20YAT #3: Reef – Glow
UK album chart peak: #1
There really isn’t much to commend Glow, an album that’s aged as badly as one might expect from a series of blues-rock pastiches made by four lads from Somerset but delivered with an indistinct mid-Atlantic patois. Indeed, one suspects Glow might’ve sunk at the time, too, had its first track and lead single not mutated into one of those runaway successes that outgrows first its album then its own band, and ends up becoming a sort of permanent scorch mark on the musical landscape.
But that’s exactly what Place Your Hands became, and that’s why Glow gets a nod here: twenty years on, rock radio stations regularly vibrate to the song’s rubber-band guitar riffs, and we know, thanks to a pleasingly arch Twitter account reporting the song’s continuing success, that it still comfortably sells 600 or so copies every week.
It’s tempting to ascribe Place Your Hands’ popularity to a perfect storm of circumstance: adopted first by the laddier end of the Cool Britannia school, and then by Chris Evans, who thrusted it into the nation’s living rooms every weekend as the theme to TFI Friday’s viewers’ correspondence, its role was as a sort of totem for “proper music”, and its ascendance was accordingly pre-ordained.
But perhaps that’s uncharitable. After all, Place Your Hands has all the ingredients for a great novelty pop song: bright, bouncy instrumentation, quirky vocal tics, an irresistibly catchy chorus full of daft, karaoke-friendly lyrics, and just enough technical proficiency across the song to endow the band with an underdog charm. When those elements mesh as well as they do here, it’s a hard heart that denies the finished product.
Of course, one fun piece of bubblegum doesn’t make a sweet shop, and the less said about the rest of Glow – broadly, eleven successively weaker attempts at another Place Your Hands – the kinder.
Like a star striker at the front of an otherwise abject team, Place Your Hands dragged Glow to the top of the album charts for one week. Twenty years on from that brief triumph, however, there’s little else to celebrate.
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Also out this week: Eels – Beautiful Freak (Dreamworks). Chart peak #5
