What We Call The Most

'Look, Mary, no hands!'

There's no question in my mind that Cliff Richard has made a lot of good records, but very few of them have the immediate dance floor appeal of his very groovy version of 'The Girl Can't Help It' as released on his 1970 LP 'Tracks 'n' Grooves'.

The Little Richard cover puts Cliff back in touch with his rock and roll roots, of course, but it's a slightly daring move as the lyrics are ridiculously and comically lascivious, with numerous metaphors for sexual arousal and climax.

To complement the saucy words, Cliff is given a loping, slightly sleazy arrangement to emote over, full of dirty bass and, yes, prominent horns. In an attempt to temper the relentless smut, a middle eight is inserted where a Hammond organ goes all churchy and Cliff suddenly declaims 'OH, HEAR ME NOW!' as if he were a hysterical evangelist working a tent full of gyrating snake handlers.

Nice one, Clifford, nice one, son.

A Million Horns

It’s 1970, and Cliff Richard faces up to the challenges of a new decade and a less than inspiring recent sales record by teaming up with his old pal Hank Marvin and releasing a single that is not only rockier than his usual output, but also exploits a topical theme: the unstoppable rise of the car, and the damage pollution is doing to the environment.  

Written by Hank, ‘The Joy of Living’ features an interesting guitar effect that seems to evoke the grinding futility of a traffic jam, and lyrics that are both deeply sarcastic and rather angry and are redolent of J.G Ballard (who would have thought lots of big, sexy, deadly cars a good thing) or even Patrick Hamilton (who would have thought it disastrous*). In this dystopic version of the future where the motor car is King,  man is reduced to living in state appointed high rises, looking down on the world and remembering what it felt like to breathe clean air, like a scene from the credit sequence to 'Soylent Green' come to life.

In the end, however, a strong ecological message and a jaunty chorus were not enough to propel the song  higher than number 25 in the charts and the backlash against the dirty bastard car didn’t take place after all.  As someone who was stuck in a lovely multi coloured crocodile for twenty minutes this morning, I wish the world had listened to Cliff more closely. He was also right about young ones not being young for very long.

* Hamilton had more reason than most to hate the motor car, having been knocked over and nearly killed by one in the late 1920's. In 'Coleoptera', the last chapter of his 1953 novel 'Mr. Stimpson & Mr. Gorse', he predicts a Britain over-run by cars, created by man to serve but now completely in charge of their inventors and 'pitilessly exacting' in their demands. 'The beetles were not magnanimous in victory', he notes.

I Had No Luck With Her

To kick off, here's a screenshot from a recently repeated episode of 'Top of The Pops' originally broadcast in 1980. It features the backing singers for a performance of Jona Lewie's quirky electro pop hit 'You'll Always Find Me In The Kitchen At Parties'. 

Left hand lady is the much missed Kirsty MacColl, of course, but I have been unable to identify her co-worker. This task has been made harder by the fact that neither of them actually sang on the record, they were just in the vicinity when needed for the telly. They really remind me of the girls I used to like as a young man: attractive, feisty, not interested.  

Derry Good Plus

It’s impossible for me to think about Northern Ireland for any length of time without hearing the wonderful music of The Undertones in my head. One of my favourite groups of all time, ever, The Undertones did that supremely difficult thing of mixing pop tunes with crunching rock music: hard coated, soft centred stuff filled with life and energy and joy and excitement. I’ve been in a few bands in my time and tried to emulate this confection, and haven’t even got close.

If you want to know what being young feels like at its best, listen to the joyous ‘Here Comes The Summer’ – if you want to know what it feels like at its worst, then listen to ‘Teenage Kicks’, a timeless razor sharp pop song filled with yearning. The Undertones simply wrote great songs, seemingly artless, almost naïve things that, nevertheless, were full of emotion and profundity. They were clever, too – and funny - they called the opening track on their second album ‘More Songs About Chocolate & Girls’, after all.

All the best group’s progress, of course, and, with each release, The Undertones’ sound evolved into something more subtle and considered. Their songs became more complex and layered, and began to be about things other than chocolate and girls, quite often the situation in Northern Ireland. The band never became self-indulgent, but they did become slightly self-conscious, and their later records try a little too hard to be diverse. Surprised by their success and the sort of lifestyle it afforded them, the band lost their unity too soon, and split up (initially) in 1983.

