Paul Hardcastle - Rain Forest - 1985 - Bluebird
Tuesday, August 19th, 2008
Click above for big pictures, click below to play me…
In 1985, the song ‘19′ seemed like just another Paul Hardcastle record, but it wasn’t, it was different in many ways - particularly the difference between the prices. A previously recorded song called ‘Rain Forest’ for example cost me 8 pence and was entirely instrumental… but ‘19′ was a hit which you bought for £1.50 and also had nonsensical words.
N-N-N-N-Nonsensical words.
This Previous Song Any Good ?
‘All those who remember the war-orrr, they won’t forget what they’ve seen…’ the middle eight of ‘19′ begins oxymoronically - and what exact situation is it that these poor petrified soldiers will both always remember and never forget, as if these acts of memory recall are two completely separate feats ?
‘Destruction!’ of course, ‘of men in their pry-ime whose average age was 19.”
This famous statistical conclusion is obviously extremely thought provoking, but the song itself is really rather weighed down by the mention of a detailed mathematical calculation and the clunky usage of the word ‘average’ - which presumably worked sparklingly well when spoken dolefully by a heavy smoker in a documentary on the television, but unfortunately doesn’t scan very well when shrieked out loud by a female vocalist.
Indeed, in my more wistful moments I dream that a following line in the lyric - ‘The cube root of which incidentally is 2.668401648721945′ - was hastily axed by nervous record company executives fearing nerdy Paul’s war-orr based calculations were starting to get just a little bit too complex for the casual listener to fully digest.
Can You Tell Me About Rain Forest Please ?
If that weren’t enough, the sentence’s badly thought out phraseology when taken in it’s entirety reads
‘All those who remember the war-orrr, they won’t forget what they’ve seen : Destruction of men in their pry-ime whose average age was 19.’
and suggests that the aforementioned ex-soldiers aren’t just endlessly reliving the dreadful time they watched all their best friends getting their fucking heads ripped off by submachine gun fire in the terrifying battleground of Vietnam.
Instead it seems they are actually endlessly reliving the dreadful time they watched all their best friends getting their fucking heads ripped off by submachine gun fire in the terrifying battleground of Vietnam - with the very important caveat that at that moment they were all more than fully aware that their average age was 19. If Paul’s sensational claim is true, we must only conclude that whilst all the absolute total hell of death and near death and brain/face juxtapositional clashes were horrifically taking place both on and around them all, the US soldiers were independently consistently calculating the arithmetic mean average age of all their counterparts - and if this really was happening then, frankly, it’s no wonder they lost the bloody war.
Rain Forest ?
‘Di-Di Di-Di Di-Di Di-Destruction!
Di-Di Di-Di Di-Di Di-Destruction!’
the singer then repeats, apparently with the strange belief that saying this word twice with a rhythmic stammer will hammer this frankly unbelievable point home to an already sceptical audience. This is complete nonsense of course - after all, if repeatedly stammering in this way was an even remotely useful device to get people to listen to what you were saying to them, then I am sure interrogator de rigeur Mr Jeremy Paxman would have used it at least a couple of times in his famous interview with Michael Howard out of sheer fucking desperation.
‘Di-Di Di-Di Di-Di Di-Did you threaten to overule him ?
Di-Di Di-Di Di-Di Di-Did you threaten to overule him ?’
Mind you, if Jeremy had used this device, I suppose it would at least have allowed Michael Howard - when interviewed a couple of years later for one of those tedious talking heads programs about the recent past - to turn confusedly to the camera and also repeatedly state
‘I wasn’t really sure what was going on
I wasn’t really sure what was going on.’
Oi! Why Are You Going On About That Massive Hit Song ‘19′ ? I Know All About That Record, I Want To Know About This One - This Instrumental : Rain Forest.
Because ‘19′ was a worldwide hit for Paul Hardcastle on the major label Chrysalis in the same year that Rain Forest wasn’t a hit on the label Bluebird. It must thus follow that our Paul was either signed as a direct result of a general perceived wonderfulness of this record… or that this record was re-released after all that ‘19′ stuff in an attempt to cash in on the success of the other. Either way, what it does mean most categorically is that their histories are intrinsically and fascinatingly intertwined.
You’re Just Saying That Because You Can’t Think Of Anything To Say About Rain Forest Aren’t You ?
Absolutely not.
I Don’t Believe You.
OK, then I will talk about it for a bit.
Errr… as records go… Rain Forest is quite… squelchy.
Squelchy ?
Yes, squelchy.
It squelches along like your ever damp feet in a leaky pair of wellies after a particularly strong rainstorm.
In A Rain Forest Perhaps ?
