(* Quincy Jones featuring....and Chaka Khan )
Chart entered : 13 January 1990
Chart peak : 21
And so, with some trepidation, we enter the nineties. I say trepidation because the far end of the decade is real "Here Be Dragons" territory for me. The Top 20 of 1/1/90 is familiar, if mostly unpalatable ; that of 31/12/99 is a foreign land. I could name about five records in it and that's only because I compiled a pop quiz round on it a few years back.
There are a number of reasons why this was so. The first was a decisive break in my radio listening habits. On the first Sunday of the new decade, I caught Alan Freeman's Pick of the Pops and got engrossed in the old charts, free from Stock Aitken and Waterman and New Kids On The Block. For the next couple of years, I tuned into oldies radio stations instead of Radio One ( though I remained loyal to Annie Nightingale's show for a while ). When that palled, I switched to the old Radio Five which had excellent music ( generally the best of the eighties ) as well as sports coverage and when that was scrapped in 1994 , I turned to Virgin which would only play a carefully selected portion of music from the charts.
Bruno Brookes had already alienated me from the Sunday night chart show but that was OK, I could catch up with the chart when Record Mirror came out on a Thursday. However when that ceased publication in April 1991 it left a void that was never completely filled. My knowledge of the charts became patchy , gleaned from The Chart Show ( which used a different chart ), Top of the Pops ( which I wasn't watching as religiously ) and Q ( which was more interested in the album chart ).
And the nineties of course were a time when keeping up with the chart became much more demanding. As single sales dropped through the floor, most releases didn't actually make any money for the record company and came to be viewed purely as a marketing device for the album. It didn't really matter which tracks were picked as singles any more so many of them were only purchased by committed fans of the group and disappeared from the chart the week afterwards. This was perfectly illustrated by The Wedding Present in 1992 when they scored a hit each month with defiantly uncommercial throwaway thrashes , only three of which remained on the chart for a second week. The chart became little more than a bewildering barometer of who had the biggest fanbase that week with a few genuine crossover smashes establishing reigns of terror at the top.
Anther reason I dropped away was the poor performance of singles that I really liked. The Inspiral Carpets couldn't crack the Top 10, 10.000 Maniacs couldn't get into the Top 40 and Stephen Duffy's Natalie wasn't a hit at all. If people wanted to slather over those twin totems of nineties mediocrity, Gary Barlow and Noel Gallagher , then so be it. I had better things to do.
The enlargement of my social life from 1993 onwards was another, more positive, factor in my disengagement with the chart.
One other thing I should mention here is a shout-out to the website 45cat which has been an invaluable help in researching this blog but won't be for much longer as the vinyl single pretty much disappeared in 1992. This is as good a place as any to express my appreciation to the guys who maintain it.
It doesn't surprise me at all that we're starting with a goodbye post. The list of artists making their exit in this decade is huge and from this evidence , it seems that Britpop was far more effective in scorching the earth than either punk or Live Aid.
Ray had been away from the charts for even longer than Max. Genius or not, Ray wasn't any more immune from the Beatles blitzkreig than his peers and after 1963 he had to settle for only minor hits, the last ( prior to this one ) ironically being a cover of "Eleanor Rigby" which reached number 36 in 1968. In the seventies Ray started label-hopping and recording shoddy covers albums with little new material, In the eighties he recorded a string of country albums for Columbia.
"I'll Be Good To You" was recorded in 1989 as a favour to long time friend Quincy Jones for his star-studded Back On The Block album . The song was a cover of a 1976 US hit ( number 3 ) for The Brothers Johnson which Quincy produced. The original is a likable, if not particularly memorable piece of seventies pop funk in which the singer promises fidelity. Quincy re-works the song in a new jack swing style although given the combined age of the trio perhaps "old jack creak" would be more appropriate. Ray's voice is still in good nick at 59 but neither he nor Chaka sound particularly comfortable with the arrangement which jettisons most of the melody and puts a horrible guitar solo over the first chorus. It was a number 18 hit in the US. I must confess it rings no bells with me at all, a sign that my disengagement had already begun.
Ray used the record's success to sign a new contract with Warner Brothers something like his seventh label. He released a new LP "Would You Believe" later that year. I've heard three tracks from it, all polished retro-soul and all preferable to the single, but it made no impact. Ray's next album "My World" in 1993 had more contemporary influences and was a minor hit in the US. His third and final album for Warners , "Strong Love Affair" in 1996 is mainly composed of slow soul ballads with an overpowering lyrical preoccupation with growing old. It didn't find any takers and Warners closed his account.
Ray bided his time with appearances in the TV comedy The Nanny and television commercials and continued to tour, remaining very popular in Japan. In 2002 he got to release the last studio album in his lifetime with "Thanks For Bringing Love Around Again" . Age really is starting to take its toll with lazy electronic arrangements and a heavy dependence on backing vocalists to carry him through the songs, many of which seem only half-written.
In 2003 he had hip replacement surgery. He was then approached by A & R man John Burk to do an album of duets to be co-sponsored by Hear Music, the label owned by Starbucks. The star guests included Norah Jones, Elton John, James Taylor and Van Morrison on a collection of covers and revisits to earlier hits. It's all very tasteful and adult if you like that sort of thing. Before it could be released Ray died of acute liver failure in June 2004. It was released two months later as "Genius Loves Company" not a title you suspect Ray would have chosen for himself. Starbuck's heavily promoted it in their stores and it entered the US charts at number 2. Two months later the biopic Ray was released and after Jamie Foxx won the Best Actor Oscar for playing him the record went to number one. It reached number 18 in the UK and the duet with Norah Jones on "Here We Go Again" was a minor hit in France and Austria.
Later that year a Christmas album Ray had recorded with a gospel choir was released. In 2005 , a second volume, "Genius And Friends", cobbling together previously unreleased duets Ray had recorded at various times between 1997 and 2003, reached number 36 in the US. In 2008, "Ray Swings, Basie Swings" bolted together live vocals from concerts in the seventies to new arrangements by the Count Basie Orchestra and reached number 23. Two years after that , "Rare Genius: The Undiscovered Masters " worked up 10 outtakes and demoes to a releasable standard but by then people had had enough of the barrel-scraping and it was ignored.
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