“Would it be exaggerating to say that what I was experiencing was an epiphany?” On Paul Young and the greatest non-Christmas Christmas song ever.
By the end of 1984, Paul Young was the sort of boyfriend material that would elicit adjectives like “dreamy” from Nicola Adkins, Fay Greaves and all the other girls in my class at school. He seemed like a good sort, did Paul. To those girls, he came across like the Platonic ideal of your older brother’s kind friend — the one who always found time to ask you how you are, when your actual brother had given up asking you those sorts of questions a long time ago. And while I struggled with the slick, airless production of his records, it really didn’t matter what earnest Smiths-smitten boys like me thought about Paul Young. At the end of 1984, his stock was so high that he landed one of the big solo turns on Do They Know It’s Christmas?, alongside Bono, George Michael, Simon Le Bon, Sting and Boy George, who in the pages of Smash Hits, had bluntly compared Paul’s features to those of a Cornish pasty.
I already had one record in my collection which featured Paul on lead vocals, but I wasn’t aware of it at the time. That’s because it was credited to Streetband, whose sole hit in 1978 had been a song called Toast which was all about what a totally brilliant snack toast is, in all its comforting deliciousness and versatility. Toast was my favourite item of food in 1984 and it’s still in my top three even now, which is why I’ve held onto that record all these years.
But the thing that got Nicola Adkins, Fay Greaves and all the other girls in my class at school into Paul Young was not Toast. It was the breakthrough version of early Marvin Gaye b-side Wherever I Lay My Hat (That’s My Home) which shot to number one a year previously, and propelled his debut album No Parlez and its swift successor The Secret of Association into a million British homes. Wherever I Lay My Hat (That’s My Home) was so ubiquitous that it even spawned its own amusing spin-off, Wherever I Lay My Hat (That’s My Hatstand) by Paul Yuk (aka comedy writer Philip Pope, who later scored his own number one hit with Spitting Image’s The Chicken Song).
But hey, let’s return to the end of 1984 and the other thing that Paul Young did at that time. Because this is the Paul Young that has been soundtracking my interior live feed lately. And this is the Paul Young I want to discuss right now. I’m talking about his number 9 hit Everything Must Change: a song which has scarcely impinged on a single waking thought I’d had in the preceding 39 years suddenly reactivated itself about three weeks ago, and all I can do is wonder what took me so long. It was in my head yesterday; it’s in my head now; and it’ll probably be there tomorrow.
On one level, it’s not hard to see why this might have happened. It was released around Christmastime and — not least because of the bells you can hear on the chorus — it’s a very Christmassy-sounding record. And yet, in recent years, Everything Must Change has been somewhat neglected, while another record in that year’s Christmas top ten — Last Christmas by Wham! — has, year upon year, further entrenched itself in the nation’s affections as Britain’s Christmas national anthem. Finally this week, it landed the UK number one position in the Official Singles Chart for the first time. And while it’s not my place to come between Last Christmas and its long ascent to the summit, what I can do is tell you what happened after Paul Young’s song mysteriously resurfaced in my head after its epic hiatus.
First of all, I went to Spotify and clicked play, just to check if it sounded as good as it suddenly appeared to be sounding in my head. The answer was no. It sounded even better. It sounded amazing. Not just amazing, but really, undeniably, deeply moving. Would it be exaggerating to say that what I was experiencing was an epiphany? In the dictionary on my computer, there are two definitions of epiphany. The first reads: “the manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles as represented by the Magi… a manifestation of a divine or supernatural being.” Well, to Nicola Adkins, and Fay Greaves, the Paul who smouldered back at them on the sleeve of No Parlez was certainly a divine being — but like I said, back in those days, my attentions were more firmly planted on Morrissey’s paeans to celibate longing. However, here’s the second definition: “a moment of sudden and great revelation or realization.” Yes, that’s definitely what was happening as I listened to Everything Must Change for the first time in almost four decades.
Its melody was possessed of a hymnal power, which was accentuated by a profoundly soul-searching lyric. Prior to this moment, I had assumed that the version you get on the album is the version that was released as a single. But no! The version on The Secret of Association bypasses the longer intro of the single version to parachute you straight into the lines “I was never one to back out of an argument / And say I was wrong / Even when I’d seen the other side / I’d hide my foolishness / And carry on.”
