JENNIFER RUSH – "The Power Of Love"

I played this in a school concert in about 89 or 90, with 4 or 5 other lads. Strange choice of song really, given that we were an all-male comprehensive. But I got to play SYNTHS, and yes, I really vividly remember those looooooong sustained chords, and the feeling that I just wasn’t actually doing enough, sitting there holding keys down. So instead I ended up improvising around them (which didn’t come to much more than a few arpeggios and a couple of ridiculous trills, in all honesty) and feeling very proud of myself for it.

Despite that fond memory though, I can’t really bring myself to give this more than 3.

This record plods along for ages, as you note. What almost saves it is the very final couplet – when Jennifer actually goes for a high note on the ‘ready’ and ‘power’ in “sometimes I am frightened but I’m READY to learn, about the POWER of love” at the song’s end; almost promotes it to a five, I would opine. Notably, Ms Dion dodged that challenge. Interesting arm-pit sniffing picture sleeve; a tribute to Patti Smith, no doubt.

I was surprised by how much I enjoyed this – it manages a difficult tension between power and restraint- teutonic iciness and passionate delivery. The woman sure can sing – but without resorting to the extraneous vocal pyrotechnics that subsequent female singers seem duty bound to use.
The video is quite compelling – she does a strange jerky head movement that makes her look like a malfunctioning replicant.
According to wiki she’s due to release a new album of material next year – no doubt riding the crest of the Popular induced revival

Number 2 watch: 3 weeks of A-Ha’s glorious and euphoric ‘Take On Me’ Pity that didn’t get to the top…

So this is Jennifer Rush. Right. The song itself is instantly familiar, it’s just that I had no idea who performed it – I assume I was simply too young to bother with that level of detail when it came out. Apparently it hasn’t intrigued me enough to find out who did it either.

Still – to keep a recent trend going – it’s not that bad. Since I was too young to really take notice of artists at the time, I was also too young to understand English, and so the lyrics never really registered. For some reason, that makes it easy for me to ignore them altogether even now and just accept Rush’s vocals as an instrument. I would most likely have despised the whole thing if I had been just a few years older in 1985, but as it is – I kind of like it. Not in a deeply emotional way; it doesn’t evoke any kind of romantic feelings and most certainly isn’t something I would like to hear at, say, my wedding.

But taken as a combination of different sounds, I’d say it’s reasonably enjoyable. Rush’s vibrato isn’t really to my taste, but both vocals and production are melodic enough (more so than the majority of similar power ballads, I think) to keep me at least half-interested. And the combination of airy synths atop a heavy drum undercarriage is a trick that always tends to work on me.

SwedenWatch: A slow burner here as well, gradually inching its way up the charts and ending up at #3 in late January ’86. There’s also a localised cover version called “Ängel i natt” to regale you with, recorded by Swedish-Norwegian singer Elisabeth Andreassen (who, as one half of duo Bobbysocks, won the ESC for Norway in ’85 with “La de swinge”): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=POHThe3FYtM

That version was, however, not released as a single.

I’m intrigued as to your differing reactions to this and “Total Eclipse Of The Heart” Tom – for me they serve the same basic karaoke purpose (uh, an idea of karaoke at least – I wouldn’t dream of going anywhere near either with my voice), all big hair and big emotions and wind machines turned up to 11 million. I love the idea of both but can’t imagine actually willingly clicking play in itunes on either.

If there is a difference in the way they come across I suspect it’s because “Total Eclipse Of The Heart” is ever so slightly more ridiculous, that it’s big because big is funny, while “The Power Of Love” is more weighty, it’s big because the subject matter deserves bigness. But that’s too reductive, there are elements of ridiculousness and seriousness in both.

I’m intrigued by the ‘remix’ sticker on the sleeve – anyone know what the original sounds like? Tom, the version I have (which I’m pretty sure was the radio hit) is 4 mins 30, though granite through treacle still applies.

