KYLIE MINOGUE AND JASON DONOVAN – "Especially For You"

As a Neighbours fan at the time (not watching Neighbours was Unthinkable – I covered this in the I Should Be So Lucky thread I think) I loved it, and I still think of it very fondly. Another great video (we’re in the middle of a good run of them with Cliff and the next #1) and a very singable melody. Now that we’re togeeeether, TOOOOOGEEEETHER, I wanna SHOOOOOW you my heart is O-SO-TROOO. Classic. Plus ‘especially for POOOOOO’ = playground favourite! At least an 8 from me.

A key element of this song that you’re not recognising (probably intentionally, as it’s an effect rather than a cause and, of course, by definition doesn’t actually feature the singers) is that it’s a perfect karaoke number. Duets are hard to come by in the karaoke songbook and this one is so familiar, simple but with the occasional soaring and emotive melody, the odd bit of harmonising, that it’s a timeless couples tune.

You could always tell when Stock, Aitken & Waterman were pulling out the stops for something that they wanted to be remembered – a bit more care was put into the instrumentation. This prestige Christmas product is free of the lapses that even aficionados like me tend to find mar their universally excellent songs; rum-ti-tum percussion and blaring synthi-horns. Here we find rather nice flamenco guitar solos and Christmassy bells. And best of all –

Those harmonies that usher in the duet!

Wow they’re divine! There’s a little pause before the listener is swept into the world of the song;

Especially for you
I wanna let you know what I was going through
All the time we were apart I thought of you
You were in my heart
My love never changed
I still feel the same

There’s a directness to the best SAW lyrics that tends to be overlooked, and is a really difficult technique for songwriters to master. You could call it simplicity, but I prefer to hear it as unaugmented expression of feeling and circumstance – objectives and obstacles, as dramatists are encouraged to think.

There is something atavistic about the appeal of this song to the appreciative listener – the search for the missing other… This theme is made yet more direct in the video for Especially for You, and the memorable Top Of The Pops appearance climaxing in Kylie running into Jason’s arms. For good or ill, it is a moment that is remembered by everybody who was even faintly following pop music in Britain in 1988.

A real Billy favourite. 9.

Number 2 Watch: Three weeks of Erasure’s Crackers International EP’ (That would be ‘Stop!’ then. And erm… Consults Guinness Book of Hit Singles – ‘The Hardest Part’, ‘Knocking On Your Door’ and ‘She Won’t Be Home’. I don’t remember any of them, even though I bought the thing)

I love Jason Donovan’s “Look what I’ve got guys! ” expression in the video. You think – Hope you enjoyed the moment mate cause Hutch was just around the corner.

I was amused when Johnny Vaughan and Denise Van Outen did their version because he was no worse a singer than Jason and she was much better than Kylie. Must be the only instance where a charity version was musically better than the original.

#8 Don’t fret Billy it is quite hard to recall named Erasure tracks. They’re dreaded by all pop quiz regulars (along with Jamiroquai and Shakatak)

# 5 Hi Jude welcome to the party !

During the “I Should be So Lucky” thread I decided it was time I got up to speed on Kylie and scooped up all her post-SAW albums on Amazon. Every one a winner, or at least with winning moments, and the contrast with this was staggering. Still, I can appreciate what she brings to the song, and if it were a Kylie track alone I might have gone for a 4. But Donovan is surely the Polyfilla of male vocalists, and he spackles over every interesting wrinkle this might have had. 2.

@5 Hi Jude, great to have some new blood during this lean patch at the top…

@11 As a curtain-raiser on 1989 this couldn’t have been more appropriate, sadly enough.

Some puppies you have to poke in the eye to see if they’re alive.

First things first – does Beck sample the first bar or so of this for the beginning of Lost Cause (off his come-down album Sea Change)?

