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Outside of the traditional, there are I think two types of Christmas songs that work best; raucous party singalongs like 'Merry Christmas Everybody' and, at the other end of the joy spectrum, the more downbeat affairs.* Misery and Christmas always go well together and it's this category that 'Lonely This Christmas' slots nicely into.
With their faux Glam tresses long since shorn, Mud had no further need to try to get down with the kids and Les Gray was now free to fully indulge his karaoke Elvis fantasies. And by god he goes to town on it, helped in no small way by 'Lonely This Christmas' sounding exactly like something the sixties Elvis would have recorded (though maybe he already did under the title 'Are You Lonesome Tonight' - 'Lonely This Christmas' wins no prizes for originality I'm afraid).
"I just break down as I look around and the only things I see
Are loneliness and emptiness and an unlit Christmas tree"
Oh dear. Les isn't having a good time at all, and though its anti Christmas greeting card lyric reads as cynically hollow as those found in cards proper, with 'Wombling Merry Christmas' poised at number two then the subversion of Chinn/Chapman's song provides a welcome diversion for all the 'Bah! Humbuggers' worn white with the jollity of it all. As The Samaritans are wont to remind us, it's not the party season for everybody.
* Though if you can manage both, as The Pogues & Kirsty MacColl did on ' Fairytale Of New York', then so much the better.
Instantly recognisable in both sight and sound, Barry White's entire public persona has by now become a caricature or parody of the man himself. Just as a fancy dress Napoleon outfit always comes with a triangle hat, eye patch and a greatcoat to thrust your arm into, Barry White is forever remembered and portrayed as a fat, sweaty lothario gasping out his songs through gulps for air. Unfair and untrue - there was always far more to White than the 'Walrus of Love' image accorded to him both in his lifetime and posterity.
Gifted with a smooth bass vocal, White's seventies output married classic soul with the emerging disco sound, a convergence no better illustrated that on 'You're The First, The Last, My Everything'. Greased by a sweet orchestration, the swooping strings of romance are augmented with the clout of a straight disco beat whilst White's vocal effortlessly rides them both in the crossover. Basically a celebration of his love for his woman, ''You're The First' fair explodes with a delightful optimism for either dancing like a fool, or locking eyes with your partner and slowly swaying to; "I know there's only one, only one like you. There's no way they could have made two"- I think this is what Charles Aznavour was trying to say on 'She' but made a right pig's ear of. Then again, he was never the walrus of love, was he? (damn those accurate sobriquets)!
If, as I've suggested elsewhere, Rod Stewart was an iconic seventies figure who recklessly squandered his talent, then David Essex would also be a junior partner in the same firm. After the spacey weirdness of 'Rock On' and the kookiness of its follow up 'Lamplight', 'Gonna Make You A Star' brings the party back to earth with a shuddering bump - not because it's particularly 'bad', but because it disappoints in its ordinariness and lack of musical daring after such a promising start.
While the above mentioned singles gave Essex ample opportunity to twist and bend his voice to fill the gaps the music left behind, the straight forward narrative of 'Gonna Make You A Star' leaves him no hiding place and it shines a bright spotlight to lay bare the limitations of his flat, London tone. And it's a tone that renders the song cold and uninvolving, making its sly comment on fame sound more irritatingly petulant than humorously wry. But if we're talking about faults, then mention must be made of the blaring synthesiser hook that carpet bombs the mix whenever Essex shuts up. This new fangled technology may have sounded like the future in 1974, but to modern ears it annoys in its forthright datedness.
Although it doesn't feature in the movie, 'Gonna Make You A Star' compliments Essex's star turn in 'Stardust' the way vinegar compliments salt on chips and the multi-media attack on two fronts marks the point where Essex became a bona fide star. So it's kind of ironic that both gave a negative 'Oooh it's tough' commentary on stardom. But rather than subvert from within, Essex was to prove only too willing to play the game and the early promise shown was destined to never be fulfilled.
To my mind, a good cover version is one that takes the material of the original, unpicks the seams and then re-fashions it into a new suit of clothes tailored for the new artist. West Coast MOR rockers Bread made for an unlikely source for supplying a tune to be given a reggae makeover, but Jamaican Ken Boothe manages to make 'Everything I Own' his own not simply by pasting a rocksteady rhythm over the words (you only have to listen to Boy George's 1987 attempt to appreciate that that's not nearly enough by itself to make it interesting), but by coming at it from a different angle entirely.
