I’ll start.
The Pointer Sisters – Fire, at 1.50
Link in comments
Great pauses in pop songs
by 67 Comments
Comments
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
Musings on the byways of popular culture
Musings on the byways of popular culture
by 67 Comments
You must be logged in to post a comment.
“Romeo and Juliet”…
I’ll steam in first with Come up and See Me (Make Me Smile).
It was the first one that occurred to me.
…and, in the same breath as Make Me Smile (Come Up and See Me)…
Dance the ghost with me.
Below is link to a nice blog post by Andrew Collins about the song. I like the anecdote about Eldritch asking Collins to turn off the Radio 6 webcam because he wasn’t dressed in character. I fully approve of this sort of thing.
https://circlesoflife143.wordpress.com/2013/08/07/the-sisters-of-mercy-lucretia-my-reflection-1988/
Yep. That’s a brilliant one, remember it well without even playing the clip
Broos. Rosalita.
Nah, it’s the gap in Born To Run: 1,2,3,4…..”The highway etc etc”
Which he does on umpteen songs, but take your point.
Brooce:
Showmanship 10/10
Lyrics 8.5/10
Music 6/10
Those are unconventional time signatures for someone I always thought was a four to the floor kind of guy.
About 30 seconds in
FGTH – Relax. Many’s a time I left a poor girl on the dance floor because of the pause.
Family – In My Own Time
Sex Pistols – I Wanna Be Me
AC/DC – Jailbreak
With a bullet in hiiiiis baaaack…………..
Not sure if this counts – but it’s a great song and there is a small pause at the intro before the first “Huh!”
I am the Resurrection stops and then starts again, almost like they need a breather before diving back in again.
Very good shout.
A perfect example of why The Stone Roses could be so infuriating.
One half of the song is lumpen and dull but then, post-pause, it becomes a thrilling series of ever-increasing highs.
See also the sublime Fool’s Gold backed by the much-less-than-sublime What The World Is Waiting For.
That’s a great point and one that had eluded me all these years*. Everyone** rates their debut album as one of the best ever, and there are really good moments on it, but overall, as a listen, there are some bits where it really drags – it’s quite uneven.
*the elephant stone in the room
**yeah, not everyone, but you know what I mean.
Agreed @salwarpe. It is a massively inconsistent album.
Personal opinion and all but you could lose three or four tracks from the middle of the album and it wouldn’t lose anything of significance. Particularly Bye Bye Badman, Elizabeth, Shoot You Down and, depending on my mood on the day, Made of Stone.
I love What the World is Waiting For and I Am the Resurrection (all of it) for what it’s worth
I agree that it always felt like a mixture of the inspired with quite leaden indie pop
I wrote about this many years ago in The Dictionary of Captcha:
Fuvu noun: A mid-song pause
The classic fuvu (derived from the Mandarin word for ‘missing tooth’) goes like this. The band brings the last song of the night to a thundering abrupt halt. The crowd roar and applaud – but this is a fuvu; one bar later the band start playing again, leaving the audience with the choice of clapping like nutter sealions for another three minutes, or pretending they knew it was coming all along. A fuvu should not be confused with a fuva, which is the embarrassing pause between the end of a song and the applause from an audience who, having just fallen for one fuvu, are wondering if this is really the end of the song, or just another fuvu.
A fine example of this is The Stone Roses’ I am the Resurrection, which has a fuvu four minutes into its nine minutes; audience members who went apeshit during this fuvu and tried to sustain it risked severe mental and manual trauma, which is why Ian Brown famously screamed “YOU’VE PEAKED TOO SOON!” to the mosh pit at Spike Island.
Ian Brown famously screamed “YOU’VE PEAKED TOO SOON!”
To the crowd at Spike Island?
Or as a forecasting of his own career?
I’m not sure if it’s known everywhere as doing a Bobby Gillespie but The Stone Roses are frequently more interesting the less the singer is involved.
I can’t believe I’m the first person to mention the song that’s so full of pauses that it’s more pause than song, and that’s David Essex’s “Rock On”. Here’s DE performing it live, and there are plenty of tremendous pauses from about 1:48.
Good choice.
3 examples from me.
Ben Liebrand’s Eve of the War has Richard Burton’s “then the music stopped”
Pet Shop Boys Left to my Own Devices has a brief pause before the last verse “it’s not a…crime” & the full Anne Dudley Orchestra kicks in
Telepopmusik Love’s Almighty that collapses & turns into a James Bond piece
A fractional pause between “and then my mind split open” and the squalling guitar in the VU’s I Heard Her Call My Name
In Every Dream Home A Heartache:
(Pause) “And then she blew my mind” (pause) wig-out coda.
Some good ones:
Waiting Room – Fugazi (still the best)
Just What I Needed – The Cars
Hard To Explain – The Strokes
Staraflur – Sigur Ros
March of the Pigs – NIN
Was just about to post Waiting Room.
The mark by which all other pauses in rock should be measured against.
Others?
