2 May 1991
Here we see one of the inherent risks involved with the ’90s marketing strategy of releasing a huge tie-in single for your movie: what happens when the single gets so huge that it overshadows the movie? This was the first-world problem that afflicted Mermaids, what looks like an early-’60s-set rom-com starring Cher, Winona Ryder and Christina Ricci as a mother and two daughters, with Bob Hoskins as an unlikely romantic interest for (one hopes) the mother. I’ve surmised this plot from the video for that tie-in single, ‘The Shoop Shoop Song (It’s In His Kiss)’, as despite that starry cast Mermaids didn’t really make a dent on our collective pop-culture consciousness. The song, though, was everywhere.
This record is fine apart from three small things: the song, the production and the singing. The pre-hippy ’60s setting of the movie requires one of those pre-Beatles teenybopper US pop hits as cover material, but the selection is irredeemably twee and corny: sub-Brill Building (Brill Basement?) call-and-response shtick with no charm. Because this is now the ’90s, the production choice is glossy, reverb-laden soft rock, right down to the denim-jacketed, mullet-haired guitar solo, which is also corny and charmless in its own different way. Finally, our singer is just shouting at us: “YOU’RE NOT LISTENING TO ALL I SAY!” she bellows, as if we had a choice in the matter.
What redeems this potential disaster, and what surely drove it to mega-hit status, is that the singer in question is Cher, who has always had undeniable charm and a functioning sense of humour. The video (below) with her two young co-stars shows them treating this as an opportunity for dressing up and vamping: in other words, fun. I have no real wish to hear ‘The Shoop Shoop Song (It’s In His Kiss)’ again, at least without diving for the volume control first, but unlike most other number ones of this wretched year I can fully see its appeal.
