Tuesday 13 November 2012

The disappeared: 13/10/77

Rokotto – Boogie On Up
First of three (not counting the dance) we won't see again are Dundee's own contribution to funk - sounds like some comedy concept, but remember Average White Band - grooving up a storm yet a couple of weeks after Rose Royce had taken the opening spot seeming a little undercooked. Does it look to you like there's a couple of ringers here? Also note TOTP2's usual rigorous caption research.



Rod Stewart – You’re In My Heart
The video, obviously, to the first single from Foot Loose & Fancy Free, which we'll see in a couple of weeks.

Brotherhood Of Man – Highwayman
There can't be many bands who sandwiched a complete, top 50-missing flop between number ones, but even at their greatest moment of consistency BoM managed it. This isn't the performance - it's from Top Pops, in fact - but I can't imagine what was shown was too different. The uploader indignantly comments underneath that they can't be an Abba ripoff because they'd been together since 1973. The sound, the look, even the stances must be sheer coincidence, then.



Rose Royce – Do Your Dance
Repeat of their bravura turn from a couple of weeks before.

Mary Mason – Angel Of The Morning/Any Way That You Want Me
To be reshown in a couple of weeks when the first three songs on the show are all technically medleys.

Nazareth – Love Hurts
Pained rock balladeering as seen the other week.

George Benson – The Greatest Love Of All
As always archived by One For The Dads, featuring no Pauline again and rather too much arm waving in big sheets to count as proper dancing as such. Well, how much better would you have done with the source materials?

Ram Jam – Black Betty
Really, what was that bloke's business being there?

John Forde – Stardance
This has already attracted some debate in the comments about where Forde came from and whether Judge Dread was involved somehow. It's another example of something I referred to last week about the rise of space disco, sounding a good few years ahead of its time in places - maybe it got on because someone thought there was a British Space in the offing? - and it's turned up since in the playlists of the likes of 2manyDJs. No sign of the TOTP performance unfortunately, or even a single edit, though there is the extended 12" version.

David Soul – Silver Lady
David stays atop, his dream machine stays running.

25 comments:

Angelo said...

Didn't know about the Highwayman song ~ and yes its totally Abba in performance and sound, though maybe not as slick and polished ~ surprised it wasn't a hit though, seems quite a catchy number, and BOM did a good job in the way they stood and delivered it :-)


p.s Telephone Man

p.p.s Mull of Kintyre (can't wait!)

Dory said...

Shame to have to miss this show, but it would be interesting to know how much of the david soul video was shown, that is if it was more than on the previous week. Is this video available from any other source to see the complete version?
Would also have liked to see the Ram Jam video, as it's next showing is a Legs and co routine.

Noax said...

The evidence we have shows a not particularly exciting show, especially as I really dislike George Benson and that dreary song.

The BOM performance is clearly the most blatant ABBA ripoff yet!

The only one I'd really like to see is John Forde to be honest.

I cannot believe they gave Nazareth another airing.

80sblokeinthe70s said...

I've never knowingly heard "The Highwayman" before - though I must have seen this at the time. as people have said not even a solitary week at no50. Prefer the poem myself;-).
Not really a fan except for 'Oh Boy (The Mood I'm In)'which is a class above the other stuff I've heard but passed us by pretty quickly on these re-runs.
That fan sticking up for them does them an injustice in one form or another they've been together since 1969/70. And the two men even wrote all their stuff.Think the dark-haired female looks very very nice with her hair up in the German clip on Youtube.

Rokotto - seen this a few times not bad but not a patch on Honky's "Join The Party" which I can still sing(!) and really grew on me.

Mary Mason - another I've never knowingly heard.English too I've just noticed.

John Forde - yet another I've never knowingly heard - and very good too and yes it fits well in with the space disco - which made a bit of a come back in 1979/80 with the amazing "Dancing In Outer Space" by Atmosfear and equally good "Space Bass" by Slick and Jupiter Beyond 'The River Drive'. Which coincidentally all have spacey-song/act names too!

