past and/or future being screamed at but not before peering at us with those implacably compassionate eyes.
And I thought of Sinéad, of course I did - that vibrato, those occasionally accusatory gazes to camera - and how on her 1994 album Universal Mother she sings the song "Scorn Not His Simplicity." The man who wrote that song did so in honour of his first son, who was born with Down's syndrome and only survived until the age of four. The song was written by Phil Coulter, who also co-wrote..."Puppet On A String," a song whose original singer addressed with a degree of latent insolence worthy of the later Charli xcx; not because of the song as such, but because of the way The System had been methodically weighed out against her and compelled her to perform it. Sandie Shaw has nothing but praise for "Angel Of My Dreams"; she understands fully the things that female pop performers are now, at long last, entitled to enjoy.
What was the name that Bill Fay gave to one of his albums? Still Some Light. Like Fay, RAYE is a Christian performer, and that radiates right through this song from its name onward. As I have said on several occasions elsewhere, I am moved by the expression of religious faith - can jazz, blues and soul be fully understood, whether it's Ellington, Coltrane or Aretha, without that element? - and there is absolutely no doubt about RAYE's full commitment here (she co-wrote the song with the noted American gospel composer Marvin "Toneworld" Hemmings).
"Genesis." also exists in that rarefied universe which is above such things as "the charts." As a single, it peaked at number 22 - although on sales alone, it made number two, which would qualify it for inclusion in Lena's blog - and although Capital Radio DJ Abbie Reynolds compared it with "Bohemian Rhapsody," the reception thus far has been slightly muted. Some critics think the jumpcut from section two to three too abrupt - even though it is clearly signposted throughout the first two sections - but I believe it works as startlingly well as the flipped transition from cod-opera to hard rock in "Bo Rhap"; sometimes you have to force a crack in the clouds for the sun to shine through.
In addition, comparisons with "Bo Rhap" are not so farfetched - performed by a singular singer and pianist in exile from Zanzibar whose Zoroastrianism was as pronounced and faithful as any religious belief, in which he sings of self-hate and imagines that the rest of the world wishes to destroy him - did he really kill a man and stand trial, or is it all a fantasy in his head, a nightmare from which he awakens and sighs, with some relief, that "nothing really matters"? The song's closing gong provides its own beams of reflected light. All Freddie has to do is manage to reach the window, and its curtains.
None of this detracts from the fact - not opinion, but quantifiable fact - that "Genesis." is the most remarkable song of what has already proven to be a quite remarkable year for songs. Would that I were thirteen years old when I listen to it, as was the case when Donna Summer's similarly life-altering "I Feel Love" was released. The main video can be seen at the end of this piece. Please, please listen to and invest in this magnificent record. It could pull a lot of people back from the brink. The third section could be used as a Party Election Broadcast. Vote for that future. It's so much lighter and nicer than the sternly dark alternative.
"How then does light return to the world after the eclipse of the sun?
Miraculously. Frailly. In thin stripes. It hangs like a glass cage. It
is a hoop to be fractured by a tiny jar. There is a spark there. Next
moment a flush of dun. Then a vapour as if earth were breathing in and
out, once, twice, for the first time. Then under the dullness someone
walks with a green light. Then off twists a white wraith. The woods
throb blue and green, and gradually the fields drink in red, gold,
brown. Suddenly a river snatches a blue light. The earth absorbs colour
like a sponge slowly drinking water. It puts on weight; rounds itself;
hangs pendent; settles and swings beneath our feet." (Virginia Woolf, The Waves)
