Wednesday 10 August 2011

The Alternative TOTP Canon #29: Jilted John - Jilted John

TOTP may have been slow and wary towards punk but when the dam broke they just had everyone on - the Lurkers, the Angelic Upstarts, you name it. That's probably how this got on when just at 37 (and perhaps EMI payola too) because beyond the junior Buzzcocks guitars it's not an obvious crowd pleaser, but there's a man balancing a naive joy of being on TOTP with the knowledge he can't break character. Producer Martin Hannett (Joy Division, Magazine, Psychedelic Furs, Happy Mondays)'s studio band and Vini Reilly, later of the hugely influential Durutti Column, are backing him.



You more than likely know who Graham Fellowes became, but for the 2008 Big Chill, for no apparent reason...

5 comments:

wilberforce said...

note the backing band not only has no bassist, but also 3 guitarists - were they influenced by sunfighter?

this one dredges up another personal memory... many moons ago i was working as a "car-park cleaner" at tesco to help pay my way through college - i began to notice that with about half-an-hour to go before the place opened (at 8am), a motley bunch of saddos would begin to assemble and wait, then come opening time would enter the store even before the shutters were completely lifted - i used to call them the "limbo dancers" ha ha (i once actually saw some guy duck his head on auto-pilot as he chatted to someone else whilst walking through!)... anyway, i decided to give them a bit of "entertainment" whilst they hung around (didn't they have anything better to do, like sleep for instance?), so studiously learnt all the lyrics to "jilted john" as an appropriately raucous and irreverent tune, and barked them out as i emptied the bins nearby - perhaps unsurprisingly, in their zombie-like state none of them ever took the slightest notice of me!

Arthur Nibble said...

One of the handful of singles which my sister and I bought separate personal copies of. Graham's best recent work probably has to be either 'Pigeons In Flight' or the classic wolfing-my-dinner-down ballad "I Can't Go Back To Savoury Now'.

Simon said...

I hadn't clocked this when I scheduled this post at the end of last week, but that appearance was actually on this day in 1978.

Neil Barker said...

I loved this single so much when I was 5 that two different family members bought me a copy (neither in a picture sleeve though sadly!). No sign of Vini Reilly there though (unless he's on one of the other two performances).

Anonymous said...

Re-" Producer Martin Hannett (Joy Division, Magazine, Psychedelic Furs, Happy Mondays)'s studio band and Vini Reilly, later of the hugely influential Durutti Column, are backing him. ",all totally incorrect