MELANIE C – "I Turn To You"

this sounds to me like a fair-to-middling Eurovision entry – vague, earnest lyrics over a boshing beat and a sprinkle of strings for a touch of class. It’s too bland for me to love or hate so 5 seems about right

Well that’s a first. I clicked on here to see if their was a new entry, saw that Rock DJ was still featured so decided I may as well refresh my memory of I Turn To You so that I was ready for the next entry. When I clicked off youtube, the I Turn To You piece was here.

In all honesty it felt a bit like a slipstream number one at the time. Melanie C had started with two moderate hits and everybody was surprised when Never Be The Same Again took off as strongly as it did. It also feels a bit cynical, going after a big summer dance hit at just about the right time.

In chart terms there were a few curious things about this. It was Mel C’s tenth number one, making her the second female to break into double figures and putting her in a tie with her former bandmate. It was also her last hit of any real significance. The fact that the follow up only made number 18 can be excused by the fact she released it over Christmas and was already available on a year old album. However she only troubled the top ten twice more with Here It Comes Again (2003, number seven with a 7-16-27 top forty trajectory) and Next Best Superstar (2005, no 10, 10-30). Both of these songs were the lead off from new albums, both were fanbase hits. In 2000 it felt like she only had to turn up to top the charts. In 2015 she is still making music and maintains a modest following but the wider public has long since ceased to take notice.

Finally in the long run of one week wonders we’re currently discussing it’s worth noting that I Turn To You is the only one that wouldn’t have held the top spot if the week after hadn’t seen any big new releases – it dropped to four with Rock DJ still at three.

The album mix has 50% more streams on Spotify than the Hector Hex radio mix does, so Tom’s (and my) preference seems to be quite widely shared. Decent track in that form, though nothing too exciting. 5 seems about right to me.

Generic, not unpleasant dance pop that anyone could have done anytime in the five years preceding this. But, while Mel C’s voice retains its agreeable fragility, the song is kind of insubstantial, decent to dance to in the main single version, but hardly earthshattering, timeless, stuff. (I quite liked the fifth single, “If That Were Me” the fragility and sensitivity of her voice was put to good work there with the song’s subject matter – it was really rather lovely, if kind of slight)

This one is, however, far superior to Christina Aguliera’s hit of the same name from almost exactly the same time. But of all Mel C’s singles, “Northern Star” shines and stands out, way above all the others, in my book. The constant switching between different styles seems peculiarly ill-advised. (5)

Unlike almost every other post-Spice solo record, I’m actually familiar with this one. It never reached the Hot 100, but it did get some airplay, and also topped Billboard’s dance chart. I like it a bit more than others here: 7/10.

Funny, the album version’s really listenable. OK, it’s Metalheads-by-the-yard, but better artists than Mel C have done all right with William Orbit-by-the-yard, to name but one. That would have been a definite 7, although presumably it would never have got to #1 in the first place. But I don’t care what the kids on the street say, that Hector The Inspector NB check this mix is just awful – 3 from me.

Id totally forgotten ITTY existed, until I reminded myself via YouTube and the chorus kicks in and it’s classic…”oh, THIS one!”. Yeah, I’m falling in with the consensus here and thinking about the number of different hats she was trying on should be no impediment to success. As far as the average pop punter was concerned, Mel C was covering all bases quite ably, without settling into something that suited her Spice persona. Nevertheless, ITTY, while quite agreeable is nothing special and obviously not unique enough to allow me to recall the song without the necessary prompt…waffle, waffle, blah, blah. (5)

I like ‘I Turn to You’ a lot. The album version is gorgeously Ray of Light-ish, with the opportunistically banging Ibiza-ready remix taking it into the chart’s glory-hunting territory. What’s not to like?

In terms of the previous number ones of 2000, the radio edit builds nicely upon the trance-lite stylings of Chicane, Fragma and Sonique, and (save for a 2002 cover version bunny) is the last pop-trance chart-topper until it resurfaces in a house-flecked iteration in 2009 (under the nauseating EDM label).