This is a mums record if ever one existed, something to help get you through – gradually, as if wading through wet cement, or super-treacly treacle – the menopause, or a husband’s mid-life crisis. But then my folks were just the right age for things like this and Ashford & Simpson’s Solid to become emotionally relevant.

I always found the intro (or the odd lack of one) arresting. I’ll also add to the general approval of La Rush’s voice; it has an odd quality that suggests she was hard of hearing. I remember someone playing her in the first round of Stars In Their Eyes, singing The Power Of Love, then having to do follow-up Ring Of Ice in the final (she didn’t win).

Jungman….read my comment on Nena’s 99 Red Balloons and all will become clear.

thefatgit

“The Power Of Love” is after all a song about how love removes your own sense of scale, makes existence itself unfamiliar, so the disorientating disconnect between it and anything resembling my emotional reality makes a sort of warped sense.
Indeed. This is what M. Haneke (Funny Games, The Piano Teacher, Cache, Code Unknown, etc.) picked up on when he used half of PoL and a totp/bandstand/solid gold-ish video for it in a memorable scene near the end of his brilliantly disturbing first film, _The Seventh Continent_. (The scene’s easily tracked down on youtube, but it’s best seen first in the context of the film.) That film was the first part of Haneke’s ’emotional glaciation’ trilogy: what a cut-up that guy is.

To me PoL’s the antipode of both ‘Move Closer’ (the find of the year for me in Popular’s review) and ‘Into the Groove’: it’s inhuman and non-specific (unlike MC) and the music invades you in a way that feels truly unpleasant (not in ITG’s good way). PoL makes ‘Total Eclipse’ (both song and vid) seem witty and light on its feet – that itself is quite an achievement.

Note too that David Lynch basically stole the whole song (as ‘Mysteries of love’) for Blue Velvet, but crucially tweaked/humanized it with breathier vocals, e.g. here. (L. Dern for the poodle hair win!)

So PoL’s had quite a large direct and indirect impact on snotty/hipster/art film… and I like it and its doubles in that (basically, heavily ironized) setting. But it’s a grimace of a song to actually imagine choosing to listen to for/by itself (repetition would breach geneva conventions). Hard to know how to score this track – it feels orthogonal to normal pleasure. 3 or 4 perhaps, so long as that’s along the y-axis of the complex plane, and O in the real.

As far I can remember, the song is continually referenced in David Lodge’s novel Nice Work, which is about the collision between leftish academia and Thatcherite big business – it’s the business bloke who listens to Jennifer Rush. Anyone else remember it more clearly? Suspect that Lodge didn’t have anything particularly perceptive to offer re: pop.

This went to #57 in the States, but while I remember this version, most people here never heard this song until Celine Dion took it to #1 for 4 weeks in 1993. I like Dion’s version slightly better, but still can live without both versions.

#25swanstep- You’re right about the difference between the UK and US list. That’s why I find this #1 countdown so interesting. I’m seeing a lot of UK hits that I remember seeing on MTV, yet never charted much in the US.

Also covered by Laura Branigan (totally unrestrained and over-the-top and surprisingly good, though it has a key change) and Air Supply (unbearable).

Checking the Jennifer Rush versions on MySpace: most are six minutes, and are from her hits albums, though there’s a 4:30 edit that’s also on a hits album. Wikipedia gives the single’s length as 5:44.

Mark @22: ‘Nice Work’good book and the dramatisation from about 1989/90 on Channel 4 wasn’t bad too. David Lodge IMO is one of the best English novelists of the past 40 years.

Very good observations on class too the middle class attitudes of the leftish female academic versus those of the unreconstructed nouveux riche but still working class in his outlook(despite him now running his own toolmaking(?)business) male protagonist.

IIRC the leftish academic was more pissed off with him listening to Randy Crawford – didn’t she see he had Randy’s tapes in his car.

