Day 19 - "SOS" by Take That (2010)

Mainstream pop is often seen as an empty, meaningless genre. After all, most of the songs that hit the top of the charts are disposable ear candy, aiming no higher than getting us onto the dance floor or humming along as we go about our daily lives. But even the most banal song out there reflects, in some way at least, the society which produced it, and can often work to highlight some of the central concerns for those who listen to it.

Take That are one of the most enduring acts within British popular music. Beginning life as a boy band in the early 1990s, they broke the hearts of teenage girls around Europe when they called it a day in 1996. Reforming amid much nostalgia in 2005, most industry watchers expected the band to return to their hit songs, fill the arenas and watch the money roll in. Talk of “new” music was greeted with scepticism, until their MOR anthems lodged themselves at the top of the charts and refused to be budged. Their 2010 album Progress (which saw errant member Robbie Williams return to the fold after a successful solo career) was their most surprising – experimenting with a bit of musical innovation and, perhaps most bizarrely of all, showing an obsession with the apocalypse.

This shouldn’t come as a total surprise. After all, Take That member Mark Owen had achieved a rare solo hit with his song “Four Minute Warning”, in which he contemplated a response to his looming annihilation by approaching nuclear missiles. Attempting to chart a society in denial about its own imminent destruction, Owen’s lyrics are surprisingly bleak for an early noughties number one single, painting a picture of apathy in the face of catastrophe:

Four minutes left to go, is this the end then?
Message on your stereo, four minute warning.
Everybody wants to know, what should we do?
The official story's a four minute warning.

Sasha stands in his yellow cafe,
The heart of the city is here, so he tells me,
Sitting on his red leather sofa, he's rolling another,
Man, I'll see you when I see you.

Amusingly, Owen concludes that he’s wasted three of his final four minutes singing the song, ending with the enduringly jolly couplet: I think of you, I think of me/Then I think of nothing, it's the end you see! Of course, we as listeners have wasted our final four minutes actually listening to the song, so the joke’s presumably on us (it’s now on the Spotify playlist if you should have the urge to hear it).

“SOS” sees similar apocalyptic angst, and it’s perhaps unsurprising that Owen takes lead vocal duties. The song provides a list of humanity’s failings, managing to find time to bemoan the effects of government surveillance culture, global warming and consumerist obsession with youth. The band even manage to fit in a classic JFK quote: “Without debate, without criticism, no administration and no country can succeed - and no republic can survive”.

Yet much like Owen’s earlier effort, the lyrics reveal a sense of cynicism over the possibility of the ability of humans to change. Where the tracks from the last couple of days have expressed extreme cynicism about God’s role in apocalyptic events, Take That don’t deny the place of the divine in bringing about the end. Yet here the song, for all its poppy melody, hits its bleakest point – even as God prepares to intervene and the righteous to ascend to heaven, humanity continues to engage in the same old pointless politicking – We’ll be practicing our politics/Defending all our policies/Preparing for apocalypse. The lines recall Jesus’ words in Luke 17:27 “People were eating, drinking, marrying and being given in marriage up to the day Noah entered the ark. Then the flood came and destroyed them all”; or the shattered survivors who wander around a destroyed London in Peter van Greenaway’s Crucified City, only to discover the mute figure following them is Christ, who has returned and been ignored.

As an apocalyptic afterword on Take That, we can turn to their performance on the 2010 X-Factor finale. The band were to perform their newest single, “Kidz” (sample lyrics: The daggers of science/Evolving into violence/We're not sure where the fallout blows) accompanied by dancers dressed as riot officers. The performance was vetoed for Simon Cowell, who felt that the images would remind viewers of recent civil unrest – the band opting to perform a song without any apocalyptic resonances at all, their previous single - “The Flood”.  You can the band out of the apocalypse, but you can’t take the apocalypse out of the band…

SOS (Owen, Williams, Howard, Barlow, Orange, 2010)

Save our souls we're splitting atoms
Go tell Eve and go tell Adam
Liberate your sons and daughters
Some are gods and some are monsters
We'll get a five minute warning for divine intervention
With the satellites falling prepare for ascension

Under mind-control
We'll be practicing our politics
Defending all our policies
Preparing for apocalypse
Don't let the hungry serpent see you no
No, no, no, no, no
She'll let you fall asleep then eat you whole

It's like a bullet to the head
It's an SOS, it's an S.O.S.,
Oh yes, oh yes, it's an S.O.S.
It's an SOS, it's an S.O.S.,
Like a bullet in the head, it's an S.O.S.

When the levee breaks
And Manhattan sinks
There won't be water fit to drink
When the winter's warm
And the summer's cold
The poison stops you looking old

You'll get a five second warning for divine intervention
And the satellites are falling prepare for ascension
As the earth looks on
The odds or probability
Of losing all capacity
To function as hereditary

No antibiotic can save us now
No, no, no, no, no
We are the virus that we talk about

It's like a bullet to the head
It's an S.O.S., it's an S.O.S.,
Oh yes, oh yes, it's an S.O.S.
It's an S.O.S., it's an S.O.S.,
Like a bullet in the head, it's an S.O.S.
It's an S.O.S. it's an S.O.S.,
Oh yes, oh yes, it's an S.O.S.
It's an S.O.S., it's an S.O.S.,
Like a bullet in the head, it's an S.O.S.

Like a bullet in my head
Like a bullet in my head
It's an S.O.S., it's an S.O.S.,
Oh yes, oh yes, it's an S.O.S.
It's an S.O.S., it's an S.O.S.,
Like a bullet in the head, it's an S.O.S.
It's an S.O.S. it's an S.O.S.,
Oh yes, oh yes, it's an SOS
It's an S.O.S., it's an S.O.S.,
Like a bullet in the head, it's an S.O.S.

Listen on Spotify: Apopalypse: Apocalyptic Advent Calendar

Buy: http://www.amazon.co.uk/SOS/dp/B004B4BWVC/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1355907763&sr=8-1