Mondeo Pop

If Jimmy Nail is "too funky" where does that leave Level 42?

Level 42 just "feel" right as a Mondeo Pop band, especially "It Runs In The Family" and "Lessons In Love".

Yacht Rock had "Regulate" and "Eye Know". Where are the great Mondeo Pop sampling hip-hop tracks?

The Avenue by Roll Deep is I guess the template but I'm pretty sure The Maisonettes aren't Mondeo Pop. When you've finished with your fantasy NME group (The Scene?) how about a UK Hip Hop act who trade simply on riding Kanye style ultra familiar Mondeo Pop samples.

'ain't do doubt' isn't too funky exactly but too rough-edged, production-wise, or even raucous.

same thing duh

not exactly.

Level 42 just "feel" right as a Mondeo Pop band, especially "It Runs In The Family"

what was the line, "back seat of the car / with joseph and emily"? haha ugh so mondeo

Level 42 just "feel" right as a Mondeo Pop band, especially "It Runs In The Family"

what was the line, "back seat of the car / with joseph and emily"? haha ugh so mondeo

It reminds me a lot of trips in our old Ford Sierra, so spiritual forebears then. Mark King is The Mondfather. Soz.

"I think Mondeo Pop is more of an aesthetic than ledge would have it. It's not always what Soto and co would call Sophisto-Pop but it is similar. I don't think Sade, who epitomizes Sophisto-pop is Mondeo Pop at all but The Beautiful South are the kings of Mondeo Pop and they are not Sophisto-pop. It is a style that takes inspiration from the hot indie sounds of a few years prior and makes it a bit classier."

Maybe the distinct quality of mondeo pop is a certain quality of humility, perhaps even self-deprecation - that's the slightly indie tinge at work. All this stuff feels almost self-conscious about its lack of ambition.

Sade's music seems indifferent to questions of pride/vanity/humility/self-deprecation.

Have we discussed the eligibility of Everything But The Girl yet?

Mondeo Jungle

That would be pretty much all of it from 1995 on.

Maybe the distinct quality of mondeo pop is a certain quality of humility, perhaps even self-deprecation - that's the slightly indie tinge at work. All this stuff feels almost self-conscious about its lack of ambition.

I think Tim has hit on something here. Apert from a sense of mslightly misguided nostalgia I think there is a definite sensibility uniting a lot of these bands. I'm not sure "lack of ambition" is quite right but it's clear that none of these groups wanted to U2 y know. There's something about all of them that sets them apart from rock / pop distinctions, on the whole they lack the brashness of pop but they also lack rock's iconaclastic, outsider streak. maybe they have more in common with folk , the idea of these bands being played on local radio possibly ties in here.

there is also a british class issue here. i think dom could elaborate on this better, maybe. i choose the word Mondeo cos this is actually a big trope of UK pop criticism, can you search by word on the nme or guardain music pages? i'd be intersted to see how often Mondeo has been used as a signifier....

wow

Showing results 1 - 10 of about 14 for mondeo

Audio Bullys: Generation | Reviews | NME.COM
Add Audio Bullys to Your NME Artists. Go to Artist Page. 8 Issues of NME ... hands it is the soundtrack to Mondeo Man's midlife crisis: after he's stopped ...
From: http://www.nme.com/reviews/audio-bullys/7812

Morcheeba : World Looking In | Reviews | NME.COM
... around" it's also "familiar as the soundtrack to the current Ford Mondeo ads". Really, the band would have to line up with prize-winning pumpkins on their ...
From: http://www.nme.com/reviews/morcheeba/4242

Apartment | Reviews | NME.COM
Apartment ... This track is part of an Audi project, in which ... The song, meanwhile, is distinctly more Mondeo. Reviews (1) Sign in to add your comment. ...
From: http://www.nme.com/reviews/8304

Moby | Reviews | NME.COM
You know them like you know the interior of your mid-range, fuel-injected Mondeo. ... They have seduced you into desiring all manner of modern ergonomic gadgetry. ...
From: http://www.nme.com/reviews/3531.htm

The Beautiful South: London Brixton Academy | Reviews | NME.COM
Though they've rarely been beautiful, they still deserve to be treasured... unfamiliar material into such magnificent Mondeo Man anthems as 'You Keep It ...
From: http://www.nme.com/reviews/beautiful-south/3684

