FEATURE:
Revisiting…
Betty Boo - Boomerang
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ANOTHER edition of Revisiting…
PHOTO CREDIT: Sandro Hyams (via The Guardian)
where I am heading back to 2022. A recent look back at some albums that were maybe overlooked or not played as much now as they should be. Betty Boo’s third studio album, Boomerang, was released on 14th October. It was her first new album in three decades. There was a lot of excitement and interest around the release of an album from one of the most distinct Pop artists of the late-1980s and 1990s. I remember owning Boomania (her 1990 debut) and falling for songs like Where Are You Baby? I really love her style and sound (and attitude)! Boomerang is a little different compared to her 1990s material, though there is still that colour and energy that defined her early work. There were some very positive reviews for Boomerang. Even though I cannot copy and paste this review, it is a five-star salute for Boomerang. I am going to come to a review very soon. There were interviews conducted with Betty Boo (Alison Clarkson). A shift from her first two albums in terms of the rapping and the bite, I do love the vibe and quality you get through Boomerang. Produced by Betty Boo, Gavin Goldberg and Andy Wright, it reached forty-five on the U.K. album chart. Super Deluxe Edition were pleased to speak to an artist who made a big impression when Boomania arrived right at the start of the 1990s. With this new era emerging, I wonder whether another album will come from Betty Boo:
“It’s exactly three decades since Betty Boo (aka Alison Clarkson) released a new studio album, a gap that would surely have even Kate Bush raising an eyebrow, but Boo is back with Boomerang, a new record co-written and produced with Andy Wright. SDE sat down with Betty to discuss what’s she’s been up to, why she’s returning to the spotlight and the song she wrote 20 years ago that won her an Ivor Novello award…
SDE: Hi Betty. Congratulations on the new album! I know you have been writing for other people, but aside from that, what have you been up to over the last couple of decades?
Betty: Well, a few things actually, I’ve been an executive producer on a couple of films, including The Art Of Rap, which was directed by Ice T and produced by my husband. The idea came about through me really, because I knew Ice T having been signed to Sire Records, years and years ago, through Seymour Stein. Many films have been made before about hip hop, the culture and stuff like this, but our film was more about rap as an art form. And so we had all the giants of rap in there like Eminem, Dr. Dre, Snoop, Ice Cube, Chuck D etc. I took quite a long time to make, but I went to Dr Dre’s house, which was the best thing I’ve ever done! [laughs].
I bet he’s got a nice house!
Yes, a very nice house. It’s up Sunset Plaza, so his house overlooks the whole of Los Angeles and you can see South LA from the top of his house, which is where he’s from.
So have you missed the music industry? Why come back now?
Well, in the back of my mind, I thought, I’ll make another record one day. And then five years would go by and I still hadn’t done it! I did so much clinical songwriting, which wasn’t particularly satisfying for me; working in Los Angeles with some of the big names – it was all a bit sort of soul destroying. I didn’t use any of the things that I use as myself, as Betty Boo, because that doesn’t relate to a generic artist. But it’s very difficult for some artists or even producers, just to get that what I did. There are lots of people out there who are really good at it, but it wasn’t really for me. I did enjoy some of it…
What’s that process like? It sounds kind of intimidating, going to LA and sitting in some producer’s studio, trying to create something together?
Yeah, it was. It’s a bit like a blind date, although not really… Some of these sessions were like Masterchef for songwriting [laughs]. You had to come up with stuff and if you didn’t, you’d really feel the pressure. I mean, lots of producers were making songs, writing and producing songs, on the fly. Everything was sounding great, even if it was shit! [laughs]
Is it one of those things where everyone wants a writing credit, including the tea boy who walks in at the time…?
There’s that and also, a lot of these teams have like, 20 writers for one song. Really? And then one day I just thought, I must try and do it myself again, because it did just come to an abrupt stop, with what happened in my family [Betty’s mum was diagnosed with terminal cancer] and everything. It would have been sad if I didn’t do it.
Have you knocked that all on the head then, doing songwriting for other people or do you still dip your toes in every now and again?
Well, you know, if the right artist came along, and I had enough in the tank! [laughs]. I’ve got a great writing partner [for the new album] in Andy Wright, who’s legendary. I’ve known him for years actually, but we haven’t actually written together until about three years ago. So having that rapport with somebody like him is amazing, because he’s so good at programming beats and also is a brilliant musician and keyboard player. He’s got this pop sensibility and he really brings out the best in me. There’s never been one day in the studio where you’re like “Nah, I’m not feeling that idea…”.
Did it all come back to you quite naturally? Obviously, you’ve been doing lots of writing anyway, for other people, so it wasn’t like, ‘I haven’t written a song for 20 years’, but did the Betty Boo clothes fit easily again, in terms of the spirit of what you were doing?
I was very nervous, thinking, ‘how am I going to find my voice again?’ And to find the confidence as well, to think “I can do this”. I was always of the mind that if you’ve been a pop star in your 20s, or in your teenage years, trying to come back when you’re 50 is crazy. It’s mad. It was unheard of, in our day. Like Cliff Richard… I remember seeing him on Top of the Pops back in the day and he was about 50 then! It wasn’t ridiculous to me, but he seemed old, if you know what I mean.
