Back to Basics album review
Back to Basics: The Essential Collection 1971-1992, Geffen
Olivia Newton-John was a transplanted Australian doing time on bad British variety shows when a faux-barnyard album track (“Let Me Be There”) unexpectedly became an American country hit, giving her a new career in a new town, leading, ultimately to her ’70s pre-eminence as AM wave-band dreamgirl next door. The combination of drowning-pool eyes, sunny disposition, and quavery breathy vocals cemented her public perception as a benign free spirit forever floating in slow motion through waving fields of corn.
From this period came the sound-tracks to a million adolescent infatuations, consummations, and separations. When she sings “Have You Never Been Mellow?” Newton-John’s voice is so unaffected and caressing that young male listeners would suddenly find themselves clumsy, flushed, and flustered for no apparent reason. How many long-suffering ladies dedicated “Sam” to the stubborn lunkheads in their lives? While she was later to reach pole position with a song called “Hopelessly Devoted to You,” Newton-John had already recorded a song that exquisitely encapsulated the aforementioned emotion. Listen to “I Honestly Love You” today and marvel at the economy of the arrangement. And that final verse key change… sniff.
The Grease duets are cutesy irritants, important only because they signal the next phase of her career. At the finale of Grease, her character snapped out of her Sandra Dee strait-jacket, strutting and smoking like a hellion in a black-leather bondage film. The movie was over, but Newton-John continued to straddle the boundary between insipid and incendiary.
The predatory posturing of 1978’s Totally Hot and its big single, “A Little More Love,” seemed forced, but the release of the Physical set in ‘81 caused global inhalation. Boasting a lyric as dumb and despicable as anything Warrant could perpetrate, “Physical” made public the notion of health club as meat market and summed up the tone of the times-driven, narcissistic, promiscuous. Her two subsequent albums, Soul Kiss and The Rumour, inspire no watery-eyed recollections.
But the four new-for-‘92 songs included on this collection hearken back to the Olivia of old. Call this a comeback.
By Jonathan Bernstein