NOVEMBER 1977

 

 

Notes on Text

 

I’ve published a link to the full “Live In Trouble,” “Float On” sequence included. Those were the times and snapshots of history are not interchangeable with airbrushing history. I much preferred “Get Down Shep” myself, as did most of my classmates (“Live In Trouble” was overwhelmingly purchased by kids), but that wasn’t a hit.

 

“Alex” was (and still is) Alex Swanson, nominally my best friend at school and academically it was us plus supporting act (well, sort of; actually no, not at all – he was way ahead of me in science and maths and nobody was remotely surprised that academically I gravitated towards the arts stream). He was (and still is) also a stern, unbending Tory. I am not, but more about him and that later on in the blog. At school discos, when I wasn’t doing my big punk acts, we tended to stand morosely at the side talking shop while everybody else enjoyed themselves, hooked up with partners etc.

 

Andrew Austin was that rarity, a genuine friend at school. Bit square and Christian but his heart was in the right place. He’s done very well for himself since then and has a nice big house up there in Largs, by the sea. Which is a good thing; it warms my heart to see my friends getting everything right about their lives and doing well.

 

Colin Adams was yet another schoolmate and musically far and away the coolest of the lot of us. Did I mention how I borrowed his copy of Wire’s 154 for nine months?

 

TINA CHARLES: Love Bug-Sweets For My Sweet (Short Version)/Love Bug-Sweets For My Sweet (Long Version) (CBS 5680)

 

 

 

It’s 12" disco medley time as an original is mixed up with a sixties cover; the theme appears to be bees, honey and so forth. A very energetic and only slightly desperate attempt to win the La Belle Epoque audience and it’s perhaps too British and polite really to make a big impact but overall it isn’t bad at all.

 

 

 

ELECTRIC LIGHT ORCHESTRA: Turn To Stone/Mister Kingdom (Jet Records UP 36313)

 

 

 

The group’s new album Out Of The Blue has only just come out, and one would have thought its first single would have been released well ahead of time, but even in the age of punk the album already sounds like a major statement, and it’s rather amusing and somewhat ironic that ELO have ended up sounding like Wizzard. The verses of “Turn To Stone” are absolutely Roy Wood to the bone and the cheeky control of dynamics throughout the song is quite masterly. I also love the huge “A Day In The Life”-style ascending string section freakout at the end. I suspect most fans will go with the full double album rather than just the single but it’s a terrific pop single nonetheless.

 

 

 

THE BARRON KNIGHTS: Live In Trouble (Part 1 – You Make Me Feel Like Dancing/Angelo/Float On)/Live In Trouble (Part 2 – D.I.V.O.R.C.E./Loving You/Lucille) (Epic EPC 5752)

 

 

 

Haven’t seen these would-be jokers in the charts for nearly nine years but they return with their parodic medleys of current (Part 1) and less current (Part 2) hits. My father finds it hilarious, therefore I have to find it funny or else. However, the Irish and gay routines on “Float On” are, whatever way you listen to or look at them, ill-advised. I think this group are liked by potentially very dangerous people.

 

 

 

BEE GEES: How Deep Is Your Love/Can’t Keep A Good Man Down (RSO 2090 259)

 

 

 

The mid-seventies Bee Gees so far seem to have had better luck in the UK with their uptempo songs than their ballads but that’s about to change; this is a tremulously well-structured smoocher – their words still don’t make a lot of sense (“We belong to you and me”?) but who listens to the lyrics of pop ballads closely, or at all, when you’re at the school disco, it’s ten to eleven and “IT’S YOUR LAST CHANCE, LADS, NOW OR NEVER” for the slow dance? I wouldn’t know about that because Alex and I are usually halfway up the Main Street heading home by that time. Neither of us ever gets a slow dance, usually because we don’t ask or get asked for one. My mother thinks all the girls in my year fancy me but the truth is that either they pretend to fancy me or think they fancy me, then they get slightly closer up and think better of it.

