DEEP BLUE SOMETHING – "Breakfast At Tiffany's"

This was my favorite song the year it was released! I was a senior in high school, everything was taking on a melancholy glow of prefabricated nostalgia, and I thought the instrumental break at the end of the chorus was just about the most beautiful musical sequence I’d ever heard. (My musician friends assured me it was not as complex as it sounded, but I didn’t have the ear for complexity yet; a basic descending sequence still went a long way with me.)

I don’t know that I ever thought much about the lyrics, except to the extent that I also kind of liked the film and so identified with both the song’s characters; but I certainly never thought the song supported the idea that kind of liking an old movie was a solid basis for a relationship. That self-absorbed doofiness was, I suppose, part of the charm. (Only, perhaps, because I was also exactly that sort of self-absorbed doof. With more maturity under my belt I would no doubt have hated the song too. I certainly would hate anything similar that became popular today; and one of the best things about the postmillenial pop landscape is that this kind of mealymouthed power-pop would have a hard time getting any traction.)

I remembered it being around at the time but I’m amazed it actually went all the way to the top. It seemed too bland and tuneless (with trite lyrics to boot) to even be a top 10 hit let alone a #1. Maybe they were extraordinarily handsome which seemed to be the main criterion for male pop acts to hit big in the late 90s.

I expected Tom to savage this one, and so be it.

Can’t agree with the mark. Well, bloody good point about that scattergun pop-cultural referencing – imagine if it went “And I said, what about, Sex Lives of the Potato Men?” Mind you, I know it’s not very hip or sexy, but I’ve always had a fondness for this über-anthemic, whitebread, middle-Americana. (see also: Semisonic, The Connells, honestly much of R.E.M and Pearl Jam’s discography.) You could call this a Butlin’s take on the Replacements. But at least it’s something vaguely like the Replacements. 7.

American AoR, otherwise unchanged since the seventies, smuggled itself back into the nineties under “alternative” cover, and the facade proved highly profitable. Throughout the mid-nineties there sprouted a rash of essentially conservative rock/pop groups who typically enjoyed one major hit single and one auxiliary major hit album before going back to the bars or to infinitely more profitable careers writing and producing for others. The Spin Doctors, 4 Non-Blondes, Soul Asylum…all could have existed in 1975, but with the correct post-Cobain packaging and marketing they looked “alternative” and prospered with the post-Hornby clientele anxious still to look “with it” but fearful about allowing music to come too close to them lest it disturb them and thus remind them of their own rapidly dwindling mortality.

“Breakfast At Tiffany’s” was the culmination of this line of selling and in a lot of ways is the “Release Me” of its time; the song concerns a couple on the verge of breaking up, hating each other actively and passively. In desperation the singer summons up a dim reminder from their distant beginnings (“And I said, what about Breakfast At Tiffany’s?“) to little effect (“She said, I think I remember the film” – hardly the cherishable memory as the foundation of a deep and lasting relationship). He persists (“And I said, well, that’s one thing we’ve got”); his underlying desperation and insecurity surf to the surface (“I see you, the only one who knew me”) before he finally gives up (“I guess I was wrong…/Still, I know you just don’t care”).

This minimalist scenario is played out in just two verses and a chorus and might have worked had it found a more sympathetic musical setting than DBS’ bar-room politeness alternating with “punk” guitar “thrashes” and noodling which might pass as Johnny Marr at 50,000 miles, not to mention the terrible, hearty lead vocal which sounds like Pete Seeger being subpoenaed into singing with the Rembrandts. Music for the intimidated middle-aged couples who lived through punk and couldn’t understand why their sun wasn’t blotted out anymore.

#9 Not that it’s really important. But out of those you mentioned, only 4 Non Blondes actually sprouted a member who ultimately went to songwriter/producer-for-hire’s greener pastures – no need to name names here, I suppose.
Another “alternative” star one who went on to find fortune (if not fame; but that’s exactly the point, right?) in that very field was Dan Wilson out of Semisonic. Those royalties from Adele’s “Someone Like You” surely will be enough to pay his rent for the next few years!

