Sorry, I’m getting ahead of myself, The main thrust of this post is the question: did ABBA rip off The Damned?
But before you start trying to work out which song the phenomenally successful and wholesome Swedes might have stolen from the demented British punk act, I should say, no, not that Damned.
Hands up, I know practically hee-haw about the first band to record under the moniker of The Damned. Only that they were Dutch and released their one and only single in Britain on the Young Blood International label in April 1974, a time when The Bay City Rollers were Shang-A-Langing their way up the charts, while ABBA were enjoying the first of many number one hits with Eurovision winner Waterloo. Their next chart topper? That would be SOS in the Autumn of 1975.
It’s compare and contrast time. Have a listen to The Damned’s Morning Bird and pay attention as their singer delivers the line ‘Morning Bird, have you heard? My Morning Bird!’ and then listen to the ABBA bridge from SOS ‘When you’re gone, how can I even try to go on?’
ABBA time now, take it away Agnetha:
Benny and Bjorn clearly possessed a knack for penning a more than decent pop ditty or two without resorting to ripping off other acts, but there is at least briefly a distinct similarity, isn’t there? I’ll file it under ‘In all likelihood a coincidence’. And, of course, Glen Matlock later took inspiration from SOS when finishing off Pretty Vacant, explaining in his recent book Triggers: A Life in Music that the song was ‘part Matlock, part Duchamp, part ABBA.’
I completely missed out on The Damned single on its release*, only coming across it decades later when it featured on the 2003 junkshop glam compilation Velvet Tinmine, along with tracks like Rebels Rule by the mighty Iron Virgin and The Tartan Horde’s Bay City Rollers, We Love You, a song intended to be so ghastly that it would likely extricate Nick Lowe from his unwanted United Artists contract. Or, then again, with Rollermania still on the rise, maybe manage to score a massive novelty hit with his pisstake pastiche.
To the surprise of Nick (who adopted the alias of Terry Modern for the release), record execs at UA were delighted by his efforts and got in on the act, claiming in a mischievous press release: ‘Terry chose the name Tartan Horde to express his devotion to Scotland, the home of the Bay City Rollers. As a confirmed Rollers fan, Terry wanted to express his dedication and wrote the song.’
The single did fail to make a dent in the British charts, but in Japan it proved much more popular. The suits insisted on a follow up. Nick remained on the UA roster.
From June 1975, here is Bay City Rollers, We Love You – and if you’re wondering about Nick’s voice, as Will Birch explained in his biography of him, Cruel To Be Kind: ‘Nick slowed the tape down in order to record his vocal, so that when it was played back at normal speed his voice would sound higher and younger, perhaps in order to appeal to the pre-pubescent Bay City Rollers fans.’ And he invited some local kids into the studio to help out with backing vocals.
Did Lowe rip off Shang-A-Lang for the song? Let’s just say, if it had been a huge hit in Britain, a court case would surely have resulted and I think we can all guess which way the verdict would have gone.
Nick wouldn’t like to hear me saying this – on reflection, he probably wouldn’t give a damn – but I’d much rather listen to this than anything by his previous band Brinsley Schwarz, a bunch of pub rockers that I’ve never been able to get a grip on, even though solo Nick is cool. The Jesus of Cool? That might be pushing it.
Interestingly, Rat Scabies (or Chris Millar as he would have been known as back then) is rumoured to have drummed on the track although it bears absolutely no resemblance to his vinyl debut with (the British) Damned. More on that in the not too distant future.
*Morning Birdis about to find itself once more on vinyl with independent Just Add Water Records reissuing the single to celebrate its 50th birthday. For more on the release:
Calderwood is East Kilbride’s second oldest housing scheme and provides the town’s population of around 75,000, with 15,000 or so inhabitants. For a time this included a young family who like most young families in the then new town had overspilled from Glasgow, in their case from Parkhead in the East End of the city.
In the 1970s, Calderwood had three pubs, a dozen tower blocks, a community centre (more on that later), a chippy that’s been misspelt as the Manhatten for many decades but which still sells a cracking fish supper. There also used to be four big concrete sculptures of green frogs in the car park of the local shopping centre where the Manhatten stands. New towns were big on public sculptures back then.
The town’s first sports centre is also located in Calderwood, although two young townsfolk, William and Jim Reid, were never destined to excel at sports the way another Calderwood resident Ally McCoist did.
The Reid boys instead concentrated their energies on music. One of their aunts gave both brothers a record token in 1973. Older brother William bought Bowie’s Drive In Saturday with his. The Sweet’s Hellraiser was to become the first ever single Jim ever owned, and he has even spoken of Sweet inspiring him to become a musician. Coincidentally, their singer Brian Connolly lived as a child in Blantyre, three or four miles down the road from Calderwood.
According to The Jesus and Mary Chain, nobody was interested in noisy guitar music in their hometown, but a smallish music scene did exist in East Kilbride, albeit bands generally bemoaned the lack of venues to play. Many pubs refused to showcase live music as they feared troublemakers might be attracted to these events.
Not every bar shared these negative perceptions of young music fans. When one local act The Electrix put on a show at The Salmon Leap pub on Calderwood Square one Sunday night, the East Kilbride News claimed it was so busy that hundreds had to be turned away. That weekly paper began around this time to take more interest in local bands with one young journalist Lorraine Kelly punting for young acts to get in touch regarding live shows and even interviewing some acts from further afield such as The Members, as well as reviewing albums. Haven’t followed her career since then, but she did her bit for many local musicians.
