AUGUST 1975

 

 

Monday 23 August 1975 was the first day of my first year at Uddingston Grammar School. My beginnings were inauspicious. I’ve never been one for acting the big star – I hadn’t even heard of Big Star at that point – but you would have thought that with my preceding reputation, Hamilton Advertiser cover star etc. I would have been welcomed more warmly, wouldn’t you? Uh-uh. None of that counted for anything. I should actually have started at UGS the year before, but had to repeat a year at Muiredge for stupid admin reasons.

 

I was treated like all the other pupils, i.e. like scum. My parents had ordered my school uniform from the Great Universal catalogue in plenty of time but they still managed not to deliver it in time. What I chiefly remember, therefore, from that first day is being yelled at by the Latin teacher – an excitable young Welshman – at one in the afternoon for not wearing a school uniform. I explained the situation but talk about starts bad, goes on bad. Furthermore my best friend at Muiredge had been put in a different class from me; he was in 1A1 whereas I was in 1A3. Perhaps whoever drew those classes up had decided that I was only a third-class pupil.

 

Oh yes, and there were A, B and C streams. Apartheid is an emotive word which shouldn’t be used lightly, but it’s remarkable how the system was so efficiently able to divide 11-12 year old children and instantly alienate them from their natural peers. Mind you, that was the school’s main purpose. If you were in the A stream you were going to have a big job – doctor, solicitor, chief executive. In the B stream you were to be manual workers or bureaucrats, employees to be bossed about by the As. The C stream was already assumed beyond redemption. But that’s how it was – school isn’t there to educate children, but rather to condition them for the working week with their emphasis on unquestioning obedience and punctuality. Everybody gets here on time, wearing their uniform.

 

So I was just anyone, another formerly big fish tossed into a larger pond. It was made very clear to me on my first day that it wasn’t intelligence, talent or ability that counted – it was how smoothly and readily you were able to conform in the context of pre-existing societal models. And yes, I really did talk like that in my first year, and much good did it do me, because the presumption was that eleven-year-olds were eleven-year-olds, hence juvenilia and no you can’t take out such and such a book from the school library because those are for SENIOR PUPILS ONLY you get the baby cartoons. Well stuff you then; I don’t get that from the library on Uddingston Main Street. The system was not built to accommodate awkward fuckers like me, and that has remained a truism my entire life through.

 

Not with my presumed peer pupils, though. Oh NO, he’s been on the front of the paper, let’s just make FUN of him. Either I got ridicule and worse from below, or condescension and sneering from above as those swanky middle-class 1A1 and 1A2 pupils made it perfectly clear how much cleverer than me they were. Go onto Google now and see which name gets the most hits. Uh-huh.

 

My first year was not a success, academic or otherwise. I can’t think of a single teacher in that year who inspired me, as opposed to telling me off or threatening me. That’s how to inspire the minds of impressionable children. And yes, even half a century on I remember every fucking name of every teacher and pupil and what they did or didn’t do for or against me. I learned to find out things for myself. I remember almost nothing I was taught at school. I remember everything that I taught myself.

 

A few notes on the records mentioned below:

 

The Stylistics got to number one whereas Alex Harvey (recorded live at the Hammersmith Odeon, but you really need the visuals to make his “Delilah” work fully) had to make do with number seven.

 

Well do I recall the Top Of The Pops orchestra, on camera, performing “El Bimbo,” with a mortgage-paying-off Kenny Wheeler prominent in the trumpet section.

 

"The Last Farewell" was produced by Denis Preston in his Lansdowne Studio, with its characteristic echo, in 1971, at more or less the same time, and using some of the same musicians, as Mike Westbrook's Metropolis.

 

"7-6-5-4-3-2-1 (Blow Your Whistle)" was written by Roger Cook, hence serves as an unlikely yet logical sequel to "I Was Kaiser Bill's Batman."

 

“A Child’s Prayer” made it all the way to number eight, which was pretty good for a not obviously catchy record.

 

Mike Harding has remained a popular folk performer over the subsequent half-century and for many years presented the Radio 2 Folk Show before being unceremoniously ousted in favour of a cheaper (in every sense) substitute.

 

One of Jasper Carrott’s Moseley Grammar School classmates, and subsequently a workmate of his at the Beehive department store in Birmingham, was Bev Bevan, who I suspect is playing the drums on “Funky Moped.” Mr Carrott – real name Robert Norman Davis, father of Lucy “Dawn from The Office” Davis - is also the co-creator of the Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? format, so he doesn’t have to worry.

 

For several decades Mike Batt withheld his permission to reissue “Summertime City” on CD because he found the song profoundly embarrassing (see also: early seventies Scott Walker). However, he was eventually persuaded that it wasn’t a bad old pop song really, relented and gave the go-ahead for it to come out again on his 2020 compilation The Penultimate Collection. The New Edition were the resident dance troupe on Seaside Special, and are not to be confused with the eighties boy band New Edition. As though anybody might.

