In which I listen to every song that has entered the UK charts' top 10, one week at a time. The good. The bad. The terrible. The weird. You name it, I will listen to it. This is not a sensible way to listen to music.
The Liquidator - The Harry J Allstars (peaked at Number 9)
I'll hand it to them, the Harry J Allstars did have a cool name. Named after their leader, producer Harry Zephaniah Johnson, much like the Upsetters, the Allstars were a band made up of session musicians. Harry, it seems, had obtained the rights to a track called Liquidator, with the intention of using it as backing for a completely different song. When that fell through, I guess he must have decided that the song could stand alone.
Why, I have no clue. Because The Liquidator is just a track with very little going on. Well, no, that's a lie, there's a guitar riff that opens it all, and a staccato reggae beat that drops in about 23 seconds in, plus a bit of organ over the top playing something that I might call a tune, if I were feeling generous. I'd have to be feeling pretty generous, though, at best it's on par with Dollar in Teeth. Which was the better of the Upsetters' two tracks, but it wasn't exactly a thrill ride. And neither is this, it's very repetitive, meandering aimlessly around the same melodic ideas without any great development, before fading pointlessly out, not even a proper ending. I'll admit, the organ's also starting to grate, the more I listen, too.
Despite this, the track clearly did do well, perhaps thanks to a demographic that I didn't really think about, back when the Upsetters' tracks came out. I wondered then who the target audience was. But The Liquidator was apparently used - and still is, for certain clubs, most notably Chelsea - as a track to play as the players run out onto the field at football games. Which makes sense, now I think about it. It's a bouncy track, for sure, and there's a certain confidence and swagger to it. I bet the organ, grating as it is through headphones, really pops when played over tinny stadium speakers, too, cutting through the crowd noise handily. Plus, there's no lyrics for you to mishear. So yeah, not my favourite track, but I'm glad it found its niche.
I wonder if I watched more football if the connection here would have been more obvious. As it was, the link was a genuine surprise - but like I said, it makes perfect sense, when you think about it, both that the song would be used as a stadium anthem, and that it would get super popular, as a result. Kind of makes me wonder if other clubs were using Return of Django or Dollar in the Teeth for the same thing, when they got big a few weeks back...
Favourite track of the football-fevered bunch: The Liquidator
Hmm, okay, another slightly random week, I guess, just looking at the artists we've got this go round...
Sweet Dream - Jethro Tull (peaked at Number 7)
I may have already said, I love me some Jethro Tull! I don't think I know this one, though. Looking at it, the songs I know best seems to mostly be their 1970s ones, so I guess that makes sense. And to be honest, if it weren't for Ian Anderson's very distinctive voice, I have no clue listening without context if I'd recognise this as a Jethro Tull track at all, it's got barely any flute right up until the final thirty seconds or so, going heavy instead on bombastic brass, a guitar riff nicked right out of a Led Zeppelin song and later on some pretty intense use of cowbell. None of which are completely outside of Jethro Tull's wheelhouse, but the combination has much more of a standard hard rock vibe than I usually associate with the group. Or perhaps I just miss the flute, love me some flute.
The lyrics, at least, are suitably weird. As far as I can tell, they're about the singer appearing, succubus-like, in the night to woo their young lover away, hence lines about how you'll hear me calling in your sweet dream / Can't hear your daddy's warning cry, promising that you're going back to be all the things you want to be / While in sweet dreams you softly sigh. Things turn a bit darker as they exhort you to get out and get what you can / While your mummy's at home a-sleeping, describing you leaving and starting your parents' car, all wrapped up tightly in the coat you borrowed from me, promising that your place of resting is not far / You hear my voice is calling / To be mine again. Which... okay, the band were in their early twenties at this point, which definitely makes it a bit less weird, but still. Definite potential for creepiness here, it feels like Ian's playing into a super sinister, unwholesome sort of character.
And indeed, there does exist a music video, made much later, set in an old-timey abandoned cinema, with Ian playing some sort of vampire. I cannot recommend it enough, there's an Igor lookalike, Ian Anderson rises from a coffin in Bela Lugosi get-up, there are all sort of little visual references to Nosferatu and other 1920s German expressionist films, there are clips from the Cabinet of Dr. Caligaria, the whole video's shrouded in dry ice smoke, there's some completely inexplicable nonsense with huge balloons, a ballerina, a tarantula with laser eyes, a creepy nun, many, many candles. It's a good time, basically. Also, it's a different version of the song with way more flute, so you know, added bonus, if you like that kind of thing too (which I very much do).
Ruby Don't Take Your Love to Town - Kenny Rogers (2)
Hmm. I thought this was a song that I'd know, but listening, I'm not sure it is at all. In my head, I thought it was about a man in love with a prostitute, a sort of country version of the Police's Roxanne. And I maintain that that probably is a song that exists, it's the sort of downbeat small-town story that country music's good at telling. Kenny's got a sad kind of voice, too, all husky and creaky, so as he launched into the song, singing about how you've painted up your lips and rolled and curled your tinted hair, I thought I was on solid ground. Ruby, he asks, are you contemplatin' goin' out somewhere?
Except then verse two gets going, and I realise that this might not be the story I thought it was, because suddenly he's singing about how it wasn't me that started that old crazy Asian war / But I was proud to go and do my patriotic chore. Yup, it turns out this is a Vietnam War song, and quite a depressing one, too, told from the perspective of a veteran who's come back injured. Ruby, in this telling, isn't some unrequited crush for Kenny to pine after, she's his girlfriend. Or perhaps not for much longer, because she clearly doesn't have much time for him, now that he's back. And this is something Kenny does initially seem to understand, with lines about how it's hard to love a man whose legs are paralyzed / And the wants and the needs of a woman your age, Ruby, I realize. But as she leaves, this understanding gives way to a bitter rage, with Kenny swearing that if I could move, I'd get my gun and put her in the ground / Oh, Ruby, don't take your love to town. Talk about dark!
As short stories go, it's pretty compelling, I found myself really sympathising with Kenny, right up until that sudden, murderous urge, which comes completely out of the blue, but not in a bad way, more in the sense of somebody hitting their breaking point and just snapping, worn down by so much ill-treatment. There's an irony to it, since the very injury that's caused all Kenny's problems is stopping him acting on his impulses here. And honestly, I feel for Ruby, too, in all this, because while the song sets her up as a pretty unlikable hussy, you do still get the feeling that things have been hard for her, too, that there's probably more to the story than Kenny's letting on. He admits himself that I'm not the man I used to be, and given how quickly his impulses turn violent, you have to wonder if that line's about more than just his physical injuries. Which in turn makes this in retrospect also into a song about the lasting impact of the Vietnam War, the sad, messy situations it creates even after the men have come back home.
And some Stevie Wonder to wrap up, nice! This is a very straightforward, bittersweet sort of ballad, Stevie longing to turn back time and go back to a time before his love dumped him, back to yester-me, yester-you, yesterday. I was pleasantly charmed by this wordplay at first, but the more Stevie leans into it - and he really does lean into it here - the stupider I'm afraid it's starting to sound to me, and that's before he gets into lines asking what happened to that yesterglow, reminiscing about a pair of yesterfools, chasing after those yesterdreams. Ugh. I get it, the song has a shtick.
Fortunately, the song does at least sound good, which doesn't quite make up for how irritating I find the lyrics, but it does make it a bit more listenable. Stevie's voice is, as ever, very easy on the ear, by turns smooth as silk and then rougher, picking up just the tiniest bit of an edge. His backing singers are giving it their all, and when you add guitar licks, a bit of bass, some slinky bongo percussion, expressive strings, and some well-timed mmmm-hmmms, you end up with something that despite the dumb lyrics is still perfectly pleasant to listen to.
But yeah, compared to other recent Stevie Wonder songs, Yester-Me, Yester-You, Yesterday just isn't my favourite. It's not bad, but it's kind of nothingy. And there might be a reason for that, because looking into how the song came to be, it sounds like Stevie was having vocal problems at the time. Needing to rest his voice, his label thus put out a whole string of older material, stuff he'd recorded years ago and never got round to releasing, this track included. Except I feel like that's always going to get you some kinda meh songs, because if something was really good, it would have been released back when it was initially recorded. Oh, well. Can't fault Stevie for that, I suppose. Hope he gets better soon, though, and we get some new stuff!
Hmm, okay. If I were grading here based purely on how much fun I had listening to a song, then it would be Jethro Tull for sure this week. But alas, most of the fun I had there was linked to a music video that only got made in 1981, which we're a full 12 years away from. So, in the (slightly arbitrary) spirit of this blog, I think I can't count it. So, purely on the merits of the songmanship, which is totally a word that exists...
Favourite song of the bunch: Ruby, Don't Take Your Love to Town
Beatles! Also, some other stuff, but c'mon. Beatles!!
(Call Me) Number One - The Tremeloes (peaked at Number 2)
Hah. Ironic. You know, because it peaked at Number 2? But obvious joke aside, I'm honestly mostly just surprised the Tremeloes are still around and scoring charting hits. They've been a going concern since, what, 1963, now? Which isn't that long, in years, but the musical landscape's totally different, better bands have gone under in the intervening years. But the Tremeloes feel like a bit of a mid-60s staple, they're always around with a hit or two a year, usually some inoffensively dumb, stompy rock hit.
So, does this fit the pattern? It's heavy, sure, we're definitely in rock territory, but I'm not so sure it does. Certainly, it doesn't sound like many other Tremeloes hits. Instead, we open to acoustic guitar, but with a distorted electric guitar chord played drone-style over the top of it, creating this strange, slightly ominous effect. And then, suddenly, a cut to hammered guitar chords, and a vocal that's thin and a little bit nasal, there's a touch of the Bee Gees to it. Then the band come in with this strange chant, a chesty wa-chee! wa-chee! wa-chee! wa-chee! while a bit of jazzy saxophone plays over the top, followed by a very country rock bit of guitar, and it's only then that you get the classic Tremeloes slightly rowdy "everybody in" chorus.
And even then, it doesn't last long before we've got solo vocals again, a bunch of thumpy chords, the acoustic guitar from the intro... through sheer repetition it does just about work and come together, but it makes for quite a weird song, not one where you can really find your feet. And that's before you get the wailing, squalling solo towards the end, with its sitar-like drone underneath, very psychedelic, very trippy.
Lyrically, it's also very hard to parse, you really get the sense that this is a conversation between the Tremeloes and an ex, not something you're necessarily invited to fully understand. Even the opening lines are confusing: I picture the rain on windows / And I think of home / I wonder if you remember / Did you ever know? What are you supposed to be remembering, here? What does that final line mean? How's this linked to memories of home, and of rain on windows? The Tremeloes at times seem to want to travel, singing about the places I dream about / I will be getting out / Then I can follow the sun, but at other times they seem to want to go home, wondering will I be afraid to tell you / That I'm coming home / I'm ready to take the highroad / I've been away too long. And the chorus, asking their love to call me number one comes in the middle and makes absolutely no sense, either. And, like, I get it. Songs don't have to make sense. But this feels kind of incoherent.
Something - The Beatles (double A-side, 4)
Man, this song comes out the gates strong. It's a really simply start, just a drum roll, the main guitar motif, a whoosh of cymbals, and we're off, with a vocal from George Harrison that's very soft and gentle, perfect for the lyrics, which are also very soft and gentle, inspired by his wife, Patty Boyd. They're romantic, on paper they look quite sappy and sentimental, but something about the simplicity of them, George's sincere delivery, and the complete lack of cliché really wins me over here: something in the way she moves / Attracts me like no other lover / Something in the way she woos me / I don't wanna leave her now / You know I believe, and how.
