The Tony Rich Project – ‘Nobody Knows’

7 June 1996

What exactly the project is here, I’m not sure. Write the most maudlin, mawkish romantic ballad ever? Throw generic supermarket piped music into a comparatively positive light? Or is ‘project’ short for ‘projectile vomiting after a fill of slush and mush’? Whatever the project scope, I imagine Tony Rich’s Gantt chart only had two project tasks: listen to ‘Walk On By’ and ‘Tears Of A Clown’, then write his own but without the hurt and anger of the former or the lovelorn thrill of the latter. Need I add that our Tony is certainly no Dionne Warwick or Smokey Robinson in the vocal stakes, or a Bacharach or a David in songwriting? You get the picture.

If I really must itemise this terrible track, it’s oh so bland: bland bossa nova beat, bland acoustic guitar picking, bland synths, bland cliches, bland everything. Really, the lack of imagination here is laughable. Then on top of that we have Tony’s simpering delivery and trite, histrionic lyrics: the highlight-lowlight is how his heart is “just like a jigsaw puzzle / it’s been torn all apart”, showing a crucial misunderstanding of how a jigsaw puzzle works. Weep-along soundtracks will always have a place in our record collections, but you can still do it with quality such as the two tracks mentioned above or Lorraine Ellison’s weapons-grade ugly-cry magnum opus ‘Stay With Me’. As for Tony and his mediocre effort, I presume another of his exemplars was the recent overwrought soul balladry of Boyz II Men; we never hear from one-hit-wonder Tony again, so his ‘Nobody Knows’ was indeed his ‘End Of The Road’. Consider this a project review and emphatic close-out.