Anyhow, this is new to me – I’ve never knowingly heard a Jason Donovan track before, and the next Kylie song I’m sure I recognize is Spinning Around! – but at first hearing I find it a little better than Tom gives it credit for; the nice touches in the first 60 sec or so that Billy Smart mentions are there. It runs out of gas though – Tom’s point about the musicians just ‘steering this one safely home’ seems right to me. So, for me it’s a 4, but I dare say it could have been a 7 or 8 if, say, Prince or Ne-yo or some Nashville crew had been let loose on its second half.

Kylie sounds unsettlingly like Ja’mie from We Can Be Heroes and Summer Heights High in the spoken bit of the Kermit one.

Mind-changing score-changing shock! I listened to this on headphones last night, and for the first time noticed the bed of oohs and aahs from Kylie throughout, which improved it for me and made my 2 look a little mean. So I’ll nudge it to 3. That includes the -2 Donovan Penalty mentioned previously.

I’m with you on this one Tom. This has always left me a bit cold. Just a 4 from me.

Didn’t SAW admit at the time that this was consciously based on Peaches And Herb’s Reunited?

Bye bye Chris & Neil. I was supposed to change the pic to Kylie after I Should Be So Lucky but completely forgot, so now Jason gets an oar in too. Maybe an animated GIF could show him being yanked off and replaced by Michael Hutchence, or indeed a certain dastardly Leporid…

This would be about the time an oleaginous chap of Mediterranean appearance oozed down our area steps and attempted to persuade us to sell half of our garden in Notting Hill. Since private gardens in Notting Hill are a precious commodity we gave him the brush off. The blank wall at the end of the garden belonged to a then semi-derelict mews cottage and shortly afterwards a planning application turned up to put a window in the wall looking directly on our garden. Despite our objections the application was granted and as soon as the hole was knocked through and the glazing was in we uprooted a laurel bush and replanted it right in front of the window.

There were frequent weekend parties once the mews cottage was inhabited, but we weren’t invited to any of them. It was only several years later after I was no longer living there that I learned that it was set up as Jason Donovan’s London pad, but Jason himself didn’t live there in the beginning. Instead he had a famous tenant, a well-known Pakistani author living undercover while under a well-publicised death threat from a religious-zealot autocrat.

You heard it here first!

My critical judgement may have been clouded by being utterly in love with Kylie at the time (and yeah, now too, a bit), but I thought this was charming. Felt a bit chunkier too, oddly, than some contemporary SAW productions and the ‘catch’ under “You changed my life” is a killer. Jason’s horribly strained vocal anchors it around 6 for me.

Terrible shame about ‘Stop!’ though, as I think I said last time. That’s an absolute blast, in fun-times and sonics.

I’m another whose sticking up for this one. In Ramsey St lingo fair dinkum mate it’s bonzar.

@5 Hello Jude.

Because I don’t know where else to say so….

Another brilliant Poptimist column, Tom. I’ve been working my hardest to bust apart the idea of genre for a while now, but your simple and elegant reflection does so much more than all my little scribblings put together will ever manage.

Your Pitchfork column is easily my most eagerly anticipated reading on the web — not that it would look like it, given that I’ve only just worked out it’s a four-weekly piece and not a monthly one…

So thanks, and keep up the intelligent intervention.

Cheers

I had a mate who looked like Jason Donovan (tall, blonde, good-looking – the bastard) and one afternoon back then we were in this clothes shop in Soho and the assistant kept following us around, making flattering comments whenever my mate pulled out an item of clothing to look at. It was only when we were leaving and he said “I love your records!” that we realized why he’d been acting like that.

Apropos the Blue Peter Baby (#33), I remember Daniel clearly, the cute curly-haired little tyke! But, wait! The Swede remembers something else. The child became a scrote. I was sure this was true. Bloody certain, in fact. So I googled him and dagnabbit I was right:

SHAME OF THE BLUE PETER BABY

WHEN the parents of 14-week-old Daniel Scott called Blue Peter in 1968 suggesting they “adopt” him and chart his progress, bosses loved the idea.

