Top of the Pops, 24th May 1979: Rise of the machines

Watching re-runs of old editions of Top of the Pops reminds me that the show could be exciting, tedious, brilliant and stupid, often within the space of forty infuriating minutes. Whichever week of whichever year you’d care to drop into, you’ll find that the charts were pretty mediocre, with sometimes only the occasional gem sparkling among heaps of anodyne rubbish. On a bad week, Top of the Pops could make you feel that the music business existed just to rub your nose in the futility of existence. On other occasions, the stars would align and the tastes of Joe and Josephine Public might roughly coincide with yours. Then you could allow yourself to believe that everything in the world was good and that pop music was a truly wonderful thing.

Once in a lifetime, you might win the lottery and encounter an episode that so faithfully reflected your musical worldview that you’d be tempted to think that the producer had rifled through your record collection and opted to share your exquisite taste with the nation. This happened to me one evening, late in May 1979. An episode of Top of the Pops (shown recently on BBC4) featured Roxy Music, David Bowie, Elvis Costello, Blondie, ELO, The Skids and a ‘new’ act that had already exerted a powerful grip on my musical imagination. I loved all of those named artists, but the new act that night – Tubeway Army, led by Gary Numan- somehow felt like ‘my’ discovery.

I had heard Tubeway Army for the first time a couple of months previously, while listening late one night to John Peel’s show on BBC Radio. Sitting in a corner of our living room with the headphones at ear-damaging volume, I would have been hoping that the show would throw up something interesting. John Peel played stuff you wouldn’t hear anywhere else and -if you could abide the default setting of 'indie bloke' freemasonry- you could usually expect to find some excellent music in among the (often deservedly) obscure flotsam and jetsam. Midway through what had been an average middle-of-the-week show, he played a track called Down in the Park and duly transformed my musical world. It was a menacingly atmospheric, yet hauntingly beautiful slice of electronic pop and I hadn’t heard anything quite like it.

I couldn’t quite grasp all of the detail, but I knew that the song told a story. The lyrics seemed far removed from the bog standard new wave fare, painting a nightmarish scene in which the park was not a place for the local folk to gather and enjoy the scenery; it was, instead, part of a minatory landscape in which killers, government agents and ‘rape machines’ roamed, brutalising a cowed populace. At the end of the track, Peel said something like: ‘Blimey … that sounds like a Pink Floyd for the 1980s’. He was wrong about the Pink Floyd bit, but absolutely right about the ‘blimey’. To a lonely teenager imagining himself at the centre of an alienated and hostile universe, Gary Numan really hit the sweet spot.

That weekend, I hunted down the Replicas album and quickly became absorbed in its dystopian and decadent fantasies. It appeared to be a concept album set ten minutes into a totalitarian future in which population control was maintained by government surveillance agents, people had relationships with synthetic humans and the city was patrolled by thought police and sinister assassins in trench coats. Numan’s musical schtick was part-Bowie (particularly the Low album) part Kraftwerk, part Brian Eno, with maybe a little dollop of early Ultravox thrown into the mix.
Lyrically, it was clear that he was heavily influenced by the paranoid, hallucinatory writings of Philip K Dick, William Burroughs and –to a lesser extent- JG Ballard. For a young reader who was devouring dystopian science fiction by the bucketload, this album seemed like a perfect reflection of my view that the world was on the verge of forming a strange and unsettling relationship with burgeoning technology. Whatever was going to happen, I just knew it would involve synthetic humans, sinister government conspiracies and androgynous young guys in make-up, playing synthesisers.

Utterly mesmerised, it was the first time that I was aware that an artist’s image might be almost as important as the music. Numan had perfected an androgynous robot stormtrooper look (no doubt heavily influenced by Kraftwerk) and it made him stand out a mile in an era when most new wave bands made little concession to ‘image’, beyond wearing drainpipe jeans and perhaps a skinny tie. On that iconic Replicas sleeve, Numan looks fantastic: dyed blond hair, kohl eyeliner, black nail varnish, black shirt, tie and trousers. With respect to the Replicas narrative, the cover shot is ambiguous; it’s not clear whether the guy in the room is a victim or a victimiser. Why is he dressed like that? Is he one of us, or is he one of those 'machmen'? Is he a government agent or maybe one of those synthetic humans working in the sex trade? What’s going on in the park outside his window? How come the ‘reflection’ in the window has his hands clasped together while the person in the room hasn’t?

