Following the predictable but agreeable strains of Aly’s fiddle and Phil’s accordion on BBC1 Scotland’s Hogmanay Show, a timeworn ritual marred only by a hoarse Marti Pellow slaughtering some hapless auld folk song, and with a view to avoiding the Soul, Passion and Honesty of Jools Holland’s Mid-November Hootenanny – despite its supposedly stellar cast list, Ruby Turner seemed to be belching away every time I flicked over to BBC2 – I turned over for reassurance, or refuge, to the Take That O2 Arena concert, broadcast on Scottish TV about half an hour after it took place. My mum loves the jigs and reels of Messrs Bain and Cunningham but loved Take That even more, and I could see her point. It set me thinking just how great an album an imagined combination of Beautiful World and Rudebox might have been – in the White Album sense – with Gary’s staunch reliability counterbalancing Robbie’s rambles. Occupying a midspace pitched between the Pet Shop Boys at Wembley ’91, Close Encounters and Torvill And Dean’s Holiday On Ice, the performance proved that Take That had learned from New Pop in terms of presentation if not quite in terms of music. The deployment of Cee-Lo Green – in the Lulu role on “Relight My Fire” (into which he interspersed a snatch of “Crazy”) and as general wise seer and handyman elsewhere – was certainly a coup though I hope that Green doesn’t get cul-de-sacked into having to find even more novel and exhausting ways of singing that one song on tap, since his Cee-Lo Green…Is The Soul Machine has slowly increased in attraction over the last few years and may well end up one of this decade’s key albums.
The keystone, though, was “Could It Be Magic,” which Take That now interpret in the original Manilow arrangement. Taken in tandem with the subtle lyric change in “Never Forget” (now it’s “and we’re not so young”), the performance illustrated the strangely logical duality of youth and adult responses to pop; back in early 1993 they sped it up even faster than Donna Summer managed and delivered the song in a boisterous hi-NRG (moderate setting) manner. And of course, Robbie sang the original lead; one still can’t visualise him doing so now, and certainly not in this environment. So the band had to retrench and reconsider – and it came out as a performance of no small wonder.
Manilow’s original – released on album in 1975, a US hit single in 1976 and eventually a UK hit single in 1979 (in Britain, Manilow has always been viewed and adored as a live act and as an albums artist, in that order) – still strikes me as one of the last expressions of the 1967-8 move towards avant-balladry (Scott 3, Odessa, A Tramp Shining etc.); long and in its own boldly modest way experimental, which begins and ends the same but not in the same place. One can imagine “Could It Be Magic?” as the dream of the young Julliard student, brushing up on his Chopin at the library piano; the song is based on Chopin’s Prelude in C Minor (Op 28, No 20 to be exact), a piece very familiar to me in early 1979 since I had to learn it as part of my Grade V piano lessons. He drifts into abstractly suppressed pleas for inspiration (“Spirits move me”) but then with carefully gradated passion expresses his joy and wonder at the woman he loves and who seems to love him; I have no idea whether his “sweet Melissa” (diplomatically changed by Gary Barlow to “you’re my lifeline”) was fellow Arista recording artist Melissa Manchester, but he is clearly spellbound, tentatively making his way up the arching stairway of “Baby I love you” before strings echo his yearning request – “Come, come, come into my arms” – and underscore his bewildered but already bordering on ecstatic rhetorical question of “Could this be the magic at last?”
His tentativeness of delivery also excuses the occasional odd lyrical lapse – shouldn’t she be the “answer to all questions I can find” rather than the “answer to all answers,” and I’m not quite sure of the extra-astrological significance of the point where the stallions meet the sun; it all fits with the song’s emotional tenor, however, and note how the bass sighs as Manilow makes his key push towards enlightenment and union, answered by sliding cymbal and middleground choir – the procession is so natural sounding that I don’t at all mind the clear orchestra cues of his spoken “Come on!”s, since it continues to build up with true boldness until drums crash, hands clap en masse (the spectre of Spector isn’t far away: cf. Dion’s “Make The Woman Love Me,” recorded the same year) and Barry’s “COME!”s reveal their true meaning; poignant because the song never quite shifts out of the minor key, and therefore out of uncertainty. It climaxes with the repeated fanfares (they’ve come) of the French horns upon which Manilow’s voice disappears into the ether of oneness, leaving the post-“Hey Jude” arrangement to continue, possibly forever and putting me in mind of the pivotal role of the French horn as emotional catalyst in pop – think of, inter alia, First Class’ “Beach Baby,” Nancy Sinatra’s “You Only Live Twice” (the Hazlewood-produced version) and Billy Fury’s “In Thoughts Of You” – before that phantasm, that splendid chimera, also vanishes, leaving Barry alone again, at the piano, bringing the Prelude to a close with the huge question mark of his final two chords, i.e. will it happen, and if so is it magic? One 1979 Sunday afternoon, on the Top 40 countdown, it was followed by “The Staircase (Mystery)” by Siouxsie and the Banshees – another great single in one of our greatest years for singles – and nobody understood how or why I could be bewitched by both, or indeed either. But the song’s naïvely knowing greatness has endured, perhaps most greatly in the version sung by Sylvester and his keyboard player Eric Robinson on the Living Proof album, recorded live at the San Francisco Opera House at around the same time as half of a medley with Leon Russell’s “A Song For You” – the two turn it into a hymn of holy devotion, and their final, extended beyond all rational forms of breath, declaration of the “last” on “could this be the magic at last?” are like Isis and Osiris arising from their golden slumbers to the bluest air of transcendence and peace.