NME.COM - Arctic Monkeys - A Scummy Man and Mardy Bums: The ultimate Arctic Monkeys Album Guide
Get music news, reviews, charts, tickets, newsletters, NME magazine, info on festivals, tours, clubs, concerts, rock, ... Ford Mondeo - Brand of aspirational ...
From: http://www.nme.com/arcticmonkeys/albumguide

NME.COM | Carling Weekend - Reading Backstage - Post details: Alex Zane stole my taxi and was nearly swindled by ...
Reading Festival ... After saying goodbye to Kate Nash and giving her my ... Har har Alex Zane, your theft meant you had to get to the site in a Ford Mondeo. ...
From: http://www.nme.com/blog/index.php?blog=77&p=2487&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1

Plays The Music Of REM | Reviews | NME.COM
Lovely, pass the boiled sweets, will you, darling. Oh look, Little Chef two ... The soundtrack to these Mondeo Miseries was inevitably one of the popular ...
From: http://www.nme.com/reviews/royal-philharmonic-orchestra/1586

London W1 Embassy Rooms | Reviews | NME.COM
The Bhs rollneck sweater brigade are out in full force tonight. ... than Shania, Shelby's about to take Mondeo Man's world by storm, but on ...
From: http://www.nme.com/reviews/1606.htm

Eighties Matchbox B-Line Disaster : Horse Of The Dog | Reviews | NME.COM
Eighties Matchbox B-Line Disaster : Horse Of The Dog ... the 'Disaster capturing the hearts of Mondeo-driving floating voters remain slim. ...
From: http://www.nme.com/reviews/6764.htm

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6 results

In praise of ... the Manic Street Preachers
Guardian, Friday May 4 2007
Leader
From Sylvia Plath to the Spanish civil war, the Manic Street Preachers embrace difficult themes not (just) to show off but because they have something to say. Twelve years after lyricist Richey Edwards vanished at the Severn bridge, his former bandmates continue their Reithian rock mission, releasing a new album - Send Away the Tigers - next week. In the Film & Music section (...)

(...) of one gig reported how the group packed Wembley Arena full of Mondeo drivers and then sent them home in T-shirts emblazoned with (...)

Manic Street Preachers
Guardian, Saturday December 11 2004
Alexis Petridis
The last few weeks have not been kind to the Manic Street Preachers. Lifeblood, their seventh album, was released to lukewarm reviews and sales. Despite a commercial AOR production, it somehow managed to enter the charts lower than 1994's The Holy Bible, an album described even by the sleevenotes of its recent reissue as "so bleak and horrid as to be unlistenable". Bringing (...)

(...) stand, the kind of balding, post-Edwards fans derided by critics as Mondeo drivers are queuing up to buy T-shirts bearing a quote (...)

Dido, Life for Rent
Guardian, Friday September 26 2003
Alexis Petridis
For about a decade now, music journalists and the record-buying public have been at odds. This is all Oasis's fault. In 1995, reviewers announced that their second album, (What's the Story) Morning Glory, was nothing special. It went on to become the pivotal release of its era. Two years on, critics awarded its follow-up, Be Here Now, full marks. The public snapped up Be Here (...)

(...) it. Just as Gray's audience is supposed to be comprised of Mondeo-driving middle managers singing along on their way to Furniture Village, (...)

Morcheeba
Guardian Unlimited, Friday August 8 2003
Caroline Sullivan
If you had to be at a gig on the hottest day of the year so far, it might as well have been Morcheeba at Somerset House, a night out made in inertia heaven. With its riverside setting and airy courtyard, there can't be a venue in London that better complements the trio's music "that makes people fall asleep and crash their cars," as their own bassist put it on the sleeve of (...)

(...) their constituency. Many of the latter were reeled in by a Ford Mondeo ad featuring the dreamy World Looking In, which secured the (...)

Hold tight the massive
Guardian, Friday November 22 2002
Alexis Petridis
Ever since Simon Dee's first broadcast from the MV Caroline in 1964, pirate radio has played a crucial role in forming Britain's musical taste. Now the phenomenon is bigger than ever, the airwaves in the cities so crowded that the pirates are being pushed into the suburbs and the countryside. Alexis Petridis picks up the story in an Essex garage with a young man named Stealth . . (...)

