Well, it looks like we might have made it. Yes, it looks like we made it to the end. This retrospective year of Glamourpuss and Harpo. Of the sisters Chanter and Surprise. Of Dr Kiss Kiss and Shake It Down. Of Ben Goldacre's Noosha Fox revelation and Alexis Petridis' Guardian article. Of whether young people who've somehow stumbled across this would think Liverpool Express were one of the defining bands of the age. Of the rise and fall of Ruby Flipper, literally in the case of TVC15. Of trying to understand Noel's links, DLT's concepts and Diddy's parting. And, of course, that late run to infamy by John Christie. And now we only have a two part look back at 1976 to go.
Question for commenters to pad out your comments and additions to this show - what's your choice of outstanding moments of Top Of The Pops 1976? As some sort of memory jog, here's a Spotify playlist of a lot of what was featured.
DLT and Noel, a partnership that would produce something rather less suited to family viewing sixteen years later, are your hosts, and someone must have booked the studio as they're in front of a chromakeyed wall behind a full set table at the near side of which is an enormous turkey. There's two on its far side, you may say.
Slik – Forever And Ever
Getting in early, DLT's gag for this link is to pretend to have drifted off, unable to be roused. It doesn't show great commitment to what's ahead of us all when you're acting like that in the first link. This Bay City Rollers song at 33 1/3 - written by the same people who were responsible for the Rollers' original hits and had originally been recorded by the substantially less portentous Kenny - was a number one in February but we've seen Midge and co's baseball jacketed US culture fetishising outfits since. What we haven't seen before, because with hits comes dignity, is the keyboard player's matey grin and nod to camera mid-chorus. On the wall behind our hosts there's shots throughout of aftermath and crowd, so we get to see Slik wander nonchalantly off stage...
Elton John & Kiki Dee – Don’t Go Breaking My Heart
...as our duo contrive some pundom based on Noel's "flower arranging art". You know this video by now, as even though it's not been on the show since 1st September it's ingrained on every single one of your neurons.
ABBA – Dancing Queen
A shaking with excitement Dave Lee Travis with a knife in his hand. Must we fling this filth at our pop kids and their families? Or indeed this filth, as Legs & Co's two performances are both costumed around bra, pants and accessories. In this case that means big white furry hats the shape, colour and consistency of marshmallows, possibly so they don't catch their deaths of cold, and some sort of arrangement around long necklace-like strands connected to the hats plus wristbands and strips tied to their pants of similarly consistency. It's like mink bondage. A director has the idea of shooting the intro chorus from below, which coupled with pointing and spinning suggests a very wrong Soviet Pennies From Heaven adaptation. Not unreasonably, there's a lot of women standing off to one side, arms firmly folded. A group of gentlemen at the back sway to the beat. One chap caught close up seems transfixed, not moving a muscle. Amid all this, with what must for once have been more than three days' notice Flick doesn't really seem to have got a handle on it.
JJ Barrie – No Charge
Noel makes a Light Brigade joke. If it's meant to provide levity linking into one of his studio appearances, it doesn't work. This is still, after all, No Charge.
Laurel & Hardy With The Avalon Boys feat. Chill Wills – The Trail Of The Lonesome Pine
Yeah, interesting, this. Not just because of its fact - partly Peel's fault, apparently - but also it was a number two at Christmas 1975 and yet is still counted, crossing over as it does into the first couple of weeks, as a 1976 hit. And they're right there in the stu... no, wait, it's the clip from Way Out West. Several more courses, a smaller turkey and a bottle of wine now bedeck the presentational table. Noel tells DLT to "use your loaf". So he does, with a loaf of bread cut in half and enacted by Travis as a talking mouth. It makes Noel and the offscreen crew corpse. That must have been a long shoot.
Tina Charles – I Love To Love (But My Baby Loves To Dance)
The big turkey is back. Behind it Noel elects not to make a joke having been put off by DLT combing down his shirt, claiming he's "trying to clear up my dandruff". It's plausible. Unlike what they've done to Charles, as despite the huge studio floor completely empty apart from three crew and a camera taking reverse angle long shots she's ended up being filmed in one shot on a fairly narrow gantry, her movements even more restricted by some scaffolding and a couple of boxes. She hasn't helped herself sartorially with a test card of a jumper design and big scarf. Was there a draft up there? She should have said something. No explanation of her predicament is forthcoming. Tight schedule? For the Christmas Pops?
