ENIGMA – "Sadness Part 1"

I can never for the life of me remember how this goes until I play it, at which point I instantly recognise it. If that make sense…

That said, I enjoy it for the curious little chart topper that it was. I like Return To Innocence a lot more.

The female vocals on Sadeness Pt 1 are provided by German pop diva Sandra, whose solo material is cut from a very different cloth indeed. Her signature tune (I’ll Never Be) Maria Magdalena should really have crossed over here, it’s fantastically ridiculous.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qw-h2VvUE4Q&feature=fvst

#2 Watch: A week of Seal’s ‘Crazy’. A bit overly smooth, perhaps, but it still carries an epic, romantic, charge within it.

In full agreement with both review and score.
A lot of pop singles might be turned into muzak at some point but this is one which frankly just is muzak. Simply a load of things that are suppossed to signify ” atmosphere ” shuffled together and offering little in sum bar a biege flatness.

Shave the beard off and stick a knife in his hand and that monk could be in Don’t Look Now.

This track has been slightly ruined for me by the fake trailer for Satan’s Alley at the start of Tropic Thunder (Robert Downey Junior and Tobey Maguire play homosexual Gregorian monks). I don’t think it was used to soundtrack the trailer – but with the monk chanting and so on, all I can think of when I hear this is Tobey Maguire fondling Robert Downey Junior’s rosary.

The classic sign of a genre coming to its natural end is the novelty record, whether it’s Monster Mash (Twist/dance craze) or Jilted John (punk), and this was the fag end of Movement 98. Keep On Movin’ and Sadeness were its bookends. It wasn’t awful, just weak, definitely pretentious, and detached from the Balearic beats that made 98bpm an event.

It sounds thoroughly lifeless now. I wonder if it was meant to be a 90s version of Je T’Aime? Sex with a sadistic monk??

As for the early 90s ‘spiritual’ thing, there were lots of eco-aware ads on tv for the first time; this record is a musical equivalent of Simple soap.

Actually, I can easily explain why I hated this record at the time – it was played endlessly on the radio to the point where any charms it had died a steady death (my parents listened to Essex Radio at this point, and that station loved it, with the morning jock Gavin McCoy bragging that he always knew it was going to be a hit). A record being heavily playlisted is not a sin in itself, obviously, but in the middle of January with the dark early mornings, this felt depressing and somnambulant, and got the day off to an appalling start. If the track is anything, it’s a midnight cocoa moment, not an “Out of bed and off to work with you” piece of pop.

Clearly not everyone agreed, however. A friend of mine shared a house with somebody who used to insist on playing it full blast every morning to “wake her up in the right mood”. After a few months he had a temper tantrum and whilst she was out, knocked the offending piece of vinyl off the cupboard her stereo sat on and down the back of the radiator. Looking back that seems a bit unnecessary and harsh, but I can almost understand where he was coming from.

Listening to it again, I’m struck by how downright inoffensive it is. It sounds like the soundtrack for a luxury chocolate bar advert rather than a proper single, and my main feeling is one of total indifference. I suspect it was bought largely by people who felt they were buying into something new and unusual, people who might not otherwise have been aware of The Orb or The KLF’s “Chill Out”, let alone Eno. It is to ambient what “San Francisco (Be Sure To Wear Flowers In Your Hair)” was to psychedelia.

What fascinates me about it now is the fact that it seems like a genuine freak one-off chart topper. I can’t think of a number one which even comes close to it. Robert Miles’ “Children” was, I suppose, almost close enough in style to count, but that only reached number two, and I do actually have a soft spot for that one.

I assume Sadeness was influenced by records like this, which was a big summer 1990 tune. Still sounds rather rich and chocolatey, though, unlike Enigma’s dry packet of Cadbury’s Options.

Another thumbs up for Robert Miles’ Children. Didn’t that also have some rather pretentious ‘meaning’ to it, beyond mere new age twiddliness?

Re #14. No, that would be ‘Je T’Aime… Moi Non Plus’.

Ambient and chillout were watchwords for the ’90s and this was neither of those things. “Sad(e)ness Part 1” suffered from being a euro-facsimilie of the kind of groove that Soul 11 Soul and Neneh Cherry had made their own.

