Song 78: If You're Not the One

The Bedingfield Supremacy. The Bedingfield Epoch. How to describe those in-between and retrospectively innocent early-2000s, which birthed two such smiling, gleaming pop monsters?

OK, first, I've nothing against either Bedingfield, they're pretty admirable, they both had a burst of extreme success based on pure popskillz - no talent show, no scenes and gimmicks and lurid stuff - it's very wholesome, for want of a better word, and very endearing.

I think the Bedingfield Ascendancy came to an end when the brother and sister performed 'Ain't Nobody' together at the Brits and everyone went "Well, that's a bit weird", but it was fun while it lasted. Natasha Bedingfield was also very successful in America, even after the first single on her second album was 'I Wanna Have Your Babies' and it was not good.

Here's my main Bedingfield memory though. Summer of 2003, and I'm in an Ealing Community Transport minibus on a sunny summer's day travelling the brief stretch between Portchester and Portsmouth, as I'd done so many times before, and we're listening to Ocean FM and it's Daniel Bedingfield's 'If You're Not the One', and the DJ says "If that's not the best love song of the last ten years, then what is?"* It wasn't a phone-in.

But you know, right then, I remember thinking "Fair enough, why not? Good for you. And here we are."

That was my last Portsmouth. 2003. I don't really think of Portsmouth being in the Bedingfield era. My first Portsmouth was 1995, I remember listening to Suggs' 'I'm Only Sleeping' (along with a "Sound of the Seventies" compilation which was surprisingly faultless) and boring everyone to death with my barely-formed half-arsed musical views (as haha I've been haha doing haha ever since).

What's a Portsmouth, you ask, apart from being the only UK city on an island and the most densely populated part of the UK outside of London?

It's a long old story. It's, in its way, a great story. I'm not going to tell most of it.

Portsmouth, or PHSP, or the Playschemes, or the Access Guides, or whatever we'll call it, was a thing some of us did, connected to the school Christian Union (which I wrote about here), where we'd go off and do something for two weeks - usually it was two weeks running playschemes in the North End area of Portsmouth, staying in Portchester Community School, our group made up of St Paul's people, people, originally from Hephaistos School then from a wider sphere after Hephaistos closed down, with disabilities, and various others with various connections, but sometimes we'd spend some of that surveying a city for disabled access, resulting in 'Access' guidebooks. That's really the big and important part of the story - you could read a bit about it here.

But, look, I can't do justice to that. I'm here to talk about Daniel Bedingfield, kind of. There was a lot of music on Portsmouth, there was a lot of travel on those green ECTs. In the early days, you could have an open front door and sit on the steps, maybe, on the way back from a day's playscheme, smoking a cigarette or am i imagining that for the sake of the idyll?

I first did the playscheme when I was 16/17 (it always coincided with my birthday) and kind of struggled with it the first two years and was far from my best and wouldn't have gone a third time but my gap year ended prematurely (another tale) and i don't really think i enjoyed the 3rd time all that much either but then, on the 4th time in 1998, I was a bit more grown-up and got into the swing of it and was more use, and then after that I really loved it.

My friend Alex (not the same Alex as the Dolly Parton Alex) was in charge of the whole thing in 2000 and we did loads of the preparation work together in the week before and then the two weeks was great fun too,  and then I was in charge of the whole thing in 2001, and, again, it was a bit of a riot - I think it was a bit off-script of what the thing ought to have been, but it was fun.

There was a lot of stress and ludicrous arguments on Portsmouth, there were lots of pretentious conversations, there were lots of great people, there were angry and troubled people too at times, there was a lot of music and lots of arguments about music, there was a lot of drinking, of course. I did some of my best drinking there.

After the day's playscheme finished at 4, there'd be an hour or two of getting shit ready for the next day, then we'd traipse to the local pub (Ruddles £1.25 a pint) and there was a "two-pint" rule sometimes obeyed, and then there was dinner with wine in the courtyard on those warm nights and then an evening meeting where someone would say something heartfelt and other folk would chip in and god knows some of the shite that came out of my mouth then,  as  i was mainly very drunk, and then port and coffee and it's one of those things where you ride with the drinking and you never quite have an unworkable hangover.

I know I'm making it sound like everyone's standard youth, but it was something, really something. Friends were solidified, friends were made, good and real friends.

We had a reunion in 2018 (a party for Gordon the founder's 80th too) and I was charged with leading the celebration - I'd done a quiz 10 years before at a similar event and I didn't fancy doing another quiz, so I focused on the music ... the songs we sang and listened to ... all the kid's song and the washing up songs and the late night songs and the minibus songs (I didn't include Bedingfield, i think that memory was too too personal). I was given a list to read out of names of alumni who had died - there were a lot, often people whose lives I'd only passed though and vice versa, but some people who really had a profound effect.

You grow out of some of things you do when you're young, but that's not really because you're growing up, or getting better.

*Incidentally, on Bedingfield, I've rather enjoyed finding out that he doesn't like this song at all, he just wrote it to try and be a bit commercial like Westlife, thought it was sappy cack and didn't want to put it on his debut album.