Ah, the 1970s. Anybody my age can likely remember the elaborate ritual of getting dressed up for a night out at your local disco. Pulling on your fingerless gloves, then slipping a big bangle round each hand. Next, you’d roll a ninja mask over your head before squeezing into the pièce de résistance, your transparent bin liner thingyme.
Who could fail to admire your sense of style?
The RAH Band consisted of a sole member Richard Anthony Hewson. A jazz guitarist, Hewson was a favourite orchestral arranger with Apple (the original Apple that is) and worked with The Beatles, Badfinger and solo Paul McCartney.
By the mid-1970s, he was feeling the urge to make a pop record of his own and for his first attempt, he hired a Philips 4-track and laid down a tune in his bedroom, playing all the instruments himself. He later added a brass section in a more conventional way in a studio.
As it’s accompanied by (ahem) a real crunching riff, he titled it The Crunch.
A few years later, Tony Visconti’s Good Earth label picked up on the track. It was released as a single in February 1977 when people in Scotland were dressing like Nanook of the North and only slowly made any impact, eventually peaking during that year’s heatwave summer, when everybody was dehydrated, sunburned and in T-shirts and shorts.
The Crunch spent two weeks in August at #6 in a chart that included a number of tracks where synthesisers were utilised: I Feel Love, Oxygene Part IV and Magic Fly.
Not that The Crunch was part of any pop/synth revolution. None were used in its making, despite the Minimoog on display on the Top of The Pops appearance. That almost irritatingly catchy riff is the result of Hewson putting his Hohner electric piano through a guitar pedal. This is something I only discovered earlier this year.
Something else I have only recently found out is that Hewson is not the guy with the ninja-mask that you see on Top of the Pops. As The Crunch began racking up enough records sales to send it into the charts, The RAH Band was invited onto the show. Hewson wasn’t available to appear so a pretend band was speedily assembled, in order for the song to gain from some further and very crucial exposure – and in Britain in the 1970s around 15million viewers tuned in every week to the show.
I doubt Hewson was impressed by the imposters.
It’s easy to imagine a very young Alison Goldfrapp bopping around to The Crunch in her bedroom, so here is a slice of Goldfrapp electro-glam from 2003. This is Strict Machine:
Still on the theme of electro-glam, here’s another track that might just contain a little of The Crunch in its DNA. Written and produced by Beck – he plays guitar, synth bass and synth too – this is the video for Charlotte Gainsbourg’s Terrible Angels.
And if you’ve ever wondered what could possibly be even more wonderful than Charlotte Gainsbourg, here’s your answer: Charlotte Gainsbourg and a bunch of doppelgangers.
Charlotte Gainsbourg’s directorial debut Jane By Charlotte, a documentary examining her relationship with her mum has just received its world premiere at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.
For more on Charlotte Gainsbourg, click here.
For more on Goldfrapp, click here.
And more on The RAH Band, here’s yer link.
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