'Everything I Own' is a song of regret, but in place of the wistful aura of the original, Boothe adds a keen yearning to the song. Whereas original singer (and writer) David Gates sounded like a man quietly reminiscing to himself in an empty room, Boothe's vocal is more strung out and desperate, a man on his knees pleading to the back of someone walking away. Also, by deliberately/mistakenly changing the 'Everything' of the title to 'Anything', Boothe gives the lyric a more urgent and immediate air through asking them to take their pick from anything to hand rather than the predictable and empty sounding gesture of 'take it all'. The pedestrian shuffle of the backing only adds to the tension as Boothe painfully draws out every syllable with pliers to make sure his point is understood, but by the fadeout you know that it's falling on deaf ears. 'Everything I Own' is a downbeat single to be sure, but it's good to see the public acknowledging that reggae isn't all sun and could do misery as well as the next tortured singer/songwriter.
One of the less celebrated phenomenon of the seventies are the Hallmark 'Top Of The Pops' compilation albums. Seemingly endorsed by the BBC from their title, each boasted a stellar line-up of recent hit singles for only a fraction of the price they would cost if you bought them individually. You even got a picture of a dolly bird on the cover - what could be better? Well, plenty as it turned out, because the pop fan on a budget got a bit of a shock when they got the album home and played it because the catch was that all of the songs were cover versions recorded by soundalike (or is some cases, soundnothingalike) jobbing musicians making cash on the side.
Listening to 'Sad Sweet Dreamer', I can't help but be reminded of those albums because this song is also a sawn off approximation of something else. Writer David Parton had obviously been taking note of the popularity of Philly soul amongst UK record buyers and so chanced his arm at writing something similar. Unfortunately, Manchester (where the band hailed from) is not Philadelphia, and try as he might, Marcel King was not Curtis Mayfield. Completely lacking the confident touch of Gamble and Huff, 'Sad Sweet Dreamer' is a home-grown gloop of overloaded strings heavily spooned on to cover the shortcomings of a song that only ever comes alive at the chorus. And with no filler in-between, it's a chorus that's milked harder than a cow on market day.
Just like the 'Top Of The Pops' compilations, 'Sad Sweet Dreamer' is a cheap and cheerful knock-off that may at first blush have fooled people into thinking they were getting a piece of the real deal, but just like the false economy of buying supermarket own brand cereal, it only takes a few mouthfuls before you wish you'd opted to pay that little bit extra for something decent. *
*Though in a splendid moment of supreme irony, the version of 'Sad Sweet Dreamer' that appears on 'Top Of The Pops Volume 41' is a less orchestrated, more funky guitar led take on the song and is all the more enjoyable for it.
My own first encounter with 'Annie's Song' came via James Galway's 1978 instrumental version, a recording that went on to provide the hackneyed template for every 'new age' release from that day to this. But I'll not hold that against him. It wasn't until later that I discovered it was actually written by professional country boy John Denver and that it came with a set of lyrics dedicated to his then wife 'Annie'.
In Galway's version, the melody is stressed over all and, when picked out on the flute, it's an emotively pretty one (it wasn't until later still I found out this itself was 'borrowed' from the second movement of Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony'). But Denver carries the whole of the tune with his voice; and it's a voice that, let's be honest, is a whole less tuneful than Galway's flute. So much so less tuneful that he almost derails his own song. And it's not just the general tunelessness of the vocal either; the vagueness of Denver's lyrics never bring 'Annie' to life and we are no near to understanding her at song end than we are at song start.
Then again, as Denver is apparently celebrating love itself rather than the subject maybe we're not supposed to, but in that too the lyrics layer on metaphor like a motorway pile up, comparing his love to (inter alia) ' a night in the forest', 'the mountains in springtime', 'a walk in the rain', 'a storm in the desert'. Vivid descriptions all, (and the fact they don't specifically refer to an 'Annie' gives the song broad appeal), but all ultimately a bit meaningless in isolation and more than slightly alienating; they lack the shared immediacy of that 'ah, I know exactly what you mean' response because you're never entirely sure what Denver is getting at beyond attempting to generate a mystic-like ambience from what sound like the titles of eighties Athena posters; in that sense, 'Annie's Song' is no more than the audio version of that infamously iconic/kitsch 'Wings Of Love' print.
Despite this, I'm willing to give 'Annie's Song' the benefit of the doubt. A tad sickly and gushing it may be, Denver's voice has the rough hue of emotional sincerity that just about raises it above the empty platitudes of a greetings card verse, though not enough (to my thinking anyway) to make it anything other than a guilty pleasure - the pleasure is in the tune (which, don't forget, isn't really Denver's anyway), but the guilt in listening comes from knowing there are any number of singer songwriters who have done this sort of thing so much better who you could be listening to instead.
And speaking of crazes, few came bigger in the mid seventies than Kung Fu. Bruce Lee's death the previous year had done his career no harm at all and cinemas were full of cheap chop socky knock-offs hastily imported to cash in on 'Enter The Dragon', while on the telly, David Carradine walked the American West as Kwai Chang Caine in the popular series 'Kung Fu'. Big business indeed - even that vile juice Hai Karate aftershave shifted by the gallon so why not write a pop song to cash in? Why not indeed, because that's exactly what Jamaican Carl Douglas did.
