One More Time For Marc: T.Rex: "The Groover"

"T-R-E-X!"

 This may well be the first song where the artist announces himself, as if you didn't know immediately who was playing; and this is an anthem, a kind of self-reflecting song that a band can only do once they, in fact, no longer need to tell you who they are.  It doesn't really go anywhere as a song- "I'm a groover, honey!" and "Yeah!" is pretty much the song, but of course being Marc Bolan he's got something to say...and it's mostly about how he actually doesn't care what he's called (Arnie??  Slim?!) because he knows he's the Groover, and thus can go anywhere.

Star King?  Jeepster?  Hmmm, when you start referencing your other songs in a song that is kind of a tipping point; I can see how this only got to #2 on the Luxembourg chart - as boistrous and by-rote strutting this song is, it lacks a vital oomph; it really is like overhearing someone talk about how great they are instead of actually getting to see/hear how great they are, instead.  There is a fine line between buoyant boasting and joie de vivre and this; this, which sounds uncomfortably like T.Rex now needs a cheerleading song to keep the band going in their perpetual battle to stay in the Top Ten, to stay relevant, even.  Marc Bolan must have realized that he started the whole Glam Rock thing and now it is everywhere, and here he is celebrating himself (far more than the shoegazers would in 20 years' time) as if to remind everyone that he was first.  But it still sounds strained, as if he could also see this central role disappearing, his kingly finery being trampled by so many stack-heeled boors who couldn't be truly groovy if they tried.  This is the last time I write about T.Rex here and it's sad that the song isn't more emphatic; instead it's like seeing a ship sail off, over the horizon, never to be seen again.* (Note:  it's not like T.Rex ended; they just didn't get a Top Ten hit after this.) 

The first part of the 70s is now over; the period that I will be calling The Fog has yet to begin, though anyone who now feels itchy even thinking about certain tv shows - UK tv shows I mean - will know The Fog is already here, and pop music is doing its darnedest to fight it every step of the way...

Next up:  as one world ends, another begins.

 *Coincidentally, by this time I know we are going to be moving to Canada; we have a few weeks to clean and pack and have probably already sold the house to a friend.  I have finished kindergarten and will soon be going with my parents cross-country in our car, a trip I don't remember that well, besides it was a hot summer and we ended up in a place called Oakville.  New worlds, indeed.

We Are All Together: Medicine Head: "One and One is One"

It may come as a surprise, dear readers, that anything that isn't either Glam or Teen Idol material can show up here - in competitive, who-can-wear-the-most-outrageous-outfit-on-TOTP-this-week 1973, and yet here we are with...hippies. 

Just because the 60s ended technically didn't mean hippies disappeared; at this point, in fact, they are slowly but surely the cause of all sorts of things to come, things that don't really exist at this point but eventually will (everything from organic food to recycling to flotation tanks and crystal healing; some of these will prove more popular than others).  Hippies, as I understand/imagine it, may well have given up buying singles altogether in favor of albums; but this got in the chart, an anomaly to say the least, and an NME #2, as well.   

For those of you who might think that maybe this song is proof hippies can't do math, well, man, it's all about how love puts two together so they are one, dig? (Hippie declarations of love are of course the lower octave, as they'd say at the Omega Centre, of the higher octave of universal love, man*.)  Far from being a pompous blowhard-type declaration, this is as easygoing as a Sunday and may well be the first appearance of a jew's harp on MSBWT, if I'm not mistaken.  Medicine Head were a blues band, mostly, but this is pure pop, the lyrics all love-eagerness (more phone talk, "little darling") - if anything this is what a more lively Dire Straits would sound like, had they existed yet.  (The guitar here sounds a bit like the guitar on "So Far Away" and there are little organ blips and bleeps too, less frenetic than those on "Industrial Disease.")  The vocals are laid back, so much so they're almost spoken word, and it is a shame that the band (signed in the 60s to John Peel's Dandelion label) didn't get to build on this success; perhaps they were too offhand and hippie to compete in the Glam Rock/Big Important Album dichotomy of the time, and end up, effectively, as the kind of band only people (pardon me, "heads") from back in the day remember at all.  This song is thus part of The Void - I have yet to hear it on UK radio - drowned out by its noisy neighbors in the chart, from Suzi Quatro to 10cc, Wizzard to Wings.  There were other laid-back songs on the chart, of course, but none as lo-fi as this. 