 

 

 

 

12 November

 

THE JACKSONS: Goin’ Places/Do What You Wanna (Epic EPC 5732)

 

 

 

More uptempo than their last two, but the only place this record is likely to go is to the “Ex-Chart Singles” bargain bin at Woolworths. What happened to the group who gave us “I Want You Back”?

 

 

 

RUBY WINTERS: I Will!/Bluer Days Ahead (Creole Records CR 141)

 

 

 

Andrew Austin likes this a lot and I can see it becoming a really big hit; soulful cover of what according to the Tony Jasper chart book is an old Billy Fury song. So this isn’t one for the youngsters, which therefore makes me wonder why Andrew likes it – mind you, he’s a big Genesis fan and I’ve been to his house to listen to the Seconds Out live double album, which I liked more than I was prepared to admit to myself. Middle-aged families with memories will adore it (“I Will!,” that is, not Seconds Out).

 

 

BONEY M: Belfast/Plantation Boy (Atlantic/Hansa K 11020)

 

 

 

Potentially controversial topic for a song, this one, but Frank Farian’s team manage to smooth down the complications of the Troubles so that it’s on the same level as Chicago in the thirties (“Ma Baker”). There’s a lot of wordplay – “be leaving/believing” - and chanting here but little if anything of genuine insight.

 

 

 

DARTS: Daddy Cool-The Girl Can’t Help It/Medley Excerpts: Zing Went The Strings Of My Heart-Come Back My Love-Stay Away (From Them Girls)-Sh-Boom (Life Could Be A Dream)-Shotgun (Magnet MAG 100)

 

 

 

Another group of fifties rock ‘n’ roll revivalists, but the twist here is that they’re supposed to be the hip version of Showaddywaddy. There certainly seems a more relentless vigour to their non-stop-rock ‘n’ roll-hit medleys – and again, my father’s quite fond of this one (he also likes Frank Tashlin’s original film of The Girl Can’t Help It) – but overall it sounds like a West End stage musical about rock ‘n’ roll than the thing itself. Very theatrical, but the group will appeal to those who think Showaddywaddy have veered too far in the cabaret direction, but are scared of the Pistols and the Clash. That’s quite a large audience of “inbetweeners.”

 

 

 

SHOWADDYWADDY: Dancin’ Party/One Of These Days (Arista ARISTA 149)

 

 

 

And immediately we are faced with the problem – into the chart four places higher than Darts, and bound, I suspect, to be a much bigger hit. Bob Stewart on Luxembourg thinks this is exciting – and my father ALSO likes this; can’t anybody differentiate? Up against punk this is like the Stargazers trying to head off Elvis (Presley as much as Costello); the yobbish chants of “AN’ EVERY NOIT’S A SAH-TUH-DAY NOIET!” seem to mock punk – it’s just prescribed “excitement” for compromising people who would instantly die of shock were they ever to be truly excited. Being human – it’s so indecent.

 

 

 

 

19 November

 

BRIGHOUSE & RASTRICK BRASS BAND: The Floral Dance/Girl With The Flaxen Hair (Transatlantic BIG 548)

 

 

 

This is apparently down to Terry Wogan. A straight-ahead Northern brass band playing an early twentieth-century folk song to a Twist beat with intermittent, odd psychedelic sound-effects – the latter probably reflecting the input of producer Ivor Raymonde. This year’s Royal Scots Dragoon Guards Band and a clear frontrunner for the Christmas number one. That’s probably quite punk rock in itself.

 

 

 

ELVIS COSTELLO: Watching The Detectives/ELVIS COSTELLO & THE ATTRACTIONS: Blame It On Caine/ELVIS COSTELLO & THE ATTRACTIONS: Mystery Dance (Stiff BUY 20)

 

 

 

Finally, Britain’s most talented new songwriter and performer gets a hit. And I’m not just happy about it because he looks like me (even though it is an inspiration – well, if he can do it, so can I…).

