WHIGFIELD – "Saturday Night"

After a semi-crap first year at secondary school (like everyone else’s, I guess), my second year seemed packed full of new friends, better classes and stupid crushes on boys who couldn’t care less. Saturday Night went down a treat at the Lower School Disco (ages 11-14), in that it was the only song that the majority of kids danced to, because they could copy someone else in a socially acceptable way. I made a point of memorising the routine so that when the jump-jump-jump-CLAP bit rotated me 90° and put me on the front row, I’d still know what to do without having to steal a glance either side of me. DON’T LOOK WEAK.

Jesus, 7/10. I despair. This is a song fragment posing as a song. The track’s not finished; it’s barely even been begun.
“a lovely bit of house piano heading for the fade”
Really? I didn’t notice anything.

SN is a 2 or 3 tops in my books, and not worth discussing. 4 weeks at #1 – unbelievable!

Brings back immediately some very strange memories of nightly entertainments at Haven holiday camp, dancing to this & various other Eurodance numbers with (I think) large furry animal mascots. (Was 6 or 7, not sure.) Anyway, listening to it again the last 45 seconds or so are really lovely.

#6. Chelovek … I was about to respond by quoting what ‘someone’ had said on the Gabrielle/Dreams thread, when I realised the ‘someone’ was you. It reminded me of Crystal Waters, too, and Gabrielle. This was because they were, respectively, the first female solo acts to debut at 3 and 2 in the charts, and Whigfield the first to go straight in at 1. And in each instance, large numbers of the population were left wondering what the heck all the fuss was about.

Actually, I do have an unpleasant memory associated with this song as well! I was actually chatted up by a woman at a party (note – this almost NEVER happens, and when it does I’m normally flattered beyond belief) while this was number one, who was determined to drag me on the dancefloor to do the “Saturday Night” dance. I was polite enough not to tell her that I hated the song, but I did (honestly) say that actually I didn’t know how the dance went. This she found unbelievable and was incredulous, but continued drunkenly and unsubtly coming on to me, at which point I had to (honestly) say that I was spoken for by somebody else in my university town.

This lead to ranting, raving, mocking and general invective (“You’re ugly anyway, and you’re so up yourself”, etc. etc.) which her friends actually had to talk her into stopping. It was almost like the sort of thing women have to put up with in clubs every weekend, except I was finding myself on the receiving end instead. Genuinely interesting, but a bit worrying. It was an incident people reminded me of for years afterwards, but today is the first time I’ve thought about it in an age.

And I never did learn the “Saturday Night” dance, either. Sorry if the above is of interest to no-one.

She did horrible things to Last Christmas as the shepherd’s crook appeared from stage left.

I have no problem with cheesy dance music in theory, but sometimes in practice the records just aren’t good enough. No more than a 3.

I was on a clubbing hiatus for financial and behavioural reasons when this was big, so never witnessed ‘the dance’- which from memory of TOTP was close to line dancing. I may be conflating this with another, bunnied, abomination though.

It was key that Whigfield seemed to a great extent reluctant to show herself to her public. The video for “Saturday Night” has her in front of her dressing table mirror, happily getting herself ready and singing to herself as though she were all she needed; she looks so knowingly happy one wonders whether she even needs or wants to go out. On TV performances she hid half her face beneath a baseball cap with such regularity that her record company eventually had to order her to take it off on pain of immediate excommunication.

Both connected phenomena would explain why it’s hard to get a grip on this record. It was 1994’s Eurodance smash, sung by a Dane and written and produced by Italians (the same team responsible for Spagna’s 1987 number two hit “Call Me”) which came with its own inbuilt Club 18-30 line dancing routine; shamelessly artificial, monotone and plastic, it seemed the ideal record to dethrone “Love Is All Around” since it represented everything Wet Wet Wet weren’t, or at least pretended very hard not to be.

