You don’t have to go home but you can’t stay here.
[Video]
[3.11]
Alfred Soto: They’re drunk. They’ve gotta go home, right? The script demands it (and, boy, is this song, if nothing else, a script). It’s all the same, a stupid game, another love cat purred more than thirty-five years ago. Lots of Method acting — the words are even slurred! Like watching two average people saying average things at each other at a bar.
[3]
Samson Savill de Jong: This song is written as a funny piece of irony: people falling in love at a bar with someone who’s wildly incompatible with them because they’re drunk and horny, and which promises nothing but regrets in the morning. However this song is sung as if this is the most serious thing in the world, and the beginning of an honest to god forever after romance. Maybe that’s part of the joke — the singers taking it too seriously despite the obvious flaws — but if it is, it isn’t pulled off. The seriousness dooms the writing, which is hardly good but doesn’t stand a chance in these hands — Tom Grennan spectacularly fails to pull off “Even though you talk way too fast / I can’t stop looking at your … eyes” (get it it’s funny because you thought he’d say ASS but he talked about eyes which is much more socially acceptable objectification god we’re comedic geniuses). Ignoring the lyrics just leaves you with a fairly boringly generic song, so I wouldn’t even call it something you could switch your mind off to and enjoy. Give this to Doja Cat or Cardi B — people who know how to have fun in their music — and maybe it might’ve got somewhere, but these two are too busy showing they have emotions to ever treat this song in the way it needs.
[4]
Thomas Inskeep: You think you’re cute with those “almost said a dirty word!” lyrics, but guess what: you’re not; you’re actually more actively annoying for that. Doesn’t help that the song’s just another pop plod, or that you sound (intentionally, I presume) like a pair of drunken 20-something prats at closing time.
[1]
Vikram Joseph: The little profanity fake-outs are a slightly jarring addition to this very straight (in every possible sense) duet. It’s kind of sweet, but also somehow makes the prospect of half-cut chemistry with a stranger sound about as exciting as a trip to IKEA.
[4]
Will Adams: I too remember that one joke from Shrek. I remember it being funnier then.
[3]
Mark Sinker: Even as a kid I never loved when grown-ups used “sugar” as a coy fake swear, and the two over-signalled dodged rhymes here are even smarmier. Also this is that guy I once called an emo Jar Jar Binks, isn’t it? I guess it didn’t destroy his career after all.
[3]
Katherine St Asaph: I never understood people who want social distancing to continue until four minutes ago.
[1]
Nortey Dowuona: The fact that both of them are average singers hampers an otherwise well stitched song with wilting piano chords and sickly guitar strums, so when the thigh high bass and loping drums arrive, the crushed percussion and flat snares either kill the song or briefly give it a kick. Also, how come everyone drops the drums not on the last chorus but on the second verse so the synth horn bridge smashes into the heavy-set drop chorus, which feels like a small bottle of water in your face? It’s very trite.
[5]
Scott Mildenhall: “Come on down to the 54,” they said. “Sippin’ sizzurp in my ride,” they were. Well, for better or worse, some people just want Wetherspoons. This corporatised provinciality, its bizarrely smug reneging on rude rhymes — if you’re a privately educated popstar who became famous at 16, it might even be aspirational. But, not to project too much, there’s an uncanny bleakness to its concerted mundanity.
[4]