George Benson - I've always thought this was one of his best and it was also one of the only things I enjoyed by Whitney Houston.
To me being a teenager growing up in the suburbs of London in the early/mid 1980s this will also be the final tune on "The George Benson Collection" which just about everyone I hung around with seemed to own back then.

Simon said...

You know sometimes you find something and you're not entirely sure what to do with it so you just end up foisting your new knowledge on someone?

Well, in 1976, fresh from inventing disco Mud invented road safety.

Noax said...

Well, that's...somehow just not right. Had they booked Showaddywaddy or someone similar and then they pulled out at the last minute?

Actually, they missed a trick there - just imagine them helping you across the road, Romeo could have done a very low pitched 'LISTEN' to finish the whole thing off.

Anyhow, presumably this is very rarely seen because it doesn't contain Todd Carty, Dave Prowse, 'SPLINK' or judicious use of the phrase 'out of their tiny minds'.

Arthur Nibble said...

Well, I'm sure Mud released a live album called "Mud On Road", so it sort of fits in.

"Highwayman" made number 60 in the breakers and lost a great chance of publicity when BoM decided to sing "Angelo" instead of this, their current single, on the Royal Variety Performance.

Another potential nugget hidden away on a 'lost' show, Really peeved we can't get anything on John Forde - not a publicity photo or scrap of video footage to be found. He released at least three singles in the UK, all co-produced by Alex Hughes, aka judge Dread.

TOTP were obviously stuck for acts this week if they gave Nazareth's minor hit another airing a la Sheer Elegance - I still miss those boys!

Arthur Nibble gets it wrong again said...

MASSIVE schoolboy error! The shame of it! This re-issue of "Love Hurts" (part of an EP) reached number 15. "Love Hurts" had made 41 the year before. Pass me that conical hat with the Big D on the front!

As for Showaddywaddy doing the Green Cross Code ad, how would they have all fitted onto the pavementt in one shot? Maybe at an adjoining bus queue?

Arthur Nibble (again) said...

Doesn't look like (m)any ringers in Rokotto if this sleeve for the top 40 scraper's anything to go by...

http://www.chartstats.com/art.php?release=7375

Could you imagine if Legs&Co had performed the whole of that George Benson ballad? They'd have needed to make the show 45 minutes at least, and the gals would have had severe armache by the end of it. Not George's best but, as stated earlier, a much more sympathetic version than Whitney's wailing.

Arthur, let someone else have a go... said...

Just checked - "Stardance" was in the breakers for five weeks and peaked at an agonisingly tantalsing unofficcial number 51.

wilberforce said...

i read in the papers that our host's ex-chauffeur (and also a DJ) has now had his collar felt with regard to s*vilegate - i wonder if he was one those weird guys who popped up in the JS-fronted editions we've seen so far?

regarding the green cross code - you may sneer at it, but in my opinion there's even more need for something like that to be shown today - it might make all those c*nts that cross the roads oblivious to oncoming drivers realise that CARS have the right of way... not them!

Darren said...

Respect to 80sblokeinthe70s for giving Jupiter Beyond's "The River Drive" a mention - one of my favourite tunes (but must be listened to in its full 10 minute version!) Sadly the only chart action this saw was as part of the "Calibre Cuts" medley that reached number 75.

Space Disco was just surfacing in late 77, a la Space, John Forde, etc. but it never went away until disco did. TOTP will see some space disco action in just a few months' time with Dee D. Jackson's "Automatic Lover".

Zygon said...

Toight's may dissapear too...

apparently DLT has been arrested by the JS Case investigators...

Anonymous said...

Well, this puts a different spin on his "comin' 'atcha through the cornflakes" catchphrase.

Anonymous said...

BBC News Online are now naming DLT as the 'man arrested is in his 60's from Bedfordshire'.
Also saying tonights Top Of The Pops will be a Kid Jensen hosted edition instead.

Wonder if this is a repeated repeat or jumping a week on from where we should have been?

Anonymous said...

Kid Jensen hosted 27/10/77, so we're just skipping forward a week.

