BELINDA CARLISLE – "Heaven Is A Place On Earth"

Surprised you didn’t mention that the chorus is just a straight rip off of You Give Love A Bad Name…

“Baby I was afraid before/I’m not afraid any more.”

The exultant growl of “baby” and the eager upwards leap of the second of the three syllables she makes out of the word “more” demonstrate just how right it was that Belinda Carlisle should finally become a mainstream pop star. Some alleged that she sold out, but there’s a difference between wearily yielding to corporate bar charts because you’ve just received a fresh tax bill and gaining stardom by right while retaining the essence of the personality which attracted people to you in the first place.

It is a shame that Belinda had to go solo to achieve her first real commercial success in Britain – since the Go-Gos deserved far better chart luck than they found here – “Heaven Is A Place On Earth” is a splendid example of how to do AoR bigness properly. She left the writing and producing duties to Rick Nowels and Ellen Shipley (who became her regular support team) and compared to the Brian Dennehy fist-shaking of something like “Livin’ On A Prayer,” the “ooh baby”s, the “ooh heaven”s and the thunderous drums are sensationally astral in their ambition. Beneath it all is a thoroughly professional, logically constructed song, rising on the aforementioned “baby” before readying itself for the chorus, with Belinda singing the praises of unity, both spiritual (“When I’m lost at sea/I hear your voice/And it carries me”) and physical (“And we’re spinning with the stars above/And you lift me up in a wave of love” – note the aqueous common metaphorical denominator). The record is full of near-miraculous touches, for instance the ethereal, distant “heaven” harmonies which loom up like the Sirens’ song near the end, as the drummer adapts some lessons from Trevor Horn, before hammering his way back into the final key change and chorus.

The record launched a very smart and astute sequence of hits which have arguably weathered better than those of Madonna’s over the same time period; cheerful cheerleading bubblegum-AoR anthems (“We Want The Same Thing,” “Live Your Life Be Free,” the fantastic “Leave A Light On”) alternating with moodier musings – “Circle In The Sand” in particular captures the chill of the abandoned beach with considerably more acuity than “La Isla Bonita.”

TOTPWatch: Belinda Carlisle performed Heaven Is A Place On Earth on the edition broadcast on December the 17th 1987. Also in the studio that week were; Wet Wet Wet, Simply Red and The Pogues & Kirsty MacColl. Gary Davies and Mike Read were the hosts.

“A song built to fit a chorus” – that neatly sums up the Belinda experience. ‘Leave A Light On’ always gave me that impression, although I must say I prefer it to ‘Heaven…’

i’m certainly with punctum and others on the excellence of ‘circle in the sand’ – “the chill of the abandoned beach” is a great phrase, though there’s a good dollop of frys turkish delight-style eastern exoticism in there too i think.

i’m much less sure about ‘heaven is a place on earth’. at the time i think i mentally filed it alongside the bangles as fresh and sparkly and an all round good thing, but the more i’ve heard it over the years (and i’ve heard it a *lot*) the more the horrible AOR bludgeoning side of it has come to dominate. if everyone would just stop playing it for the next five years, then i’m sure i would come back round.

what we need to hear more of, on the other hand, is jane wiedlin’s glorious ‘rush hour’.

Video directed by Diane Keaton. (Apologies if this is something of a Frank Beard.)

@14 – great call on Rush Hour.

Talking of Jane Wiedlin, still trying to work out if ‘Cool Places’ ft. Sparks is Any Good At All.

“The exultant growl of “baby” and the eager upwards leap of the second of the three syllables she makes out of the word “more” demonstrate just how right it was that Belinda Carlisle should finally become a mainstream pop star. ”

Yes. This. This this this this. The chorus is wonderful, yes, but it’s actually the verses that sell “Heaven Is a Place on Earth” for me, it’s where you can hear Belinda’s voice more. Unlike the largely terrible last single (yes, I AM being that pedantic!), the joy of someone who actually believes every word that she sings.

Good to see such enthusisam for “Circle In The Sand” here which was my favourite single of the year. Also a punctum review that I can 100% agree with.

#22 Yes, Belinda’s conviction is genuine because she’d had a bad time with drugs, the acrimonious split of The Go-Gos and her weight problems and had come through the other side and recently married. So the title has a double meaning for her one that she’s enjoying her hard- won marital bliss and two, life improves when you get your feet back on the ground.

this is great exuberant energetic pop – and I agree with Tom that it succeeds because of that suggestion of ‘rock and pop and disco and funk all melted together’ – a 7 for me

The part of “Rush Hour” where Wieldin’s voice goes into falsetto (“OOH you send ME”) is pure gold. What she does here reminds me of what Christine McVie did on her Fleetwood Mac: she conveys the elation of a bruised older sister who’s found happiness.