It helps that it's also really beautiful, musically, with just some very light guitar, some super minimal drums from Ringo, and then a bassline that's playing a completely different counterpart melody, deep enough and quiet enough that it's not stealing the show, the focus is absolutely on George, but it just adds depth in a way that makes me want to look up the chords and work out what's going on. There are a bunch of augmented chords, and chords that change at the end of lines, and as soon as hit the "don't wanna leave her" line, you've got this beautiful minor chord, organ dropping in followed by swelling strings, all conveying the tension George feels when he even considers it. And then, that guitar from the intro, bringing everything round full circle for a second verse.
But then, after that second verse, there's a shift. The guitar returns for a third time, but this time it ends differently, resolving to somewhere unexpected. It's a brighter sound, a major chord, but when you're not expecting it, there's something a bit unsettling about it, and it does then lead into the heaviest part of the song, as the mood completely changes, with harsh, echoing drums, more intense strings, as all the Beatles pile in. You're asking me, will my love grow? they ask, I don't know, I don't know. A series of deep, chromatic chords follow, very heavy, lots of double bass, plus a nightmarish Wurlitzer-like sound subtly underneath. It's perhaps the most typically "Beatles-y" part of the track, it actually sounds a lot like parts of A Day in the Life. But you can't deny it's also pretty intense, much darker than everything up until now, as George seems unsure of what the future may bring. You stick around now, it may show, the band sing, I don't know, I don't know.
And then it all just clears, the uncertainty, the tension, as the chromatic chords come back, but on a honky-tonky piano, smaller, friendlier. Things slow down, the same beautiful, interesting chords from the opening come back, but this time with George playing this expressive, calm solo on slide guitar, full of yearning, ornamented and a little bluesy, but ultimately a very calm, relaxed vibe. It feels like the clouds clearing after a storm, you get the sense that he had his moment of anxiety, but then he thought about Patty again, saw her, and all that uncertainty just faded away. Something in the way she knows / And all I have to do is think of her / Something in the things she shows me / I don't wanna leave her now / You know I believe, and how. And that's it, with the guitar coming back a final time, repeated twice to round things off, creating this neat bookend on the track, the sense that George's love really isn't going anywhere.
Come Together - The Beatles (double A-side, 4)
It's interesting, I feel like Something stands out because the Beatles weren't doing many straight-up love songs at this point in their career. Most of their output recently - or at least the stuff hitting the charts - has been a bit more experimental, or a bit more political, or a bit more spiritual, or whatever, just stuff that reflected the Beatles' various interests at the time. So it's nice to get something that's relatively straightforward, or at least relatively accessible. Let's hope that continues with... ah, okay. Never mind.
This is a song that starts inscrutable, and only gets more so, with that slinky, whispered shoot me intro, followed up by lyrics about a mysterious man: Here come old flat-top, he come groovin' up slowly / He got juju eyeball, he one holy roller / He got hair down to his knee / Got to be a joker, he just do what he please. Even if I didn't recognise John's voice, I'd know this was a John lyric, it's that classic thing where he's just having fun playing round with words, you get the same in a bunch of John's songs where it's just word salad, usually peppered with hints towards various other songs, or cultural phenomena of the era, or the Beatles' own oeuvre and personal lives, just enough that you're kind of tempted to try and pick it apart, to read it allegorically, and then you hit lines about how he got feet down below his knee, and you realise that it might not be all that deep.
Not that there's nothing behind it. Come Together apparently had its genesis during John and Yoko's "bed-in" world tour, and in particular the Monteal section, where they received visits from all manner of US and Canadian counterculture figures, including Timothy Leary, a clinical psychologist who was also a huge proponent for LSD and its mind-expanding powers. He seems like a very 1960s figure, he literally coined the hippies' "turn on, tune in, drop out" catchphrase. He was also hoping to run for governor of California against the then-incumbent, Ronald Reagan, with the slogan "Come Together, Join the Party".
Naturally, he asked John to compose him a campaign song, and while that song didn't get written in time, you can see the bones of it in this version of Come Together, which stews in a heady broth of drugs, free love and politics. There are the surreal, trippy lyrics, there's the veiled reference to "shooting up" on drugs, there's the inevitable sexual resonance of John just moaning come! at you for a good portion of the track, there's the idea of "coming together" metaphisically but also politically, there's a reference to John and Yoko's "bagism" idea, there are lines that seem to be mocking the idea of a politician who gladhands and panders to voters and makes obvious statements line one and one and one is three, who got to be good-looking, cause he's so hard to see. It's a lot, but the more I'm listening, the more I am seeing the vision.
And then another layer is that the Beatles are also in their blues era, and this is part of that. So yes, John's songwriting's really getting into the politics of it all, but on top of and beyond all that, the band's also just trying to play about with this very bluesy, swampy sound, to see what interesting stuff they can do. There's the intro, with its low, repeated bass riff and its pattering percussion, and its shoot me line, which I always thought was just a wordless bit of mouth-percussion. It's really distinctive, probably the most recognisable bit of the song, sparse and minimal, but super funky and stylish. The bass continues through the verses, along with a chugging, distorted guitar and that same, stripped back percussion, then a rawer chord on the come together line, a bit of steel guitar later on, the whole thing feels heavy, brooding, dangerous even. There's yet another luxuriously jammy, seemingly effortless solo from George, who's the absolute hero this week. And all of it's super bluesy, something that feels like it's even being referenced in little ways, like the rhythm of the first flat-top line being taken from an old Chuck Berry song, or a line referencing Muddy Waters and his track Got My Mojo Working. So yeah, lots going on here, there's wordplay, attitude, references on references, little style things. It's very good.
Wonderful World, Beautiful People - Jimmy Cliff (6)
And then It's 1969, so of course we have to round off with some reggae. It's a very bouncy, upbeat sort of reggae, jolly and bright, with a fiddly bit of guitar kicking in, after that classic reggae drum roll start. Jimmy's got a very soulful, smooth voice, once the vocals come in, too, he's very nice to listen to, with lyrics that seem almost comically cheery and optimistic, Jimmy describing a wonderful world, beautiful people / You and your girl, things could be pretty. So far, so good, I'm getting flashbacks to Sam Cooke's Wonderful World.
But there's a twist coming, since underneath this, there is a secret / That nobody can reveal. What is this secret? Unclear, because first, something even more unexpected, which is a violin solo! I don't think we've had a violin solo in a reggae track like this before, it feels like a very strange bit of intrumentation, but I don't hate it, it adds a bit of refinement and class to proceedings, which definitely helps WWWP stand out from some of the other, less memorable reggae we've heard recently. If Return of Django had strings, would I remember it more fondly? It's quite possible...
So, anyway, the twist is politics. Take a look at the world, Jimmy exhorts us, and the state that it's in today / I'm sure you'll agree / We all could make a better way / With our love put together / Everybody learn to love each other / Instead of fussing and fighting / Cheating, backbiting / Scandalizing and hating / Baby we could have a / Wonderful world, beautiful people... it's not the deepest or most trenchant of political analyses, this is some All You Need is Love-level feel-good fluff, but still, it's heart's in the right place, and I do like Jimmy in the outro explicitly calling on Harold Wilson, Richard Nixon, George Pompidou and Alexei Kosygin to make peace with each other. Modern "political" songwriting would never, it all has to be so coded nowadays - can you imagine a song calling Trump out by name like that, or Putin, or whoever. I certainly can't, I feel like the blowback today would just be too much, it wouldn't be worth it.
There's a naive charm to Jimmy's approach to things here. But let's be real, this week was all about the Beatles, I spent far too long picking their latest hits apart. But that's because there's a lot to unpick. The Beatles are headed for a break-up, that much has been clear for a few years. Their latest albums have felt like a few different solo projects in a trenchcoat, they've all picked up different interests, there are weird interpersonal tensions going on, and you get the sense the Beatles just aren't as close as they used to be - heck, the video for Something doesn't even feature any Beatles interacting with each other, that's the point we're at. And yet, Something and Come Together - and Abbey Road more generally - are proof that when the band are on the same wavelength, they're still firing on all cylinders, still capable of putting some really good, layered, interesting stuff, and I love it.
Well, November continues on, dreary and grey, while in the charts, we've got two familiar names, back for another bite of the apple...
Love's Been Good to Me - Frank Sinatra (peaked at Number 8)
Well, this is a Frank Sinatra song I know absolutely nothing about. But it was released on a 1969 album, so it's part of his late-career comeback, same as My Way. Which is a song I can't stand, but I'm trying to keep an open mind here, there's plenty of other Frank Sinatra songs I like...
And fortunately, I do indeed think this is a gentler, humbler affair than My Way was. It starts out in a similar vein to My Way, with a line about how I have been a rover, I have walked alone / Hiked a hundred highways, never found a home. But instead of blowing this up into a big deal, singing about the difficulties life's thrown at him, and how Frank, ever the rugged individual, has prevailed over them all in his own, unique way, this track instead takes a different tack, reflecting on how yes, life's been hard at times, but despite it all, Frank's generally content with how his life, since once in a while, along the way, love's been good to me. There are memories of a girl in Denver, with a smile to drive away the storms, another girl in Portland Frank would go out courting with. And those memories are enough, all in all I'm happy, reason is, you see / Once in a while along the way, love's been good to me.
It's a sweet, simple idea, and pretty, as most Frank Sinatra tracks are. At 54, his voice is still fantastic, warm and velvety-smooth. There's a restraint to the delivery, he's not belting or showing off, doesn't need to, it's a quiet, calm sort of track, reflective in a way that suits a slightly older singer. And to compliment it, the track's orchestrated in this very lush, classic style, with sweeping strings, harpsichord, a gentle bit of glockenspiel, woodwind and horns here and there. It's lovely, there's nothing groundbreaking going on, but it's a very classy, listenable vibe.
Delta Lady - Joe Cocker (10)
In contrast, this is a pretty rowdy affair, a blues rock number from Joe Cocker that rocks pretty hard from the word go, with bass and piano playing a funky riff before Joe launches in, full-throated and husky as ever. The whole thing's driving, energetic, jubilant, as Joe sings about his American lover, his delta lady, with a gospel-style backing chorus coming in on the choruses to help him celebrate his love, complete with plenty of tambourine and cowbell, all of which gives Delta Lady a whole lot of oomph, I found myself bopping my head along almost instantly.
The other thing that struck me, though, was how sexy this was! At first, I thought the song was going to go the innuendo route, with lines about Joe longing for your soft and fertile delta. But then you get lines about her yearning for the warmth and tender shelter of my body, or Joe thinking about how many times I found you / Standing wet and naked in the garden. So you know, I guess that's another option. There's an intimacy to all this, but Joe's clearly very comfortable revisiting it, and there's a real sense of fondness to it too, a sense that these are treasured memories, still.
For a song by a British artist, the whole thing sounds super American. You've got Joe's bluesy delivery, the blues rock feel of it all, the gospel elements in the chorus. I guess you'd expect this, in a song about a "Delta lady", but it's still kind of funny to me. I guess there is at least a little nod to the strangeness of it, with that line in the middle with the line about how when I'm home again in England / I think of you, because I love you, love. Which is literally an acknowledgement that Joe isn't actually American, but there's also a very Beatles-ish trumpet fanfare, which I do think at a stretch might be construed as a little cheeky nod to the British Invasion and the sort of musical tradition that Joe's markedly not part of. And then we're right back to the US again, England very deliberately set aside for the charms of the Mississippi Delta.