The Wurzels – Combine Harvester
You can't imagine the Wurzels had a lot on as they've come back for a studio encore sitting with the audience in the round on a small tractor, as is their wont, without so much as a tuba in sight. Pink shirts, brown waistcoats and brown cords are the dress code this time along with the signature neckerchiefs. Despite the passage of time since this was an unknown song "she made oi laugh" gets an actual audience laugh. Despite some stout singing along things don't really get going until fake snow and balloons get dropped and much batting about of the latter commences, leading to a widespread failure to be really listening any more. One balloon manages to knock Pete Budd's live mike partly round, though just by shifting his posture he's able to continue. A man standing to the side of Budd is enjoying it rather more than a man of his more than mean audience average age should be, waving his arms about all over the place. Has to have been a plant.
Cliff Richard – Devil Woman
Pretty sure this hasn't been on before, as there's an audience in shot, some of them are still theateningly holding balloons (imagine that Cliff/Wurzels green room conversation), no backing band and Cliff is wearing trousers of an acceptable size. A fire is superimposed over him at various points, which is certainly a quick and cheap way of denoting the concept of devilment. Cliff's still largely playing to camera rather than the people, though you may argue his baring yards of hairy chest isn't a way to play to anyone. Congratulations to the audience member who turned up in a red wide brimmed hat, much as it must be blocking plenty of people's views.
ABBA – Mamma Mia
DLT claims it's a Liverpool song - "when the kids came home from school hungry they knocked on the door and said 'mam, I'm ere!'" DLT is from Derbyshire. Apart from Bjorn finding a gap between the girls' heads so he too can sing his inaudible backing vocals direct to camera it's the three session men, and they look the part, we really need to be watching given all ABBA routines are part of the national consciousness these days, standing out only by not being allowed to wear the same colour-coded electric blue outfits as the main four. The drummer looks bored and/or distracted beyond comprehension, not a good look if you're pushed to the front of the stage. This again seems to be a new in-studio version, raising the possibility they may have been watching their own song being loosely interpreted earlier on.
Hank Mizell – Jungle Rock
The bread face has been put at the front of the table with a banana in its mouth, and already it's more likeable than Noel. Legs & Co are back, and we get to compare and contrast now as on the very first show of the run Pan's People in their dying embers worked this to a hunting motif with cameos by whatever animal costumes they could find in the back of an old storage cupboard. With time and expense the whole jungle hunting side is explored further with the ladies doing a wardance in parrot feathered head-dresses and about as small Indian reservation fancy dress bras and pants as could be got away with in pre-Hot Gossip days. As if from a 1940s cartoon they're taking the cannibalistic option on jungle mores, doing a war dance round a large cooking pot, in which stands a bemused Tony Blackburn, who has clearly been given no clues on what to do so just has to stand there observing the madness for two and a half minutes. Before long a whole new menagerie joins in, and clearly the advance notice has paid off with some relatively more elaborate costumes with a hint of Victorian theatre about them, although some of the heads are more Cubist. With a tiny amount of studio space delinated by fake trees, six dancers basically circling the pot with progressively less energy plus extras in varying bear and crocodile outfits variously Susie Q-ing here and ring-dang-doo-ing there doesn't leave a lot of physical room for self-expression and it becomes lots of people trying not to overtly bump into each other, especially when the camel arrives. Still, the girls are visibly having fun, attempting to find partners for the close. An alligator has a balloon attached to its tail. Lulu exchanges pleasantries with a tiger (and if anyone can lipread her - it's right near the end - do tell) Tony Blackburn stands in his pot, unloved, forgotten and alone, watching the young people and not so young crew members have fun without him. Your heart bleeds. No it doesn't.
Pussycat – Mississippi
DLT produces a knockoff Emu in the wrong colours. "I had problems with a man called Hull" Noel comments in a textbook injoke as it attacks. (If anyone does know...) This is a repeat of the studio performance with the girls in black and mysterious wavy lighting effects overlaid. You've probably heard this enough recently.
Demis Roussos – Forever And Ever
"Here's something really big in Greece - BBC potatoes!" Noel and DLT work between them before both collapsing into laughter at their own joke. Not even technically a new joke either - when this was number one Noel introduced it as "the really big thing in Greece at the moment - no, not a BBC hamburger". Demis didn't come over for that single but he's over for the Christmas crowd in an alarming outfit, a red all in one with plunging neckline and an open full length coat. Like Cliff, despite being surrounded by transfixed kids he sings entirely to whichever camera is operational. Even when the Ladybirds take over he just looks straight down the lens at us in a statesmanlike stance for fully twenty seconds or more. He then gradually raises an arm in the air and watches the camera as it circles him for another twenty seconds.
