Sealed, not delivered

On the face of it, Seal should be returning home as a hero. Two weeks ago his Kiss From A Rose, the single which had already done much to reawaken his relationship with the UK record buyers, went to No 1 in the US Billboard chart. Let's leave aside the issue of why British fans should greatly care who's doing well over the water for the moment. The fact is that if Blur had done what Seal's done, Damon Albarn's OBE would already be in the post, by popular demand. Yet scarcely a word has been uttered about Seal's triumph. Two songs into his maiden show at the Plymouth Pavilions, as he drifted about the stage in a black silk suit, oozing poise and restraint and singing like an angel, you wonder why.

We know a lot about Seal: that his parents were Nigerian and he was christened Sealhenry; that he grew up in London, didn't like school, trained in the clothes trade, but did his share of "McJobs" in his early twenties (he is now 32), right down to working at McDonalds and putting cards in phone booths for Soho prostitues.

He also sang in a group called Push, but was known on the rave scene, which is how he came to meet the Howard Jones of house music, Adamski. They recorded the bouncy techno anthem Killer together and it topped the chart in quick order, meaning Seal found himself in the enviable position of having scored a No 1 hit without being signed to a record label (Killer was in Adamski's name). Before long, he signed to former Buggle and Frankie Goes To Holywood producer Trevor Horn's ZTT label and recorded a magnificent follow-up, Crazy. By Christmas 1991, Crazy had reached No 2 in the singles chart and Seal was on his way to becoming a star.

The dark, horizontal scars on Seal's face are not, as many people have imagined, some kind of tribal marking. They just appeared eight years ago for no apparent reason and no one knows what they are. Seal used to fancy that they were some kind of spiritual inheritance from his forefathers and with the light shining down on his huge frame, reflecting off the surface of his dark, shaven head, they do look striking, adding to his already considerable presence. When Seal moves to the front of the stage, you, the audience, feel as though he's standing among you.

Indeed, spirituality is something that looms large in Seal's lexicon - perhaps, on the evidence of Wednesday's Plymouth show, too large. The stage set-up looked curiously like seven enormous, up-turned condoms arranged in a semi- circle behind his band. One wondered initially whether each member was going to jump out of one, Spinal Tap-style and, by the end, was rather surprised that they hadn't. The thing is, no one does the weighty pop demi-epic with the chord changes aimed squarely at the pit of your stomach like Seal does. You realise this when he hit Crazy at the end. This was magnificent, Seal's voice aching with restraint and all the more powerful for that. Lesson's I've Learned, delivered as an encore, was also pleasant, just as a clever, eastern-tinged reading of the enormously classy Kiss From A Rose had been earlier.

For whatever reason, though, Seal seems unduly keen to convince us that he's less Earth Wind And Fire than Foucault, despite the evidence of the lyrics which seldom rise above the level of well-meant platitudes. Not that this would be a problem - pop has always thrived on the dodgy couplets - but for the fact that most of the beats and melodies fall in behind the words. Taken over an hour and a half, you realise that Seal is something of a one-course horse. Nearly all the songs are roughly the same, middling pace; the structures are the same and the melodies are aiming to pluck at the heartstrings. Naturally some (the singles, generally) are better than others (most of the rest) and this is the problem. The greater ones are cheapened by the lesser. At one point, after a turgid run of three or four balads, Seal perked up and said, "Round about this time, you must be about ready to dance..." Then his boys conjured up another lumpen rhythm, one that seemed little different from what had gone before. This engendered a desire to toss a caber as much as dance. And if Adamski was in the audience when a flat-footed, quasi-industrial version of Killer came along, it must have been a bitter experience for him.

The reason why music fans are not busy celebrating Seal's success, then, is because his music is no longer for them. There was a noticable gap in the audience for this show. There were a lot of kids with their parents and young people in their early teens. Then there were late twenty and thirtysomethings. The 18 to 25s, on the other hand were relatively poorly represented. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this, either - what I'm saying is that the people who buy a lot of records don't listen to Seal anymore. His music is bought by those - the silent majority - who will only buy a few albums during the course of a year. The same could be said of Phil Collins or Simple Minds. Seal is the Simple Minds of soul. At best, his angst is pretty and easily digested. And good luck to him. It's probably the most direct route to an OBE anyway.

Reproduced without permission