For those not old enough to remember, 1976 was not just
another year in pop music, but another planet entirely. As evidence to support this statement, I’d
like to present exhibit A, a song by Mr JJ Barrie. JJ was a genuine one-hit wonder who hit the
top spot in the charts for a single week in June that year with ‘No
Charge’. Almost without parallel on the cheese continuum, ‘No Charge’
was a paean to motherhood that left mere cloying sentimentality on the starting
blocks as it blazed a noxious trail to the far side of Maudlin Central. The story of the song features a little boy
who asks his mother for some extra pocket money after presenting her with an
itemised list of all the household chores he has successfully carried out. Mum, rather than do the proper parental thing
and send the little scamp upstairs to tidy his room, decides to make up a bill
for all of the things she has done for him.
Her ‘bill’ constitutes the chorus of the song:
For
the nine months I carried you growing inside me – no charge
For
the nights I sat up with you, talked with you, prayed for you – no charge
For
the time and tears that you cost though the years – no charge
And
when you add it all up, the full cost of my love is – no charge
Yes, ‘No Charge’ was weapons-grade schmaltz, capable of
inducing a lump in the throat and something in the eye at twenty paces, but
somehow –particularly when the vocal from mum kicks in- this song still manages
to elicit at least the flicker of an emotional response in me. I realise, with no little degree of shame,
that this probably says more about my pitiful status as a nostalgic, easy-to-manipulate
sucker than anything else.
It is remarkable to think that ‘No Charge’ got to number one
in the charts; it’s not just that they don’t write songs like this anymore,
it’s more that anyone who even considered trying to write a song like this in
2013 would probably be locked up, or at the very least laughed out of the early
auditions of X-Factor.
There are some who would argue that pop music in 2013 is
trundling along in a rather self-regarding dotage, endlessly regurgitating and
repackaging everything it has done before. This view holds that pop music in 2013 is generally
too calculated, too marketed, too buffed to a sheen, too soul-less, too pre-packaged
to be anything other than mere ‘product’. I don’t necessarily subscribe to that, but I do suspect
that, whatever else it might be, pop music now can never be less than streetwise,
smart and self-aware. 1976 –by contrast-
seems like a prelapsarian golden age, an age before cynicism and auto-tuning,
an age before the irony cat got out of the bag.
On the theme of self-awareness, I suspect that some folk
will be expecting my next sentence to read something like this:
“Ah
… when I was a lad, it was all fields around here.”
And funnily enough, the song that knocked JJ Barrie from the
top of the charts was ‘(I’ve got a brand new) Combine Harvester’ by The
Wurzels.
