Almost the nineties, on the threshold of the decade which she and Moroder helped invent, and Donna Summer couldn't get arrested; the alleged comments on Aids victims had torpedoed her career in the latter half of the eighties with only scant photocopies of hit records (e.g. 1987's burningly strange "Dinner With Gershwin") and the defiant Bronski Beat/Marc Almond reshaping of "I Feel Love" had outsold most of her eighties work put together.
At the other end of this particular telescope, it was Germany in the early seventies, and a young A&R man named Pete Waterman had approached Summer with a view to her joining the German dance act Silver Convention. But Summer went with Giorgio instead, and Silver Convention's own brief but buoyant run of international hits ("Fly Robin Fly," "Get Up And Boogie") went on to demonstrate that sometimes common language reached beyond barriers of words.
But in 1989, Stock Aitken & Waterman brought her back for one last Hail Mary of disco poignancy. The huge drone at the beginning of "This Time" stands like a particularly querulous question mark before A Linn's trademark jacks trot into the picture. The record's reflectively golden melancholy is helped by SAW's early adoption of Detroit techno mores, including Kevin Saunderson's patented synth-as-tuned-drums patterns; but there is also a briskness which signifies that we must continue to move on.
Donna Summer. She loves him but whatever she tries she can't get him to notice - walk a tightrope, write his name across the sky, shout through a megaphone, get on the radio, on the TV news, lease out a skyscraping neon sign - but she continues to strive in the full knowledge that he will end up unable to help noticing her and responding, with elegant chord changes which in another world could have come straight out of Gershwin (the deceptively complex musical world of SAW, indeed).
Then the chorus, and her voice is sufficient to rip through any skies, yearning, proclaiming (her growl on the "hands" of "when I get my hands on you" is the anti-Bros antidote), refusing to resign, fireworking the heavens with the neon Bible of the song's title, relaxing in the instrumental break with her offhand "oh, baby"s to counterbalance the nearly unbearable tension band wiring of "If I wait for you too long I might EXPLODE!"
On her last, climactic "real," the breath of which she will hold forever until he comes to love her, the express train of the music continues in a cautiously celebratory but also rather sad manner; those implied minor keys, but the possibility of failure or ignorance cannot be countenanced. They've brought her back for real, and this superlative single takes me directly back to jacking down Cromwell Road in the springy sun, the burnished ambers of Pimlico apartment blocks, visions of gold far from expired. A record of this emotional quality could not have been made without the human intensity SAW have so often been denied, just as it's easy to dismiss Jason Donovan as a Fairlight-assisted robot before recalling that "Nothing Can Divide Us" covers, in its own jolly, unsensational way, some three-and-a-half octaves.
At the other end of this particular telescope, it was Germany in the early seventies, and a young A&R man named Pete Waterman had approached Summer with a view to her joining the German dance act Silver Convention. But Summer went with Giorgio instead, and Silver Convention's own brief but buoyant run of international hits ("Fly Robin Fly," "Get Up And Boogie") went on to demonstrate that sometimes common language reached beyond barriers of words.
But in 1989, Stock Aitken & Waterman brought her back for one last Hail Mary of disco poignancy. The huge drone at the beginning of "This Time" stands like a particularly querulous question mark before A Linn's trademark jacks trot into the picture. The record's reflectively golden melancholy is helped by SAW's early adoption of Detroit techno mores, including Kevin Saunderson's patented synth-as-tuned-drums patterns; but there is also a briskness which signifies that we must continue to move on.
Donna Summer. She loves him but whatever she tries she can't get him to notice - walk a tightrope, write his name across the sky, shout through a megaphone, get on the radio, on the TV news, lease out a skyscraping neon sign - but she continues to strive in the full knowledge that he will end up unable to help noticing her and responding, with elegant chord changes which in another world could have come straight out of Gershwin (the deceptively complex musical world of SAW, indeed).
Then the chorus, and her voice is sufficient to rip through any skies, yearning, proclaiming (her growl on the "hands" of "when I get my hands on you" is the anti-Bros antidote), refusing to resign, fireworking the heavens with the neon Bible of the song's title, relaxing in the instrumental break with her offhand "oh, baby"s to counterbalance the nearly unbearable tension band wiring of "If I wait for you too long I might EXPLODE!"
On her last, climactic "real," the breath of which she will hold forever until he comes to love her, the express train of the music continues in a cautiously celebratory but also rather sad manner; those implied minor keys, but the possibility of failure or ignorance cannot be countenanced. They've brought her back for real, and this superlative single takes me directly back to jacking down Cromwell Road in the springy sun, the burnished ambers of Pimlico apartment blocks, visions of gold far from expired. A record of this emotional quality could not have been made without the human intensity SAW have so often been denied, just as it's easy to dismiss Jason Donovan as a Fairlight-assisted robot before recalling that "Nothing Can Divide Us" covers, in its own jolly, unsensational way, some three-and-a-half octaves.
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