It’s hard (and slightly pointless) to try and pick out The Undertones finest moment from their marvellous back catalogue but, if pushed, I would nominate the astonishing garage rock of ‘You’ve Got My Number (Why Don’t You Use It?)’, a jet propelled pop art vignette fuelled by hooks and oomph, as played by brilliant yobs in half mast trousers.    

 

Feargal's red polo neck and shooting jacket combo remains the outfit I'd like to be buried in.

Feathery

Hutch.

Hermione.

David.

The sixties super group that never, ever was: Feathers. Never mind, Dave, you'll be fine.

Dragonfly Trumpeter

At the time, Freddie Mercury (who would have been 67 today) always struck me as the archetypal 1970’s rock superstar: arrogant, self-indulgent, out of touch, excessively hairy. I scoffed at him and his fans because I liked new working class groups like The Specials and Madness and ‘middle aged’, University educated Queen seemed like posh dinosaurs, punk dodgers, old top hat.

I was wrong, of course, and I realised this soon after Freddie died. You don't miss your water and all that. Twenty odd years on, I’m still wearing that old hat and loving it, enjoying their early albums and marvelling at their preposterous blend of pomp, speed metal and dungeons and dragons.

Released in 1974, 'Queen II' has a white side and a black side (not literally, it’s an artistic notion rather than a novelty pressing). The white side is okay, but the black side is (literally) fantastic. Written entirely by Freddie Mercury, we are caught in a landslide of multi-tracked vocals, mantelpiece guitar, piano, harpsichord and big drums, all linked together by clever production and lyrics that reflect the 28 year old Mercury’s obsession with fairytales and mythology, and set in his very own imaginary world of Rhye.

‘Ogre Battle’ is a rip-roaring tale that tells of every wizard’s idea of a great night out: a ringside seat at a big old scrap between club wielding giants. One can only hope that elf and safety rules were followed. This segues into the centrepiece of the album, the epic (in scope, not timing) ‘The Fairy Feller’s Master Stroke’.

'The Fairy-Feller's Master Stroke' (1855-1864) 

Based on the painting of the same name by Richard Dadd, this remarkably overblown song tells the story of the titular faery, his associated band of dilly dally-o’s, dirty laddios and quaere fellows, and the mighty axe he uses to crack Queen Mab’s walnut. Yes, I know. But it’s as brilliant and as unhinged as the artist Dadd himself, who suffered from paranoid schizophrenia, killed his father and continued a long career from the confines of various asylums.

The bombast and driving harpsichord of ‘Feller’ gives way to a ballad, ‘Nevermore’ that sounds like its being performed on a crystal grand piano at the top of a very tall tower and could have been done by The Beach Boys if they came from Narnia rather than California.

Anyway, don't take my word for it --

Listening to the black side of this album has led me to revaluate my feelings about Freddie, banishing my image of him as a strutting, moustachioed rock knob and instead revealing a far more sympathetic figure: a somewhat lonely and out of place person who retreated into a fantasy world to find somewhere his difference didn’t matter. & Freddie was different: born in Zanzibar, brought up in India, Parsi, Zoroastrian, buck toothed, gay (or bisexual, he had a long term girlfriend at this point). If the record hadn’t been so perfectly realised, or he didn’t have the rest of the group behind him, he could have been the archetypal outsider artist.

Wacker's World

It's holiday season on The Island (and Mounds & Circles). There are other blogs, of course, but they mainly just pinch stuff from us. I'll be back on the 1st September, but I'll leave you in the capable hands of those glorious Scouse femme fatales The Vernons Girls.

Be seeing you!

Too High

Pop music is a lot of fun when it is done well, bringing a smile to the face, a warmth to the cockles, a spring to the step or a lump to the throat depending on the tone. But pop music is very rarely profound: the confines of the two to four minute radio friendly hit template generally preclude philosophical debate and, as a result, very few pop records have actively contributed to a wider understanding of the nature of existence: it’s just not something they do.