The keystone, though, was “Could It Be Magic,” which Take That now interpret in the original Manilow arrangement. Taken in tandem with the subtle lyric change in “Never Forget” (now it’s “and we’re not so young”), the performance illustrated the strangely logical duality of youth and adult responses to pop; back in early 1993 they sped it up even faster than Donna Summer managed and delivered the song in a boisterous hi-NRG (moderate setting) manner. And of course, Robbie sang the original lead; one still can’t visualise him doing so now, and certainly not in this environment. So the band had to retrench and reconsider – and it came out as a performance of no small wonder.
Manilow’s original – released on album in 1975, a US hit single in 1976 and eventually a UK hit single in 1979 (in Britain, Manilow has always been viewed and adored as a live act and as an albums artist, in that order) – still strikes me as one of the last expressions of the 1967-8 move towards avant-balladry (Scott 3, Odessa, A Tramp Shining etc.); long and in its own boldly modest way experimental, which begins and ends the same but not in the same place. One can imagine “Could It Be Magic?” as the dream of the young Julliard student, brushing up on his Chopin at the library piano; the song is based on Chopin’s Prelude in C Minor (Op 28, No 20 to be exact), a piece very familiar to me in early 1979 since I had to learn it as part of my Grade V piano lessons. He drifts into abstractly suppressed pleas for inspiration (“Spirits move me”) but then with carefully gradated passion expresses his joy and wonder at the woman he loves and who seems to love him; I have no idea whether his “sweet Melissa” (diplomatically changed by Gary Barlow to “you’re my lifeline”) was fellow Arista recording artist Melissa Manchester, but he is clearly spellbound, tentatively making his way up the arching stairway of “Baby I love you” before strings echo his yearning request – “Come, come, come into my arms” – and underscore his bewildered but already bordering on ecstatic rhetorical question of “Could this be the magic at last?”
His tentativeness of delivery also excuses the occasional odd lyrical lapse – shouldn’t she be the “answer to all questions I can find” rather than the “answer to all answers,” and I’m not quite sure of the extra-astrological significance of the point where the stallions meet the sun; it all fits with the song’s emotional tenor, however, and note how the bass sighs as Manilow makes his key push towards enlightenment and union, answered by sliding cymbal and middleground choir – the procession is so natural sounding that I don’t at all mind the clear orchestra cues of his spoken “Come on!”s, since it continues to build up with true boldness until drums crash, hands clap en masse (the spectre of Spector isn’t far away: cf. Dion’s “Make The Woman Love Me,” recorded the same year) and Barry’s “COME!”s reveal their true meaning; poignant because the song never quite shifts out of the minor key, and therefore out of uncertainty. It climaxes with the repeated fanfares (they’ve come) of the French horns upon which Manilow’s voice disappears into the ether of oneness, leaving the post-“Hey Jude” arrangement to continue, possibly forever and putting me in mind of the pivotal role of the French horn as emotional catalyst in pop – think of, inter alia, First Class’ “Beach Baby,” Nancy Sinatra’s “You Only Live Twice” (the Hazlewood-produced version) and Billy Fury’s “In Thoughts Of You” – before that phantasm, that splendid chimera, also vanishes, leaving Barry alone again, at the piano, bringing the Prelude to a close with the huge question mark of his final two chords, i.e. will it happen, and if so is it magic? One 1979 Sunday afternoon, on the Top 40 countdown, it was followed by “The Staircase (Mystery)” by Siouxsie and the Banshees – another great single in one of our greatest years for singles – and nobody understood how or why I could be bewitched by both, or indeed either. But the song’s naïvely knowing greatness has endured, perhaps most greatly in the version sung by Sylvester and his keyboard player Eric Robinson on the Living Proof album, recorded live at the San Francisco Opera House at around the same time as half of a medley with Leon Russell’s “A Song For You” – the two turn it into a hymn of holy devotion, and their final, extended beyond all rational forms of breath, declaration of the “last” on “could this be the magic at last?” are like Isis and Osiris arising from their golden slumbers to the bluest air of transcendence and peace.
