26 November 1988
I’ve never liked the sickly-sweet taste of Coca-Cola, even as a mixer for student-level vodka, so I was never going to like this saccharine power ballad that was the soundtrack to a Coke ad. Clearly it was written for a TV commercial’s one-minute attention span. All the heart-wrenching, shirt-ripping, tear-jerking drama is front-loaded in the first verse and resolves itself in the first chorus, so when the second verse starts you feel a bit confused: hang on, didn’t we just go through all this? Is this a new first time, or the same first time continued, or is the second time also as life-or-death melodramatic as the first? By the final pass of the chorus, the law of diminishing returns has laid waste to whatever appeal ‘First Time’ had as a snippet on TV.
Robin Beck was a Brooklyn-born session singer who had released one album before this and has released many albums since, but without ever having another hit, so ‘First Time’ was indeed her last time. I suppose you’re never going to get an established or successful act to sing an advertising jingle for you, but on the other hand it always seems a bit unfair to shove someone into the spotlight with one tune that, by dint of soda pop marketing, will almost certainly get to number one across the world but forever brand them as a one-hit wonder. I’m sure she sings it at her concerts and has come to terms with it as part of her story, and maybe there are hipster Robin Beck fans who sneer at this as “the hit” the way Radiohead fans feel about ‘Creep’. Anyway, this song and ad were inescapably massive in late-’88, Robin Beck on her website and social media seems to be doing just fine, and we’ve all moved on.