It’s like Paul McCartney seemed old in the ’80s when he was in his 40s. And now everyone’s raving about him as an 80-year-old at Glastonbury
I know! So I just thought, “no, you’ve got to really stop that attitude”. Artists like Rick Astley and Bananarama have paved the way for me. People have fond memories of their music and it was part of an era where people didn’t have mortgages and kids and they had a nice carefree life. So I drew some confidence from that and then when I started writing with Andy, the first song we wrote was great, so it was just building blocks from there, really”.
I want to come to an interview from The Telegraph. It is no surprise that there was interest around this sort of great return. Boomania is the icon back at the front! Even so, there are collaborators to be found. One track features none other than the great Chuck D of Public Enemy. Given extra weight and brilliance to an otherwise superb album:
“Aged 25, Betty Boo left the music business. “It was a total tragedy,” she says of her serial bereavements. “And if I'm honest, I was in automatic mode and didn't deal with my own grief. I thought in the back of my mind, ‘yeah, I'll get back to making music.’ But I never did.”
As for the “what-if?” if she’d taken the Madonna dollar: “It's a really good question,” she muses. “I would have had to move to LA. I might have changed! I might have had loads of work! I might have listened to people who said: 'Hey, you know, I've got a great surgeon, girlfriend, his name's Saul,’” she says, now sounding like Ruby Wax. “’And look at me, I look fantastic!' That could have happened!" Clarkson laughs.
The plastic surgery didn’t happen, although the glancing observer – standing further away than, say, a breakfast bar’s width – might assume otherwise. At 52, Clarkson looks practically unaged from her early Nineties heyday. But her midlife youthfulness is entirely natural. Three decades out of the pop spotlight have clearly been very good for Alison Clarkson.
And for her music. Boomerang, her first album in 30 years, is a sparkling collection of gravity-defying pop belters. It opens with Get Me to The Weekend, which weaponises a sample of The Human League’s Love Action to thrilling, Peak Eighties effect, and features guest vocalists David Gray, Sophie Ellis-Bextor (one again “daaaahncing”) and Chuck D – an old friend ever since he invited Clarkson’s teenage rap crew She Rockers to support Public Enemy on an American tour.
IN THIS PHOTO: Betty Boo in 1990/PHOTO CREDIT: Getty Images
Clarkson, who enrolled herself on an audio engineering course aged 19, made most of it in the marital bedroom of her gorgeous, barn conversion home. And, once an independent woman, always an independent woman: she's releasing Boomerang on her own label, Betty Boo Records.
As she serves up lunch, complete with tomatoes from she and her film producer husband’s garden, Clarkson acknowledges the role hitting 50 played in her long-awaited comeback. Both her parents were dead by that age: her Scottish mum at 49, her Malaysian dad at at 46. “So I just thought: ‘What am I waiting for? This is stupid.’”
To be fair, Clarkson kept working in the interim, either as a backroom songwriter for other artists. – Girls Aloud, Hear’Say – or hiding in a band: she was one third of WigWam, a brief 2006 project with Blur’s Alex James and producer Ben Hillier. The writing “for other people was OK,” she says without much enthusiasm.
“I kind of enjoyed it. It was a way of finding an outlet for my creativity. But I didn't find it that easy. You're under duress… I did a stint in LA with these big hitters, and they'd expect you to just come up with stuff. They'd be writing and producing it on the fly, so by five o'clock in the afternoon, you had a nearly-made record.”
Barely into her twenties, Clarkson was constantly busy. She was her own woman, the catsuits and bob very much her own creation, as were the songs – a fact lost on many (male) industry observers. But she had to work like the clappers, constantly.
“Nobody considered logistics either,” she says. “If you had to go to Germany and then be back in England to do something else, and then go back out to Italy, nobody thought about whether or not you're going to be exhausted.”
Things reached rock bottom during a live TV show in the Netherlands. Betty Boo’s exhaustion and stress manifested in a boil in a particularly unfortunate place.
“Have you ever had a boil on the bum? It's really painful! I had to go to hospital to get it lanced. It was awful,” she laughs. “But I didn't make much of a fuss, and then I went back and did the show. And then I let my bottom heal properly when I got back home. Yeah, it's an unnatural thing to be a pop star.”
In Mel C’s recent memoir, the former Spice Girl – a band recruited via an advert seeking “five Betty Boos” – writes of feeling exploited by the music business. But bum-boil be damned, Clarkson never felt that. “I was really lucky to be doing what I was doing, because it was against the odds: being a female, doing rap music, having control over my image, control over my music. Everyone else, the Kylies of this world, they were all puppets, really.
“Looking back, though, the BBC would have opinions about how you looked. I remember once my shorts were a bit too short for Top of the Pops. They were hot pants or something. And I was thinking: ‘Well, people get their baps out! It's no biggie to wear shorts.’ But things have changed a bit, haven't they?"
They certainly have. Has the sexualisation of pop gone too far? “No, because it’s about creativity. People should be able to express themselves. But because I'm a bit prudish, I find some of it a bit over-the-top and I'm not quite sure if I should be watching, But it's a great time to be a young female artist. And also, you've got artists who are [physically] larger than your average, and now they're being celebrated. Which is great.”
