replacing Hardly Baked whose feed is broken for reasons unknown. Original Hardly Baked + archive are here http://hardlybaked.blogspot.com/
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^"Really awful is more interesting to listen to than pretty good" - Eno
Amazing clip of Tom Jones leaving nothing to the imagination
A lovely memento of a moment when we thought desublimation was, if not, revolutionary, at least, liberating...
Although showbiz always had its raunchy side, but not perhaps ever this pelvic - Jones folded early "Memphis Flash" Elvis into Vegas 'n' variety.
Apparently Tom used to address the rare man in the audience who'd come with his wife or girlfriend, say "don't worry feller - I'll pump up the tires, you ride the bike".
Part of his stage routine was to catch panties thrown from the audience and dab the sweat from his face and brow.
Here's a lovely reminiscence from Woebot about the first records he owned - a pre-cool collection of children's music initially, graduating gradually to proper pop music and a genuinely cool record to have bought at the age of nine (no spoilers) and perhaps even more so as a pre-recorded cassette.
Matt's meditation got me thinking about my own start with music.
And I realised that with the exception of a single single - the theme from The Sting, better known as Scott Joplin's "The Entertainer" - I didn't buy any musical recordings until.... the age of 16. Not one!
My brothers and I did between us get some comedy LPs - Monty Python, The Goodies, National Lampoon's That's Not Funny, That's Sick!. These had some songs on them - "Winter Sportsman" by the Goodies; a pretty tight and slick funk track on the Lampoon album titled "The Shere Hite Disco Report" - but they were not primarily music. They did, each one of them, get played scores of times - this was the pre-videocassette era when if you wanted to re-enjoy your comedy faves, the LP (or the spin-off book - of which we also had loads) was the only option.
So music for me, growing up, was the music that my parents played.
Which was musicals (mainly West Side Story), comic song (Tom Lehrer), light jazz (Oscar Peterson, Dudley Moore Trio - these didn't impact me much, although as a grown-up I would adore Dudley's Bedazzled soundtrack LP). Sinatra's Songs for Swingin’ Lovers, which is engraved in my bones.
And then there were a few famous classical things.
Which is why to this day my favorite classical works are Beethoven's Pastoral and Holst's The Planets.
The latter was a particularly favorite - I used to listen to this on the Grundig radiogram in my parent's bedroom, sprawled on the coverlet. "Neptune, the Mystic" especially would have me drifting and swooning into a trance.
The embarrassing truth is that my favorite classical music - the stuff that I can actually remember - is from before the age of 16. Things I heard from my parents. Or at school, like Carmina Burana (although its "O Fortuna" sequence was also in the famous aftershave advert).
Further embarrassing truth: the only things added to the small classical faves list subsequently would be things heard through movies: Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries", Saint-Saen's "Aquarium", the Ligeti bits on 2001, A Space Oddity....
The classical I like is all the most famous bits that get either portioned out on the radio as if they were singles and "hits". Or that you just hear around (in film, or adverts).
Take Satie. I am not sure how I would first have heard Satie's "Trois Gymnopedies" - was it in a TV drama? That's another one that would have been heard young. At a certain point, it seemed to be everywhere. But again, despite later efforts, I have failed to fall in love with any other Satie.
Yes, it's not for want of effort in this department. But even things I like as I'm listening, e.g. Debussy, or Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, it doesn't stick somehow.
I think rock and pop and electronic music have spoiled my ears. My ears want insistent rhythm (meaning drums and bass). Production. Studio spatiality. Timbral range and richness.
It's one of the reasons I found this Morley book such a surprise - and why, in a strange way, even while enjoying it, on some fundamental level I couldn't quite believe it. How could someone who grew up listening to and deep-feeling the Velvets, the Stooges, John Martyn, Roxy, Eno, go through such a total conversion? I mean, yeah, he who fucks nuns will someday join the church... but still!
There is a great novel about this (well, not exactly this, but on theme) - Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach. The conflict between the young woman and the young man - in love, but unable to function sexually - is paralleled by her love of classical music and his passion for blues and rock 'n' roll. It's set around the turn of the 1950s into the 1960s and he's going to places like Eel Pie Island and seeing people like, I dunno, Alex Korner. He tries to play her rock'n'roll records and she tries to make nice comments ("bouncy!"). But the four-square rhythm sounds impossibly crude and rudimentary to her (she plays in a string quartet so has a deep understanding of and immersion in the music). Conversely, when she takes him to concerts, it all sounds ridiculously fussy to him, a prim agitation that makes him itch with restlessness.
Spoiler alert! The marriage breaks up almost instantly (on their wedding night in fact) and they go divergent paths. He is caught up in the adventure of the Sixties, free love, etc. He organizes some rock festivals. He becomes part-owner of a record shop. Never marries or has kids. She meanwhile steadfastly and with great discipline continues with the string quartet, who become acclaimed and renowned.