By July of 1980, a small ‘what’s on’ feature began appearing in the paper, spotlighting all kinds of music from heavy rockers like Red Ellis to bar room singalongs. Also, around this time, tapes of local acts became available from a local address, costing 50 pence per cassette. The Electrix, Sinister Turkeys and Complex Society were among those who found themselves showcased on the tapes.
There was even a couple of ‘alternative’ discos held within easy walking distance of the Reid’s home at the Calderwood Community Centre in the very early 1980s. These attracted very decent crowd numbers, although the second night ensured that the team who’d set up the event wouldn’t see any profit for their efforts. Punters weren’t searched going in, and this being Lanarkshire, more than a few attendees had a good scoop beforehand and then sneaked in half bottles or even full bottles of wreck the hoose juice.
By the end of the night, it was clear some girls had had a smashing time. They smashed sinks, smashed a toilet cistern and smashed a toilet lid, and anything else that a Doc Marten boot could do damage to in the female lavvy. Plumbers were expensive even back then and so ends the tale of one attempt to inject some much-needed life into the town.
Maybe William and Jim just weren’t aware of what was going on around them, too intent on procrastinating in their bedrooms. They admitted to switching on the TV just after getting up. Did they tune in to see Aztec Camera, another act from the town that Jim later decried as ‘the arsehole of the planet’ miming to their chart hit Oblivious on BBC One’s lunchtime magazine show Pebble MillAt One? Or where they, ahem, oblivious of the performance?
You can imagine the reaction of just about everybody they’d ever come across if they had dared around this point to suggest their plans for chart success. Anybody that had lived through the high point of punk in Britain and still been unable to make any kind of inroads into playing live more than five years later could easily be dismissed as deluded. Weren’t bands supposed to have been fired up by the punk revolution to the extent that they would be playing live within weeks of buying or borrowing their instruments?
I would bet that the Tote bookmakers on the Square would have been happy to offer generous odds on the boys ever releasing a record, let alone getting anywhere near the top thirty. And they might have let you choose your own odds on them still being around forty years later and releasing an album that would make the British top ten and recieve many glowing reviews from critics. Record Collector for instance announced new album Glasgow Eyes as ‘Age-defying magnificence from East Kilbride’s brothers grim,’ with Jeremy Allen praising it as ‘a staggering, swaggering achievement more vital than anything they’ve done in the last 35 years.’
And finally, a track that namechecks Calderwood Square (at least I think it does, my hearing isn’t so good nowadays, likely as a result of going to see too many noisy bands in JAMC back in the day). From her underrated album Little Pop Rock issued on Chemikal Underground in 2007, this is Sister Vanilla (Linda Reid, the younger sister of William and Jim) and TOTP with some sumptuous spacerock guitar from William. Wish she’d have released more music but sadly the project seems to have been a one-off.
Apologies to anybody stumbling across this post who expected to see an insanely photogenic Debbie Harry in a deserted disco, sashaying and swirling around in a silvery dress. This Heart of Glass (or Herz aus Glas to give it its original German title) is something very, very different and I would have to admit, not much of a gas.
Following Aguirre, the Wrath of God and The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, in 1976 director Werner Herzog took one of the many unorthodox decisions which have been a regular feature of his career. Already having established himself along with Wim Wenders and Rainer Werner Fassbinder as a leading light in German New Wave Cinema (also known as the New German Cinema movement), he placed classified ads in several local Bavarian newspapers, seeking to cast many of the respondees in his next film and deliberately neglecting to mention his own name.
Hardly an original idea you might say. But here’s the idiosyncratic part: the ads also mentioned that before being selected, the potential actors would be required to undergo hypnosis for their auditions. And that while on camera if chosen, they would be acting under hypnosis too with only a single exception in the main cast.
Hias (Josef Bierbichler), a mysterious herdsman and seer, is that exception, although such is his intensity that you could be forgiven for assuming that he had been sent into a trance too.
Everything is trancelike in Heart of Glass. We see some weird timelapse landscapes where fog and clouds speed forward relentlessly like a river above the Bavarian hills and forests. Hias makes a series of apocalyptic visions predicting the end of the world. ‘This is the beginning of the end,’ he announces. ‘The world’s edge begins to crumble, everything starts to collapse…’ Not the cheeriest of chappies, it would have to be said.
In a remote village in the late 18th century, the man who devised the formula for perfect Ruby glass has just died and somehow no-one else working in the glassworks that produces the precious ornaments has ever been supplied with the secret formula. Their livelihoods threatened, the inhabitants of the village sleepwalk into a deep malaise and the performances undoubtedly possess a highly peculiar quality that Herzog judged was suitable for their slide into a collective catastrophe. Mostly the actors deliver their lines as if they’ve just swallowed a handful of Mogodons.
Should Herzog have told his hypnotized cast that they were world-class actors? Not surprisingly, that wouldn’t work. As events progressed, I did begin to speculate on whether the film wouldn’t have been better without the hypnosis and I also, as my mind wandered, briefly wondered if Ian Curtis, who had committed suicide after watching Herzog’s Stroszek, had developed a fascination in hypnosis through his interest in the director – in an attempt to persuade Curtis not to kill himself, Bernard Sumner hypnotised the singer in the weeks leading up to his suicide. I digress.