As a song, 'Kung Fu Fighting' always balances precariously on a ledge between affectionate homage and comedic pisstake. In truth it's a bit of both, and I'm not sure Douglas himself ever definitively knew which he was aiming for; 'Those cats were fast as lightning, in fact it was a little bit frightening' - the tone fair drips with sarcasm, and his (albeit sketchy) tale of funky Chinamen Billy Chin and Sammy Chung 'chopping back up' and 'chopping them down' always puts me in mind of Ernie's fight with Two Ton Ted. But then the sight of Douglas decked out in full martial arts gear and red headband, busting moves as he sang showed a dedicated attention to detail and suggested he was aiming at something a bit more serious than acting out his Jackie Chan fantasies in public.
This duality carried over into the music too. Those 'Woh-ho-ho-hoooo's on the prologue and the audacious Chinese musical motifs are predictable genre clichés that still make me smile, yet underneath all the Wishee Washee pantomime gimmicks, 'Kung Fu Fighting' bustles along on a seriously funky blaxploitation guitar riff and clipped bassline that's no less danceable now than it was in 1974 and it brings an edge of urban grit to the disco dancefloor. 'Kung Fu Fighting' is a novelty song for sure, but it's a Kinder Egg quality novelty rather than one out of a cheapo Christmas Cracker, and it's sheer good naturedness (I mean - what's not to like?) has given it a longetivity that it perhaps doesn't really deserve but has nevertheless garnered through the cheek of it all.
If Donny Osmond's solo career was a sickly sweet dessert straight out of the treacle tin then at least The Osmonds en masse had the decency to aim at something more akin to a main course with their output (and in the case of 'Crazy Horses' even managing to sound just plain weird). What helps with this too is having Motown stalwart Johnny Bristol writing for them and then Merrill rather than Donny taking lead vocal, two facts that render this as something more substantial at a stroke.
'Love Me For A Reason' has always struck me as a song of two parts; Bristol may have known his way around a tune, but this effort hides some spectacularly stiff lyrics ("I'm just a little old-fashioned, it takes more than physical attraction. My initial reaction is honey give me love, not a facsimile of") so it's probably for the best that most of its running time is devoted to that cartwheel of a chorus where the hooked double repetition of 'love' hangs on to the catchy tune to disguise it's teleological 'message' that isn't really making too much sense by itself; 'Love me for a reason, let the reason be love' - that's a phrase designed to be swooned over while gawping at the record sleeve rather than analysed for meaning (much like the emotion it's trumpeting I suppose) and in that aspect at least the song nails it's audience to the wall, albeit in a nice, not cynical way - despite a smokescreen of grown up bravado, 'Love Me For A Reason' remains teen fodder at heart.
'Don't love me for fun girl, let me be the one girl'; now that's a straight bullseye, a set of words designed to strike chords galore with young teens not yet soured by experience, and it would strike them no matter who was singing it. But in having it delivered by a bunch of clean cut heartthrobs, the whole becomes less a song and more a licence to print money (as Boyzone were to appreciate some twenty years later). Nothing wrong with that in essence - everybody has to eat and 'Love Me For A Reason' provides a big enough helping of quality for everyone to get their teeth into. Which is a damn sight more than can be said about the fodder offered up by the majority of boy bands who followed in their wake.
In terms of credibility drains, having Prince Charles proclaim you as one of his favourites ranks right up there alongside Margaret Thatcher's raving over 'Telstar', but let's not forget that The Three Degrees had a pedigree within Philadelphia soul that stretched right back to the early sixties. Being the first all black, all female trio to reach number one since The Supremes, comparisons with The Supremes are as inevitable as they are lazy. And yes, I'm going to make them here too, though only insofar as they instructively show just what The Three Degrees were not.
Because whereas The Supremes personified Motown's 'sound of young America' with their hook laden pop confections, The Three Degrees presented a far more sophisticated, grown up sound and aura. A crown jewel within its genre, 'When Will I See You Again' was definitely one of the most 'adult' number ones in years. I can remember watching their staid performance on Top Of The Pops as a lad and feeling bored and irritated. It all sounded like so much dullness and well......boredom compared to all that Gary Glitter stuff we were singing in the playground. And that's because Sheila and the girls weren't singing to snotty little schoolkids.*
Laid back and smooth throughout, the hushed vocals of the verse generate a tension that reflects the confusion of uncertainty as to whether a new relationship is going somewhere or nowhere. "Are we in love or just friends, is this my beginning or is this the end" - the stress in the harmonised voices build to a peak before collapsing into a restrained repetition of the title's key question, though by the close even this becomes a point of anxiety when no answer is forthcoming. As an outward representation of inner dialogue, 'When Will I See You Again' is a masterclass in understated restraint. Ably assisted by a typically majestic Gamble and Huff production, the composition as a whole is the star with no room for individual grandstanding. A song to lose yourself in while you're losing someone else.
