One week at number one on 20th August 1988
Otis Clay’s original version of “The Only Way Is Up” was always on the latter side of the fence, though wasn’t a huge success when released in 1982. If you haven’t listened to it in a while, go back and do so again – while researching this entry, I found myself unexpectedly moved by having the experience afresh. I’d forgotten just how understated it was, yet personal. If you’ve ever experienced poverty, however briefly, the idea of having somebody by your side throughout the ordeal takes on a highly romantic edge; a lot of couples don’t make it through to the other side as desperate times expose ugly personality flaws. We may all have insecurities about not being attractive enough, clever enough, charismatic enough or warm enough for our partners, but capable enough? Able to actually contribute towards food and shelter, fundamental life basics? Not being a financial drag? In the unforgiving modern world, that’s a kicker, and something the post-Reagan/Thatcher mainstream continually reinforces as a kind of societal blight.
Literal hunger can also lead to brash comments, rash behaviour and long solo walks in the freezing cold away from the claustrophobia of the bedsit. The very idea of a couple helping each other through the dark times, convinced that better things are ahead, is therefore an extremely strange idea for a dancefloor driven ballad, but an effective and touching one – and the songwriters Jackson and Henderson pull no punches (“If we should be evicted from our homes” is a brutal line in any context) while Clay sells it subtly and beautifully, without a hint of bitterness, like a warm hug in a freezing cold bed. When he sings “I know love will see us through” (a line missing from Yazz’s version) he could be singing about a relationship or about society more generally, depending on how you want to hear it. It feels like underclass gospel.
In some senses, Yazz may have seemed like the perfect person to front a cover of this record. She was sold to the public as a plucky everywoman, a club dancefloor girl with a distinctive peroxide crop who got lucky. On her first chart appearance with “Doctorin’ The House” she played an important part, providing a clarion call and foundation to Coldcut’s chaotic pilfering of old records, but it was certainly more their track than hers. A lot of people assumed she was a friend of the duo, grabbed from the club floor, when in reality she had already spent some time working as a catwalk model, and was shortly afterwards handled by Wham!’s management team. They sent her to singing lessons and she cut a demo, then was subsequently introduced to Coldcut, who happened to issue “Doctorin’ The House” right at the point where House music was becoming a commercial force (their previous records had not charted).
Her version of “The Only Way Is Up”, produced by Coldcut again, is fascinating to listen to back-to-back with Clay’s, purely because the approach is so different. Clay is smooth and warm but dogged, doing his best for his partner and guardian angel. Yazz, on the other hand, is being driven by something else – a noisy self-belief almost. Her delivery suggests she’s never lost a minute’s sleep in her life wondering if she’s wrong, or feeling as if actually, her natural level in life might be working in a call centre. The track is far too ebullient for that, punctuated with screams of victory and joy. You exit Clay’s track thinking he might land himself a perfectly average job soon, whereas throughout, Yazz sounds as if she’s already won the lottery (and in a funny way, of course, she had).
You could meaningfully compare “The Only Way Is Up” to “I Will Survive”. While Gaynor’s single is about surviving without your deadbeat cheating lover, “Up” is about the pair of you surviving through the difficulties – in Yazz’s hands, it’s a tool of absolute defiance and self-belief, determination winning over any scrap of self-doubt. Just as Gaynor knows she can get by alone, Yazz also knows that two good people united in determination to overcome their difficulties are going to have better odds than one.
Her ecstatic (pun absolutely intended) delivery is also much more in keeping with the dancefloor of the day. Coldcut’s trumpet howls, jittery bottle-bank rhythms and squelching Acid sounds demand something that can overpower them rather than falling beneath them, and just as she did on “Doctorin’ The House”, Yazz rises to the occasion. At moments, she howls in what can only be described as joyous defiance, and it sounds like an unbelievably of-the-moment record – skint kids at Shoom, being part of a movement, a moment, dosed up on E and believing that despite all the difficulties, they are finally part of something together (cue one of Mike Skinner’s diatribes). She effectively took this song away from the early eighties global recession and translated it for the later, chemical part of the decade.