I'd heard of neither of these songs before, but both were perfectly fine? I will say, I think I'm ready for Frank Sinatra to fade into obscurity, though, with My Way as a final smash hit and then Love's Been Good to Me as a quieter coda, a gentler and more agreeable hit to bow out on. Joe Cocker, on the other hand, feels like he's just getting started exploring this amped-up, Americanized sound. And given the energy he brough to things this week, I'm tentatively quite excited to see where that goes...
November, ugh. Have we time for a Caribbean get-away? We do? Great, let's go!
Return of Django - The Upsetters (double A-side, peaked at Number 5)
Right, before we get going, let me just say that "The Upsetters" is a sick band name. They were the house band from Upsetter Records, a label founded and run by producer Lee "Scratch" Perry, whose name is also pretty cool. Anyway, this wouldn't be relevant, except on top of presumably providing backup for other, bigger artists, it seems like the Upsetters had quite a run of hits in their own right, instrumental hits that didn't have anybody singing on them at all.
Such is Return of Django. Who Django is, I have no clue, or where he's returning from, or why. But there you go. The track opens with a brief clatter of drums and these horn licks, before settling into a steady, reggae rhythm, bass guitar keeping everything ticking along. There's a bit of sax going on, too, such that if you don't listen too hard, it kind of sounds like you're listening to an old rock and roll track. The rhythms are off, but the chords, the instrumentation, the quality of the recording, all of them feel like something you'd hear Bill Haley or Chuck Berry doing back in the early days of rock and roll, which is kind of cool.
Unfortunately, the song doesn't then do all that much with this, it creates a groove and then just sits there in it, without really going anywhere. It's not unpleasant, but the overall result feels a bit pointless. There is a brief moment in the middle where everything cuts away and you get a drum fill that's kind of fun. And the high point of the whole track has to be the sax solo you get at 1:20, which is genuinely pretty impressive, with whoever's playing occasionally leaping up into the stratosphere, getting all these rather unlikely, squealing sounds out of the instrument. But it's not long before we're back to the same old groove as before, and it's fine but I was really hoping for something more. Heck, the song doesn't even bother to end properly, it just fades out, it's not a very satisfying resolution.
Dollar in the Teeth - The Upsetters (double A-side, 5)
I was really hoping that Dollar in the Teeth would provide a few more fireworks, but alas, it was not to be. On hitting play, it's the same reggae drum roll, and then once again we just settle into a steady, relaxed groove. It's fine, everybody involved is clearly a competent musician, but there's not much else you can say about it, the track's all about setting the scene, creating this chilled out, cool vibe to really sink into, and that's it, that's the whole point.
To be fair, I do think there's a bit more substance to this one than there was to Return of Django. At the very least, you get the interplay between an abrupt, honking horn, a bluesy Hammond organ and a funky saxophone, all three of which at various points in the track come to the fore playing something approaching a tune. It's still pretty groove-based, but there's more sense of a melody and melodic progression, something you could hum back to somebody, if they asked you how the track went.
So yeah, I probably prefer this to Return of Django. It's jazzy, it's confident, there's a bit of pizzazz to it. And I'll admit that while I do find both tracks a bit aimless, still, I am starting to see the virtue of this sort of vibes-y, repetitive track. If nothing else, you can just spin Dollar in the Teeth on loop and get lost in it. The bass and drums and guitar settle into this very steady, dependable pattern that through sheer repetition becomes like a neutral canvas that the rest of the instruments can then paint on top of in their own unique ways, adding a bit of flair and style while the rhythm and chord patterns keep it all very cohesive and coherent.
Well. Neither of these tracks rocked my world, they felt like backing tracks that really ought to have somebody singing over the top. Which, now I think about it, might have been the point, I know for a fact that Jamaica has a tradition of people deejaying and scatting over the top of records. Except that still doesn't explain how it got so popular with the British record-buying public of 1969, who I suspect were just buying this and listening "as-is". Was it just for mood-setting? I guess reggae is having a bit of a moment this year, so I could see this being background music, something you could put on to give your party a chill and fashionably exotic background ambience...
In 1968, five teenaged friends got together in the small American town of Riverdale, with a dream of forming a band. Naming themselves after their lead vocalist, the co-ed group took the charts by storm, and despite their lack of a bassist, they soon had not one but two minor chart hits, Bang-Shang-A-Lang and and Feelin' So Good, all within a year of the band's formation. They were young, they were hip, they were a household name - and they were completely fictional?
Sugar, Sugar - The Archies (peaked at Number 1)
Yup, this is the Archies, a band made up of characters from Archie Comics, a long-running teen comedy comic book that had gotten its start all the way back in 1941, if you can believe that. The main cast- made up of Archie Andrews, Jughead Jones, Reggie Mantle, Betty Cooper and Veronica Lodge - don't seem to have had a band in the original, they were just regular high-schoolers, but right before The Archie Show was launched in 1968 as a cartoon spinoff, the premise changed, and a band was duly formed, with the rather ambitious idea that they'd be a real band - that is, that they'd make and release all their music like any other bubblegum act.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the inspiration for this came from the Monkees, another group that blurred the boundary between fictional and real, having been assembled by executive Don Kirshner for a scripted TV show all about the fictional band "The Monkees", who just happened to be played by four chaps with the same names as the characters they played in the TV show The Monkees. I can only imagine how much potential this has to tie you in knots, artistically but also just psychologically, and indeed, it was the individual band members who ended up bringing the show down, as they got increasingly tired of micromanagement, wishing to branch out beyond the bright, unchallenging music that Don wanted them to be putting out. And so the Monkees (real, human band) ended up tanking The Monkees (TV show-slash-musical project). But it had been a huge success while it lasted. If only there was some way of making a fictional band that you could control completely...
And so the Archies were born, a completely animated band, "voiced" (as it were) by session musicians, who would provide the sound, but whose faces and personalities would never be linked to the characters they were playing. Which in turn meant they were replaceable, a real-life band member wanting out could be shown the door without it having the slightest effect on the fictional band. It was a clever set-up, since it also meant that the Archies' style didn't have to change or develop, Don could find a vein of crowd-pleasing, sugary pop and just mine that vein until the public stopped caring, swapping musicians out as needed.
The result's perhaps the most bubblegum of bubblegum pop songs, to the point where the lyrics almost read as parody. Honey, the Archies sing, oh sugar, sugar, / You are my candy girl / And you got me wantin' you. I shouldn't be enjoying this, it's so very basic. I just can't believe the loveliness of loving you, the Archies sing, and I wonder if they've ever heard of a thesaurus, I just can't believe it's true. Or take the line about how when I kissed you, girl / I know how sweet a kiss could be / Like the summer sunshine / Pour your sweetness over me. That's bad writing, by most metrics, or it's pretty unoriginal at least, there's nothing original here, it's ostentatiously cliché and predictable. But perhaps that's the point. As a literal cartoon band, the Archies are meant to be, like, the platonic ideal of a band, the bandiest band ever to band. And so yeah, of course they're leaning hard into this super conventional, appealing style.
And let's be real, it also sounds great. Which is perhaps another bonus of hiring session musicians, since for a relatively cheap day rate you get musicians who are super experienced and competent, and who by definition are great at slotting into whatever group you throw them into. On top of that, if you're recording all the music in advance, you can do lots of studio stuff, too, because you no longer have to worry about if the band can replicate it "live" on stage. One consequence of this is that the song makes heavy use of multi-tracking; there are only actually three people singing on this, but they manage to sound like a much larger band. And the same goes for the instruments, you can record them all separately and tweak until you're happy with it, and you're not limited to the number of instruments that five teens could actually play at one time in real life, which gives you this very full-sounding track that's still clean, every instrument carefully chosen and implemented.
And all of this gets thrown onto a structure that's super simple, but there's something new just about every verse, there's xylophone and sax at the start, then shakers, then some gentle baba-ba-ba-ba backing vocals, then a bridge with Hammond organ, then tambourine, then a section with bass and hand claps, then the pour a little sugar on me call-and-response bit, and so on and so forth, all the way through to the end, you're never allowed to get bored. It's brutally effective, by the end of it, I defy you not to have the tune stuck in your head, in all its bubbly, dumb glory.
I really like this song, okay? It's fun and it's catchy and it's well-made. But I'm also fascinated by the weirdness that comes with a fictional band. It's something we'll see re-invented again and again, from Alvin and the Chipmunks to Gorillaz to Huntrix, and I'm a sucker for its meta weirdness, the complicated knots you can end up tying yourself in getting your head round the logistics of it all, and the freedom you have to just do something kind of oddball and left-field - even if you do then go and use that freedom to make the most conventional, crowd-pleasing pop imaginable.
Favourite song of the stunningly basic bunch: Sugar, Sugar
Something for everybody, this week, from solid pop bops, to seriously sentimental balladry and to the delightfully weird debut of somebody I suspect we'll be seeing quite a bit more of as the 1970s approach.
I'm Gonna Make You Mine - Lou Christie (peaked at Number 6)
First, though, Lou Christie. I'd never heard of Lou, but a quick google confirms he seems to be a pretty standard late-60s American pop star, lots of floppy hair and a generally pretty clean-cut look. And surprisingly enough, once I hit play, I actually do think I might have heard this song before? I can't sing along or anything, but there's a definite sense of familiarity, the more I listen, the more I reckon I've probably come across this somewhere before, goodness knows where.
Or perhaps it's just because it's a pretty standard-issue pop number. I don't mean that in a bad way, either, because this is very competent stuff. It's bright and catchy and there's something very satisfying in the way it's written, the emphases that fall with almost clockwork precision on just the right note: I'll try-y-y-y-y-y / Every trick in the book with every step that you take / Everywhere that you look, just look and you'll find / I'll try to get to your soul, I'll try to get to your mind / I'm gonna make you mine. There's so much that's quietly good there, from the repetition of "every", to the punchiness of all those verbs, to the "mind" / "mine" half-rhyme, and the whole thing has a great flow, it just keeps going from one idea to the next very neatly.
I like Lou's voice, too, he's really throwing his whole self into it, giving it a bit of a wail where he needs to, without it ever feeling too over-the-top. There are a few rather acrobatic leaps that he handles well, plus a few falsetto gonna make you mines and aah-ha-ha-ha-haha ad libs, plus that try-y-y-y-y-y moment. And there's also the bridge, stompy and pounding, with a big, performative grunt as he sings about how I'll be a hard-lovin', pushin' kinda - uh - individual / Knockin' night and day at your door. This is the sort of sentiment I'd normally have a bone to pick with, but again, I think Lou just about threads the needle right, leaning into the camp cheesiness of it all as he promises that you'll have to turn me away like a indestructible force!
The whole thing honestly feels very Billy Joel, to me, if Billy Joel arrived on the scene ten years earlier and had access to a whole Wall of Sound-style backing orchestra to play with. Because the backing here is very 1960s, I'm hearing a lot of brass, but at other points there's guitar, piano, pizzicato strings, harpsichord, a triangle, a tambourine, what sounds like a vibraslap and of course those very 1960s backing singers. It's a lot, but I quite like it. And yeah, very Billy Joel. Good vibes.