Next up:  Did someone say hippie?   

*I'm not sure if the term "New Age" was being used in '73, but the Omega Centre is a New Age place in Toronto, in case you're wondering - in Yorkville, where people would go in the late 60s to make fun of hippies.  Things have changed...

Ka-Boom!: The Sweet: "Hell Raiser"

And now we return to The Sweet - the band that came up through bubblegum and wanted to be a rock band and found themselves, at this time, with one metaphorical foot in each camp.  Unlike Slade, David Bowie or T. Rex, The Sweet didn't write their own songs and thus were at the mercy of the fairly new songwriting team of Nicky Chinn and Mike Chapman.  As I previously wrote about them, they had to do songs like "Funny Funny" and "Co-Co" and probably felt like adults trying to ride tricycles; but clearly Chinn & Chapman sensed in the band's harmonies and attitude something a bit...de trop.  Something a bit beyond the aggressive workingman's pride of Slade or regal foppery of T. Rex - The Sweet were inherently silly because of their split circumstances, and that awkwardness feeds into their best songs. 

"Hell Raiser" was their next single after their own hysterical "Block Buster!" - and of course it's loud, starting out with a fiery yell of lust and going out for blood afterwards.  This isn't exactly Black Sabbath, but damned if it doesn't sound like punk rock as well (I can only wonder what the future Joey Ramone made of it).  The song is about a girl who is nothing but trouble (she sounds as if she is a one-woman riot, nearly) who has "ultra sonic eyes" and who is a literal bombshell, a "natural born raver" - a huge female that the singer is scared of, as much as attracted to.  "Look OUT!" Brian Connelly yells at the start, as if the girl is indeed about to send her own special shockwaves out, stunning all the men as she shakes her "ooh."

That the lyrics have the narrator telling his mom (who wants him to get this girl) that whenever she touches him it feels like he's "burning in the fires of hell."  Thus this whole song is him trying to explain how intense this girl is and how in turn he feels; this isn't so much a song about thinking as much as feeling, the ferocity of the song matching all this lust-fear-lust stopping-and-starting.  The song leaps out at you in the best Glam Slam tradition, singing directly to those boys who know a girl just like this (or maybe wish they did).  The song ends with an explosion, which could stand for so many things (I will let you, dear reader, figure out what it means).  Chinn and Chapman and The Sweet, with this song, balanced the rock and bubblegum perfectly - the hysteria of the song melds with the supersonic speed and they sing sincerely - well, as sincerely as possible, all things considered.  (It certainly sounds more grounded in reality than the song which kept it off the top - the breakdown-inducing "Tie A Yellow Ribbon" by Tony Orlando and Dawn.) 

When I next return to The Sweet, the song won't be about a girl who is a riot - it will be about a riot.  Well, it is the early 70s.

Next up:  we are all one, man.

Postmodern "Love": David Bowie: "Drive-In Saturday (Seattle to Phoenix)"

Easter 1973 was perhaps the first one I remember; I had the chicken pox and was confined to my bed, while my father went off to this place called Canada for a job interview.  It was sunny and warm in L.A., I was hot and itchy and felt weird - weird to look at my skin, and weird that I knew that if he was successful, we would be moving pretty soon.  The undifferentiated chunk of my early formative life in Los Angeles, in Silverlake in particular, would be ending, the future unknown (not that I thought much about 'the future' as such back then).  When he came back, he brought me a concave plastic toy - shiny silver, with a green rubber ball suspended in the middle, so I could move it around and notice the reflections in the concavity...(my father wasn't much for presents). 

At the time I had no idea about David Bowie, as I've said before; but I can imagine there was a whole horde of kids in the UK who also felt weird, as if their own skin was strange, and who latched on to Bowie with that same feverishness I felt; if following T.Rex was like an ecstatic experience, then Bowie was more a contagion, something that took you over and left its marks, for good or bad.  This song (#2 on the Luxembourg chart) from Aladdin Sane has the strangeness of something you know is bad for you, maybe even corrupting; but it is done so well that hardly matters. 

