‘A Song that is a Guilty Pleasure’
I think I’m going to break with tradition just slightly tonight, and write about just one song.
Imagine that. Answering the question set. Doing exactly what it says on the tin. Perhaps the Ronseal effect of the approaching school holidays and garden maintenance is starting to rub off?
The song I’m going to write about is ‘Never Forget’ by Take That.
Yes. I know. A boyband. Or at least, a boyband grown old: not quite so boyish… receding hairlines, expanding waistlines, and a healthy dose of wives and kids.
I like this song anyway, so to that extent it truly is rather a guilty pleasure, but I have a specific memory attached to it which sums up what I think of an awful lot of what goes on in the popular bit of the music industry. A few years ago, there was a ‘local boy made good’ on ‘The X Factor’… Eoghan Quigg. Much maligned by Harry Hill et al at the time, and the proud recipient of a review which speculated that his debut album was possibly ‘the worst album ever released’: but still… a local lad, and he made it right through to the final.
In one of the live shows, Eoghan performed ‘Someone Else’s Dream’. It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t particularly good: his inability to hit the high notes had to be masked rather by a children’s choir and some strategically deployed pyrotechnics, but nonetheless… he got through it, and he must have got quite a lot of votes, because he went through to the following week. The whole thing though: looking at the lyrics, the ephemeral nature of the fame granted by shows like ‘The X Factor’ seemed to be so neatly summed up. ‘One day this will all be someone else’s dream’… and sure enough, a new crop of contestants come through every year for ‘The X Factor’ or ‘Britain’s Got Talent’ or Andrew Lloyd Webber’s latest search for a West End star. ‘The Apprentice’, even. ‘Strictly Come Dancing’. We are endlessly inventive in recycling our loyalties to these contestants… like the preteen girl who idolises a new film star every month, we find someone new to support and someone new to vote for. Amid tears and spiral-falling glitterstorms, this year’s champion is crowned just as the voiceover asks for contestants for next year’s competition. On it goes - inexorable as the passing of the seasons which are so often marked by the stages of the different programmes’ series. These programmes themselves are often a guilty pleasure for me, especially the ones shown in the winter months: I always swear that this year, I’m not getting involved, not getting hooked, but then, somehow, I do…
‘Never Forget’ is quite clever in how it starts off with the choral introduction, with the innocence of children’s voices. The instrumental at the very start references Tchaikovsky - ‘The Nutcracker Suite’, with its tales of mythical monsters and magical Christmas trees. The same Christmassy tinsel embues the annual ‘X Factor’ final with a false magic: somehow amid the myth of Santa Claus we imagine that whoever wins the ‘X Factor’ will have their future assured as though by a fairy godmother. Or godfather. And yet reality proves us wrong so many times: recent reports suggest that baby-faced Joe McElderry, 2009’s winner, has followed other former winners Leon Jackson and Steve Brookstein, even Shayne Ward as I write this, into the complete oblivion of being dropped by Simon Cowell’s record label. Some of the talent shows themselves have drifted off into the Lethe of public forgetfulness: ‘Fame Academy’, ‘Popstars’, ‘Soapstar Superstar’: who remembers them now?
But a closer look at the ‘Never Forget’ lyrics says it all. A few lines sum it up for me.
‘We’ve come a long way, but we’re not too sure where we’ve been.’
Could this line sum up the backstage manipulation of the audition rooms, perhaps…? Don’t believe in that fiction of the nonentity picked from obscurity by the international superstar judge, who’s wiping fake tears from the eyes in which the dollar signs are appearing… it’s all manipulated from backstage so that the public, and the international superstar judges, will see the brilliant, the terrible and the downright weird. And no-one else.
‘Never forget where you’ve come from,
Never pretend that it’s all real,
Someday soon this will all be someone else’s dream’.
I couldn’t have put it better myself. Reality TV? Surely the artifice is there in the category title: the mimetic confession that this is entertainment, not real life. If we hold (‘as ‘twere’) the mirror up to nature, we get all the refractions of physics as well as the reflections of the department store’s beauty hall. Looking in the mirror, we get a version of what we look like: quite literally, a reflection, not our own reality at all. And reality TV just reflects real life - it shapes it into a plot, a character, something someone at home on their sofa is going to want to watch.
Towards the end, the lyrics degenerate into a drum-led chorus (slightly referencing Queen’s ‘We Will Rock You’, if you ask me) with a certain degree of phonetic-based nonsense. Things like ‘nah nah nah nah nah’ or ‘nah nah nah nah nah nah woo o’ or ‘c’mon c’mon everybody everybody everybody everybody’ make, it seems to me, a very profound statement of just how much sense all this reality / talent show stuff means. Agree, nod along, sing along even, don’t worry if the words don’t make sense: and everybody believe, yeah, everybody, come on now…
‘There’s a road going down the other side of this hill’, though, and Take That have had the foresight to warn us about it. They’re almost as good as a SatNav system as they warn us that we might climb the hill of success, but we’ll inevitably have to come back down the other side. That’s right. Back to the bottom of the hill again. Back to obscurity. Ground level.
And from a band of such ephemeral success - a band for whom millions of teenage girls went into mourning when they split up as a boyband away back in the mid-1990s - surely that shows a disarming, if fleeting, glimpse of self-awareness.
Or maybe I’ve just read far too much into it yet once more?
Maybe I never should have tried to ‘pretend that it’s all real’?
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