* As a point of interest, while this was at number one, The Stylistics were propping up the rear at number two with the equally 'boring for kids' 'You Make Me Feel Brand New'. Tch - it's as if Glam never happened.
The history of popular music is littered with crazes. They come and they go like the seasons. With Glam in its autumn days, its once green and bountiful trees were starting to look a little bare and from across the Atlantic a fresh wind was blowing in to rip the last leaves from its trees - disco. Just as thrash metal came to boil rock music down to the riff alone, the backbone of disco was the groove, and the more flexible that backbone the better - disco was a genre for the feet rather than the head - hedonism, not cerebralism was the order of the day.
Taking the funk lite, brass led, smooth Philly soul as its template, 'Rock Your Baby' was another of those glorious flukes that populate modern music. The backing groove was written and performed down by future members of KC & The Sunshine Band (who would themselves be major players in the genre) as an instrumental while a passing George McCrae provided a sweet and soulful Curtis Mayfield-like vocal that hangs just behind and underneath its sashaying rhythm to keep it from running away with itself. George is in no hurry.
What I like about 'Rock Your Baby' is just how organic it sounds, how human compared to what disco was to become (as a genre, 'soulnessness' was to become a common criticism). Cheaply recorded with just three musicians, the music holds the beat without ever sounding cold; there are spaces between the playing that McCrae fills with his vocal honey, repeating the 'Woman, take me in your arms. Rock your baby' title until it becomes a blissed out hypnotic mantra of desire that transports pillow talk to the dancefloor.* Slinky and sensuous, 'Rock Your Baby' stood light years away from the brash and bruising gangbang of Glam, and within its own genre it's a world away from the camp and coke fuelled gaudy excesses that disco would come to be reviled for.
* As an aside, the use of mantras to aid attainment of a higher level of consciousness have been a staple of Eastern religions since before the common era. Drones have also been present in ethnic music since time immemorial though their Western popularity was pioneered by La Monte Young in the 1960's. Drones and mantras were a staple of contemporary seventies Krautrock bands such as Faust, Can and Amon Dull II, and in the same year as 'Rock Your Baby', Charlemagne Palestine released 'Strumming Music', which was basically over 45 minutes of two piano notes playing in rapid alternation that slowly expand into clusters. Admittedly, you're not going to dance to any of this, but there's a thesis to be written on the power of musical repetition to transport you to another, perhaps more primal level, be it in the temple, the 4/4 slam backbeat at a rock & roll concert or the smooth grooves that wash over a disco dancefloor.
I was walking into town on my lunch break a few months ago when I saw a group of teenagers in a huddle. They were poring over a map and one of the girls broke away from the pack, came over to me and said 'Allo, can yoo elp me pleez'? It sounded so damn sexy that my first reaction was to ask her to say it again into my mobile so I could use it for a ringtone. But it also made me think that sometimes stereotypes are stereotypes for good reason. And that's because they're true - I can't deny it, a female French accent has a certain 'je ne sais quoi' that the local girls don't have and it made me rather more willing to help than I usually would be.
I think a similar kind of witchcraft must have been at work in 1974 to take Charles Aznavour and his paean to ideal womanhood to number one. To my mind, 'She' is a song that can be taken as either a pedestal placing act of worship of womanhood, or an ever so slightly patronising and demeaning view of what Charles no doubt views as the 'fairer sex'. "For where she goes I got to be, the meaning of my life is she, she, she" it does appear that Monsieur A is more in love with the idea of love than anything else and he'd be happy with somebody/anybody rather than be on his own: "She may be the beauty or the beast, may be the famine or the feast, may turn each day into heaven or a hell" - doesn't sound like Charles is too choosy does it? Any 'she' will do. As long as it comes with a pair of tits, then he's happy enough.
In all honesty I can't say I've ever 'got' the meaning of this song, but by crooning it in his outrageous French accent, Aznavour provides the veneer of romantic sophistication that stops you peering too closely at the dry rot underneath in the same way a French girl stopping me for directions didn't annoy in the same way it would if anybody else had tried to suck up my time.
If we're playing to stereotypes, then French is the international language (or accent) of love, and Aznavour's trembling lip converts the mutton of the lyrics into lambs and then sets them gambolling over all passing female hearts (after all, it's a song sung by a man and dedicated to women. Or THE woman. Try as I might, I simply can't imagine a bloke getting taken in by all this, unless they were using it as a seduction technique along with the candles and dimmed lights. And what a distressingly oily image that little lot conjures up).
'She' is a confused and soppy piece of work all told, the musical equivalent of picking up a Valentine's Day gift from the 24 hour service station on February 15th. It may well look the part and pluck a few heartstrings at first blush, but anybody with an ounce of nous will see through the smokescreen to the desperation (or the dim schoolgirl who can't read a map) below.