 

This outclasses the likes of Showaddywaddy and the Barron Knights quite embarrassingly. A paranoid domestic fantasy set against a minimalist shotgun dub-like soundscape – Nick Lowe produces with his usual no-fuss aplomb - as though the song’s protagonists are warily crouching at opposite corners of the same living room, metaphorical (as opposed to sex) pistols to hand. Thrilling, genuinely frightening and musically innovative – Graham Parker meets and is superseded by King Tubby – “Watching The Detectives” is as snarling and unplaceable as any other New Wave (as we now have to call it) single of 1977, yet quietly a lot more radical.

 

 

 

JONATHAN RICHMAN & THE MODERN LOVERS: Egyptian Reggae/Roller Coaster By The Sea (Beserkley BZZ 2)

 

 

 

Great to see the Modern Lovers having another hit, albeit with an instrumental which does exactly what its title suggests. Catchy, subversive in its own intangible way, and possibly a bigger hit than “Roadrunner,” which is to be applauded.

 

 

 

 

26 November

 

CRYSTAL GAYLE: Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue/All I Wanna Do In Life (United Artists UP 36307)

 

 

 

About time the country singer broke through to the charts after umpteen appearances on Val Doonican’s show, although this is much more of a cocktail jazz ballad than anything to do with Nashville. A very fine ballad, however, even if it can’t quite work out how to finish. Should be a big hit.

 

 

 

THE TUBES: White Punks On Dope/Don’t Touch Me There/What Do You Want From Life (A&M AMS 7323)

 

 

 

Another 12”-only release, and really one has to wonder about Herb Alpert, out there in A&M’s head office, having to deal with the fallout from the Sex Pistols fiasco but still managing to sign up Ornette Coleman and the Tubes! The appearance of “White Punks On Dope,” a dirty epic worthy of 1974 Todd Rundgren, in the charts seems almost…illegal, and as it’s only on twelve-inch and extremely unlikely ever to be played on daytime radio, it probably won’t do any better than “Complete Control” managed. But it’s still a remarkable, to-hell-with-YOU piece of pieced-together elements of music, akin to Thin Lizzy being kidnapped by Alice Cooper and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and made to play the lead in The Rocky Horror Show. That’s the magic of the charts; that their benign suburban surface can be breached by such eruptions. It’s why we do it – to annoy our parents. Colin Adams has already got his copy so what more need I say?

 

 

 

THE DOOLEYS: Love Of My Life/Only You Can Get Me By (GTO GT 110)

 

 

 

God bless the Dooleys, naffer than Formica but more genuinely working class than diplomat’s son Joe Strummer. They look and sound as though it’s still 1974 but if you miss Candlewick Green you’ll adore this catchy ditty, as I suspect will thousands. Top five.

 

 

 

BOOMTOWN RATS: Mary Of The 4^th Form/Do The Rat (Ensign ENY 9)

 

 

 

Bloody-minded pub rock with a great free-form ending, but Bob Geldof is twenty-six and far too old to be singing about schoolgirls. Isn’t there supposed to be a law against this kind of thing?

 

 

 

WINGS: Mull Of Kintyre/Girls’ School (Capitol/MPL R 6018)

 

 

 

All right, wait a minute – last week I tipped “The Floral Dance” for Christmas number one, and although that’s going great guns it’s been significantly overtaken by Paul and Linda McCartney, Denny Laine and the Campbelltown Pipe Band. The song sounds like the oldest of folk songs and my father can’t stand Paul’s “mist FRAAAM the sea” in the chorus nor his whoops near the end, but “Hey Jude” + “Amazing Grace With Bagpipes” = number one probably until next Christmas. That’s also quite punk rock. As for the other half of the double A-side – which I do not think likely ever to be played on the radio – see “Mary Of The 4^th Form” above.