3 February 2005
At the start of 2005 I emigrated. What this means for our Irish number ones over the next eight and a half years—the length of my exile—is that in some cases I won’t have my own local context for a home-grown star or Irish pop-cultural trend. Of course, it also means I was out of the jurisdiction during ‘Jumbo Breakfast Roll’, so swings and roundabouts.
My initial reaction to Zoo, an Irish boyband working a hard-rock angle, is: I’m gone from the country two weeks and you do this? ‘Poison’ is a cover of the Alice Cooper hit, when the ’70s rocker successfully tweaked his glam-goth persona for the MTV hair metal ’80s. Zoo get Alice’s raspy voice right, and in fairness there had already been varying mixtures of rap and hard rock sloshing around the charts by now. However, their poppy R&B beats and jaunty dance moves, as in the video below, are not worthy.
Further giving the game away that these five boyband lads may not be putting their back into their chosen genre: the other track on this double-A-side is ‘I Believe’ – okay, not the watery ’50s ballad covered to ’90s million-selling UK chart-topping effect by those noted metalheads Robson & Jerome, but still an insipid Westlife-style romantic-domestic—rom-dom, to coin a phrase—ballad. Rock on, dudes! And this was your first number one in my absence! Clearly I had done the right thing in getting the hell out of Ireland.
