"All sensible people will readily admit that to be American is an essentially hellish state to which no one in their right mind would aspire" Guardian Saturday January 27, 2001 I don't care what people say - I like All Saints. The girl group may or may not currently exist, of course, after one spat too many over whether Shaz or Nat got to wear the gold combat jacket, but even this is cool. Unlike the Spice Girls Mk II and their endless, depressing show of Friends Foreverish phoniness, the All Saints reflect the awful but unremarkable truth that people who work together for any length of time come to get on each other's nerves something awful. They are a refreshing refutation of that disgusting "We work together, we play together, and work's just like play because we're all such good mates!" ethos that has seen such a comeback in recent years with the Natural Nylon mob, the Richard Curtis Notting Hill set and Blair's stinking cackle of cronies. Furthermore, I love the way the Saints were presented as a "natural", organic alternative to the Spices, when, of course, they are nothing of the sort. If you see photos of Baby or Scary when they were unknown, they look more or less the same, give or take a Versace jacket and a decent haircut. But when you see a photograph of the young Natalie Appleton - to my mind, literally the most beautiful woman in the world today - there is absolutely no point of connection whatsoever with the current appearance. She looks as much like a whole other person as does a supergrass who's been sent off to have a new face put on before he lives out his days incognito in Spain. That's so much more cool, I reckon, than the timid little habit of having a bit of cowardly tweaking here and there, and hoping that it looks "real". So, the point is that I would basically forgive the All Saints anything. Anything, that is, except their latest single, All Hooked Up. Ooo! Ouch! I'm talking real-time minor-league trauma here. Because, over and over again, some old Saint keeps singing (and you should, gentle English reader, forgive the expression), "I know that you want a piece of my ass." Oh me! Oh my! as Craig David would say. I'm by no means a prude, but I find this little toe-tapper only slightly less perturbing than the legendary Je T'Aime duet between Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin, during which a decent young Englishwoman tried to explain how she could possibly ever feel one iota of sexual attraction towards a Frog twice her age who regularly beat her up and made records about how much he wanted to have sex with his daughter. "I know that you want a piece of my ass." Missus! Surely it's not only me who, against all odds, draws back, puts on a Kenneth Williams whine and shrieks, "Oooo! Not even with two saveloys and a portion of mushy peas, luv!" If it was Mary J Blige, we wouldn't turn a hair, but the fact that All Saints are English, and attempting to communicate in a minority American vernacular, should strike anyone with the least bit of feeling for the fitness of things as extremely amusing and grotesque. All Saints habitually sing with American accents, of course, an occurrence so common in English popular music that it's barely worth commenting on. However, I don't quite understand why Ali G is obviously funny while, say, Scots Londoner Rod Stewart pretending to be a dead old black man isn't. Age hasn't withered the habit, either. Anyone addicted to the fantastic PopStars programme will have noticed that, while the hopeful youngsters speak in the broadest Scots, Irish and northern English accents imaginable, when they begin to sing they all sound like the same confused, yowling moose. That is, they all sound American. Now, all sensible people will readily admit that to be an American is an essentially hellish and moronic state to which no one in their right mind would aspire. To be born British, especially, and aspire to this low condition would seem rather like throwing a platinum bracelet back in the face of an admirer and demanding a Perspex bangle instead. Only two types of people move there: the morally bankrupt, such as Amis and Rushdie; and the monumentally dim, such as Vinnie Jones, who hope with good reason that their stupidy will pass for normal in such a sea of dunces. Why, then, when it comes to crooning, does every damned warbler - with the odd exception such as Bryan Ferry and Steven Morrissey - aspire to having been born on the other side of the pond? And often, the most apparently anti-American and intelligent singers, such as Elvis Costello, are the most blatant offenders. The obvious answer is that rock'n'roll was born in the US and therefore it's a sort of living homage. But that's obviously not true of, say, the chanson, which is, of course, French in origin. But if an English singer stood up and performed a chanson in a French accent, he'd get bottled off. It would seem like he was making fun of French people - a noble occupation, admittedly, but there's a time and a place for everything. No, the reason why American is the natural language of pop is that the character of its people - babyish, petulant, shallow - is echoed so resonantly in the I-want-I-need-I'm-gonna-scream-and-scream-until-I'm-sick ethos of pop itself. With her typical tin-ear, Madonna is reported to be taking English lessons. It'll never catch on. I was happy to see that the very clever writer Lorna Sage, who died recently, named her only child Sharon. And also that my favourite ever EastEnders character, Sharon Watts, is about to return. Sharon is a beautiful name; as is Tracey, as is Debbie. Sharon, Tracey, Debbie, Julie - silky, sinuous, mellifluous. And quite beyond the pale, taste-wise. There are many irritating things about the Daily Mail, but surely a contender for most irritating item is Keith Waterhouse's recurrent Sharon and Tracey column, in which two monumentally thick working-class shopgirls demonstrate that they have the IQ of a sock. From time to time, highly-qualified young Sharons and Traceys write in to the paper and request that Waterhouse desists. But the tired old routine drags on and on. Can we imagine Waterhouse being allowed regularly to spoof two stupid, idle West Indians or Irishmen in his column, even in the Daily Mail? Of course not. And talk about pots and kettles. Isn't "Keith" a bit of a joke name itself? But then, no old Fleet Street geezer ever finds himself ridiculous. "Wayne" will always sound funnier than "Auberon" to them. I'll never forget the delightful spectacle of Hunter Davies trying to humiliate the boy pop star Marilyn and having the tables roundly turned on him. "What kind of name is Marilyn?" he sneered unpleasantly. "I don't know, Hunter," came back the response. "What kind of name is Hunter?" _______________________________________________ Crashlist website: http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base
