We're fully into the grotty end of September, now, and to celebrate it, here's a song that I'm willing to bet precisely nobody has actively thought about in years...
Little Arrows - Leapy Lee (peaked at Number 2)
The opening notes of this, played on guitar, suggest a pretty cool, squelchy psych rock vibe. Unfortunately, not five seconds later, it's abandoned in favour of something else entirely, a jaunty, vaguely country sound. The whole thing's pretty cheesy, an impression that's not helped by the fact that the whole thing's a very cutesy allusion to Cupid and his "little arrows": there's a boy, a little boy, shooting arrows in the blue / And he's aiming them at someone, but the question is at who? This has some echoes, at least to me, of Connie Francis' Stupid Cupid, a full ten years earlier. And there is a late 50s/early 60s vibe to this. I don't think it would have sounded exactly the same if it was recorded in, say, 1962. But I also don't think it would have been all that different, you know?
The more I'm listening, the more I'm starting to think that it's actually perhaps a novelty track. There's nothing overtly comedic about it, apart from perhaps the image of somebody with Cupid's arrows all over them, stuck on their clothes and in their hair. Which is a little bit funny, I'll admit, in a mild, cartoonish way. Not side-splitting, but it's something. But the main thing that makes me suspect that this is a novelty is just the sound of it, from the daft little guitar licks at the ends of the lines, to the oom-pah bass, to the ice cream van tinkling that comes in later on. Or how about the way that Lee's voice leaps up to a thin falsetto on the line about how you're falling in love again, then sinks down to the depths on the whoah-oh-oh the pain line? It's so very goofy, gimmicky and unserious in a way that I just don't think can be a coincidence.
Whatever the case, Leapy Lee seems like a very low-key, likable chap. At the time when he recorded Little Arrows, he'd been unsuccessful in his musical career and was actually working at a bingo hall. Little Arrows then becomes basically his only big hit, and is translated into Spansih and Swedish, and is a hit there too, something that Lee himself seems pleased but also quite nonplussed by. And that's it for him - he scores a few more country hits in the UK, but never makes it half as big as this. There's a low point with a bar brawl and a prison sentence, and after that, it's time to move to Mallorca and settle down as a ... columnist in an English-language newspaper for expats? Really? That's a job that exists?! Good for Lee, I guess. How random.
I don't really care about this one enough to form an opinion. It inhabits a sort of grey no-man's-land somewhere between novelty and just regular, cheesy pop, it sounds at least five years out of date for 1968, and it made me want to re-listen to some Connie Francis. That's all you're getting here.
Favourite song of the proabbly-went-clubbing-on-Ibiza-before-it-was-cool bunch: Little Arrows
