Fascinated by this particular performance of a song that was among the select group of pre-punk songs to cut through to me, a child then not paying that much attention to the hit parade beyond a weekly watch of Top of the Pops.
"Wide Eyed and Legless" is a harrowing confession of inadequacy and failure - "this world is full of my shame" - from a man beaten by the bottle ("the rhythm of the glass is stronger than the rhythm of life") and who sees no prospect of ever getting "free of these chains". He's been here before, so many times, and remains locked in a cycle of sorrow that cannot be drowned.
And here's the singer grinning through the performance, laughing and larking about, and the band too all smiley affability - while an audience of children (the show is Supersonic) bob balloons about and treat Fairweather-Low and crew as if they're a boy-band like Slik or Flintlock.
Incongruous!
Musically, it's true, the laidback, easy-going sound is at odds with the lyric - it sounds more lighthearted than the subject matter..
That Old Wave musicianship also feels equally at odds with Supersonic. It's like if John Martyn popped up in the teatime slot for kids programs
Packed with pre-punk pleasures: the smokey yet somehow also icy electric piano (on the record it's played by Rabbit aka John Bundrick.... here it is Georgie Fame)... the pedal steel from B.J. Cole.... Maudlin countrypolitan strings add sweetness that only brings out the sourness more sharply.... and a great aching edge-of-strained vocal from Andy Fairweather-Low.
For sure, pop history has had its fair share of "heavy" hit singles, dealing with death and other grim stuff...
(I mean, "Copacabana" is tragedy.... "D.IV.O.R.C.E." is gritted-teeth behind the jokey framing... Country specifically is full of this kind of thing: "If Drinkin' Don't Kill Me (Her Memory Will)", "He Stopped Loving Her Today"... I once tried to persuade a girlfriend that "Hello Walls" was as harrowing as Joy Division).
But "Wide Eyed and Legless" - it's like The Lost Weekend or Leaving Las Vegas fed through Billy Sherrill...
"Wide Eyed and Legless" got to Number 6 in the winter of 1975.
You couldn't get much more Old Wave than the title and cover of the album on which "Wide Eyed" appears. The washed-out colour palette alone...
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"Legless" I get.... "wide eyed", though? It works in the song - but on reflection I'm not sure what he means... so drunk you've lost control of your vision as well as your limbs?
Did Andy F-L actually create an idiom here, by combining two existing idiomatic type words?
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Presumably it's the semi-inspiration for this made-for-TV film I never heard of before, and which seems to be trying to out-do the song for grimness.
Wide-Eyed and Legless (known in the US as The Wedding Gift) is a 1993 made-for-TV British drama film, directed by Richard Loncraine starring Julie Walters, Jim Broadbent, Sian Thomas and Thora Hird.
It is based on the 1989 book Diana's Story by the writer Deric Longden, who co-wrote the script with Jack Rosenthal.] The film tells the story of the final years of Deric's (played by Broadbent) marriage to his wife, Diana (Walters), who contracted a degenerative illness which left her unable to walk and in almost constant pain and which medical officials were unable to understand at the time, though now believed to be a form of chronic fatigue syndrome or myalgic encephalomyelitis. As Diana's health deteriorated, she encourages him to spend time with another woman whom Longden has met (the partially-sighted and legally blind novelist Aileen Armitage (Thomas)), to help ease his pain over her eventual death.
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It's been borrowed at least a couple of times as the title for a book, including this one, where the "wide eyed" fits the idea perhaps of an innocent thrown into the decadence and madness of the rock biz:
Wide Eyed & Legless: The memoirs of a music biz journalist & pr
by Brian Anthony Harrigan
The story of a music journalist in the UK in the 1970s and early Eighties in which our hero is fished out of a freezing swimming pool by Ozzy Osbourne, is terrified by the older brother of the Kray Twins, inadvertently inspires a hit record for Lindisfarne, gets his best friend a smack in the mouth from Tony Iommi, helps launch a brand new music paper in ten days, co-writes the Encyclopedia Metallica, is horrified by Jimmy Saville, spends an afternoon in a pub with Genesis P. Orridge and an elephant's vagina, faints after meeting a Beach Boy, cruises the bomb-ravaged streets of Belfast with the Bay City Rollers and is at a complete loss as to what to do with Dee D. Jackson
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Looking for any info on the real-life inspiration for the Andy Fairweather-Low song, I came across a borrowing of the title by latterday singer-songwriter Laura Veirs
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In a mysteriously deleted post, a commenter notes what I had clean forgot: Talking Heads's "Cross Eyed and Painless" is clearly a nod to "Wide Eyed and Legless". So it must have got some radio play in the USA....
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A detailed interview with Andy Fairweather-Low, going from his pop star days in Amen Corner through the solo career and onto his long latterday career as a journeyman playing with figures like Eric Clapton and Roger Waters. Presumably his amiability and reliability have put him good stead...