I saw this was coming up and spent quite some time looking for the Harry Hill clip of him and Stoufer the cat singing this. If anyone finds it, I owe you a google (I owe you a duckduckgo sounds filthy).

#5 I was wondering if someone would mention Semisonic – I always had that band and Deep Blue Something tied up quite closely together in my mind, although as you point out, there are numerous other contenders from the same period. Bloody hated Semisonic. A local pub I used to frequent was owned by a brewery who had some kind of deal going on with their record label where for a few weeks they would play “Closing Time” at, you guessed it, closing time. The tune was turgid anyway, but to cap it all off someone thought it would be a wise idea for it to accompany the “drink-up” cries of an impatient and scowling landlord. Not the best marketing device I’ve ever come across, to this day if someone mentions Semisonic (which isn’t often) I just associate them with being kicked out of pubs and having a lonely walk home to my student digs.

Anyway, Deep Blue Something. “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” is one of those records I really don’t like, but I can grin and bear it if it comes on the radio. It’s music you can imagine one of the characters from “Friends” really enjoying, slick yet slightly bitter-sweet and not too edgy. If you were a young aspirational person, you could put it on the stereo at one of your first dinner parties and at least nobody would complain.

At the time the lyrics made some kind of sense to me, but now I’m a grown adult I just listen to it and think “What? You’re trying to save a relationship based on mutual film and music likes? Get a grip. For that reason alone, leave, woman, leave”. These days I’m not the kind of romantic who thinks that shared cinema tastes and shared love of the same band t-shirts means much of a damn thing, to be honest, it’s just a nice bonus.

EDIT TO SAY: I think Simon Mayo got right behind this single, didn’t he? It seems like the kind of record he would unconditionally support. That and bloody Joan Osbourne’s “One Of Us”.

Perhaps YOU will be the one to overturn critical consensus about Deep Blue Something! http://t.co/BQLPYWmi0E – but probably not tbh

Surprised by the strong reactions to this. The song strikes me as of course a bit of a joke, there’s no way the line “we both kinda liked it” would appear if the narrator wasn’t supposed to be a bit pathetic*, but there’s something slightly adorable in how earnest his scrabbling away at straws to try and salvage something so palpably doomed is. I certainly don’t get any sense of irritation from the song.

It’s a bit too repetitive, though, and as much as I’d like to stretch to a 7 for contrariness’s sake I think 6 is as high as I can go. Which is odd because I gave “Wannabe” a 7 and I listen to this for pleasure far more than I ever would to that.

What else to say? I think it’s the second, and last, grunge #1 hit (after “Inside”), although I might have forgotten some, and it’s entirely possible some of the later Oasis hits (which I haven’t heard yet) are grunge like most of …Morning Glory was (but not “Some Might Say”). Someone mentioned the album, Home, upthread; it was complete pish and I think of it as the archetypal “album that’s only good for one song”.

*that’s probably why I’m so surprised by the reaction to the song, actually: the narrator is so obviously pathetic that you all read like HOWWIBLE BULLIES by being mean about him

P.S. Hootie and the Blowfish are shitter than shit.

flahr @19, I’d never call this grunge myself. Post-grunge, sure, but that scene was as distinct from grunge as post-punk was from punk.

Meanwhile, I have managed to survive 46 years without ever knowingly hearing a Hootie track! Woohoo! (And that took some doing in the 1990s, I tell you.)

(Of course, now I wonder if there was something I was missing… but no, my curiosity isn’t going to get the better of me at this late date.)

(It is, isn’t it. Curse you, Internet.)

(LOOK WHAT YOU MADE ME DO. [Runs sobbing from the screen.])