Up until the age of two, cute little Daniel made several appearances to teach viewers how a baby develops and how to care for one.

Sadly, BP’s chubby-chopped adopted son turned into something of a black sheep. Daniel’s parents split up and he became a teenage tearaway. After pulling himself out of a life of drugs and petty crime, he admitted: “I was a look-out man in a burglary and I was caught. I got a minor fine and two years’ probation.”

Auntie Val would have been disgusted. Mind, you, Daniel’s not the only Blue Peter personality to have fallen from grace. Remember, for example, what they used to grow in the Blue Peter garden one time?

I really can’t understand the generosity shown towards the vapid anonymous anti-music manufactured by SAW and their ever-bewildering array of talentless vocalists. I cannot imagine anything less attractive or exciting in pop. Clean, crisp generic synth sounds, obvious melodies, shockingly poor lyrics. Nothing SAW produced was original or inspirational or anything I would look for in pop. It was an exercise in marketing which killed off my interest in the charts for some time -if not for good. This is just a turgid ballad with naff lyrics sung by two very average singers – nothing even vaguely romantic about it. Is this really what it had come to? Do people really sing this at karaoke? Thank God for E’s, Baggy & Raves. Tom, stick to your guns here – it’s awful – no ABBA-style revisionism is ever going to persuade me otherwise.

This was probably the record that sealed the move for SAW from dance floor to bubblegum for good, despite the best efforts of Donna later in the year. Their output gets patchier for me from here, though I still loved them at the time.
I had a serious boy crush when this was out, so it was pretty much perfect for me; thus all critical faculties have been chucked out the window! Even though it’s not something I’d listen to by choice now, I can’t help but get goose bumps when I hear it, especially when accompanied by the video.
In attempting to listen objectively, still a very strong song, held back considerably by clunky old JD, bless him. Something I’m looking forward to discussing in more detail in the near future!
@22, SAW definitely said they were influenced by Peaches & Herb for this, and that the original demo was more reggae-flavoured, if you can imagine such a thing. ‘All I Wanna Do’ on the flip seems to be them channelling ‘You’re The One That I Want’, so Ciarans comment about it sounding late 50’s seems about right.
14 year old me would give it a 10, now I’d give it a five, but that would seem churlish. I’ll settle on seven.

Re #3, was there more than one Indie Chart? The Cherry Red book (or at least the Cherry Red website’s reproduction of the contents of the Cherry Red book…) has this peaking at #2*, presumably behind the Crackers International EP.

(Yes, yes, not only pedantry but out-of-date pedantry and not only that but out-of-date pedantry regarding the ’80s indie chart. Impressive work.)

*I’m not sure how this works given that it reached at #1 in the actual chart…

Like all S/A/W productions, the sleeve to this single sported the legend “vocals recorded on a CalRec Soundfield Microphone”. It had never occurred to me to wonder what that meant until now but a quick Google turns up this article by Hit Factory engineer Les Sharma:

http://www.lessharma.com/recording-with-saw-stock-aitken-waterman.html

There, I learned two things.

1) Pete Waterman, the Arthur Daley of 1980s synthpop, had done a deal for free microphones in exchange for the credit.

2) Kylie was deemed a “good” singer, while Jason’s vocals were regularly ghosted by Mike Stock (in the early days, at least).

It makes you wonder why there isn’t more written about PWL and the glory days of the Hit Factory. The process is fascinating.

Anyway, to the song in question. I hated it at the time, but have become more fond of its goofy charm over the years. The singers’ lack of skill makes it more believable than the more showy love ballads – like they’d just wandered in, love hearts in their eyes, and asked S/A/W to record a song they’d written in their school jotters. The line that sells it for me is the simple sincerity of “now that I’m next to you”.

A five, I think.

Hm… an analysis of the influence of SAW on early 90s family sitcom theme songs would be fun. I can’t shake the association.

I can’t totally hate this one. A very charitable 4/10 from me.