Cinerama Cup: Group F

         

A reminder of how the point-scoring works:

• The panel must award a total of 36 points
• No song may receive more than 12 points
• At least one point must be given to 5 songs (i.e. no more than three zeros) 

Group F

• Don’t Touch That Dial
• Your Charms
• 10 Denier
• Apres Ski
• Unzip
• You Turn Me On
• Crusoe
• 146 Degrees

If you take my blog as any sort of reliable guide, this was far and away the strongest set of songs in this stage. Only one of the tracks wasn't in my top 30, five of the eight were in the top 20, and a couple were in the top ten.

In general, the panel agreed. Steve M called it both 'the actual group of death' and 'a proper bastard.' Several commented that they gave zeros to songs that would actually have scored well in a different group.

The Results

Although it ended up coming second (and led the group until the final few votes), 'Don’t Touch That Dial' didn't receive uniformly strong marks. In many cases, this was because - even though it was originally released as a Cinerama single - judges didn't quite see it as a 'proper' Cinerama song. 'Your Charms' had more consistent support, although it received a zero from Kirk ('going through the motions') and only a three from Ian ('phoned in'). 

The only track here that didn't make my blog's top 30 (I put it at number 71) was 'Unzip'. The judges mostly took a similar view of the song, and it finished in a very distant last place, with comments such as 'dull' (Jona), 'plodding' (Joanna) and 'sTinging, cRinging tWee' (Gricey). Gav M thought it 'a song where DLG perhaps reveals a little too much about his personal "specialist interests".’ The most positive response came from James: 'isn’t a bad song, but something has to come last.'

I adore 'Crusoe', which featured in the top ten of my blog. As was the case with 'See Thru' in the previous round, the panel didn't share my enthusiasm - although there were enough positive comments to suggest that it might have made it through in a weaker group. I at least had allies in Keg ('Anyone whose heart doesn't ache when they hear the line "the silence when you hold me is deafening" has something wrong with them') and Johnny ('The aching juxtaposition of such beautiful music tied, unbreakably to such devastating lyrics…that turmoil, that heartbreak… it’s what I come here for.')

There wasn't a huge amount of negativity regarding 'Apres Ski', but neither were there many big scores. Johnny, however, did think that 'if Jilly Cooper wrote indie bangers this is what it’d sound like.' We also discovered that it is 'one of the few Cinny tracks [Marc's] wife likes,' which did lead me to ponder whether Marc should be disqualified from judging for his use of the term 'Cinny'. 

It was a very close thing for third and fourth place: with a couple of votes left to come in, only six points separated three tracks. 

Johnny was a passionate fan of '10 Denier':

'...an unavoidable volley of exhilarating, flirty, full on gorgeousness. Every time, every single time that this comes on I am immediately sucked in to its whirlpool of beauty - and upon being spat out, breathless on the beach at the other end I always click ‘back’ and go though it all again. That immediate, driven, captivating piano riff with its accelerating drum crescendo instantly draws the attention, and those strings, oh those strings, linked directly to my damaged heart, pulling, nagging, breaking it even more that it was already. It’s everything. All the while his lyrical tale is devastatingly, desperately accurate - the proverbial nail on the head. As that piano motif resurfaces throughout I find myself pulled back into the briny deeps of an overwhelming riptide, I’ll never learn - and why would I want to when the intensity of disaster is this beautiful?

Kirk awarded '146 Degrees' a maximum 12, commenting that '[Simon] Cleave brings a new dimension to proceedings and it’s all the better for it.' Bob found it 'flutey, and funky. Well, about as funky as DLG could ever be.'

As for 'You Turn Me On', Marc enjoyed its 'cracking singalong chorus'; Joanna's description was, 'joyous, toe-tapping stuff... three-minute pop perfection.' Bob thought it a 'banger' which would have got a 12 from him in a lesser group. Keg, on the other hand, found it 'a little slight.'

In the end, it was 'You Turn Me On' that missed out - by a very narrow margin. Whilst it finished on equal points with '146 Degrees', in direct competition between the two songs, '146 Degrees' was favoured by eleven of the panel, 'YTMO' by only eight (see the marks in red below).

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