I notice a few mentions of “Friends”, I often confuse this song with the theme to Friends, and this band with The Rembrandts (I just had to google them). I’m not quite sure what the link is, but if other people have mentioned it, I’m clearly not entirely mad. (I am not a fan of the show.)

like Alan at 25 (and also mentioned by Marcello at 9) this strongly reminds me of the theme from ‘Friends’ – I don’t mind it. I’ve never paid much attention to the lyrics but I enjoy the melody and it has a Country-ish twang to it which I quite like.
For some reason I’ve always thought this was by the Divine Comedy which shows how much attention I was paying at the time (and since).

yeah this wasn’t even scrunge, nevermind grunge. they were vaguely in that vein of college rock that was always where altrock radio’s heart really was – gin blossoms, counting crows, live, hootie, dave matthews, collective soul, goo goo dolls, matchbox 20, third eye blind, the wallflowers. the rembrandts were in this vein also as were the bodeans who also managed to crossover to radio w/ a television theme song. there are many others who managed one hit and were gone immediately and if there was any mystery or excitement to this era it lay in being unable to predict generally which nuisance was going to be here and gone like the verve pipe or deep blue something and which were going to linger like matchbox 20. rem are kinda the wellspring (or septic tank maybe) from which all this flows though the one’s who lingered added another element be it a more pronounced power pop (gin blossoms, third eye blind somewhat), a solid classic rock impersonation (counting crows, wallflowers), bombast on loan from u2 (live), vague jamband aesthetics (dave matthews), or (my fave) 90s BARITONE (hootie!). no idea how matchbox 20 survived (and thrived, sustaining a multialbum hit career almost none of their peers here could dream of).

#19. Kinda. The usage of kinda became prevalent in the 90s, didn’t it? Dunno how prevalent, or where it came from, or went to. At one point, in these parts, there seemed to be kind of a division between those who used it, and those who disapproved of it. Kinda like uptalk or whatever it’s called. It led to an amusing moment when a UK football commentator interviewing John Harkes (of Sheffield Wednesday and the USA) tried just that bit too hard and enquired “Your parents* were** kinda Scottish, weren’t*** they****?” He replied, good-naturedly, “They**** were*** Scottish.” Just realised that looks like an expletive-ridden exchange. It wasn’t though.

There was even a kind-of Estuary English version, where the V was pronounced more than the D? Sounded a bit like “carve”. I recall a friend accidentaly saying it in a meeting with someone who wondered what the word meant. Don’t hear it so much now. Wonder why?

Anyway, maybe DBS’ singer was being kinda polite – like not wishing to presume she liked it that much?

* might have been grandfather or grandparents or Mum or Dad. But not grandmother.
** might have been was, is or are
*** see **
**** might have been he or she

I have a memory of seeing this debut on Rage (the ABC in Australia used to televise the singles on Saturday mornings) and fairly quickly ascend to the top 5, and of never having heard the song before that. I listened to rock radio/alternative radio at the time, and would have heard it if it was playlisted, so I think I assumed it was being played on the chart pop stations.

My memory of this at the time (as a 14 year old) was that it was okay, but pretty slight; I didn’t mind it existing but I definitely wasn’t going to go out of my way to hear it (I appear to feel this way about most landfill alt-rock of the time…memories). It was definitely catchy though, which was why it was successful; it’s a difficult art to make the kind of song where the lyrics are part of what’s catchy rather than just the rhythm or melody, and BAT does this pretty well (and I’m assuming that it was a fluke on DBS’s behalf judging by its one-hit-wonder status).

In Australia we got a fair bit more landfill alt-rock like this than the UK must have (judging by the comments here) but bypassed lots of stuff that was big in the US (Blues Traveler never made it to Australia, for instance). In my mind, this stuff has often lasted better than the more serious and well-respected alt-rock stuff of the time, because shorn from the now-irrelevant arguments about selling out etc, at least stuff like this was well-crafted. But then I listen to Hootie & The Blowfish or Matchbox 20 and reconsider…

Reading this thread is like headbutting a stone wall. Every other post is giving me and my tastes a kicking. DBS are kinda what I liked but not a particularly good example of it ( neither were Hootie and the Blowfish ).

