Song 2: Goldfrapp – Rocket
Around its release in March, much was made of how utterly stuck-in-1984 Rocket sounded. The Van Halen synths, the pumped-up bass, and Alison Goldfrapp mincing around the record’s sleeve in a pink catsuit shooting lasers out of her hand: to call it throwback is kind of the point, one assumes. But there’s nothing wrong with pastiche in pop as long as it’s better than the source from which it’s drawn – and Rocket is exactly that.
What’s such fun about 80s poodle rock and keytar-driven nonsense is the triumphalism and mania that runs throughout its production, the sense that the world isn’t big enough for this three-minute pop song, the idea that subtlety’s for wimps. Rocket has all that in spades. What’s not so good is that the emotional depth of those songs just about runs to knee slides and air-punches, and accordingly Rocket relies on Alison Goldfrapp’s vocal to elevate itself above that trashiness– and the way she does that makes it the wonderful record it is.
Sweet and doe-eyed in the verse then belligerent and strong in the choruses, her delivery is the song’s secret weapon. The opening “started something, thought it could be fun” is as mournful and expressive in its own way as the saddest end of Joni Mitchell’s catalogue, and the woah-oh-ohs that usher in the hook are as life-affirming as they need to be after all that minor-key melancholy. Indeed, so rousing is the chorus, and so apt is it to be sung by thousands in unison, it’s surely only a matter of time until it goes the same way as Village People’s Go West or Domenico Modugno’s Volare and is adopted by football’s terrace songwriters: “Woah-oh-woah, we’ve got Wayne Rooney…” – it’s far from inconceivable.
Indeed, perhaps the only disappointment about Rocket is that it hasn’t become the total anthem that it seems both to deserve and long to be. This blog doesn’t bother itself unduly with the implications of sales figures on a song’s worth, but for a lead single, and one that is so commercially brazen that it virtually leads you to the record shop and thrusts itself into your hands, to peak at 47 in the charts is mystifying. Instead, Rocket should’ve been a number-one hit, played in Balearic clubs and the back of taxis, admired for its braggadocio as much as its tenderness. After all, it’s one of the best pop songs not just of this year but in recent memory – camp, calamitous, instantly familiar and almost impossible to tire of.