There are always exceptions to any rule, however, and the exception can often be from an unlikely source. The Sweet had charged up and down the charts in the early seventies in a platform heeled frenzy of alliteration and sexual innuendo, all set to a thumping glam rock beat. Songs like ‘Little Willy’ and ‘Wig Wam Bam’ did very little to push forward man’s knowledge of himself and his surroundings, and although classic tracks like ‘Teenage Rampage’ and ‘Blockbuster’ tapped into the prevailing climate of radical politics and violent civil uprising, the focus was on action rather than ideology. After their peak period of activity, however, when hits were harder to come by and the band were older, wiser and bearded, they wrote and recorded ‘Love Is Like Oxygen’ (1978), one of my favourite songs, and one of the deepest pop records ever made.

‘Love Is Like Oxygen’ is a song that sums up thousands of years of accumulated knowledge about human emotion in three simple but piquant lines:

‘Love is like oxygen: you get too much you get too high;

not enough and you’re gonna die’

…and sets this lyrical gold to a powerful mix of crunching rock guitar, mutant disco and sweeping analogue synthesisers to create a musical track of highs, lows and plateaus that perfectly complement this important message. I must admit to be slightly less enthused about the verses, which are a little slow and seem permanently on the verge of pan pipes, but the chorus is magnificent and scientifically accurate (another rarity in pop) and I am not ashamed to admit that I have used electrickery to loop it and often listen to it for 10-15 minutes at a time, creating a motorik rock groove that is almost terrifying in its relentless truth.

The Ivor Novello award nominated record was The Sweet’s last Top Ten hit, and they split shortly afterwards. Sadly, singer Brian Connolly died in 1997 in an abject state, a chronic alcoholic wrecked by numerous heart attacks; their excellent drummer Mick Tucker passed away in 2002. It’s my nature to end on the downbeat. Sorry. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have some heavy pondering to do. Where did I put that Sweet loop?

Oh, and given the date, no, this is not a piss take, just a slightly gilded lily. 

Sing, Boy, Sing!

A Valentine's card to one of my greatest musical heroes, Scott Walker. His latest album is incredible.

The Film Wot Slade Dun

Hairy black country rockers Slade were phenomenally successful in the early seventies, so it made perfect sense for them to make a film. ‘Slade in Flame’, however, is a strange one: it’s gritty and violent and depressing and ends not in triumph but in defeat, not with a bang but a whimper.

Originally invited to do something more in keeping with their lovably thuggish public demeanour, the group instead invited the director and the writer to accompany them on a gruelling US tour. Realising that pop life was more sweat than sequins, and inspired by the group's tales of their own and others experiences, the story of a group called ‘Flame’ evolved, a sort of composite of any number of bands struggling to make it in the hectic and hugely competitive music scene of the late sixties.

Flame's rise to fame has all the glamour of a blocked toilet in the services at Newport Pagnell, full of grind, scabby dressing rooms, shit deals, piss ups, punch ups and Johnny Shannon as a nasty bastard gangster manager who ditches them when they're down only to come back to suck them dry when they start to make some money. It's not without humour, and it's not without charm, but, overall, it's dingy and dark - a cautionary tale rather than a success story. It's a shit business.

Slade acquit themselves well, especially as they are asked to act a bit rather than simply chirrup the odd line and not bump into the furniture. Noddy Holder is particularly good, certainly the only one able to hold his own with proper actors like Tom Conti, and with so much hair he looks like a ginger Womble. 

I’m not a big fan of Slade’s music by any means, but they’re at their best here: loud, fast, cocky, lewd and full of energy and aggro - and Noddy's Benson and Hedges falsetto is a thing of improbable wonder.

Slade In Flame

Having A Wild Weekend

It seems odd now, but The Dave Clark Five were one of the biggest names in sixties pop, particularly in the US where they appeared on the Ed Sullivan show eighteen thousand times and had sixty number ones or something. The DC5 didn’t really bother with things like musical progression, and they didn’t get all hairy and weird like The Beatles, so they may have seemed safer and more palatable to our predominantly more conservative transatlantic cousins. Their music, a pretty basic shouty, stompy take on early rock and roll is probably one of the least interesting things about them. By far the most interesting is the film they made in 1965, ‘Catch Us If You Can’.

