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.
I will admit to quite liking the Tull, at least between '69-'71, but their huge popularity in the early 70s will always remain an absolute mystery to me. Anderson wd have come across as rather sinister to those of a tender age, simultaneously lugubrious and kind of diffident, and let's not mention the codpiece. Something distancing about the knowingly theatrical delivery, all the songs about tramps, minstrels and horses
ReplyDeleteI tend to bracket Jethro Tull with the Sensational Alex Harvey Band - a whiff of "amuse me, jester" about the pair of them.
ReplyDeleteHad no idea Brotherhood of Man were around for such a long time. I thought they were artificially put together for Eurovision.
I quite like the music of 1970, it was a brief moment of purity - First Step, Fire and Water, Road to Ruin, etc. As if the anti-commercial instincts of the hippies had won. Makes me suspect that Glam was put together by a bunch of record industry insiders during a planning session.
I too enjoy the 68-71 Tull. Their performance of A Song for Jeffrey in The Rolling Stone's Rock and Roll Circus is a highlight.
ReplyDeletePretty much exactly the period captured by Nik Cohn in his elegiac “Ending” to Awopbopaloobop, first published in 1969:
ReplyDelete“Anyhow, it’s finished now, the first mindless explosion, and the second stage has begun. Pop has gotten complicated. That was inevitable, everything ends, nothing remains simple. Pop has split itself into factions and turned sophisticated. Part of it has a mind now, makes fine music. The other part is purely industrial, a bored and boring business like any other. Either way, there are no more heroes and no more Superpop. It has all been reduced to human beings.“
Could probably make the case that that book, and that chapter in particular heralded / prefigured Glam, the same way Mick Farren’s ‘The Titanic Sails at Dawn’ sounded the trumpet for Punk.
DeleteExactly - Cohn says what was once integrated has now separated out. Bowie and Roxy and T.Rex will integrate the two aspects again... Roxy with more of a foot in the Blodwyn/King Crimson realm than the other two.
DeleteThe bubblegum-gone-harder side of glam - glitter rather than artpop - is more like the mindless industrial thing he's complaining about. Hit factory producers, bands as puppets. The Sweet, desperately wishing they were Deep Purple but bossed around in the studio.
I often wondered what Cohn made of glam, it does seem like an attempt to make good on his Superpop idea, reverse the artprog direction he disliked.... sales of singles shot up dramatically from Bolan onwards
But i think he was so disillusioned he wasn't paying attention. And then disco happened and he got interested again
He did refer to Bowie with appreciation in a piece written decades after the fact
This is the Cohn piece, a celebration of the return of the Single in the 21st Century, meaning the Track as in streaming... the death of the album https://shockandawesimonreynolds.blogspot.com/2019/06/the-truth-of-pop-continued.html
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