JASON DONOVAN – "Too Many Broken Hearts"

I think you’ve hit the nail on the head here. It’s a SAW throwaway, but even a SAW throwaway has enough to recommend it if you’re not of a cynical bent.

I guess they got lazy after this preferring the quick fix of a vocoder cover. Still a nice song that heralded the soullessness of the 90s and all the anonymous rubbish that was to follow.

I found myself more positive disposed towards ‘Especially for you’ than I’d anticipated but can’t find much to like about this. JD’s voice is an atonal drone and the production sets my teeth on edge.

This went straight in at #1 IIRC. That is all.

Nice to see some eucalypt-green in the video. And, um, it’s nice and short. Er…

Oh god, no, nooooo. I’d rather even listen to “Belfast Child” again. 2.

Coincidence – Mike Stock has emerged in the papers today chatting crypto-racist/snobbish shit about R&B, as is par for the course for the UK pop establishment. “99% of the charts is r&b and 99% of that is soft pornography,” apparently. Even if that were true it’d still be preferable to SAW. He’s a moron and needs a punch in the face.

(I have never heard a Jason Donovan single, remarkably! It’s funny how some mocked-at-the-time plastic-fantastic pop stars (or even just individual songs) get critically rehabilitated – Kylie, I guess – and others just, well, don’t.)

When we did the JasonD biog there was a ‘competition’ to come up with the title – and I pitched “Ten Good Reasons to Stay”. (It was ‘Between The Lines’ cos of TEH DRUCQKS, which they had pretty much decided on before the SO CALLED competition. fume.)

iirc ‘When You Come Back To Me’ was, bafflingly, lifted pretty much wholesale for One True Voice’s ‘Key To My Life’ – Waterman’s attempt to combat Girls Aloud, suggesting just how out of touch he’d become (arguably compounded further by Eurovision result earlier this year).

This record is pitiful. SAW or their C-team must have spent all of 5 minutes pasting it together. Ugh:
2

‘You Spin Me Round’ shimmered and cackled, ‘Respectable’ fizzed and chugged, ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’ shuffled and floated, ‘Lucky’ bubbled and percolated. Even ‘Especially For You’ lilted from side to side a little, like an awkward school disco slow dance (which is kind of what it was for, eh)
This, SAWs least impressive number one to date, (Let it Be doesn’t count, so there) just clumps and staggers, with no discernable groove. Punctums reference to the sixties feel of the song is ironic in that the song SAW wrote for Cliff later in the year felt a lot more contemporary.

Remix watch: The 12” starts off lumpenly trying to emulate Inner City’s ‘Good Life’ before tumbling into the seven inch version; the remixes for the US release try to take it further into house territory but sound cluttered and uncomfortable. Most perplexing is the ‘Party Hardy’ mix which drops in about a minute of Pat & Micks ‘Haven’t Stopped Dancing Yet’ for no apparent reason. When I say drops, it sounds like it’s been edited with a toothbrush.

Meanwhile, further down the ten was one of SAW’s finest moments, ‘This Time I Know It’s For Real’. I don’t doubt that Donna Summer was more formidable a character than they’d become used to. Much of their finest work (Bananarama, Dead or Alive, ‘Rhythm Of Love’-era Kylie) seems to have come about as a result of them facing a little friction and having to up their game. Can’t see any amount of conflict turning Jason into a half-decent pop star, though.

#21 i’m not so sure about that. the nick cave period lead to a kind of half life where she was seen as a good thing by critics in theory with little reference to her actual recorded output (which in turn became not very successful attempts to chase critical respect – manic street preachers colabs!) but commercially was right in the doldrums. it was only really when she went back to making good dance pop records again that the stars aligned for her. but i hear hopping….

i was thinking more of the period after ‘confide in me’, which i think was pretty successful all round (though it turns out wasn’t a number one as i’d always assumed)

@17 Oh no, sorry. I hadn’t realized he’d… y’know. Will shut up now on matters JD, and go off to study the next page of the UK Number 1s list more closely.

@25 Her Manics collab was fab! Also, not commercially in the doldrums back home; Kylie Minogue and Impossible Princess both did very well in Australia (the latter a platinum album there).

@27 Number one in Australia!

@21 Did Kylie actually date Nick Cave? I thought that was just a working relationship. Being Michael Hutchence’s gf was the turning point in Australian music critics’ eyes. Cave sang at Hutchence’s funeral and is godfather to his daughter, so presumably that’s where the link with Kylie came from.