‘The film is meant to convey an atmosphere of hallucination, of prophecy, of the visionary, and of collective madness,’ Herzog explained to Alan Greenberg for his book Every Night the Trees Disappear.
He certainly succeeded in this aim. Heart of Glass is as strange as David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive or Inland Empire and it is definitely not for everyone. The pace is slow, the dialogue minimal and I could only guess at the reason for the inclusion of a number of scenes such as when Hias enters into the mouth of a cave and speedily exits, followed by a bear. An imaginary (and invisible) bear, which he goes on to wrestle before managing to knife it several times, killing it. More bears later, incidentally.
Fascinating though it undoubtedly is, it seldom gripped me the way Herzog’s best films have. It is, though, visually striking throughout, and the soundtrack is intriguing too, much of it provided by German music collective Popol Vuh, albeit their tracks weren’t created specifically for the film. They’re an act I seldom listen to although their evocative music works wonderfully in many Herzog movies, especially Aguirre. As unique a sound as their German contemporaries Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream.
Finally, according to IMDb’s trivia page on the film, in a New Musical Express interview from May 1979, Debbie Harry mentioned that Heart of Glass producer Mike Chapman had named the Blondie track after the film.
If you enjoyed Heart of Glass then you might also enjoy Grizzly Man. In fact, even if you hated Heart of Glass, you’ll very likely be drawn into Herzog’s 2005 American documentary.
Timothy Treadwell spent thirteen consecutive summers in Katmai National Park in the Alaskan wilderness, where he lived beside a colony of (non-imaginary) brown bears. What I’m about to tell you isn’t really a spoiler as the documentary quickly lets viewers know that there was a good reason why Treadwell failed to make it back for a fourteenth summer. This is the story of the grisly death of the grizzly man.
Timothy is undoubtedly a curious character. He claimed that he just missed out on the role of Woody in Cheers which I find dubious. Hey, I’m generally cynical about any claims made by attention seekers and Timothy definitely craved attention. And would invent stories to try and make himself appear more interesting, such as pretending that he was Australian.
He can be manic. He places his hands over some fresh bear shit and can’t hide his excitement and joy to be touching it. He can be arrogant – boasting about his sexual prowess and constantly talking up his achievement in helping keep the bears safe from poachers (although this isn’t seen as much a particular problem by the Alaskan wildlife authorities).
Certainly, he did record some video footage of a bunch of scumbags throwing a few rocks at a bear from the safety of their boat. This rightly pissed him off, but the guy who has persuaded himself that his presence was essential to their safety, failed to confront the men, although he was prone to ranting dementedly about poachers and the park service when no one else was around, the self-styled ‘kind warrior’ coming over as more of an eco diva.
Feted and funded by a number of Hollywood celebs in his self-appointed role of environmental activist and bear expert, he was invited into schools to teach kids, presumably filling their heads with nonsense about his furry ‘friends’.
Local park rangers and others with genuine expertise and less malleable minds weren’t so impressed. As the indigenous director of a museum dedicated to Alaska’s Alutiiq people, notes: ‘Where I grew up, the bears avoid us and we avoid them.’ There is an established reason for this.
Insisting they’re misunderstood and calling them sappy names like Mister Chocolate and Cracker, Treadwell convinced himself that he had established a special bond with the creatures that involved trust and respect, claiming ‘I’m one of them’, but no matter how many times he would coo ‘I love you’ to them, these animals don’t want humans encroaching on what they consider their territory.
Grizzlies are grizzlies and will often fight each other ferociously. Adult bears can be cannibalistic and eat cubs. Timothy was aware of these facts and acknowledged that he could be killed by them, but refused to carry a gun or even anti-bear spray for protection and would frequently treat them almost as if they were humans in bear suits, failing repeatedly to keep a safe – and respectful – distance from them. We even see footage of him touching one on the snout.
He possessed an excess of reckless courage, but this is not always necessarily a good thing. Do we admire the man who plays a game of Russian roulette with himself?
On the plus side, he did capture some breathtaking footage of the animals which Herzog utilizes regularly. Treadwell desperately needed the bears to give a purpose to his often troubled life. They needed him, or at least one did, for food.
The saddest part of the story is that he persuaded a girlfriend to accompany him on that doomed final visit. She was eaten alive by the same bear that had just killed him. Despite his good intentions, Treadwell’s actions not only brought about his own death, but he was complicit in hers and, ironically, the bear who killed them both had to be shot, along with a younger bear who charged the park rangers as they investigated the human deaths.
A new documentary Werner Herzog: Radical Dreamer came out last month on a BFI blu-ray. For more information click here.
Newly released on Cherry Red is You Can Walk Across It On The Grass – The Boutique Sounds Of Swinging London, a various artists compilation featuring everything from freakbeat to light entertainment, with acts like The Yardbirds, John’s Children and The Troggs mingling with Tom Jones, Twiggy and even Mandy Rice-Davies. Or as Cherry Red puts it: ‘A Celebration of the mid-60s Swinging London scene at its brash, colourful zenith.’
The collection kicks off with The Mood Mosaic’s A Touch of Velvet – A Sting of Bass and when Austin Powers is inevitably remade or rebooted in the not too distant future, this would be perfect for the soundtrack. Close your eyes as you listen, baby. Imagine the international man of mystery in his red velvet button front coat and white jabot, grooving his way along Carnaby Street, eyeing up mini-skirted dollybirds as he does so, on his way to a happening in Chelsea or a date with Vanessa Kensington or Felicity Shagwell. Actually, all that sexual innuendo might prove too ‘problematic’ for today’s po-faced Hollywood and, anyway, I’ve just vowed to never watch another remake or sequel after going to see that recent Exorcist movie. Really, I don’t know what possessed me.
