FEATURE:
Too Good to Be Forgotten: Songs That Are Much More Than a Guilty Pleasure
Cher – Believe
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THIS is another song that people might say…
has always been celebrated and few think of it as a guilty pleasure but, more than once, I have seen people name it as a guilty pleasure or feel a little embarrassed about loving the song. If you were around in 1998, you could not help but here Believe everywhere. It was everywhere on the radio and it reached number-one in many countries. Taken from Cher’s twenty-second studio album, Believe, the lead single is the best song on the album (but there are other great songs worth checking out!). Written by Brian Higgins, Stuart McLennen, Paul Barry, Steven Torch, Matthew Gray, Timothy Powell, Believe was Cher stepping into Dance territory - departing from her usual Pop/Rock mould. Some might not like the heavy use of the vocoder, but I think that it adds something. VH1 placed Believe at sixty in their list of 100 Greatest Dance Songs in 2000; at seventy-four in their list of 100 Greatest Songs of the ‘90s in 2007. Some dislike Believe because they find it annoying and a little overplayed. It is one of Cher’s best-known songs. I think it sort of provided her with a new audience and wider reach. Her previous album, It's a Man's World, of 1995 gained some mixed reviews, and it may have been the case that things needs a retooling regarding her direction. Creating a more Euro-Disco template, Believe is a strong album - and its title song has plenty of energy and panache.
I was in high-school when the song came out, and it was one of the biggest song of the 1998. So many people were raving about it and, when you went to parties or gatherings, Believe was inevitably played! I do feel like there is this mix of people: those who love it and see it as a classic, and others that find it grating or that it is a bit plastic and overly-processed. Believe is not my favourite Cher song – that would be Love and Understanding -, but I have a lot of affection for it. I want to take heavily from an article from Sound on Sound. They provided a detailed story of Believe and how it was produced in a studio in West London. It is a fascinating tale of this worldwide smash coming together:
“For most of last year, it looked as though Celine Dion's track 'My Heart Will Go On' was going to be the best-selling single of 1998 — but this accolade was snatched from the Canadian Queen of AOR at the 11th hour by another female vocalist who not only launched a successful challenge for the title, but did so with a song that was massively different from anything she had ever done before.
For those of you who've been stuck on a radio-less desert island for the last two months, the single in question is Cher's dance hit, 'Believe', which spent seven weeks at the top of the UK charts and — at the time of going to press — had already achieved sales of 1.5 million and rising. What's less well-known is that it was produced by two London-based producers Mark Taylor and Brian Rawling, in their own studio.
Together, Mark and Brian run Metro Productions, a production and publishing company which operates from Dreamhouse, a three-studio complex in Kingston, Surrey. According to Mark, despite the track's mainstream commercial success, the story behind the creation of 'Believe' is a strange one. As released, the single incorporates the work of six different songwriters, two producers and executive producer Rob Dickins (the erstwhile chairman of Warner Brothers, who has now left the company for pastures new).
Mark, whose previous production credits include Gina G and Danni Minogue, says the fact that the single happened at all is down to a series of lucky breaks, which began when Metro's songwriters were asked by Rob Dickins to submit a song for possible inclusion on Cher's new album.
Once the demo version was agreed, Mark and Brian took over for the actual production, working at Dreamhouse, which has Mackie consoles in every room. Mark says, "We knew the rough direction to take, because Rob had said he wanted to make a Cher dance record. The hard part was trying to make one that wouldn't alienate Cher's existing fans. We couldn't afford to have anyone say 'I hate this because it's dance' — then we would have turned off loads of people who are used to hearing Cher do rock ballads and MOR songs. I think we can safely say we succeeded in maintaining the balance, because kids on their own will buy a certain type of record, and adults on their own will buy another. The only way you can achieve sales of 1.5 million is to appeal to both camps. Getting that right was the most difficult part — and was the reason why I ended up doing the track twice!"