Queen – Bohemian Rhapsody
While DLT continues to attack Noel's hair by proxy, a girl in the audience shot behind them is making a note of something. Quick supermarket trip on the way home, maybe, but some things can wait for the bus journey. This is the video. All of it. This has a video, don't know if you're aware of that at all. Again, this is a 1975 hit that carried on over into the new year, making one wonder if it should technically count at all for 1976. Our hosts see us out with DLT having a health and safety existential crisis as he realises the big turkey of continuity turmoil is real before, bizarrely, Noel announces "we leave you with Legs & Company (always the full version of the name with Noel) and a bit of Wings". Instead, the show ends. How odd. There is a Legs & Co routine to a Wings song on the Boxing Day show, but that's one hell of a glaring editing cock-up. Did someone forget how long Bohemian Rhapsody is? Or just maybe was Noel making a joke about the turkey? Even for him that would be cryptic and unnecessary.
REMINDER: TOTP2 Christmas 2011 is Wednesday 7.30pm on BBC2, though you'll have to be wry about that yourselves; the Boxing Day 1976 special is Thursday at 8pm.
Showing posts with label hank mizell. Show all posts
Showing posts with label hank mizell. Show all posts
Tuesday, 20 December 2011
Friday, 22 April 2011
TOTP 22/4/76: with the ring dang doo
Diddy David Hamilton's our man this week. Somewhat of a Radio 1 nostalgia B-teamer, yet he of everyone we've seen so far was the most typically Mike Smash-like and was on the primary Pops presenter list for it. At this time he was simulcasting on Radios 1 and 2 and earned the nickname 'the housewife's choice'. Fair to say that nobody on dashing hipy young Radio 1 should have been any sort of housewife's choice, which may have been the problem. Now he pretends to admire that Michael Jackson statue and the eclectic striker stylings of Bobby Zamora for money. Anyway, Diddy is wearing a jumper with 'THE BIG ONE' on the back and a Radio 1 247 logo on the front with the collar of a red and white striped shirt peeking out over the top. With his Partridge-like parting as well - and we know it's the height of obviousness to compare a DJ to Smashie & Nicey and Partridge, let alone both in the same paragraph, but the oleaginousness is none more pronounced - you have to wonder why the spoofery didn't occur to anyone sooner.
Laurie Lingo and the Dipsticks are in the top 20, which must have caused furrowed brows among the production team. Don't worry, they'll be on soon enough and we're preparing things to say about it already. Meanwhile a photo of Hank Mizell has been found, in which he's standing with his guitar in the middle of a woodland clearing.
Jimmy James & the Vagabonds – I’ll Go Where Your Music Takes Me
It might say that, but at first look it seems like no Vagabonds the soul revue second division outfit would have known. In fact the original Vagabonds had split in 1970 and James formed a new backing band in 1974 when based in England, and in their matching grey suits, red shirts, shaggy hairdos and sheer semi-distracted air of £7 an hour for hire no band can surely look more like they've been dragged up from the working men's club circuit. As we first see Jimmy he's indulging in light larks of a conversational gee-up hue with the guitarist, who isn't paying him the blindest bit of notice. Maybe he's trying not to acknowledge some nasal female backing vocals that have been mixed on the same level as James' own and the world's least effective vibes solo. Meanwhile, someone in the front row wears a morning suit top hat with what looks like a crepe paper rose on the front. Nobody's getting sweaty here.
John Miles – Music
No explanation why the whole of Miles' band are in his rundown picture. It's the same performance as three weeks ago, with Miles' ineffectual guitar soloing at the piano and the bit that sounds like the theme to Blake's Seven. Despite this extra time I still can't work out if he's wearing a biker's jacket, a T-shirt with epatulets or a tabard.
Harpo – Movie Star
"Our next star sings shoeless and with a bicycle bell on his walking stick". Funnily enough, Harpo failed to turn this into a hitmaking career that lasted for longer than one number 24 single. His extra affectations - tartan cap, neckerchief, David Soul cardigan, tremendous amounts of hair, pronounced accent when singing live - don't add up to the sort of thing that makes careers either. To compensate for his clothing box ransacking he developed a full range of interpretative hand signals, as can be seen on this clip from TOTP2 when Stuart Maconie was writing the captions and couldn't think of anything to say about his oeuvre either. Extreme close-up!