 

 

2 August

 

SUSAN CADOGAN: Love Me Baby/Call My Name (Magnet MAG 36)

 

 

 

Same as the last one, except written by Peter Shelley and Pete Waterman, which is why it isn’t as good as the last one.

 

 

 

ROGER WHITTAKER: The Last Farewell/A Special Kind Of Man (EMI 2294)

 

 

 

Very old-fashioned sounding Victory At Sea/ar-har me hearties swooping nautical ballad about leaving paradise and sailing into hell. Whittaker doesn’t sound too thrilled at the prospect but acts out the song’s intrinsic drama, from rage to consolation, very effectively. What is a dell, though, and how does English mist (my father didn’t like that reference – “what’s wrong with SCOTCH mist, you CENSORED?”) roll through it?

 

 

 

GEORGE McCRAE: It’s Been So Long/You Got To Know (Jay Boy JAY 100)

 

 

 

His simplest and most direct song since “Rock Your Baby” and therefore probably his biggest hit, except for “Rock Your Baby.”

 

 

 

RIMSHOTS: 7-6-5-4-3-2-1 (Blow Your Whistle)/Harvey Wallbanger (All Platinum 6146 304)

 

 

 

More excitable disco from the year’s most promising new label.

 

 

 

THE MOMENTS: Dolly My Love/More Dolly (All Platinum 6146 306)

 

 

 

Well, it was promising, but this isn’t exactly pointing to a shining future. Even more boring than “Girls” and are they singing about a children’s toy or a really old lady called Dolly? Who is actually going to become excited by this record?

 

 

 

THE SENSATIONAL ALEX HARVEY BAND: Delilah/Soul In Chains (Vertigo ALEX 001)

 

 

 

Whereas THIS is just – WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAT HAPPENED? High time the Glasgow Elvis got a big national hit, and here it is; the horrible old squeezy Tom Jones song reworked as a story of cheap betrayal, revenge and murder, which is perhaps what it always was, deep down. Harvey is so powerful an actor that I don’t know why they don’t take him on at the Citizens Theatre. Incredibly he is only four years younger than my father so that’s who I imagine is singing this – angry, in pain, lashing out. And yet Alex is so FUNNY at the same time. It’s Glasgow; if you live here, you know and can feel what he’s singing about. This would be an incredible number one (on the Radio Clyde Tartan Thirty it’s already there)!

 

 

 

THE STYLISTICS: Can’t Give You Anything (But My Love)/I’d Rather Be Hurt By You (Than Be Loved By Somebody Else) (Avco 6105 039)

 

 

 

Yet another song that sounds like the music from a Sunsilk commercial. Absurd orchestration by Van McCoy that sounds like the bombastic soundtrack to a Wagnerian shipwreck behind the vocals in the verses but manages to quote “The Hustle” in all but one of the choruses. Overblown but I suppose catchy enough to do really well.

 

 

 

 

9 August

 

GLADYS KNIGHT & THE PIPS: Best Thing That Ever Happened To Me/Don’t Burn Down The Bridge (Buddah BDS 432)

 

 

 

From 1973 – I suppose the British are slow to catch on (when is “Midnight Train To Georgia” going to become a hit here?) but Gladys and the Pips can sing this sort of stuff in their sleep, which doesn’t mean that it’s no good – it’s actually very good soul music.

 

 

 

SPARKS: Get In The Swing/Profile (Island WIP 6236)

 

 

 

The most creative group pop has at the moment with a demented marching band song that detours into Gilbert and Sullivan operetta and painful prayer to God about questionnaires. Only the Mael brothers could even imagine that.

 

 

 

BIMBO JET: El Bimbo (Version 1)/El Bimbo (Version 2) (Columbia DB 9041)

 

 

 

Good grief; is the Columbia label still going? This year’s “Y Viva Espana,” only without words; a huge Continental hit that’s been hanging around since last summer and British holidaymakers getting drunk to it are buying the record now. We heard this a LOT in Blackpool.

 

 

 

 

16 August

 

DAVID BOWIE: Fame/Right (RCA Victor RCA 2579)

 

 

 

VERY classy and funky. Bowie sounds so much more at ease in this setting than all that Ziggy the world’s going to end pseudo-melodrama and his band here is so much better than the Spiders from Margate. Guest star John Lennon is there to help out, and bizarre speed variations on the vocals. Perhaps the Beatles would have ended up sounding like this if they hadn’t split but I suspect they would have sounded more like Supertramp.

 

 

 

THE WOMBLES: Super Womble/The Orinoco Kid (CBS 3480)

 

 

 

Astonished they’re still getting hits – this is really nothing much.

