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 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 "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.
