October 2010 – Shameless

Listening to Alex Gaudino’s I’m In Love, I can’t help but suspect that 10cc had the right idea. Fancy another song from Emma’s Imagination? Right you are, then. It didn’t hang around, this one, it went straight in at No.7, plummeted to 53 and that was that. It’s a bit too slow for me, truth be told. Just The Way You Are is Bruno Mars’s best single so far, but he’s heading for trouble in the video. His girlfriend / wife / significant other’s happily listening to her Walkman (because yes, in 2010 everybody still listened to cassettes), so what does he do? He takes it off her, ejects the cassette, pulls some of the tape out and then by way of Jedi mind tricks he makes the tape move on the table, forming and reforming into moving images. That would be brilliant, but there are several points where the tape has clearly been cut. Good luck sticking all that back together, sunshine.

The piano motif in Heartbeat is doing my bloody head in, I don’t mind saying. Even I could play those sodding three notes, for heaven’s sake! Anyway, Adele. Beautifully sung, written by Bob Dylan, should be a classic… but no, not for me, ta. Still, it took two full years to reach the Top Ten so well done for finally making it. Let The Sun Shine’s fairly straightforward, but it’s oddly likable, so that’s good. While I’m at it, Written In The Stars is also better than I thought it’d be. Nice when that happens.

Given a choice between Sex On Fire and Radioactive, I’d choose Radioactive every day of the week, but I really hope I wouldn’t have to listen to it every day. Once is way more than enough, thank you. There’s something about Miami 2 Ibiza that’s a bit heard-it-all-before, and it’s not Tinie Tempah doing the vocals on two songs out of the last three. Shame is basically four minutes of Robbie Williams and Gary Barlow clearing the air – it has its moments, but its shelf-life is hugely shortened by being so obviously about those two; there’s no way anybody else could sing about having thirty foot high posters outside Toys R Us. I have to say, for such an aggressive title, Cee-Lo Green’s song is probably the happiest I’ve heard in some time. That’s very confusing, but very welcome at the same time.

I haven’t heard Cooler Than Me in years, but it’s definitely improved with age. Ambitions isn’t bad either; it’s a huge step up from Joe McElderry’s X-Factor winner’s single. It’s not brilliant by any means, but it holds its own. Barbra Streisand is a very silly song, and that’s probably how it just about gets away with it.

Dappy wants a girlfriend, Tulisa wants a boyfriend – instead of singing Best Behaviour, couldn’t they have joined a dating service instead? Jay Sean was right, you know; 2012 wasn’t the end. I should know, I’m writing this in 2014 so if that’s not proof I don’t know what is. The lyrics seem pretty certain that the end is/was nigh; I doubt this song is still in Mr Sean’s concert repertoire. Katy Perry’s next, with an unintentionally scary video in which people’s chests explode in a shower of sparks. I’ve seen Westworld; there’s no way you can convince me that any of this can possibly end well. Heart Vacancy – five years earlier, I bet you this would’ve been sung by Blue. Let’s just stop and think about that for a moment.