He Ain't Heavy, He's My Brother - The Hollies (3)
And then it's time for something quite different, as all Lou's instruments drop out in favour of a plaintive, warbling harmonica solo that actually goes out of tune mid-solo. Which wouldn't normally work, but here I think it sounds quite cool? I don't know, it's my favourite part and definitely the most iconic part of this song, the part where I'm like "oh, yeah, I know this one". It does then drop out, but it comes back near the end to frame everything, with this clear, mournful tone that sets the scene well for the rest of the song.
Because this isn't a very cheery number. It's not on the same level as Nobody's Child from last week, thank goodness, but it's just a very serious song, as the Hollies, completely out of left field, present us with a slow, earnest soft rock ballad with some lofty ideals, its theme taken rather unexpectedly from an 1884 book of parables and sermon illustrations written by Presbyterian minister James Wells, in which a little girl is struggling to carry a large baby, but when asked if she needs help, she replies with the title line: he's not heavy, he's her brother.
It is, I guess, a pretty touching story, if a bit saccharine for my tastes, and it's as good an illustration as any of Christian charity, but that still doesn't explain how it reached the Hollies' attention. But from being printed in 1884, the phrase does seem to have been repeated in various magazines and publications all the way into the 1920s, always as the punchline to some moral fable. Notably, it also gets used as a slogan for a major US children's home, inspired by a story of one resident carrying another polio-stricken child up some stairs.
And my suspicion is that somewhere, in all this, it becomes a sort of proto-meme, a glurge-y story that the Hollies probably absorbed just by osmosis, connected to various worthy causes, with a vague but ultimately uplifting message of mutual support not unlike You'll Never Walk Alone, but with a more somber, dour seriousness, and a wordiness that you don't often get in pop songs, with some very Victorian-sounding lines about how his welfare is of my concern / No burden is he to bear, or about how he would not encumber me alongside much more straightforward lines about how I'm strong, strong enough to carry him, or about how the load doesn't weight me down at all. Because at the end of the day, he ain't heavy, he's my brother. If we all saw each other as brothers and sisters and bore each other's burdens, we'd all be much gladder and the world would truly be a better place.
All of this I understand. What I still don't entirely get, on an intuitive level, is why people liked this so much. Or why they still like the song, because I know that people do like this one, even today. But sadly, for me, at the end of the day, it's way too earnest and sentimental, and the moral message, while admirable, just doesn't move me all that much, it's nice enough and I do broadly agree with the Hollies, but that's as far as it goes. Honestly, for me, it's an "eat your vegetables" kind of songs, it's good and worthy and you know you're meant to like it, but ugh. What a slog.
Space Oddity - David Bowie (5)
This, on the other hand, is a nice surprise! I don't know if I was expecting David Bowie to turn up in the 1960s, he's such a 1970s and 1980s artist in my mind. But the 1970s are almost upon us, so perhaps I shouldn't be shocked. Whatever the case, it's great to hear from Bowie, and especially with Space Oddity, which I've liked for a long time. It's such a perfect little thing, a quirky track about an astronaut drifting in space. And actually, I'm now realising that that makes total sense for 1969. People just landed on the Moon, for goodness' sake. We're mid Space Race. 2001: A Space Odyssey came out just a year ago. Of course people had space on the brain. Honestly, now I think about it, I'm surprised we've not had more space songs.
So, Space Oddity. It opens with a strummed bit of acoustic guitar, drifting in faintly from the distance. Ten seconds later you start to get these quiet chords on electric guitar, some echoing snare rolls here and there in the mix. It's a perfect set-up, sparse and dreamy with just the faintest hint of something a bit more ominous, perfect for David's voice to come in over the top about the 30-second mark. It's not a pretty or a smooth voice, not a conventional pop voice at all, but very distinctive. There's something rather deadpan and emotionless about the delivery, the whole Ground Control to Major Tom section is very detached as David goes mechanically through the pre-flight checks.
But perhaps this works, because the story's meant to be a bit unsettling. It starts fine. We get Major Tom lifting off, a gloriously dissonant chord, building, higher and higher, like a rocket shooting upwards. Ground Control congratulates Tom, asks him to step out the capsule, and there's a moment of real wonder, Tom singing about how I'm stepping through the door / And I'm floating in a most peculiar way / And the stars look very different today. But already there's a tension as Tom describes himself sitting in a tin can / Far above the world / Planet Earth is blue / And there's nothing I can do. And this is where things go wrong: Ground Control to Major Tom, your circuit's dead, there's something wrong / Can you hear me Major Tom? The line's repeated, but he can't respond. Tom's capsule's cut off, dead in the metaphorical water, and the song ends there, on that same, powerless, strangely peaceful detachment from before, as far above the Moon / Planet Earth is blue / And there's nothing I can do...
All of this sounds great, by the way. I mentioned the dreaminess of the start, the way the countdown's incorporated into the start, creating tension and drawing you into the story just in time for that glorious, soaring liftoff chord. The song falls back into a soft, psychedelic rock vibe after that, but there are still surprises, like the gorgeous, shimmering flutes that come in over the here I am sitting in a tin can parts, the sudden injection of energy on the guitar break that follows, surprisingly folksy acoustic guitar and hand claps giving way to an epic, lush electric guitar solo that ends with a disquieting bit of feedback, right as the spaceship starts breaking down, another bit of storytelling just through the sound of it all. And then the whole thing ends on this long, chaotic Day in the Life-style fadeout, instruments playing at random, quieter and quieter, like the ship's instruments misfiring as Tom drifts off into the black, never to be heard from again. It's *chef's kiss* perfect for the story it's telling, you can tell how much Dvid and his team have taken with this.
I'm a huge sucker for space stories, so it's no surprise that I really like all of this, the sci-fi romance of it is super compelling. There's that clash between Tom's role as this idealised space hero, risking his life to boldly go where no man's gone before, all fanfare and applause, contrasted with the reality of those quieter, more introspective moments where he realises just how cut off he is from the rest of humanity, how isolated. And then his ship malfunctions, and Tom ends the song as a sort of Laika figure, set adrift to die, but accepting his fate with a tragic stoicism, because what else is there to do? It's peak drama, and I love it, and that's before you get into the resonances with the 60s counterculture, Major Tom on a trip, away in space and unable to connect back to the world below... it's rich, that's all I'll say. Lots and lots to like.
Oh Well - Fleetwood Mac (2)
But we're not done, because we get some Fleetwood Mac to round off! I loved their last hit, Man of the World, so I was excited to see them pop again, with yet another hit I'd never heard of. And I was right to be excited, because this is a banger! From the get-go, it's got lots of energy, opening with a blisteringly fiddly bluesy picked-out guitar riff that I'm sure takes some serious skill to play. It gets repeated twice and then we get the same riff again, this time on an electric guitar, maracas and cowbell joining in as the riff gets developed into something a bit funkier, a bit more involved. Already, not thirty seconds into the track, this rocks, it's got a proper hard rock energy that's giving Led Zeppelin, or some White Stripes tracks, if you want a more modern comparison, it's much heavier and rougher around the edges than I'd normally associate with Fleetwood Mac, even having listened to some of the rest of their earlier output.
Anyway, the guitar then drops out, all of a sudden, and we get half of the song's lyrics, Peter Green crooning in a blues sort of way about how I can't help about the shape I'm in / I can't sing, I ain't pretty and my legs are thin / But don't ask me what I think of you / I might not give the answer that you want me to. These lyrics don't mean anything. I mean, I guess they probably do, but it's not the point, the point's to create a break in the song, to have an excuse to pull everything back so it can come crashing back in again, even heavier and harder-rocking than before. Same with the verse later on about talking to God, the actual lyrics aren't the point, this is basically an instrumental song, with Peter's voice acting as just another instrument among many.
And then the song does something a bit strange, grinding to a halt completely a minute from the end, feedback ringing on the final chord, and we get a much slower, almost classical guitar coda, very minimal and sparse, a cello playing these sustained notes quietly underneath. There's a lick of something on what turns out to have been a recorder, but it doesn't really feel like it resolves, you've just got this strange, dark ambience... and then the song's done? It's jarring and unresolved and weird. What was going on?
The answer, it turns out, is that Oh Well was recorded in two parts, with the single version more properly bulled as Oh Well (Pt. 1). The second part was then released as a B-side, presumably to make it a more commercial length, since Oh Well (Pt. 2) was a full five and a half minutes long. It's also a lot slower, picking up where the first part ended and just kind of sitting in that same quietly stormy space, brooding and ominous but doing very little, until the whole thing ends on a tiers de Picardie, a major chord brightening the mood very subtly right at the end. I actually do like this, it feels like a much-needed cool-down after the excitement of Part 1. But I can see why it didn't make the A-side, it's all a bit empty and stark and honestly, the question it mostly leaves me with is why on earth they included any of this bit in Part 1. A confusing decision in an otherwise quite fun pair of tracks.
Whew! I took my time listening to these, but I did really enjoy myself this week. I love to think that I'd have been cool enough to be into Bowie and Fleetwood Mac if I was around in 1969. The reality is that I'd probably have been a Lou Christie girlie, though. And there's nothing wrong with that, he's very good. But man, Bowie and Fleetwood Mac both blew it out of the water this week with songs that create these very dramatic, interesting moods and soundscapes, and in the case of Space Oddity manages to tell a pretty compelling story. More of this, please!
Ooh, a cover of a properly old track! We haven't seen one of those for a little while...
Nobody's Child - Karen Young (peaked at Number 6)
This track originally dates back to 1949, when it was recorded by country artist Hank Snow (no, I hadn't heard of him, either). It doesn't seem to have ever been a huge hit in the US, but in the UK it saw several covers throughout the 50s and 60s, including one by Lonnie Donegan, and another by rock and roller Tony Sheridan with the a little up and coming group called the Beatles as his backing band. So it's a tune people might well have been familiar with, even before Karen Young's version came out.
That said, I still can't see why this got quite as popular as it did. Lyrically, in particular, it's a huge downer, telling the story of Karen passing by an orphanage, stopping for a moment to watch the children play, as you do. Alone, a boy was standing, she notes, and when I asked him why / He turned with eyes that could not see / And he began to cry. This immediately casts Karen as the villain of the song for me, because seriously, you're going to just ask some random blind kid why he's got no friends? What a jerk! Things only get more emotionally manipulative in the chorus, as the kid sings about how I'm nobody's child, I'm nobody's child / Just like a flower, I'm growing wild / No mommy's kisses and no daddy's smile / Nobody wants me, I'm nobody's child. Eek.
And yeah, as you might then expect, the rest of the song continues in a similarly sentimental vein, with the kid singing about how families keep coming and taking the other children home and passing the blind kid by. This is already laying it on a bit thick, it feels borderline like a RSPCA ad trying to convince you that this sad cat or dog really needs to be adopted. But it gets even worse in the next verse, to the point where I actually come all the way round and instead of finding it at best twee and kind of irritating, I start to find it actively hilarious. Which probably doesn't say anything good about me, but it's just so mawkish and overdone, with the kid going on about how he's sometimes so lonely he wants to die. I'd walk the streets of heaven, he sings, where all the blind can see / And just like all the other kids / There'd be a home for me. Can you hear how hard I am rolling my eyes at this?
I don't think it helps that it's all done in a super bland style as a steady, dull country ballad. The pace is kept slow, the tune's repetitive, there's literally nothing memorable about this. Even Karen's vocals sound sleepy, there's no energy to them, no great emotion, just a strangely mannered quality that feels very old-fashioned to me, at this point, a throwback to the terribly well-spoken singers of the 1950s and early 1960s. And so we plod along, and I find that I'm not at all sad when it's time to say goodbye to Karen.
