Fever times

I don’t really want to talk about viruses at the moment.  But this song means I have to. 

Only three songs send a sinister chill down my spine just by listening to them – Straight to Hell by the Clash, The Cutter by Echo & the Bunnymen and The Harder I Try by Brother Beyond.  Yes.  Brother Beyond.  (I really think there is another that is much higher up the list – but the ones that do this were all released before I left university – I think I became more robust when I started work).

I first heard it on Top of the Pops when I had a ferocious temperature and was really feverish.  It was the stuff of fever dreams for some reason.  The video really freaked me out and Nathan Moore seemed to be struggling out of the TV screen (this was not the first time I had hallucinated with a fever – four years earlier I had been attacked by own curtains the night my fever broke).  Anyway I got better.

Oddly afterwards I had an attachment to the track – as time went on it still sends a chill up my spine, but I also listened to it a lot after I was better and the fact that I wasn’t being attacked by Nathan Moore was reassuring.

Now I think Pete Waterman is a genius (I mean an evil genius like Doctor Doom or Lex Luthor, not like Reed Richards or Richard Feynman) but I think Stock, Aitken and Waterman were, on the whole, an incredibly baleful influence on late 80s music.  Very samey music with a rotating roster of singers – it made money, but it was like eating cardboard – no satisfaction.  It was only the arrival of Madchester and dance music that finally injected some energy into popular music after an appallingly fallow period.

On a musical level all I can say is that this track is way above the usual SAW rubbish.  It almost sounds like Tamla Motown 20 years on.  Or at least that is where they stole it from . The Harder I Try by Brother Beyond.