I’m a kid of the eighties. And proud of it. In fact, I was coming into my own musically when this track was first released right in the middle of the decade. It’s an era that gets a lot of bad press, people having rewritten its history to their own ends, making it seem as if it was all shoulder pads and Swing Our Sister, legwarmers and Wham! If you think that, then you weren’t really there. I was, and “there”, for me at least, was probably a muddy festival field, I was sporting a “Coal Not Dole” t-shirt under a trenchcoat and watching Echo and the Bunnymen.
But if the 1980s was about anything, it was about great pop music. Punk had kicked open the doors, and people were free to try anything. Goths were being all dark and epic, ex-punks were ushering in a new wave of vibrant music, and popsters, armed with the latest technologies and appealing to now broader tastes, were making some of the best pop that there would ever be. Belouis Some was one of those pop-makers.
And now he is back with a remix package of his breakthrough single, “Imagination.” As part of the Orchestral Eighties album, which sees iconic eighties songs orchestrally enhanced and reimagined and then released one track per week, “Imagination” is available again in four formats.
Not only the original as a reminder of how great it was in the first place, that neat blend of groovesome bass and soulful guitar licks, big vocal harmonies and shimmering sonics, but also as an extended mix to prolong the enjoyment, and then there are the orchestral versions. What is great about these orchestral reimagining of the song is that rather than merely rendering them into a purely classical sound, instead they take the key ingredients that made the song so great in the first place and weave string washes through and beyond, below and above the existing musical lines to truly enhance and add to the song, especially in the extended version where there is room to really explore.
I guess that songs are never truly finished. Their story is ongoing, and they are always looking for new forms and different outlets. Well, the best of them are at least and “Imagination” is absolutely one of the best of them. Pop in the present-day form may be a bit of a disappointment. Belouis Some, it would seem, is back in the nick of time to remind us of how glorious the pop genre used to be…and could be again.
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