Not really - more like around your local supermarket after you’ve dashed from the car park in an attempt to avoid the downpour. In fact, so much does it sound like the kind of thing Sainsbury’s might well play quietly yet sinisterly in the background whilst I buy some delicious processed food, by the end of the song I was absentmindedly pulling cans of baked beans off the shelf in my kitchen and handing them to my bemused cat to scan them in over the hob.
I Think I Vaguely Recognise This Song. Is That Possible ?
Yes, it is… as it turns out that it is both of the assumptions as stated above ie It is the song that inspired Chrysalis to sign him and a re-release after ‘19′ to cash in on his new number one status. Rain Forest was originally released in 1984 reaching the intensely magical heights of number 41 - and lets face it, you can’t get much more tantalisingly close to number 40 than that. It was originally recorded as a television theme tune for a programme about the British hip hop scene, only to then apparently get released itself and become a massive hit internationally selling over half a million copies worldwide. When re-released in the UK a year later however, it appears to have sold bugger all.
Interestingly, after all that ‘19′ stuttery stuff (the album of which Melody Maker’s Colin Irwin reviewed with words pretty much emulated everywhere else : ‘Paul Hardcastle is a clever bastard, but he seems to have no grasp of transferring true warmth and human emotion to record.’) Paul has now gone all Smooth Jazz on us - and very successful he is too :
He seems very well respected in his very glittery field and has even recently revisited this very song in an ohsojazzy way - it’s sounds a bit like the theme tune to Cagney and Lacey played at a tenth of the speed by a man you can only presume is
a) Endlessly winking at you. And,
b) Wearing gold lamé :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qCnkSMholc
Don’t care about his latest Smooth Jazz stuff and want to immerse yourself in Paul’s earlier work ? Then why not try the follow up single to ‘19′, ‘Just For Money’ featuring the voices of Sir Lawrence Olivier and Bob Hoskins - with the former enunciating painfully correctly and the latter grunting like a creepy cockernee :
http://tw.youtube.com/watch?v=jqj3c8-aTjE&feature=related
Or relive Paul’s theme tune to Top Of The Pops :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VNxzsUWBwz8
Or, completely off the subject, just watch all the Top Of The Pops theme tunes in one go :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uuSI2q_TVt0
Was The Average Of The Combat Soldier In Vietnam Really 19 ?
It depends upon who you want to believe.
This website, for example, claims the real average age to actually be a rather precise 22.8 years old :
http://www.vietnam-war.info/myths
But then, seeing as it also claims “The American military was not defeated in Vietnam” because “The American military did not lose a battle of any consequence “ - and describes it militarily as “almost an unprecedented performance” you may not want to 100% hang upon it’s every pronouncement.
This argument, along with a few others, is looked at in a bit more depth here if you’re interested :
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Why_did_the_US_lose_the_Vietnam_War
“Technically, we were not at war, we were advisors [as] the Congressional approval to fight in Vietnam was not given. “
Incidentally, the main documentary samples in ‘19′ are from a narration about the Vietnam war by an American chap called Peter Thomas. In a bizarre change of career, he then went on to become the digitised voice for the Philips Heartstart range of defibrillators which prompts emergency medical personnel on when to press that scary button which delivers an electric shock to the patient in an attempt to revive them.
And let’s face, if you were in a similar my heart’s just stopped beating situation, I should imagine suddenly hearing that voice yell CLEAR! would be shock enough to start your heart again all by itself.
You Haven’t Told Us Anything About This Record At All !
Well, I haven’t done that badly. After all, I regret to inform you that you have just spent a part of your life you will never get back again reading precisely 1495 words on the subject of Paul Hardcastle… with 251 of them dedicated soley to Rain Forest.
Now, if you take these 251 words as a percentage of the entire word count of the article, it works out as an entirely reasonably 16.78%.
Which is, ermmm… about average.
Money Update
Cost : 8 pence. There is another record here all about being 19 years old in Vietnam. Why not take a look, I got called a fuckwit because of it and everything : http://www.iamnotthebeatles.com/?p=387
Current Value : I got all excited for a few seconds there - as some people are charging 20 quid for this song. But it turns out that is only for the US release. My 8 pence version ? 2 pounds and 74 pennies. Pffffft. Don’t Waste My Time.
Current Profit : 212 pounds and 74 pence. Want to read the lyrics to ‘19′ ? The ones transcribed at the next link do a bit of a role reversal and make Vietnam sound like a war for geriatric oldies compared to the sprightly youngsters fighting in World War II. Just clicky here : http://homepage.ntlworld.com/gary.hart/lyricsh/hardcastle.html
Want to download some naughty free ‘19′ mixes whilst you’re at it ?
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