Mark got halfway through the first version before consigning it to the bin without having played it to anyone else. "It was just too hardcore dance — it wasn't happening," he says. "I scrapped it and started again, because I realised it needed a sound that was unusual, but not in a typical dance record sort of way. This was tricky, because dance music is very specific. To get what I was after I had to think about each sound very carefully, so that the sound itself was dance-based but not obviously so.
Everyone who hears 'Believe' immediately comments on the vocals, which are unusual, to say the least. Mark says that for him, this was the most nerve-racking part of the project, because he wasn't sure what Cher would say when she heard what he'd done to her voice. For those who've been wondering, yes — it's basically down to vocoding and filtering (for more on vocoders and the theory behind them, see the 'Power Vocoding' workshop in SOS January 1994).
Mark: "It all began with a Korg VC10, which is a very rare, very groovy-looking analogue vocoder from the '70s, with a built-in synth, a little keyboard and a microphone stuck on top", he enthuses. "You must mention this, because SOS readers will love it — and I know, because I've been reading the mag for years!
IN THIS PHOTO: Producer Mark Taylor
"Anyway, the Korg VC10 looks bizarre, but it's great to use if you want to get vocoder effects up and running straight away. You just play the keyboard to provide a vocoder carrier signal, sing into the microphone to produce the modulator signal, and off you go. The only drawback is the synth — you can't do anything to change the sound, so the effects you can produce are rather limited.
Mark spent time alone in the studio painstakingly processing Cher's vocals in this way, and by the following morning, he was convinced he didn't have the nerve to play her what he'd done. "It was a bit radical," he laughs. "Basically, it was the destruction of her voice, so I was really nervous about playing it to her! In the end, I just thought it sounded so good, I had to at least let her hear it — so I hit Play. She was fantastic — she just said 'it sounds great!', so the effect stayed. I was amazed by her reaction, and so excited, because I knew it was good."
Although the vocoder effect was Mark's idea, the other obvious vocal effect in 'Believe' is the 'telephoney' quality of Cher's vocal throughout. This idea came from the lady herself — she'd identified something similar on a Roachford record and asked Mark if he could reproduce it.
Believe' took approximately 10 days to record. Once it was completed, Mark ran a monitor mix onto DAT and sent it to Rob Dickins for clearance. To Mark's surprise, Rob was so pleased with the sound that the monitor mix basically became the final version, with only the most minor of tweaks. "The vocals were much too loud, because I was trying to clear the track," he laughs. "But apart from that, it worked fine, and everyone was really happy with it. It just goes to show that you don't need to spend days mixing in order to get a hit. With 'Believe', I was adjusting things as I went along and running everything live on the computer, which meant I could save just about everything, apart from the effects and EQ hooked up to the desk. All the level changes in the mix were already recorded in the sequencer, so the finished mix just kind of grew in an organic way as we worked on the track."
The single was mastered at Townhouse, although very little was actually changed at this stage. "It was very straightforward," says Mark. "Just the fades and the odd dB of cut and boost here and there — standard mastering stuff."
Looking back, Mark says the most satisfying part of the project was getting to know Cher who spent six weeks at the studio working on the album. "The first day was incredibly nerve-racking," he admits. "I thought she might think our setup was a bit small, and that she would turn out to be a bit 'Hollywood'. But she was really great and easy to get on with. These days, artists like Cher are used to working with producers who have their own studios — and these are not necessarily big, just well equipped”.
That is some history and background regarding one of the biggest songs of the 1990s. I can appreciate why hardcore Dance fans find Believe a little inauthentic and commercial; others might just not like the lyrics and find them a little trite. For me, Believe is not a blast from a better decade: it is also one of those songs that can get everyone moving and has a real sense of memorability! It has a huge chorus and a great hook; Cher’s voice is pretty decent…and I can understand why the song did so well. Believe is one of the best-selling singles ever, with sales of over eleven-million copies worldwide. It was nominated for the Grammy Award for Record of the Year and won Best Dance Recording. In the U.K., Cher’s Believe muscled out George Michael’s Outside. It was eventually toppled after seven weeks by B*Witched and their track, To You I Belong. In a very packed and fine 1990s, Cher’s Believe remains…
ONE of the best of the decade.