Produced and arranged by Mark Wirtz, who the following year would produce twee psych hit Excerpt from A Teenage Opera by Keith West, and whose signature style was described by Mojo as ‘Phil Spector scoring Camberwick Green’, A Touch Of Velvet – A Sting of Brass would soon be adopted by German TV show Musikladen as its theme tune. Featuring vocals by The Ladybirds, a female vocal harmony trio, who were regular performers on Benny Hill’s TV show and provided backing vocals twice to British Eurovision entries, here are The Mood Mosaic:
Despite its distinct lack of soul, this 1966 track went on to enjoy a strange afterlife at northern soul allnighters such as Manchester’s Twisted Wheel and then Wigan Casino. An inferior cover version by The Ron Grainer Orchestra (an artist who also appears on the Cherry Red comp) was even a minor hit in Britain when issued on the cash-in Casino Classics label in 1978, a year that we’re often told witnessed Wigan’s reputation rocket internationally.
‘It scarcely seems credible now,’ the Guardian reported in a 50 key events in the history of dance music feature, ‘but ahead of Studio 54 as Billboard’s Best Disco in the World 1978 was a northern ballroom that didn’t even have a bar.’
This is a boast made many times and which has always struck me as not remotely credible, the kind of fabrication made back in the pre-internet days when it was more difficult to disprove this kind of claim.
‘For your information, Pete Townshend, at one point, almost quit The Who. And if he had, he would have ended up in this group, thus making it Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick, Tich and Pete. And if you ask me, he should have.’
The first five Quentin Tarantino films were all hugely enjoyable watches. Great motormouth dialogue, clever plotting and inspired soundtrack and casting choices – think the high-profile returns of Robert Forster and Pam Grier in Jackie Brown for starters.
Death Proof had a lot going for it too such as Kurt Russell’s equally menacing and creepy performance and Zoë Bell’s insanely dangerous stunts, but Sydney Tamiia Poitier tried way too hard to exude cool as Jungle Julia. I’ve always reckoned that Tarantino should’ve cast Rosario Dawson in that role instead of as the Abernathy character, who appears in the second half of the movie. She would have been instant upgrade in the charisma stakes.
I’ve a feeling that Jungle Julia’s Pete Townshend claim is another complete fabrication, albeit that’s fine as she is a fictional character getting something wrong as folk sometimes do in real life too – see also calling Mick Mitch a couple of times.
Maybe the idea isn’t quite as outlandish as it initially sounds. In 1966, the year of Hold Tight!, DDDBM&T were enormously popular in Britain. A quick look at the bestselling singles of 1966 shows that – and I wouldn’t have suspected this – they had four top ten hits, one more than The Who managed and DDDBM&T spent ten more weeks in those top tens.
So, they were arguably more popular at this point, albeit they were never as musically or lyrically inventive as The Who. Saying that, the football chant rhythm and those drums that sound like a marching band on speed certainly get the feet tapping, while the Hollies style harmonies are infectious as hell. Best of all is Ian ‘Tich’ Amey’s guitar solo around the song’s midpoint, aided by a Tone Bender fuzzbox. Utterly glorious, isn’t it? I wouldn’t have guessed it, but the turbo-charged power pop of Hold Tight! proved to be the perfect choice of music to soundtrack a high-speed, head-on car collision onscreen.
Here is track two from You Can Walk Across It On The Grass:
I’ve been reading The White Album. Yeah, you read that properly, this particular White Album being the collection of essays by Joan Didion from 1979. This prompted me to watch the screen version of her novel Play It As It Lays, which in turn prompted me to give Lloyd Cole and The Commotions’ album Rattlesnakes a spin.
In explanation, according to an interview with Lloyd in the Guardian in 2019: ‘The idea for the song Rattlesnakes came from a line in Joan Didion’s book, Play It As It Lays: “Life is a crap game, and there are rattlesnakes under every rock.” ‘
I haven’t read the novel myself, but the movie, a searing depiction of hollow Hollywood, which Didion adapted for the screen along with hubby John Gregory Dunne, is worth a watch, albeit it never absolutely gripped me until the final scene. Early in the movie, the central character does dislodge a rock from the earth it sits on to reveal a rattlesnake. Cut to her randomly firing off shots as she soars down a freeway in the desert. She also tries her luck with a traffic policeman, very likely ‘out of boredom more than spite’, although I’m not sure if her never-born child is still haunting her as she does so, though it is later revealed she has had an abortion.
Maybe I’ll have another look and review it. Maybe I’ll eventually get round to reading the book too.
I could be completely wrong here but I vaguely recall the young Lloyd Cole discussing the possibility of writing a novel himself at some point once his music career had ended. The career is ongoing to this day, and the book I have to assume, if that really was ever a plan, remains unwritten.
Anyway, here is the reference heavy Rattlesnakes:
Like Lloyd, I studied at Glasgow Uni. Kind of. I doubt taking an adult education course in writing radio drama really counts. Again like Lloyd, I never finished the course. Lloyd dropped out of his English literature and philosophy degree due to the blossoming pop success of The Commotions; I bowed out for the slightly less glamorous world of a temp Christmas job at the Glasgow Mail Centre unloading vans filled to the brim with sacks of cards and pressies, the twelve hour shifts – well, it is a busy time there – clashing with the course.