(...) like an inspector from the DTI - he's even driving a Ford Mondeo." Finally, though, Stealth has agreed to drive us to the secret (...)

David Gray: A New Day at Midnight
Guardian, Friday October 18 2002
Alexis Petridis
When a record company advertises an album on television, it usually tells you one of two things. Either it is a disaster and they are desperately trying to gee-up sales, or else they are giving a final boost to a vast success, trying to galvanise the last few potential buyers. The TV ad for David Gray's White Ladder was the latter - and also summed up the nature of the (...)

(...) the jackpot. Immediately, people complain that your audience are all boring Ford Mondeo drivers, and that, by extension, you - the bohemian singer-songwriter guy! - (...)

I'm not sure all those examples are all quite right but I think the idea of the Mondeo Popper strawman is quite powerful. It symbolizes something that is anthema to many. This idea of POP fitting so comfortably into suburban life it being neutred of some revolutionary force it supposedly holds. I think I first got the whole idea of Mondeo as a pejroative from reading about the Manic Street Preachers, I was quite a fan once, for this band who symbolized revolution and such to be now embraced by the sort of people who had mortages and stuff was seen as like an ultimate affront or something. Some kind of defeat worse than going over the Severn bridge.

The class thing, Mondeo Pop is upper working, lower middle, suburban on the whole which runs contra to so much. It seems to reject working class definat "realness" of the Oasis sort and the ethos of the art school groups. Not Punk Rock, or something. But the thing is this stuff can not be made anymore, i don't think it really can. It's not just changing fashion, it's something deeper in the fabric of the country it's the stuff i've kinda run into the ground here:

Gentrification, "Coffee Table", the 90s, Broadsheets, False Consensus and "The New Punk Rock"

and here

The Great Moving Right Show II: The Kirsty and Phil Years

The modern equivilant of Mondeo Pop is somehow more "edgy" but a lot more middle class. G2 Pop innit. Yr Allens, yr Kaisers, yr Feelings etc The Mondeo Poppers often sounded like they learned their tricks playing pubs and clubs, their modern equivilants... don't.

Where is the spiritual heart of Mondeo Pop then, socio-geographically?

in yr banjo

Produced in the North? But Mondeo Man of Petridish world is surely Essex.

xp

Mark G. Stop.

Robert Palmer, Blue Nile.

electronic: mondeo pop for people who don't like mondeo pop.

I think there's something to be said about that... guys like Sreynolds who were scared and confused by Danny Wilson could find something in Electronic to calm them down, I think?

The Blue Nile transcend Mondeo Pop surely - although maybe not Peace At Last. But the first two albums are too widescreen. I think of a lot of these other bands as being more accomodating than that.

I think Blue Nile are perhaps... I dunno. They do seem like the "hard edge" of one side of Mondeo Pop, in the same way that Wet Wet Wet are the hard edge in the opposite direction (I don't want to say pop v indie here, because it isn't, but it's at least part of the same argument). I do wonder if perhaps there are less than 20 Mondeo Pop bands out there?

i wouldn't expect tim to drop rockist-tinged concepts like 'transcend'.

blue nile are maybe MP's leading edge. chronologically speaking. they come from the right place, geographically too.

Blue Nile, Aztec Camera, Prefab Sprout... Mondeo Pop for fanzine writers?

Did they (Blue Nile) ever have a hit single? I don't think I've ever knowingly heard them.

NRQ: ha ha true. "transcend" may be the wrong word here. Anyway it implies that I don't like mondeo pop that much when actually I do like a lot of it - but The Blue Nile take a lot of mondeo pop elements and then make them so... intense... that they almost cease to be mondeo anymore.

More "transcend" in a pop sense though I think - like how "Sweet Like Chocolate" "transcends" "UK Garage". (okay I'll stop with the inverted commas now)

Three top 20 albums, no hit singles. I suppose being an album band defeats the "music for the working day" idiom of MP tho?

xp

Maybe and Robert Palmer is so not Mondeo Pop I don't think Sonic Youth would fuck with true Mondeo Pop. It's like Shania Twain is not Mondeo Pop but someone somewhere maybe listening to her whilst driving a Mondeo. Get me?

