The most notable thing about this month was that there wasn’t much school. There was a strike of petrol tanker drivers going on that month with consequent severe fuel shortages, meaning that most schools in the Clyde Valley, including Uddingston Grammar, were too cold to keep open, hence school was out for a bit (although we were told to listen to Radio Clyde at 7:45 every morning for updates in order to see whether my school had reopened).
My parents took advantage of that unanticipated break by taking me down – by train, not affected by the dispute – to London to see Gil Evans and his orchestra, performing for the first time in Britain, at the Royal Festival Hall in LAMBETH! The support band was the Stan Tracey Octet performing the Salisbury Suite, and so impressed was Evans with the tenor playing of Don Weller that he immediately hired him for his own band! The whole two-hour performance remains one of the finest and most transcendent of my lifetime and absurdly its recorded release was chaotic. Half of the recording was deemed unusable/sonically suboptimal by RCA, who put out the other half which, great as it was, didn’t include “Variation On The Misery,” the Hannibal Marvin Peterson-starring tour de force which put many of the audience in thought of what the old likes of Miles Ahead might have sounded like on stage. That remaining half did get released on LP in the following year, but on the independent Mole Jazz label. The latter can easily be found on YouTube and second-hand copies of the LP are fairly frequent to come by, but none of the concert has ever been issued on CD and the RCA material is almost completely unavailable online. Given that the concert constituted some of the greatest music I’ve ever heard in my life, it is ridiculous that it’s not readily available for people to hear now, presumably for legal reasons. Is it too much to ask that two sets of heads be banged together and a complete 2-CD set of the performance, in sequence and remixed/remastered where necessary, come into existence?
7 February
JONATHAN RICHMAN AND THE MODERN LOVERS: The Morning Of Our Lives/Roadrunner (Thrice) (Beserkley BZZ 7)
The aptest adjective to apply to Jonathan Richman is “charming” and he and his group, here heard live, could charm even the grumpiest birds down from the trees. “The Morning Of Our Lives” is as open and fresh a welcome to new life as “Lovely Day,” though obviously in a very different way. The fact that he and the Modern Lovers are, for the time being, chart regulars, is extremely reassuring.
SMOKIE: For A Few Dollars More/Goin’ Tomorrow (RAK 267)
What is the appeal of Smokie? They’ve been mostly having hits for the best part of three years now, most of which ascend gently to about halfway up the top twenty or ten and fail to get anybody really excited, yet still they continue and presumably prosper, which is great news for Mickie Most and his label but no news for the rest of us. This is as a dull and processed a slice of soft rock as anything they’ve done, yet their prolonged success has undoubtedly made their songwriters Chinn and Chapman content that their “progression into maturity” was the right move. Four ordinary blokes from Bradford who dress like your father’s workmates – no girls are going to scream at Chris Norman, but that’s not really his purpose – and play nothing out of the ordinary but do so professionally and skilfully. Are so many people really so happy to nod at the unremarkable?
STARGARD: Theme From “Which Way Is Up”/Disco Rufus (MCA 346)
Clearly angling to be this year’s “Car Wash,” Norman Whitfield returns with this girl group slinky funk puncher; not as catchy as “Car Wash” but just as danceable.
SWEET: Love Is Like Oxygen/Cover Girl (Polydor POSP 001)
Absent from the charts for almost three years, on a new label and thoroughly watered-down, this bland AoR plodder sounds like the once-great band have given up. This is the difference between them and Queen; Freddie and the lads were able to imagine and progress to “Bohemian Rhapsody” and “We Will Rock You,” but it may be that Brian Connolly and Co. just don’t have that urge in them. Possibly their most compromised-sounding single since “Alexander Graham Bell.”
DARTS: Come Back My Love/Naff Off (Magnet MAG 110)
Previewed on the medley B-side of “Daddy Cool/The Girl Can’t Help It,” the full version of this energetic fast-paced ersatz doo-wop singalong looks like another big hit for the band they call the credible Showaddywaddy. The problem remains that this is just too polite and sounds too rehearsed and polished, even unto Den Hegarty’s practised ad-libs. Like Showaddywaddy, they concern themselves with the shape of rock ‘n’ roll, rather than its essence.