“Confide in Me” is very much a product of the Sexkylie Hutchence-dating years.

Just noticed that on the single sleeve pic, Jason’s hat looks like a black halo, medieval-painting style. Too many broken SOULS.

I remember him saying in Smash Hits that he had a guitar and played casually. And Kylie herself could give Bez a run for his maracas money.

#11 Lex, I think Mike Stock’s worked with enough black artists not to have the r-accusation casually thrown at him. And you’re quoting him a bit out of context; the main thrust of his argument was against premature sexualisation of children with Britney Spears and Lady GaGa as his examples. If he was maoaning about everything in the charts sounding the same then of course he’d be on very thin ice indeed but that wasn’t the argument.

Musically you can’t make a case for Jason – all his records are terrible though “I’m Doing Fine” the one he claimed was a Beatles pastiche (presumably with Pete Best on vocals) was quite amusing just for the conceit. I do quite warm to him in interviews nowadays when he’s still moping about Kylie and never seems very happy about the way his career mapped out after “Neighbours”.

“Jase is ace” as one banner read at a SAW Roadshow in Bristol around this time. I really don’t mind the song at all, though clearly it’s closer to the stunted ambition of Give A Little Love than Gonna Make You A Star – it really reminds me of early 70s Cookaway/Macaulay-McLeod bubblegum. But obv. Jase is not that ace vocally and the production is made of balsa wood. 4 makes sound sense.

During his “alleged” “drugs” “period” he would go into a cafe on Westbourne Grove, rather like the one on the cover, where a friend of mine worked. Jase was always in extremely good spirits, and would stick around for hours, but would usually unsettle my friend by saying things like “Look at this chair! Aren’t chairs AMAZING?”. That’s an actual quote. Bjork could’ve pulled it off, I suppose.

Everything about it sounds thin and flimsy.
It’s inoffensive and likeable enough so yes 4 is the fair score.

Of course, if I jump in at this point and say this is actually one of my favourite SAW songs, I’ll be asked to provide some kind of reasonable argument why. And I don’t think I can make much of a case.

Yes, I know Jason’s voice is dire – and I did say so when we were commenting on “Especially For You”. I also know that this is a good record (in my opinion) rather than a great one. But it was a guilty pleasure for me when it first came out, causing me to go rather quiet when my schoolfriends starting spitting fire about what a terrible number one it was.

I think a large part of what clinches it for me is actually that the chorus is ridiculously optimistic and uplifting despite the lyrical subject matter, and at the time of its release it coincided with the arrival of Spring. I can still remember listening to this on the radio during a freakishly warm day and feeling that it just soundtracked the moment perfectly. And beyond that, whilst the cheap brassy synths are intact, the SAW-favoured rinky-dink groove is absent, replaced by something which almost (almost!) sounds similar to a rhythm pattern and arrangement Erasure, New Order or the Pet Shop Boys might have used. So this means I disagree with comment 23, unfortunately.

Ultimately though, it’s much easier to defend things you feel passionately about rather than records you just think are quite good, and this is far too much of a “I like hearing it on the radio” song rather than a “must-own” effort. And actually, this is probably the very last SAW track I actually like – it’s all downhill for me from here.

(As an aside, Tom’s comments about karaoke have reminded me of a night I sometimes go to where the audience actually break into polite applause if the singer manages to hit difficult notes… “Take On Me” is a particular favourite for this treatment).

A couple of years later and he still hadn’t taken heed to the ‘guitar as prop’ criticisms.

Check him here at the 1991 Children’s Royal Variet performance singing RSVP:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dn1qItgkkHE&feature=related

Easy picking for Michael Barrymore to take this piss out of him immediately afterwards:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ANFra5e37s

Well, I think for the sake of fairness I should say that I’m fairly sure both Erasure and the Pet Shop Boys used those rinky-dink grooves (or slight variations of them) on some of their tracks as well. But with SAW, it ended up becoming a cliche, causing people to say “Oh, they’re using the same rhythm pattern again!”

There are a few other SAW cliches present on “Too Many Broken Hearts”, of course, but as a single it did sound relatively fresh to me at the time. And like Tom, I think that Jason’s weaknesses as a vocalist may actually help the song slightly, in much the same manner that Bernard Sumner’s vocals seem charming rather than cringeworthy on most New Order tracks.

#47 Bernard will always sound more comfortable (excepting the first album) because he’s singing his own lyrics on tracks he has helped to sculpt. Jason’s always straining to keep in line with a guide vocal over music that doesn’t really excite him (or anyone else over 12).