17 January 1991
It’s about devil worship! If you play it backwards you can hear satanic messages! Such was the chatter in my school and on night-time radio about this record. This was mostly based on the word ‘diabolique’ in the lyrics, which were all in Latin and French; if we couldn’t understand them, we presumed they were hiding something nefarious and filthy, perhaps even blasphemous.
January is traditionally a down time for major releases, leaving outliers and bolters with their shot at topping the charts, and so it proves here. Enigma was the project of Michael Cretu, a Romanian producer based in Germany who had previously been a session musician on the likes of Boney M’s ‘Rivers Of Babylon’. This record is actually called ‘Sadeness (Part I)’ as in the Marquis de Sade and sadism, but in the English-speaking world the title was amended: maybe from fear of causing even more scandal than the mere word ‘diabolique’, maybe just to make it an actual word in English. The female voice is that of a German pop star called Sandra, big on the Continent but hit-free in the UK and Ireland, who also happened to be Cretu’s wife.
The combination of Gregorian chant, Panpipe Moods synthesisers and a slightly Balearic beat certainly makes for a distinctive track, but the overall effect is just boring New Age drizzle. Now that I’m older and Francophone, I can decipher the French lyrics, which aren’t particularly racy but are fairly pretentious: all about Good and Evil and God and Man. I’ll leave it to my ancient Roman readers to interpret the Latin part for us, though I think we can expect notions there too. No harm to have something different like this popping up at number one for a week, but let’s not pretend that this is anything other than a novelty hit.
Irish Number Ones 