But where is Whigfield, a.k.a. 24-year-old Sannie Carlson, in all of this? Her vocal is reedy and evidently speeded up, with the consequence that she sounds like a newly-stranded Martian urgently trying to learn the planet’s language from a nearby sixties bubblegum compilation; pop tropes dart around the track, not especially joined up (“I’ll make you mine,” “I’ll take you to the top,” “I’ll drive you crazy,” “It’s party time,” “Be my baby,” and so on and so forth, as well as the obligatory Euro-syntax slip of “And not one minute we can lose”) and making no great sense. The music doggedly runs along its pre-built line of post-House pop, building up exactly as one would expect, albeit with some interesting birhythmic crosscurrents in the final minute, with a retrospectively indispensable hook (I hesitate to call it “punctum” in this context) of what sounds like an anxious and hungry duck quacking for its mother all the way through. It’s reasonable enough, doing what it says on the cover and no more, but there’s a protective layer of aspic around its curvatures which means, at least for me, that it’s impossible to access; the toe may tap but the heart can never believe, or even connect.

(Oh, and I think Eddy Grant would still like a word about an old Equals song called “Rub-A-Dub-Dub”…)

Hmm, let’s have a look at the stats:

Prior to Whigfield two other singles in 1994 had debuted at #1 (Mariah Carey and Take That).

In 1993 there were four – one was “Five Live,” the other three were by Take That.

In 1992 there was just one (Erasure).

In 1991 there were five – Elton/George, U2, Michael Jackson and two by Queen.

In 1990 there was just one, Iron Maiden (hang on a minute – nope, entered the chart 30 December 1990).

So it probably escalates from hereonin but really had been there for some time.

Re 5: That is exactly what I thought about this song. Whoever wrote it couldn’t actually be bothered to finish it, and that prevented me from enjoying it in the way others evidently did. My reaction was always ‘huh, is that it?’

Really, compared to 2 Times, Call Me or even the contemporaneous Rhythm of the Night it’s pretty flimsy. 4 from me.

#18 It is true. I wonder about the increased anticipation at the time as to who was going to be the first act to do go straight in at #1 with their first single. What’s interesting is that:

a) it took a complete bolt from the blue to dislodge Wet Wet Wet (it was a huge help that LIAA had been deleted on its 15th week – it could well have beaten Bryan Adams record otherwise unless Take That had lined something new up sooner).

b) the aformentioned precursors of Crystal Waters (who’d just had her biggest hit since her debut with the very good ‘100% Pure Love’) and Gabrielle suggesting that a hitherto-unknown solo woman with a club-friendly track was more likely of achieving the feat than any other kind of act (harder to imagine the guitar bands on the verge of becoming the country’s biggest managing it in those days). Just coincidence tho I guess – maybe Stiltskin would’ve done it in a different week.

#24 “Although I do have one query – similar to ‘YMCA’, the distinctive dance doesn’t actually appear in the video, so where did it actually come from?”

I’m wondering that myself now, as I’m sure I saw (English) people doing the dance, in I think it was Gran Canaria, at least a month before it hit #1 here.

But now I’m worried my memory has more holes in it than Dr Sam Beckett’s.

There’s this thing in some of these ‘european’ ‘feel=good’ hits, of “Party Time”, which you don’t get in UK or USA hits of the same, um, feel.

That DJ Otzi waits until 3/4 way through before announcing “ok, everyone it’s party time!!” like it wasn’t before.

At least W mentions it in verse one, so we know where we are, or where we are supposed to be. Then again, where is that? Venue details not forthcoming…

#24 See also the single cover for What’s Up by DJ Miko though at least that looks like a speaker it was clearly the design of choice for that record label at the time.

#31, #24 The label was Systematic, a short-lived London Records imprint, seemingly a home for for dance releases considered a little mainstream for ffrr. Systematic also gave us Ann Lee amongst others.

http://www.discogs.com/label/Systematic

Re: comments on “party time”, when abouts did this start to become a saying? I suspect, but have no proof, that it might all be down to Wayne’s World (and 2) using it in the title sequence of the show within the film (Wayne’s World, party time, excellent, guitars bit, end) though if usage predates this as a temporary blip on 90s culture, I could, as usual, be talking out of my hat.

