BORIS GARDINER – "I Want To Wake Up With You"

Boris, Boris, Boris…oh dear, what were you thinking?

You can’t really hate this like CdB’s effort. It’s a drink of water when what you really want is Pol Roger.

Nice shots of Westbourne Park tube though!

Three weeks at #1, and, according to wiki, the third best-selling single in the UK in 1986, and the biggest so far in 1986. How odd. One would have thought Bananarama’s ‘Venus’ would have blown through this in an instant (perhaps especially in the UK), but no. There’s a Cheers dialogue where Sam tells Diane that he hates her. She scoffs and says that of course he loves her, continuing for good measure:
Diane: And everyone knows that hate is not the opposite of love. Indifference is.
Sam: Well, whatever you say. I really don’t care.

Mercy, this one’s dull. Halfway through watching the video I began wondering how many forms of transportation Boris would get to use–walking, subway, car! I was holding out for a boat sequence, but sadly no…

A 2 or 3: I flipped a coin and gave it the lower score.

Aw! I reckon that poor Boris was only bounced into making the video with an unsuitably young woman by his record company. I rather like this – at times when I’ve been particularly struck by the wish to wake up with someone it strikes a cord, and the rest of the time its perfectly agreeable. I even liked it when I was 13.

Boris Gardiner had some good previous form though. His much earlier hit, 1970’s number 14 smash ‘Elizabethan Reggae’ is the business, if amazingly sprightly organ led pop ska instrumentals are your bag – and they should be. Indeed, looking at the chart for 17th of January 1970, the week that it entered, one can see it as part of a golden age of reggae pop; Liquidator, Wonderful World Beautiful People, Moon Hop, and further hits for Desmond Dekker and The Equals.

anatol (#5) – it does indeed. “Boris Gardiner” (which reads as “Boris’s curtains”) could easily have been a Swedish punk band from the late ’70s.

It truly is a harmless song, this. My first impulse was to dismiss it as horrible, but it isn’t. It seems friendly enough. And it unexpectedly started playing in my mind on the way to work the other day, so it’s stickier than I would have thought at first. But it doesn’t go any further than that. Maybe a slightly more riveting arrangement could have helped.

Speaking of the video – the age difference between Boris and his object of lukewarm romantic interest doesn’t bother me as much as the fact that Boris creepily just happens to show up wherever she goes and merely looks at her like a sad puppy.

SwedenWatch: #4. Apparently it was less popular with the Tracks listeners, as it peaked at #9 there.

Someone at the record company fucked up and misspelled the man’s name on the single sleeve. I’m far more interested in that than the song in question.

Wikipedia tells me that Boris was some kind of reggae journeyman popping here and there for years. It doesn’t have a lot of information about him. Can anyone here give me a little context for this guy and this song?

So, fast forward to 1989. I’m deep in the throes of my first significant relationship which naturally involved sex. And lots of it.

After one particularly passionate evening my partner breathlessly quoted a line from the film “About Last Night”. “As Demi Moore would say”, she whispered, “I love making love with you……”. Stunned by this curveball I searched my memory banks for a similar reference which I could use to return the complement and with a straight face I solemnly intoned “And as Boris Gardner would say, I Wanna Wake Up With You.”

For that, and that alone, it’s a 10 from me.

Boris Gardiner was there virtually from the birth of reggae, as original bassist with the Upsetters and producer of various post-ska favourites, one of which, “Elizabethan Reggae,” hit big in 1970; but by 1986 he had long since mellowed into a straight-down-the-line MoR crooner, a sort of JA Johnny Mathis. The fact that “I Want To Wake Up With You” was subsequently covered by Engelbert Humperdinck should confirm its very tenuous connection to Lovers’ Rock, even though it is strictly speaking Britain’s biggest-selling Lovers’ Rock single, and in the post-“Under Mi Sleng Teng” reggae world it came across as even more old-fashioned. But it crossed over to the punters who thought that Dennis Brown wrote The Singing Detective, and its simple and rather repetitive construction was enough to make it 1986’s big last-dance smoocher. Gardiner sings it with fulsome mellowness, and while the song’s sentiments can hardly be disagreed with, ultimately it’s the type of Dale Winton-friendly pop reggae which makes UB40 sound like Black Uhuru. Blameless, but also fairly unexciting, as per its ghastly AoR synth intro.

#3 Jim D – I’ve met Barry Gardiner in the context of government work I once did and that bit of surreal vandalism just made my morning

TOTPWatch: Boris Gardiner performed Everything I Own on the Top of the Pops of December 25th 1986. Also in the studio that Christmas were; Doctor & The Medics, Simply Red, Pet Shop Boys and Chris De Burgh. Peter Powell, Gary Davies, Janice Long & Simon Bates were the hosts.

Every time I try to sing it, I end up with “There’s Something Inside So Strong”.

#14: hahahaha, Rob K, that is magnificent!

Oh, I quite like this. 6 from me…