First it was the turn of the Windows Media Player on my computer. That didn’t do it. So I next tried my Boombox during a workout. That didn’t achieve anything. Neither did the workout. I’m still not anything to look at and neither was the record. So I tried it in the bathroom, forgoing my usual five-minute finger workout for something that so far hadn’t threatened to yield the same brief momentary pleasure. So in the end I just kept playing it. Wherever. Whether I was in the bathroom, the bedroom or in the ladies chamber – it didn’t matter – at some point I would just have to get the point. And eventually I did. You might say that all good things come to those who wait. You might say that if you sling enough mud at it, the mud will eventually stick. You might however argue that by playing something to death you will eventually grow to love it. It’s that old Kidnapper scenario, I guess. You eventually grow to identify and sympathise with your captor, if for no other reason that than they define and determine your immediate future. And for a time fella, they’re your only real friend. And so it was with Mousse T. I wasn’t able to justify or condone his past behaviour (the flagrantly geriatric piece of nonsense that was Tom Jones’ ‘Sex Bomb’ or the dearly lamentable ‘Horny’) nor was I able to able to really understand why the record was so straightforward and so utterly devoid of pretension. I’d recently been listening to Air and Alessandro Baricco’s ‘City Reading’ – so I knew what pretension was. But I was able to sympathise with it. It dawned on me that this was the whole bloody point. It wasn’t supposed to be a painstakingly crafted leftfield dance manifesto, it was pop, pure and simple. Pop with a capital ‘P’. Pop, Jim, not as we know it – but as it should be. An album packed with as many peaks as it is troughs, where the careless and the disposable is the one pivotal extreme in an otherwise pointless endeavour. As crazy as it was hear the Roxette-meets-Basement Jaxx-meets-T-Rex party-isms of hit single ‘Is It ‘Cos I’m Cool’ it was also bizarrely liberating once you accepted it for it really is: bright, breezy knockout bubblebum cheese. Even the thoroughly disrespectful – ney profane – use of ex-Strangler and coolio Hugh Cornwell on the paisley-printed sixties tunefest that is ‘Underground’ may stagger belief but in this context it works. What is this context? This context is the odd, surprising and implausible parallel universe of a spacewankered pop-astronaut who simply doesn’t give a shit about cool and who can chuck-up the limp, awkward soul of ‘Sex Has Gone’ (featuring Roachford – yes that Roachford!) just as easily as he can ejaculate the blissful froth of pop that is ‘Wow’ (featuring Emma Lanford) and ‘Turn Me On’ (featuring Kathleen Chaplin – granddaughter Charlie).
Tracks like ‘Bounce’ may desperately try to rehash the sass and vigour of tele-ad favourites like Groove Armada’s ‘I See You Baby (Shakin’ That Ass)’ but the delicately hewn downtempo class of ‘Just Look At Us Now’, ‘Music Makes Me Fly’ and ‘All Nite Madness’ provides a near perfect alibi.
Don’t expect it to change your life, but if you want to prolong the sun for just a little while longer, it’s a lot less embarrassing than purchasing a rub-in tan.