As a growing army of teenaged Numanoids wrestled with these questions, the prosaic reality gradually emerged over the next couple of years as Gary went on to become a massive pop star. We discovered that he was actually just a shy young man (diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome) who had managed to articulate and brilliantly exploit his melancholic fantasies about alienation and androids. He was just a 21-year old kid from Slough who didn’t know much about anything. Jesus, he even admitted to voting Tory in an interview. If he’d been more worldly wise, he’d have known that that was an unforgivable sin in the right-on world of rock journalism. Needless to say, he was pilloried for years on the back of it and his relationship with the press quickly declined from curious to bad to catastrophic.

In spite of the various press maulings, it’s probably fair to say that Numan has had the last laugh. Two decades after it first appeared on Top of the Pops, Are ‘friends’ electric? was brilliantly re-imagined by the Sugababes for their number one hit Freak like Me. He has enjoyed a recent upturn in commercial and critical fortunes and his music has been cited as a powerful influence by the likes of Basement Jaxx, Armand Van Helden, Foo Fighters, Afrika Bambaataa, Nine Inch Nails and Marilyn Manson.

By the time Are ‘friends’ electric? had made it onto that edition of Top of the Pops in May 1979, I was already boring my friends rigid with my ridiculous zeal for Gary Numan’s music. My ‘discovery’ of this weird and wonderful artist allowed me to feel quite smug as his song made its steady way to the summit of the charts over a six-week period, progress which –by today’s standards- seems positively glacial.

During that time, the synthesiser was transformed from being a progressive rock instrument played by classically-trained bearded blokes in capes into something quite sexy, sitting right at the epicentre of pop culture. And, without anything resembling a recognisable chorus, a strange song about a robot prostitute topped the charts for four incredible weeks. I’ll always love Gary Numan for that.

In the words of the song: “You see, it meant everything to me.”

No sleep 'til Penzance

The ‘Top of the Pops’ re-runs have now reached the summer of 1977, when the likes of the Stranglers and the Sex Pistols were riding high in the charts. Those heady days are often written about, but sadly there is one hugely influential (but massively under-rated) band that is sometimes overlooked when historians are reminiscing about that golden age of musical and cultural transformation.
I’ve long considered it to be a travesty of lazy criticism to have pigeonholed The Wurzels as a mere novelty act. Readers of a certain vintage may recall those trailblazing glory days when they broke down the musical barriers in a way that Milli Vanilli, Black Lace and Radiohead could only dream about.

Their number one single from June 1976 'I've got a brand new combine harvester' celebrated the arrival of new technologies at a time when the industry was trying to arrest the decline precipitated by the Devon strawberry famine of 1973, while the follow-up 'I am a cider drinker' was a serious study of the effects of alcohol abuse on workers in the Cornish agricultural industry.
Rock historians are invariably split on the topic of The Wurzels. Their music is multi-layered and full of delicious lyrical ambiguities, but they have also suffered for this cleverness. Some may recall the late-seventies controversy when their albums were banned in the southern states of America after lead singer Tommy Banner claimed that God was over-rated. He later retracted the statement by claiming that he had merely said that ‘cod’ was over-rated, but by then it was too late. The band had become front page news all around the globe, as hundreds of angry bible-bashers burned piles of Wurzels albums and threatened violent retribution. Only the intervention of the UN cultural ambassador Barbara Streisand stopped things getting really ugly. Those were strange days indeed and one can’t help but wonder whether the young Johnny Rotten might have been influenced by the anarchic events.

It’s probably fair to say that The Wurzels never really recovered from that setback, although in his seminal work on the band -'Adventures in Cider Space, Volume 1’- Charles Shaar Murray actually traces the start of their artistic decline to their ill-advised decision to re-launch themselves by jumping on the short-lived 'Scrumpy and Western' bandwagon in the mid-eighties.
Their trailblazing glory days may be behind them, but there is at least a glimmer of hope that The Wurzels may yet return to the epicentre of pop culture. The blogosphere is currently in meltdown with tantalising rumours of a forthcoming collaboration with Jessie J. We can only live in hope.

