31 March 1995
Gary Barlow understood being taken seriously as doing ‘Back For Good’ and no longer jumping around singing uptempo pop. Robbie Williams understood being taken seriously as jumping around singing uptempo pop and no longer doing ‘Back For Good’, or at least not seriously. This tells us a lot about the two personalities and the red herring of being taken seriously. What does it tell us about ‘Back For Good’?
“Seriously”, for Gary and for an awful lot of other people, sounds like soft rock power ballads in the white middle-aged male establishment style. He has already written some of those for Take That, including the dreaded song about writing songs (‘A Million Love Songs’) which is the usual homework after day one at AOR Junior High, and goes on to write a lot more for his solo career. ‘Back For Good’ comes perilously close to being just another naff AOR ballad: it has the key tropes of bland vocal harmonies, tasteful acoustic guitar and piano, and sugary strings. Even its chorus lyric veers into Phil Collins territory of sulking male entitlement: “Whatever I said, whatever I did, I didn’t mean it” doesn’t sound like much of a sincere apology to me, and the closing line of “I guess now it’s time / That you came back for good” may be a neat conflation of opening line and chorus (© AOR Junior High) but does little to assuage my Phil Collins fear.
Oddly, what saves ‘Back For Good’ is that same try-hard AOR clunkiness of Barlow’s. The two lyrics we remember from it demonstrate this. First, “Got a picture of you beside me / Got your lipstick mark still on your coffee cup” is time-worn soft rock methodology, but here it works because the lines scan easily, the visual images pop out so clearly, and the sentiment is restrained and relatable. Second, and even better, “a fist of pure emotion” is a flawless crystallised image of the entire soft rock power ballad idiom, its laborious naffness redeemed by its melodramatic kitschiness. Also, where the dreaded Phil Collins would have dragged this song down into male-pattern whingeing, Gary’s good-naturedness sells it as hurt and confusion. I can’t say Gary Barlow goes on to write anything else as likeable and impressive as this, and even Robbie eventually needs his own big-ballad moment to save his career, but at least ‘Back For Good’ is seriously good.