There is an extraordinary short passage near the end where the young man, now old and red faced and bald, looks back on his life and concludes that it has amounted to nothing. Whereas his ex-bride... She has made a contribution.
McEwan is saying that the whole of post-WW2 culture - the cult of youth, sexual liberation, informality, spontaneity, living for the now - was a gigantic detour and waste of energy. That the true strength of Western civilization is its high culture traditions. This is what will endure. This is what has value and spiritual profundity. He is saying that sublimation and deferred gratification are the mettle out of which lasting cultural worth is forged. That there's an upside to repression.
(The childlessness of the rock-and-roll loving boy-man symbolizes this, and is McEwan tipping the hand a bit. Perhaps the only clumsy touch in what's otherwise a delicate and subtle book).
Ah, this turned into a bit of a detour in itself, from the original point of the blogpost which was a little nostalgic cast-back to those days you are innocent of an idea of "pop", let alone "cool" - a internal aesthetic hierarchy within rock (one that mirrors and duplicates the high versus low opposition that once cast all of pop rock etc into the lowly category).
We used to watch Top of the Pops every week. And I used to love certain songs (Hollies "The Air That I Breathe", Bachman Turner Overdrive "You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet") and was fascinated by others (the bass-detonations and "t-peculiar way" in "Space Oddity", reissued in 1975 and an even huger hit. or the wah-wah guitar in "Theme from 'Shaft'", which I didn't know was wah-wah or even a guitar - it sounded to me like helicopter blades). Sparks's "This Town" made a big impression.
But it never once occurred to me to buy any of these as a 7-inch single.
My slender resources money-wise went to books or Indian ink (I was an aspiring cartoonist, obsessed with Windsor & Newton's range of products) Or to other hobbies / pastimes / obsessions, of which there were a great succession.
Actually, now I remember, there was another source of music in my life before my brother Tim introduced me to punk.
Granny had one of those small portable record-players that look like picnic hampers, with a built-in mono speaker.
For some reasons she had a copy of the Beach Boys Greatest Hits (I think her eldest son, finally moving out, left it there - her own attitude to pop was "it's all rhythm", meaning the drums were too strident).
But the record that we did play a lot was Evita. Despite generally reviling Andrew Lloyd-Weber, this is a really pretty tune, I think.
I've no recollection of ever hearing at the time about this record - David Steel's "I Feel Liberal, Alright!" - which predates Neil Kinnock's fumbling attempts to get down with the youth via Tracy Ulmann videos by several years.
While trawling through old music papers recently I came across this news item about Steel's attempt to rejuvenate the Liberal Party's image.
Until Steel's spoken bit - NME's Pennie Taylor describes it, generously, as rapping - it's a convincingly funky tune, almost disconcertingly so.
The reason for that is the man responsible for the music, Jesse Rae, a serious funkateer.
As a songwriter he penned this classic discofunk tune
Whose melodic structure (and off-color lyrics) I analysed here
Rae then finally broke out as a performer in his own right and had some success, or at least, garnered a heap of attention, in substantial part for his image - the full-blown Braveheart look of kilt, sporran, shield, helmet, scabbard, and sword. He also sung in his native brogue.
This song got quite a bit of attention, as much for the video as the tune.
A few years later I reviewed the single "Houdini"
I mention Zappman Roger Troutman in the review, but this video's titling namechecks Jimmy Douglass - formerly of tough funk unit Slave, he'd produced Gang of Four's Solid Gold, and later he would be Timbaland's right hand man in the studio.
Then when it transpired that this was no one-off but from a very solidly funky album, I did an interview. Which Rae conducted in full costume, wearing that helmet with the metal noseguard strip. I was worried that the man wielding a huge broadsword might have taken exception to the comparison about Fulton Mackay, but he was all affability.
Stubbs gave the album The Thistle the thumbs-up too.
He carried on fitfully putting out music over the next decade or two... but, here's a funny thing, he had a stab at politics, running not as a Liberal (despite the admiration for Steel) nor as Scottish Nationalist, but as an independent.
In 2007, Rae stood for the Scottish Parliament as an independent in the Scottish Borders electoral constituency of Roxburgh and Berwickshire to warn the Scottish Borders that they would be losing their high street banks and of the devastation to local shops and businesses this would cause.[ He gained 318 votes for a 1.2% share of the vote. He stood again in 2011 as an independent candidate in the expanded seat of Ettrick, Roxburgh and Berwickshire, this time polling 308 votes for a 1.1% share. In the 2015 general and 2021 Scottish Parliament elections, he stood in Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk.
Bands no one ever mentions today (a potential series....)
Stiff Little Fingers
I remember a boy at my school whose binder was covered in logos for TRB, but he also had the SLF logo
On the basis of that first album Inflammable Material, with all its songs about the Troubles, they were seen as political punk at its rawest.
Hence the bracketing of SLF by my schoolmate (Sandford!) alongside Tom Robinson Band.