I don’t think we got to know what her own tastes ran to but being mid-late 80s youngish trendyish academia I’d guess at possibly the Smiths or something?

There was a time – and that time need not concern anyone else here – when I wouldn’t have expected to give this karaoke staple especially high consideration. But, as I have repeatedly been taught in the course of this exercise, just because I think I know a record on a long-term intimate basis doesn’t necessarily mean I know it. So at the moment I feel that the biggest-selling single of 1985 – the only single to exceed a million sales in Britain that year – is entirely justified in holding that title.

“The Power Of Love” was truly a word-of-mouth record; unlike most autumn Europop hits, it was a ballad and that summer’s clear last-dance favourite. The holidaymakers returned and the record began its slow, organic ascent to mass popularity. Over July and August the single, A-listed on local commercial radio stations, was already selling strongly in Scotland and the North and crept into the lower half of the national Top 75. Then as autumn set in, Radio 2 belatedly picked up on the single, helping it break the Top 40 barrier; three weeks later, it was at number one.

Although Rush is an American artist, the single’s performance in her homeland was surprisingly modest; it reached only #57 on Billboard, and the song did not do well there until Celine Dion’s cover (and also her international breakthrough hit) a decade hence. The feeling appears to have been that was Rush’s reading was somewhat too European, in both production and delivery, for transatlantic tastes, whereas Celine’s version very cleverly makes the song slightly more American (including Michael Thompson’s sometimes intrusive guitars) and therefore more palatable.

The original record was conceived and recorded in Germany, and indeed originally boasted German lyrics. A new English lyric was composed by Rush in conjunction with one Mary Applegate, but co-writer Gunther Mench acted as arranger and producer. There is heavy irony about Rush displacing Midge Ure at the top of the charts, since Mench’s arrangement is almost entirely indebted to “Vienna” – but then the latter was equally indebted to Walker’s “The Electrician” so we see the filtering process hard at work here. The general atmosphere is one of a displaced Euroamerican trying to emulate the template of the Anglo-American power ballad and not quite getting there but in the process accidentally inventing something else.

It begins quietly if imperiously with Rush’s sonorous, vulnerable “The whispers in the morning” and builds up from there with patience infinite (the single lasts a full six minutes). As with the spiral staircase of the first movement of Gorecki’s Third, Mench’s music and Rush’s voice methodically add on extra layers of depth and meaning as the song’s ambition climbs higher. The song is about sexual uncertainty and latent fear (“Sometimes I am frightened but I’m ready to learn”). Gradually the singer’s timidity matures into confidence, and on towards the apex of bold revelation; Rush’s turning point is when she peaks with the “can’t” of “The feeling that I can’t go on” and follows that line with the liberating “is light years away.”

The song’s central tenet of “‘Cause I am your lady/And you are my man” was what essentially sold it – as a Scot I could sense naturally how such sentiments, expressed in such a way, would appeal to a very central yearning. There has been some criticism that Rush’s vocal is perhaps too dispassionate, pitch-perfect at the expense of emotion, even slightly congested. But I think her performance just about perfect for the emotions which the song demands. Celine’s delivery is technically flawless, and in the first verse in particular she demonstrates her ability to melt and twist her soul around the song’s emotional corners, but ultimately she sounds a little too sure of herself. The song, however, is supposed to be sung by someone who doesn’t necessarily know what love is, is deeply scared by it, so Rush’s reading is a nerve conduction study, concerned with doing the right thing and learning the language rather than long having mastered it.

And finally she frees herself with that tremendous and not entirely expected high C “love” at the end – she has literally come to the top, is triumphant and humble, and so the song ends on a long, sustained choral-synth chord…as though the hurt of Joy Division’s “Decades” had somehow been remedied.

As a pop record, this “Power Of Love” is very nearly perfect, and perhaps a little too perfect, since FGTH’s “Power Of Love” – not to mention “Total Eclipse Of The Heart” – does finally go that extra, ambiguous and tormented mile in order to attain greatness. But twenty-four years after its success, it now reveals itself as an intricate wonder, with one of the finest and – yes – noblest female vocal performances of its era at its trembling core.