ROD STEWART: Hot Legs/I Was Only Joking (Riva RIVA 10)
A curious and possibly deliberate double A-side pairing; on one side, an extremely tired-sounding Faces-style romp verging on self-parody – and Rod, you’re in your thirties now and shrieking about sexy schoolgirls at your age is EXTREMELY questionable (even if you are intending to cater to teenage boys with barely controllable hormones) – whereas on the other side one finds a haunted, patient and possibly devastated ballad in which the singer seems to review his life and ways and finds them sorely wanting to the point of abject failure. Since this album chart number one regular found his last album ingloriously kept off the top by the Sex Pistols – revenge for last summer’s “God Save The Queen”/”I Don’t Want To Talk About It” brouhaha? – he may well be right.
ELECTRIC LIGHT ORCHESTRA: Mr Blue Sky/One Summer Dream (Jet Records UP 36342)
Whereas this single, masterminded by another refugee from the late sixties, would have been a remarkable, original and beautiful pop record at any time over the last quarter-century. Crying out to be released as a single from Out Of The Blue, it has finally happened, and how wonderfully the song weaves together elements of the later Beatles – the puff-pant up the avenue of McCartney’s section of “A Day In The Life,” the terminal orchestral majesty of the medley that takes up most of side two of Abbey Road – as well as marrying them with all sorts of seemingly random (but actually highly precisely-timed and orchestrated) elements such as the fire engine cowbell (“Penny Lane”?), the general use of choirs and the melancholy but fulfilled descent into the night (there are traces of “All The Things You Are” in the closing choral/string/florid piano/”Sparky’s Magic Piano” finale).
I think it’s Jeff Lynne’s “running down the avenue” that moves me most; as with “Lovely Day” and “Morning Of Our Lives” it seems to propose a new morning for everyone, a morning that is bright, sunny and filled with promise and possibly even love. One marvels at the record’s unceasing invention and its deceptively steely optimism. Had it not been available on a best-selling double album for several months, this would probably go to number one, but it should still prove one of ELO’s biggest and hopefully most enduring hits. There is punk (if only just) but there is also this, and great pop, regardless of its label or looks, is never disqualified from being great. “Mr Blue Sky” might be one of the greatest.
ABBA: Take A Chance On Me/I’m A Marionette (Epic EPC 5950)
The highest of this week’s eight new entries, and the obvious favourite to go to number one – sorry, ELO! – this bouncy synth chugger finds the Swedes in a far cheerier mood than of late (although the single’s nightmarish B-side belies that cheer). Supernaturally catchy pop, whichever way you look at it, which should teach the Brotherhood Of Man a thing or two about who the bosses still are.
11 February
BILLY JOEL: Just The Way You Are/Get It Right The First Time (Family Productions/CBS 5872)
Elton John covering “I’m Not In Love”; gruff-voiced New Yorker making somewhat cross demands of his would-be lover, including his dislike of “clever conversation.” Does he just want her to grunt at him?
YELLOW DOG: Just One More Night/Up In The Balcony (Virgin VS 195)
Immensely irritating soft rock jogger by what’s left of Fox (without Noosha) with plenty of sub-Steve Harley drawls and gimmicks but little in the way of actual humour, like Cockney Rebel doing “No, You’re Moving Out Today!”
THE STRANGLERS: 5 Minutes/Rok It To The Moon (United Artists UP 36350)
Their least compromising single to date – now that they’ve had a few hits, they can loosen up and challenge the audience – a frenzied electronic-rock stampede of lyrical horror and vocals more gulped than sung, all of which collapses into chaos, feedback and ticking time bomb clocks at the climax like an inadequately-woven rope bridge. Another great Martin Rushent production and exactly the kind of hit record that gets other people in Uddingston annoyed. Good.
TONIGHT: Drummer Man/Stroll On By (TDS Records TDS 1)
The big noise in the music press just now is about an imminent power pop revival in Britain, presumably for those who found punk too impolite. The leaders of the scene appear to be called The Pleasers and say their ambition is for their first single to reach number seventeen because that’s what happened with “Love Me Do.” No mention has been made of this band Tonight and their stuttering punk-lite strummer featuring endless repeats of the words “the majorette” and its immediate televisual exposure and bizarre chart career – 34, 32 then suddenly up to 15 – makes me wonder just how popular it actually is.
