Back To Now: Now – The Summer Album

Now - The Summer Album (Virgin/EMI, 1986) - listen to Tim Worthington and Iain McDermott talking about it in Back To Now.

It’s the long and not especially close to anything resembling ‘hot’ summer of 1986. Any excitement engendered by the day starting off with the BBC’s battered prints of Boss Cat, The Monkees and the Aardvark-equipped iteration of The New Pink Panther Show soon gave way to unwelcome school-reminding banality in the form of the Why Don’t You…? gang showing you how to make ‘Squashy Grannies’ and the time-averse schedule-halting inertia of CP & Qwikstitch, which trudged on into interminable afternoons of parental meandering around garden centres and motoring accessory stores with seemingly the exact same Herbie film on television every single day, and evenings where it seemed television had essentially just given up bothering altogether. Chris De Burgh straddled the pop charts whilst apparently having taken an executive decision not to actually move on Top Of The Pops with The Lady In Red, a proudly lyrically underenthusiastic ballad that scarcely actually moved in and of itself, and to add dreariness to monotony somehow became adjacent for reasons that nobody could ever quite quantify to an equally tedious Royal Wedding that everybody from Anne Diamond to local newsagents seemingly forever in the process of putting bunting ‘out’ refused to stop talking about for more than two fifteenths of a second. The media was awash with excitable previews of and behind-the-scenes reports on movies like Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Running Scared, Big Trouble In Little China and The Karate Kid Part II which were already wowing those double feature-saturated granted-for-takers in America but which you knew full well would not see release here until you were well and truly back at school, with only the underdelivering promise of Under The Cherry Moon and Shanghai Surprise on hand to resolutely fail to do anything approaching tiding you over. Meanwhile, throughout it all, the weather resolutely refused to adopt a position on either the ‘warm’ or ‘not warm’ side of Ian McCaskill’s isobars. The only respite from this avalanche of stultifying monotony could be found in bunting-dodging visits to the local newsagents, where in amongst stacks and stacks of an exciting new carbonated fruit drink named Citrus Spring, you could still find your regular fix of Smash Hits. Including one issue boasting an advert for a compilation that just sounded so downright odd that it had to be good.

Released in June 1986 in the full expectation that it would prove every inch a commercial high tide as Now – The Christmas Album had done six months previously – it didn’t – Now – The Summer Album was a bizarre attempt at evoking the sound of about fifteen different idealised visions of ‘summertime’ all at once, which not only veered all over the place stylistically and chronologically but also found that there weren’t enough licensable ‘summer’ songs to fill up a double album and had to resort to including a handful that were quantifiably about the autumn or in one or two cases not specifically aligned to any season whatsoever. It is the only Now That’s What I Call Music! album ever to feature any track by The Beatles, along with a substantial number of esoteric and at the time half-forgotten at best names and, for reasons nobody has ever been able to satisfactorily explain, two tracks by The Lovin’ Spoonful right next to each other. It can never quite make its mind up whether it is trying to reflect a Nescafe Frappe advert-adjacent vision of sophisticated jetting off to exotic climes to sip fruit-crammed cocktails on a beachfront lounger at sundown, tinnily tannoy-accompanied throwing up after getting off those things that spun round within things that spun round at the fairground, distractedly ‘fishing’ with a plastic net at a coastal resort to take your mind off the fact that your ice cream fell straight into the sand the second you tried to take a lick of it, or hosting extremely late evening barbecues soundtracked by a skipping CD of Summer Chart Party after ‘forgetting’ to invite your neighbours. It’s got everything from rock’n’roll era salutes to the basic concept of ‘summer’ to stroppy post-punk seaside alienation, geographically contradictory pointers towards where you might find the ‘Summer Of Love’, wistful yet radio-troublingly lyrically frank wistful reminiscences of ‘getting’ it ‘on’ in the sunshine, and an Elton John song that even Elton John didn’t realise existed.

If you want to find out why you reputedly ‘Can’t Imagine Summer Without It’, which most definitely does not involve another eighties compilation album with a Beatles song on it that we simply do not dare mention, then you’re in luck as you can listen to me chatting about Now – The Summer Album on the Back To Now podcast here. So join us for a chat about ’30 Original Summer Hits’ along with Willie Rushton’s influence on Yacht Rock, The Drifters Cinematic Universe, Bill Withers’ ‘Billy Bragg’ Phase and whether it’s still possible to buy an album from John Menzies even if they don’t actually have it in stock…

You can listen to Back To Now: Now The Summer Album below, and you can find more thoughts on Now – The Summer Album – and indeed Smash Hits – here.

Buy A Book!

If you’re looking for a more prolonged paddle in the contents of Now – The Summer Album and the rain-lashed joys of the Great British Summer Holiday, then you can find all of that and more in Keep Left, Swipe Right, available in paperback here or from the Kindle Store here.

Alternately, if you’re just feeling generous, you can buy me a coffee here. After all, I’m sure there was almost certainly some way in which Jerry Keller contrived to consider coffee somehow emblematic of ‘summer’.

Further Listening

You can find another chat I had with Iain on Back To Now – this time about 1985’s Now Dance – here. You can also find a chat about the quietly forgotten original version of Now – The Christmas Album in Looks Unfamiliar with Ben Baker here, and Suzy Robinson’s thoughts on Now That’s What I Call Music! 4 – which might not be quite what you were expecting – here.