This is the kind of music that would have been background music at the wrong kind of dinner parties, long before the swingers and the chattering classes could sink their teeth into Portishead’s “Dummy”. Enigma are the somewhat tenuous link between born again New Pop casualty, Sal Solo and Songs Of Praise favourites, Libera. Libera’s eponymous 1995 debut single borrows heavily from “Sadeness Part 1”, and some of that same choir were recruited for Solo’s sickly-sweet “San Damiano” in ’87. So in essence, this is sandwiched between Heaven and Hell, as it were. Yup, Paradise is truly lost.

Not that I ever watch softcore porn, but if I did, I’d notice that this tune is still frequently ripped off as background music in sex scenes.

This is a 3 for me, it was funny to pronounce it Shadayness but that’s about it. The itchy synth sound is unpleasant. I can’t imagine anyone ever needing to put this on autorepeat, it plays and it ends and that’s enough.

Re: #6 – The song was called ‘Sadeness’ on release in Europe but was changed to ‘Sadness’ for release in the UK, for some reason (as mentioned in Tom’s review) – The record sleeve must be the release from another country, and we should really call it “Sadness” as that’s the name of the record people in the UK bought. Anyway, it’s not an important point really.

The song itself is a clear victim of the process where exotic sounds become tedious and predictable through repeated exposure, in this case through a million massage CDs and lazy soundtrack compilers. What I’m wondering is whether it sounded much fresher at the time, or whether this process was well underway already. Unfortunately I was only 11 so can’t remember.
I love a lot of ambient music (it’s one of the few genres I can share with my wife) but it’s a rare artist who can avoid sounding cheesy without veering into discordant sounds. Hammock and Eluvium are the only post 2000s examples I can think of right now.

At the time, i thought this was the greatest song i’d ever heard, being 6 and Catholic to hear the monk stuff on it was amazing. Also how weird it was and not knowing what the words were. It was replaced three years later when i heard Return To Innocence and thought once again that it was the greatest song in the world.

Replying to myself, after having a quick compare and contrast on Youtube, it is actually Sadness used on the fake trailer at the start of Tropic Thunder.

I should probably be ashamed that I bothered to look that up.

This track isn’t much cop though is it? The comments pointing it out as bland, beige, muzak, etc, are all pretty much spot on for me – though I’ve never really been able to wrap my head around ambient. I think the most ambient I have ever understood is Autobahn (and I dare say someone will be able to explain to me that Autobahn is not really ambient).

I’m going to have to agree with 4. I wanted to nudge it to 5 for being the blueprint for so much other music in the 1990s… but it’s not a blueprint I can stomach, really, and not a track I want to listen to again for a while.

By the way, the sidebar link to the “On Marks Out of Ten” post has broken in all of the site reorganising you chaps have been doing. It’d be handy to have that back again.

@16 Deep Forest – I liked that at the time, and even bought the CD single; better than this, although it’s also probably dated quite badly. [One YouTube visit later… yes, it has.]

The trouble with those world/electronic hybrids was that they always left me wishing for the original world music, not the standard synth guff laid over the top of it. There were a couple of Pacific Islands-inspired Deep Forest knock-offs in the late 1990s, which I bought hoping they would capture some of the feel of music I had encountered as a postgrad student that decade; but in the end I realised that what I really wanted was a whole album full of Cook Islands drumming or Maori hakas, not a few minutes of each padded out with white Aussie/Kiwi blokes on synths.

To “Sweet Lullaby”‘s credit, the last few seconds do feature the original sample unadorned.

To hear this sort of thing done properly, listen to Kate Bush’s The Sensual World, full of the Bulgarian voices so popular at the time, but wonderfully blended with her own musical sensibility. My first KB album, and possibly still my favourite.

When I first heard Sadness/Sadeness some time during the arse end of 1990 my reaction was one of hilarity. It truly seemed as if someone was taking the piss. Over the previous 18 months ‘that’ Soul II Soul beat had appeared on virtually everything – good records..bad records..indie bands’ records..shite Phil Collins’ covers. Now some bright spark had used it as a backdrop for a load of Gregorian chanting! Twenty years on, I still find it hard to take this seriously.

