movement culture people / the roads of creation

 

Bob Marley and the Wailers with the mighty "Exodus" 

I have always heard the lyric as "movement culture people" which I prefer to what I have just established is the actual lyric "movement of Jah people"

"movement culture people" expands outwards to include Neu! and all sorts, whereas "movement of Jah people" narrows to a religious meaning

Under "movement culture people", you could also file another song on this rather cool episode of Top of the Pops from 1977 -   "Roadrunner" 

albeit not a mimed performance by Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers but a daft but enjoyable dance routine from Pan's People, or is it Legs and Co

The song got to #11 in the UK charts - amazing. But then "Marquee Moon" was a UK hit single too, it's in the chart rundown at the start of this episode in fact.

Richman has quite a case of adenoids, but it just adds to the gawky aura of amateurism.

But wait, there is another connection between the Wailers and Modern Lovers beyond the utopian motion vision  (and the word in common - "roads of creation" in "Exodus")

For later in that same year JR & and ML would have an even bigger UK hit with the trifle "Egyptian Reggae", an instrumental. #5 in the hit parade.

Again danced with some proto-Bangles nonsense by the resident troupe at TOTP

Here's JR himself doing the sideways dance thing

Egypt - well that's where Moses is leading the chosen people out of. As the song says

(Movement of Jah people) Send us another brother Moses

(Movement of Jah people) From across the Red Sea

The very first time I heard "Exodus" was not the original but a junglized version played at a 1994 festival in Clissold Park in Stoke Newington  by deejays from Exodus, the Luton rave collective.

I'd always assumed that the track was made by someone associated with Exodus  - but doesn't necessarily seem to be so, instead it's a kind of anthem-of-opportunity

Another "Exodus"-bassed track, this time the mode of deliverance is airplane

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. 

The Toppermost of the Poppermost

How much do I love these Top of the Pops opening sequences from the late Sixties and early Seventies? 

Quite often they are the high point of the show and it's downhill all the way when we get to the actual music! 

What is surprising is how frequently they changed up the intro sequence, which generally looks distinctly more expensive and edited-with-flair than the main body of the programme. 

That whole episode is actually worth watching but primarily I commend to your eyeballs this edition of TOTP and the many others below for the opening sequences with the run down of the chart - although they varied them up often, these intro bits all generally put across a POP SCENE / SWINGING ENGLAND / GROOVY CHICKS vibe. Like the Carnaby Street thing lingering into the 1970s.

Then there's the theme tune, a sort of library-music remake of Led Zep's "Whole Lotta Love" with added horns - unfeasibly thrilling, rather too often the best music in any given show.

Before the Led Zep remake, the theme was a punchy movie-thriller / action-series type theme, quite redolent of The Prisoner's intro sequence. In fact, given that it soundtracks a chart run-down, you could imagine a pop star, or a pop single, defiantly shouting: "I AM NOT A NUMBER, I AM A FREE SOUND".

The still image press photos of the bands and singers in the chart are often bathos-drenched and sometimes hideously unflattering - you think, 'what were the record company, the publicist, thinking, providing that to the Beeb?!"

Although the stylized black and white photos of artists in the chart in this episode above are unusually artistic and striking-looking.

So many artists that you've never heard, or even heard of!

Another thing about these TOTPs I find endearing is how bad most of the dancing is. It really does start to seem like there's an English disease of Chronic Arrythmia.  Young people lurching about, determinedly off the beat. Boogieing in invisible deep sea diver boots. Office party twirls and dips. 

But in their own stilted way, the girls are really getting down and grooving, in an oh-so-English way.

Tremendous levels of enthusiasm and excitement  - like the line of girls brocking out to "I Want You Back" by The Jackson Five in the Tony Blackburn presented TOTP above....

Or the girls in the background of this classic T.Rex "Get It On" rendition from above

Or the sweet girl in the white frock really getting into it in back of The Strawbs in this one. 

 

In Zaire

How amazing that after over four decades of unhealthy obsession with pop music, you can still come across astounding oddball songs from your own lifetime and your own country that you never heard before!

Another version 

This though is my favorite - the one I encountered first - while wading masochistically through an absolutely atrocious, nearly completely barren episode of Top of the Pops from 1976, the unchallenged nadiral year of British pop... at  least until the 2000s. 

The performance is at 27.32

Freaky-freaky sounds the guitarist wrenches out of his instrument in "the solo"! 

It actually reminds me a little of this astonishing avant-guitar release 

Followed by a performance by Twiggy. Singing country and western.

Nadiral it was.

Johnny Wakelin was a fellow from Brighton and amazingly "In Zaire" isn't even his first hit single about Muhammad Ali. Before the Rumble in the Jungle inspired "In Zaire", he had a Top 10 hit with "Black Superman (Muhammad Ali)".

He was initially almost monothematic, song after song about boxers and boxing.

This made me think about other songs about boxers and boxing, Or that take boxing as an allegorical framing device.

LL Cool J, "Mama Said Knock You Out" - the single greatest rapping performance of all time? 

That one by Simon & Garfunkel. 

Survivor, "Eye of the Tiger"

This garage rap oddity, uploaded to the commonweal by yours truly - specifically the second song, "K.O."

Didn't Guns N'Roses have a song about music journalists called "Get in the Ring"?

There's loads more, even just in rap.