18 February
TOM ROBINSON BAND: Rising Free…. (E.P.) (EMI 2749)
Track listing: Don’t Take No For An Answer/(Sing If You’re) Glad To Be Gay/Martin/Right On Sister
All recorded live. “Don’t Take No For An Answer,” a fierce rocker with an unhinged Danny Kustow guitar solo, is obviously being plugged as the main track on this E.P. but the big news here is “Glad To Be Gay,” a sober, heartfelt and calmly very frightening and angry protest song which is unlikely ever to be played on the radio but will be the one everybody remembers in twenty years’ time.
RITA COOLIDGE: Words/Southern Lady (A&M AMS 7330)
Bland and unremarkable Bee Gees cover.
KATE BUSH: Wuthering Heights/Kite (EMI 2719)
The polar opposite of bland and unremarkable; who be this fugitive from 1968? Who has even heard anything like this before? Plaintive but emphatic piano, chord sequences you don’t normally find in pop songs, wayward tempi as though the music were forming itself around the words, trying to capture and replicate their language…all sung in a way we haven’t, to my knowledge, previously encountered; yearning, soaring, disquieting, full of unexpected guttural and register swoops like an impatient heron, a structure that practically demands that you listen to it differently than you’ve done before, all about coming back in the storm to him, the book but barely the book, as though its mission as a record were to fly delightedly through all of the boundaries that “normal” people would recognise as “pop.” A touch of Barbara Dickson in the choruses, more than a hint of Yoko Ono elsewhere, “Wuthering Heights” is the kind of unique spectacle that either sells nothing or a million. At present it appears to be on course for the latter. Why shouldn’t she be a teenager in love?
FREE: Free (E.P.) (Island IEP 6)
Track listing: All Right Now (Long Version)/My Brother Jake/Wishing Well
Marketing is marketing, I suppose; and so “All Right Now,” which doesn’t appear to be relevant to anything else in this chart (except perhaps “Hot Legs”), becomes a hit for the third time in less than eight years. It’s a case of scratched old records being replaced, in many cases I suspect by student disco DJs.
SAMANTHA SANG: Emotions/When Love Is Gone (Private Stock PVT 128)
New Zealander tremulously sings a Bee Gees ballad and is eventually drowned out by the Bee Gees themselves. Uninvolving.
BEE GEES: Stayin’ Alive/If I Can’t Have You (RSO 2090 267)
Particularly when you have the Bee Gees themselves, supremely confident yet also scared to their boots in this determinedly sinister but extremely catchy and danceable midtempo hustler from the forthcoming film Saturday Night Fever which looks very funny, based on what I saw of it on Barry Norman’s Film ’78.
25 February
ERUPTION FEATURING PRECIOUS WILSON: I Can’t Stand The Rain/ERUPTION: Be Yourself (Atlantic/Hansa K 11068)
One of this decade’s biggest injustices on the part of the British record buying was to stop Ann Peebles’ classic original version of “I Can’t Stand The Rain” at number 41, in favour of cabaret acts from Opportunity Knocks. Another injustice is that this unsubtle and bombastic disco cover version, produced by Boney M dictator Frank Farian, is likely to become a very big hit indeed.
GERRY RAFFERTY: Baker Street/Big Change In The Weather (United Artists UP 36346)
Back on his own after years away – due to legal action following the break-up of Stealers Wheel, as I understand things – this is a sensational pop record which deserves to go top three, if not to the very top. Encyclopaedically harrowing, the singer wanders the streets of London, which no longer hold any magic for him – echoing both “Streets Of London” and “Pinball” from three-and-a-half years ago – runs into an old friend (or should that be a mirror?) who says he’ll give up this life, go back into the countryside and settle for being quiet but doesn’t even believe himself when he says it, his inner anguish articulated, not by words, but by the saxophone of Raphael Ravenscroft and guitarist Hugh Burns. Brilliantly orchestrated and produced (by Rafferty himself, with Hugh Murphy), “Baker Street” is a fantastic and, if you think about it, very punkish explosion of bottled-up frustration. This is the kind of pop record that I wish I could make, if even imagine.
EARTH, WIND & FIRE: Fantasy/Be Ever Wonderful (Kalimba Productions/CBS 6056)
Spectacularly noble soul-pop with terrific horn arrangements and an ascending portrait of utopia worthy of the Fifth Dimension; “Saturday Nite” was clearly a dancefloor one-off, but this may well be Earth, Wind and Fire’s real breakthrough hit in the UK. So many of this year’s great singles so far have NOT been made by “punks.”