The high point of Atlantic 252 must have been around now. Although they mainly followed the chart quite closely, they had a habit of latching on to quite minor hits in the soft rock vein and playing them to death – Soul Asylum, the Connells, Third Eye Blind, Sophie B Hawkins and Roll To Me by Del Amitri are a few that spring to mind. They never had much chart impact but I got to know them very well.

This song must be that genre’s defining moment – the one effort that unaccountably broke through and became more than a minor hit. I wonder how much of a part Atlantic 252 played in its popularity.

#32 The follow up charted solely due to having “Breakfast At Tiffany’s” as one of the additional tracks on the CD single. The label deleted the BAT CD single a couple of weeks before “Josey” was released.

This sort of thing was fairly standard practice at the time, and not something that can happen with download-era charts.

As for the hit itself, it’s not hugely offensive or inept, just bland. The sort of thing that makes my soft spot for Crowded House (of whom I hear a slight echo in BAT) more difficult to defend. 5.

#39 BAT is the kind of song that would be in a download only chart for 80 weeks running, I fear, bumping around the lower 30s.

So, I’m sat in Physics in early 1996, around a table with a few of my mates. The teacher was an absolute waster – we were the top set and he wasn’t pushing us at all, just setting us away with an experiment (some pendulum thing) whilst he buggered off into a separate lab to work on something of his own design. As you’re bound to do, you stop paying attention to your measurements and start talking about music. One of my mates had just come back from Dubai, visiting an uncle, and said – very confidently I might add – “there’s this song – it’s called Breakfast at Tiffanys – if it ever gets released over here it will be massive, it was on all the expat radio stations there all the time”. Fast forward 10 months and he had a very smug look on his face.

As a result of this, I (probably wrongly) bracketed this as a slow burning Macarena, positing that people went on holiday, heard this song and then brought it back to the UK, via requests on radio – but fewer people go to the US than Spain, hence a lower number of requests meant that it required more time to build to critical mass. I could be talking out of my hat on this, as regards the general public of course – I usually do – but that’s where I always thought this came from.

You’ve obviously got Friends and, later, stuff like Dawson’s Creek which probably helped some of these bands mentioned up thread gain some familiarity in the UK. Again, perhaps wrongly, it doesn’t surprise me that many of them are getting a bit of a kicking and this hasn’t done well either with Tom or below the line. They don’t strike me as the kind of music that people who come here will be that into but also, and crucially, much of it isn’t very good. My girlfriend is from the USA and consequently a lot of this stuff is in her CD collection and reminds her of growing up. I find most of it incredibly turgid. Dave Matthews, in particular, is a musician that I cannot find any redeeming features for, even after repeated exposure.

The only one of these bands I’ll stick up for is Semisonic – yes, Closing Time is over-exposed but some of their stuff is what I would class as proper Power Pop (with pep in some cases or, as with Secret Smile, a good woozy quality), as opposed to this which, whilst the chorus is catchy, is too mopey and a bit too polite for its own good (leading into the last chorus there’s some scratchy guitar ticks cribbed from Creep by Radiohead but whereas Jonny Greenwood is raising a massive middle finger, these guys are just clearing their throats). As I said, I’m not surprised that it’s taken a bit of a kicking – but then it’s also not very good, so it probably deserves it.

Semisonic also miles better than Dave Matthews, Goo Goo Dolls, Spin Doctors and many of the other US guitar bands that we mostly avoided post Grunge (bar the odd big song) in favour of Shed Seven, Kula Shaker and Ocean Colour Scene. Ahem.

#15 I completely associate this song with the Reverend Mayo as well, he was certainly its most vocal supporter on Radio 1. But then he did have some fave raves from left-field as well because I remember around this time he also offered his enthusiastic patronage to What’s In The Box by The Boo Radleys.

