BUCKS FIZZ – "My Camera Never Lies"

I have no memory of this whatsoever.

Now I’ve heard it, I can’t say I’m surprised,

I was going to say that about the sleeve photo too, it’s like they raided the wardrobes of Duran Duran, ABC, T’Pau, Kate Bush and Bonnie Tyler. Sometimes I’m surprised how early the “1980s” started.

My memory of this is was a blank too and listening to it made me think it was crying out for a Trevor Horn who could make it sound less cheap, it’s shine was more like tin foil than chrome.

Blimey – have we found the “Baby Jump” of the 80s?

It’s the ticky-ticky sense of not quite rightness, a slightly half-formed feeling that makes this song an interesting listen 27 years on. Where does this come from, and what mood is this song trying to create? I’m not sure that I could tell you with any confidence.

This is only true up to a point though, and its rather a shame that we aren’t talking about any one of the four astonishing singles Dollar made with Trevor Horn instead.

“It’s like Bucks Fizz, aware their fame is running out, are trying to cram all of new wave and new pop into a single supercompressed hybrid, halfway between Devo and Dollar.”

Which, theoretically, is my idea of a 9.5. If there was a one-off brillo-pad icon for shiniest number one, this gets my vote. And “everything you tell me is booor-ring” is either splendidly compressed new wave or Shampoo ten years early. The overlapping vocals, overriding sunniness, and abundance of good (if semi-formed) ideas remind me, somehow, of the Beach Boys. So much to enjoy that the lack of an instantly hummable tune doesn’t really bug me. I’m semi-aware that I’m sticking up for an underdog here…

Still, I’m surprised this has so comprehensively slipped from the collective memory. It creeps into my mind every time I pick up a camera, just as surely as that sax appears whenever I’m winding my way down to Baker Street.

I love the shift from the near-ambient “click click” intro to the Phoenix-esque acoustic guitar, as hard and shiny as an 8 ball – if this was a brand new record you’d swear that was a machine-bred sound.

I agree, it’s all production over song, and that buskers wouldn’t touch it, but I think that’s something to applaud in itself. I mean, how good is Have I The Right without its floorboard-busting stomps and Meek-gnarled guitar break?

If “buskers” did it, (they’d need four), it’d sound like a sound collage piece, a’la Furious Pig, with actual words.

I’d give it 8 here.

I wouldn’t say it was all that good, but just like WL, its a song that has been stuck in my head for twenty five years now and often drifts in when cameras are in question. Not unsurprisingly considering my record for
a) lying
b) liking films made with cameras
the concept of cameras lying or not is one which interests me. Almost as much as the clumsy lyrics to the chorus which I have never really made out;

I think (before checking on a lyrics site):
“My camera never lies any more
For there’s nothing for it lying for”
Which has surely has the flaw of too many fors.

(Actual lyrics:
my camera never lies anymore
‘cos there’s nothing worth crying for – MAKES EVEN LESS SENSE!)

I found this a real disappointment after “Land of Make Believe”. It just seems to be trying too hard – an attempt to sound “grown up” by consciously steering away from formulaic pop.

It also didn’t do them any good that Trevor Horn was with Dollar at that time, and consistently releasing out excellent singles, which this obviously fails to match, in terms of quality.

Incidentally, I know a Dollar is a “buck”, but was it just coincidence that Dollar started using the prefix “Buck” on the catalogue number of their singles at this time?

The zone between Devo and Dollar sounds like a wonderful place in theory but like Shangri-La not an easy place to locate and you often find your reach exceeds your grasp. I don’t think this is bad record at all but it reminds me a little of the session musicians on English girl pop records of the 1960s trying to mimic the Motown Sound but just not having the chops or feeling for it. What they did had it’s charms but you knew it was a few steps short of the magical real thing. 5 seems about right.

I think this was one that I admired rather than liked – well crafted, complex vocals done well, fine production, but just not that much in the way of heart. It was impressive that the Fizz had had three number ones and had – fairly unexpectedly – moved on from Eurovision, but this wasn’t among their most affecting songs.

