(part 6 of a series that’s starting to settle into a nice regular pattern now)

CAST - Beat Mama

Ah, Cast. When people go a-binting about how shit Britpop was, there is usually the concession that so-and-so had the odd decent tune. Not with Cast, though. The endless ’sad bits in football’ montages that have featured John Power bleating “Gorreh wauk away, wauuk away, wauuuk awayyy� thass what they say-eee what they say-eee what they say-eee�” have done rather a lot of damage to most people’s opinion of them, not that those opinions tended to be favourable in the first place. You never even hear ‘Walkaway’ (two separate words, is that too much to ask?) on those montages anymore, cos now we have Coldplay’s songs that have pianos on.

This might be the bit where you’d expect me to say I actually really like Cast. Thing is, though, I don’t. The Liverpewl accent has never, ever sounded quite so dreadful as when it comes out of John Power’s mouth. Never, never, never. Then, dear lord, there’s the songs. At the height of their fame, Cast had six top ten hits in a row. These were (gracias a Everyhit):

8 Sandstorm Jan 1996
9 Walkaway Mar 1996
4 Flying Oct 1996
7 Free Me Apr 1997
9 Guiding Star Jun 1997
7 Live The Dream Sep 1997

All of these songs are godawful mawkish hippy-dippy bull-SHIT (I am aware that they turn the guitars up on Sandstorm and Free Me � THIS CHANGES NOTHING) wherein Power�s mewl expresses sentiments along the lines of �You�ve got to flah-hahh, you need to flah-hahh� and �Somebody�s after me, I can�t pretend to be, something I know I�m not.� To be fair to the rest of Cast, they might have been OK had they not had Power as a singer. Unfortunately, they did, so they were bloody dreadful�

� except, yes, for �Beat Mama�. �Beat Mama� is not just better than every other Cast song ever, it�s actually quite good on its own. Cast, for no apparent reason, decided to put out a song that was actually a bit light, dear lord, maybe even a bit fun. The central riff sounds like a slightly dodgy ice-cream van in a slightly dodgy seaside town � definitely �seaside town�, by the way, not �beach resort�, in case you�re in any confusion. When the sun is out, it just sounds bloody wonderful, this irritatingly perky �De-nee-der-nee-derneeder!� jangling about from around 1974 or sometime around then. Someone decides to make John Power�s vocals sound like they�ve been lifted off some old vinyl too, and he doesn�t sound that much like he usually does either � I mean, obviously it�s still John Power singing and so on and so forth, but somehow he�s a lot less irritating than usual.

Then the chorus, wherein Power gets swamped entirely by the rest of the band yelling his pseudo-mystic �Toploader belongs to me�-isms along with him. You wonder why Cast never thought of this before, because their lyrics are far less irritating when sung/yelled this way. In fact, they�re really very catchy indeed. �JUST! TURN IT ON! TURN IT ON DON�T TURN IT DOWN! AND YOU WANT! TO BELONG! TO BELONG FOR HIGHER GROUND! DO YOU BELONG FROM HIGHER GROUND! DO YOU BELONG FOR HIGHER GROUND!� They�re still not any good, but coupled with the whole song�s general chirpiness, they work fantastically.

I saw Cast do this live on the telly once. The chorus was stripped of the yelling, with just Power singing it. It sounded fucking awful. �Beat Mama� would be their last dalliance with the top 10 (#9, May 1999). Their next single sounded like Starsailor and ended up at #28. Then, after attempting a �new more dance-influenced direction� which made no impression on the charts at all, Cast fucked off for good. After �Beat Mama�, it�s the second best thing they ever did.