Melanie performed it at the Spice Girls’ reunion tour in 2007-08, and it was one of the show’s highlights, given the full Gatecrasher strobes and laser treatment and triumphantly culminating the solo section.

The song is reportedly about her relationship with her mum. This interpretation does away with some of the understandable accusations of lyrical genericness – mums aren’t that well-represented in lyrics to number one singles (Mel had gone there in 1997 with the Girls, of course).

9

See, the main rule for succeeding with solo albums is: Make it much better than anyone could reasonably expect.

This is why MelC, Robbie and Phil Collins succeeded, and why Gary Barlow, Jarvis and Roger Waters didn’t so much: They made those albums everyone expected.

And when it comes to Girls Aloud, lots of “I fancy you” songs with vids wearing not much tends to get nobody excited really. Half the battle is understanding the music you are making. Cheryl gets underestimated with regard to that.

#21 Nicola Roberts – yes, precisely. If only that album had had a bit more spent on it production-wise (marketing-wise, too) ….well (to judge by the quite, quite, brilliant lead single, which did get the cash and a push),… it would still have been largely ignored…unfortunately

With a multi-platinum debut album, two number one singles and huge success in Europe – at this point, the prospect that Mel C would ‘do a Robbie’ really looked like a reality.

But while Robbie’s solo career endured, Mel’s commercial fortunes rapidly collapsed – this was her commercial peak, but it was also her last major UK hit of any note.

What went wrong? It doesn’t really matter that fifth single ‘If That Were Me’ missed the top ten, most fifth singles do. But the “I couldn’t live without my phone / But you don’t even have a home” lyrical clunker was roundly mocked and I think any fragile shred of credibility she’d built up (the media was still predominantly hostile to her – from NME savaging her to the tabloid media criticising her weight) took a major hit that might have coloured what happened next.

What did happen next was that the public just seemed to utterly lose interest. Perhaps it was Spice girl fatigue – the group were on haitus but all five solo careers were operating at once from 1999-2001, and there was a *lot* of material being put out, of wildly varying quality.

Perhaps Mel C’s pop narrative had just reached its natural end point. Robbie’s major selling point has always been his personality, and Mel doesn’t have that same level of charisma. (A pop star with Mel’s talent and Geri’s force of personality could be a force to reckon with indeed. Indeed, that’s kind of what Lady Gaga is/was). She was the talented underdog who deserved her moment, and she got it. After that, what did she have to keep the public engaged?

Which brings us to the music, and perhaps the simple answer is that Mel C never made a better album than Northern Star. ‘Reason’ was a complete commercial disaster, selling less than a tenth of Northern Star’s total in the UK and doing even worse on the continent. But it isn’t a Rudebox-esque folly by any means. It’s just – sort of bland. As I mentioned in the NBTSA thread, the curious thing about Mel C is that she never really attempted to replicate her two biggest hits. There’s no RnB or Euro-dance on ‘Reason’, just a lot of her (presumably) preferred genre of soft rock.

Lead single Here It Comes Again is listenable enough, but it’s one of those songs that tries to feel epic without really earning it. It passed people by – as did the Ronan Keating-esque follow-up ‘On The Horizon’ – which for me features one of her most unpleasantly shrill vocal performances. Whatever the public wanted from Mel C, this wasn’t it.

There are nice moments on the album. Third single ‘Melt’ went totally ignored, but is as lovely as anything on Northern Star and should have been released sooner. ‘Water’ and ‘Home’ are also pretty midtempo moments, but the album clearly lacked in hits.

To her credit, while the rest of the girls only seemed interested in making music for as long as the public were interested in buying it, Mel has ploughed on and quietly built up a small but loyal following. She got a big break in Europe when Enrique Iglesias-penned ‘First Day of My Life’ became a huge hit that strangely never got a push here. She did have one more brief top ten appearance with ‘Next Best Superstar’, which is rather bitter lyrically but actually in my opinion one of the post-Northern Star releases that best fits her voice.

