ROBIN BECK – "First Time"

Another triumph for The Men In Suits. Another forgettable jingle. Let’s compare the awkwardness of blossoming love with the experience of tasting New Improved Flavour Coca Cola. You loved the old Coke, but now we’ve tweaked the recipe (oh God! I hope they like it!). We think it’s soooo good, you’ll fall in love all over again.

Take the jingle out of context, and it’s another generic power ballad. Play that jingle over two youthful everyteens sharing a Coke and it’s like some weird alchemy…”I must stop what I’m doing this very instant and go out and buy this New Improved Coke and see for myself how good it is!” Well…no not really. I’m not going to teach the world to sing and I’m certainly not falling for an adman’s idea of what Young Love should taste like.

ps. any photos of me wearing Coca Cola sweatpants that still exist were FAKED, I tell ya. FAKED!

I seem to remember (I could be wrong though) that the old ”I’d Like To Teach The World To Sing” advert was brought back around the same time as well. Or at least an updated version.

Of course, this won’t be the last time we’ll be discussing fizzy pop at the top of the charts.

Tom #6 yes, I was a bit off with my timing there. Still an odd way to try and reclaim your brand, when conventional wisdom would dictate that nostalgia is the preferred meme to reconnect with your customers.

I heard (and loved) the Sunblock version before I looked up the original – this number one being before my time of regular chart listening. One of my all time favourite pop-dance songs.

Hearing her valiantly trying to reach each new peak, especially in the middle eight, I was reminded of the David Coleman puppet in Spitting Image: “Oh no, I’ve gone too soon! I’m already hysterical and there’s an entire lap to go!! Disaster for Coleman!!! And my head’s going to explode!!!! BOOOM!!!!!”

Anyone remember the genius that was the Irn Bru parody of songs like this – where the lad tries to impress his girlfriend by kicking the vending machine and the machine gives him a headbutt? Or something.

And let’s not forget “Howard” from the Halifax.

On second thoughts….

If I had to select a favourite from the soft drink jingle canon, Um Bongo would get my vote.

Everybody sing along now!

Way down deep in the middle of the Congo, a hippo took an apricot, a guava and a mango.

He stuck it with the others, and he danced a dainty tango.

The rhino said, “I know, we’ll call it Um Bongo”, Um Bongo, Um Bongo, They drink it in the Congo.

The python picked the passion fruit, the marmoset the mandarin. The parrot painted packets, that the whole caboodle landed in.

So when it comes to sun and fun and goodness in the jungle, They all prefer the sunny funny one they call Um Bongo!

This is at least significant as the first song to get to #1 off the back of a TV advert without being a cover version or re-release tho right?

Doubtless wanting to show those Levi’s who’s boss, seventeen years after they started the whole business with “I’d Like To Teach The World To Sing,” Coca-Cola were anxious for record buyers not to forget the purpose of “The First Time.” Even on the tracklisting of my Telstar Greatest Hits Of The ’80s double compilation (“50 Number One Hits…The History Of A Decade…”), the Coke logo is prominently displayed next to the song title; advertisement first, art a very distant second.

The song itself is a clumsy Lego assembly of a power ballad – and I note with some sorrow that among the composers was former Monkee sidekick Tommy Boyce – filled with the standard love-as-free-enterprise memes (“It’s an unchartered sea, it’s an unopened door/But ya gotta reach and ya gotta explore”). Beck, hitherto a jobbing session and jingle singer – as indeed she remained after the hit, at least until 1993 when she unexpectedly became one of the most influential musicians of the nineties with a string of acclaimed albums commencing with Stereopathic Soul Manure – sings it professionally enough, though without much in the way of dynamics or real feeling; at the song’s high-register climax she sounds shrill and throaty rather than liberated. Compare with Ann Wilson’s tremulous, breaking “You don’t know” and “waiting” in the first two lines of the second verse of Heart’s “Alone” and it is clear we are dealing here with door-to-door salesmanship rather than life-altering wonderment.