As a star-turned-hitmaker, Clarkson knows better than most the inner workings of the music industry. But her crucial role in the beginnings of the reality TV military-industrial complex evokes bittersweet memories. Clarkson originally co-wrote Pure and Simple, the huge 2001 hit that launched Hear’Say, the first winners of Pop Idol precursor Pop Stars, for Girl Thing. They were a short-lived girl band created by Simon Cowell as a rival to the Spice Girls. But their version of the song wasn’t even released in the UK.
“It was completely rejected. I remember my publisher hated it so much he excluded it from the contract I had with him, because he didn't want any part of it: ‘I don't want that s___ in my publishing company!’ And then he had to buy it back.”
That was at a significantly inflated price, after the song became a monster hit, selling over half a million physical copies in its first week of release. Still, Clarkson found the experience “cheap”, because no one bothered to tell her the song was being repurposed by Hear’Say.
“But it was a great surprise two years later. It shows that nothing's on the shelf... Then it won an Ivor Novello award, which made me think: wow, I probably wouldn't have won that for my own stuff.”
“So, yeah, I am bouncing back. Although somebody said to me yesterday, ‘yeah, but boomerangs don't bounce...’ I said, ‘well, they do ricochet. So if they ricochet, they bounce.’ It's a boomerang, and it does bounce back in my world”.
I am going to end with a review. Although it is a little mixed, it does go into detail regarding one of last year’s most important albums. I think that it is underrated and didn’t quite get the focus it should have had. Many of the songs from the album should be played on the radio at the moment. This is what SLANT had to say about Boomerang:
“Alison Clarkson, better known to beat heads as Betty Boo, was discovered by Public Enemy after freestyling for the group at a West London McDonald’s in 1987. The Malaysian-Scottish rapper, singer, and songwriter became a household name in the U.K., buoyed by hits like “Hey DJ/I Can’t Dance (To That Music You’re Playing),” a collaboration with Rhythm King stalwarts the Beatmasters. After her more pop-centric second album, the gloriously titled GRRR! It’s Betty Boo, landed with more of a purr than a growl, Clarkson left the industry, but not before turning down an offer to sign with Madonna’s then-fledgling record label.
Clarkson was embraced more by American club DJs than urban radio in the early ’90s, but her brand of dance-oriented pop-rap helped create the template for crossover hits by many of today’s female hip-hop artists. With its disco strings, cowbell, and rapped verses juxtaposed with luscious pop hooks, “Shining Star”—a standout cut from Clarkson’s belated third album, Boomerang—would sound inconspicuous alongside Doja Cat’s “Say So” or “Kiss Me More.”
But aside from that track, and the Auto-Tuned vocals of the rock-tinged “Nobody Can Bring Me Down” and the sinuous “S.O.S.,” there’s little connection between the album and contemporary hip-hop. Nor is there much in the way of the late-’80s hip-house that initially put Clarkson on the map. Boomerang exists in its own out-of-time universe, where Brit-pop, pop-rap, and disco coexist, and where gangsta rap, alternative hip-hop, and trap music never happened.
The effervescent title track is stacked with micro-hooks, while the reggae-infused “Bright Lights,” which finds Clarkson reminiscing about her salad days as a b-girl, is a mix of deep dub bass and sugary pop that recalls “Hollaback Girl”-era Gwen Stefani. But while it’s adeptly produced and mixed, Boomerang lacks the bite of Clarkson’s underrated debut, Boomania, whose cartoonish pop-rap was shrewdly tempered by sleek, unassuming house tracks.
Lyrically, Boomerang is less combative than Clarkson’s early albums, focused mostly on having a good time, though “Never Too Late” touches on the artist’s own personal and professional journey: “If you wanna go back to the way things were/Then you gotta find a way to start all over.” From the album’s frothy, Human League-sampling opening track, “Get Me to the Weekend,” to the rousing “Hell Yeah,” the album risks tipping into toxic positivity (Clarkson’s old pal, Chuck D, is sadly wasted on the terminally optimistic “Miracle”).
Clarkson’s lyrical references, which include Frank Sinatra and Kool & the Gang, are charmingly antiquated, and a subtle nod to Kriss Kross’s 1992 hit “Jump” during the bridge of the aptly titled “Stop Your Nonsense (Bubblegum Pop!)” lands on just the right side of clever given that the entire album pretends like the last three decades didn’t exist. Clarkson has called Boomerang “the record I should have made when I was 25,” and in many ways it sounds like it was, proving that sometimes what goes around really does come around again”.
An album that I want to shine new light on, Betty Boo’s Boomania arrived last year and was a welcome reintroduction from a legendary Pop artist. From her collaboration with the Beatmasters on Hey DJ/I Can't Dance (To That Music You're Playing) to her 1990 debut, Boomania, this star has added something unique and distinct to the music landscape! A lot of people were comparing Boomerang to her earliest work. It should be judged on its own terms. A really solid and interesting album, I think that people should revisit…
THE superb Boomerang.