Anni-Frid is on backing vocals on the recording, which reminds someone...
ABBA – Fernando
Third appearance in four weeks! And it's not even ***SPOILER*** number one yet. It's the promo clip from week one, for the record. This is going to be a very drum-hearing late spring on BBC4.
Sheer Elegance – Life Is Too Short Girl
On two weeks ago as well! But the poor man's Temptations are back in the studio for a second go, still in that remarkable get-up of tartan waistcoats, yellow all-in-ones and paisley shirts with huge collars. You'd think they'd have at least made this "Sheer Elegance's infamous yellow all-in-one uniform" by now, but as they're wearing blue suits with ridiculously large black with white polka dot collars in their chart rundown picture this must be a uniform specific to this song. They're trying to get some swaying in unison going too, except one of them steadfastly refuses to play ball. No wonder people remember Lenny Henry and Marti Caine instead from the 1975 New Faces intake.
The Rubettes – You’re The Reason Why
As if to prove the real power of a uniform, the Rubettes had ditched the flat caps and matching pastel suits by this stage, turned into a wet boogie band and accordingly only had one more hit. Maybe what really turned things was what they went for here, with one member dressed as a sitcom bus conductor and Alan Williams revealed as looking like Alan Freeman. It takes mere seconds for the drummer to wink at the rostrum camera. Diddy David calls it "incredible".
Hank Mizell – Jungle Rock
"Once again we have some very good news for the fellas". Yeah, cheers. Another re-run, but some repeat performances are worthwhile so as the viewer can take in the level of attention to detail. The BBC props and costume departments have long been the envy of the television world.
Someone uploaded that just after the first showing so we can now gain more of an understanding on some of the big questions. For example, are those convincing outfits - alligators look just like that, of course - inhabited by ver People? Well, the 'gator seemingly has evident breasts but otherwise it's unclear. It's not the same people in the camel and elephant, we can say that almost for certain, as the camel is quite reticent about moving more than one leg at once whereas the pretend pachyderm is going for it with running man-like gusto. You could ask what sort of jungle houses a fox, rabbit, camel and kangaroo, but you'd have had to take that up with Mizell directly had he not died in 1992. One set of lyrics claims a "great big falcon" appears just after the alligator and what Flick interprets as a leg-shaking grizzly bear is in fact "all the fish stepped by", but both are indistinct and completely confuse jungle ecosystem matters. And then there's the issue of the girls themselves and what sort of faces they're pulling to camera when not asked merely to express neutral seduction for three minutes. We point for specific evidence to 1:34. Hope we all appreciated Cherry Gillespie's spirited waggling of her arse direct to camera in time for the lyric "I moved a little closer just to get a better view". Having seen Tony Blackburn make a joke about him out of the first showing, Hamilton obligingly makes a joke about Blackburn this time.
This was the last time this appeared on Pops, so here's the Fall's cover, which appears on a fascinating new album called Beyond The Fall of originals of songs Mark E taught us, and a note that Legs & Co redid Jungle Rock for the Christmas show, which is here. Despite the paucity of clothing, the ramping up of cliches, developed setting, Tony Blackburn cameo that takes far too long and leaves him with nothing to do for two minutes and frankly nightmare inducing new animal costumes just make it too crowded. Look at the end, there's so little room left that everyone all but gives up on proper dancing.
Gilbert O'Sullivan – Doing What I Know
Although the knot of kids behind him seem keen, the insistent electric piano sound didn't translate to chart business and he only bothered the top 40 once more, in 1980. One of the audience already seems to be copying Noosha Fox's haircut.
Brotherhood Of Man – Save Your Kisses For Me
"It's a hit all over the nations" David enthuses somewhat ungrammatically. Back to the studio performance, and we're pretty sure there is already nothing else that can be said about this. April 1976 was very much a studded denim jacket/wrongfooting last line sort of month. Hamilton claims four people are "going mad" around him, Andrea True Connection play us out, and we still wait for the great leap forward. Unbeknownst to most, the Wurzels are only three weeks away.
