1976 was another planet

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.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_1nkUbepaU 

The summer of 1976

The West Indies cricket team, back in the UK for another series against England, has endured a spectacular fall from grace since the mid-nineties, having been the dominant force in world cricket for the best part of two decades.

Despite the often dismal standards to which they have slipped, I will always have a soft spot for them. This is mainly because I first got interested in the game by watching their great side of the mid-seventies, featuring magical players like Andy Roberts, Michael Holding, Gordon Greenidge, Clive Lloyd and the incomparable Viv Richards. The swagger with which that man made his way to the crease seemed to put the opposition in its place before he had even started to unleash his outrageous and devastating variety of strokes. To see Richards at the top of his game -a rapid, ruthless and stylish accumulator of runs- was to witness the essence of cool.

The 1976 series between England and the West Indies had infamously been preceded by England captain Tony Greig’s remarks about hoping to make the West Indies ‘grovel’. It was an unfortunate remark to have made at the best of times, but coming from a white South African, those words seemed –at best- to have been catastrophically ill-judged. It would be an understatement to say that Greig’s remarks gave something of an edge to the series. For that alone, one might have been inclined to support the West Indies, but I had another, more personal reason for getting behind the visiting team.

When I was in my early teens, there was a lad who, every summer, used to come up to Glasgow from Manchester to spend a big chunk of his school holidays with Scottish relatives. Let’s call him ‘Mike’. He was a junior member of Lancashire County Cricket Club and an avid England supporter. He was rather less than fond of the West Indians and used a variety of derogatory terms to describe both individual players and the team; his favoured epithet for the West Indies was ‘the bus conductors’. In modern terms, I suppose he’d be described as a bit of a racist. I didn’t mind the fact that he supported his country, but there was something about the way that he couched this support in terms of sheer hatred for the opposition that seemed just too ugly to be comfortable with. Enforced exposure to Mike (who, in everyday aspects of social intercourse, was by no means a pleasant young man) meant that it just seemed kind of natural for me to support whoever was up against England.

The first two matches in the series had been drawn, with England making a pretty good fist of it against the supremely talented opposition. By the time of the third test at Old Trafford in July, Mike had arrived in Glasgow for his annual sojourn. I recall him boasting, on the eve of that match, that Lancashire’s Frank Hayes, playing on his home turf, would ‘sort those fucking bus conductors out’. I didn’t know anything about Frank Hayes, but was not –at that point- inclined to wish him well.

In the first innings, the tourists posted a modest 211, with Gordon Greenidge making a remarkable 134 out of this total. The home side went in late on the first day with high hopes of establishing a first innings lead, but endured a vicious battering from the West Indian pace attack. By the time Frank Hayes arrived at the crease on the second morning, England had four wickets down with only 48 on the board. The home crowd would have hoped that there was perhaps an opportunity for their hero to dig in and help turn the match back in England’s favour, but one ball later, poor Frank was heading back to the pavilion having failed to trouble the scorers. In attempting to fend off a vicious short-pitched delivery from Andy Roberts, he had been unable to do much more than send the ball lobbing in a sad arc of surrender to Clive Lloyd in the gulley. Around half of the crowd sat in stunned silence, while the other half let rip with whistles, hooters and what sounded like a bewildering variety of percussive instruments; those West Indians sure knew how to make a noise. Meanwhile, in Glasgow, at least one wee boy probably shouted something like “get it up ye!” at the TV.

According to Wisden:

In eighty-five minutes England were all out, the last eight wickets, in fact, going in an hour for 25 runs. Holding, who took five for 9 in 7.5 overs was the leader of a fearsome trio. Some balls lifted at frightening speed and Greig and Underwood both had narrow escapes from what could have been serious injury. Woolmer and Hayes received balls which were all but unplayable and even the greatest of batting sides would have been severely taxed.

Dismissed for 71 in that first innings, England went on to lose the match by the small matter of 425 runs. I had no gripe against Frank Hayes or English cricket, but young Mike’s ugly mean-spiritedness made me take great pleasure from the way that Clive Lloyd’s team dismantled England over the course of that summer. The 3-0 series defeat seemed comprehensive at the time, but worse, far worse, was to come; over the next fifteen years, that all-conquering West Indies side would go on to wipe the floor with all available opposition and would twice hand out 5-0 series thrashings to an utterly hapless England.

When I was growing up, there was no great level of interest in cricket among young Glaswegians. It was (and, for some, still is) seen as a boring English game played by, and for, effete posh boys from private schools. I count myself lucky to have first sampled the game at a time when a magnificently talented side was somewhere near the beginning of an upward curve that would see them dominate world cricket for many years. The dazzling ability of those West Indians sowed the seeds of a love that has endured to this day. 

