It used to be that appearing on the National Lottery show was the biggest possible plug for a new record but, as Peter Andre’s astonishing comeback has shown, Dale and his balls o’ plenty can’t compare to reality TV.
In a world where has-beens and socialites become household names for eating insects, Andre’s faux-spontaneous renditions of ‘newly-written’ ditties on I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here! have seen him score Number One and Number Three singles six long years after his last Top Ten success.
The touchingly-entitled “The Long Road Back” comprises 11 new songs and two versions of the never-any-good “Mysterious Girl”. It opens with "Insania", less a song than a statement of fact. Peter’s is a world in which people in the street call out to him to join their ‘reggae jam’ (“Let’s Go Dancing (Ooh La La)”), where technology makes him sad (“Insania”) and where Shaggy-esque ragga middle-eights are still de rigour. Girls are quicksilver characters with his happiness in their hands and metaphors are there to be mixed: “You can feel the butterflies/Sending chills down your spine” (“What Is Love?”).
Yet, painful as it is to admit, the man who personified Barbie’s Ken for the post-Bros generation has a consummate pop voice, if one self-consciously styled after Michael Jackson. Whether curled around cheapo ballads (“All Cried Out”) or gurgling through party tracks, his “Thriller”-era tone squeezes feeling and meaning from every single syllable.
Not unlike “Justified” if it had gone through the perma-’80s European hit factory rather than anointed by the Neptunes, “The Long Road Back” flirts with genres and thrives on the unfailing confidence of its central character. It’s an addictively silly album and for anyone whose favourite songs are those that sound best when they’re drunk, it’s simply unbeatable. Wooo!
