All The Good Love That I Have Wasted.

This post is apropos of nothing. At a stretch I suppose it could be tied to New Year's resolutions; I did hear this in the Accessorize at Euston Station on Christmas Eve, tired, hungover, phoneless and whisky-damaged. It was one of those days when you're sporting your finest unibrow, boil breakout and eye tyres and you still feel the night before sitting stubbornly on your skin. Mental oaths sworn to never drink again may have passed sluggishly through my fogged head. Dignified it was not, especially when the flashbacks started up. But Jamelia, in all her magnificence, is abounding in the stuff - dignity, not flashbacks to drunken misbehaviour. I have to admit that I needed to google the sample, not for the title of the song, but for its meaning - "Golden Brown" - could refer to any number of things: demerara (sp?) sugar, a wholemeal loaf, frying onions, Caramacs, fake tan blurbs, the feathers of a tawny owl, the interior of any given Greggs. I was being absurdly naive, as per; no tawny owls for The Stranglers, rather heroin. No love for frying onions perceived in a lyric, no matter how big it may seem, could make sense in 'Never a frown with golden brown.' Silly innocent, food/owl obsessed brain.

The ingenuity of the sample could be twofold: the melodic jaunt of the harpsichord adds rich contrast to sedate vocal swayings, but there are lyrical connotations too. Though this sounds like many a generic ballad/ break up lover's farewell laced up in convention and tied up in cliché, could it be a comment on someone's drug addiction, given the coded meanings encrypted in the sample? Perhaps that's bestowing too much gravitas onto a straightforward pop song, but the potential for ambiguity is, is thrilling? Clever? Overemphasised?

Perhaps. "Golden Brown" seems to have been applied in its most literal sense in the video: sepia tones, fireworks, ochre tinted wallpapers, aged fabrics, varnished woods, the topaz haze of a lit city under the night sky (albeit a terribly green-screened one). Perhaps Jamelia hasn't wasted all her love on a hapless junkie (haven't we all), perhaps she just got stung by the strapping hunk featured feeling her up under the sheets; quelle tragedie. Whatever the context, it is still emphatic, anthemic in its repetition.It's what she excelled in after all: see "Thank You", "See it in a Boy's Eyes" - she was always convincing in strength, elegant even in frayed jeans and a baseball cap (the budgetless "Superstar" debut.) No more, no more indeed; no more to a lot of things. If you keep to your resolutions, that is.