The names of the planets have not been all that well represented in pop. I'm sure that there are several songs with 'Mars' in the title though I can't think of any of them beyond Bowie's "Life on Mars?" and Ash's "Girl from Mars". Stevie Wonder's "Saturn" is a good song — even if it gets a bit lost in the shuffle on his magnum opus Songs in the Key of Life — and I suppose there are all those drum 'n' bass tracks from '97 with titles like "Saturnz Returnz" or something. And what else? Not much — except for Venus. (I imagine our own planet has been covered as well but, again, I'm mostly coming up empty: Voice of the Beehive's "I Walk the Earth" — probably the finest song ever about travel — is the only one that leaps to mind)
The second planet from the Sun has a great deal of representation and this is without even the aid of a simple Google search. Let's see, there's The Velvet Underground's "Venus in Furs", Shocking Blue's "Venus" (which would be memorably covered by Bananarama in the eighties; sadly and soul-crushingly, we'll only get to discuss the original here), Television's "Venus", Wings' "Venus and Mars" (oh, there's a third one for the Red Planet!), Bjork's "Venus as a Boy", Miles Davis' "Venus de Milo" and Prefab Sprout's "Venus of the Soup Kitchen". "Wait! These songs aren't all about the planet," you may or may not be thinking, "they're about the famous sculpture or the Greek Roman goddess or, uh, Serena Williams' sister!" True but I didn't actually say they had to be about a planet, only that they had to have one (or more) named dropped in the title. A win by technicality is a win all the same, chumps!
Where the anti-"Venus" crowd is spot on is with the meat of the song. The verses stink and would no doubt have cleared a fifties' diner on a Friday night that had been packed with teenagers the moment it came on the jukebox. Good lord, it's a mess: you can barely hear old Frankie, he doesn't really sing at all (it's probably for the best that you can hardly hear him then) and everything is treacly and sickly and crap. Horrible and utterly unlistenable.
The saving grace, at least to an extent, is the chorus, all haunting echo and Avalon's suddenly more affecting voice gliding in and out. It's actually a shame that they didn't milk it more often, particularly in the song's middle when it needs nothing more than to be lifted out of its self-imposed torpor. The production is dense and foggy which makes it all seem ghostly; I've seen comments that it's ethereal which I can see but I prefer ghostly myself. Quite why this effect wasn't used throughout is anyone's guess. It even manages to make up for the fact that Avalon's wandering vocal appears to say "oh Vera" rather than "oh Venus" as it gets smothered by strings and a choir and a sense of unease. (It may just be me having once been a sad Anglophile teenager who watched Coronation Street religiously but I don't think there's a name with less sex appeal than 'Vera')
"Venus" was also a number one hit on the American Hot 100 but it doesn't seem to be remembered all that fondly especially since Avalon is frequently cited as one of the stars during that wasteland in rock 'n' roll that fell in between the heyday of Elvis and the rise of Beatlemania. It also lacks the cool cred of many of those other songs with 'Venus' in the title. As such, it hasn't been covered much over the last sixty years. Yet, there's a darkness to it that it seems to share with "Venus in Furs" and "Venus as a Boy" and the others. Indeed, I can imagine Siouxsie and the Banshees or Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds adding a much needed Gothic edge to it. Throwaway pop shouldn't reject it's dark side, it should embrace it.
Score: 4
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