Any radio play by me certainly remains unwritten, albeit one of the ideas that I was working on was later developed and led to me being invited to take part in a year long course run jointly by the BBC and Royal Court Theatre with mentoring and semi-regular meet-ups in London and Manchester. Nothing came of that, though.
The adult education course tutor was author, journalist, former fanzine writer and radio dramatist Beatrice Colin, who was perceptive and highly encouraging. Before writing novels such as The Luminous Life of Lilly Aphrodite and To Capture What We Cannot Keep, Beatrice was also one half of Glasgow based-band April Showers.
I wasn’t living in Scotland when the band emerged and missed out on them completely. I’d guess Billy Sloan would have played them on his Radio Clyde show, but they were never regulars on the live circuit although they did apparently take part in a ‘spontaneous happening’ in the early summer of 1983 in The Venue in Glasgow along with The Primevals, Pastels and headliners Strawberry Switchblade. Sounds like fun, even though I’m not sure just how spontaneous it all was, given it was being advertised beforehand. The debut issue of fanzine Juniper Beri Beri named them the ‘hippest group around just now’ in a Glasgow scene A-Z, while #2 featured an idiosyncratic interview with them, accompanied by the photo above.
Written by Jonathan Bernstein, the other half of April Showers, Abandon Ship is the band’s sole release. Even though it wasn’t a big commercial or critical success, its’ reputation has grown since it was issued in the summer of 1984 – as The Commotions were scoring their first hit with Perfect Skin – and it’s a real favourite with bloggers like The Vinyl Villain.
It’s not hard to see why. Anne Dudley, whose immaculate string arrangements on Rattlesnakes were a key ingredient of that song’s success, produced here and again her work is exemplary. The combination of that lush string section and languid bass with Beatrice’s vulnerable vocal works beautifully. Even little details like that percussive clack is perfect – I’m not sure what instrument that is, it couldn’t be a rattlesnake castanet, could it?
Abandon Ship was included in Gary Crowley’s 4CD Box-set Lost 80s in 2019 and it’s one of those songs that I always have to play at least twice in a row. They really shoulda been contenders.
Another single was to have been released by uber-stylish Brussels label Les Disques du Crépuscule, founded by Michel Duval and Annik Honoré, but this never got beyond the planning stage, which is a real pity.
Jonathan Bernstein went on to work as a film critic for Spin magazine and has published many books. During lockdown, I finally read his Pretty In Pink: The Golden Age of Teenage Movies which acts as a guide to what were dubbed ‘Brat Pack’ films during the 1980s. He writes with an accessible and humorous prose style and even persuaded me to watch some movies like Sixteen Candles and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off which I’d never had any great interest in seeing beforehand. The book also got me thinking that if a contemporary director with Anglophile tastes like John Hughes had selected the track for one of films of the time, it would have: A) surely sounded perfect for some montage sequence where Molly Ringwald’s character is going out on a fun date with a new boyfriend, played by say Anthony Michael Hall or Andrew McCarthy and falling in love, and, B) The high-profile exposure would have gifted the band a great leg-up and likely sent sales on both sides of the Atlantic rocketing.
Nowadays, like Lloyd Cole, Jonathan lives in America and he continues to write prolifically while, sadly, Beatrice Colin passed away almost five years ago aged 55, after a fight with ovarian cancer, which makes one of the lines in the song especially poignant.
Fifty years ago, Merry Xmas Everybody clocked up around half a million advance orders and entered the British singles chart at #1. It went on to sell a million and has been included in roughly a million Christmas compilation albums since then. Estimates suggest that the song generates royalties of around £500,000 every year and, as I type, it’s #33 in the UK Christmas chart but forget all that. There are better Slade tracks out there.
I don’t always agree with Noel Gallagher but when he declared How Does It Feel? to be ‘Easily one of the best songs ever written,’ on the 1999 doc It’s Slade, this was an assessment that I wasn’t going to argue with.
It’s early 1975 and two music related films are playing at cinemas around Britain. One is Stardust with David Essex; the other is Slade in Flame. Both are more glum than glam.
In the case of Flame, the downbeat nature of the movie proved a surprise. A big surprise. Slade were perceived as a good-time band. Never preachy, the foursome were more keen to give folk a laugh than a lecture and looked like naturals to star in big screen comedy along the lines of A Hard Day’s Night. This almost came to pass, with a quip-heavy script being touted for them called The Quiteamess Experiment, aiming to parody The Quatermass Xperiment, the 1955 British sci-fi horror movie.
Instead, the Midlands band chose a very different vehicle. As director Richard Loncraine explained: ‘I wanted to make a film about the dirty end of the rock’n’roll business. I wanted to show the shitty little clubs that these bands have to play. Slade were very on board with this.’
Andrew Birkin, the brother of Jane, was drafted in to write a screenplay and, along with Loncraine, he travelled to North America with the band on tour to get to know them better and gain an insight into what life on the road consisted of.
Filmed mostly in the summer of 1974, Flame is set in 1967, in an England that is no hotbed of hippiedom, a world where you’re more likely to see a pigeon shack than a peace symbol. Here’s a small illustration of the film’s gritty nature: Noddy Holder’s character Stoker, a pigeon fancier, is shat on by one of his birds.