That said, I’m sure that if Sadness had been a one-off I would regard it now as an fondly-remembered freak hit. The pity is that it became a blueprint that Cretu (and others) would make careers out of.

# 24 I thought it had something to do with out-of-their-tree youngsters getting mown down on a busy road outside one of the main clubs in Ibiza. I found it difficult to muster up much sympathy to be honest.

Not having been exposed to much in the way of “ambient”, and hearing this for the first time in nearly 20 years, I have to say I don’t find it bad at all. No doubt because I’m not so familiar with the genre as to recognise its clichés. Yes, the Soul II Soul beat had been greatly overused – maybe as much in three years as the Bo Diddley beat in as many decades – but the combination with the Gregorian chant that isn’t anchored in anything to do with the beat and is carrying on in its own world while the beat goes on in this world, works nicely for me. Great as a single dose, and different enough to be a classically “January” number one but, as Rory says, maybe even a whole album would be 45 minutes too much of it.

So Cretu was the first Romanian at number one? Pity it wasn’t Gheorghe Zamfir back in ’76, but a blessing that a couple of more recent Romanians haven’t emulated him, if you know what I mean. (Wouldn’t have minded the leather-clad lovely who represented them at Eurovision last year, mind you.)

I am inclined to disagree with people a little about this record: too busy to say what I’m fond of it today, but will try and remember to scribble something during the week.

Unless the “synth chords piling up in a threatening manager” that punctum mentions scare me off! Is this threatening manager you, Marcello?

Don’t talk to me about bloody Midsomer. That place had a higher murder rate than Johannesburg. A stockbroker’s daughter on a pony? Deadly, man! Only Cabot Cove, Maine was more dangerous than this place.

And I thought Stockwell was dodgy…

#18 – that’s interesting, I’d somehow convinced myself that this wasn’t a one-week wonder, and spent at least a couple of weeks at the top. This is obviously either the ITV Chart Show or the Network Chart playing tricks with my brain. (Well, possibly a combination of that and the song’s ubiquity at one point). I wonder where it finished in the list of best-sellers of the year? It seems to have slumped to number three the week after its little breather at the top, so I suspect that it may not even have sold enough copies to pick up a silver disc.

Also, it’s likely to be of interest to nobody, but I’ve just remembered that there was a heavy metal band based in my area at this point called Enigma. They were all in their early twenties and I remember them being grossly offended at the name clash, which they seemed to take incredibly personally, especially as they’d only recently got some art college student to design a logo for them when this went to number one. I think they changed their name in the end, presumably to avoid the kerfuffle which might have been caused by people turning up to Essex pubs expecting to see some Gregorian monks and Peruvian pan pipers on stage.

Whatever his other crimes, Cretu — a Romanian — is surely deploying ROMANIAN panpipes, rather than Peruvian. As Erithian points out above, the panpipes were brought to the world at large in the 70s by fellow-Romanian Gheorghe Zamfir.

#41. Indeed, ‘Sadness’ was top of the other (ILR/ NME) charts for three weeks.

There was a previous Enigma, who had two hits in 1981, ‘Ain’t No Stopping’ (No. 11) and ‘I Love Music’ (No. 21). I’m guessing that they were funk or soul, and I’d bet that I’d prefer them to the nineties Enigma.

#41. It was 37th in the year end chart of 1991, which made it appear like a pretty poor-selling number one … though not the lowest ranked of the year. Add to that the facts that it had appeared at #80 in the year end for 1990, and achieved the unheralded status of Christmas no.4 in 1990 and its overall sales will have been ok.

#45. How much would you bet you’d prefer Enigma 1981 to Enigma 1990? The 1981 hits were medleys of disco hits in the heyday of the medley … They are very hard to acquire (or at least they were in the immediate pre-download days) because they never make it onto retrospectives and did not make it on to (m)any Ronco and K-Tel compilations at the time. So if you want to own the recordings, you have to find the original singles.

I’ve found the 1981 Enigma, who did indeed have Skakatak connections –

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wONfE8cUy44

– Wow, this is poor stuff! The segue between ‘Hi Ho Silver Lining/ Jump To The Beat/ Baby Love’ is perhaps the lowlight, though the sessionwoman approximation of Debbie Harry’s ‘Rapture’ rap is also striking.