CALL ON ME

Eric Prydz

If you were a songwriter in the 1980s or before, you worked far too hard for your royalties. Take Steve Winwood, for example. Here's a chap who originally started out in the sixties with the Spencer Davis Group, decided it was time for a change, quit and then played with Blind Faith and Traffic for a while (actually, re-reading that, it's a damn good job the band names had capital letters). After that, he struck out on his own and had a few hit singles - I know this because Higher Love appears on my battered copy of Now 8 - and another big hit he had, namely Valerie, crawled up the charts to No.19 back in 1987. Really though, he needn't have bothered. All he actually needed to do was bide his time until the time came to write Valerie, use a little foresight and then... streamline it a little. Tune? No need, just pick four notes that sound good when repeated ad nauseum. Verses? Where we're going, we don't need verses. All you need is a chorus, that's the hook that draws in the punters. You've got four notes, so why not settle for four words (the original title and the new title should give you a clue as to which ones), with an extra line added every so often to really get things going? Back in the eighties, a song like that would have stood as much chance of getting in the chart as the Fast Food Rockers have of getting a Lifetime Achievement Award at a future Brit awards ceremony, but times change and nowadays, as some band once said, words are very unnecessary. These days, if you want to revisit a forgotten artist's back catalogue, you have to make things as simple as possible, so four words and four notes it is. Make it a tad more uptempo so the listener can jig around to it and there you go, one guaranteed smash hit single. If you're going to write a hit song these days, the trick is to let someone else write it first, but if I'm going to be fair about this, there are far worse attempts at updating songs than this that have hit the Top 10 (Exhibit A - Queen's Flash from last year, what a sorry mess that was). The spirit of the original is retained even if the actual melody or the words aren't and the old stuff works quite neatly when put alongside the new bits. Of course it gets a bit repetitive, but then, for four notes what do you expect? I quite like this even though I feel I shouldn't.

REAL TO ME

Brian McFadden

This is one of those rare cases where the words are better than the tune. The tune is a dreary cross between Delta Goodrem, Westlife (good heavens) and Dido - yep, best move on from there I think. The first verse is great. I'm not kidding. Brian's going it alone and he's got things to say. Coming up against people who know naff all about music but have somehow become his decision makers, running around from country to country so often they all blur into one, he wants you to know it's not all sunshine and light being a pop star. Go on Brian, you stick two fingers up to The Man! We're all behind you. No, we are, honest, keep going, tell it like it really is. So he does, he tells us how important his family are to him. Fair point, family's more important than work, I'll grant him that. The second verse then goes on to say how some dying flowers in a hotel room convinced him it was time to bail out of Westlife. Personally, if I was him, the sight of a dead horse being flogged would be a bigger clue, but it worked for him. He then goes to sing about how he likes to laze around in the garden, invite the family round and watch the footy. And that's it. The words are grounded in reality, none of that Flying Without Wings tat here, and if they'd been put to a decent tune, he'd be onto a real winner. Still, half a good song is better than Queen Of My Heart.