MEL AND KIM – "Respectable"

Your comments pretty much sum up my feelings about this one, Tom – easily my favourite of the SAW hits

Probably my second favourite SAW #1 after Dead Or Alive. It might sound a bit cheap (but as we’ll see SAW managed to surpass this on that front by fair distance) but high on pop thrill-power thanks to the fake piano rolls, deep undulating bass, punchy beat and the stylish, reasonably original girls themselves doing a good job altho looking far too respectable really. An 8 for me, if only because I also like Showing Out a little bit more.

The “Tay-Tay! T-T-T!-Tay!” bits were are result of studio varispeed serendipity, and the addition of something unplanned adds a lot to what would be an exceptionally good single even without them.

I’m not sure that I really accept the kit-built argument about all SAW singles. What always strikes me is that you can tell when the producers are really making an effort to create something special, and when they’re just knocking together today’s project. We’ll be hearing from both the inspired and routine SAW over the next few years.

It just sounds a lot more alive, and to present a much more enjoyable world to participate in than most contemporaneous pop.

The most interesting Mel & Kim hit to could construct a thesis around has to be FLM;

“If you’re in confusion
Here’s the solution;
Fun! Love! Money!”

Its a problematic song. Certainly not musically – Stock, Aitken and Waterman at their absolute best; creating a structure that locks the listener into a fizzy cage of innumerable brilliant hooks; plinky keyboards, a bouncing bass, trapped vocal sounds, crazy sounding samples.

But Billy at 14 found the ‘money’ part of the trinity troubling. Was this a Thatcherite anthem, saying that love (or even fun) needed to be fed with money? Is that a happy thought? Or is this pragmatic? Ironic?

I didn’t notice the spoken word bridge enough at the time;

“I love money!
I love money!
Boyfriends are boring
I love money!
I love money!
Wait till the right one comes along
I love money!
I love money!
Independence”

Something very interesting was going on there.

Though it didn’t feel that way at the time Respectable was quite an influential record. Yes, the road to all things Spice starts here. And didn’t Estelle give the Applebys a namecheck on her single 1980?

I love this though. 9 from me, for the dancing, the sheer catchiness of it and the first glimpse of the stutter effect that SAW seemed to reserve for their very finest concoctions.

(By the way, I always thought the quasi-Thatcherite agenda that SAW wrote into FLM and their final single That’s Just The Way It Is was a bit tagged-on. The girls themselves never came across as ruthless self-centred types in the slightest)

Only 4 for me (which is not a terrible mark for me where 3 is probably my most commonly awarded score)but I’d have given “Showing Out” 7 or 8.

But you’ve got it RONG, Swanstep! What they’re actually singing is;

“Hesitation is just frustration, Give us the music – and we’re alright!

On each occasion, for your information – We can look after ourselves! Alright?”

SAW lyrics are usually very good indeed, I’d say, offering precise descriptions of emotional states and situations – especially ones that teenagers are experiencing for the first time.

Anyone noticed the comment from Ian Upton on YouTube that he co-wrote the Tay-Tay riff? Amazing! I guess we’re all equal now on the Web.

That piano riff ain’t a million miles away from Jack Your Body, come to think of it.

Well at least we don’t have to talk about Kim’s solo stuff.

i always wish saw’s batting average was better and am amazed that it wasn’t – they had a solid formula, were capable of executing it (perfectly on occasion), were rewarded for it by the marketplace, weren’t dependent on a particular artist to channel it thru – they should have a box set of peak material, instead they have 4 or 5 great singles, another 4 or 5 near great (where i’d put this), a handful of others i can sympathize with for some reason or other (hello ‘i’d rather jack’), and then so so much dull garbage.

@16, Billy S. Argh, thanks for the correction! I still don’t think much of it lyrically (is it someone’s else’s hesitation that’s frustrating? their own? ‘fascination is our sensation’ say what?) Above all, all these syllables are forced into a procustean bed of clenched synth stomping so it’s clear that *anything* would really do (so make up your own:’hibernation is your application, we won’t sign on the dotted line’). Nothing has a chance to breath, so nothing matters anyway, before (‘tay tay….’) inevitably the nonce catch-phrase returns. And, of course, SAW frickin’ proved this by recycling almost exactly the same drivel over almost exactly the same stomp the following year for bunnyable Kylie:
‘In my imagination/There is no complication/…/In my mind a celebration/The sweetest of sensation/…/In my imagination/There is no hesitation’

Look, I understand that this is one way to write and do pop music… as delivery system for a nonce chant for your inner 8 year old: tay tay tay, lucky, lucky, ducky,… but to me it’s pretty painful.

Count me in with #15: This is SAW at their very worst. I’m American and I guess I didn’t get overexposed to this kind of stuff, but what I have heard from SAW I’ve always liked, and this is the first one I’ve heard which I can find nothing at all to like about. This is terrible. Really just terrible, and monotonous on top of that, and the Tay-Tay-Tay is the worst part about it.

