Zuzana wrote:philipchevron wrote:Yes, that was apparently the reason why the record company did not want to release "BMS" as the follow-up to "FoNY", which would have been our choice, I think. This may be the only time in recorded history that a record company turned down a follow-up single because of any inherent similarity with The Big Hit. We were right, they were wrong, a depressingly familiar pattern even then.
But parts of the melody of BMS and FONY
are the same. If BMS was released as a follow up to FONY, wouldn’t it give the impression that the band ran out of ideas and had to resort to borrowing music from themselves? (I’m not implying it is the case – just saying what impression it could give.) As much as I love both the songs and believe they could both make outstanding singles, I must admit that if I were to make the decision in the recording company, I would be against releasing BMS right after FONY too...
Oh yes, all very possible, of course. But we rarely fretted about whether anyone thought we had run out of ideas and anyway, it never stopped Gary Glitter or Marc Bolan making exactly the same record over and over again for several years. Or Chuck Berry, come to mention it.
Record companies operate just like movie studios. They don't know what they want and everything seems alien to them until it catches the public's imagination, then that becomes the
only thing they want. Warner Bros rather pathetic response to this phenomenon was to insist upon Kirsty's voice being added to the "Fall From Grace" single. Their antipathy to "BMS" was, if memory serves, a bit more complex than
just "it sounds like the last one" which, as I've already argued, is ordinarily a positive point with record companies. They may even have considered "Broad Majestic" a bit too "Irish", though I daresay they did not actually say so to our faces.
The fact remains, we did not follow FoNY with a hit record from that album. "Fall From Grace" was a minor hit, as I always argued it would be, and "Fiesta" stopped at #24. "Fiesta" could only have been the Top 10 hit it should have been if it was, in itself, a follow-up to a hit. That leaves "Broad Majestic Shannon" and the too-long "Thousands".
