Polls Apart Welcome to Polls Apart, the Clash barometer of the best and worst facets in music. At ten, the antithesis of cool – the worst perpetrators of musical crimes. At one, the most influential and heroic saviours. Let count down commence!
This week: HOLIDAYS
10. Cliff Richard – ‘Summer Holiday’
Alongside the theme tunes to Steptoe And Son and Bread, Cliff Richard’s ‘Summer Holiday’ must surely rank as one of the most infuriatingly contagious hums ever to be unleashed on the public. A lilting nursery rhyme of a tune, its melodious simplicity is made all the worse by the pious cunt guffawing down the microphone. A copy of the Daily Mail brought to life, Cliff Richard is a menopausal bigot’s wet dream – peddling his inoffensive strain of neutered rock and roll to a fan base who views the modern world as a bewildering and pejorative hinterland populated by feral hoodies intent on killing swans and wanking atop the Union Jack. The kind of song you were forced to sing in school assemblies when the local old folk’s home came to visit, ‘Summer Holiday’ effortlessly quashes the excitement and anticipation of an overseas adventure and instead brings to mind damp trousers and nicotine-stained caravans.
9. Will Smith – ‘Miami’
Occam’s razor dictates that the simplest explanation for any given phenomenon is predominantly the correct one. Accordingly, middle-aged men driving expensive sports cars may well be sterling members of their community who are not seeking to flaunt their wealth at a disenfranchised proletariat but are instead attempting to brighten their days with a glimpse of engineering beauty. Alternatively they are rich twats whose lack of creativity and individualism has forced them to try and buy a personality in the shape of some painted metal with wheels on. Which is it? It’s the latter. The fucking latter! What’s this got to do with Will Smith’s ‘Miami’ you may well ask? Everything – that’s what. This is exactly the kind of carbonated Pop ‘N’ B that these pricks enjoy, and even if they don’t, they should. Because they’re wankers. Like Will Smith. And this is probably the kind of holiday they’d love; pretending they’re young at some overpriced boutique hotel, cheating on their trophy fiancé with some slapper half their age who is willing to fuck anything with a black AMEX.
8. Sabrina – ‘Boys (Summertime Love)’
Were Chlamydia to have a ringtone, this would be it. An 18-30’s holiday taking place in the gusset of Hades, Sabrina is a Viz caricature writ very large – jiggling away lasciviously in an itsy-bitsy bikini whilst making her predilection as a sunburnt cum repository patently clear to any knuckle-faced oafs who happened to be passing by. Less a song about holidays and more a prologue to the STD clinic, ‘Boys (Summertime Love)’ captures the vinegary essence of Magaluf et al. as Sabrina chirps, “Boys, boys, boys / I’m looking for a good time / Boys, boys, boys / Get ready for my love”. Classy. Where Blur’s ‘Girls And Boys’ took similar subject matter and treated it with the social contempt it deserves, Sabrina overtly revels in the promiscuous shenanigans of Brits abroad – resulting in a pop song that should come packed with a complimentary course of antibiotics.
7. Dizzee Rascal & Chrome – ‘Holiday’
You’d think there would be a point where we’d tire of slagging off Calvin Harris. But no; he’s the cunt that just keeps on giving. Having already reduced Britain’s most exhilarating vocalist down to a leering yoof stereotype on the abysmal ‘Dance Wiv Me’, permadick Harris has once again jizzed his fluorescent incompetence all over Dizzee’s face on new single ‘Holiday’. Having evidently been bought a Fisher Price 808 for Christmas last year, Harris now seems intent on drowning everything he touches in anaemic synth washes that are supposed to invoke glowing euphoria. Instead it makes me want to pump the fucknut full of MDMA before locking him in a room that contains nothing but a solitary strobe light and the sound of a modem playing at tinnitus inducing volume. I think I’ve got a hard on. As for the song beyond Calvin, Dizzee fumbles about with some crowd pleasing nonsense (“A Blue Marlin will please ya / And I’ll never let your belly get empty / Even when your belly’s full you’re still sexy”) that suggests going away with the boy from da corner would be a demoralising affair that centred around force-feeding sessions of rancid cocktails and scotch eggs.
6. Weezer – ‘Holiday’
For a bunch of lads who look like they’d start peeling if they got too close to a bottle of Sunny Delight, Weezer are surprisingly chatty when it comes to holidays. In addition to the lilting loveliness of ‘Island In The Sun’, ‘Holiday’ sees the geek regents extolling the virtues of some time away from the shackles of an Oyster card – imploring their fey bird to pack her toothbrush and prepare for the time of her life. And they rhyme Kerouac with bivouac. La de fucking da! However, in reality a vacation with Weezer would likely revolve around crippling bouts of hayfever, heat rashes and crying on the stairs after a bit too much gin.
