Especially For You

I greeted Pete Waterman's announcement that he's putting together a Hit Factory tour this summer with initial delight, rapidly followed by a sense of trepidation.  Delight because - hey, Rick Astley, Lonnie Gordon and Jason Donovan on the same stage?  The possibility of Kylie and Jason reforming for one last performance of 'Especially For You' (a single I queued round the block outside Our Price to buy on its release date)? Stop it!  

I'm in my mid-thirties, so PWL's Hit Factory formed the sounds of my youth.  And to be honest, I'm immensely glad of it.  It was sneered at then; even more so now.  It doesn't carry the grinding right-on cachet of punk; it doesn't have the simpering fey flourish of the New Romantics.  But what you heard was, quite simply, what you got.  Glittering musical rainbows.  It was fun; nothing was ever taken too seriously, and it made you want to sing along and make up dance routines in your bedroom (something my best friend and I used to do religiously after school to Kylie, The Reynolds Girls and Mel and Kim - we'd then perform the dances to one another and 'grade' them; a bit like an early version of 'Britain's Got Talent'.  I was a notoriously low-grader and made her work for her 10s, whereas she thought everything I did was brilliant.  We're still best friends now, and life hasn't changed much since then!)  My wedding reception was heartened by the PWL mix I insisted on the DJ playing, much to the lament of my husband and the DJ himself.  "You'll be the only one dancing to that rubbish!" the DJ fumed, only half-joking.  But he was wrong.  The opening bars of 'Too Many Broken Hearts' caused a stampeding-elephant-like rush to the dance floor that just made me beam inside.

And yet...I felt trepidation because as I read the tour announcement I knew my phone would start beeping almost instantaneously with messages from excited friends (of around my age, natch) asking if I wanted to go along to Hyde Park and watch the show in all its glory.  Which it did.  But reader, I declined.  Why?  Well - without question it'd be a bit fun, but it'd also be a bit sad, too.  Everybody's twenty-five years older now, including us; I'm a bit worried that the songs wouldn't sound the way they did when we and they were young.  I suspect that now we'd find them all a bit...irrelevant.  I love Kylie and Jason, but they're not going to be able to pull off 'Especially For You' the way they did in the video (incidentally still one of my most favourite music videos of all time) because now we know how they ended up.  She left him for Michael Hutchence; he took too many drugs.  Watching them perform 'Especially For You' now would be like the first time you saw someone dressed up as Father Christmas once you knew for certain he wasn't real...pointless, a bit depressing and devoid of any magic.

So I think those songs and those performers need to be frozen in time and enjoyed the way they were then, not the way they are now.  I'll stick to the occasional evenings when I get my friends over and we watch my 'PWL Gold' video collection with a few bottles of wine; laughing at the utter state of the Reynolds Girls in their charity-shop leggings and freeze-framing Lonnie Gordon's constipated facial expressions in the video for 'Happenin' All Over Again'.  Whilst hoping that now, for all our sakes, it doesn't all start "happenin' all over again".