The Unpoppermost of the Toppermost

 

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. 

Quintessence(s) of Old Wave (4 of ??)

 

There can surely be none-more-Old-Wave than this clip of Lindisfarne doing "Fog On The Tyne" on the Old Grey Whistle Test.

Scarcely believable that music like this could exist. 

As for the lyrics: 

Sittin' in a sleazy snack-bar suckin'

Sickly sausage rolls

Slippin' down slowly

Slippin' down sideways

Think I'll sign off the dole

'cause the fog on the Tyne is all mine, all mine

Could a copper comprehend

That a crooked coffin maker is just an undertaker who

undertakes to be a friend

'cause the fog on the Tyne is all mine, all mine

We can swing together

We can have a wee wee

We can have a wet on the wall

If someone slips a whisper

That his simple sister slapped them down

And they slavered on their smalls

Not only did they exist (still exist in fact) but they were hugely popular - the album Fog On the Tyne got to #1 and was the eighth biggest Brit seller of 1972. 

This was the Top 5 single off the album.

In the Top of the Pops rendition, the drummer reputedly hit a large bass drum with a rubber fish - but I see no trace of such antics here.

The next album rejoiced in the title Dingly Dell.

More albums with very Old Wave artwork

By this point, after the New Wave, they're just wet -  Smokie with strings

I associate Lindisfarne with The Strawbs - a group I find oddly fascinating not just as quintessence of Old Wave but also a quintessence of rock middlingness

Ah I'd got the idea it was an anti-union song, but apparently it's a celebration - and became a chant on picket lines. 

Now I vaguely remember that arch-Old Waver Steve Harley wrote an anti-union song

Which would make sense given that he'd been traumatized by a walk-out when the original Cockney Rebel demanded more pay and more say. 

Is it this one, "Red Is A Mean, Mean Colour"?

Hard to extract that sentiment from the lyrics - or indeed any coherent statement on anything

This one from '78's Hobo With A Grin  - presumably made during Grunwick etc etc - does include the line: "I don't believe in unions"

 

"I don't believe in unions, I don't believe in power

Tired of revolutions, they're dyin' hour by hour

Yes, I believe in open space, yes, I believe in human race

Yes, I believe in open space, yes, I believe in human race"

Some of the Strawbs actually went New Wave 

The lyric and album artwork seem Old Wave 

Although admittedly there is a twist to the sexism in "Nice Legs" - the singer gets his comeuppance. 

Discogs claims The Monks were intended initially as a spoof of punk rock. 

And also asserts that their debut album Bad Habits went double platinum in Canada. 

Old Grey Wave / Don't Go Back to Beardsville

 

Todd-talk led me to this Old Grey Whistle Test excursion to Bearsville, New York, in 1977 - for the Bearsville Picnic, an annual festival convened by Albert Grossman and his Bearsville label. Performances by Foghat, Jesse Winchester, Paul Butterfield, Corky Laing, Todd Rundgren and  Utopia. 

A year earlier, Bob Harris and the OGTW camera crew made a similar jaunt to Georgia for the Macon Whoopee Festival, instigated by the Southern Rock label Capricorn. Performers include Wet Willie, The Marshall Tucker Band, Bonnie Bramlett, Sea Level. There's an all-star jam featuring Dickey Betts, Elvin Bishop, Dan Toler, Bramlett, and Stillwater. Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter - who'd just announced his run for President - talks about the importance of rock music for youth consciousness today. 

Thinking about what "Old Wave" means - and it's not a term anyone used at the time - it occurred to me that it's not something you would apply to anything and everything pre-punk. It doesn't make sense to tag Leo Sayer or Lynsey de Paul "Old Wave" - or most of the contents of the pop charts, for that matter. (Obviously, it's not a distinction that works at all with black music - soul, reggae, funk, disco, all of that stands completely outside this schema). 

"Old Wave" describes specifically what until that point been a new wave of a kind in itself: the proggily expansive (but also sophisto / rootsy) movement in rock from about '67 onwards, plus attendant values, assumptions, attitudes, mannerisms, argot, sartorial-tonsorial trappings, graphic design conventions etc etc. 

Growing a beard (Beardsville would work just as well as Bearsville). Getting better and better at playing your instrument. Songs getting longer. Solos stretching out. The growing-up of rock. 

(In that sense, "Old Wave" kinda does fit, in so far as this was rock'n'roll growing older, embracing grown-up seriousness - leaving rock 'n 'roll and its teenage outlook behind). 

People didn't say Old Wave at the time (i.e. 76-77), but they did say "Boring Old Fart" -  that was the antonym of New Wave. 

B.O.F.  - a hurtful, heartless designation for artists you once admired.... former heroes in many cases... and by extension, a set of aesthetic values you most likely subscribed to until very recently (Mark Perry with his Zappa albums, Keith Levene with his Yes groupiedom). 

The sort of people who embraced punk included a lot of people who had been listening to Little Feat and Hawkwind right up until Horses and the debut Ramones. 

(I have mentioned before the lovely, lovely touch in 24 Hour Party People: Tony Wilson - shoulder length hair all through this period - and his chums go back to their pad after seeing the Pistols at the Lesser Free Hall, but what they put on to play while skinning up is John Martyn's Solid Air). 

"Boring Old Fart" was wielded against people who were then in their early thirties, sometimes even late twenties. People once loved, now ruthlessly shoved behind a temporal line - in effect, told "you're useless... go away and die". 

Hey looky here - I am rereading Nik Cohn's Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom (so unbelievably great) and here he is, in spring 1968, identifying the dynamic and actually using the term B.O.F., in reference to the Rolling Stones.

"That's how fast pop is: the anarchists of one year are the boring old farts of the next"

Early 1968 - the very dawn of what-would-be Old Wave but at that moment of dawning was a new tendency.

A development  Cohn detested of course -  Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom is elegaic, it ends with a "so that was Superpop, now it's all gone" coda, in which he mourns the emergence of an adult and arty rock. 

The two-and-a-bit greatest pages of writing about rock and pop ever, still. 

Although funnily enough for the paperback version a year or so later, Cohn adds a very very brief update on the state of rock - less than two pages - and the only bands he mentions as positive developments could not be more beardy, ZigZaggy, Old-Wave-to-be: Bonnie & Delaney & Friends, The Band, Flying Burrito Brothers.