Finally, emerging out from the suffocating museum, we have a number one which actually sounds like 1987. While Stock/Aitken/Waterman always seemed to pull out an extra stop with the Appleby sisters, the cheerfully brutalist futurism of “Respectable” still comes as a much-needed slap of freezing water in the face to wash away the mould of respect and dignity.

Mel and Kim’s first hit, “Showing Out (Get Fresh At The Weekend),” a top three hit in the autumn of 1986, was one of that year’s finest singles, and one of the first pop singles anywhere to take the innovations of House firmly on board; it is an explosion of brashly bashing beats and sweet melody (with a middle eight which harks back to the days of Linx) which was as indispensable a soundtrack to driving into London, past the M25, down through the narrowing barriers of the Brent Cross flyover, as Test Dept or Janet Jackson or Tackhead. “Respectable” doesn’t quite match it, but its potent, carnal zipping and unzipping of keyboards together with its crashing breaks and rollercoasters of vocal cut-ups (“Take take TAKE take taytaytay taytay TAKE take”) is like being thrown from one end of a rainbow to another. The SAW team keep the lyrics minimalist and sharp (“Explanations are complications,” “Conversation is interrogation”) as well as defiant (“Like us, hate us, but you’ll never change us”), and the instrumental break with its Marshall Jefferson synth riff and vocal cackles is exhilarating.

Much of the power of “Respectable” is down to mixmaster Phil Harding, who was also responsible (together with, some say, SAW themselves undercover) for producing the hardcore Essex industrial-electro collective Nitzer Ebb (“Join In The Chant,” released about a month later, is the exact obverse of “Respectable”). But the record also sets an important precedent; with its unapologetically proud stance and fuck-you attitude, it is the clearest antecedent to the Spices and Saints and Alouds who would follow in their path, and perhaps also a ground-breaker in British girl group pop; I have tried hard to think about precedents to Mel and Kim, but in terms of girl groups, they had previously tended to be demure, homely and unthreatening – the Caravelles, the Paper Dolls, the Pearls, the Nolans; an extension of pre-rock memes. Only Bananarama, who made a point of co-authoring their SAW-produced hits (Waterman later described them, albeit not pejoratively, as the hardest act he’d ever had to work with), stand as a workable comparison point (the post-punk explosion of Slits and Raincoats and Girls At Our Best being a parallel, but not quite pop, phenomenon), but the slipstream of subsequent girl pop is very much in Mel and Kim’s wake.

Their sole album, F.L.M., did very well, but in early 1988 Mel Appleby became seriously ill with cancer. They recorded one further single, “That’s The Way It Is,” though Mel was too unwell to appear in its video or promote it on TV or in clubs, and SAW’s peak of anti-anti-futurism polemics, 1989’s “I’d Rather Jack” (eventually given to Liverpool one-hit wonders the Reynolds Girls), was scheduled to be a Mel and Kim track. Mel died in 1989 and Kim soldiered on for a while as a soloist before marrying the dismissed third member of Bros and future manager of Pink and record company head Craig Logan. But “Respectable” in demonstrating absolutely no respect for history, dignity or respect itself, helped steer pop back into its future.

I’m new here, so please be nice. What a smashing blog you have.

I think of this song often. I was quite small when it came out, and at the time I was utterly convinced that they were singing “our registration number’s OUTATIME”. Apart from that it scans quite well, there aren’t really any lines that sound like that so I’m not sure where I got the idea. Perhaps I just assumed that Mel and Kim were the kind of girls to ride around in a Delorean, recklessly travelling through time and space.

Still, it’s nice for the residents of Dundee to have the river Tay immortalised in something other than McGonagall’s epic, isn’t it?

Ha! I’m a girl actually. But I quite like being called a chap, and will encourage it in my daily life.

Re:34. I love the idea that SAW produced Nitzer Ebb. It sounds like something from the NME’s late-80s Believe It Or Not column (“Neil Tennant is a qualified rugby league coach. Stock, Aitken, Waterman are producing the next Nitzer Ebb album, More Shouty Stuff About Discipline”)

I remember Nitzer Ebb being part of the first wave of Balearic Beats artists alongside Thrashing Doves and The Residents. A confusing pic & mix bunch of genres right there. A bit of an antidote to the burgeoning Acid House movement, and an indicator as to how the future of Dance was about to fracture into sub-genre and micro-genre.

Fuzzbox ended up with quite a ‘four distinct personalities’ type image too. Only the lead singer Vicki (last seen on Never Mind The Buzzcocks ‘Line-up’ round last year) really went for the sex symbol angle tho. 20+ years ago you could have all-female normal/weird-looking bands in the top 10 mutter moan etc.