SATURDAY 26 JANUARY 1974

(Author's Note: the following represents the UK Top 30 singles from the above week, reviewed in ascending order from numbers 30-1.)

 

30. CLIFF RICHARD: Take Me High/Celestial Houses (EMI 2088)

 

 

Cliff must think he's still in Eurovision - yet another old-fashioned oompah-oompah singalong for thou-shalt-not grandparents. Take me high - is he planning to go up a skyscraper?

 

 

29. STEVIE WONDER: Living For The City/Visions (Tamla Motown TMG 881)

 

 

We have Innervisions so already know about this one. Edited down for the single but you need to hear the whole thing - it's really scary how it ends. Go out and buy the album already.

28. MILLICAN & NESBITT: Vaya Con Dios (May God Be With You)/I Want Our World To Be Like A Beautiful Garden (Pye 7N 45310)

 

 

The old miners from Opportunity Knocks. God bless the miners who will hopefully bring this rotten government down but what does this record mean to anybody under 70? If I said I liked this I'd never get a girlfriend.

 

 

27. LULU: The Man Who Sold The World/Watch That Man (Polydor 2001 490)

This is GOOD. You can hear Bowie on this but it's very different from his own version - more like a James Bond theme. Shows you how good Lulu can be when she gets rid of Eurovision.

 

 

26. ALICE COOPER: Teenage Lament '74/Hard Hearted Alice (Warner Bros. K 16345)

 

He sings this like the end of the world is approaching. Not as catchy as "School's Out" but maybe as scary. It's like he's telling you not to smoke.

 

 

25. HAROLD MELVIN & THE BLUENOTES: The Love I Lost (Part 1)/The Love I Lost (Part 2) (Philadelphia International PIR 1879)

 

 

Typically good Philly Sound stomper. Too sophisticated to be a really big hit, though.

 

 

24. GILBERT O'SULLIVAN: Why, Oh Why, Oh Why/You Don't Have To Tell Me (MAM 111)

I don't know, Gilbert! Another melancholy Two Ronnies ballad but for all I know he could really be singing about Jeremy Thorpe.

 

 

 

23. ROXY MUSIC: Street Life/Hula-Kula (Island WIP 6173)

Oh this is so great. The way Bryan Ferry snaps his fingers on Top of the Pops to this is pop music. The way he sings "telephone" to make the word sound like "tele-postbomb." The whole album Stranded is brilliant and anybody who doesn't like it has no brain. My father thinks he's a ponce, though, whatever that means - I think Frank Muir said it on Call My Bluff.

 

 

 

 

22. WIZZARD: I Wish It Could Be Christmas Everyday/Rob Roy's Nightmare (A Bit More H.A.) (Harvest HAR 5079)

 

 

We all love Wizzard in this house - Roy Wood is so funny. I don't understand why people are still buying this after Christmas, though; is it being sold cheap?

 

 

21. STEELEYE SPAN: Gaudete/The Holly And The Ivy (Chrysalis CHS 2007)

 

 

Christmas carol singers, out looking for pennies. But it's January!

 

 

20. RONNIE LANE Accompanied by the Band "SLIM CHANCE": How Come?/Tell Everyone (GM GMS 011)

Really good and subtle record from the guy who used to be in the Faces but isn't Rod Stewart.

 

 

19. STYLISTICS: Rockin' Roll Baby/Make It Last (Avco 6105 026)

Yuck, this is terrible, little boy dancing in iron shoes, oh isn't he cute well no he isn't, you wouldn't believe what I get from my father for not already being famous so don't need to be constantly reminded about it.

 

 

18. MOTT THE HOOPLE: Roll Away The Stone/Where Do You All Come From (CBS 1895)

They're really good and catchy all the time. Ian Hunter sounds like he's got a brain, which can be useful.

 

 

 

17. DRUPI: Vado Via/Un Letto E. Lei (A&M AMS 7083)

He's Italian so of course my mother likes this. Hoarsely-sung ballad with old-fashioned arrangement like it didn't get into Eurovision. Nice walking bass line towards the end, though. I was disappointed that he wasn't Droopy, the dog from the cartoons.

16. DIANA ROSS: All Of My Life/A Simple Thing Like Cry (Tamla Motown TMG 880)

My father thinks this sounds like a Sunsilk commercial. She's so boring; no wonder Tony Blackburn likes her.