I would contend these are pretty great opening lines. You could open a novel with these lines. Read them out loud and a character instantly starts to form in your mind. In these lines, the seeds of some future transformation are sown. This is a man wrestling with a spiritual impasse of their own making, casting a rueful eye over their selfishness and pondering what they risked squandering by continuing to be this way. Straight away, you want to know what happened next. By the end of the first verse, our protagonist has alienated all the people close to him: in denial of his own folly he is left alone!
Fifty-one seconds in, we get the first chorus, the message of the song. Don’t fear change! Change is all around us! Nature is in constant flux! And change too is the fate that awaits our protagonist if he is to redeem himself. As well as the hymnal melody, I wonder: is there something Christmassy about the thematic terrain being covered here? Ever since A Christmas Carol, this time of year seems to be synonymous with tales of characters who need to look deep inside themselves and find the wherewithal to become better people: Elf, Christmas…Again?, Home Alone and Planes, Trains and Automobiles all contain characters who are fated to embark on this journey.
At two and a half minutes, in the verse that leads into the middle-eight of Everything Must Change, our protagonist also finds himself on this road: “I’m going back to the top to start myself off / But first of all, some things I need to know / When I’m scared of being wrong again / Won’t you be the one I turn to / To let me know?” Paul, of course, was a self-declared soul boy, and in this section, we can hear the purest expression of his feel for soul music — far more than we can, in fact, on his versions of soul classics like Ann Peebles’ I’m Gonna To Tear Your Playhouse Down and, of course, Wherever I Lay My Hat (That’s My Home).
And then, how sweetly does he land that middle eight, just seconds later, when he switches from the anguish of “…All I feel I do is wrong” to the vulnerable candour of “…And it’s never to late to learn about love / And this victim needs your hand to hold on”? And then seamlessly back into the chorus! A chorus which, the first time around, sounded like the beginning of a painful realisation sounds, this time around, like the start of resolution, perhaps leading to redemption. This is songwriting of Olympian magnificence! Which leads us to ask, “Who even wrote Everything Must Change?
It was Paul himself. Not just Paul, but Paul in collaboration with Ian Kewley. Now, we know all about Paul. But who was Ian Kewley? Well, Paul and Ian were in pre-No Parlez geezer-soul combo Q-Tips, and that’s his keyboard playing that helps create a cocoon of confessional intimacy around Paul’s wonderful vocal performance.
Ian’s importance in Paul’s musical life was apparent in his Facebook post back in 2020, when he shared the news with his fans that his friend had passed away: “We buddied up in the Q-Tips,” wrote Paul, “as we started to write together and he was the first guy to tell me to spread my wings and take a solo deal (and just when I was actually having a crisis of confidence!)”
As Paul’s musical MD, one assumes that it was Ian or perhaps producer Laurie Latham who steered Everything Must Change into the inspired key change at 4:09 (on the album version) which ushers us into the most dramatic moment of the song — the breakdown section which sees backing vocalists Jimmy Chambers and Tony Jackson stepping up to trade lines with Paul, before affirming the song’s message (“Change! Change! Everything must change!”) and, in doing so, leading the song to its cathartic climax, over the hot mercury rush of Kewley’s Hammond B3 soloing. These seasoned soul men who could also be heard on contemporaneous releases by Dexys Midnight Runners (Let’s Get This Straight (From The Start)) and Lloyd Cole & The Commotions (Brand New Friend). Those are all great songs, but Everything Must Change is the only one you could take back to a gospel tabernacle church and know it could handle itself in those surroundings.
Listening to it on my daily morning run this month, I’ve been imagining how fitting it would be if someone used it to soundtrack the regret/taking-stock/getting-your-act-together montage bit in a movie, where the protagonist has royally screwed up and he has to dig deep to win back the affections of his ex-lover, who finally had enough of his shit and thrown his belongings out of the first floor window. It’s coming up to Christmas; she’s angry and sad and lonely, and it’s going to take something extraordinary to give him another chance. But, of course, you know it’s all going to be ok. You know that because, well… why would you waste Everything Must Change — a song that exists to remind us that our best selves lie ahead of us — on any other outcome?
