New Singles of the Week

7th January 2015

Will Young – ‘What The World Needs Now Is Love’

Singles of the Week starts off on a suitably sombre note for the deep midwinter. Pop Idol winner and all round nice guy Will Young has teamed up with WWF (World Wildlife Fund, not those beefy dunderheads with lycra taped to their nether regions) to cover the Burt Bacharach/Dione Warwick classic ‘What The World Needs Now Is Love’. We see Will Young gloomily surveying stunning footage of nature at its finest: mist-swarmed mountains, lounging leopards and fearsome lions. The video ends with alarming messages about environmental destruction flashing on-screen.

Say what you will about the song (it really is quite saccharine and shallow), it’s nevertheless a moving video about the degradation of the planet we live on. Like a smack addict mainlining himself into an early grave, the human population is treating its very own life sources to a savage beating. Hey hey! Christmas is over! It’s dark basically all of the time! Environmental destruction, crippling social inequality, and the systematic degradation of human rights! 2016 is going to be wicked. 

Nero – ‘Into the Night’

Now, I know what you’re thinking! Nero Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, Roman Emperor from 54 to 68 AD, has risen from the dead and released a single?! Get outta here! No silly, Nero is the name for the Grammy-winning British electronic trio composed of Dan Stephens, Joe Ray and Alana Watson, who this week release ‘Into The Night’, a single accompanied by an animated video which will make any 90s child punch the air and shout “YU-GI-OHHHH!!!”

The track will make a welcome addition to the mp3 sacks of DJs frequenting clubs like PRYZM and Syndicate. The kind of places where boozed-up uni sports club lads in their best blue jeans and white shirts can show their WKD sides by getting lashed and groping unsuspecting women. Bants! Either that, or it can be added to the Spotify playlists of no-contract gyms in Broadmead so that muscleheads can gargle ‘tuuuune’ while gulping down their whey protein. Utter shite.

KSI Ft JME – ‘Keep Up’

For those of you oldies out there, KSI is the alias of internet sensation Olajide “JJ” Olatunji, the Youtube contributor whose online name is KSIOlajideBT, the ‘BT’ standing for British Telecom (sweet isn’t it). It’s very confusing, but all you need to know is that this lad has racked up a huge number of views for his videos and currently has almost 12 million subscribers to his channel. It makes early online trendsetters like Stephen Fry seem like…well…small fry.

For his latest musical offering, KSI has teamed up with grime MC JME to produce ‘Keep Up’, a single sponsored by the Football Association to get kids playing that oft-neglected game soccer! “Keep up!” implores KSI. “Keep up, keep up, can you can you keep up?!” I can’t decipher the rest of the lyrics, but I think the general gist is that playing keepie-uppies is a good laugh, and you should try to maintain as much control over the ball as possible. The video is your standard grime fare, with the addition of some groupies who are overcome by the heft of KSI’s gangsta credentials. “Apparently he’s got millions of subscribers, and a book!” one of them coos, in what must surely be the final nail in the coffin for publicly-funded library services.

Conal Dougan