MUSIC-USA: Mixing and Scoring, Brits Ignite Dance Floors

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

NEW YORK, Aug 13 1996 (IPS) - The torch song has long been a staple of smoky nightclubs, with the moody songs of lost love wafting over the lonely souls in the bar-room.

Now, however, some jazz-influenced British groups have dragged the genre, exemplified by French chanteuse Edith Piaf, into the discotheques. A wave of new dance trends, with names like “trip- hop” and “jungle,” have mixed the ominous quiet of torch songs with beats that Piaf would not recognise.

One of the most successful groups to pull off this hybrid has been mixing jazz and pop music for years. When the British group Everything but the Girl first was formed in the early 1980s, the duo — singer Tracey Thorn and guitarist Ben Watt — affected the cool alienation of jazz sophisticates.

Times have changed, and the group has now become successful in the United States — but as the creators of a new disco-influenced dance album, ‘Walking Wounded’ (on Atlantic Records) that owes more to the bass of modern “house” music than any homage to Billie Holiday.

Everything but the Girl’s transformation is one of the more peculiar cases of a band re-inventing itself to catch up with the latest trends. The group’s first big U.S. hit, called ‘Missing’, has been garnering radio play this year two years after it first came out as a moody, soft ballad.

This time round, the song boasts the pumping keyboards and propulsive house beat of a new producer, Todd Terry — and has become a staple of gay dance clubs, Thorn notes. The lyrics, built around the chorus “And I’m missing you/ Like the deserts miss the rain,” suggest a mood of longing and lost love perfect for dance clubs in the age of AIDS.

The group itself seems more aware of loss, having taken several years off from the music business when Watt was being treated for an immune disorder. During that time, Thorn recorded several songs with the dance group Massive Attack, and became an expert at attaching her wry observations on love to a throbbing bassline. Now, a band that always sang about lost love has learned how to hook up their tunes to danceable — but still pensive — rhythms.

Thorn is happy with the group’s transformation. Before, the singer says, the band was in danger of becoming lumped in with such musicians as “light jazz” saxophonist Kenny G. Now, however, Watt and Thorn are re-casting their sad, ironic love songs to the ominous beats and pulsing basslines of the British “jungle music” scene.

‘Walking Wounded’, EBTG’s current hit, complements Thorn’s rich, low voice with clattering drum tracks that stop and start suddenly, provided by the jungle group Spring Heel Jack. But Watts’s lyrics are the sort of night-time musings that typify the torch song: “Out amongst the walking wounded/ Every face on every bus/ Is you and me and him and her/ Nothing can replace the us I knew.”

Thorn also writes lyrics that twist the language of love into self-aware, self-mocking phrases: “The mind may grow wise,/ But the heart just sulks and it whines/ And it remains a child./ Why don’t you love me?”

Such longing has now become a staple in dance clubs, thanks not only to Everything but the Girl but to newer groups, including Massive Attack, Portishead and the Brand New Heavies.

Massive Attack, which helped transform Thorn’s image with their 1994 album ‘Protection’, has now done a similar job with none other than Madonna on the first song from her new album, ‘Something to Remember’ (on Maverick).

The chirpy U.S. singer is uncharacteristically yearning on her recent remake of Marvin Gaye’s ‘I Want You’, a song whose torch- style longeurs (“I want you/ To want me, baby/ Just like I want you”) are heightened by Massive Attack’s slow, reggae-tinged backdrop.

The trend is growing. Portishead, another British group, weds its self-pitying lyrics (like the “Nobody loves me” chorus of its 1995 song ‘Sour Times’) to sinister music that recalls the soundtracks to James Bond movies.

More recently, the Brand New Heavies, one of Britain’s new jazz- funk bands, slowed down its frenzied beats on a new album, ‘Excursions: Remixes and Rare Grooves’ (on Delicious Vinyl). Soul singer N’Dea Davenport sounds appropriately torchy next to the cool rhythms of ballads like ‘Mind Trips’ and ‘Forever.’

But just in case you might think that the future of the dance clubs holds only sad new variations of ‘La Vie en Rose’, the Brand New Heavies’ album closes with a cheerful version of the coy disco hit ‘Midnight at the Oasis’.

Thorn and Watt close off ‘Walking Wounded’ with jumpy, club versions of the title track and the fast-moving ‘Wrong’. In clubland, the beat still wins out over a sad mood.