Yawn. I don't have much to say here. You don't need to go listen to this one. It's sad and dreary and set my teeth on edge with how limp and pathetic and sentimental it was. What on earth could the appeal have been? I don't know, honestly it just kind of feels exploitative, misery porn for the masses, and boring misery porn, at that. Bleurgh.
Favourite song of the bunch, I suppose: Nobody's Child
Okay, busy IRL week over, we are back in business! And three whole songs, to mark the occasion.
Throw Down a Line - Cliff Richard and Hank Marvin (peaked at Number 7)
Okay, this is something a bit different. It's Cliff and Hank Marvin, so I thought I knew what I was in for, but it turns out this is a track Hank wrote originally with Jimi Hendrix in mind. Who's about as different as you can get to Cliff, and the result's something that's very unexpected but, dare I say it, not bad? The vibe's straight psych rock, heavy and brooding, with yowling guitar licks, these slow, pounding drums, and an ominous rumbling underpinning it all. I like it, it's properly moody stuff.
And over the top of it all, Cliff, bluesier than he's been in years, pleading with us to throw down a line, help a poor boy, who's drownin' in a stormy sea / Throw down a line, help a poor boy, who's hangin' in a nowhere tree. There's a darkness to these lyrics that I suspect Jimi would have just eaten up. And Cliff's no Jimi Hendrix, but he does an alright job too, leaning hard into the whinier side of his voice, which suits the lyrics, as he sings about how I feel the stab of pain returning / Despair is burning in my heart again, or about how the peaceful hand that once caressed me / Hurts like the rest, because it's turned to stone / Talons of steel have grown. These are super melodramatic and, yes, a little silly, but with enough whimpering, Cliff can just about make them work, I reckon.
The star of it all's got to be the guitar solo in the middle, though, which is even more distorted than the rest of the guitar work, this shimmering, hazy, metallic, wailing thing straight out of some obscure prog rock epic. Except it's not, it's a 3 minute-long Cliff Richard song, which is insane. If you just played me the solo and asked me who the artist was, never in a million years would I guess. I love it, it's a lot of fun - I just wish Hank had been given, oh, an extra thirty seconds to revel in it?
It's Getting Better - Mama Cass (8)
Hmmm. I'll confess I did think for a moment that this was going to be Mama Cass covering the Beatles' Getting Better, which I was briefly very excited for. Alas, it isn't, but I'm still pleased to see Cass back. She was a founding member of the Mamas & the Papas, but the band broke up in 1968 following various arguments, and the aftermath sounds like it was particularly rough for Cass. she made a successful solo debut with a Las Vegas run of shows, but lost an unhealthy amount of weight for it and got really sick. The reviews were brutal, and she apparently was depressed for some time afterwards. And then, in the midst of it, this, a track that Cass doesn't seem to have loved - far too saccharine, no real substance at all- but that was at least an undisputed hit.
Because Cass is good here. She's got a lovely, warm quality to her voice, a strong, confident contralto that's not super overwrought, but just does enough to sell the lyrics. Which is what this tune calls for, since it's a song about a love that's not spectacular or showy, but that's steady and dependable. Once I believed that when love came to me, she sings, it would come with rockets, bells and poetry / But with me and you, it just started quietly and grew / And believe it or not, now there's something groovy and good 'bout whatever we got. She's not turned on and starry-eyed, mooning over her love, but there's a contentment and an affection that's getting better, growing stronger, warm and wilder, getting better every day. Which is cute, right? It's very down-to-earth, very real, and Cass' voice suits it well, she's not going for vocal fireworks, just a solid, sweet performance.
To modern ears there's also a very nostalgic, vintage feel to this, I can't explain exactly what it is, but something in the way Cass sings, the bouncy tune, the sunny flutes and trumpets and steel guitar backing her up and especially the twee little da da da da da backing vocals, it's very well done, but also very of-its-era, or even of a slightly earlier era, because it is a very Brill Building sort of sound, with simple romantic lyrics, a basic but competent song structure, a bit of Latin flare in the percussion, lots of backing vocals, heavy use of session musicians, catchy hooks. It's exactly the sort of song that could have been a hit at just about any point in the 1960s, with only minor changes, and I'm not shocked that it's from Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, who are one of the big 60s pre-Motown songwriting duos (You've Lost That Lovin' Feeling's probably their biggest hit, but they did tonnes of stuff!)
Yeah, the more I've listened, the more I think I've warmed to this. I think at first I was afraid it would be a little twee, and it is, very much so, but in a charming way, plus I have absolutely been won over by the lyrics. They're simple, but capture a sense of contentment, a grounded, unflashy view of love that I think's underrepresented, in music and in culture more broadly.
Lay, Lady, Lay - Bob Dylan (5)
And some Dylan, to round off! It feels just instinctively like it's been ages since we've heard from Bob - and yup, I've just looked it up, his last Top 10 hit was 1966, when he brough out Rainy Day Women Nos. 12 and 35, a track that's apparently pretty forgettable, since I have zero memories of it, just a faint suspicion that I didn't much like it. But yeah, three whole years, with barely any lower-chartings hits in-between, too.
What's Bob been doing? A brief glimpse at google doesn't turn up much. He was in a motorcycle accident and took a break from touring as a result, instead recording his 1967 album John Wesley Harding, which was sparse and serious and had All Along the Watchtower on it, which is a song we've heard, but not Dylan's version. And then it sounds like Bob's just playing gigs until 1969, when he puts out a new album, even more country-flavoured than John Wesley Harding was, called Nashville Skyline. It's stripped back, it's homey, it's soft, and that's where Lay Lady Lay comes in.
Because Lay Lady Lay is a very chill, gentle song. It's not completely acoustic, there's still a proper electric, rock feel going on. But it's quite soft, with Bob affecting a different voice to his usual nasal whine, a lower, more melodic sort of croon. There's an acoustic guitar, plus steel guitar playing this melancholy, descending line, there's what sound like bongos, but also cowbell, and later on there's a quiet bit of organ, but it feels pretty light-touch throughout, even where things gets a bit more worked up in the chorus, everything seems to pull right back whenever you hit the refrain, it doesn't stay high-energy for long.
And this works with the lyrics, which for Bob are quite simple. I normally associate Bob with a certain lyrical density, words that need to be unpicked and analysed and pulled apart. And there is a similarly poetic quality to the lyrics here, they're not completely obvious. But the refrain still gives you a solid sense of what the song's about, and it's a love song, with Bob inviting his love simply enough to lay, lady, lay / Lay across my big brass bed / Stay, lady, stay / Stay with your man a while / Until the break of day / Let me see you make him smile. There are other lyrics, more enigmatic lines about the colours of his love's mind, about Bob's dirty hands and his clean clothes, about taking what you want and not waiting. But at the end of the day, this is a very straightforward, intimate song, Bob concluding by singing about how I long to see you in the morning light / I long to reach for you in the night / Stay, lady, stay / Stay while the night is still ahead. Which is about as plain as it comes, with Bob.
I enjoyed these three songs. As is often the case, they don't really fit together, but they made a pretty pleasing playlist, and I'd say that both Cliff and Bob managed to pleasantly surprise me, Cliff with a rather out of character bit of psych rock and Bob with a vulnerable, light-touch love song that had none of his usual complexity, no cynical edge, no bite, just a strange combination of coziness and yearning that I honestly found quite appealing.
A Boy Named Sue - Johnny Cash (peaked at Number 4)
I like me some Johnny Cash, so I came into this one feeling pretty optimistic. I feel like Johnn's got a very calm, down-to-earth kind of sound at the best of times, and there's an fantastic energy to the live tracks he recorded in prison, I love that you can hear Johnny chatting with the inmates, interactions with guards, people clapping and cheering, plus there's something quite moving about songs like Folsom Prison Blues or 25 Minutes or especially something like Greystone Chapel, which offers up a glimpse of grace and hope, even in prison. And then you get stuff like A Boy Named Sue, recorded at San Quentin prison, which serves a different but related purpose, providing a moment of much needed levity in the middle of an otherwise heavy set.
Because this is a very silly song (in case the title didn't give it away). It was written by Shel Silverstein, better known for children's writing and especially cartoons, and this does feel kind of cartoonish, with Johnny recounting the story of a boy whose dad left when he was only three, leaving only a guitar and an empty bottle of booze. Now I don't blame him 'cause he run and hid, Johnny sings, but the meanest thing that my daddy ever did / Was before he left, he went and named me Sue. A life of mockery ensues, but in true country fashion, it makes Sue sharp, I grew up quick and I grew up mean / My fists got hard and my wits got keen. He vows to track his dad down and kill him, finds him at a saloon in Gatlinburg. I knew that snake was my own sweet dad / From a worn out picture that my mother had / Knew that scar on his cheek and his evil eye. I love all these details, it's all very economic but also very evocative, you can tell Shel's a writer first and foremost, somebody who knows exactly how to get the most mileage out of cliché details.
And there's a funny conclusion to the story, too, as they fight, his dad cuts off a bit of Sue's ear, the fight continues, until his dad explains, saying the name was meant to toughen Sue up, you ought to thank me before I die / for the gravel in your gut and the spit in your eye / 'Cause I'm the son of a bitch that named you Sue. Well, Johnny doesn't sing the profanity on the live version of the record, he censors it with a silly chicken cluck, but other versions keep it, it's very punk rock. And it clearly wins Sue over as I got all choked up and I threw down my gun / I called him pa, he called me son / Come away with a different point of view. Which is a sweet enough ending, but Johnny can't quite leave it there, instead concluding that he has a boy ever he'll name him ... Bill or George or Frank or anything but Sue, hate that name! Which genuinely gave me a chuckle, it's a perfect punchline for what at the end of the day's a pretty daft story.
So yup, there's some solid comic writing here, and then you've got Johnny, who's also great, very conversational. The whole thing's set to music, but it's done in a talking blues style, so basically Johnny reciting lines over the guitar, it's the same style though quite a different vibe to Subterranean Homesick Blues a few years back. All of which gives the track a rhythm and a catchiness, but at the same time, it does somehow feel kind of like a stand-up comedy set more than a song. It's a curious thing, and definitely novelty-adjacent, but not necessarily in a bad way.
Ah, Johnny. I should sit down and re-listen to San Quentin at some point, I forgot how much I enjoy his style and vibe. Live albums aren't usually my thing, but Johnny Cash singing in prisons might just be the exception to the rule, like I said, the energy's off the charts. And A Boy Named Sue's for sure part of that, a little bit of well-made but still quite wacky fun as an entertaining buffer between heavier or more serious tracks. More Johnny Cash soon, please, chart gods!
Favourite track of the chatty, chatty bunch: A Boy Named Sue
Huh, it's been two whole weeks... weird. I don't always check, I just tend to assume that there's something new coming into the charts each week, but I guess everybody last week was far too fixated on whatever Serge and Jane had going on to listen to anything new. Alas.
Good Morning Starshine - Oliver (peaked at Number 6)
I'd never heard of this song, nor had I heard of Oliver before I hit play, but he was apparently an American pop singer, best known for... uh, this song, and one other? So we're not in the major leagues here, I guess, but Oliver's still somebody people might still have known. His full government name was William Oliver Swofford, which maybe explains why he went with the mononym option, because that's a mouthful. And he seems to be a pretty standard pop singer?
