1974 Mud: Tiger Feet

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.