I've been banging on a fair bit as to the slow metamorphosis of Glam Rock into a more nostalgic 1950's cast and now it's ironic that one of the best examples of what I'm on about comes in the form of Gary Glitter's least fondly remembered hit. The glitter might have faded until only that drum beat remained, but it's less prominent now and over the top of it I can hear snatches of 'Let's Dance', 'Baby I Don't Care', 'At The Hop', 'I Can Help' and a myriad other suggestions of other people's songs.
But in saying that, the reliance of some lumpen rock & roll chops coupled with Gary's shameless vocal mugging make 'Always Yours' more of a pastiche or parody than true homage; it's got more in common with a 'Stars On 45' type megamix than anything truly original. What he ends up with is a song with neither heart nor soul, a song with a forced bonhomie that sounds like a host trying to keep a party alive when the sun is coming up and most of the guests have gone home. Sometimes enthusiasm by itself simply ain't enough.
I'm always suspicious of any TV comedy programme that comes with its own laughter track. By my thinking, if something's funny then I don't need a poke in the ribs to point it out to me. On the other hand, no amount of dubbed hilarity from a bunch of slack jawed cretins is going to make me change my mind if I don't see the humour.
Apparently a skit on the then popular (it says here) craze amongst American college students, 'The Streak' comes with its own laugh track. A bad omen in itself, but it also comes in a sleeve that effectively gives away every single joke before the needle gets anywhere near its grooves; it seems Ray couldn't have been more desperate for you to laugh along if he came 'round in person and tickled you with a feather every time you played it. Ray says 'Boogity Boogity' in a funny voice, Ray says 'Don't look Ethel' in a funny voice and there's a funny whistling sound every time Ray sings 'oh yes they call him the streak' - all this is marked out in advance along with Ray's shit eating grin that lets you know that the record has japes a-plenty.
Except it doesn't. Because 'The Streak' isn't really all that funny. It's simple bawdy Conservative humour (yes, little 'b' big 'C') backed by tune sounding like a redneck plucking a banjo. It may raise a smile with those who see something risqué in 'He's just in the mood to run in the nude' and the like, but to my mind it's as welcome and as humorous as one of the titular streakers running onto the pitch at a crucial moment in a test match. Never mind 'He's just as proud as he can be of his anatomy', you just want someone to grab him and give him a good booting off camera. That's the streaker, not Ray. Though come to think on it........
One thing that constantly interests me when working through these number ones is the visible rise and fall of both artists and genres as popularity wanes and the public look elsewhere for their thrills. 1973 was without a doubt the year of glam, but by 1974 it was off the front page. The hardcore old guard of Slade, The Sweet, T.Rex etc were falling short of the heights hit previously and the more successful acts were those who saw the change in the weather and adapted. Alvin Stardust and Mud had found success by looking to the past to soften the glam sound into something safer while still retaining its look and 'Sugar Baby Love' is arguably the same approach taken to its logical conclusion.
Very much a manufactured concern,The Rubettes' image of white suits and cloth caps could be taken as novelty personified, a bunch of hastily assembled chancers hanging on to the last few miles of a bandwagon before it finally left the road. Maybe some of their later releases would justify this view (come to think on it, most of their later releases would more than justify this view), but 'Sugar Baby Love' stands well apart from later offal like "Juke Box Jive" or "Foe-Dee-O-Dee". And that it stands apart is largely through the sterling efforts of Paul DaVinci, the lead vocalist who never went on to become a formal member of the band after recording this song.
Which is a shame, because his ferocious three and a half octave falsetto provides a distinctive glam edge (in the sense that it was as over the top as anything in Steve Priest's wardrobe) yet also provided an anchor to the safe harbour of the past; in a parallel universe, DaVinci would have spent his formative years singing doo wop on Harlem street corners with Dion DiMucci, because to be honest, there's precious little else to 'Sugar Baby Love' and its homage to fifties doo wop apart from DaVinci's vocal. Yes there's music playing in the background there somewhere*, but you'd be hard pressed to hear any of it over his opening cry of agony or ecstasy (it's impossible to tell which) and the yearning "All lovers make the same mistake. Yes, they do".
'Sugar Baby Love' is a repetitive, bubblegum song from a manufactured bubblegum band. In other words, it's something that the snob in me should hate by default. But on listening to it again this evening, I find the relentless upbeat drive and soothing wash of backing vocals provide a curious mix of inspiration and heartbreak. They remind of falling both in and out of love in equal measure. There's no beginning or end to 'Sugar Baby Love', it's a quick snapshot of a relationship heading for the rocks with no ultimate indication if it's salvaged or actually does run aground. But regardless of outcome, DaVinci's "Love her anyway, love her everyday" punchline provides a love affirming statement that just because he's messed up, it doesn't mean that you have to as well and that he's going to scream in your face until he gets the message across.**
* If you watch any contemporary footage of the band playing this you'll see their guitarists performing a bizarre kung fu kick dance routine, seemingly for the want of something to do.
