Here in the Four Word Reviews auditorium, we are used to closing our eyes and listening, carefully and attentively, to two kinds of music. One is the album made in earnest that is unwittingly terrible. The other is the novelty album of knowingly substandard tunes. And then, every now and then, we get something else. Something that isn’t a novelty record, but perhaps isn’t a serious artist making a serious and earnest expression of their art either. Today we’re here to listen to one of those albums. Today we’re listening to “Classic Bruce Willis” by Bruce Willis.

I don’t know what this is.

We all know Bruce Willis, obviously. He’s the one off of Die Hard who tried to join the army after 9/11. But his brief music career of the late 1980s is less well known. It turns out that he got his start as a comedy actor, and around the time he was shifting from TV comedy to semi-Christmassy action movies he decided to poke his head in to a recording studio and make a pop-blues album for Motown called “The Return of Bruno”. Wikipedia describes it as having “moderate success”. The lead single was a cover of Respect Yourself that featured the Pointer Sisters.

With a couple more albums under his belt, it was time for a greatest hits compilation, and this is it – “Classic Bruce Willis” – featuring a mix of all his best tunes. It was remastered and re-released in 1999, which is where this copy comes from, so presumably some people really do want to listen to this. The sleeve notes, cryptically signed “GS, November 1999” make some elaborately worded excuses for the man that GS clearly regards as a thwarted impresario.

“Despite good sales of his debut and the singles that emerged thenceforth such as Respect Yourself, and Under the Boardwalk, Willis’ musical career never really took off. This is perhaps attributable to various reasons – that he was never accepted by the music press, he rarely performed live due to acting commitments, and as the years went on he became a husband and father.”

What the music press were stubbornly refusing to accept was an attempt by Bruce Willis to be a sort of one-man Blues Brothers. These songs desperately want to be wild, stylish, freewheeling blues in a smoky underground club, but whether it’s how Bruce likes his blues or whether it’s just because it was 1987, they’ve all turned out a bit too soft, quiet and synthy. The end result is something that sits firmly in the middle of the road. The picture on the front of the album shows old Bruno doing his best Bruce Springsteen impression but none of the music ever really sounds like that picture looks.

There’s 18 tracks of this to wade through. Buckle up, we’re going in.

Track	Word 1	Word 2	Word 3	Word 4
1. Under the Boardwalk	Slow	gentle	cover	version
2. Respect Yourself	Gospel	choir	roped	in
3. Down in Hollywood	Sassy	trumpets,	suggestive	harmonica
4. Young Blood	Argument	with	backing	singer
5. Comin’ Right Up	Bartender’s	horny	dream	sequence
6. Secret Agent Man (James Bond is Back)	Bond	theme	with	lyrics
7. Save the Last Dance For Me	Slow	with	unwelcome	accordion
8. Fun Time	Resembles	“Walk	the	Dinosaur”
9. Lose Myself	Weird.	Absolute	dog’s	dinner
10. Flirting With Disaster	Terrible	generic	80s	pop
11. Jackpot (Bruno’s Bop)	Aimless	jam	session	chaos
12. Blues for Mr. D	Slow	self	pity	ballad
13. Tenth Avenue Tango	Bluesy	instrumental,	not	awful
14. Love Makes the World Go Round	Twinkly	with	hand	claps
15. Here Comes Trouble Again	Shouty	blues	by	numbers
16. Soul Shake	Wild	bluesy	frenzy.	Sigh
17. I’ll Go Crazy	Saxophone	stab	saturated	plod
18. Respect Yourself (7″ extended mix)	Interminable	track	two	repeat

Imagine yourself some sax-heavy “go crazy” 80s Americana – the sort of music you put in a film of that era if you want to give the impression of a nightclub where everyone’s having a great time – and you more or less have this. It’s not horrendous, it’s just very much by the numbers.

What probably saves this is the hint that Bruce Willis wasn’t taking it very seriously. He was mainly known for being a comedy actor when the first of his singles came out, and “The Return of Bruno” was apparently promoted with a Spinal Tap-style movie that showed him performing his songs at events like Woodstock as though he was a legendary artist with a decades-long pedigree. And then, of course, you open the booklet inside the CD case and see just how dumb the publicity photos are, and your attitude to all this nonsense softens because he’s clearly having a laugh.

That’s not an excuse for all this album’s crimes. The lyrics are, almost universally, a terrible shame, reaching a low point on track 4 which is outright creepy – one line goes “she looked so good, I tried to follow her all the way home”. And there are quite a lot of tracks that either start or finish with the voices of black people doing what I would describe as “funky shouting” in what can only be an attempt to make it sound like a James Brown song. But musically it’s not heinous, Bruce Willis turns out to have a surprisingly good voice, he’s got himself some great backing singers, and – I think we have to acknowledge this in full – he’s not being entirely serious about being a blues singer.

In conclusion, then, I won’t be returning but this could have been a lot worse. My favourite thing about this album was the line in track 8, Fun Time, that went “got a few jingles janglin’ in my pocket”. It got a proper laugh out of me. My least favourite thing was that, when I first put the CD in the player, it spat it straight out again, but when I wiped it on my sleeve and gave it a second go it played just fine. After a decade of Four Word Reviews the CD player was clearly trying to tell me something.