EDIT NEWS: The major discard this week is a Pan's People routine involving the girls in bra/crop tops. And it was their penultimate week on the show too. Have some respect, BBC4. The song is You Sexy Sugar Plum by funk-soul variable attraction Rodger Collins, the routine one of those where having got the girls dressed down Flick can't really think of much to do with them. There was also a video for the Sutherland Brothers' classic rock staple Arms Of Mary, presumably the same Bay City Rollers Love Me Like I Love You video as the first week and, perhaps left out because enough people on Twitter go on about the imminence of punk, Keith Emerson. Honky Tonk Train Blues is a cover of boogie-woogie trailblazer Meade Lux Lewis and is basically a man playing barrel roll piano at great speed. How Pops would have staged that one, and how the dancing kids would have reacted to it without starting to smoke from the heels slightly, will remain a mystery.
Laurie Lingo and the Dipsticks are in the top 20, which must have caused furrowed brows among the production team. Don't worry, they'll be on soon enough and we're preparing things to say about it already. Meanwhile a photo of Hank Mizell has been found, in which he's standing with his guitar in the middle of a woodland clearing.
Jimmy James & the Vagabonds – I’ll Go Where Your Music Takes Me
It might say that, but at first look it seems like no Vagabonds the soul revue second division outfit would have known. In fact the original Vagabonds had split in 1970 and James formed a new backing band in 1974 when based in England, and in their matching grey suits, red shirts, shaggy hairdos and sheer semi-distracted air of £7 an hour for hire no band can surely look more like they've been dragged up from the working men's club circuit. As we first see Jimmy he's indulging in light larks of a conversational gee-up hue with the guitarist, who isn't paying him the blindest bit of notice. Maybe he's trying not to acknowledge some nasal female backing vocals that have been mixed on the same level as James' own and the world's least effective vibes solo. Meanwhile, someone in the front row wears a morning suit top hat with what looks like a crepe paper rose on the front. Nobody's getting sweaty here.
John Miles – Music
No explanation why the whole of Miles' band are in his rundown picture. It's the same performance as three weeks ago, with Miles' ineffectual guitar soloing at the piano and the bit that sounds like the theme to Blake's Seven. Despite this extra time I still can't work out if he's wearing a biker's jacket, a T-shirt with epatulets or a tabard.
Harpo – Movie Star
"Our next star sings shoeless and with a bicycle bell on his walking stick". Funnily enough, Harpo failed to turn this into a hitmaking career that lasted for longer than one number 24 single. His extra affectations - tartan cap, neckerchief, David Soul cardigan, tremendous amounts of hair, pronounced accent when singing live - don't add up to the sort of thing that makes careers either. To compensate for his clothing box ransacking he developed a full range of interpretative hand signals, as can be seen on this clip from TOTP2 when Stuart Maconie was writing the captions and couldn't think of anything to say about his oeuvre either. Extreme close-up!
Anni-Frid is on backing vocals on the recording, which reminds someone...
ABBA – Fernando
Third appearance in four weeks! And it's not even ***SPOILER*** number one yet. It's the promo clip from week one, for the record. This is going to be a very drum-hearing late spring on BBC4.
Sheer Elegance – Life Is Too Short Girl
On two weeks ago as well! But the poor man's Temptations are back in the studio for a second go, still in that remarkable get-up of tartan waistcoats, yellow all-in-ones and paisley shirts with huge collars. You'd think they'd have at least made this "Sheer Elegance's infamous yellow all-in-one uniform" by now, but as they're wearing blue suits with ridiculously large black with white polka dot collars in their chart rundown picture this must be a uniform specific to this song. They're trying to get some swaying in unison going too, except one of them steadfastly refuses to play ball. No wonder people remember Lenny Henry and Marti Caine instead from the 1975 New Faces intake.
The Rubettes – You’re The Reason Why
As if to prove the real power of a uniform, the Rubettes had ditched the flat caps and matching pastel suits by this stage, turned into a wet boogie band and accordingly only had one more hit. Maybe what really turned things was what they went for here, with one member dressed as a sitcom bus conductor and Alan Williams revealed as looking like Alan Freeman. It takes mere seconds for the drummer to wink at the rostrum camera. Diddy David calls it "incredible".
Hank Mizell – Jungle Rock
"Once again we have some very good news for the fellas". Yeah, cheers. Another re-run, but some repeat performances are worthwhile so as the viewer can take in the level of attention to detail. The BBC props and costume departments have long been the envy of the television world.