Commercially speaking, this approach was always going to prove, at best, a gamble. Many young fans found it difficult to distinguish between Slade and Flame and didn’t want to see their idols bickering onscreen against such a bleak backdrop. They wanted slapstick and fantasy.
Musically too, this was a very different Slade from the chart behemoths of recent years with their string of raucous, singalong number one hits. Piano, horns and flute were not standard Slade song ingredients, but they work fantastically well on the relatively subdued How Does It Feel? Here’s a slightly abridged version from Dutch music show TopPop, I believe.
On its release, Slade in Flame was neither a critical hit nor box-office success, although its reputation has rightly grown over the years. Mark Kermode even called it ‘the Citizen Kane of British rock movies’ and later even named one of his books How Does It Feel? Noddy’s performance, incidentally, impresses the most, while the rest of the boys don’t disgrace themselves. Johnny Shannon is perfect as the band’s vindictive bawbag booking agent, soon replaced by Robert Seymour (Tom Conti), a posho moneyman branching into music, who begins to (not) look after their interests. Alan Lake also convinces as a low-grade Lothario singer ditched to make way for new vocalist Stoker.
There was talk of a follow-up film. Birkin favoured a more upbeat cinematic outing second time around and got as far as penning a treatment provisionally titled Down in Flames. A Titanic spoof, it imagined the band playing a cross-channel ferry that hits an iceberg and sinks. Sounds like it might have ended up quite a mess if it had ever been green-lit.
Chart-wise, Slade’s hits began to dry up with How Does It Feel? only reaching #15 in Britain, while most subsequent singles failed to match even that. By 1977, they could even title an album Whatever Happened to Slade. This is also the title of a new book, Daryl Easlea’s Whatever Happened to Slade? When the Whole World WentCrazee, which I’m currently reading and would recommend.
Richard Loncraine went on to helm episodes of Band Of Brothers and won a Silver Bear for Best Director at the 46th Berlin International Film Festival in 1996 for Richard III, a cinematic success which Andrew Birkin also enjoyed, earning his Silver Bear award for his flawed but utterly fascinating version of Ian McEwan’s brilliant novel The Cement Garden starring niece Charlotte Gainsbourg.
Before that, he’d co-adapted The Name of the Rose and also co-wrote and directed Salt on Our Skin in 1992. The latter was not the success it had been tipped to be, perhaps due to my appearance as an extra talking to Greta Scacchi – who I’d fancied ever since seeing her in The Ebony Tower with Toyah and Larry Olivier – didn’t make the final cut. On reflection, possibly other more important factors counted against the film, though.
From a 1970s act looking back to the previous decade to the real thing. The Creation recorded How Does It Feel To Feel as the profile of Flame was supposedly exploding. No such fame for The Creation, though they were briefly a pretty big deal in what was then West Germany.
Produced by Shel Talmy, this is the fifth single by the band beloved by the likes of The Television Personalities, Alan McGee and Paul Weller.
The past few years have certainly seen the Scottish music scene of the late 1970s through to the 1990s being covered extensively. There was Graeme Thomson’s Themes For Great Cities; Bobby Gillespie’s Tenement Kid; Alastair McKay’s Alternatives to Valium; Craig McAllister’s The Perfect Reminder – The Story of Trashcan Sinatras’ I’ve Seen Everything and Hungry Beat: The Scottish Independent Pop Underground Movement (1977-1984) by Douglas McIntyre, Grant McPhee and Neil Cooper. All are recommended, though I have to admit I found some of Bobby Gillespie’s comments on the snidey side and struggled at times with his political haiverings, especially after discovering in the Guardian that lifelong ‘socialist’ Bobby apparently sent his son to Eton.
I can’t get my head round why he would choose to do this.
Everybody knows that Harrow is the superior boarding school.
Derek Forbes’ book A Very Simple Mind has also just been published, though I haven’t yet read it. If it’s half as good as his bass playing then I’m in for a treat.
Just out today is another (photo)book on the Scottish music scene, with an introduction by the aforementioned Bobby Gillespie. Post Punk City: Glasgow by Martin McClenaghan is a photographic portrait of the city (and surrounding areas) and is the fourth independent publication in recent years by Chris Brickley. There are pictures of acts playing venues like Strathclyde Uni, Tiffany’s and Glasgow Tech, together with photos of the rapidly changing city itself. Hopefully, I’ll pick up a copy at the weekend. The photo above is from an Orange Juice show at the Bungalow Bar in Paisley and below is another example of Martin’s work, the infamous Hutchie E flats near the Clyde. Built in the tail end of the 1960s, these five-storey deck-access blocks were almost immediately plagued by dampness and condensation problems. By the time that the photo below was taken there had been regular calls for the flats to be demolished, which they were before the 1980s were out.
During my art foundation year, I took some photos myself from inside one of these flats after chapping a random door unannounced and politely requesting the chance to hone my photography skills from inside a complete stranger’s home, which a young couple, without any hesitation, agreed to. I still remember a little child playing in an obviously damp living room, heated by a Calor Gas fire.
I don’t know what became of these pictures or if I even got around to developing them but they wouldn’t have been as good as this.
If you’re wondering about the two shacks in the middle of the photo, they’re what are known as doocots in Scotland, shelters for pigeons. Once a fairly common sight in the city.
