And now for something different. A somewhat atypical 33 at 33 feature, vaguely based around Yazoo and Erasure synthmeister Vince Clarke naming Michael Jackson’s Dangerous as, surprisingly, one of his favourite albums. More on that later…
Michael Jackson’s Dangerous? Now there’s a thought that went through many a people’s minds back in the day. But we’re not here to talk about video crimes and misdemeanours, because thirty-three years ago this week MJ’s eighth solo album was sitting at No. 33 in the UK album charts.
Depending on your point of view, that unremarkable placing may have been a cause for concern or celebration. Yet what is an incontrovertible fact is that not only was Dangerous the first Jackson album after the era-defining Q Trilogy (the Quincy Jones produced Off The Wall, Thriller, Bad) but it was, less proudly, the first set to suffer from what the Pet Shop Boys tartly described as “the Paul Weller syndrome”.
This is where a major name, usually in their post-imperial survival phase, enters the charts with all guns blazing, thanks to blanket publicity and a coterie of loyal/rabid/hardcore (delete as appropriate) disciples who try and buy everything on the day or week of release, yet there may not be the time or inclination for more fairweather fans to get behind the record before it plummets down the charts, its life forever on a downward spiral.
Case in point, on the British chart week dated 29 March – 4 April 1992 the rival star turns who also released albums in time for Christmas 1991 — Bryan Adams’ Waking Up The Neighbours, Tina Turner’s Simply The Best, Genesis’ We Can’t Dance, U2’s Achtung Baby, and the year’s biggest seller, Simply Red’s ubiquitous Stars — were all enjoying significantly higher positions than Jacko despite every one of them being released earlier.
The U2 opus is the most pertinent example: in November 1991, Achtung Baby was locked in a head-to-head with Dangerous when the Irish munchkins’ ‘Berlin’ album was issued conventionally on Monday the 18th while the Sony/MJ camp chose to rip up the rule book and issue their rival product on Thursday the 21st.
Of course their machinations worked, albeit only for that headline-grabbing chart debut. U2 had famously enjoyed huge first week sales with their preceding albums Rattle And Hum and The Joshua Tree (depriving Pet Shop Boys and Simply Red of chart-toppers respectively).
But in ’91 the band lost out to Dangerous because the hype surrounding MJ’s atypical “event” release had the result of forcing his fans to rush to purchase the album in droves for what would be just a two-day window to qualify for the chart position announced that Sunday evening on BBC Radio 1.
Denying the Dubliners of the top spot meant that Achtung Baby was the band’s only studio album in a three decade stretch from 1983 to 2014 that failed to get to No. 1.
Yet, conversely, it was MJ not U2 whose sales had started to tail off dramatically, at least in Blighty. Dangerous was also the first Jackson LP that enjoyed a brief stay in pole position of just seven days, but not the last. Every subsequent studio set in that magniloquent run of albums did just the same — though with even less units shifted and weeks on charts than Dangerous — before Jackson came to a sticky end in 2009.
Magniloquent, I hear you ask? Aye, every one of the Jackson(s) albums after 1979’s Off The Wall were grandiosely appended with bombastic, self-aggrandising monikers that were not only hideously conceited but whose titles were often cases of wishful thinking more than anything else. The evidence speaks for itself, tough guy:
Triumph
Victory
Dangerous
With mission statements so overblown, insipid or even illogical, one assumes that if the fedora-loving freak show had lived then the next album might have been called Sick.
Anyway, enough of the hats and stats. Like David Bowie’s Enossified and eccentric Outside four years later, Dangerous was a double album in all but name (in vinyl terms both artists’ only twin-disc studio affairs), and in both cases there is something deeply necrotic and claustrophobic about both sprawling opuses.
Alas, despite the bloated breadth of material on offer (14 tracks running to 77 minutes) I’ve purposely resisted the temptation to substantially review the songs on dangerous when Vince Clarke is about to have his say.
I will just point out that as someone who was a major lover of the shady man in the mirror — and by that I hasten to add that I was an admirer of Bad era MJ (I was a teenager; Bowie did next to nothing in ’88; here’s where the story ends) — I ummed and ahhed for months whether to buy the sequel. And that garish cartoon cover that looked like it was lifted from the side of a fairground waltzer hardly helped.