I make it a point to listen to Belinda Carlisle’s greatest hits at least once a month and this song is still amazing and not even in the top five songs on it. Shame it was her only Number One, “Leave A Light On” deserved no less. In Australia, her star dimmed quite quickly but “Summer Rain” gave her a fluke smash, oddly, since it was a flop everywhere else. That, too, is immense and such an odd topic for a pop single. “Heaven” is probably a bit too surprise-free, too straightforward, but god, bits of it still give me tingles – her trembling on the initial “ooh”, “WEB OF LAAAAHHHHHV!”, “baby!”, the break down… magic.

another vote for Rush Hour – I’m not so sold on ‘Sign your name’ – I had a ‘limited edition’ 10in version of the song remixed by Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry which featured a crying baby sample repeated ad nauseum which seems to have soured my memory

Apropos of nothing really except they’re both acts who never quite (to use a currently fashionable phrase) “sealed the deal” w/me – I wonder if people who really like B Carlisle also really like Roxette?

I’ve always preferred her first solo hit, “Mad About You” to this rather generic track. A U.S. number 1.

#2: How could anything be rip off of You Give Love A Bad Name, when that itself is an obvious rip off of Bonnie Tyler’s If You Were A Woman And I Was Your Man?

The revenge of youtube: here’s Belinda C.’s unsuccessful demo of Waiting for a Star to Fall from 1987. The writers of that song eventually did it themselves of course.

Anyhow, I saw Billy Bragg around this time stop a concert for a 5-10 minute rant about HIAPOE. I forget the details of his objections – the vid. took some abuse I suppose (‘those f-ing batboys’) – but the core of it was just a general lament about how it sounded like an ad.. Bragg and his pianist improv’d a few quick parody ad jingles based on it for Mastercard and Revlon – some of which basically came true right?) and how generally depressed he was that it had become this huge hit, how much he hated anyone who’d bought it, how he was losing the will to go on in this business, etc.. Good times.

So… Ooh baby, you’re worth it. Come to the Galleria. It’s Heaven. It’s not the mall where the White people used to shop at. It’s like a wave of love. It’s everywhere you want to be. Oh… just go to the literal version (fitting perhaps because this vid – -diane keaton wtf? – was infamous in some of the same ways that Total Eclipse’s was).

Probably Tom’s score is about right I guess. But, yeah, Sign Your Name was robbed!

OK, I just checked and HIAPOE had a beautiful upward parabola in the charts: 43, 19, 8, 5, 2, 1. That used to be the norm (and prima facie makes a lot of sense), but after about 1994 that sort of chart behavior ceases, and almost everything (prima facie bizarrely) enters the charts at its peak. What happened to create the ‘In at peak’/no upward parabola phenomenon in the UK charts? (I’ve been dying to ask this for some time.) I confess that it seems like a very depressing change to me: apparently almost no song connects with a qualitatively larger group than its original insider group of fans. Relatedly, chartwise Gaga looks truly exceptional in modern terms. Her hits have really won people over and have the glorious upward trajectories to prove it.

I vaguely remember Jon Bon Jovi saying some rather unkind things about this along the lines of “we’ve sold a billion more records than this rip off!” and I think the “sell out” accusations that someone mentioned above might have had something to do with Belinda’s weight, as being a chubby tomboy was more Punk Rock but now she’d gone all glam and slim like any other airhead pop singer.

Think I’d give this an 8 now, one of those I like a lot more than I did when I felt like I had a dog in the fight. The general consensus of the boys down the pub at the the time was that the record was decent enough but Belinda did look very fetching.

#42 I lament that change in the same way as you Swanstep. I think there were a number of interlinking factors involved.

1. The changes at R1 from the playlist in 1986 to the Bannister blitzkrieg in 1993 ending its role as tastemaker.

2. Record companies switching their attention to re-selling classics on CD rather than finding lasting new talent.

3. Falling single sales as “the kids” switched to computer games leading the charts to fill up with acts who had a considerable fan base but couldn’t cross over. This was already happening in the 80s with Gary Numan and The Jam who tended to peak at their entry position.

4. Record companies seeing all the above, started using singles as tools in a marketing campaign where first week sales were all important.

I’m also not sure those Lady Gaga curves show the kind of crossover effect you’re talking about – the factor that has changed things yet again since the 90s is iTunes. Those Gaga songs were available to download as album tracks before they were promoted as singles, and so people were able to buy them as soon as they heard them – whereas in the days of CD singles only all that demand would be held back until the single came out.

Thanks 46-48 for suggestions about how to understand this big change in singles charts. Those chartstats graphs are so fascinating…. Looking again at them now it does seem as though things have shifted again perhaps just in the last few years with downloads and that, yes, that’s what Gaga’s track-record really reflects.