The song's from Hair, which we've already come across, back when Nina Simone put out her mashed-up version of Ain't Got No / I Got Life, which I really liked. But where Ain't Got No / I Got Life had a little poetry to it, especially in the way I Got Life worked as a reversal of Ain't Got No, Good Morning Starshine isn't that deep. Instead, it's a song about the main character enjoying a nice moment stargazing. That's literally it. Good mornin' starshine, Oliver sings, the earth says hello / You twinkle above us / We twinkle below. He describes the stars shining down on him and his love, and then the rest of the song's literal nonsense, lots of glibby gloop gloopy, nibby nabby noopy, la la la lo lo, sabba sibby sabba, nooba abba nabba, le le lo lo, tooby ooby walla, nooby abba nabba, early mornin' singin' song. I wish I was exaggerating how dumb this sounds.
I will grant that it is at least dumb in an affable, good-natured sort of way, like an old hippie, blissfully stoned and impervious to mockery. Part of this comes from Oliver's voice. He's got this clear, folksy voice, a little warbly à la Simon & Garfunkel, but perfectly pleasant to listen to. Throw over some bright, bouncy instruments, a glockenspiel, a tambourine, lots of gentle, Latin-sounding percussion, steel pans, an acoustic guitar, some gentle strings a little later on, and you've got something that sounds very happy and chill, good vibes all round. Oliver's still just singing absolute nonsense, but it's hard to really hate this one, at worst it just feels a bit throwaway.
I'll Never Fall in Love Again - Bobbie Gentry (1)
This, though, this is a tune. It was already a hit at this point, with Dionne Warwick releasing a version back in 1968, but the version that hit the UK charts was this one, by Bobbie Gentry, an artist I mostly know for the (absolutely fantastic) Ode to Billie Joe. So I'm predisposed to like Bobbie. She's a folk and country singer, mostly, but with a bit of a pop sideline, and that's what this is, a proper old-school Hal David-Burt Bacharach showtune, written for a by now surely mostly-forgotten Broadway musical called Promises, Promises, which was itself based on 1960 rom-com The Apartment, about an insurance exec who lets his boss use his apartment for conducting romantic affairs, in return for a promotion. Which is an insane premise, but the musical was apparently a big hit, enough that this song and the title song both became big independent hits.
So yeah, knowing this backstory, I do think this song makes a lot of sense. Because it feels like a song from a musical, capturing a specific moment, this character beat as Bobbie complains to a third party about how pointless love is, asking what do you get when you fall in love? / A guy with a pin to burst your bubble / That's what you get for all your trouble / I'll never fall in love again / I'll never fall in love again. Which is fun, I love how jaded she is. Love just means lies, sorrow, a broken heart. And in the middle, as if to tone down and undercut the melodrama of it all, my favourite line, a genuinely genius pull from lyricist Hal David, as he has Bobbie sing about how when you kiss a guy you get enough germs to catch pneumonia / After you do, he'll never phone ya. Which is gloriously unglamorous, and was inspired by the fact that Burt Bacharach was indeed hospitalized with pneumonia while Hal was working on the body of the song. Yikes!
The tune's also good, it's simple but catchy and clearly well put-together, hitting all the emotional notes it needs to. Burt Bacharach knows what he's doing, the whole thing sounds fabulous and flows well, each verse leading nicely into the next, the bridge coming in just when you're ready for it, before bass and piano lines steer you right back to that same old tired what do you get line. Which in turn gets at the real star of the show, which is clearly Bobbie, who manages to genuinely sound bone-tired here. There's a hoarseness and a rasp to her voice too, perhaps a slight stuffiness, not so much that it sounds unpleasant, but just enough that she sounds like she might really be singing through a head cold. And on top of all this, she also manages to sound annoyed, but in this very distinctive, resigned way. There's no burning fury to Bobbie's vocals here, just a frustrated sort of irritation, a sigh of disappointment at yet another failed romance that feels so very relatable, and so very real.
That makes two songs from musicals! I haven't really been keeping track of how many songs come from musicals, but I feel like it's been dropping as of late, so it's nice to see that "star covers Broadway hit" is still a viable way for songs to make it big, especially when you've got artists as talented as Bobbie Gentry doing the covering (seriously, do yourself a favour and go listen to Ode to Billie Joe, I'll wait).
Favourite song of the bunch: I'll Never Fall in Love Again
Has a track yet made me this viscerally uncomfortable? Unclear... but let it be known, I'm not having fun with this one.
Je t'aime... moi non plus - Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg (peaked at Number 1)
It's a sexy song from the get-go, with this funky guitar quickly giving way to a vocal from French singer-songwriter Serge Gainsbourg and British actress Jane Birkin that's deliberately very breathy and whispery, like two lovers' late-night conversation. Je t'aime, Jane moans, in French that a good chunk of even the famously monolingual Brits could probably understand, o mon amour. And if you know any French, it only gets worse, with Serge singing about how I come and I go between your legs. Well, the word's actually "kidneys", or the small of your back, language is weird, the main thing is that the sense is definitely sexual. Or how about Jane singing about how you are the wave, and I the naked isle?
There's something a bit weird and ambiguous, especially in the title, which translates as I love you / Me neither, or the line at the end, where Serge sings about how physical love's a dead-end, there's a sense that Serge might be less into it that Jane is. But still, it's clearly meant to be a sex song, even if it's status as a love song's a bit less clear. If you were in any doubt about that, the second half of the song should make that amply clear, as Jane spends most of it faking an orgasm, well enough, apparently, that a good chunk of the press about the song was just people trying to work out if there was any actual sexual activity going on in the recording studio.
This seems ridiculous, but Serge was known as a womanizer. He'd originally recorded the song with Brigitte Bardot, also famously a huge French sex symbol. He'd been in a relationship with Brigitte at the time, and there was reportedly "heavy petting" in the recording booth, which was leaked to the press. Brigitte's husband at the time called for the single to be withdrawn, and humiliated, she had to beg Serge not to release it, which he didn't. But he wasn't done with the song, and a year later, he recorded another version with Jane, who he met and struck up a relationship a year later, making the film Slogan, itself about a sexy Frenchman abandoning his pregnant wife to carry on an affair with a younger Englishwoman. So you know. Not entirely out of character for Serge. He reportedly asked Jane to sing very high in the studio so that she's sound different to Brigitte, which is kind of weird. And even weirder, he also apparently asked Marianne Faithfull to record a version with him, as well as French actresses Valérie Lagrange and Mireille Darc. Dude just really wanted to convince pretty much-younger blondes to fake having sex with him on tape. Gross in many many ways.
But honestly, even without this (unsurprisingly icky) context, there's something I just really don't like about this song. I think it's the breathy earnestness of the whole thing, the soft-focus porno vibes of it all, the slow, hazy feel. It's a deeply unpleasant feeling, it's literally making my spine crawl listening to Serge groaning and Jane simpering. And I can't imagine any situation, socially, where putting this on would be okay. You can't listen to it on your own. You can't listen with friends. You can't listen with your family. You're clearly supposed to listen in the bedroom to get you in the mood, except I can't think of a worse turn-off, horrifying concept. I guess if you're, like, thirteen and somehow still able to purchase it, you might listen with your friends and have a bit of a giggle at how taboo and "naughty" it all was. But beyond that? I got nothing. Baffling how this reached Number 1. Truly beyond me.
Natural Born Bugie - Humble Pie (4)
Thankfully, we're on more solid ground with this one, with a bit of blues rock from Humble Pie, a group I'd never even heard of before today, but who were apparently one of the first rock supergroups, with members including Small Faces' Steve Marriott, the Herd's Peter Frampton and a bunch of other musicians who usually played for other bands. The band's formation, from what I can tell, sounds like it was pretty organic, as Steve wanted to invite Peter to straight-up join Small Faces, but it didn't work out, and the result was this, a whole new breakaway group that quickly got signed to Andrew Loog Oldham's Immediate Records. Which perhaps also explains why this sounds so much like the Rolling Stones?
Because this is super Stones-y. There's the bluesy, riff driven chug of the bass underpinning it all, there are the driving, steady drums, but there's also the interplay between the jangly guitar and the bluesy electric piano, both of which play these fun little licks between lines. The guitar gets a solo later on, introduced by somebody just shouting guitar! Which, let me say, is one of my favourite ways to introduce a solo, it gets me every time. And on top of that, you get a vocal that could also come straight out of a Stones song. It's a little nasal, a little rough around the edges, a little snotty at times, there's a bit of a moan to it at times, and then layered on top, all these little yeahs and ooohs and hey-yeah ad libs, and the whole group piles in on the chorus to give it a bit more body. It's classic, you know?
And all that's without any thought to the lyrics, which also feel like something the Stones would have cooked up. There's the repeated line proclaiming that she's a natural-born woman, which means literally nothing. There's the weaksauce innuendo of lines about how she's got it where you find it, if you know what I mean, or lines warning you don't look too long, boy, she'll make your glasses crack, both of which allude slightly cheekily to the lady's feminine allure, but don't actually imply all that much except "oh boy, she's hot". Compare it to Jane and Serge, and Humble Pie come away looking like choirboys, it's very generic, very harmless.
And then, to top it off, you throw a level of hokey faux-Americana over the top, with references to Humble Pie's anonymous lady stopping Main Street in its tracks, her looking like Creole Queen, asking their listeners out of nowhere to lay off of my blue suede shoes, or singing about moving to Memphis, pay my money to see a rock-n-roll show. All of which does feel like it's trying a bit hard, this is a bunch of mostly Londoners singing at the end of the day, they're probably not actually about to hit up a Tennessee honky-tonk. But the Stones do exactly the same at the end of the day, and I don't mind it when they do it. I enjoyed Honky-Tonk Women just fine. And this really does fall into the same category for me, at the end of the day, it's a big, dumb, deliberately macho American-themed rock song about picking up women. For what it is? Yeah, it's fine.
I don't think it's much of a competition this week. Natural Born Bugie was standard but competent, a decent Rolling Stones B-side that just happens to be by a completely different, less well-known band. There's not much to help it stand out. The American elements are a bit exaggerated. I still don't know why the title wasn't "Natural Born Woman". But despite these faults, it's still perfectly listenable, which is more than I can say for Serge and Jane, who I literally had to turn off at a few points here, there was just so much cringing and wincing and physical repulsion going on as I was listening to them, and that's before I learn about how weird Serge got about the whole thing. Highly unpleasant.
Summer is drawing to a close, and things are getting pretty menacing... almost like there's a bad moon on rise, or something (geddit?!)
Viva Bobby Joe - The Equals (6)
Whew! Right out the gates, this one's crunchy, a proper full, stompy sound from what sounds actually kind of like the same guitar you've got at the start of My Sharona. There's what sounds like a drum machine in the background too, adding in some machine-gun-like hand claps that sound far too even and mechanical to be real. The end result's something that at least to my ears is a very glam rock vibe, a few years ahead of when I'd have expected that.
No clue in all of this who Bobby Joe actually was. The opening chant of Bobby Joe, viva Bobby Joe's pretty infectious, though, and the rest of the song, all about his funk machine, whateverthat may be, causing a sensation's also pretty fun, Bobby's clearly causing waves. I'm charmed by how British it is, too, with lyrics about his tearing about, Liverpool to Brighton, baby, opening shows and driving people wild with his funky hot tunes. I don't know, "Bobby Joe" just feels a very Americ name to me, somehow, imagining him schlepping it down to Brighton amuses me.