Someone uploaded that just after the first showing so we can now gain more of an understanding on some of the big questions. For example, are those convincing outfits - alligators look just like that, of course - inhabited by ver People? Well, the 'gator seemingly has evident breasts but otherwise it's unclear. It's not the same people in the camel and elephant, we can say that almost for certain, as the camel is quite reticent about moving more than one leg at once whereas the pretend pachyderm is going for it with running man-like gusto. You could ask what sort of jungle houses a fox, rabbit, camel and kangaroo, but you'd have had to take that up with Mizell directly had he not died in 1992. One set of lyrics claims a "great big falcon" appears just after the alligator and what Flick interprets as a leg-shaking grizzly bear is in fact "all the fish stepped by", but both are indistinct and completely confuse jungle ecosystem matters. And then there's the issue of the girls themselves and what sort of faces they're pulling to camera when not asked merely to express neutral seduction for three minutes. We point for specific evidence to 1:34. Hope we all appreciated Cherry Gillespie's spirited waggling of her arse direct to camera in time for the lyric "I moved a little closer just to get a better view". Having seen Tony Blackburn make a joke about him out of the first showing, Hamilton obligingly makes a joke about Blackburn this time.
This was the last time this appeared on Pops, so here's the Fall's cover, which appears on a fascinating new album called Beyond The Fall of originals of songs Mark E taught us, and a note that Legs & Co redid Jungle Rock for the Christmas show, which is here. Despite the paucity of clothing, the ramping up of cliches, developed setting, Tony Blackburn cameo that takes far too long and leaves him with nothing to do for two minutes and frankly nightmare inducing new animal costumes just make it too crowded. Look at the end, there's so little room left that everyone all but gives up on proper dancing.
Gilbert O'Sullivan – Doing What I Know
Although the knot of kids behind him seem keen, the insistent electric piano sound didn't translate to chart business and he only bothered the top 40 once more, in 1980. One of the audience already seems to be copying Noosha Fox's haircut.
Brotherhood Of Man – Save Your Kisses For Me
"It's a hit all over the nations" David enthuses somewhat ungrammatically. Back to the studio performance, and we're pretty sure there is already nothing else that can be said about this. April 1976 was very much a studded denim jacket/wrongfooting last line sort of month. Hamilton claims four people are "going mad" around him, Andrea True Connection play us out, and we still wait for the great leap forward. Unbeknownst to most, the Wurzels are only three weeks away.
EDIT NEWS: The major discard this week is a Pan's People routine involving the girls in bra/crop tops. And it was their penultimate week on the show too. Have some respect, BBC4. The song is You Sexy Sugar Plum by funk-soul variable attraction Rodger Collins, the routine one of those where having got the girls dressed down Flick can't really think of much to do with them. There was also a video for the Sutherland Brothers' classic rock staple Arms Of Mary, presumably the same Bay City Rollers Love Me Like I Love You video as the first week and, perhaps left out because enough people on Twitter go on about the imminence of punk, Keith Emerson. Honky Tonk Train Blues is a cover of boogie-woogie trailblazer Meade Lux Lewis and is basically a man playing barrel roll piano at great speed. How Pops would have staged that one, and how the dancing kids would have reacted to it without starting to smoke from the heels slightly, will remain a mystery.
Saturday, 9 April 2011
1/4/76: Where is Beatles band?
NB. I'll be using original TX dates rather than BBC4 schedules for this. I have a list.
It's Tony Blackburn! In a roll neck! Tony Blackburn is remembered now, apart from being a key component of that tremendous Peel anecdote about the Radio 1 Fun Day Out at Mallory Park, as crassly enthusiastic and thus now ironic, a career bubbling that started in about 1997 on Five's Night Fever and continued to about a year after I'm A Celebrity, by which time, as Paul Whitehouse pointed out, he was doing all the stuff people ascribed to him for comedic purposes. In the last couple of years he's put away the spangly jackets he never wore first time round, having left well before the Radio 1 Roadshow, and reinvented himself as an elder statesman of it being all about the music, whereas Jimmy Saville, who actually was a music man in his heyday alongside the million foibles, has remanoevured so well he's now spent twenty years as the nation's favourite Uncle Disgusting. While he never seems to have been comfortable per se, maybe his spell on Junior Choice loosened him up for TOTP. Actually, here's the start of this very show, and note the Beatles pic at number 27 inventing Oasis' 00s style:
Sailor - Girls Girls Girls
How do you hit upon a setup like that? The adapted drum kit is one thing, but behold the majesty of the Nickelodeon, an entirely self-constructed riot of keyboards, glockenspiels and completely useless bass drum on the side. If Chase & Status used one of them face to face we'd have far more respect for them. Sailor were British, though the singer was Norwegian and they sound somehow Dutch. How thick is this veneer of irony they project?