Nevertheless it is worth noting that “The First Time” marked the second occurrence in 1988 of a chart phenomenon absent from previous years; the Belinda/Tiffany/Kylie sequence was the first instance of three consecutive number ones by female artists, and with Whitney/Enya/Robin the pattern was repeated. It also marks a small bend in the transatlantic power ballad river; when we reach 1989 the preponderance of homegrown and very uniquely British number ones will quickly become noticeable, though the phenomenon of the number one single as a heavily underlined Event – even if that event is a multinational advertising campaign – will, regrettably, not diminish.

I’ve never heard this before, and I can see why – it’s that magic combination of terrible and boring. I’m glad I wasn’t old enough to pay attention to the charts until 1989 – 1988 would have almost certainly put me off them for good.

By the way, I’m a bit confused about the first line of the Jim Diamond entry – did you forget this one was coming up, Tom? https://popular-number1s.com/ft/2009/08/jim-diamond-i-should-have-known-better/

Sounds like late 80’s Cher/Heart mixed in with an oddly effective Pop/Metal guitar solo. But Beck pounces on every word here that I also think this sounds like something Celine Dion would come up with when she needs a Power ballad for one of her albums. Zero chart action in the U.S.

I note with interest that, although she was a one-hit wonder in Guinness Book of Hit Singles terms, Beck’s follow-up single ‘Save Up All Your Tears’ peaked at number 84 in March 1989.

Is this the least enduring number one of the eighties?
It doesn’t surpise me if Tom or others can’t remember it because it’s one of the most tedious pop records I’ve ever come across.
Oddly enough I remember Robin Beck on TOTP precisely because The First Time was so anti-climatic. Robin tended to dress a bit like Stevie Nicks and as Billy Smart noted her backing band were a group of session players who looked just as bored as the rest of us.

“Repeat it several times over a single and it just seems a bit profligate, each peak a little smaller than the one before until the record fizzles out completely.”

Might want to save this somewhere for use with another advert single a few years down the line…

Two places in this record where my face falls: at the turning point a few seconds in where the drums come in and it becomes painfully obvious how the rest of the song is going to go; and at the very end, when we have a sequence of ascending piano notes that are pretty much taking the mickey. Grim. 3, 4,… 3.

How about this, One Moment in Time, Nothing’s gonna change my love for you, and, I dunno, maybe a few bars of Every Loser Wins for the ultimate masochists’ mash-up challenge?

I have absoultely no recollection of this whatsoever. And therein lies a tale. Whilst exchanging texts with Erithian recently, it was mentioned that this record was coming up on the thread. I told him that not only had I never heard of Robin Beck but had zero memory of “his record” either. Says everything really, doesn’t it?

Mind you, it’s good to see that I’m not the only one of our cheesy little band to suffer “Baby Jump-itus” over this one!

Slightly different in terms of implication, I’d say – an “unopen’d door” is a door that is waiting to be opened, full of the sort of potential as the uncharted sea (lying there impatient to be charted), whereas a “non-open door” is something of a dead end. It’s not open, and that’s the end of it. (Thus replacing “non-open” with “unopen’d” in the lyric would in fact make it better. Such inefficiency from the Coca-Cola company!)

This song is somewhere around fifteenth in the list if you search Spotify for “first time”; first in the list is “Do You Remember The First Time?”. (Apparently not.)

Christ, even with the songs I’ve “forgotten” there’s some buried trace of them in my brain that hearing a few bars will bring back, but this? Nothing. Even watching the video I’m still at a loss. Come on Tom, joke’s over, what was the real Number One that week?

It’s terrible, of course.

According to wiki, AT&T’s ‘You Will’ ads were directed by David Fincher. Figures. Good mash-up possibilities with the ends of Se7en and Fight Club perhaps?

As others have said Need You Tonight really should have made it to the top rather than this bilge …

Flymo versus Qualcast