now fourteen

howdy pop pickers

quite a glorious day for shopping, one (fairly) recent friday was. not only was i able to pick up the latest edition of The Viz, featuring preparations for the coronation of HMKC3(PO), but also the latest reissue of a classic volume of Now That's What I Call Music. as you may (might) well have worked out from the title, or simply by following my posts, it is indeed Now 14 they have reached, look you see. 

indeed this was a kind of (sort of) autopilot, i have to purchase incident. for the magazine and the tapes, arguably, but it's the tapes (discs) this is dedicated to. up to now (as documented across this blog) i have gone ahead and bought all of the Now releases, be it re-issues or, for the first few, the first time issued on compact disc releases. not all of them Yearbook things, though. maybe i will get them all at some stage, for i picked up the 1984 one, but not yet. 

to tell the truth, no, i wasn't all that excited (or @rsed) about this volume coming out. as point of fact i had actually forgotten it was due on the shelves. but, then, i haven't been that bothered since, realistically, Now 6, which was the last one i remembered owning with any fondness. some pleasant surprises have cropped up in picking them up, but then also bad ones, like Now 5, which i think only had two or three decent songs on it. 

as it turns (or turned) out, Now 14 is considerably more good than bad. it covers, in the grand scheme of sets, a surprisingly short period of time, featuring hits from (very) late november 88 to around february of 89. with little or no "big" Christmas hits. making a point i have made before would be to say that i didn't "get", as in purchase or be given as a gift, any set after Now 6 simply as any of the tunes on them i would have wanted would have been bought as singles long before the release. so, there was no real need for them. it wasn't that much hard work to switch 7" records on the player, you know. 

perhaps i should (in glorious retrospect) done this for all of the releases, but here we are. a one (1) word review of each track, in running order, is as follows. on tape (disc) one we go - outstanding, brilliant, fun, sh!t, sh!t, ok, excellent, brilliant, excellent, fun, sh!t, excellent, outstanding. even if the latter is an odd edit, but shall get there. meanwhile for tape (disc) two - excellent, yeah, outstanding, ok, excellent, sh!t, excellent, what, excellent, great, what, tiresome, hmn, great, sh!t, what. even if i am being kind for whatever reason, only five really bona fide sh!t songs out of thirty isn't too bad a ratio. perhaps someone somewhere likes them. i would be surprised, however, with one or two in particular, if even the people what gone done them even like them. 

you don't really get these Now releases without some "controversy" or incident, and so of course there are two (2) songs absent from the original tape, disc and record release. a big plus is that one of the missing ones is a Phil Collins number, so that saves wear and tear on the skip button, nice one. the other, however, is Need You Tonight off INXS which is a sad missing one. hey ho, it shall be but the work of a moment to put the Kick tape (disc) on the stereo. 

no, i am not doing a track by track thing, except for that bit a paragraph or so ago. but, that said, what a hellishly good start to the set. it makes me kind of sad to hear Something's Gotten Hold Of My Heart now on the basis that absolutely no one puts anywhere near that much work or effort into making a pop song anymore. the production values are breathtaking and it's an astonishing single. so, too, is the one what comes next, Stop! off of Erasure. true, i appreciated it more after the devastating use of the song in the Rules Of Attraction soundtrack, but still, i well remember it from the time. 

elsewhere on tape (disc) one there's another good song called Stop, of course. there's also the tremendous You Got It off of Roy Orbison, and She Drives Me Crazy off of Fine Young Cannibals remains as good now as it was then. odd that, from the same era, Good Thing off of them tends to get more radio play these days, but there you go. for some reason i associate the Status Quo number with the Bruno vs Tyson fight; i think maybe one of them was on the cover for no given reason. the inclusion of what, if i were forced to pick, is my all time favourite Morrissey song is a plus, yet it does always feel strange that The Smiths never got on any of the sets. after the decent Poison tune (perhaps the only really good one they did) you get a peculiar edit of Belfast Child off of Simple Minds. the song remains staggeringly brilliant, but a strange edit, taking "only" a minute off of the running time. give or take.

moving on to tape (disc) two, then, and oh look, one of my all time ultra great top bangin' tunes of all time. i speak, of course, of Hey Music Lover off of S'Express, although sometimes they called themselves S'Xpress. whichever, whatever. i just think it's ace. with slightly less love but still lots of it i had much merriment in hearing Promised Land off of Style Council, in which Paul Weller (and his mate Mick) for some reason elected to go all gospel rave. no idea why (i have suspicions) but i liked it even if their record label did not. i am not all that big a fan of it, but All She Wants Is remains Duran Duran, so it's worthwhile. 

for the rest of tape (disc) two, well, Buffalo Stance was boss, but i ain't no dancer. which kind of also covers Straight Up off of Paula Abdul. i like the song, a lot, but can't get my groove on to it. good luck to all those who can. Blow The House Down was familiar when i heard it now, but didn't know it was them lot Living In A Box what done it. and who doesn't love some Tone Loc, represented here with the awesome Wild Thing. that song was life changing for a few friends of mine, one in particular. but that story is for another time, another place. 

complaints? the single biggest bestest greatest song from the period isn't here. that is, of course, Love Train off of Holly Johnson. oh, well. perhaps they couldn't licence it, but that doesn't quite explain some of the unmitigated sh!t here instead. like Hue & Cry proving they should never ever have been allowed into a record studio, and the frankly horrendous "soul jazz" disaster for Yazz. and just what the f*** is Michael Ball doing on a pop compilation album, exactly? quite sad to hear Tracie off of Level 42 here, for once they were decent. whilst cover versions are not all bad, some people should be arrested for what they do to certain songs. like, for instance, Adeva for crimes against Respect. 

lots of tracks on tape one and a few on disc two mean that this shall probably get a fair bit of play on my stereo. that's as decent a review as i can give, for many volumes (in particular 5) sit gathering dust or similar. yes, if they release 15 i shall probably by it, but by my reckoning that will be an end to the 80s era of the sets. oh, make no mistake, some great music was recorded in the 90s, in fact some of the best ever. but not necessarily in the first couple of years of that decade, and not of a nature which may end up on a Now set. 

be excellent to each other!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!