KYLIE MINOGUE – "Tears On My Pillow"

Ugh! Synthi-horns! You get the impression that everyone other than Kylie was putting in the minimum effort possible here, secure in the certain knowledge that this was bound to be a hit.

The next four singles after this formed a quartet of brilliance, enjoyment and sass that is all that one can hope for in pop, though. The charts can be so unfair, sometimes…

I have a feeling that SAW were trying to make some point about throwaway pop music with all this 50s throwback stuff, but all they seem to have proved is that you can’t recreate old pop magic.
BTW, has anyone actually seen The Delinquents? Is it any good? Or is it notably bad? I suspect neither, much like this song.

“Tears On My Pillow” was the old Little Anthony and the Imperials weepie (“You don’t remember me” indeed, since the 21-year-old Kylie couldn’t possibly have remembered the record first hand) resuscitated to soundtrack Kylie’s long forgotten teen flick The Delinquents. Judging by the harmonic confusion in the keyboard department and the occasional miscued backing vocals, the record probably took marginally longer to make and produce than the 146 seconds of its duration; and the 1990 model of Kylie sings it with all the sunniness and cheer you would have expected her to bring to a song about obsessive loss.

Coming from people who less than a year previously were loudly proclaiming that they didn’t want golden oldies back, SAW now seemed to be relying on them more and more; in the same year we had Jason Donovan suffocating “Rhythm Of The Rain” and Sonia making this writer momentarily wish for the actual “End Of The World.” But perhaps this indicated a pop cup running empty. Despite their septet of 1989 number ones – remembering that two of them were all-star charity fundraisers and all bar two of them involved Kylie and/or Jason – SAW had now peaked and were gently but inexorably slipping downwards. Rick Astley and Dead Or Alive were long gone (and, more tragically, Mel Appleby had gone the week before “Tears” went to number one; Kim persevered as a soloist elsewhere), Bananarama were gradually running down, Big Fun and Sonia came, did their assigned job and went, Jason’s pop star warrant was close to expiry and subsequent things like Boy Krazy never really came. There was still room for one late masterpiece – Lonnie Gordon’s “Happening All Over Again,” wherein the singer’s performance is so violently passionate that it seems set to shake and demolish SAW’s careful bouncy façade – but Gordon couldn’t follow it up.

In essence, then, by the end of 1990, in contrast to their Hit Factory of stars a few years earlier, Kylie was all that SAW had, and bearing in mind the two years left to run on her PWL contract, the team tried to up their game; “Better The Devil You Know,” a number two hit that summer, was basically more bubblegum but markedly harder musically, “Step Back In Time” was a subtler anti-nostalgia meditation than “I’d Rather Jack” (“Remember the O’Jays?” queries an audibly bewildered Kylie), but “Shocked” and “What Do I Have To Do?” from 1991 gave the first indication of real adventure in Kylie’s work. Again, though, SAW never really built on this, so it was back to the nice-try-but-no-condom Let’s Get To It album with its half-hearted entreaties to consummation and surfeit of sloppy sub-R&B ballads, together with, in their final year together, interest-free readings of “Give Me Just A Little More Time” and “Celebration” which titles in themselves may well tell their own story. After that, Kylie wandered off to work out how to become a pop star on her own, or under the guidance of different and more unexpected directors. We will have to wait a long time until the next chapter can be told here. In the meantime, “Tears On My Pillow” is efficient and professional but utterly lacking in any blood or any real grief or anger – and its lackings are drawn into far sharper focus by the next devastating entry, which tells the same story but really delineates the difference between life and living death.

I’ve seen the video lonepilgrim refers to, and it comes from a 2007 ITV special, where Kylie gives a notably better performance and the song receives an altogether classier production than the single, which is more of a SAW wall-of-sound effort. I have next to no memory of this being out at the time, which for a number one would have been unthinkable a couple of years earlier.

Other examples of two totally different songs with the same title reaching number one? (although this one shares the same lyrics, “Tears on my pillow, pain in my heart…” with Johnny Nash’s)

Awful production. Vocals good. 3.

Very sweet vocal, not Kylie-on-autopilot at all, and the sleeve makes me feel all gooey. But it’s still not a patch on Little Anthony’s clipped drama.

Re the Sealed With A Kiss/Rhythm Of The Rain re-runs: Gary Lewis & The Playboys had already done this brace of covers, in the same order, in 1968. Beyond lazy, SAW!

The vocals on this are AWFUL. Love is not a GADGET! If we could START ANEW! I’d actually defend Kylie’s performance on “Hand on Your Heart,” but this is deplorable. Rolling Stone, I understand, called this version of the song “incompetent,” and I agree.

Kylie looking very fetching on the sleeve (her best photo up till this point?) is pretty much the highlight of this record (which is new to me). Awful backing track. 3.

Ear-peeking ahead to Kylie’s next few singles, I don’t hear anything to get excited about.

Re: 12 – Agreed, ‘What Do I Have To Do?’ is the absolute pinnacle of the quartet, doing many of the things that SAW were best at; desperate and defiant unrequited love songs, pop-house influences, heavenly host backing vox, call and response “you!” and “do!”s… It certainly left a deep impression upon me. I vividly remember my 18 year old-self spending hour after hour alternately playing it and ‘Motown Junk’ by the Manic Street Preachers, each single building upon the emotions of the other one in my disturbed and overactive mind.

But I think that WDIHTD isn’t as well-remembered as the other three singles because it lacks an imaginative hook to register in the public Kylie narrative – ‘Devil’ says “marked improvement”/devil/Michael Hutchence, ‘Step’ = Disco/comic seventies nostalgia, ‘Shocked’ = ‘sexy new image’/risque.

