20YAT #5: Texas – White On Blonde
UK album chart peak: #1
“Texas couldn’t run and manage a successful paper merchants,” insists David Brent in the first season of The Office, recalling a time before he became general manager of the Slough branch of Wernham-Hogg when his band Foregone Conclusion were supported by “a little-known Scottish outfit”. He continues: “I couldn’t do what— actually, I could do what they do, and I think they knew it back then. It’s probably what spurred them on.”
That Texas is this joke’s punchline tells you all about the public perception of the band shortly after the success of White On Blonde: they are the kind of act held in high esteem not by critics or tastemakers but by middle-aged, middle-of-the-road middle managers like Brent who value “proper music” but lack the imagination to stray too far from the charts – indeed, exactly the kind of character first sympathised with and then sneered at by Blur a few years earlier.
It was White On Blonde that gave Texas this place in the dictionary of cultural shorthand, and it’s easy to see how. An album of unchallenging blue-eyed soul performed by a set of inoffensive personalities, White On Blonde is, on one level, the epitome of tasteful coffee-morning muzak. Its second half in particular, a parade of unadventurous four-note choruses and plasticky production, is thin gruel to even the most conservative pop fan.
But for all that Texas, on balance, probably deserve their reputation, the received wisdom surrounding White On Blonde does the album something of a disservice. After all, Texas were at their best when softly appropriating their influences and buffing them to an edgeless sheen, and, to that end, the first half of White On Blonde is a masterclass: Say What You Want, gently quoting Marvin Gaye’s Sexual Healing alongside a hint of Al Green and daisy-age hip-hop shuffle, is irresistibly pretty, Put Your Arms Around Me’s amiable melancholy has a depthless charm of which Stevie Nicks could be proud, and Insane’s Morricone guitars and muted trombones evoke the smokiness of Portishead’s Glory Box.
It’s Halo, though, the album’s surprisingly timless highlight, that rescues White On Blonde. Splashes of Springsteen, Fleetwood Mac and Prefab Sprout dapple the song’s melody with a polished poignancy, allowing the full range of Sharleen Spiteri’s voice to gleam, without ever dominating.
If White On Blonde is emblematic of anything in the greater context of 1997, it might be of the bloat to which so-called alternative music had succumbed by this stage in the nineties. Twenty years on, the album can be objectively observed as pop, but at the time it was positioned as authentic alternative culture, with ads in the weekly music press and indie festival bookings. Even if Texas fitted in to that scene, more or less – Spiteri, the sparky tomboy with French New Wave hairdo, certainly looked the 90s part – it also meant that David Brent was now welcome at the party, a situation that, if not exactly provocative, was perhaps a little too cosy for some.
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Also out this week:
David Bowie – Earthling (RCA). Chart peak #6
The Offspring – Ixnay On the Hombre (Epitaph). Chart peak #17
Spacehog – Resident Alien (Sire). Chart peak #40