** And in case you didn't get it this time, DaVinci would have another crack in two months time with his solo single 'Your Baby Ain't Your Baby Anymore' which followed the style and structure of 'Sugar Baby Love' so closely they could have been twins separated by a plagiarism suit that never was.
Though year zero for Abba as far as the UK charts were concerned, the band had already enjoyed no small European success before 'Waterloo' and the Eurovision Song Contest came along. But whilst the likes of 'Ring Ring' and 'People Need Love' were firmly rooted in the knees-up music of the schlager tradition, 'Waterloo' was a conscious stab at a more Anglo/American pop approach with one eye on the classic 'it's got a backbeat you can't lose it' rock & roll structure with the other (or make that the left hand) embellishing it by picking out some wonderfully rolling boogie woogie jazz piano fills.
From the opening bars, 'Waterloo' is infectious enough to grab the attention of the half awake, but then the opening cry:
"My my, at Waterloo Napoleon did surrender
Oh yeah, and I have met my destiny in quite a similar way"
elicits a 'wha..???' ; rare for Napoleon to get name checked in a pop song and it blows expectations right off course (out of interest, I couldn't find out how many points France gave this at Eurovision). It's not a literal history lesson though - 'Waterloo' here is used as metaphor to describe the crumbling of the singer's resistance to the charms of her suitor and a surrender to the inevitable power of love. It's similar, though not the same as Lyn Paul putting up with any kind of wrong treatment at the hands of her bloke in 'You Won't Find Another Fool Like Me'; we don't even know why the singer in 'Waterloo' resisted for so long, but there's no doubt that the song is a joy of celebration rather than a resigned shrug; "And how could I ever refuse, I feel like I win when I lose". There are no fools in this relationship.
It was rare for anything under the Abba banner to be truly original, and true to form they've cited 'See My Baby Jive' as an inspiration for the song. In a side by side comparison you can hear the influence, but while Roy Wood was hell bent on shoehorning as many kitchen sinks as possible into his production, Benny and Bjorn have a firmer grasp of the clean, unfussy lines necessary for a rock based stomper; they're content to simply follow the blueprint rather than try to better it. Sure there are enough piano's and horns for everyone, but not to the extent that the basic tune is swamped and in so doing it ensures that 'Waterloo' never pauses for breath for first to last.
Lively and up-tempo it may be, my main beef with 'Waterloo' is with its inherent unbending stiffness. Abba were to become masters of the disco genre, but 'Waterloo' doesn't simply doesn't groove. There's a constant 4/4 drum beat in the background that sounds like a handclap and, perhaps providing a revealing throwback to the band's aforementioned schlager roots, it summons up visions of a roomful of seated people happily clapping along. Which is what the audience for the Eurovision Song Contest were, so horses for courses I guess. Though that's not a damning criticism - 'Waterloo' is a memorable song that would have remained memorable even if Abba had promptly faded into obscurity the following year. But they didn't, and hindsight shows that the seated audience would soon be up on their feet.
Whenever I hear 'Seasons In The Sun', I picture a deserted valley with two opposing armies facing each other on the opposite mountaintops, gesticulating angrily with their banners flapping terribly in the wind. On one side are the people who's heart breaks every time they hear the song, while on the other are those who voted it number 5 in CNN's 'Worst Songs Of All Times' (it appears in many other such charts too, but this is as good example as any). That valley floor is deserted simply because there's not a lot of middle ground with this song - people either love it, or they don't.
"Seasons in the Sun by Terry Jacks!!! ARRRGH! It makes me want to kill!!! It is so schmaltzy and saccrine-like (sic) it sucks to lowest depths of Dante's Inferno". No, I didn't write that, one 'Texas Johnny' on Sodahead.com did, but it seems to sum up the views of one of those armies quite succinctly. And it's a view that's always annoyed me in the same way that people who dismiss Morrissey as being 'miserable' annoy me. It's a lazy opinion, one that's been filtered down through an accepted common consensus until it's become a 'fact'. Even people who've never heard a note from Morrissey 'know' that he's 'miserable and depressing, ain't he?' Well no, no he's not, and I don't think 'Seasons In The Sun' is schmaltzy and Saccharin-like either.
The tale of Jacques Brel's original lyric being watered down in translation by Rod McKuen is well told and I'm not going to rake over it again here. "Goodbye my friend it's hard to die, when all the birds are singing in the sky" - yes, it could be taken as sentimental clap trap with a juvenile rhyme when written down cold, but I think the vocal from Canada's Terry Jacks effectively short circuits such a simplistic assessment. Jacks of course had already had a top ten hit with 'Which Way You Goin' Billy?' as part of the folk/pop outfit The Poppy Family, but on 'Seasons In The Sun' he doesn't so much sing the lyrics as resignedly speak them. It's a curiously detached vocal given the subject matter and his delivery goes some way to explaining (I think) the hatred many feel toward this.
