26 April 1998
Before re-listening to this Boyzone number one, I honestly couldn’t remember it. I’ve just listened to it now and I still can hardly remember it. Of the impressions that have barely stuck with me, ‘All That I Need’ is vapid white-bread R&B-lite. Tasteful, over-produced acoustic guitar-picking and bossa nova rhythm on the track, not to mention suits in the video, suggest to me that this is Boyzone pivoting, if that isn’t too dynamic a word, to a slightly older listenership. The chorus vocals are so breathy and mixed-down that they’re almost indiscernible, like a fart wafting in a gale.
In hindsight and hindhearing, ‘All That I Need’ is Boyzone marking out ground that will be exploited more profitably by an all-new recidivist Irish boyband in a chart-year from now. If only there was a totally different sort of Irish pop group, one with an exciting and energetic single full of, say, joie de vivre and even je ne sais quoi. But what were the chances in 1998 of that happening?