'Things I know now that I didn’t know then', part 154

In the dual time zone of 1976 /2011, Johnny Mathis has recently knocked Showaddywaddy’s ‘Under the Moon of Love’ from the top of the charts.

Mathis had a distinctive crooning style (said to be based on the desire, during his formative years, to emulate his favourite female vocalists) and his song was an obvious candidate for the Christmas number one; hell, it even had a schmaltzy spoken part designed to bring a tear to your glass eye. It would have been hard to compete against something that seasonal (not to mention well-executed) and poor old Showaddywaddy capitulated after three weeks at the top. Although they were denied the glory of being crowned Kings of the Christmas countdown, they are worth more than a passing mention because, now that the concept of ‘shame’ has largely disappeared from the showbiz lexicon, it’s difficult to think of a modern-day equivalent of Showaddywaddy.

Hailing from Leicester, a city that has never really been acknowledged as one of Britain’s rock and roll capitals, this phalanx of pretend Teddy Boys occupied a special place in my teenage consciousness. When I was at school, they were the sheer, living embodiment of naff. In fact, the style police would have considered ‘naff’ a disgracefully lenient judgement on their schtick, because Showaddywaddy were the colossi of anti-cool; they were as far from the concept of ‘cool’ as it was possible to get. Like a massive black hole in the distant galaxy of Ultra-Naff Major, they exerted a gravitational pull so powerful that the slightest exposure to their work had the potential to suck you down into unimaginable depths of oblivion, shame and ostracism.

Their nickname among the cognoscenti was Sho-fannypaddy. The alliterative word play around their name, the inferred link between their musical prowess and menstrual discharge was not, whichever way you might try to spin it, much of a compliment. To admit to admiring their music might have impressed people, but only in the same way that talking to yourself on the bus would have impressed people. There was a bloke in my class who admitted to liking them and, rather than take this at face value, even the kindest among us interpreted this predilection as an embarrassing lapse in taste, never to be mentioned in polite company. Harsher critics considered it a symptom of his simple-mindedness.

Now that I’m middle-aged and more or less impervious to the whims of fashion, Showaddywaddy look like they would be a good night out. Their material was a tad lightweight, but that’s a charge you could level at most pop acts. They had a dress code, but still allowed individual characters to express a little bit of personality. Best of all, they had an engaging front man in Dave Bartram. He sported one of those big, sexy mouths that would lead you to think that he must have been at least a distant cousin of the Tyler showbiz clan. His movements were just graceful enough to be ‘pop star’ appropriate, without appearing to be too posy or contrived. If you’d like to see a visual demonstration of ‘posy and contrived’, look up Rod Stewart performing ‘The Killing of Georgie’ on Top of the Pops. To say that Rod camped it up outrageously would be something of an understatement.

Bartram had a certain easy charm with the camera and was also comfortable enough to get in among the audience when the mood was right. He looked like a bloke who just happened to be a singer in a band and it’s really hard not to like him, even if you’re thinking that the whole Teddy Boy look is just so déclassé. And remember that, in 1976, the members of Showaddywaddy were aping a look that had been dead for the best part of twenty years. To a teenager, that seemed like the most hideous crime imaginable, but Dave Bartram and Showaddywaddy didn’t seem to mind. They just looked like they were enjoying themselves and trying to entertain people.

I wish I’d been simple-minded enough to have known that at the time.

In praise of ugliness

One of the charming things about watching these Top of the Pops re-runs is that you can’t help but notice that you didn’t have to be all that good-looking to be a pop star in 1976. You could be riding high in the charts with average songs and below-average looks; or, in certain cases, you could get away with being plug-ugly. Take, for instance, the Kursaal Flyers. Their hit song ‘Little does she know’ was pleasant enough, but blimey, those lads had faces that only a mother could love. The singer looked like he’d come straight from running the waltzer franchise at a fairground in Skegness, sporting the peacock hairstyle and spiv moustache of a man not unfamiliar with the company of what used to be called ‘jailbait’.

