ROBSON AND JEROME – "What Becomes Of The Brokenhearted?" / "Saturday Night At The Movies" / "You'll Never Walk Alone"

You can really hear the money poured into those sumptous arrangements.

It is a truth universally acknowledged to say that all pop music had been leading up to this point.

It’s the werewolf from Being Human and the voice of Tommy Zoom’s dog, Daniel

Three standards lovingly reworked for you by two popular entertainers with good taste and dignity. What could go wrong?

Well: the arrangements, while pleasant enough, are bland and unadventurous, and the songs all grow monotonous too quickly. The singing is undistinguished, with parts of WBotBH sounding like Paul “Housemartins” Heaton on an off-day. Worse, all three sound like half-arsed demo versions where more effort went into trying not to offend anybody than into making something of substance. In short, “will this do?” It’s all rather pointless and unnecessary, and the only redeeming feature is that none of them manages to be a complete stinker. FOUR.

My old neighbours were lovely people. When they were together, they just complemented each other so perfectly. And nobody was more shocked than I, when their marriage went down the plughole, because afterwards, both parties came out of the whole thing changed for the worse, unfortunately. Why do I mention them? Well, they both had a love for Dire Straits, UB40 and Robson & Jerome. They enjoyed the comedy of Jim Davidson and they enjoyed the soaps. And neither of them spent any time reading. This didn’t make them bad people. They both enjoyed a few drinks. Their children were well behaved. It wasn’t enough for them. As the story so often goes, infidelity did for their marriage. I haven’t heard a peep from either of them in donkey’s years, although a mutual friend tells me their youngest boy, now an adult is apparently full-time carer for his ill mother these days. There are so many people like them. Their stories, unremarkable as they seem, are probably not dissimilar to many other people.

Robson & Jerome could have forged out a successful career covering pop and R&B from the ’50s and ’60s well into the new millennium, cheerfully patronised by the sort of people like my old neighbours and many others like them. For they are legion. They are our past, present and future. Ignore them at your peril…

This was a disturbing listen, not because of the songs, but because at first listen a couple of days ago my reaction was: This isn’t that bad. Could I possibly end up giving higher than 3 to a Robson and Jerome song?

But then I realised that the single had two more A-sides beyond “What Becomes of the Broken Hearted?”, and was quickly reassured by YouTube that they were just as horrible as their earlier number ones, so the average comes down to a far more respectable figure.

Their WBOTBH really isn’t that bad; it’s never going to bother the ranks of the six-and-above, but the song itself is a drop-dead Motown classic, and the production and performances here are unobjectionable enough to make it passable radio fare, at least before they go all polyphonic in the last 30 seconds. I’d give Jimmy Ruffin’s original an 8, and Robson and Jerome only destroy about half of that inherent value, so if they’d stopped there they would have scored a four from me. If they hadn’t worn out their welcome with two previous number ones, I might even have stretched to five.

However! “Saturday Night at the Movies” is pointless, and a 2. And “You’ll Never Walk Alone” is positively painful, and a 1. So that’s an average of 2.333, which rounded to the nearest whole number equals 2. That’s more like it.

(Now that I’ve voted: who on earth are these 25 other voters giving this an average of 5.7? Have the Robson & Jerome fan club flocked here to pad the numbers? Or are people just voting on the basis of WBOTBH? Live by the triple A-side, die by the triple A-side, soldier.)

there’s definitely something not right – it’s gone up above 7 now – lol

It could have been worse, they could have released their cover of “The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore” as a single.

I always thought this was an interesting version of WBOTBH, probably not least because it was the first version I was actually aware of (forgive me, but I was only a small child – I didn’t know about Motown classics yet): http://youtu.be/sGxZsnm7srU

I just realised that the modern day equivalent of Rob & J covering 40 year old ballads that have already been #1 twice is Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman releasing a million-selling cover version of Love Me For A Reason.

That’s something I’d probably buy.

