23 September 2000
Like a summit between rival superpowers of souped-up, watered-down schmaltz, Mariah Carey and Westlife meet on Capri in the cheaply-made video for their duet ‘Against All Odds (Take A Look At Me Now)’. But that isn’t the weirdest thing about this video. Mariah’s vocal on the single is actually just re-used from a solo version she had made and released as an album track earlier that year. However, the video shows her in the studio with our boys, purportedly recording their take together. And for all Mariah’s legendary diva-dom, not doing stairs and the like, according to Westlife themselves (in some interview I skimmed years ago) the biggest challenge for the video makers, not to mention for Mariah herself, was to edit around how one Westlifer spent almost the entire shoot footage looking at Mariah’s chest.
I’ll be honest: I didn’t pay any attention to this record, or to the chests of any of its participants, in 2000. The original, a 1984 Irish number one for the dreaded Phil Collins, is an appalling song anyway, but this is already better simply by having no Phil Collins on it. Still, it’s a strange choice for a duet: are both parties sulking and self-entitled at each other? I doubt the sense of the lyrics was much of a concern here: they just wanted a proven big-bluster soppy ballad with some easy money notes. That said, up until the climactic final chorus Mariah is quite restrained on this – ‘subdued’ is actually a smart choice for engaging with this song’s inherent sourness. Yes, right at the end she gives it all guns blazing, but that’s what happens on a Mariah Carey record.
The real rotten fish smell of this record emanates from Westlife. Their verses give us the signature styles: Shane bleating like a confused sheep, Mark over-emoting wildly, the other three standing at the back. Worse are their ridiculously witless backing vocals, which they deliver with no musicality at all. They literally just repeat the previous lead vocal lyric in a slow, syllable-by-syllable drone. After this experience you can imagine Mariah quickly adding ‘Capri’, ‘Westlife’ and ‘leery Irish lads’ to ‘stairs’ on her shit-list.