His dental regime truly was a sight to behold. Imagine, if you will, that the average mouthful of teeth is something that is routinely installed by respectable construction companies, operating under licence and to strict professional guidelines. Not so, alas, for your man from the Kursaals. His gob looked like several cowboy builders, each determined to pre-empt a messy legal case over property rights, had gone ahead and started work without the necessary planning permission. In fact, each rogue firm, in its desire to get the job done and move on to the next act of civic vandalism, had gone ahead without any ‘planning’ at all. His upper east side bore no aesthetic or proportional relationship to his lower south, while his menacing lower east side could best be described as ‘untamed’. Nowadays, the only kind of pop singer who might conceivably get away with that sort of dental regime would be the kind that turned up in the early auditions for X-Factor, probably accompanied by a social worker.

The Kursaal’s bass player, who didn’t look like he had skipped many meals in pursuit of his craft, had the look of drunk rotary club member on a package holiday, invited up onto the stage at the end of the night by the house band. His dancing was every bit as good as you’d expect from a drunk 54-year old man with no sense of rhythm and an overwhelming need to visit the toilet. To be fair, the song was pretty good and any band that was willing to perform in front of a row of washing machines, as they did, must have had a sense of humour. And not many folk write lyrics like these anymore:

When she finished her laundry, she was all in a quandary, and made for the street like a hare. Her escape was so urgent, she forgot her detergent, and dropped all her clean underwear.
Little does she know that I know that she knows that I know she’s two-timing me.

In spite of having some nice, middle-of-the-road (and, frankly, a bit bland) songs, Doctor Hook took the ugliness deal to an altogether more menacing level. They had somehow mastered the art of sounding like a bunch of big girl’s blouses, but looking like a crowd of ruffians. The best way to describe them would be to imagine a film in which a young pair of city slickers on their honeymoon get into trouble somewhere in the deep south of the USA. There will be a scene in which the twenty-something, clean-shaven, city-dude husband and his pretty young schoolteacher wife will go into a bar in Ratchetsville, Missouri (population 137) to try and get help after their car has broken down. Well, the guys who will beat the husband up and abduct the pretty young wife will be Doctor Hook.

In the dual time zone 1976 /2011, a German band called Pussycat has just been removed from the number one slot after several weeks at the top with a song called ‘Mississippi’. Catching their act 35 years on, one can’t help but be impressed by the fact that they had also mastered a Doctor Hook-esque image paradox. Even as they sat on the very top of the showbiz pile, Pussycat managed to look like a jaded, middle-of-the-road covers band. In their own way, they may well have been quite excited about being number one, but their enervated demeanour was illustrative of a band that was either:

a) performing their third set of the night at the Spratlington North Miners Welfare Club, or
b) under the influence of some pre-gig ‘herbal’ cigarettes.

Like the bloke in the Kursaal Flyers, the lead singer in Pussycat had a somewhat relaxed attitude to dental excellence. Had she ever been unfortunate enough to have had her jaw wired up after an accident, she would have been consoled by the fact that she sported a gap in her front teeth that would comfortably have allowed her to have been fed through a very large straw. I wouldn’t swear to it, but such was the gap that she might even have been able to cope with a bar of Toblerone.

Last week’s episode also featured Legs and Co dancing to ‘Maid in Heaven’ by Be-Bop Deluxe. It’s a song I know very well and, according to Jimmy Saville, it was working its way up the charts from the rather modest position of 36, with a bullet. Well, if not quite a bullet, then maybe something fired from a pea-shooter. Given the embarrassment of riches throughout the rest of the top 40, one wonders why the dancers picked this particular song to interpret. I guess someone somewhere at the BBC must have liked Be-Bop Deluxe, because the song evidently wasn’t picked because the dance routine bore any significant relationship to the lyrical content or, indeed, the rhythm track. In fact, you might have got an equally valid interpretation of the song from watching a monkey on a bicycle, towing a fridge on wheels. The monkey would have been funnier, but perhaps not quite as pleasing on the eye.

Imagination versus Reality

It is one of the surreal delights of these re-run shows to witness the glorious spectacle of the Top of the Pops dancers in full flight. In the autumn of 1976 Ruby Flipper still reigned supreme, but the 'new' dancers are just about to be named, as Ed ‘Stewpot’ Stewart announced the other week. Ed, dressed more like an insurance salesman than a happening DJ, announced that the new name would be chosen by a member of the public, through a proper, old-school, ‘answers on a postcard’-type competition. One can only imagine some of the suggestions that must have come in, particularly from the watching dads. All will be revealed this week, but look away now if you don’t want to know the answer. The new dancers will be called ‘Legs and Co.’ and they will caper and cavort gracefully for some fifteen years.

