After the loose, good natured breeze of 'In The Summertime', the headlong bull charge of 'Baby Jump' comes as something of a shock with the psycho blues, mutant piano runs and Dorset's leering vocal fair taking the breath away. For about the first thirty seconds anyway; the initial spike on the cardiogram soon settles into a flatline when the constant barrage of one key noise wears with its inherent boringness and the curtain is pulled back on the initial rush of primal lust to reveal some giggling schoolboys trying to re-write 'Louie Louie'.The idea seems to be that if you play loud and fast enough then the song will take care of itself, but no plugs are sparking here and the unnecessary false ending is used as little more than a device to extend things already dead well past their natural length; rather than engendering another burst of excitement, the feeling when the music starts up again is more one of 'Oh Christ, no more please'.
What it's doing at number one is anyone's guess (and who plays or even remembers it anymore?), though a national postal strike that hampered the return of reliable sales data may be partly to blame. What's odd too is that the moral campaigners who seized on the 'Have a drink, have a drive' line from 'In The Summertime' have turned a blind eye to the paedophilic "I dreamt that I was Humbert and she was Lolita" lyric here, but this itself predates The Police by a good nine years and sets up the cracking pub quiz question 'Name the first number one to namecheck a Nabokov novel'. So all is not lost.
No comments:
Post a Comment