Diana Ross - Theme from Mahogany
Do You Know Where You're Going To, as you may know it. Diana looks wistfully out of a window, and then it suddenly ends. Doesn't seem to be a modern edit, more the hamfisted nature of a lot of 1970s editing.
Tarmey & Spencer - I’m Your Man Rock ‘N’ Roll
Rock'n'roll isn't sentinent, you know. Actually the Tarney-Spencer Band, but that name is how everyone archived it which shows how big a hit it wasn't. An odd record too, unsure whether to be 12-bar electrified blues, bar band or staccato pop-funk so being none of the above. Alan Tarmey, who Tony is keen to tell us played everything but drums on the recording, went on to produce Cliff during his turn of the 80s renaissance, the first three A-Ha albums and the single version of Saint Etienne's You're In A Bad Way. Bob's work, doubtless.
ABBA - Fernando
It's the video around the campfire. Tony mentions Eurovision in his intro even though that was nearly two years back by then.
Laurie Andrew – I’ll Never Love Anyone Anymore
Or Lawrence Andrew, as Tone calls him twice. A bloke who looks like Kevin Godley and has a vocal bordering on Tracy Chapman-tone female plays a dull longing ballad with wistful synths while wearing a jacket meant to look like that of a child's cartoon pauper.
Hank Mizell - Jungle Rock
"Trouble is, nobody can find him" Tony says, which is plausible when you find out it was recorded in 1958, did nothing at the time but was rediscovered by influential DJs around 1971 after appearing on a Dutch bootleg. He was found eventually and would appear in a later week, while in 1997 Mark E Smith added it to his personal list of quixotically covered rockabilly. In the here and then it was given for Pan’s People to hoof in khaki shorts with bazookas accompanied by cutaways of the world's single cheapest animal costumes. Seriously, religious programming on specialist satellite stations would be ashamed. Tony makes a joke about David Hamilton.
John Miles - Music
"Music was my first hit and it will be my last" quoth Nick Hancock. Miles, see, never quite gets across the message that he loves music as much as he thinks it has wronged him and must pay. He's heard Live And Let Die and thought piano into rock section must be the key. Then he has a go at grandstanding orchestral, during a section where his band are concentrating hard. Then there's a key change right out of an appalling music and well above Miles' vocal range. My, the self-absorption.
Fox – S-S-S-Single Bed
And then a strange woman in a bedsheet comes on and this is the one that gets on Trending Topics. Noosha Fox did, at any rate, and so nearly did Alison Goldfrapp, the comparison made seemingly more on an individual comeliness rather than musical basis, though were Alison and Will ever to go slithery disco we'd be keen. Go on, Will, get your talkbox out. Then Ben Goldacre, kind of an Alan Maryon-Davis for the Tens, let slip that Susan Traynor, to give Noosha her proper name, is his mum and all merry heck broke loose. What else? This was their third and last (and not even biggest, despite being the one people know - not enough funk, that's the problem with those) top 20 single, and songwriter/Frampton-to-be Kenny Young penned Under The Boardwalk, worked in the Brill Building and most recently worked with Buena Vista Social Club. This is from a later show but it's the same performance, and it's great, so...
The Beatles - Hey Jude
"We go back to 1966" as Tony says both before and after. Seriously, did they not have researchers? Or books? There's no particular reason I can tell for there being loads of Beatles songs reissued - it was ten years after their last gig, but that was in October. The clip is a performance I've never seen before and even then badly stored and all sepia.
Brotherhood Of Man – Save Your Kisses For Me
There are crowd members giggling at the choreography. Should that not have been a hint? Mind you it's number one, like they should care. That last line is quite something. It's still number one next week so I'll mention that the Drifters' Hello Happiness is over the end credits with its ill-advised British Invasion guitar line and cover the Eurovision fall-out then.
It's Tony Blackburn! In a roll neck! Tony Blackburn is remembered now, apart from being a key component of that tremendous Peel anecdote about the Radio 1 Fun Day Out at Mallory Park, as crassly enthusiastic and thus now ironic, a career bubbling that started in about 1997 on Five's Night Fever and continued to about a year after I'm A Celebrity, by which time, as Paul Whitehouse pointed out, he was doing all the stuff people ascribed to him for comedic purposes. In the last couple of years he's put away the spangly jackets he never wore first time round, having left well before the Radio 1 Roadshow, and reinvented himself as an elder statesman of it being all about the music, whereas Jimmy Saville, who actually was a music man in his heyday alongside the million foibles, has remanoevured so well he's now spent twenty years as the nation's favourite Uncle Disgusting. While he never seems to have been comfortable per se, maybe his spell on Junior Choice loosened him up for TOTP. Actually, here's the start of this very show, and note the Beatles pic at number 27 inventing Oasis' 00s style:
Sailor - Girls Girls Girls
How do you hit upon a setup like that? The adapted drum kit is one thing, but behold the majesty of the Nickelodeon, an entirely self-constructed riot of keyboards, glockenspiels and completely useless bass drum on the side. If Chase & Status used one of them face to face we'd have far more respect for them. Sailor were British, though the singer was Norwegian and they sound somehow Dutch. How thick is this veneer of irony they project?