In recent years she seems to have had a modest revival in fortunes with a successful run in Jesus Christ Superstar, tours with Jools Holland and even a return to the top 20 in a duet with Matt Cardle. The impression I get is that people broadly like and respect Mel C – which is more than can be said for her bandmates – but ultimately aren’t terribly invested in her as a recording artist.

Still, she’s worked hard and proven to her many detractors that she actually is a musician first. She’s wealthy enough and has enough of a following that she gets to keep doing what she loves. She may not have had Robbie’s career, but on the whole she seems to have survived pop superstardom pretty well, and proven a lot of people wrong in the process. Good for her.

It’s amazing that more care wasn’t taken with that second Mel C album. She had a tremendous chance to really establish herself as a solo star. It took four (?) years to come out, which suggests that maybe too much care was taken with it? Was she involved in a lot of other projects between 1999 and 2003?
This sounds like a passable late 90s trance pop song, and has dated much worse than its cool, slinky rnb tinged parent single.

There is a surface similarity between Robbie and Mel C (who I believe had a brief fling circa 1997) in that both initially courted an indie audience and both scored their biggest solo hits after an initial wobble. What Robbie got right and Mel C didn’t is that Robbie struck while the iron was hot – I’ve Been Expecting You came out just thirteen months after Life Thru A Lens and indeed he was exceptionally prolific, issuing four studio albums, a covers record and a standalone single in just over five years. By contrast Mel C waited over two years before releasing new material and, as #24 noted above, didn’t seem to go after the right audience.

It’s also worth noting that the Spice Girls never formally disbanded, announcing an `indefinite hiatus` at the end of 2000 (obviously on the other side of a bunny). Perhaps this meant that their solo stuff still felt like side projects.

Ironically enough when the Spice Girls eventually attempted a reunion, to say it bombed was an understatement.

Indeed, the tour was extended so much in Europe (19 dates at the O2, three in Manchester), and North America that announced dates in South America, Africa, Asia and Australia were postponed indefinitely and then cancelled.

Apparently the reunion was agreed under a strict window of time imposed by band members who wanted to get back to their solo projects (Posh and Sporty spring to mind). This left plenty of time to complete the initial itinerary, but with the excess of demand in England, the U.S. and Canada it made a great deal of sense to milk the opportunity: profits are obviously more generous when travel and set transportation costs are lower, and eventually time ran out to get everywhere to which they’d committed.

The scale of this demand clearly hadn’t been anticipated, and the organisation was a bit of a mess in that respect – the tour ended so promptly that the show wasn’t professionally recorded, missing an obvious opportunity for broadcast and DVD revenue (footage from the big screens was later leaked).

Many fans in the countries who’d been scheduled a visit were pissed off at this broken promise, as by the time the cancellation was announced they didn’t have a chance to organise a trip to Europe or North America (a trip many diehards would certainly have made with proper notice).

So yes, an enormous success, but little comfort to a Spice Girls fan in Sydney or Cape Town.

On the obligatory new content front, ‘Headlines (Friendship Never Ends)’ had a sweet sentiment and some gorgeous vocals from Emma, but lacked a killer chorus. There’s also a rushed sense to it, with the feeling that a second verse is missing: Mel C’s bit, one of the few moments the song comes to life, sounds more like a middle-eight, and Mel B is reduced to one solo line, closing the song. This uneven distribution is probably because only Emma and Geri (who get more lines than anyone, and it’s really not a stellar performance from poor Geri) were involved in the initial creative process with longtime collaborator Biff Stannard (paparazzi shots of the two leaving his Brighton studio all hugs and grins were hugely exciting at the time for fans… until we heard the song).

The video was bizarre too, friendship depicted by the Girls mostly in separate shots in which they moodily model the type of ‘saucy’ lingerie you might see in Victoria’s Secret.

Mere months after the tour ended, Mel C appeared on Never Mind the Buzzcocks and was quick to distance herself from the song, though if it had reached number one instead of no.11 perhaps this wouldn’t have been the case (she also gritted her teeth when recalling that the tour had lasted “Six months. Six. Months.”, hinting at a kernel of truth the rumours of disharmony towards the end of their reunion). It was a notably low charter for a Children in Need single, as well as an enormous flop by the Spice Girls’ own standards, but there wasn’t much promotional activity to speak of.