I’ve been guilty of commenting on recent number 1s on memory, something I could easily do up until late 84/early 85, but I realise I don’t know the recent chart toppers anywhere near as well.

So, after a couple of listens to “Power of Love” this morning, some observations:

“The song, however, is supposed to be sung by someone who doesn’t necessarily know what love is”. Interesting you should say that, as this is both sonically and in its glacial construction, closer in feel to Foreigner’s “I Don’t Want to Know What Love Is” than BT’s “Total Eclipse”.

It also has the stately feel of “Move Closer”.

But, the comparison with Nelson does it no favours.

I am going to have to go against the grain here, because I found this thoroughly hard work. As a composition, and as a recording, it is sorely lacking in dynamics. JR’s vocal, while admirably restrained, leaves me cold.

The Phil Collins fill into the second chorus grates.

And the verse melody is wearing.

There simply is not enough going on musically for this to sustain over 3 and a half minutes, let alone the bloated six it runs to.

I don’t hate it, I don’t doubt the sincereity of the artist and writers, I just wouldn’t ever want to hear it again.

Ah, gotcha. I was wondering if the “light years” was confusing matters; my first reaction to that phrase is always to think “time-no-wait-distance”, and that line feels very different when you read “time” into it (“it’ll all end eventually, but for now we’re good”).

TOTPWatch: Jennifer Rush performed The Power Of Love on Top Of The Pops on three occasions;

26 September 1985. Also in the studio that week were; Depeche Mode, The Style Council and Bonnie Tyler. Janice Long and Dixie Peach were the hosts.

10 October 1985. Also in the studio that week were; Red Box, The Smiths and The Cult. Steve Wright and Mike Smith were the hosts.

17 October 1985. Also in the studio that week were; Shakin’ Stevens, Elton John and Colonel Abrams. Peter Powell and Mike Read were the hosts.

#31, abs.

This comes back to where a song may be something you ‘do not like’, purely because it’s ‘not meant for you’. I can applaud the performance and the subject, and the ‘journey’ taken, and even rate it highly, without ever wanting to hear it again.

(This comment written before #33 came in. Blimey, don’t these comments come in fast!)

Swanstep, you’re right, I’m probably just applying the selective memory of our number-ones focus. Lots of good stuff that year. (I’m holding my “Take on Me” comments in reserve until we get to its partner…)

30 – MikeMCSG – that would explain why they played The Sun Always Shines on TV as their ‘nod to the past’ on Jonathan Ross recently?

Compared to Celine Dion it’s very restrained, then again two planets colliding would seem understated next to the power of her lungs. But that light-operatic wailing never did it for me, nor that bloody awful drum sound. If you’re going to do that at least make them BIGGER. So while I admire it’s ‘good taste’ that only shows up all the things I don’t like about it.

Watching the linked video and re-reading the above comments, I found myself nodding vigorously at lonepilgrim’s comments at #8. I guess it addresses the question of whether you need to strain or put conspicuous effort into a vocal in order to convey passion and emotion. Lots of singers these days do the opposite – strain and wander all over the scale without convincing you it’s anything other than a vocal exercise – but Rush sings with clarity and control and totally gets the message across.

As Conrad commented, it has the stately feel of “Move Closer”, and as I said in that thread, this is another one like “Paris, Texas” that demands that you take it on its own terms and at its own pace. The voice – unearthly in the opening lines, soaring as the music reaches the climax – keeps your attention (OK, mine at least), and her look is pretty compelling in the video too. Overall it’s a really class act, warm without being as cloying as Foreigner. It’s the 37th best-selling single of all time in the UK, and the biggest selling single in the period between Band Aid and that Robin Hood film we’ll be discussing in a few Popular-years’ time.