 

 

15. DAVID ESSEX: Lamplight/We All Insane (CBS 1902)

More music hall than "Rock On" but there's never anything straightfoward about what David Essex does. Still, he does know what he's doing, which is more than you can say about Ted Heath's government. The B-side is so wild it could be Roxy Music.

14. MARIE OSMOND: Paper Roses/Least Of All You (MGM 2006 315)

The Osmonds' parents must be getting them all to work. Their dog will make a record next. Dull 900-year-old country and western. I haven't even got a Stetson so what's the point?

 

 

13. GARY GLITTER: I Love You Love Me Love/Hands Up! It's A Stick Up (Bell 1337)

Daft title that makes no sense. A football chant slowed down to half-speed. A ballad for the parents.

 

(Author's Note: videos of Joan Jett covers of GG, which are invariably better than the originals, will be posted here.)

 

 

12. SLADE: Merry Xmaƨ Everybody/Don't Blame Me (Polydor 2058 422)

The end of 1973 was really frightening. No oil, electricity or television, wars everywhere else and I wondered if we'd even get to 1974 without blowing ourselves up. Denys Fisher board games and annuals stacked up in RS McColl's. Snow all over the place. A feeling that this was the end. So this Slade song was like a beacon pounding and glowing in the darkness and giving us hope, even though the song sounds doomed in its own way. I watched it on Christmas Top Of The Pops and the audience got up on stage - it was like "Hey Jude" all over again. But why are people still buying it now? Don't they want it to be 1974?

 

 

11. FACES: Pool Hall Richard/I Wish It Would Rain (with a trumpet) (Warner Bros. K 16341)

Don't think a song called "Pool Hall Richard" is going to mean anything here. What's Rod Stewart going on about? Rocks along like the Rolling Stones halfway through side two of one of their albums. You won't hear this on Singing Together. The other side is an old Tamla Motown song. I haven't heard the original but would guess it's better.

 

 

10. ROBERT KNIGHT: Love On A Mountain Top/Power Of Love (Monument MNT 1875)

Old-fashioned sixties song about climbing up a mountain and falling in love. I couldn't do that - I'd be far too worried about slipping on something and falling down.

 

 

9. ANDY WILLIAMS: Solitaire/My Love (CBS 1824)

This is a really sad and desperate-sounding song - he's got nothing left and might as well be dead. There are a lot of people who feel that way just now. Needs the cookie bear back.

 

 

8. ROY WOOD: Forever/Music To Commit Suicide By (Harvest HAR 5078)

Solo this time. Sounds like he's trying to do the Beach Boys on a budget. Catchy and quite sparkly. The B-side, though, is instrumental and sounds like the soundtrack to one of those horrible public information films you see on TV.

7. GOLDEN EARRING: Radar Love/Just Like Vince Taylor (Track 2094 116)

Hear this a lot on Luxembourg - they're from the Netherlands. He's driving a truck and sounds as though he wants to crash it; might well happen at the end. Unsettling.

 

 

6. ALVIN STARDUST: My Coo-Ca-Choo/Pull Together (Magnet MAG 1)

This is some old guy I don't remember from the sixties doing "Spirit In The Sky." Luxembourg again - they ran these ads last year: "Who is ELVIN Stardust?" but it wasn't who anybody thought it was going to be.

 

 

5. THE NEW SEEKERS: You Won't Find Another Fool Like Me (Featuring Lyn Paul)/Song For You And Me (Featuring Eve Graham) (Polydor 2058 421)

They did this on the Morecambe & Wise Christmas show. Another music hall song which sounds like it should be on The Good Old Days. Not for the young.

 

 

 

4. COZY POWELL: Dance With The Devil/And Then There Was Skin (RAK 164)

Moody but forceful half-instrumental with the drums up front and everything eles fading in and out at the back like an incomplete dream, midway between Sandy Nelson and Jimi Hendrix. Another Radio Luxembourg hit.

3. LEO SAYER: The Show Must Go On/Tomorrow (Chrysalis CHS 2023)

Now this one's really scary; he comes on TV made up and dressed like a clown and it is like being stared down by a Dalek. He sounds annoyed about most things.

 

 

2. THE SWEET: Teenage Rampage/Own Up, Take A Look At Yourself (RCA LPBO 5004)

Now THIS is what's going on! The young don't want to know about old music hall miners, they want to smash everything up and change it, and right now who could blame them? This is a majestic rallying call to arms and maybe my favourite Sweet record. And I remenber when they came out with "Funny Funny" and sounded like the Archies.