No 2 Watch: unusually, a one-week number one had a one-week number two below it – the abovementioned “Ain’t No Pleasing You” by Chas and Dave. Don’t know what the rest of you made of that, but I really liked it – for a moment there it seemed like they’d hit on a formula that no-one else was doing, old pub singalongs that the likes of their “Gertcha” old man would have gone in for, but with brand new songs. You could sink a few pints, sway and go “Well if yerthinkIdon’tmeanwhatIsay an’ I’m only blaffin, yougoddernotherthinkcoming I’m tellinyerthat for naffin” and key into a tradition as old and cherished as the music hall. Being Northern I wasn’t exactly part of that tradition, but I saw them doing a half-time slot at White Hart Lane a few years later and it all made sense…

i have to agree with some of the others that this is an 8, at the very least. it’s a pretty good signpost of what was happening in pop at the time, from the aforementioned dollar to the 10CC-ish vocals of the intro and the Antdrums in the chorus. It’s pure pop, meaning it sounds very much like a Pepsi jingle from this time period sounds.

Listening to this again, you’re struck by the bonkers production and song structure. In fact, if they’d toned down the ch-ch-ch-chorus it’d be a bit of a tour de force.

It’s records like this that inspire Xenomania and other modern production teams to come up with the more interesting pop records of today. GA’s Biology has the bonkers template down pat.

Bucks F were a bit of an anomaly amongst all the New Pop. Saturday teatime stalwarts with quite adult lyrics – esp for the time.

K-Tel watch: opened the second side Turbo Trax, followed quite spectacularly by Bardo’s One Step Further, Chas & Dave’s Margate and Altered Images’ See Those Eyes. Errm, odd one out anyone?

3- Yes I could never work out how they’d stolen a march on Dollar when the latter were making the better records.

Strange how Andy Hill never quite became a producer of at least equal stature to Trevor Horn? It may be that – as, sadly, seems to be the case with Xenomania and Girls Aloud – some producers only work magic with one act alone. “My Camera Never Lies” was released in the same week as the centrepiece and masterpiece of the Dollar/Horn tetralogy “Give Me Back My Heart,” and while the latter’s greatness has seldom been equalled and perhaps never surpassed, together with “My Camera Never Lies” it provides the unanswerable argument for “manufactured pop” – if pop can manufacture records so complex and brilliant, then we need more of it.

“My Camera Never Lies” could even serve as a premature starting point for the entire Xenomania way of thinking; a dazzling, vertiginous arrangement sheltering a shadowy and disturbing lyric. Musically it is vast; the layered Heatwave harmonies taking off from the dual electric piano tarmac before yielding to stinging semi-acoustic lead guitar, drums scattering like poison darts, the literal (camera) click track, the multirhythmic maze of the record’s final 90 seconds. The vocal arrangement alone would not have disgraced Rotary Connection; the fabulous arch which comes with the word “bor-ing,” the crouch to base level of the deep descending “lies any more,” the venom spitting out of the heavily ironic “I must apologise.”

A year ahead of “Every Breath You Take,” the song is a sordid examination of surveillance and stalking in the context of an irreparably broken relationship, but Hill and lyricist Nicola Martin don’t even bother much with metaphors; the protagonist is tracking the betrayer so closely she cannot breathe (“You’re never gonna shake me now”) while all the time realising the utter futility of his cheap quest (“My camera never lies anymore/’Cos there’s nothing worth lying for” – an ingeniously tragic double entendre). The Brotherhood of Man could never have dreamed of pop this genuinely avant-garde and challenging – and after a while, neither could Bucks Fizz; later hits such as “If You Can’t Stand The Heat” tried just a little too hard. As for Andy Hill, he was responsible for producing Britain’s greatest-ever Eurovision entry, “One Step Further” by Bardo, proceeded to odd projects like David Van Day’s startling “Young Americans Talking” and the eighth and most straightforward version of Sudden Sway’s multi-single art project “Sing Song” – and then comes back into the Popular picture some time later, but more about that when he does.

This is the only song between 1978 and 1985 where I knew the song but didn’t realise it was a number one. I’m pleased for them yet also bitter that it wasn’t ABC or Fun Boy Three.
The amount of times I have been reminded of the songs of Bucks Fizz when I’ve heard common phrases like camera never lies, if you can’t stand the heat, piece of the action is directly disproportionate to the amount of time I have spent listening to them.

My guilty pleasure, is this one.

Can’t really dislike ‘the Fizz’, and this frustratingly comes relatively close to being a decent single, but it just doesn’t quite work for me. I think Tom’s about right with 5/10, but props to them from trying something a bit different.