To be fair on Kylie, “Love is not a gadget” is a tougher sell in 1990 than in 1958, when “gadget” meant something modish, portable, miniaturised… obviously the word hadn’t lost any meaning by 1990 but it just seems more awkward as a line, the word sticks out.

(penny drops)

Never having heard this before,* I’m surprised to find myself agreeing more with Chelovek than the nay-sayers. The woozy backing reminds me of some of John Lennon’s 1970s covers of golden oldies, not at all what I normally associate with SAW, so that’s less bad than I feared; and Kylie’s vocals seem fine for the material to me (again, never having heard the original). I wasn’t expecting world-weariness from a song called “Tears on my Pillow”; instead, it brought to mind the best line in Waiting to Guffman (“I’m going home and I’m gonna BITE MY PILLOW!”) – the kind of line only a teenager (or near-teenager) can deliver without sounding camp.

So, not too bad. 5.

By the way, @14: Aussie rock/pop singers have traditionally adopted American accents when singing, shortening their vowels in words like “can’t” and dropping the y sound in “new”. By the 1980s clearer Australian accents could be heard on records by Midnight Oil, Spy vs Spy, the Radiators and the Uncanny X-Men, but mostly on the rock end of the spectrum. So Kylie’s “anoo” was nothing noo, especially for a cover song.

*Actually, if this was covered on the Grease soundtrack I almost certainly have heard it before, because the girls in my grade 5/6 class used to put that on the tape-deck all the time at school. So maybe some subliminal memory has made me better-disposed towards it. Strange, given that I couldn’t stand the stuff at the time.

And she was, at least in one unhappy instance.

I’m pretty sure 99% of ‘Shocked’ is the video, without that it’s rather ordinary, at least next to Better The Devil and What Do I Have To etc.

@17, oh I don’t know about that, exactly.

Maybe the chorus is a bit weak/subtle/4 years too late in a perhaps-they-should-have-offered-it-to-Spagna way (delete according to taste): those lines “always inside my head/never inside my bed” will do nicely as a memorable not-quite-hook. Yeah, it is a bit more sophisticated and less straightforward than a simple pop song, for all the glitter sparkling all over it.

I’d say of her 90s singles only “Put Yourself In My Place” is better than “What Do I Have To Do”, in all. I really can’t be bothered with all that Impossible Princess wanna-be Indie stuff, and don’t understand why why why it was released on DeConstruction records.

(“What Kind Of Fool” strikes me as being a bit more overlooked than it warranted being, even though it’s clearly not absolutely top-grade stuff, and, erm, having just watched it on Youtube, she was trying rather too hard to look “sexy” in the video. But it does seem to represent a look back to 1987, pre-Kylie SAW, more interested in a good dance beat and decent vocal than the pop charts. But by the time it came out it was too late for all that…).

“Shocked” has that brilliant Italo-piano intro.

I never minded this. It’s too short to be annoying, one of those songs on my iPod I never need to skip as it plays and ends so quickly. Others include the much more credible ‘Too Much Too Young’ (number 1 almost exactly ten years prior to this!) at 2:06, Blondie’s ‘Denis’ (2:19), Elastica’s ‘Connection’ (2:22), the radio edit of ‘We No Speak Americano’ (2:10) and most stuff from the 1960s.

But how this got to number 1, and the mindblowing ‘Better The Devil You Know’ didn’t, is a travesty. One of the contenders for one of the best tracks of the *decade*, even though it had barely started when it came out. The epitome of perfect pop, and I can’t help melt a little every time I hear the sampled “Oh-oh-oh-oh-oh, Ohwoah-oh, Ohwoah-oh” in the middle 8. Best Kylie track by a mile.

@32, Londonlee. The vid. for a certain bunnyable track in the early ’00s excluded presumably?

Oh yeah…

“Whenever I hear your music
Singing the same old tune
You’re so sure that I can’t refuse it
But don’t you speak too soon”

Gah, can’t believe I wrote Waiting to Guffman up there. It’s for, of course, not to. And highly recommended, if you haven’t seen it yet.

About half the tracks were co-written by Kylie, but all were (otherwise) co-written and produced by SAW.

@36, Chelovek. The median Smiths song is sub-3 minutes. In the ’90s the median Magnetic Fields song was *well* under 3 minutes. And the Arctic Monkeys notably kept things short and sweet at least until recently. As a result, I strongly associate a bent towards short songs with high quality song-writing (I’d certainly include the Primitives when they were on their game in that). I find it odd that relatively few pop acts go this route. (I also find it odd that relatively few recent movies embrace a ‘leave you wanting more’ aesthetic.)

Yr all wrong.

The shortest hit ever was Yellow Magic Orchestra and “Computer Game (Theme From The Invaders)” which was the listed track, it ran for 7 seconds (21 if you bought the 12″ version).

OK, so it segue’d into “Firecracker” but still.

SAW always mined 50’s / early 60’s teen pop standards for their teen-pop artists. It helped pad out their formulaic sounds with something catchy and ‘authentic’ sounding, and gave them (often) a solid shot at a hit: Rick Astley ‘When I Fall in Love’; Kylie ‘The Locomotion’ / ‘Tears On My Pillow’; Jason ‘Sealed With a Kiss’ / Rhythm of the Rain; Sonia ‘End of the World’. I’m sure there are others.

I’m very nostalgic for this version of the song. It came out when I had a little crush on someone and became the soundtrack to that crush. Kylie gives it a good enough vocal to convince me of the songs emotional content. The music? Meh.

This one seems all a bit lifeless to me. 3/10.