I've got a beard, get me out of here

So the BBC is running old editions of TOTP from 1976. I’ve no idea why they started the re-runs from that particular year. Perhaps it’s something as simple as them not having a complete record from previous years. Or then again, maybe it is something to do with 1976 being perceived in some quarters as pop’s ‘year zero’, the date at which punk -according to legend- revolutionised the music scene. The truth, however, is that punk was mainly an interesting socio-cultural phenomenon, one that paved the way for some interesting music to follow. As a 'movement' however, it didn't produce that much in the way of great songs. There is plenty of music from the period 1976 to 1978 that still sounds fresh and vibrant today (the works of Stevie Wonder and David Bowie spring to mind), but I don't think that is quite the case with the majority of punk's output. Some folk hold it as an article of faith that punk ‘changed everything’, but if changing everything means changing the face of the pop charts, the ‘punk changed everything’ theory doesn’t really stand up to scrutiny, as ten minutes on the intergoogle studying chart statistics will tell you.

Mind you, watching some of the acts from 1976, it’s easy to see why there might have been a musical reaction against what appeared to be the stultifying dominance of middle-of-the-road and cheesy pop. It may have stopped just short of being an actual reign of terror, but the saccharine ranks of MOR and cheese managed, on a regular basis, to dope the charts into a state of torpor. Take for instance the band Liverpool Express, who got to number eleven with ‘You are my love’. As an art statement, this track was -in its own way- pretty extreme, because it took the concept of ‘lightweight middle of the road’ right to the middle of the middle of the road and then knocked some of the edginess off until the sound was gossamer-light. Then they smoothed off any remaining rough edges in the hope of achieving a theoretical state of absolute translucence. Add to that an uber-trite lyric that even Hallmark’s A and R department might have rejected for its excessive vapidity and you’ve got a recipe for musical revolt. Being subjected to this kind of stuff on a regular basis would have made any self-respecting kid hanker for scruffy bands with loud guitars and a working knowledge of, at best, three major chords.

For all their evil genius, Liverpool Express had nowhere near the level of success enjoyed by the Greek singer Demis Roussos, a chart phenomenon who appealed mainly, I suspect, to ladies of a certain age. Demis dressed like a character from an episode of Star Trek, in which Kirk and crew had beamed down to a planet where the dominant species had evolved from a race of fortune tellers and new age therapists. He sometimes appeared on TOTP through the miracle of specially-filmed clips shot in Greece, or at least shot somewhere that was hot, with rocks and sand and electricity that was magically supplied to the various unplugged instruments. He was a handsome big fellow and he did his fair share of smouldering, but that ‘mean and slightly moody’ look was rather at odds with his high-pitched vocal delivery, which often attracted scorn from his critics. He may have sold millions of records, but many folk will remember him for having been disparaged by Mike Leigh in the play ‘Abigail’s Party’, wherein his anodyne music was a deemed to be a risible signifier of the upwardly mobile suburbanite affectations of the main character. It can’t be all that pleasant having a bearded lefty playwright looking down his nose at you, so for that reason alone I’d be inclined to stick up for Demis.

Perhaps one of the reasons he attracted ridicule was that, with song titles like ‘My friend the wind’ and ‘Goodbye my love, goodbye’, (yes, it’s that second ‘goodbye’ that does it), you got the impression that he took himself quite seriously. Maybe someone should have advised him to take ‘down to earth’ lessons from another mid-seventies chart topper, David Essex. Essex, now playing someone’s granddad on Eastenders, was an astonishingly good-looking song-and-dance man who lucked out with a succession of film roles and chart smashes. Watching him the other week perform even a mediocre song like ‘Home’ was a real pleasure, perhaps because he had the look of a man who knew full well that he had pretty much won the lottery and was loving every minute of it. Essex was by no means a great singer, but he had an individual character to his voice, an impish grin and the general air of a man who didn’t appear to take himself too seriously, a man who knew that he had managed to make a little bit of talent go a very long way. A bit like Robbie Williams, but twice as charming, three times as good-looking and nowhere near as needy.

David Essex didn’t invite ridicule in the way that Demis Roussos evidently did. Perhaps folk suspected that Demis, with his quasi-operatic vocal style and his progressive rock background (he was in ‘Aphrodite’s Child’ with keyboard wizard Vangelis), thought that pop music was maybe just a wee bit beneath him. Maybe the hair, the beard, the clothes and the moody demeanour gave out the coded message that he would have been much happier fronting a ‘proper’ progressive rock band and appearing with other bearded blokes on the Old Grey Whistle Test. And maybe then Mike Leigh wouldn’t have been so snotty about him.