But now that Legs and Co. are about to be sworn in to perform their sacred duties as the ‘Queen’s own interpreters of pop lyrics and tempos through the medium of dance’, I must admit that I’m missing Ruby Flipper. Not for their dancing, because I’m in no position to say whether their dancing was bad, good or mediocre. When dancers are on TV, I usually just concentrate on the movement of the ones I fancy the most. It’s hardly a sophisticated response, but it does at least allow me to have grounds for stating a preference. When the re-runs started and I was re-introduced to the delights of Ruby Flipper, I found, curiously, that I still liked the one that I used to fancy when I was a lad, all those years ago. That probably means something significant, unless it doesn’t.

When you have a crush on someone at school and you unexpectedly meet up with that person thirty years later, it’s probably fair to say that the odds are against that attraction still being strong. Time will have exacted a toll and it won’t have been cheap. That rule, of course, doesn’t apply in TV land, where a kind of immortality is achieved by those fortunate enough to have been preserved in amber by the magic box. When I was re-acquainted, three decades on, with ‘the Flipper’ (or, more specifically, with Cherry Gillespie), I discovered that the old magic was still there. She still had it going on, in spades.

All of which reminds me of a joke that was popular when I was at school.

A little boy says to his mum: “Mum, are Legs and Co. robots?” to which mum replies: “No, why do you ask that, son?” “Because” says the boy, “daddy said he’d like to screw the arse off one of them.”

To the jaundiced modern eye, the TOTP dancers and their all-too-literal interpretations of pop lyrics look somehow irredeemably naff. Sadly, it’s not just a comedic aspect that is noticeable; now that we’ve become accustomed to simulated sex as a virtual staple of ‘dancing’ in modern pop videos, those old-school routines look so impossibly innocent. It’s hard to imagine that there might have been a time when these routines would have been considered suggestive, perhaps even raunchy. The routines and the costumes were designed to leave some things to the imagination. Imagination, in those days, worked a lot of overtime. Imagination was busy filling in the blanks and embellishing reality, because reality was obliged to work to a pretty rigid set of rules. Nowadays, when you watch someone like Rihanna performing, imagination is waiting in the wings, twiddling its thumbs, hoping in vain to be called into action. When you observe the leap that reality has taken from 1976 to 2011 and consider the probability that the same kind of leap might be taken over the next couple of decades, you can only conclude that imagination is very shortly going to be out of a job.

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.

It's 1976 ... it's Top of the Pops!

Anyone who doesn’t watch BBC 4 (and that’s probably about 95% of the viewing public) may be unaware that the station has been running old editions of ‘Top of the Pops’ in sequence, starting from 1976. They’re also scheduling the show in the old TOTP slot on Thursday nights. Unless my arithmetical abilities have undergone a spectacular deterioration, I reckon that means we’ll reach the final edition of the show sometime in 2041. By that time, of course, pop music probably won’t exist. Or, if it does, we’ll all be flying around in jetpacks and ‘music’ will be taken in the form of a pill. Or maybe it will be stored in a virtual cloud that you’ll access by blinking to activate the i-tunes chip that your robot parent will have had fitted in your head as a present on your fourth birthday.

Apart from one aberration when Jonathan King was edited out of a show, each edition of the 1976 TOTP is being shown exactly as it appeared at the time. King’s contribution was cut, presumably because his well-documented crime was deemed by someone at Broadcasting House to have been so heinous as to merit being airbrushed from history. After writing to the BBC, he got a nice apology from Director General Mark Thompson and an assurance that it would not happen again. Let’s see if they can stick to that promise when the time comes to re-run Gary Glitter’s ‘Another Rock ‘n’ roll Christmas’.

Whatever else it did, Top of the Pops represented the 'settled will' of the audience; that is, it played the most popular songs of the day. Whenever we complained about the content (as we certainly used to in our house) we were really complaining about other people's awful musical tastes. And, judging by the fare on offer from 1976, there was plenty to complain about.
I may go into some detail on this topic.