 

 

 

THE BIDDU ORCHESTRA: Summer Of ‘42/Northern Dancer (Epic EPC 3318)

 

 

 

Disco version of the film theme which was rated X so I haven’t seen it. B-side sounds like Biddu’s trying to buy a ticket for the Wigan Casino.

 

 

 

ROD STEWART: Sailing/Stone Cold Sober (Warner Bros Records K 16600)

 

 

 

This is so obviously going to shoot to number one. A pained ballad (originally recorded by the Sutherland Brothers) which Rod sings with throaty emotion. Well produced, arranged and constructed and this will be especially big in Scotland because here we see the song as the exiles coming back home to help fight for freedom. His biggest record since “Maggie May” and will possibly be even bigger than that.

 

 

 

K C & THE SUNSHINE BAND: That’s The Way (I Like It)/Ain’t Nothin’ Wrong (Jay Boy JAY 99)

 

 

 

This is also going to be K.C.’s biggest hit. Impossibly catchy (at least two big hooks) and danceable. Miami is obviously the new Detroit. If it weren’t for Rod it might even have gone to number one.

 

 

 

 

23 August

 

CRISPY AND COMPANY: Brazil/Love Can (Creole CR 109)

 

 

 

According to James Hamilton in Record Mirror, the Ritchie Family are responsible for the original version of this, and this is a British cover. A bit like Craig Douglas covering Sam Cooke. This is OK but really British-sounding – you can smell the leaks from the wall in the studio.

 

 

 

THE GLITTER BAND: Love In The Sun/I Can Hear Music (Bell 1437)

 

 

 

This isn’t going to be another “Summerlove Sensation” if that’s what Bell Records were thinking – undistinguished.

 

 

 

HOT CHOCOLATE: A Child’s Prayer/Everything Should Be Funky (RAK 212)

 

 

 

Interesting and quite challenging social commentary song from Errol Brown & Co. with regular stops and starts – excellent Phil Dennys arrangement with lots of bells. I will be intrigued to see how high this climbs.

 

 

 

GARY BENSON: Don’t Throw It All Away/This House (State Records STAT 10)

 

 

 

Introspective David Gates-style acoustic guitar ballad with occasionally suspicious pitching. For worried housewives.

 

 

 

MIKE HARDING: Rochdale Cowboy/Strangeways Hotel (Rubber Records ADUB 3)

 

 

 

Following the Billy Connolly/Max Boyce path of folk singer-turned-comedian. A-side is amusing enough but the B-side sways like a drunken Fairport Convention, or Ivor Cutler if he'd eaten a packet of Tudor Crisps that was out of date.

 

 

 

 

30 August

 

EAGLES: One Of These Nights/Visions (Asylum Records AYM 543)

 

 

 

One of these groups grown-up men like, for people too old to dance to the Bay City Rollers. The music press and Johnnie Walker go on and ON about the Eagles but I just find this a boring whine. Perhaps they’re like milk of magnesium – you have to take it because it’s good for you. I don’t think this is what Elvis Presley or the Beatles meant.

 

 

 

LEO SAYER: Moonlighting/Streets Of Your Town (Chrysalis CHS 2076)

 

 

 

Leo Sayer tells stories in his songs in a far livelier fashion than pensioners like the Eagles or Little Feat. This could almost be the theme for a Play For Today episode about two lovers running off to get married in Gretna Green – acutely observed with real humanity and wit. If he was Randy Newman everybody would be singing his praises.

 

 

KENNY: Julie Anne/Dancin’ Feet (RAK 214)

 

 

 

Cretinous singalong. Nobody remembers glam rock any more.

 

 

 

JASPER CARROTT: Funky Moped/Magic Roundabout (DJM DJS 388)

 

 

 

This has come from nowhere! Again it’s the Connolly/Boyce/Harding crossover but Mr Carrott is from Birmingham, as he makes abundantly clear. Actually “Funky Moped” is a really good pop song – produced by Jeff Lynne (also from Birmingham) so they know what’s going on. But most people will, I suspect, buy the record for the other side – a stand-up comedy routine about the TV show with some rather rude words!

 

 

 

MIKE BATT (WITH THE NEW EDITION): Summertime City/MIKE BATT: Children Of The Storm (Epic EPC 3460)

 

 

 

The man behind the Wombles finally gets a hit in his own right, with the theme from BBC1’s Seaside Special. Watching creaky entertainers in a draughty tent isn’t exactly what I would consider light entertainment, but the British seem happy to suffer and settle for third best; they’d be lost if they didn’t. Obviously very catchy bubblegum, but the solemn B-side indicates what the real Mike Batt would like to do if people didn’t expect him to be funny all the time.