Punkest of the punks - aurally, if not image-wise - for a brief moment, Stiff Little Fingers were.
Spearheads indeed of a second-wave of punk that included the Ruts, Angelic Upstarts, and what would soon be called Oi!
... and then almost immediately Stiff Little Fingers became more of a mainstream rock band.
Jumped from Rough Trade to Chrysalis.
Cleaner sound and cleancut image.
Second album Nobody's Heroes cracked the Top Ten, got to #8.
Modest-sized hit singles and a surprisingly large number of appearances on Top of the Pops.
Only Jake Burns's pained rasp really connects it to punk.
No, I don't think anyone would mention them nowadays.
Even though in some ways they presage the American hardcore sound - Jake Burns's vocals as paint-stripping as the dude in Negative Approach. You can virtually hear the nodules forming on his larynx. Every note sounds like it's at #11 on special Spinal Tap style amplifiers. By empathetic projection, similar to the way that air guitar works, hearing his voice causes pain in your own throat.
Nor would anyone think of them alongside the Rough Trade groups like Raincoats, Scritti, Essential Logic, Young Marble Giants, et al, despite having scored a signal triumph for the label by being Rough Trade's first record to make the charts - SLF's debut Inflammable Material went in at #14 which at that time seemed like an impossible feat for an an independent label.
Well, the sound is not postpunk but punk at its most straightforwardly blasting.
SLF carried on for years, putting out albums deep into the Eighties, touring up and down the UK playing mid-size concert halls.
This advert is from 1982
Broke up in '87.... Burns hooked up with Bruce Foxton for a while.
Then they reformed and they carry on still, playing to their fanbase.
In Shock and Awe, I talk about this period just before glam, when the values of The Underground are in the ascendant. Albums are where it's at and consequently singles sales droop dramatically - it takes a lot less sales to get in the singles charts than it did during most of the Sixties, and a lot less than it will once again when the T.Rex Slade Sweet Glitter boom takes off.
One odd side effect of this is that there's a period when a lot of hairy 'n' heavy groops have hits - strangely, some of these proggy groups still do bother to put out singles, even though the likes of Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd have completely spurned such commercialist ploys. Family, for instance, get to #4 with "In My Own Time".
From January 29th 1970, the Top of the Pops episode above might well be the nadir's nadir in terms of this unpop-as-pop phase. There's really nothing at all here for the teenyboppers - no pretty faces to scream at (they're mostly covered in face-fuzz), no fruggable beats. As for melody, all that's on offer is some really runny AM radio oriented gunk (on this show Edison Lighthouse and Brotherhood of Man)
(Be warned, it's one of those "Banned" TOTPs on account of Jimmy S**ille presenting.)
Just look at the line-up
Blodwyn Pig - Same Old Story
Arrival - Friends
Rare Bird -Sympathy
Chicago - I'm A Man
Jethro Tull - The Witch's Promise
Mary Hopkin - Temma Harbour
Shocking Blue - Venus
Badfinger - Come And Get It
Jonathan King - Let It All Hang Out
Brotherhood Of Man - United We Stand
Canned Heat -Let's Work Together
Edison Lighthouse - Love Grows (where My Rosemary Goes)
S**ille seems ever so slightly embarrassed about the week's offerings, referring to how they have all sorts on the show, which is now 45 minutes long, including "avant-garde music, fire guard music, pop music".
He introduces the opener Blodwyn Pig as "a touch of the avant-garde"
Rare Bird similarly seem to discomfit him.
The gulf between the beardy proggers (the antic grimaces of Ian Anderson!) and the AM Radio pap is enormous.
Arrival, who I'd never heard of, are somewhere in between Underground and middle of the road - a sort of Laura Nyro-ish people-come-together type singalong.
Jonathan King would represent pure bubblegum except it's a cover of a really great Sixties garage tune from several years earlier by The Hombres - "Let It All Hang Out". Not a great cover version: it comes over as a few-years-tardy spoof of psychedelia, especially with the hippy coat King's wearing - like a premonition of Neil from the Young Ones.
The only really exciting song, a single that could stand alongside the mid-Sixties flood of great singles, is Shocking Blue's "Venus", which is a bit like "Hello, I Love You" delivered from within female sass rather than from a predatorial outside.
Although the Chicago tune is surprisingly dynamic. Enhanced mightily by Pan's People raving it up during the percussive breakdowns - which resemble that middle bit in "Whole Lotta Love". And thank goodness we don't have to look at the band's ugly mugs.
I do like the semi-animated still images that accompany the Canned Heat song but the tune itself is pedestrian choogle.
Then, oddly, despite this sort of semi-video having been played, Canned Heat appear on the show, giving away singles. Why didn't they just mime in the studio?
I suppose some would say, "what about Badfinger?" But to me they are that sort of warm, well-made, grown-up "pop" in the Macca / Alan Price et al zone. They are no Shocking Blue, that's for sure.
The only black music on the show is the interstitial sound of The Meters.