The song, naturally, became a football tune almost immediately, repurposed as an ode to then football superstar Bobby Moore. This surprises me in no way. The viva Bobby Joe chant's fun and easy to join in with, the hand claps are right there, the lyrics are already about somebody travelling round the country causing a sensation, but above and beyond all that, the whole track's also just got this big, repetitive stompiness that I'd bet makes it irresistible, as a crowd song. Dumb, but in the best possible way.
Bad Moon Rising - Creedence Clearwater Revival (1)
And the party continues, with yet another chugging, fist-pumping, red-blooded rock song, this time courtesy of CCR, an actually American group with a stripped back bit of no-frills country rock, just a jangly rockabilly guitar riff - pinched from an Elvis track, apparently - plus some thumpy drums and a simple but confident vocal, and a cool little solo in the middle. Many parts of this actually feel like they've been nicked straight from the 1950s, it's like the clock's been turned back to a time before the British Invasion, it's very American and kind of nostalgic.
The star of it for me have to be the lyrics, though. Songwriter and lead singer John Fogerty was apparently inspired by a viewing of the 1941 film The Devil and Daniel Webster, where a natural disaster destroys all of the main character's neighbour's crops. His own however remain untouched, a sign of the deal he has made with the devil. And so the tracks trying to capture that same slightly folksy sense of an ill omen, evil closing in, all framed in terms a simple farmer might see it in, out working the land: I see a bad moon rising, I see trouble on the way / I see earthquakes and lightnin' / I see bad times of day. Don't go out, or you're bound to die, be sings. I hear hurricanes a-blowin' / I know the end is comin' soon / I feel rivers overflowin' / I hear the voice of rage and ruin'. This is all super evocative.
There are definite religious overtones, mention of having your affairs together, being quite prepared to die, of an eye for an eye, etc. Things are about to get Biblical, you get the sense, which is interesting, coming just a week after Zager and Evans singing about God assessing the situation and deciding that it's time for judgment day. I guess there was something weird in the air, in the late 1960s. Cold War paranoia and pessimism manifesting itself, even as the US and the USSR enter a period of uneasy détente? It's not a one-to-one to one fit, but you can see how the looming threat of nuclear armageddon might produce something like this.
(I'd also be remiss in not mentioning that me and my sister once got a horrible fit of the giggles when we sang the lyrics as "there's a bathroom on the right" and proceeded to interpret the rest of the song as being about sebody with just the most catastrophic case of diarrhoea. A shocking number of the lines work far too well, we were fully incoherent by then end of it. So there you go. A fun bonus for you).
Don't Forget to Remember - Bee Gees (2)
Man, the Bee Gees did so many songs I had no idea even existed. They've got to be a contender for one of the artists of the late 1960s, which is wild, since I really think they're mostly remembered as a 70s disco outfit nowadays. But they're popping up every other week at the moment, it seems, with their own tracks or as songwriters. Robin's peeled off, so they're a brother down st the moment. But here they are, stoll going strong.
I can't say that's a great thing, though, because Don't Forget to Remember, despite the (I guess) reasonably clever song title, is a bit of a snoozefest. It's a country number that could have been a hit most of a decade ago, with the Bee Gees wailing away gamely but mopily about how my heart won't believe that you've left me / I keep telling myself that it's true / I can get over anything you want my love / But I can't get myself over you. Yawn. And the chorus isn't any more appealing, it's slow and sappy, with the Bee Gees begging their ex, don't forget to remember me, my love and going on and on about the photograph on their wall, wondering how they'll go on living etc. It's very cliché and very dull and not at all a healthy way to process a breakup.
It does at least sound pretty. This is a guaranteed with the Bee Gees at this point, I think. They're big fans of taking something basic and adding more orchestra, so despite this being a very Jim Reeves-ycountry ballad, basically, it has been dressed up to the nines, with strings and glockenspiel, a harp plinking away, and piano subtly underpinning it all, plus a chorus of gentle aaaah backing vocals. The result's elegant and reasonably subtle, it's got a texture and a scale that Phil Spector would have loved, but it doesn't ever feel bombastic or overdone. It's just a shame it's all in the service of such an uninteresting breakup ballad.
I will say, I enjoyed these three tracks, as a little mini playlist. They each had a slightly different vibe, but they gelled together, there was a country sensibility tying CCR and the Bee Gees together, the Equals and CCR both brought some Proper Rocky energy, and somehow it just worked, even with Don't Forget to Remember feeling a little lame at the end.
Two very different vibes, this week. Very very different.
In the Year 2525 - Zager and Evans (peaked at Number 1)
Man, this is a weird one. I'd class In the Year 2525 as a novelty, except this isn't the light, fluffy track you generally expect when somebody says that. Instead, what you get as you hit play, is a very weird, tense rock number, all galloping guitars, thumping drums, Spanish trumpet flourishes and shrill, trembling strings, all in service of some lyrics that are bizarre and frankly kind of unsettling.
The shtick is that Zager and Evans, a US pop duo who didn't have any other hits on either side of the Atlantic, are predicting what life will be like over the next 7000 years and change of human history, beginning as the name suggests about 500 years in the future: in the year 2525 / If man is still alive / If woman can survive / They may find....
It's a big, bombastic start, and it sets a pretty pessimistic tone from the get-go, with Zager and Evans clearly not entirely convinced humanity's going to make it that far. And as the predictions unfold, things get even more dystopian. By 3535, mind-controlling pills will dictate your every thought and deed. By 4545, we won't need teeth or eyes any more. By 5555, machines will do all out movement, and our muscles will atrophy to nothing. By 6565 marriage will be obsolete, reproduction reduced to a series of test tubes. This is all giving some WALL.E vibes, but I do think it captures some interestingly 1960s fears, as technology comtinues to develop rapidly.
But it's after this that things get apocalyptic, quite literally, as there's suddenly a key change, intensifying everything between each verse as we learn that in the year 7510 / If God's a-comin' he ought to make it by then / Maybe he'll look around himself and say / Guess it's time for the judgment day. By 8510 God will for sure have acted. And in the year 9595 / I'm kinda wonderin' if man will still be alive / He's taken everything this old earth can give / And he ain't put back nothin'. Woof. This is heavy stuff, very Cold War coded - Zager and Evans don't ever mention it explicitly, but it's hard nit to imagine some sort of nuclear wasteland by the end of the song - and it's also got some curiously environmental overtones, drawing out ideas about resource scarcity vs. renewables. Which I guess is something that was being discussed in the 1960s, but it feels very ahead of its time, putting it in a song like this.
And finally, the song ends, 10000 years in the future. For humanity, the party's over. And yet, right at the end, a tiny reprieve, as we return back to where it all began, time turning strange and circular: Now it's been ten thousand years / Man has cried a billion tears / For whay he never knew / Now man's reign is through / But through eternal night / The twinkling of starlight / So very far away / Maybe it's only yesterday. And like that, the song loops right back to 2525. It's not much, but it's something, the barest scrap of hope at the end of an otherwise very bleak track.
Too Busy Thinking About My Baby - Marvin Gaye (6)
There we go, Marvin's got the answer to all this doom and gloom: just fall in love, and all your other thoughts will fade into insignificance. Seriously, that's the whole message of this song, Marvin's got no time for worrying about money, about possessions, about how the world works, about anything. Small talk? Studying? Pondering life? Not for Marvin! He's too busy thinkin' about my baby / Ain't got time for nothin' else.
It's a simple idea, but it's Marvin Gaye, so it sounds phenomenal, with this huge, powerful vocal, by turns rough and emotional, then smoother and lighter, soaring up to a falsetto and swooping down again. The contrast with the backing vocals is a key part of the appeal too, they're very sweet and gentle, a little breathy and kind of deadpan, the contrast with Marvin's own vocals are fab. Add in a mix of toms and tambourine, a cool, simple bass guitar line and judicious use of strings, and you've got something enjoyable.
People would have known the track, too, because it's a cover of a by this point three-year old Temptations track, which had already been a hit. Jimmy Ruffin then covered it, with the Temptations returning as his backing vocalists, which is a bit of a funny one, but probably meant that rhe song would ha e felt plenty familiar, at least. Let it stew for three years, and apparently the Motown execs decided the time was ripe for yet another cover. I do think that's something you wouldn't get, today - or my gut instinct is telling me that we tend to like a bit more time between a cover and the original nowadays, at least. Correct me if you can think of one. But whatever, it was clear the way to go in 1969. And honestly, I'm not complaining, Heard It Through the Grapevine was always going to be a hard act to follow, a safe but competent cover's as good a way to do it as any.
I think of this week's artists, I'd rather approach life like Marvin. He's clearly much happier with life, and as I've said, the result's a very polished, listenable track, a proper groove. And yet, something about Zager amd Evans' doom and gloom is also kind of fascinating, if nothing else as a time capsule. It's an oddity, brooding and weird, but there's something intriguing about it, you know?
Two pretty middling tracks for you, this week, and then - bam! Just under three minutes of surprisingly shameless filth. Which is something. Not sure it's a good something, but it's sure something.
Early in the Morning - Vanity Fare (peaked at Number 8)
It's dumb but the opening notes of this sound a bit like the start of Axel F by Crazy Frog, and the second I realised that I couldn't help but create an imaginary Eurodance version, a cheesy Vanity Fare/Crazy Frog mashup for the ages. And I think that on balance, that did actually improve my experience of this song?
Not that it's terrible. It's a medium-paced pop-rock track, with plucky strings and a combination of notes that somehow give the whole thing a bit of a Greek or Balkan feel, it's a little bit folksy, but its folksiness isn't its whole personality, more like an added little bit of flair. It's a good balance, and the track also has a solid flow to it, with a tune and lyrics that just keep ticking along, snaking along steadily from line to line with the bass holding it all together. There's a brief but enjoyable guitar solo near the end. It's the sort of song you can very happily sit and kind of sway along to. Unobjectionable.
As the name kind of suggests, it's a song about the early morning, compared to other times of day. Evening is a time of day / I find nothing much to say, Vanity Fare sing, and later they'll admit that night time isn't clear to me / I find nothing dear to me. Yikes, pretty bleak. But it's fine, because when it's sunny in the morning / Over by the window, day is dawning / When I feel the air I feel that life is very good to me. They love the morning sunshine, the meadows, the songbirds, the view from the window, and the thought that today might just be the day that their love might be coming home to them. Which I suppose is sweet. As a massive night owl, I can't really relate, but there you go. Good for Vanity Fare, I guess.
I will also note that I did briefly see a Cliff Richard version of this pop up. Which makes perfect sense - it's a very "Cliff-ish" song - but I have to confess that even just imagining what Cliff's version might sound like made me shudder. Perhaps I've just listened to too much Cliff Richard at this point. Whatever the case, the comparison, even imaginary, is probably to Vanity Fare's advantage at this point. Because however middling their version is, I'm positive Cliff's will be more so.
Bringing on Back the Good Times - Love Affair (9)
Every Love Affair track sounds exactly like every other Love Affair song. This isn't a bad thing, I do broadly like their sound, but it does leave me a bit of a loss for things to say about this one. If you've listened to Everlasting Love, or Rainbow Valley, or A Day Without Love, you've basically already heard this one, it's got the exact same mix of drums, tambourine, heroic horns, sweeping strings, plus a Motown-inflected vocal clearly inspired by groups like the Four Tops.