Omitting both DLT's other remaining episodes (including Boxing Day which he co-hosted with Tony Blackburn) as well as JS's, we've now got 6 episodes to fit into 5 weeks. Two in Christmas week and we're sorted.

And JS and DLT hosted 14 episodes between them in 1978, so the Sky At Night problem solves itself.

Andee Bee said...

according to this

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00704hg/episodes/guide

DLT is on sunday at 1pm

Andee Bee said...

My YT has the other two Savile 1977 Legs & Co routines to watch

Noax said...

This is really getting ridiculous. He's only been arrested, not *charged*.

Whether you like it or not BBC, even allowing for your recent ****-ups in the news department making you extremely jumpy, YOU CANNOT CHANGE HISTORY!

Anonymous said...

That's the last straw for me. If those dozy woodentops had waited 24 hours till they arrested DLT then the Bowie edition would have been shown - the highlight of TOTP 77 for me.

Well it was nice while it lasted but that for me is that...

Anonymous said...

I agree with Noax, why are the viewers like us having to put up with these shows being removed from the schedules at the last minute? I look forward to the shows every week. Jimmy Saville and DLT are just presenting a professionals, and i see nothing wrong with their behaviour on the shows.

People's private lives are not on show, so as presenters, i see no difference in professionalism between any of the presenters when presenting TOTP, so surely the over-riding factor is the viewers like us who deserve to have these shows.....we are paying our TV licences after all!

Bamaboogiewoogieonup said...

I suppose the lack of info of the rundown and end titles tracks means that this hasn't been shown since it was first broadcast.

A great shame we don't finally get to see the mysterious John Forde. I was kind of hoping it would be Judge Dread/Alex Hughes in a RAH band-style balaclava disguise. It seems the song was a sizable hit in Austria reaching number 9 in March 1978 (8 weeks on their chart). It wasn't Top 40 hit here but it was on a 1979 dance/disco compilation LP called Don't Walk Boogie.

The Discogs site says of Mr Forde: "English synthesist/keyboard player best known for his work with Judge Dread in the mid 1970's but was for a short time in the late 70's signed to Dread's management company as a songwriter and recording artist".

I remember the Rokotto song but didn't realise it only got as far as number 40. It was written by Wayne Bickerton who wrote/produced a lot of the Mac and Katie Kissoon hits. Listening to the lyrics I can't help thinking that Mick Jackson got the idea for Blame It On The Boogie from this ("Boogie all day, boogie all night, boogie in the moonlight"). Hate Steve Wright's trite comment "Look for the drummer..." about 5 seconds after we've already seem the drummer.

The Brotherhood of Man certainly copied ABBA with Figaro being suggestive of Fernando but this sounded nothing like ABBA although the poses the girls adopt owe a lot to them. This is a catchy tune but the gimmick of the lads dressing up in highwayman gear is just too kitsch.

Just looked at the Rod Stewart video on YouTube - here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AaJpkup4IsI. Pretty boring filmed in a restaurant except the violinist looks like Stephen Fry in Blackadder Goes Forth.

George Benson stopped being a jazz guitarist at this point and turned into a fine vocalist borrowing a few ideas from Stevie Wonder. A great song but not a particularly good interpretation by Legs and Co (not that we can see their legs).

Does the existence of this clip mean that someone has the whole show?

(Simon - what does your Ram Jam comment mean?)

Andee Bee said...

I would like me send complaints to the lovely BBC

funkyboymark said...

Actually I remember seeing a perfect quality performance of the Rokotto track 'Boogie on up' taken from this 13th October episode shown on TOTP2 about a decade ago which would lead me to believe that the BBC do actually have this show (previously thought lost) in it's complete form. So we would probably have finally seen the elusive John Forde et al only for Jimmy Savile's presence. Rokotto appeared on TOTP again with their 1978 hit 'Funk theory', a show which was already repeated in full on UK Gold in the 1990's unlike this 13th Oct. episode

Simon said...

Yeah, the TOTP2 clip is embedded above - I'm using "disappeared" in the sense of BBC4 schedules now, all the wiped shows having passed.