Blame it on the Hoff. Yes, thanks for asking, I do have a David Hasselhoff album in my collection. Don't ask me why. Country of birth. Nostalgia. Or maybe because it was a buck (my name obliges...). While Hasselhoff's Night Rocker album is generally...not great (though not as awful as when he would hook up with German schlager-shlock merchant Jack White (né Horst Nußbaum), there is one track that amounts by default, but not only, to the standout track, a cool little rock number named "All The Right Moves". Until last spring I never particularly wondered why, until I did. So I researched where "All The Right Moves" came from and found one of the great shadow men of pop - Mr. Martin Briley.
Before my little research missio,, I never had
heard of or heard anything by Martin Briley. Maybe you haven’t either, at least not consciously. When he
published his first three records, including fluke hit “The Salt Of
My Tears” in the early-to-mid 1980s I wasn’t part of the
record-buying or even record-listening part of the population yet,
and then the man and his beret disappeared for more than two decades
from the eye of the public, starting a modest ‘comeback’ by
finally publishing another record in 2006. When I call him one of the
shadow men of pop, that’s because he was for long stretches of his
career, first as a performer, then as a songwriter. A behind the
scenes presence on more records than you’d know or care to listen
to, with credits that go in the hundreds.
That one moment in the
spotlight when “Salt” climbed into the top 40 and then got him
tagged as a one-hit wonder (technically correct, unfair as it is)
came after heaving away in the music industry for more than 15 years,
and after that brief moment of (semi) stardom, he returned to the
grind for a prolific if completely behind-the-scenes career as a
songwriter/songdoctor and composer for film and television.
Never without my beret...
Briley started out
with one of the many UK psych bands that crowded the market place in
the wake of the summer of love, Mandrake Paddle Steamer, later
shortened to just Mandrake. Mandrake Paddle Steamer only ever got to
issue one single, a recorded album stayed unreleased at the time and
was only issued in 2018. To my unwashed ears it sounds like pretty standard stuff for the
time, style and the era, but I’m not at all an expert on that
particular genre. Just Mandrake also went nowhere after a sole single
was released exclusively in Sweden, so clearly world domination was
out of the picture at this point. So Mandrake was kaput, though
Briley continued to work with the band’s Brian Engel in a number of
projects. One of these was an orchestral pop album for George
Martin’s AIR label, that also
got shelved and was finally released in 2007.
With Engel he worked as The Liverpool Echo and contributed to a
number of other short-lived projects like Prowler and Starbuck, while
also going into studio work as arranger, vocalist and guitar player
for hire, collaborating with hit writer tandem Howard and Blakley,
and also joined the BBC orchestra for an extended stay. He joined
prog band Greenslade in 1974 for a short interlude, cut an
instrumental slightly proggish album for Island then the Ian Hunter Band for a couple of years in the late 70s.
Afterwards he was doing studio work with a ton of artists of all ilk,
from Engelbert Humperdinck to Mick Jones.
The hunter on a spear
Looking at his clientele
list you realize that Briley had no qualms about working with uncool
and hopelessly MOR artists, including Cliff Richards, Olivia
Newton-John and Tom Jones (though sadly, never with the Hoff). This would become a topic for his later
career from the mid-80s onwards as songwriter/songdoctor for
everybody, from dozens of teenage bands/acts to Christian pop artist
Rebecca St. James to the inevitable Celine Dion, not to mention out
of left-field choices like Rosie O’Donnell or Nana Mouskouri and
even Bill Wyman’s child bride Mandy Smith. He dryly notes on his
website that he hasn’t heard most of the fruits of his labor for
the teen acts and other “gun for hire” work. He also became a bit
of a Jim Steinman mainstay, working with and for Meat Loaf and Bonnie
Tyler. That’s Briley playing the guitar on “Total Eclipse of the
Heart” (though usually Rick Derringer gets credited for it!).
But right there in the
middle, just before attacking hundreds of songs, co-writes and
commissions for music for TV and films, are his glory years, three
albums from which I pulled the accompanying compilation. As a general
rule, I prefer a “all killer, no filler” approach, so instead of
wading through three albums with a rising amount of filler-ish
tracks, here’s what I think are the best tracks from his run on
Mercury records. I have a clear preference for his debut album, Fear
Of the Unknown, which sounds still amazingly fresh forty years
later. It has a pretty obvious New Wave influence, with a faint hint
of the Cars sound, but Briley makes it work fabulously without ever
seeming to imitate someone else.
The kind of cool-ass painted cover art you don't see anymore...
His singing voice isn’t
particularly distinctive, sometimes reminding you a bit of Peter
Gabriel (he’s a dead ringer on “Heart of Life”) and to me
personally of Men At Work’s Colin Hay. What is clearly distinctive,
though, is his songwriting with a decidedly unique point of view on
such tracks as “I Feel Like A Milkshake” or “School for Dogs”
with its delightful double entendre use of the expression “man’s
best friend”. Even on some of the later, more conventional tracks
his pop smarts and craftsmanship are undeniable and no doubt
contributed to the subsequent demand for him as songwriter for hire.
This is glorious pop,
intelligent and quirky, but not with such an amount of mannered quirk
that it threatens to derail songs, like, say, some of what Lindsay
Buckingham was doing at the same time. Like Buckingham, Briley is
also somewhat inspired by 60s pop, as on “It Shouldn’t Heard that
Much” with its doo-wop style backing vocals and even throws in a
tribute to his prog days on “Fear Of The Unknown”, again complete
with Peter Gabriel-styled vocals. The production gets slicker
throughout the album trilogy, while the songs overall probably get
weaker. Some of the demos he cut during that time recall the
freshness of the debut with their slightly more rudimentary, but also
more immediate sound. As such, the accompanying comp breaks down as
having eight tracks from the debut, four each from the follow-ups and
four demos (including my beloved "All The Right Moves"!) from the time frame. So, without further ado, let the
shadow man step out of the shadows for a moment...
.webp)