You might look at the image above and recognise the work of Jacques Villeglé, the only European artist displayed in the Pop Art room in New York’s Musuem of Modern Art, a man who in recent years has been called ‘the original urban artist’ due to his decollage technique utilising ripped or lacerated street posters.
Then again, if you’re anything like me, you’re more likely to be thinking: ‘She is one strikingly good-looking woman.’
Certainly according to the curiously named Jean-Emmanuel Deluxe’s Yé-Yé Girls of ’60s French Pop, Mademoiselle Françoise Hardy made a big impact on her arrival to London in 1964: ‘Mick Jagger claimed her to be his ideal woman, while Bowie would pretend his radio set was suddenly on fire whenever she was on.’ Really? Add Malcolm McLaren to her list of admirers. And Bob Dylan. And even Salvador Dali, who as this 1968 photo by Jean-Marie Périer shows, attempted to persuade Françoise of the merits of one of his curled upwards moustaches.
She decided against the idea. A wise move.
I completely missed out the Yé-Yé pop revolution as it happened and until relatively recently, I’d only really heard a fraction of Hardy’s music, mostly from the early 1960s, although Jean-Emmanuel Deluxe under a subheading in his chapter on her (which I nicked for the title of this post) notes that: ‘For a majority of Hardyology scholars, her 1966-74 period was her best.’
The ‘Hardyology’ scholars might have a point, and the singer herself might agree. ‘My early music was terrible,’ she admitted in an interview with Dangerous Minds. ‘My first songs were very naive and recorded in appalling conditions with awful musicians. It is only when I went to London to record with English musicians that I felt I could improve bit by bit.’
In 1973, my pop revolution was Bowie/Roxy/Sweet/Slade and I was completely unaware of this single and I daresay if I had heard it I would have dismissed it as a middle of the road bore. Since coming across the song a few weeks back, this slice of Gallic gorgeosity has continued to grow on me, even those big predictable drums and smooth backing vocals that gradually creep up on you. This is the title track of the album Message personnel:
When did I discover Françoise Hardy? It must have been almost thirty years ago, likely due to her appearance on Malcolm McLaren’s Paris album or maybe via her collaboration with Blur.
Graham Coxon had been particularly eager to work with her and it was agreed that she would perform a version of To the End, which was renamed In the End (La Comedie). Although I’m fairly fond of the track, Damon Albarn’s Mockney tones failed to fully blend with Hardy’s sophisticated French vocal.
The only footage available on YouTube is very poor quality so, instead, here we have the earlier single version featuring Lætitia Sadier of Stereolab. Directed by David Mould and shot in Prague’s Národní muzeum (interiors) and Libochovice Chateau (the garden scenes), a big visual debt is obviously owed to Last Year at Marienbad – don’t ever ask me to explain that film – while musically, there are little echoes of John Barry’s work on Bond themes like You Only Live Twice in the orchestration.
I was about to say that hiring David Mount to direct their promo for Country House might have been a good idea rather than roping in their Groucho Club mate Damien Hirst. On second thoughts, the best idea of all, artistically speaking anyway, would have been to have never recorded Country House in the first place.
Last year, the July edition of Mojo magazine was accompanied by a CD titled Glam Nuggets (15 Wham Bam Rarities From The Boogie Children!). There were tracks by acts such as Brett Smiley and Sparks, The Hollywood Brats and Hammersmith Gorillas. As these various artists compilations go, it was definitely one of the better ones.
The final wham bam rarity on the album was Virginia Creeper by Greg Robbins. I know little about this particular boogie child apart from that this, his one and only single, was released almost fifty years ago to the day and that Robbins wrote the track himself.
It came out on the President label, who issued some great soul by the likes of Archie Bell And The Drells and Gwen McCrae as well as some out and out pop, one example of this trend being Radio Clyde DJ Tiger Tim, whose second single of 1975 Merry Christmas, Mr Christmas failed to knock Bohemian Rhapsody off its top spot. Or get anywhere near the charts for that matter.
President also put out Adrienne Posta’s Cruisin’ Casanova, this being the theme from Adventures Of A Taxi Driver, a rip-off of the Confessions sexploitation series of movies. Reputedly in Britain in 1976, it took in more money at the box office than Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver. To digress even further, Anna, the daughter of critically acclaimed Swedish director Ingmar Bergman appears in the film in various states of undress and later appeared again with Adventures star Barry Evans in British sitcom Mind Your Language.
Daddy must have been so proud.
Back to Virginia Creeper. Admittedly, this slice of junkshop glam is very likely an acquired taste, especially Greg’s kookily manic vocal delivery (that is surely down to some studio trickery) but I can’t help but smile at the sound of that squelchy synth swerving around the track, which must have sounded futuristic back in the day, and the crunching guitar flashes which are also very much of their time. Best of all is the pounding piano riff. Which might strike you as oddly familiar. Especially around the 1.25 and 1.52 marks.
Johnny Marr has mentioned that he took inspiration for Shakespeare’s Sister from a number of sources, mainly The Rolling Stones’ 19th Nervous Breakdown. Did he maybe, as he sat down at his piano to compose, subconsciously incorporate the piano riff from Virginia Creeper?
Likely by a complete coincidence, Morrissey was inspired to take his title for the track from another Virginia: Virginia Woolf and her essay Shakespeare’s Sister.