Like Everlasting Love, it's also clearly a track that's an excuse for lots of repeated choruses. I mean, sure, there are a few token verses near the start, lines about how since you went away / I've been losing my sleep at night, or about how I've never been loved / By anybody that's quite like you. But it's all a set-up for the chorus, which is about how sure, being dumped was miserable and unexpected, but Love Affair's lady's taken them back now, and everything's coming up roses. You're bringing on back the good times, lead singer Steve Ellis sings, taking away the pain / You're bringing on back the good times / And I'm living on air, so glad that you're there. This chorus is then repeated a million times, until it's jammed very firmly in your head, and that's it, that's the track.
It's... fine? I don't know, I really don't have many feelings about this one. Love Affair were a funny old band, a British attempt to channel a very American Motown sound, except we already had the Foundations, who were doing the same thing but better and catchier. Well, I lie, I'll admit that Everlasting Love was pretty catchy. But it feels like every Love Affair song since then has been an attempt to repeat the same success, and the result's a bunch of tracks that I fear are pretty forgettable. We're not going to have any more Love Affair tracks, after this one, and I don't find myself feeling too sad about that, sorry Steve. Give me something more interesting, chart gods, please...
Wet Dream - Max Romeo (10)
Gah! Nope! Not what I meant when I asked for something interesting! Alas, that really is the title of this one. And it's about exactly what you'd think, this isn't one of those cases where the implications have gotten dirtier over time, or where it meant something totally innocent back then. Nope, this is song about (ahem) nocturnal emissions, opening with a pretty unambiguous line about how every night me go to sleep / Me have wet dream, before we hit a chorus that's just Max entreating his love repeatedly to lie down, gal, make me push it up, push it up, lie down, and asking her to give the fanny to me.
If the Patois in the lyrics I just quoted didn't give it away, this is a reggae number, and it had become a pretty big hit in Jamaica already by the time it was released in the UK, to a predictably shocked reaction. Amusingly, Max himself insisted that it was a song about the tribulations of having a bedroom with a leaky roof, which is almost impressively brazen. Shockingly, the BBC was not convinced, and the song ended up banned after just two plays, with DJs giving updates on the state of the charts instructed to skip over it, describing it simply as "a song by Max Romeo". I can't imagine this hurt its performance; if I heard everybody talking about it like that I'd immediately want to check it out down at my local record store, if nothing else to see what the big deal was.
But even if it didn't have shock value going for it, I actually do think this one's chart-worthy on its own merits. It's got that slightly hypnotic quality a lot of reggae does, with plenty of repeated lines, and a bouncy, almost hypnotic rhythm that you can get a bit lost in. The lyrics are occasionally a little hard to parse, which is a feature, not a bug - obligatory shout-out here to the line that sounds like Max is singing about Bigfoot Joe, which I'm sure can't be right - and best of all, there are also a bunch of what I can only assume are synthesisers used throughout, which to my ears make the whole thing sound very fresh and futuristic. The solo in particular, halfway through, is played in a slightly slipshod fashion on what sounds kind of like a stylophone, tinny and warbling and appealingly janky.
I didn't want it to come to this, because as a rule I don't love songs that are just wall-to-wall sex. There's something very gratuitous about it, especially when it's spelling everything out like Wet Dream was. There's no innuendo, no cleverness to it, no nothing, it's a song about exactly what you'd expect it to be about. Which I'm sure some people were into, but it's not my usual cup of tea. Sadly, it doesn't have much competition this week, though. Faced with the "so okay it's okay" Early in the Morning and the "definitely a different song to all our other songs" Bringing On Back the Good Times, a track whose name I just had to go back and check, that's how unmemorable it was, it's quite simply the only actually memorable track. I may not like the gratuitous sex. But at least it gets some reaction. So, against my better judgment...
Stevie and Cilla, an unlikely double act? I honestly can't imagine them ever having much reason to meet, but based purely on this week's songs, I really think they'd have made for a fun (or at least very endearing) pair-up.
Ma Cherie Amour - Stevie Wonder (peaked at Number 4)
We're back to the US, for the first time in a little while, with a new Stevie Wonder hit. From the opening note, you know that we're in for a pretty, smooth sort of track, with some jazzy flutes, high, breathy, and very 1960s, somehow. Throw some la la las over the top, a subtle bit of bongos, and you've got something that at least to me feels pretty classy, and that's before Stevie starts out singing in (only slightly dubiously accented) French, to ma chérie amour, lovely as a summer day. The idea, here, if the songwriter's to be believed, was to capture some of what had made the Beatles' Michelle a hit, with its Michelle, ma belle, and I can kind of see it, to me, it does have that same slightly basic-but-at-least-they're-trying charm.
Or perhaps I just like how appealingly unexpected the next line is. Because she's lovely as a summer day, sure, but she's also distant as the Milky Way, and the rest of the song goes hard on these poignant and very earnest lines as Stevie sings about how you're the only girl my heart beats for / How I wish that you were mine. He's been near to her in cafés, or in the street, smiles a little, but she doesn't seem to see him, and so he has to be content just to dream that maybe someday you'll see my face among the crowd / Maybe someday, I'll share your little distant cloud. There's a very youthful innocence to all this, which isn't hurt by the fact that the body of the song was written a full three years previous, and was about a literal schoolboy crush of Stevie's. Which is cute, 16-year-old Stevie sounds like he was a sweetie.
There are a few little nit-picks, I suppose. There are some strings that come in here and there that I find a bit grating and unpleasant to listen to. There's a super cheesy key change near to the end that the song probably could do without. But they're small things. My main issue with this song is just that it's a little bit nothingy. It's sweet and smooth, very listenable, but there's not a tonne of substance to it, at the end of the day it's just a bit of pleasant, reasonably likable fluff with a Beatles-inspired title and a cool line about the Milky Way.
Conversations - Cilla Black (7)
Ooh, okay. This one starts quite quiet, with a low-key, vulnerable vocal from Cilla, who's a little rasp and emotional scratchiness to her voice here and there that's very touching. It helps that you can hear her really well, right at the start, as the whole thing's stripped back to just bass and then xylophone, it's quite bare and minimal, building slowly and steadily. Something about the vocals actually reminds me a bit of Dusty Springfield, they're a little American-sounding, but not in a bad way at all.
And I like the conceit here, the idea the song's following Cilla through the small talk as she gets to know somebody new. Have you come here often, she asks as the song begins, have we met before? And then, a turn to the earnest, as she wonders tell me your impression now / Could you like me more? Which I think's pretty relatable, making all that meaningless small talk while in your mind you're just desperately wondering what kind of impression you're making, if there's any spark here, if the conversation's actually going to get past all the small talk. Going "small" on the vocals works really well here, giving you a sense of Cilla's polite, slightly nervous restraint.
And then we hit the chorus, and all that's forgotten for a brief, shining moment, as Cilla turns it all up a notch, really letting herself belt, a full chorus of backing singers jumping in as she admits that it's only conversation here in my mind/ Great expectations, the loving kind / I'm losing my patience, learning the lines / I've still got to meet him, mmm-mmm. The drop back down on that final line's delightful, like she's caught herself losing her cool, getting too into it, letting herself dream, and has to force herself to calm it, she's barely met the fellow, come on, Cilla, get it together...
And so the song moves on, Cilla asking about the music, wondering if they'll meet again, if he'll want another dance. She gets carried away again, reins it in again, and the cycle continues to the bridge, where she wonders will I act like I've done before / Make a move, try to speak / Raise my eyes from the floor / Say hello, nothing more? And written down like that, this sounds like anxiety, Cilla worrying if she'll sabotage herself yet again, having gone through all this rigmarole. But when you listen, there's these big heroic trumpets leaping around by a fifth, aaaaaah vocals, pounding percussion, the whole thing sounds super heroic and victorious, like Cilla's psyching herself up, visualising herself as a hero ahead of actually making a move on this guy. And so when the I've still go to meet him chorus finally comes back right at the end for a final reprise, it sounds like a challenge. Like, yeah, you've still got to meet him. Go out and get on that, Cilla! Heck yeah!
Both of these were adorable, real glimpses into the slightly awkward world of young folks trying and failing at dating. And as I suggested in the intro, I can't help but feel like Stevie's character in all this needs Cilla to come give him a pep talk, though. He's cute and all, but he's clearly not doing much to put himself on his chérie's radar. Whereas Cilla's got the spirit. She might have a few wobbles along the way, but she's trying, you know? I don't know, I just think it's sweet.
Well, it's August. Last year was the Summer of Love, but I'm not sure how this summer's been shaping up. Let's see... okay, so the Apollo 11 crew are back on Earth, Elvis is performing live again for the first time in years, the first letters from the Zodiac killer are published in a number of California newspapers? I guess it's quite eventful, but not nearly as fun as things were this time last summer. Anyway, here's Joe Dolan to soundtrack all that.
Make Me an Island - Joe Dolan (peaked at Number 3)
I'd never heard of Joe Dolan, but he's apparently a big name in his native Ireland, the only artist to reach Number 1 in the Irish charts in the 1960s, 70s, 80s and 90s. Which I guess makes him sort of like the Irish version of Cliff Richard. His success was tied up with showbands, which I'd also not heard of, but these were apparently bands that played various local venues around Ireland, from the 1950s onwards, playing a mix of big band music, country, rock and roll and even the odd ceili tune. There would always be a lead singer, and often there would be little comedy skits worked into shows. At the height of the era, there were literally hundreds of these bands touring around Ireland, so I guess it makes sense that it could be a viable route to stardom - as it seems to have been for Joe.
So what does the result sound like? If I were feeling uncharitable, I'd describe this as budget Tom Jones. It's got a lot of the same things going on: it's a big, swing waltz, very dramatic, with lots of brass, it's in a minor key, with a big modulation to the major as Joe hits the chorus. If you liked Delilah, you'll probably like this. If you didn't, this may not be for you. I will say that the vocals are a bit different, they're a little higher than Tom's typically are, and there's a wobble to them, a bit of vibrato that gives it a slightly more operatic feel. But it's not a huge difference, the whole thing is very Tom Jones-ish.
I'm enjoying the lyrics, though, they're interesting, as Joe sings about how different eyes, different sighs, different girls every day / Different names, different games, took my breath clean away. This is somebody who's had quite the life, and quite the romantic history, you get the impression. And yet, something has changed, he's fallen for somebody who's changed him fundamentally, you have caught me, you have taught me, and I'm different now. Which in turn leads to our chorus, Joe begging his love to take me and break me, and close all your windows and doors / Shut me off, cut me up, make me an island, I'm yours / Take me away from the world, take me away from the girls / Take me and break me and make me an island, I'm yours. Which is impressively messed-up, outright asking your love to "take you and break you" and cut you off from the world just so that you can't cheat. There's a real lack of confidence there in Joe's own ability to resist temptation. That or he just likes it when his love treats him mean. Honestly, I kind of prefer that theory, that Joe's just a freak. Huge, if true.
It's been nice getting a glimpse of what's going on in a corner of the world we don't often visit, I'm pleased that Ireland had such an active musical scene. Personally, I think going to see a showband would have been a hoot - the big band energy, the mishmash of mostly American music, the odd ceili tune, it just sounds like a fun mix. No strong feelings about Make Me an Island specifically, that all said. It was fine. It sounded like a Tom Jones hit, but not in a bad way. And part of me did appreciate how abject Joe sounded in his attempt to prove his commitment to his love. But I don't think this is essential listening, sorry Joe.
An t-amhrán is fearr acu ar fad: Make Me An Island