Despite listening to Saturday Night several times over the last two days, I have nothing to say about it. It is just kind of there for me. It is not positively hateful, I reckon, but it is not something I would choose to listen to. Maybe a 4 or 5? Sounds about right. There is some proper awful euro dance rubbish to come up. I think I will likely spare the rod here to use it later on.

Alex Party’s twinkly banger ‘Read My Lips’ was another Eurodance hit from this time insistent (but in this case excitedly whispering it) that “tonight…it’s party time”. None others spring to mind for me right now tho.

#37 Cubic 22, Night In Motion?

I read #34 as “#32 is one of the TV series set in a Reykjavik petrol station” — ie Another Pete identifying what 23 Daves had mentioned as JUST ONE OF THE MANY ICELANDIC TV SERIES SET IN A PETROL STATION.

Now that I’ve parsed it correctly I feel strangely let down.

Anyway, listening to it: all I remembered of it was the title line, although it’s not really as if there’s too much more to it than that. All of my memories of it are linked to Butlins, which is not overly surprising. Pleasantly dinky but I get bored before the end, so I suppose that’s 3/4 territory.

My Popular debut! Thought of starting with Love is All Around but it’s such a daunting rock face of a hit (and not a very good one, coupled with summer ’94 being a glorious epiphany for the nine-year-old me) I’ll return to that later. By September, I seriously believed Wet Wet Wet’s behemoth was part of a sick global conspiracy, to permanently end the charts I’d been following – and taping ever since Mr Blobby kicked Take That’s jelly and ice cream stained butts (Yeah, I know..) A bit like when a cartoon character was killed off, the credits would shrink to a postage stamp on the ubiquitous CBBC broom cupboard (showing my age/tender years here!) and Messrs Forrester/Peters/Crane would have that blank “I told you so, kids” expression, pulling a… ah, let’s not, bunny alert… it’s something a long way down the line but with a similar “dee dee da da da” gimmick. With added gender dysphoria. But let’s not dwell on that.

Anyway, though this was undeniably refreshing after wading through 15 weeks of Richard Curtisland treacle (enough to drive a man to Divine Brown!), I still find this a somewhat unpalatable number, like chewing through a tiny, overpriced stick of candyfloss. Everything that works brilliantly in its favour (great hook, iconic dance routine, lyrics definitive to the record’s atmosphere) threatens to destroy any sense of credibility (the same hook all the way through, embarrassing dance routine, lyrics of tooth decaying cliches not seen on this level since Sabrina – Boys (Summertime Love) – and who, ahem, came to that for the lyrics? I’m so sorry..)

I also don’t like what this eventually did to “clubland” (note small C!) chart-toppers.. okay, all the following could be filed under “Fun For All The Family” as well as full-blooded commercial decadence dance, but compared to what made me love Ride on Time, No Limit, Mr Vain, Ebeneezer Goode, and 3AM Eternal, this just sounds like music for little girls.. not necessarily the worst thing for a number 1, but there’s far worse where that came from appearing here soon. The problem is, the production’s so polite and locked-in you lose the kitsch appeal which is always a vital ingredient of this genre. On the flipside, I loved that Tony Di Bart record but it’s meant to be tasteful, and adult… if SN wants to be juvenile it should actually try and have a bloody good go rather than faxing it in.

And anyway I’m more of a “Think of You” man myself, because one of the lyrics sounds like “I need you inside me tonight.” (Yes, I know I’m this blog’s resident sacked Carry On writer.. I’ll change tack soon, don’t worry. It’s late. I’m single.)

Worst review ever. But definitely not the worst record ever.

5.

Credit where credit’s due – that summer I was worried not about a tragic clown or evil monkey haunting my childhood wardrobe, but under my pillow finding a, er, hirsute Pellow. Sannie Charlotte Carlson, you’re a life saver.

A “Party Time” from Jamaica in the 60s (and a total winner):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jotUKlu06hk

And a welcome to Patrick from me, too.

Interesting the few mentions of Ann Lee, as 2 Times had the same producer/mastermind as this, I believe (sorry if you all knew that already). How many other cherished eurodance hits had the great Larry lurking in the shadows?

(Given that the Taliban banned all music when in power, #46 is hardly apposite.)