Mayo used to play Hootie and The Blowfish occasionally but never enough to get them proper hits, and not as much as Danny Baker who was probably responsible for the majority of their plays on Radio 1.

Re Auntie Beryl @ 39, “the sort of thing that makes my soft spot for Crowded House … more difficult to defend” – if anyone here starts dissing Neil Finn, there will be blood. (Or, um, loud protestations from yours truly, to the extent that typing a comment into a thread can be “loud”.)

Meanwhile, the dissing of Semisonic is well and truly under way, so I’d better do as promised above and go into bat for them. And also meanwhile, I notice the Divine Comedy being dissed by proxy here, so I may end up having to go into bat for them – which is an apt metaphor, given Neil Hannon’s side-project of recent years – and I’m sure there will be other personal favourites dissed here, given what a huge part of my musical life this broad genre has been. MikeMCSG @35, I feel your pain, even though I’ve given a 4 to this specific example. My lack of enthusiasm for “Breakfast At Tiffany’s” is because it strikes me as a flawed example of a style whose best examples I love, not because I would dismiss the entire style.

So, reasons I like Semisonic, which will probably convince nobody to change their mind:

I’ve never personally heard “Closing Time” played to clear people out of a pub, in the UK or anywhere else. I didn’t set foot in many pubs between its release in 1999 and around 2003, when I first started pub quizzing with friends, so I missed its heyday in that role, I suppose. Instead, I first heard it as the opening track on the album I picked up on spec during a visit to San Francisco in 1999. The band felt like a personal discovery rather than something forced on me by pubs or radio, which I’m sure affected how I listened to them. Their first album, which I bought a month later, was similarly unknown to me, and when their third album came out in 2001, I wasn’t really surprised by the indifference it met, even though I thought it was great.

A few things made me feel they were good. I liked Dan Wilson’s voice, and I’m a sucker for backing harmonies in the family tree of Beatles. The band played well, and I’m fond of that particular combination of pop-rock textures. Wilson’s lyrics were mostly teen-angst-free and middle-aged-angst free, the lyrics of a happy man in his thirties, and in hindsight that mattered too: the late nineties (my late twenties/early thirties) were some of the happiest years of my life, so I had less time for downbeat music. (Not no time, as this was also the era of OK Computer and Kid A, but it was about the overall balance.) For me, Semisonic were the soundtrack of the Web boom years, years which shaped everything I do today.

Wilson’s work struck me as being worth mention alongside some of the great practitioners of the power-pop form (Neil Finn among them, most definitely, although that was never all he did). He was never my prime example – none of the Semisonic albums matched Matthew Sweet’s Girlfriend or (unjustly overlooked) In Reverse for me – but he was a solid one.

What can I mention that isn’t “Closing Time”… okay. “Singing in My Sleep” is nice. It sounds nice. Its lyrics include the words “nice”. “All Worked Out” is one of their best singing-in-the-shower singalongs, with air-guitar-worthy solo to boot. “Chemistry” should have been the number one that BAT was. “Get a Grip” is one of the funniest, catchiest songs about masturbation ever written. Any of those work much better for me than Deep Blue Something’s brief moment in the something.

Wilson has been more of a songwriter in recent years than a performer in his own right, for acts I haven’t really followed myself, like the Dixie Chicks and Josh Groban, and in that context we’ll get a chance to discuss him again whenever Popular reaches 2011. But for now, he and his band were much more than a convenient PA device for last orders.

The sticker on the sleeve: “The US Top Ten Hit”. You might as well have a sticker saying: “Vaguely Popular in America”. Surely this is a superfluous addition, ie. how much kudos does anything (specifically “American” or attributed as “mainstream” or “Rock”) have if it hasn’t already got to #1 on the Billboard Chart in the 90s? This marketing strategy, I suspect, would have been used as an indicator of quality 40 Popular years ago.