There Goes a Tenner
There Goes a Tenner
Music video
Razzamatazz
Like the cinematic heists it pastiches, “There Goes a Tenner” is both defiant and preemptively defeated. Bush’s least successful single ever, it died on the charts, slouching at a staggering #93 in the UK, was largely ignored by radio stations and TV programs, and faded into the ether with a paucity of fanfare. Following the resounding 15-month gap between the releases of “Sat In Your Lap” and The Dreaming and the title track’s subpar chart performance, the lack of public response to Bush’s twee ballad of panto Cockney robbers is perhaps a predictable outcome. In the weeks preceding and following the release of “There Goes a Tenner,” the UK Top 10 encompassed a cadre of new wave and R&B hits from Culture Club, Tears for Fears, Marvin Gaye (with “Sexual Healing,” which we’ll talk about someday), and Kool & the Gang, an overtly goofy caper homage single seemed at best like a hard sell and total commercial folly at worst.
Even on The Dreaming, “There Goes a Tenner” feels rudimentary and extrinsic. It’s a piano/bass/drum-based track like the majority of Bush’s earlier material, which lends it a vintage quality. The rhythm of the refrain’s first line (“MY-ex-CITE-ment,” “BOTH-my-PART-ners”) has an almost trochaic pattern that’s also present in Never for Ever’s “Egypt.” Unlike the psychological abstractions of “Sat In Your Lap” or “Suspended in Gaffa,” the song’s subject is narrative and conventional. It’s a classic heist movie channeled into pop music, wherein a neophyte crook assists in a robbery (“remember that we have just allowed/half an hour/to get in, do it, and get out,” “the sense of adventure/is turning to danger”). Parabolically, the heist fails explosively (“you blow the safe up/then all I know is I wake up/covered in rubble/one of the rabble/needs mummy”) and leaves the protagonist craving their simpler, less desperate past when “you [a vague pronoun] would carry me/pockets floating in the breeze.”
Such aesthetic, narrative quaintness is decidedly out of place in 1982 pop. Bush’s mockney shtick and the thinly-layered mix sound like the score for a Buster Keaton film. She’s functionally put out a novelty single, a damning move for a pop artist in her chart heyday. The result is an odd synthesis of her older work and her newer work. Like The Dreaming’s other singles, “Tenner” is an intensely vocal track, built around the use of the human voice and mix as an instrument, especially with its Cockney hashup (“OH-KAY-RE-MEM-BAH”). What we wind up with is a song that’s more weird than interesting.
It would be comforting to assert that “There Goes a Tenner” is a lost classic that was ahead of its time, but such a claim would be more than a touch mendacious. “Tenner” is approximately Bush’s nadir as a singles artist, an unfocused mess with little distinctive musicality, a lack of imagination (comparatively, at least), a grating and flatly offensive Mockney dialect from Bush, and an unsatisfying production with a post-chorus meandering synth break that sounds like Bush giving up.
The date is October 31st, 1973. My sister and I huddle cowardly in the dark, hopped up on sugar, two little girls spellbound by the rituals of Halloween. I still remember the ghosts, the lions and leopards, the vampires and wolves and sheep. I think we were lions that year. Our costumes would have been onesies.
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