BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM. Hear that? Silly question — can’t get it out of your head, can you? Well, not according to the makers of
Top 10 Even More Annoying Records, the latest in Channel 4’s tribute to musics of varying genres, selected mainly according to the artists’ availability for interview.
Of the ten songs chosen for dissection this time, half originate from continental Europe, where the boom-boom-boom-boom of the big bass drum machine is de rigueur. In fact, were it not for boom x 4 , Europop might not even exist. What a happy thought.
Anyway, this musical tic is what removes the song from the ranks of the merely feeble and makes it memorably annoying. Classic annoying songs are those that lodge in our brains and will not remove themselves. Much of their limpetness can be ascribed to the boom quadrupled. Humankind, it appears, is a sucker for it.
As can be deduced from the title, this is Channel 4’s second jaunt down Irritating Alley. I missed the first one; maybe there was something really hot on a competing channel, like international knock-out flower arranging. But the first time round they used up the really obvious songs — The Birdie Song, Agadoo, anything by Cliff Richard — so this time the pickings are a bit slimmer. In fact, several of the songs aren’t annoying at all. Bruce Channel’s Hey, Baby was a fairly innocuous little slab of early-Sixties pop until DJ Otzi turned it into a football chant for the seriously sad, and it’s Otzi who’s the annoying part of the mix, not the song.
Hey, Baby (ooh, aah, boom, etc) is deemed the most annoying of the lot, actually, which means that should you watch the programme you will be able to switch off after No 2. Don’t thank me, just consider it a reader service. But further than that I will not go, other than to advise you to find something else to do while No 6 gets its ten minutes of shame. It’s not annoying, it’s just rather desperate, and hardly the way we should remember the early careers of two fine young men.
Instead, let’s open out the argument: what is it that makes a song annoying? It can’t just be the boom stuff. It can’t only be that an otherwise inoffensive song has been recorded by an overweight man in glitter lederhosen who still believes that perching sunglasses on the top of the head is the last word in cool. No, in the greater scheme of things, what makes us want to reach for the green ink and toilet rolls (writing paper, for the use of) is the hubris, or chutzpah, or downright cheek of the majority of songs recorded by boy bands, as well as TV creations such as Gareth Gates. It’s deeply annoying that some off-stage pop Svengali thinks that directing wind-up toys with spiky hair to sing songs aimed at the grandmother in pubescent girls could be financially rewarding. It’s downright infuriating that he’s right.
And it’s the way they sing them. Who can forget the early Boyzone mangling of Cat Stevens’s touching dialogue between Father and Son? The important part of the description is “dialogue”, but what did Ronan Keating do? Why, plough through the song using his only voice, the one that sounds like he’s chewing the words with his nose. You’d have thought they’d have listened to the original — “Why, it’s a father talking to his son, and vice versa. Let’s reflect that.”
But they were young and we can find it in our hearts to forgive them. Unlike Blue’s recording of Elton John’s Sorry Seems to Be the Hardest Word, in which the boys vie with each other to replicate Elton’s vocals in true Dead Ringers style, leaving it to the man himself (and this is what really grates) to inject a little something different into the old warhorse.
I find it hard, though, to condemn the records which usually make Most Annoying lists, the ones aimed at children. What, for example, is the point in sneering at Bob the Builder? Of course it’s annoying to adults — Neil Morrissey’s participation in it is surely proof of that.
But all this is mere camouflage and obfuscation. When it comes down to it, genuine annoying is what happens when someone you admire puts out an absolute pile of poo and you know the first time you hear it that the world is going to hold it against them for the rest of their life — hello, Paul McCartney and Mull of Kintyre.
Or, much worse, when someone releases the aforementioned pile and the world grasps it to its collective bosom. You just know I’m coming to John Lennon’s Imagine here. What a tedious, patronising, flatulent cuckoo in the nest of a great pop star. If he were alive today, he’d be rolling in his grave at the knowledge that the world threw away his oeuvre in order to grant hymn status to something he wrote while obviously out of his head on primo saccharine.
And yet the song keeps getting voted the greatest in various polls — the ones that don’t go for Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody, that is. Now, I have nothing against Bo Rhap, but there are those who fight for the honour of having been the first to have found it setting up home in their nose. There are those who will tell you that it was when it was played to death at the time of Freddie Mercury’s own demise. Others will say it was during the song’s tenure at No 1 in 1974 that their sense of taste was battered into submission. I even know a man who says he hated it the first time he heard it, but I doubt that anyone could have had enough of Bismillah and Scaramouche that quickly.
A quick whip around the office provided other interesting nominations: the Eagles’s Hotel California, for example. Well, one can see where they’re coming from. It’s terribly coke-in-a-goldfish-bowl, Seventies decadent, isn’t it? “You can check out any time you want, but you can never leave,” and so on. On the other hand, it’s also one of the few songs that you really can’t see a modern-day boy band covering, which is one thing in its favour.
Duty demands that I also register the nomination of Come On Eileen, by Dexy’s Midnight Runners, on the grounds of the inclusion of the phrase “too-rye-ay”. Excuse me? Are we talking one of the great pop songs of the past 20 years or not? Still, its inclusion serves to provide a necessary example, when compiling lists of this type, of one man’s silk chemise being another’s hair shirt.
I can’t go without mentioning an artist who cannot view his career without wanting to mess it up. Twenty years ago, this man made his name as a writer of wonderful, spiky lyrics and sharp, punchy tunes. But, lo, he looked upon his empire and said: “I know what I’ll do, I’ll do a terrible country album, and set up camp in Pretension City with the Brodsky Quartet, and warble unaccompanied, when my voice requires, nay demands, the support of at least two guitars and a drum set. And then I’ll tease them by showing that I really can write great pop songs when I want to.” Elvis Costello, what an annoying man you can be.