Diana Ross - Theme from Mahogany
Do You Know Where You're Going To, as you may know it. Diana looks wistfully out of a window, and then it suddenly ends. Doesn't seem to be a modern edit, more the hamfisted nature of a lot of 1970s editing.
Tarmey & Spencer - I’m Your Man Rock ‘N’ Roll
Rock'n'roll isn't sentinent, you know. Actually the Tarney-Spencer Band, but that name is how everyone archived it which shows how big a hit it wasn't. An odd record too, unsure whether to be 12-bar electrified blues, bar band or staccato pop-funk so being none of the above. Alan Tarmey, who Tony is keen to tell us played everything but drums on the recording, went on to produce Cliff during his turn of the 80s renaissance, the first three A-Ha albums and the single version of Saint Etienne's You're In A Bad Way. Bob's work, doubtless.
ABBA - Fernando
It's the video around the campfire. Tony mentions Eurovision in his intro even though that was nearly two years back by then.
Laurie Andrew – I’ll Never Love Anyone Anymore
Or Lawrence Andrew, as Tone calls him twice. A bloke who looks like Kevin Godley and has a vocal bordering on Tracy Chapman-tone female plays a dull longing ballad with wistful synths while wearing a jacket meant to look like that of a child's cartoon pauper.
Hank Mizell - Jungle Rock
"Trouble is, nobody can find him" Tony says, which is plausible when you find out it was recorded in 1958, did nothing at the time but was rediscovered by influential DJs around 1971 after appearing on a Dutch bootleg. He was found eventually and would appear in a later week, while in 1997 Mark E Smith added it to his personal list of quixotically covered rockabilly. In the here and then it was given for Pan’s People to hoof in khaki shorts with bazookas accompanied by cutaways of the world's single cheapest animal costumes. Seriously, religious programming on specialist satellite stations would be ashamed. Tony makes a joke about David Hamilton.
John Miles - Music
"Music was my first hit and it will be my last" quoth Nick Hancock. Miles, see, never quite gets across the message that he loves music as much as he thinks it has wronged him and must pay. He's heard Live And Let Die and thought piano into rock section must be the key. Then he has a go at grandstanding orchestral, during a section where his band are concentrating hard. Then there's a key change right out of an appalling music and well above Miles' vocal range. My, the self-absorption.
Fox – S-S-S-Single Bed
And then a strange woman in a bedsheet comes on and this is the one that gets on Trending Topics. Noosha Fox did, at any rate, and so nearly did Alison Goldfrapp, the comparison made seemingly more on an individual comeliness rather than musical basis, though were Alison and Will ever to go slithery disco we'd be keen. Go on, Will, get your talkbox out. Then Ben Goldacre, kind of an Alan Maryon-Davis for the Tens, let slip that Susan Traynor, to give Noosha her proper name, is his mum and all merry heck broke loose. What else? This was their third and last (and not even biggest, despite being the one people know - not enough funk, that's the problem with those) top 20 single, and songwriter/Frampton-to-be Kenny Young penned Under The Boardwalk, worked in the Brill Building and most recently worked with Buena Vista Social Club. This is from a later show but it's the same performance, and it's great, so...
The Beatles - Hey Jude
"We go back to 1966" as Tony says both before and after. Seriously, did they not have researchers? Or books? There's no particular reason I can tell for there being loads of Beatles songs reissued - it was ten years after their last gig, but that was in October. The clip is a performance I've never seen before and even then badly stored and all sepia.
Brotherhood Of Man – Save Your Kisses For Me
There are crowd members giggling at the choreography. Should that not have been a hint? Mind you it's number one, like they should care. That last line is quite something. It's still number one next week so I'll mention that the Drifters' Hello Happiness is over the end credits with its ill-advised British Invasion guitar line and cover the Eurovision fall-out then.
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