Anyway, ‘Headlines’ is a minor classic next to Greatest Hits album track ‘Voodoo’, a song for which the term “organised fun” might well have been coined. A limp, lifeless and unconvincing party track set to a weak disco-funk pastiche track.

The Girls’ collaborators have suggested that there are plenty of unreleased gems in the vaults, so why these couldn’t have been repurposed instead is beyond me. Perhaps titles such as ‘C. U. Next Tuesday’ and ‘Feed Your Love’ (from the first album sessions) were still considered too adult for the group’s fanbase in 2007, a time when the youngest would still have been teens.

A tranches of demos from Forever leaked a couple of months ago. Three pretty dire songs and the superior Eliot Kennedy original mix of ‘Right Back at Ya’, which was blanded out by Darkchild for the album.

Curiously, in a climate where leaks, particularly where hacking is involved, are increasingly (and rightly) seen as unethical, Biff spends a lot of time Instagramming photos of DATs labelled “Victoria unreleased”, “Spice unreleased” etc., some even with song titles, which serve only to bait the fans…

Yes, and no.

Take That’s chart comeback was absolutely spectacularly played, with great songs, a brilliant rebrand as serious artistes in a Radio 2 mould and superb marketing (I’ll stop there so as not to jump the bunny).

But their resurgent success (touring included) was contained almost exclusively in the UK, Ireland and a handful of mainland European countries. In 1995, at least, they had toured Australia and East Asia.

The Spice Girls, however, were always a global affair: look not only at the box office for the US-Canada dates in 2007-08 (and that dates in every continent were initially planned), but to the fact that their Olympic Closing Ceremony performance was the most tweeted event of the entire 2012 Games, at 116,000 tweets per minute worldwide.

(You’ve probably guessed that I’m one of those diehard fans I refer to in an earlier post, but I promise I’m trying my best to be objective!)

‘Headlines’ was an unmitigated disaster.

The Spice Girls’ Greatest Hits album, which boasted little content most fans wouldn’t already own (two songs, or five for those who hadn’t owned Forever or its singles), is estimated to have shipped 7 million copies worldwide, with 300,000 shipped in the UK. However, it peaked at no.2 in the UK, the second time a Spice Girls album was pipped by a Simon Cowell product.

On the other hand, Take That managed to shift 2.2m copies of their repurposed greatest hits collection Never Forget in the UK alone in 2005, with just one new song (‘Today I’ve Lost You’ – cleverly not released as a single), a live rendition of ‘Pray’ and a dodgy ‘Relight My Fire’ remix. These substitutions made for a few minor hits aside, the CD is identical to 1995’s Greatest Hits, which itself had done over a million.

Then again, there would perhaps be more appeal in a TT hits compilation? Their first three studio albums had sold combined, in the UK, half of the Spices’ first two combined.

We are getting a bit ahead of ourselves but by the time we get to the next Take That bunny we’ll have forgotten this discussion.

I must admit that the impression I got at the time was that the Spice Girls assumed what worked for Take That would work for them. Boyzone also attempted a comeback around the same time and did rather better than the Spices, if rather worse than Take That.

I suppose that in 2006/07 the Spice Girls’ various solo careers were still trundling along. By contrast Take That had two members with faltering solo careers and two who were never likely to have a solo career which made the comeback narrative more remarkable.

Perhaps more critically the Spice Girls’ reunion saw a once estranged member return meekly to the fold. By contrast Take That had a renegade member very much in the limelight and still occasionally flashing two fingers at them – I remember James Masterton noting at the time that the possibility of an eventual five piece reunion gave Take That an ace still to play.

I think at the time Take That very much tried to play the RW card (or it was played on their behalf), rather than calculating it would be shrewd to play this ace in the future.

It was by no means certain that a TT reunion would be a success, however looking back and taking the music they subsequently brought out into consideration, you don’t really get that impression. I remember the ITV documentary that helped to announce their reunion. It very much presented TT as a 90’s curiosity who were taking the gamble to return. The central plank of the programme was that ‘mega-star’ Robbie Williams might co-operate with the reunion and grace it with his presence. The programme seemed to suggest this was the only way TT would again be a success (as well him once being in the group seeming to be the only reason ITV were making the documentary).