Dean, Dave and I were on a road trip, driving from Cambridge to a Tin Machine gig in Brixton, when BBC Radio 1 premiered the first 45, Black Or White. All of a sudden, liking Michael Jackson’s music seemed infantile and a bit silly. We listened quietly until the song was over, and the when the lads asked my opinion, all I could muster were two succinct words: “It’s crap.”
And let’s not even talk about that hideous ‘short film‘ that took up half of an entire episode of Top of The Pops later that same week.
Now 22 and about to the make the move to the bright lights and big city of London, I’d grown weary of Jacko’s Disney aesthetic and signature whoops and shrieks. Especially as the music supporting them was now reliant on increasingly incongruous industrial soundscapes and nutcracker metallic beats, the most obvious influence being Janet Jackson‘s Rhythm Nation 1814, from 1989.
Despite the feeling he was playing catch up to his own sister, with its contemporary-sounding complexity and modernity Dangerous is certainly a more ambitious record than Bad. Notably, urban urchin Teddy Riley and co cast their New Jack Swing shebang — ostensibly a more commercial family friendly cousin to Hip-Hop — over the proceedings with the result, intentional or not, of turning Michael Jackson into a more beige version of Bobby Brown.
I could be obvious and admit ’90s R&B wasn’t for me (oh, hi, yet another guest rap three-quarter through? How original!), but then I grew to love Prince’s Diamonds And Pearls, despite not seeing him in concert until 2007. Oh, the irony. Especially when, slightly reluctantly, I did give one of Michael’s Wembley Stadium shows a go, in 1992.
Truth be told, the Dangerous tour was just a more megalomaniac rejig of the Bad tour. To rub salt in the wounds, I found the long pauses between songs — not to mention a shocking reliance on lip-synching for many of them — beyond embarrassing.
In the end, even Dangerous sending a record breaking seven singles into the UK top 10, not to mention that campy clip for Remember The Time with Iman and Eddie Murphy, couldn’t sway me. One of the 45s — a gospel-tinged onion-in-the-pocket thing called Will You Be There — did make me feel something, but when, after a screening of the video, I told my housemates was “brilliant” they assumed I was joking.
I firmly resisted the temptation to own anything connected Dangerous until a 2001 ‘Special Edition’ album remaster. And even then it was only because it was tacitly part of a set with the previous Sony albums, Off The Wall, Thriller and Bad.
Yet with the advent of Dangerous, it’s as if MJ’s creative output from here on in was one long a primal scream of unfettered rage, with each work seemingly angrier than the last.
Still, I got through an entire Michael Jackson article without mentioning the child abuse allegations. Ooops.
Over to the Erasure egghead then.
This was the first record of his that I liked. I think it’s really aggressive, in a good way, and hard. I always associated with Michael Jackson with all the Thriller stuff, which I didn’t really like, but I thought this was a real step out from that safe zone that he’d been in.
I’m not a Michael Jackson expert, but this is one of those records that you have to play really really loudly. The production on it is amazing. I guess Dangerous was the closest he got, not to my style of production, but a more synthetic sound.
Apparently, we did one of those award ceremonies, what are they called in the UK? The Brits. That’s it. I was there with Alison [Moyet, Yazoo vocalist] and he was there and I don’t really remember, because I was into not being starstruck. Alison saw him and she leapt over the security guards and gave Michael Jackson a massive kiss, it was really funny. All the security guys were looking on going, ‘What the fuck was that?’
I think there‘s a picture of us with all these really famous people like Paul McCartney, all lined up looking like geeks.
Vince Clarke, Erasure
Reproduced courtesy of thequietus.com
Preamble by Steve Pafford
The third BPI Awards at the Grosvenor House Hotel, Park Lane, 8 February 1983. Yazoo were the most nominated group along with ABC that year.
Left to right: John Williams, Vince Clarke, Pete Townsend, Michael Jackson, Kid Creole, Trevor Horn, Alison Moyet, Paul McCartney, George Martin, Kim Wilde, Linda McCartney, Freddie Starr, David Knopfler and Dire Straits manager Ed Bicknell