First, I want to thank Tom for getting out the review for “Say You’ll Be There” on Sunday rather than Monday. Therefore I was able to conduct my required scientific inquiry with the backdrop of the AFC Championship Game on mute, making the exercise slightly more palatable, especially the existential crisis I suddenly found myself thrown into.

I was fully expecting to hate this trio of recordings, and don’t get me wrong, I do hate them, just not in the way I was expecting. First up was WBOTBH, a song I primarily associate with Paul Young’s US hit from 1992 (yes, I’m also aware of the much older Jimmy Ruffin version). I like the song, so the disturbing problem for me was even R&J’s inferior version caused me to start tapping along with it.

SNATM was unfamiliar to me and R&J did not give me interest to investigate further.

And that brings me to YNWA, a song which is truly moving to me when I’m in the right frame of mind. Would that frame of mind ever include R&J’s butchered version? It didn’t last night, but who knows? Part of my problem is my interest in the pop music charts is to large extent statistical geekery as my ears are admittedly not as refined as most music fans. Does that mean that there exists an alternate universe where I was actually taken in by this R&J crap? Gosh, I hope not.

And so for a very brief flicker of a moment, I had the perspective of a person who might actually buy this record: A person with a tin ear who wants a trip down memory lane but can’t call up the quality versions of these songs at a moment’s notice in 1996 like we can in 2014. So Mr. Cowell’s fluky, and very cynical, discovery of this market with Unchained Melody the year before led to more of the same. I feel like saying much more, but I might start devolving into incoherent babbling if I try to analyze this further…..

Ok, I’m back. Tom’s 2/10 sounds right to me. Obvious next question for discussion: Which was worse, this trilogy, or Jive Bunny’s?

I vaguely remember their video for SNATM, I wasn’t even aware there were two more A-sides, did any particular song win out in terms of airplay? Does anyone care?

The triple A-side concept gives a bit of an insight into Simon Cowell’s genius. Why had (almost?) nobody done it before? Well, it’s cheesy, it’s superfluous if your lead song is any good, and it’s an uncultured break with the rock tradition of A-side/B-side. But Cowell is coming from a completely different place, where none of these are considerations and a triple A-side becomes a no-brainer – three times as many chances for people to see a song they like and buy the single. As a music fan I have a tendency to react against it, mainly, I think, because it seems like bad manners. But who am I to tell him what to do?

In the YouTube era this would at least have had the effect of people checking out the original version. It does say a lot about 1996 that this is not the worst number one of the year.

Tom correctly notes that it was Robson and Jerome’s third and final single and also their third number one. At the time they were only the fourth act to place their first three singles at the top (Gerry and the Pacemakers, Frankie Goes To Hollywood and Jive Bunny), by the end of the year there would be a fifth and by the end of the decade a further three acts would do it – with three going on to score four or beyond.

@35 Introducing the new nonuple A-side single from Michael Jackson, “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin'” / “Baby Be Mine” / “The Girl Is Mine” / “Thriller” / “Beat It” / “Billie Jean” / “Human Nature” / “P.Y.T. (Pretty Young Thing)” / “The Lady in My Life”…

Rory @ 36. Octuple A-side iirc: Human Nature was the B-side (in terms of release, not in terms of musical quality, obv.)

Julian Cope’s Jehovahkill LP was triple-sided on vinyl.

Robson and Jerome? 1/10.

Rahsaan Roland Kirk’s Three-Sided Audio Dream in Colour precedes Jehovahkill in format if little else. (Haters and scoffers would describe it as a double LP with one blank* side but they can do one…)

*Was it groove free or a silent groove? Eccentrically the secondhand copy I own only has the ordinary disc…

Did he take a break from acting altogether? His employment does seem patchy in his wikipedia and imdb entries but there’s no obvious hiatus of significant length. And (see pic above) he’s currently playing a major minor character in Game of Thrones.

(ADDING: I don’t remember anything at all about Badger, the TV cop series he was in in the late 90s, after he left Soldier, Soldier.)

@41 an extreme but understandable strategy for getting away from the oleagenous Cowell.

@ 47 Does he persistently nag everyone until he gets his man?

More nag than Findus.