From the point of view of a man facing imminent death, there's no fear in his voice, no rage against the dying of the light. Jacks neither reproaches himself nor his God for his fate and there's no bitterness at the unfairness of it all or any pleas for a little more time to right the wrongs committed as 'the black sheep of the family'. There's no positives in the song at all, no hope for an eternity in the afterlife or fond remembrance of the life being left behind ("But the stars we could reach, were just starfish on the beach"). All there is is simple, unquestioning, matter of fact acceptance that his time is up and in that at least the lyric is more cold and empty than mawkish, something ably backed up by the descending notes that open each verse and have an in-built sense of doom of their own.
To my ears, 'Seasons In The Sun' is more scary than sickly. Sure, the imagery is there to tug the heartstrings at base level (and the contemporary rumour that Jacks was in fact dying in reality couldn't have hurt sales either), but there's nothing to be done with the song except listen to it. True, the chorus is eminently singable, but to sing along risks a feeling of guilt that you're no so much intruding on Jacks' grief, but making light of your own inevitable fate. 'Seasons In The Sun' provides a stark reminder that the ride will eventually come to an end, it's a musical version of the skull slanting through Holbein's portrait. In short, something that nobody particularly wants to be reminded of. No wonder so many are keen to write it off as schmaltzy and Saccharin-like.
The first time I heard Wheatus's 'Teenage Dirtbag' on the radio, I hated it it. Simply hated it. The whiny, self pitying tone of the lyrics, the angsty, pseudo punk power chords on the chorus - American emo watered down with sardonicism, it was a tune tailor made to get right on my tits. But then toward the end, when Brendan B Brown starts singing about Iron Maiden tickets in a high pitched girly voice, that single quirk of unpredictable originality pulled the scales off my eyes and I fell in love with it.
And now, listening to Paper Lace's take on 'Billy, Don't Be A Hero', my initial reaction was similar to the above (and yes, I can remember this from 1974). Those military drum fills, the chirpy 'I Was Kaiser Bill's Batman' whistles and that tin twang of a backing guitar all conspire to fry my patience in a pan of quirky novelty. But when the chorus kicks in and a bloke starts singing in a girly voice from the point of view of Billy's would be wife, then my hatred is made complete. Squared even. Because unlike 'Teenage Dirtbag' it doesn't hit you as a quirky surprise. Not a bit of it - you expect the song to travel down a road of literal interpretation because that route has already been signposted in the mock 'John Brown's Body' cavalry plod of the music. I'm afraid I didn't like this song back in the seventies and I still don't like it now.
Which is odd really because I'm usually quite partial to songs that tell a story, but this tale of tragedy set in the US Civil War fails to engage on just about any level other than the trite. Arguably, any song about a hundred year old foreign conflict written and played by Brits was always onto a loser in terms of authenticity, but the sight of the band all dressed up in full Yankee uniforms performing it on TV (yes, I remember that from 1974 too) places further distance between the listener and any emotional response. It turns the whole spectacle into a gimmick, a fancy dress party (check out the sleeve picture) with the song playing the band again rather than them stamping any identity of their own on it.*
The shrug of indifference that closes the final verse: "I heard his fiancée got a letter, that told how Billy died that day. The letter said that he was a hero, she should be proud he died that way. I heard she threw the letter away" tries to pack an emotional punch by providing a 'Usual Suspects' style twist to the tale but it's squandered in it's hurried telling. And with Billy and his woman already little more than cardboard cut-outs, it doesn't pay off - the best 'death ballads' need characters you can actually feel something for and, to be honest, I felt far more pathos at the demise of Bennie Hills 'Ernie' than young Billy.
'Billy, Don't Be A Hero' is nothing more than a pop tune masquerading as something older and wiser, something sepia toned with a wizened message for the young. But it's too corny to engage with with any seriousness (and that aforementioned girl vocal is corn on the cob personified), but not corny enough to laugh along with. Which means it ends up pleasing nobody. Not me anyway.
* If you want to hear a fine example of the exact opposite of this, then you could do no better than The Band's 'The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down', a song so authentic you could believe Robbie Robertson actually fought against General Sherman. The cover of this single seems to be aiming for a similar vibe that The Band's sophomore album achieved, but in trying so hard they boot the ball well over the crossbar.
