![]() What’s been going on now that you have gone It’s at this point where “Tempted” plays its first great trick: an absolutely-stick-in-your-head chorus anchored by a three-note piano hook as well as Carrack’s pained confession. The story goes that meddling new producer Elvis Costello - who had just released his soul deep-dive Get Happy!! - heard Carrack singing “Tempted” and decided to recut it as as a straight-up blue-eyed soul song with Carrack singing the lead vocals, which come in after drummer Gilson Lavis and bassist John Bently have established a smoldering groove and Carrack has established the musical voice with a long organ trill. Produced by Dave Edmunds, that version was totally different, more of a reggae-ish take than the one that eventually showed on an odds-and-sods comp called Excess Moderation. I’ll get more into the recording of East Side Story tomorrow, but suffice it to say that “Tempted” was originally recorded with Glen Tilbrook on the lead vocals prior to Carrack joining. From what I can gather, Carrack played on 1979’s Manifesto - though not its greatest song, “ Dance Away” - and 1980’s Flesh + Blood, which had no greatest songs.Īnyways, at some point Carrack was recruited for Squeeze, who were recording their magnum opus, East Side Story. album charts, Carrack joined Roxy Music as the replacement for Eddie Jobson who was the replacement for Brian Eno. You see, after Ace disbanded after their third album, 1977’s No Strings barely dented the U.S. And interestingly enough, he almost didn’t sing it. Smack dab in the middle of all of this was “Tempted,” the greatest song Carrack will ever sing. Now, as you know, this blog is about loving music and very much about loving 1980’s music, so I went and listened to all three songs listed above and take no pleasure in this, but I will charitably describe them as “utter dogshit,” and think no more about any of them ever again. And so Carrack sang on two Mike & The Mechanics smashes: 1985’s #6 “Silent Running (On Dangerous Ground)” and 1988’s #1 “The Living Years.” In between that, he had a hit single under his own name, 1987’s “Don’t Shed a Tear.” That said, I’m sure the vast majority of normal, regular folks - not the music snobs I assume read this feature - recognize Carrack’s name because he was a keyboardist and a lead singer of Mike & The Mechanics, who were one of the beneficiaries of that mid-1980s law - the Collinsford Act - that stated that all members of the rhythm section of Genesis had to have top ten singles. That said, apparently in 2020, Ace did hit the top of Billboard’s “Rock Digital Song Sales Chart” (yes, this is really a thing) because of an Amazon ad - but nobody remembers it because it literally happened the exact same week the godsdamned pandemic broke out, and even people who loved that song suddenly had bigger things to worry about. A song that I will charitably describe as “proto-Yacht Rock,” “How Long” seemed to set the table for the Michael McDonald incarnation of the Doobie Brothers, though the Doobies had wayyyyyyyyy more success than Ace with that sound, as Ace were prototypical one-hit wonders. And Carrack pulled it all together with a vocal that makes you feel every bit of this guy’s torment, which is crucial to making him relatable to the audience.Let us now consider the strange case of Paul Carrack, who first surfaced as the lead singer of Ace, whose sole hit, “ How Long,” made it all the way to #3 on the Billboard Singles charts in 1975. For his part, Tilbrook created a melody that’s both instantly catchy and sturdy enough to endure. ![]() It’s a credit to Difford that he is willing to show his narrator’s struggles maintaining his fidelity, as opposed to writing another clichéd anthem about the rock star on the road pining for his girl at home. Carrack joined the band for East Side Story, and his soulful vocals found some profound, buried emotions in Difford’s guilt-ridden to-do-list. Squeeze had a secret weapon to help put the song across in keyboardist-vocalist Paul Carrack. “Tempted” tells of the narrator’s futile attempts to stay faithful to the woman he addresses in the song while dealing with temptations on the road. “I also must have anticipated a good time on tour as the chorus suggests.” ![]() “Tempted was written in a cab on the way to Heathrow, I just wrote down what I saw and how I felt as we wormed our way through the traffic,” he said. singing the low vocal in the second verse of “Tempted.”) Difford explained to Songfacts how the song came to him during the band’s travels. The song was the centerpiece of the band’s fantastic 1981 album East Side Story, which was co-produced by Elvis Costello.
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