You wouldn’t have guessed at the time that TT would be so successful again while RW’s profile would slide somewhat, to the point where it became a good career move for him to go back to them for an album.

When you consider the other 90’s pop group reunions (East 17, Steps, to name but two), the quality or critical response to the songs is what really makes Take That’s a success. I think their ace was having somebody who actually wrote the songs and therefore was more in control of correlating the tone of the music to their situation. Are their many reunions that are successful where the protagonists don’t write their own material?

I also think it’s worth noting that The Spice Girls very much seemed to assume and act as though it was inevitable that their reunion would be a success. As the BB4 documentary at the weekend noted, TT were very self-deprecating about themselves which seemed to get the press onside.

Just picking up on some of the points above, it’s worth noting that Today I’ve Lost you was an unreleased song rather than a new recording.

By the time the Spice Girls announced their return Take That had two bunnies and a massive selling album under their belts. While it could be argued that the Spice Girls initially stated there wouldn’t be a new album; had Headlines been a massive number one smash and they’d decided to do a new album after all I don’t think anyone would have condemned them for broken promises.

Regarding Take That, Nigel Martin-Smith famously refused to get involved with the comeback tour, saying that nobody would be interested. Robbie Williams was always going to be the elephant in the room but; perhaps at the same time the Take That/ Robbie Williams relationship had always been a parasitic one even during the years when Take That were inactive. Robbie Williams was still referencing his sacking by the band in song as late as 2006 and any Take That comeback was always going to face comparison with Robbie’s stellar career.

If I recall that documentary Robbie Williams was invited to meet up with his old bandmates and, after a bit of would he, wouldn’t he, declined at the last minute – the disappointment on their faces obvious. However he did send a video message wishing them well – who would have thought then that five years later he’d return almost as a supplicant.

I think we might have to agree to differ slightly as I remain convinced that with Headlines the Spice Girls thought they could (and perhaps would) achieve the same success as second phase Take That. I would also point out that this was not the first time that the Spices attempted to fob off their fans with inferior product but our discussion of the first example isn’t that far off now.

As mentioned in #38, for me the key difference between the two reunions and their varying levels of success was TT having an established songwriter in their ranks. Mr. Barlow has recieved a bit of kicking in the comments for his 1996/7 number ones, but for me he is one of the finest pop songwriters Britain has ever produced. Even if the reunion tour had been a middling success, the strength of most of those songs on Beautiful World would have convinced someone to release them in some format.
That 2005 doc is interesting in that it presents Barlow as a bit of a joke, a portly northern joker type, compared with Robbie charming slickness- but then at the end Barlow is shown in a terrifically warm family environment, a sharp contrast to the ‘lonely icon’ Robbie, as witnessed in his ‘Nobody Someday’ doc. Maybe this portrayal of TT as likeable losers helped their comeback, whereas the spices were seen (maybe apart from Emma) as a bit distant and foreign, and the warmth toward them just wasn’t there.

Yes Owen’s role is clearly greater in phase 2, the hidden track on ‘Progress’ – ‘Flowerbed’ might be one of the loveliest things they’ve ever done. He moves up from Ringo to George, if you will…

Is that the “I still want to have sex with you” song?

uddh…

I wouldn’t have had ITTY as a number 1 at all and it’s something I must admit largely passed me by at the time.

Giving it a play now and whilst it’s better than I could have expected it’s perhaps a bit lost on Mel C and could be more memorbale if given to someone more suited to this kind of thing.Can’t help but hear a bit of Cascada in all of this.5 is right for this.

Mel C appeared to be trying on several different hats in search of an identity but she lacked the force of personality that other Spice Girls had. She wasnt tabloid fodder like Geri, fashion/pop culture ice queen like Victoria, the slightly cooler big sister like Mel B so other than the first year of goodwill there wasn’t far for Mel C to go.