 

 

1. MUD: Tiger Feet/Mr. Bagatelle (RAK 166)

They are always good fun on The Basil Brush Show and this is a real laugh of a record, but not in a bad way; it's dimwitted but clever, unbelievably catchy and it just makes you feel better about life, which I think is what pop music is supposed to do.

 

 

 

 

 

THE PROLOGUE

 

For my tenth birthday, which occurred on Friday 25 January 1974, my parents gave me a special present - that week's top thirty singles, plus a standing order with the Hamilton branch of Woolworths for every single that entered the top thirty in subsequent weeks. I immediately began a notebook in which I wrote reviews of each single. In fact it was a large ledger book with a grey cover which my father had "borrowed" from his work.

I was newly besotted with the pop charts. Every week I would scan the pages of Record Mirror and write out elaborate Top 50 lists in the style of the old "BRITAIN'S TOP 50" posters which you used to find in the middle of Record Retailer (later Music Week):

- complete with bubbllng under sections and mock ads. In 1974 the chart which Radio 1 and Top Of The Pops broadcast was the Top 30 (or, as Tony Blackburn and nobody else constantly referred to it, the "Fun Thirty"). I didn't get a subscription to the whole Top 50 because, guess what, my parents weren't made of money; in fact, my mother returned to full-time work at Tunnock's the very next week and stayed there for the next 22½ years. Everyone else at school lived in nice fully-detached houses in places like Douglas Gardens and Kylepark. We lived in a flat on Uddingston Main Street:

Ours was the flat on the bottom right, just above what is now Ladbrokes but was then the noisy Bay Horse Inn pub. The solicitors' office was then a launderette, and the house to the left was our local GP surgery. I was in my penultimate year at what was then Muiredge Primary School, under the tutelage of the very nice Mrs Howarth. Life generally was not sweet and in a lot of cases extremely painful. But I got comics and eventually also records. Not that I didn't already have a quantity of either - you will note from the following writing that my family already had some of these singles on their parent albums. However, the view was of a nascent archive of sorts; a purpose of historical completeness. It was pleasing to be able to ensconce myself in literature and music as a means of concealing myself from the rest of the world, beginning from outside the bedroom door (there was only one bedroom and I had to share it with my parents - they had the big double, I got the smaller single at the foot. How we managed to get any books, comics and records into there I don't know, but somehow we managed. There was also a living room/kitchen, a hallway with kitchen cabinet, and what had originally been my bedroom as an infant but which, for reasons of dampness - which left me with lifelong lung problems - got converted into an attic or storage room). This is where I "started" as a music obsessive.

 

The purpose of this blog is to reproduce what I wrote in that large ledger book, week by week, about the songs which came into the Top 30. May I attest right now that I have not altered one word of that writing. Postmodernist smart-aleckness is absent. What you read is what I thought at the time. The writing contains plenty of what Margaret McManus of the Hamilton Advertiser termed "peculiar, grown-up vocabulary" when she interviewed me in May 1974, with specific reference to the charts which I was writing out. This is down to my being a misdiagnosed child prodigy who was able to read and write at a ridiculously early age.

 

The writing is influenced by my readings of the weekly music papers, particularly Record Mirror, but what it does not contain is hindsight. What I felt is exactly what you read. When Lulu released her version of "The Man Who Sold The World," I had no idea that the follow-up was going to be "The Man With The Golden Gun." But she made Bowie's song sound like a Bond theme to my ten-year-old ears (or, more likely, it was my father's observation). I speak about "cancelled" performers decades before they were cancelled, and again spoke as I found. There is, for example, an awful lot of G@ry Gl1tter here because those were the times and nobody knew about the other stuff, except of course the poor bastards to whom it happened. I can't pretend this music didn't happen and wasn't popular.

What follows, therefore, is a set of succinct juveline observations about the hit singles of each week, which I'll probably publish on a month-by-month weekly basis. The experiment didn't last that long - I kept up the records until May 1978, when the main chart expanded to a Top 40 and I lost interest (although I kept up my subscription with Hamilton Woolworths until I finally left for St Andrews, and then Oxford/London, in the eighties). I have posted singles covers as I received them (there were few, if any, picture sleeves during that period) plus YouTube links to songs as I can find them. Thank you for your indulgence.