How Soon Is Now? by The Smiths had topped John Peel’s Festive 50 in 1984 as a 12 inch B-side, and this helped persuade Rough Trade boss Geoff Travis that the band should bring out the song again, this time as an A. Morrissey was against the idea but went along with it when Travis promised the band that they could then bring out non-album track Shakespeare’s Sister as a single. Morrissey adored this song as did Johnny Marr. It opens with a slide guitar swoon, that urgent piano and, within the first fifteen seconds, Morrissey sings these startling lyrics:
‘Young bones groan/And the rocks below say/Throw your skinny body down, son!’
Not only do The Smiths launch straight into the action but they bail out early, leaving you wanting more as Andy Rourke’s mournful cello calls the proceedings to a halt.
Of course, Britain’s general public – you know those folks who would rather pay to see an unfunny sex farce than a classic by Scorsese – preferred ghastly super-bland acts like Go West and Nik Kershaw and this time around The Smiths reached no higher than #26 in Britain, albeit it did top the independent charts for three weeks on the trot.
Cover star of the single release is Pat Phoenix, perhaps better known as Elsie Tanner from Coronation Street, who also appeared in Bryan Forbes’ The L-Shaped Room. On the front of the Louder Than Bombs compilation is Salford born Shelagh Delaney, who wrote another Morrissey favourite A Taste of Honey, which is thought to have influenced Corrie in its early years.
Looking back nowadays, the rise of Roddy Frame might seem rapid but it likely didn’t feel that way for the young man himself at the time.
With Neutral Blue, he played shows at The Key Youth Club, (above, East Kilbride was big on concrete back then) and community halls like the Red Deer Centre in their native Westwood. A planned concert in 1979 at the Village Theatre with other local acts like The Sinister Turkeys, New Town Scum and No Romance (whatever happened to them?) would have been a relatively big deal but that was cancelled, so fans were denied the chance to hear their curious version of the Parkinson theme song.
Round about the time the 1980s kicked off, the band changed their line-up and their name. Glasgow venues weren’t initially that keen to give them their chance but a demo they recorded at Sirocco Studios helped persuade some that they were worth booking, even if only for a support slot. Their Glasgow debut was with The Stillitos playing the Doune Castle. At the Countdown (the former Mars Bar) they opened for The Visitors while at the Bungalow in nearby Paisley, they were part of double bills with The Teardrop Explodes and then The Revillos. At the latter show, they were discovered by Alan Horne.
Except that they had already been discovered by Fumes fanzine and contributed three tracks to a Fumes related compilation cassette release called Urban Development on Pungent Records.
Two Postcard singles followed before a brief move to another independent Rough Trade, who issued an album, the wonderful High Land, Hard Rain and three singles: Pillar To Post, Oblivious and Walk Out to Winter, each with definite chart potential. None were real hits, though. Okay, in explanation, Oblivious did crack the British Top 20 but only later, once they’d moved on again, this time to major label WEA, who re-released the single.
Expectation levels were high for second album Knife, but many (including myself) raised an eyebrow when it was announced that Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits had been selected for production duties. Some even speculated that he had been forced on them by the big, bad major.
By this time, they’d headlined the opening night of Glasgow’s Night Moves and as the band got ready to play Barrowlands (to be supported by The Go-Betweens no less), Roddy was upbeat when interviewed by ‘music journalist’ Dougie Donnelly in his Glasgow Evening Times Rock Page, stressing how delighted the band were to have Knopfler on board. ‘We really wanted someone we could respect as a musician, who could stand back and be objective.’
As for Knife, Roddy explained: ‘It’s a continuation of High Land, Hard Rain, but a bit more focussed. High Land sounded a bit rushed, I always think.’
You’ll all know the feeling: you want to love an album but deep down you kind of know it’s not that great. The moment you start almost willing it to improve and grow on you should be the moment when you recognise that it won’t.
Not that Knife is by any means a total dud. Lead single All I Need Is Everything might have earned a place on their debut, as could Head Is Happy (Heart’s Insane), albeit neither would have been stand-outs. The title track did briefly raise my hopes that they’d saved the best for last, but it never quite fulfilled its early promise, eventually dragging on for over nine minutes. Longer than the combined length of Oblivious, Walk Out to Winter and Down the Dip.
Maybe the best of the bunch is Still On Fire. It’s certainly the breeziest with that urgent guitar riff that opens the track and resembles The Jackson 5’s I Want You Back to an uncomfortable extent. And those horns around the halfway mark! I seem to remember making a quip about them sounding like something from a Modern Romance record. It was all a long way from the early post-punkish days and what I still think of as the classic trio line-up of Frame, Campbell Owens and David Mulholland . Released as a single in November 1984, make up your own mind:
Smash Hits judged Still On Fire to be ‘enjoyable, jerky and singalongable’ and tipped it to do well but despite its enjoyability, jerkiness and singalongability, it failed to set the chart heather alight and although the album sold well enough to reach the top twenty of the British charts, few if any fans or critics detected any great leap forward in their sound.
The same month that Still On Fire came out, another single from an East Kilbride band was also released that was much more to my taste.
Managed by Alan McGee, who had a wee Postcard connection via Orange Juice having borrowed a vox organ from his former band Newspeak for the recording of Blue Boy, The Jesus and Mary Chain’s Upside Down caused a sensation in Britain’s music press as it slowly climbed to the top of the independent charts. Not a hint of Modern Romance or The Jackson 5 here. Instead, three ferocious minutes of musical brutalism:
For Rip It Up: Post-Postcard (Part One), click here.
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