I think there's a massive Carmody style death of Liberal England thing lurking in the idea of Mondeo Pop. A lot of Mondeo Pop digs into soul and perhaps folk, a desire for erk AUTHENTICITY, which of course is why Grimey Simey had issues. Soul-cialists he calls them.

The Corrs and Texas are in a grey zone. NRQ mentioned KT Tunstall on the Mondeo Pop Facebook group then deleted it. Hmmm.

it's authenticity, but not of this kind:

"Well, I'm a lucky man
With fire in my hands

Happiness
Something in my own place
I'm standing naked
Smiling, I feel no disgrace
With who I am

Happiness
Coming and going
I watch you look at me
Watch my fever growing
I know just who I am"

which is what i meant by the verve needing to tone it down a bit.

it's more folky kind of authenticity. but not too much, if you get me.

What about Oasis then?

I do think that there is a certain smallness (or perhaps "containment" is the better word) to this stuff on a conscious stylistic level, such that when I say The Blue Nile go beyond it I'm not trying to be judgmental, just descriptive... A song like Wet Wet Wet's "Sweet Surrender" strikes me as deliberately pledging fidelity to a certain, quite conservative notion of songfulness. It reminds me of all those glowing descriptions of Crowded House's "tunesmithery" in Q Magazine back in the day. What is the implication of the phrase "tunesmith"? Craft over art? Tunes as honestly and humbly purposive and functional?

Also: let's talk about Fairground Attraction. Especially "It's Got To Be Perfect", which I adored back in the day.

The Blue Nile are the Mike & The Mechanics it's okay to like.

oasis -- and the verve -- were just too rough-hewn for this, sonically and lyrically. but maybe 'round our way' was approaching heaton. maybe. and what i was saying was, songs like 'sonnet' were taking the verve further towards MP. and naturally 'urban hymns' rang out of actual mondeos.

xpost

I mentioned Oasis cos 97 era Verve seems far more in a lineage with Oasis than say Prefab Sprout. 1997, Blair, Diana. Hedonism and sentiment finally overules Mondeo Pop streak of "Stay humble, stay low"?

yeah, fuck it. i'll buy.

But... The Man Who.

"The Man Who" is the album that killed Mondeo Pop.

I always thought that Fairground Attraction were more 2CV fodder - all that wilful rusticity crammed with a creak into a shiny new wicker picnic hamper full of shit spritzer and shoved on the backseat in a jam outside Maidenhead. I guess the Bluebells had a lot of this about them too. Also Carmel? Matt Bianco?

The folkish authenticity thing accommodates Eddie Reader's 'The Patience Of Angels' in addition 'The Second Summer Of Love', 'Young At Heart', 'Nothing Ever Happens'. I can sense tangible connections from this to Tunstall but the connections to the more urban/youthier sophistopop are harder to trace, and a far cry from something like Dave Stewart's 'Heart Of Stone'.

Matt Bianco were surely too *shiny* to be Mondeo Pop? Same reason, in a roundabout way, that Spandu Ballet and ABC aren't Mondeo Pop.

*Spandau

How did The Man Who kill Mondeo Pop... oh and then there's David Gray... I think it may have been at the scene but I don't think it was actually responsible.

xp

NickB probably right re 2CV. same things that keeps Hothouse Flowers not in this thing.

nickb's post is a thing to treasure.

Thing is you could NEVER have imagined Thatcher enjoying Mondeo Pop but there's Blair top 10 records of 1996 in that John Harris book and i is lamost 100% Mondeo Pop.

Travis were the point where Mondeo Pop made too great gains into both "pop" and "indie", they were on TOTP more, they were on Radio 1 more, they actively courted the NME and Melody Maker. It's wher ethe boundaries got broken up, which is why even if, say, Keane or Scouting for Girls wanted to make a Mondeo Pop album in this day and age they couldn't.

Keane and Scouting For Girls, The Feeling, Coldplay et al are all from a very different world. I don't see any of them writing anything so rooted if you see what I mean.

Lack of folk influence, surely? There's no humbleness.

Even when Mondeo Pop was smug (Heaton Heaton Heaton), it still meant it, maaaan. You can't say that about The Feeling.