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New Dawn Fading, Or Rising?: “I’d Love You To Want Me” by Lobo

By Marcello Carlin

Sometime in the early nineties, Bobby Gillespie gave an interview to Select magazine. I can’t immediately find the piece online – it is emphatically not the love-in with Kylie which appeared in the same magazine a little later, over the contents of which it is perhaps best to draw a veil – but in the midst of talking about various grandfatherly musicians like the Stones and the Faces he mentioned the feeling he got from listening to certain pop records from a certain time, a feeling of a new day beginning, of new light flowing into a wanting life. The ones he mentioned were both hits in 1974 Britain – “The Most Beautiful Girl” by Charlie Rich (a Billboard number one in late 1973) and “You Make Me Feel Brand New” by The Stylistics (of which more later) – but I wonder whether “I’d Love You To Want Me” wouldn’t fit in with that vision.

At the time I only knew Lobo from “Me And You And A Dog Named Boo,” a record to which I was quite attached, mainly because it sounded to me like the Archies; but having already been released once in Britain in 1972 without success, another record company picked up the UK rights to “I’d Love You To Want Me” and managed to get it into our top five in 1974. To me it’s a rather drippy ballad, sung in the manner of an ALDI Neil Young, with rather cringeworthy lyrics (sample: “And when you moved your mouth to speak/I felt the blood go to my feet”). But I do understand why it would inspire that kind of feeling in others - coming-down music to help you get back up, one might term it - and if you observe that this is not exactly Grievous Angel, then I would point out that the young Lobo (Roland Kent LaVoie) actually worked with fellow Floridian Gram Parsons in early sixties band The Rumours. It is, admittedly, patient and sober in comparison with a lot of other hits of the period and this is to the record's credit, although I continue to find it wearily predictable, while acknowledging the possibility that it might just be me. I must certainly apologise for this somewhat ambivalent and possibly misleading review, yet its tentative tone may prove a welcome relief from the “I don’t like it, therefore it’s no good” school of red-nosed clowning which so many music writers continue to make depressingly familiar.

Date Record Made Number Two: 18 November 1972
Number Of Weeks At Number Two: 2
Record At Number One: “I Can See Clearly Now” by Johnny Nash
UK Chart Position: 5 (1974 reissue)

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