Like Mud before him, Alvin Stardust had his fingers stuck in both the Glam Rock and fifties rock & roll pies, though moreso the latter than the former; Alvin already had prior history in the form of minor hits as Shane Fenton & The Fentones in the early sixties, though there was never a sniff of a number one. To take the Mud comparisons a step further, while it was a convenient bandwagon to jump, Stardust never seemed wholly comfortable with the whole Glam thang and though his name may have been hijacked shamelessly from Bowie's alter ego, there wasn't so much a light dusting of stars on the image he presented.
Glaring moodily from under a huge black quiff and mutton chops sideboards, Stardust's all black leather jumpsuit outfit made him less of a Starman and more Gene Vincent's bitter and twisted father. Maybe he was still living his Shane Fenton 'I'm A Moody Guy' image, but it made him more scarily predatory then than Gary Glitter does now (people who wear gloves indoors always have something to hide I think).
And the discomfort doesn't stop at the image. Although 'Jealous Mind' has some Glam Rock tracks and traces shoehorned into it wherever they fitted (and a main riff that always reminds me of 'All The Young Dudes'), at heart it's the sort of mid-tempo rocker cum ballad that could have featured in one of Presley's more forgettable films from the sixties. Indeed Stardust himself sounds like he'd be far happier touring a fifties revival review around Northern workingmen's clubs and doing his Elvis and Buddy Holly impressions than trying to cut Gary Glitter shapes on Top Of The Pops.
His only number one and only one week at the top - seems about fair enough on balance.
The dramatic 'a-one, a-two, a-one, two three' countdown and spoken 'Welcome to the dive' intro on this second number one on the trot for Chinn & Chapman suggests thrills and spills to come, but 'Devil Gate Drive' reneges on its promise by delivering a standard rock & roll rumble. Once again, Quatro's voice is the star turn and she leads from the front with the enthusiastic abandon of a kid on Christmas morning. But without the brash clash and clatter that fuelled 'Can The Can', it's not enough to raise the song above the formulaic and any swagger she injects is castrated by the bump bump anaemia of the backing. 'Devil Gate Drive' is bubblegum power pop with a faux edge of danger (devil gate drive doesn't sound like anywhere the nice girls would hang out, does it?), but the good humoured glee in Quatro's voice lets you know that this particular party is more pop and crisps than drugs and alcohol.
Mud will forever occupy that soft spot in my heart labelled 'one of my earliest ever musical memories'. As a five year old I loved their 'Dyna-Mite' to distraction, so much so my parents bought me the K-Tel 'Dynamite' compilation. Never mind that it had 19 other songs on it, all I wanted to hear was Mud and I wanted to hear it over and over again (come to think on it, this may have been where I first heard 'School's Out' too. Another mystery solved). It was the infectious yet unthreatening energy of it all that got me hooked, and that's a description could equally be applied to its follow up 'Tiger Feet'.
As a band, Mud had their feet in two genres. Glam overlords Chinn and Chapman penned most of their hits, but their look was strictly a fifties revivalist forerunner to the likes of Showaddywaddy and Darts who were to come later (I'd like to think that Les Gray knew a step too far when he saw one and deliberately kept the make-up in the box). 'Tiger Feet' itself plays out like an updated fifties dance craze complete with it's own movements, albeit one updated by watered down Sweet riffs - the underlying structure of 'Tiger Feet' sounds suspiciously like 'The Ballroom Blitz' with all the camp bells and whistles taken out. Sign maybe that the writers didn't see Mud as one of their Premier League artists, but virtually reducing the song to a crunchy guitar line alone injects it with a classic rock & roll verve that makes it as fun to listen to now as it was then. Still not as much fun as 'Dyna-Mite' though.
Well it's nothing if not catchy - "You Won't Find Another Fool Like Me" leaves the traps on a jollyboys Dixieland beat that screams 'Good Times Here', but appearances are deceptive. "Even though you treat me like you do, babe, I'm so hooked on you I can't get free" - you don't need to be a card carrying feminist to find something distasteful about Lyn Paul's strident vocal that seeks to find virtue in being treated like a doormat and daring her bloke to leave for the sole reason he won't find anybody else to put up with all his shit. Judith Durham - vocalist with The 'old' Seekers - would never have entertained singing such a spineless 'I'm a clown' lyric which, quelle surprise, was written by two blokes (and Tony Macaulay and Geoff Stephens at that, two blokes who should have known better).
"No one else could love you like I do"; I bet this idea of 'love' is repeated nightly in battered women's refuges up and down the country. Except nobody there is honking an R&B saxophone riff in the background while the nurse is patching them up. "Sometimes I can't understand, what makes me the fool that I am", nor me Lyn love, but you needn't sound so bloody pleased with yourself because of it.
Outside of the traditional, there are I think two types of Christmas songs that work best; raucous party singalongs like 'Merry Christmas Everybody' and, at the other end of the joy spectrum, the more downbeat affairs.* Misery and Christmas always go well together and it's this category that 'Lonely This Christmas' slots nicely into.