5. The Drifters – ‘Under The Boardwalk’
Melancholy is a slippery emotion to define. Neither here nor there, it skirts the fringes of your limbic system generating wistful sighs and soggy-chested nostalgia. And that’s what good holidays become the second you cram all your dirty pants in a Tesco bag and head for the airport; sun-bleached memories that mature with age. It was therefore good of The Drifters to capture this mood and press it onto a 45 with ‘Under The Boardwalk’; a song that chronicled a romantic tryst conducted covertly amongst the sickly fun of Coney Island. “From the park you hear the happy sound of a carousel / Mm-mm, you can almost taste the hot dogs and French fries they sell / Under the boardwalk, down by the sea / On a blanket with my baby is where I’ll be”. Nailing it with a non-orthodox key change mid-chorus (major to minor), The Drifters’ 1964 classic still sounds as achingly piquant now as it did almost half a century ago.
4. Alice Cooper – ‘School’s Out’
Apparently written in order to capture the mood invoked during “those last three minutes on the last day of school when you’re sitting there and it’s like a slow burning fuse”, Alice Cooper’s ‘School’s Out’ is a blissfully cathartic three minutes that almost makes you wish you were back in full time education purely to experience that euphoric rush as the summer holidays piled in. Whilst my childhood in Ashby de la Zouch didn’t quite match the hedonistic nihilism soundtracked by the tune in Richard Linklater’s 1993 movie Dazed And Confused, the sentiment was definitely the same – the bell has gone so we’re fucking off to drink MD 20/20 and sniff glue for eight weeks. Double French with damp trousers and muddy legs have no place cluttering up my life until September. So screw you Mr. Killock. SCREW YOU!
3. Wham! – ‘Club Tropicana’
Back in the steely grip of Thatcherite recession, ‘Club Tropicana’ probably represented some idealised notion of youthful hedonism – with the bulk of the populace failing to notice the satirical subtext and thinly veiled assault on the burgeoning 18-30 package holidays. Nowadays the name conjures up a bleak tableau of foam parties held on Tuesday nights down Tamworth, wherein legionnaire’s disease is a free gift and random violence punctuates the alchofetid air. Yet despite such gashness by proxy, ‘Club Tropicana’ is still a formidable pop song that infects even the most moribund of individuals with a breezy smile and holiday spirit. The aural equivalent of being served a sparkler festooned cocktail by a morally redundant holiday rep, ‘Club Tropicana’ makes no excuses for its disposable predilection and in doing so comes closest to snagging that carefree attitude which characterises the very best vacations.
2. Ash – ‘Girl From Mars’
“Do you remember the time I knew a girl from Mars? / I don’t know if you knew that / Oh, we’d stay up late playing cards / Henri Winterman Cigars / Though she never told me her name / I still love you, girl from Mars”. Disingenuous in print, on record the opening salvo from Ash’s 1995 single ‘Girl From Mars’ was a proper little heart-wrencher; lobbing you straight back to your fifteenth year as you became entangled in the first throes of a teenage summer romance. Similar in tone to ‘Under The Boardwalk’, ‘Girl From Mars’ dusted its melancholy with an optimistic blush that conjured hazy sunsets and pollen dense air with a nuanced quiver of indie pop. The spiritual heir to Bobby Vinton’s ‘Blue Velvet’, ‘Girl From Mars’ chronicles a halcyon time (real or imagined) where innocence, excitement and a seemingly endless summer break coalesce into something quite magical.
1. Madonna – ‘Holiday’
Michael Jackson hit his expiry date; thank fuck for that. A bit callous you venture? Well yes, and to be fair a mild dose of the clap would probably have sufficed. Essentially, anything that would have prevented the ivory clatter of latter-day MJ donning his rhinestone Messiah complex and hauling himself around the Millennium Dome was good enough for us. In our head, Jackson will forever be galvanised pre-‘Dangerous’; long before all the shit wrought his life into a rolling embodiment of Munch’s The Scream – albeit desaturated through some godly version of Photoshop. ‘But other stars of his era pull it off – touring to unsullied adoration whilst reinventing their back catalogue,’ you argue. ‘Madonna, for instance?’ But that’s where you’re wrong. So wrong. When he first emerged, Michael Jackson seemed simultaneously guileless and painfully self aware; dancing like a dancer and singing like a singer. Madonna, by contrast, always looked like she was two weeks’ worth of rehearsals short of adequate. Even box fresh Madge (TM The Sun) was a ruddy shambles and whilst this arguably lent the Material Girl much of her charm, it also meant she could plough on through the thread-vein years without the aggregate getting tearful at what we had lost. Conversely, Jackson’s death saved us from having to mourn him in person as he wheezed away to vastly diminishing returns at the behest of a telecommunications giant. Less of a thriller and just plain bad. And with that cleared up, what of ‘Holiday’? Truth is it’s all a bit reedy and trite; but thanks to a catchy chorus and batshit electro production it got lodged in the collective head and stayed put for twenty-six years. Look it up on YouTube or Spotify and it soon becomes clear that the version you have stored in your memory banks is much better than the original product. But then so are our favourite holidays.
Words by Adam Park
