15 June 1989
Those of you following the Jason Donovan: Pop Star plotline will recall how ‘Especially For You’ was a mid-tempo romantic duet, ‘Too Many Broken Hearts’ was an up-tempo number, and Jason sounded comfortable on neither. What next for our hero and the three-headed hit machine of Stock, Aitken and Waterman behind him? Anything, says you, as long as they don’t push him even further outside his comfort zone, like make him sing a cover of a ’60s slow ballad with a key change at the end.
Yes, they make him sing a cover of a ’60s slow ballad with a key change at the end.
I doubt Stock, Aitken and Waterman cared whether or not Jason actually had the skillset for this. He was the teen heart-throb du jour, so any summer romantic ballad with his picture on the sleeve was a low-investment, high-yield no-brainer. Anyway, SAW weren’t all that comfortable themselves on slow-set stuff, a market demand they usually met disparagingly with retro cover versions like ‘Tears On My Pillow’, ‘When I Fall In Love’ and this. ‘Sealed With A Kiss’ as source material is a dirge anyway, so it’s not all Jason’s fault. However, it exposes his limitations; those ever-present backing singers sound almost protective around him. By the key change I was almost urging him on myself, in the manner of our club coach on the sideline of a cross-country race: come on Jason, last chorus now, you got this!
The odd thing is that, aside from the inherent dreariness of the song and the weak voice of its singer, Jason Donovan’s ‘Sealed With A Kiss’ is less gaseous than I remembered, thanks to the un-SAW-like guitar, piano and drums bolstering the sound. Perhaps a ’60s pop angle for Jason, marking him out from Kylie’s hi-NRG and Rick Astley’s Northern soul, was the SAW takeaway here. We’ll soon see. Our next Stock, Aitken and Waterman number one, though, will bring a new name and a return to core SAW values.