Sabotage – Beastie Boys
Stop – Jane’s Addiction
Love Shack – The B-52s, the impact of which is lessened by the fact it’s only 30s before the end of the song and the song only returns as it was rather than moving up a gear
The sheer length of the pause on Waiting Room puts it in a different class.
Stop is an excellent suggestion. What a great record that is.
A Bowie one :
“Don’t you know you’re life…itself?’
Wild is the Wind
Superb.
And the loooooong pause before the chorus on his stripped-back 1979 version of Space Oddity.
Wax: Bridge to Your Heart
The Chain. There’s a pause then the bass comes in then it’s the F1 theme blazing away.
Peter Gabriel – Waiting For The Big One has several excellent lacunae. Brilliant for air drumming, this one.
Hazel O’Connor’s Will You, which heralds the arrival of the sax solo with a false ending, a pause, and a drum fill like a dustbin falling down a lift shaft.
King Crimson’s 21st Century Schizoid Man has a few.
A Google search declares such a pause to called be a caesura. I didn’t know that.
Right at the end of Electrolite there is a pause before Michael Stipe sings ‘I’m Outta Here’.
..which as it turned out was actually the case for Bill Berry.
Can there be a more daring pause than the one that occurs 1 minute into the Mahavishnu Orchestra’s ‘Open Country Joy’ and lasts for 10 seconds?
The tune was edited in length for a US radio promo 45 and that gap was reduced to 5 seconds – doubtless in case some daft DJ thought the song was over.
..or the radio station’s automatic dead-air-detector was triggered and “We are experiencing technical difficulties. Please stay tuned” was announced, followed by some pre-recorded light music.
😀
This one’s only about 8, I reckon, but I do remember wondering whether the bloke from Two Tribes would kick in to tell us the world was ending if they ever played it on the radio..
(DJ Shadow – Blood On The Motorway)
Supervixen by Garbage – less of a pause, more of a stutter.
I first heard that late at night, laying in bed. Peel played it and it woke me up!
Great call! Love that and the anticipation each time it comes around.
The several pauses/stutters at the start of Madonna’s Don’t Tell Me made millions of listeners say “What the hell’s wrong with this CD?”
This – starts with a stop, then drives into a righteous rhythm and semi-connected vocals that are so weightless. I love it
Then disappears into the ether with a pause before the final Deal ‘ooh’
One of the best-known routines at a Phish concert is the pause in »Divided Sky«:
Somewhere in the »silent passage« (around 5:00 in the video) the band freezes – just before the final note in the guitar melody. They stare at the crowd and wait till everyone is quiet. This used to take up to 3 or four minutes; everyone in the audience of course is in on the joke nowadays and usually there’s always someone cheering near the stage. Nonetheless it’s always a fun moment of anticipation and tension-building suspense as the main guitar solo is just around the corner.
A Medium article on the subject:
Great Music Pauses that will make you happy
“What happens when the beat finally drops?
You can feel it, right? I bet you do. A study published in the scientific journal Nature Neuroscience investigated this connection and found that listening to music can make you feel euphoric by causing a dopamine release in your brain.
The effect is even more powerful if you anticipate it happening, as is the case when the music pauses before delivering a high-energy return at the awaited beat drop. And that feeling is what makes us come back for more.”
I bet @bingo-little knows some great dance tracks with massive drops.
Couple of obvious tracks with pauses before big drops:
They’re less prevalent than you’d think though. Silence and dancefloors don’t really mix that well.
John Lennon – God
“I just believe in me … ”
(long pause)
“… Yoko and me”
You forgot the prior pause:
(Strained, emotional voice) “I don’t believe in Beatles…”
(Pause AND music stops)…
(A capella, sotto voce) “…I just believe in me…”
I think it’s the more dramatic of the two pauses.
This far down and we havnt had … Stop……….. Hammer Time!
The Replacements – Talent Show
Radiohead – Just
(about 2:30 in, a moments silence before the guitar goes fuzzy mental – great pause, maybe 2 or 3 bars too short though)
Immediately this.
All this way with no mention of Ruby by Kenny Rogers!
I’ll also throw in Don’t Go Back to Rockville by REM.
Sparks -Something For The Girl With Everything “She knew way back when you weren’t yourself, pause,plink plink, pause, plink plink, pause, intake of breath, guitar solo”
Possibly too country for the OP which specifies pop, but the pause before the vocal comes in on each chorus is marvellous.
“A Flower?”
Not a Genesis fan, but when I fast forward “Supper’s Ready” on the iPod, this pause is the cue for “Willow Farm,” the fun, Bonzos-style pop song in the middle of the prog opus. (like breaking a Twix bar open to get the caramel)
Pet Shop Boys – Left to my Own Devices
A very upbeat, house piano-led banger which pounds along nicely for a couple of minutes until the beats stop abruptly. And then :
“I was faced with a choice at a difficult age
Would I write a book? Or should I take to the stage?
But in the back of my head I heard distant feet
Che Guevara and Debussy to a disco beat…”
After a pause, the song resumes properly and is an utterly euphoric moment.
Lou Reed – Street Hassle