Directed by rising star John Boorman, the film is wacky and fun loving for approximately ten minutes before becoming quite amazingly wistful and downbeat. Dave and the lads (the other four aren’t given names. One has no lines at all) play stuntmen (Dave’s job before he became a pop star) who are working on a successful advertising campaign for meat. The star of the ads is Dinah, the ‘Meat For Go!’ girl. She and Dave share an unspoken mutual attraction and both feel confined by the ruthlessly commercial world they have become a part of, a world run by manipulative men only marginally older than them but much more ‘grown up’: men who no longer have dreams, only goals. Dave and Dinah impulsively run away from the latest advert shoot, stealing an e-type Jag and heading for an island off the Devonshire coast that Dinah is thinking of buying.

What follows is an hour and a bit of Dave and Dinah trying to find freedom, pursued all the way by the unstoppable forces of adult life and the press who, in order to generate maximum publicity,  have been led to believe that Dinah has been kidnapped. This downbeat travelogue is occasionally punctuated by DC5 recordings (the band do not play or sing at any point during the film), and, superbly, incidental music from an uncredited Basil Kirchin.

When they finally arrive at their destination (Burgh Island near Plymouth) the young almost lovers soon realise it’s far from being the safe haven they dreamed of - not only is it readily accessible when the tide is out, but the media circus following the couple has already landed. Dinah, swayed by the flash bulbs and the attention, is immediately sucked back in; a baleful looking Dave and the boys drive off in their Mini Moke to their next existential crisis.

A strange, pensive film, it’s interesting to think what DC5 fans would have thought of it, especially under its US title ‘Having A Wild Weekend’, but then I suppose ‘Having A Weird Weekend’ doesn’t sound as much fun (it does to me).  Dave Clark readily admitted that he was not comfortable as an actor and this clearly shows – in fact, he does the strange thing of making the viewer uncomfortable. Described throughout as ‘saturnine’ he is a dark, glowering, monosyllabic presence who spits out his chewing gum on his own floor, the sort of bloke one tends to steer clear of in real life, whatever that is.

Here’s a lovely medley of the amazing Mr. Kirchin’s incidental music. it has never been officially released, so this is an audio rip from the film. I’m not a technical sort, so don’t expect perfection, just a lo fi sound portrait of Basil’s usual brilliance.

Catch Us If You Can

Your Lips Are Void Of History

A young David Bowie knocks out 'Let Me Sleep Beside You'.    

The Tomorrow People: The Heart of Sogguth

'Do you really think that young Mike playing an African tribal drum on television could raise the Devil from Hell and bring about the destruction of the Universe?'

Well, yeah, or, at least, that's the general idea of 'The Heart Of Sogguth', a 1977 story from the fifth series of 'The Tomorrow People'. It all starts when the mysterious Jake (Roddy Maude-Roxby) starts sniffing around Mike's band Flintlock, sorry, Fresh Hearts, and promising that, under his management, their anaemic brand of adenoidal pop will be 'bigger than The Beatles'. Immediately, we know that he must be evil. He's actually a Professor of Ethnic Culture and the head of a way out religious sect who worship Sogguth, an ancient evil who's essence is captured in the aforementioned drum, and has the power to control minds through dark percussive rhythms (yes, that is Bella Emberg freaking out at the band's rehearsal).

A slight and rather short story (the two episodes only run for about half an hour combined once you take out the credits, recaps and ad breaks), it nevertheless has three interesting things about it: the rather kinky initiation that John goes through, the tribal surfabilly / haunted house moog jam that Fresh Hearts, sorry, Hearts Of Sogguth, play on the telly, and the extraordinary ending in which they conclude that where there is the Devil, there is also a God, so we should probably all go to Church once in a while.

Anyway, here's that tribal surfabilly / haunted house moog jam, serving as a soundtrack to a really slow stun gun fight between the forces of good and (temporarily) evil.

As our friend Piper Gates previously pointed out, the commentaries on the 'TP' DVD sets are extremely amusing, and this one highlighted the fact that the scary skeleton left behind at the show's climax is a lot less scary when you notice that it still has the hook in the top for hanging it up.