It is hard, especially in these renewed days of Bowie fever, to cast any light on this song that hasn't already been shone; save to say how even on a train from Seattle to Phoenix (he didn't like to fly - still doesn't I guess) he is still determinedly English; let Elton John and Bernie Taupin sing about America, Bowie guesses that the young creatures of the future are going to be Anglophiles into Mick Jagger and Twiggy, not Marilyn Monroe or Roy Rogers.  These young folks have to learn the arts of romance, so to speak; and thus go to see movies and learn how they are done.  Yes, in the dystopia to come, even normal instincts are lost; or perhaps the apocalypse has made them unnecessary, until now...I don't know if the love in this song is real or not; or perhaps the love for cinema is stronger than the actual 'love' made in and around the song itself.  This is a concave world folding in on itself, the music a complex doo-wop*, Bowie's voice climbing and noting, gaining footholds, sympathetic (I think) to these hapless ravers, who are bumbling in the dark, so naive they have to read books and consult friends.  That this is normal adolescent behavior and doesn't need a post-apocalyptic setting to work is the secret of this song; teenagers will be clueless no matter what fall out may be around.  It is the music that is the most strange thing; I suspect that is why Mott the Hoople turned it down - Bowie gave them first dibs - and their rejection of it upset Bowie.  I am not sure Ian Hunter would have liked singing about "Jung the foreman" or "Astronette 8" and would have no idea what "Sylvian**, The Bureau Supply for ageing men" meant.  (Hm, maybe it's the lyrics and the music together...)  The entire effect is one of a kind of decadence, wherein figures from the 60s are in a 70s-style doo-wop song sung from the point of view of someone looking back on a post-apocalyptic future adolescence.  Whew! 

This is audio pop-art, the kind I remember being full of noise, lights, machines with personalities; I remember seeing a show like this at the time and being alternately thrilled by it and a little scared too.  That is as close to my reaction to Bowie would have been at the time - that this was maybe a little too grown up for me, that there were a lot of symbols and ideas going right over my head, ones I wouldn't have a clue about one way or another.   In the spring of 1973 Bowie was, as the V&A show no doubt says, influencing people; asking them, with this song, to consider the eternal verities and warn them of nostalgia, of relying too much on Jagger and Twig the Wonder Kid for glamour - for propping a whole culture up on the 60s in essence, the effective continuation of life itself on a video or two. 

That people are clamoring for Bowie now at the V&A is ironic as far as this song is concerned; I think it is right to view the past in context, but the right context is to hear the whole chart for this time to note how utterly different Bowie (and T.Rex and Roxy Music) were to everything else; strange and thrilling and a little scary.  (The V&A show strikes me, who will probably never see it, as one of itchy idolatry - the overheated reaction to it and his new album show that the contagion still exists, a benevolent one of course, but one that leads to things like zig-zag earrings and "David Bowie Is Turning Us All Into Voyeurs***" buttons isn't always a good thing.)

Still, this is the tacky, awkward post-apocalypse of romance; teenagers are going to manage with whatever is left, the 50s/60s merging into a past that is only of some help.  For those who felt out of step, odd in their own skin, Bowie was there to reassure them; but for others, those who didn't have to rehearse any lines or read books because their hormones were on fire - well, that's what I'm getting to next.

  

*Add to this confusion a performer who is very much English trying to do an American style of music - in hearing this I wondered if Bowie had ever even been to a drive-in.  Methinks not.

**I have no idea if David Sylvian got his last name from this song, but then again he was 15 at the time, so he probably did, unless it was the New York Dolls' Sylvain Sylvain first. 

***Voyeurs of what?  "David Bowie Is Watching You" is the t-shirt for the show; all this watching, directly or surreptitiously, sounds like one ugly game of hide and seek.  It also makes me wonder how this figure of the future knows about what the kids are doing...why is he so interested?  Cough.
   

Osmondmania: Little Jimmy: "Tweedle Dee," The Osmonds: "Let Me In," Marie: "Paper Roses," Donny and Marie: "I'm Leaving It (All) Up To You"

There are few phenomenons so closely linked to the 70s that have fallen quite solidly into The Void as the Osmondmania that gripped the globe in the first half of that nostalgic decade.  And in hearing all these songs, that is what strikes me most - we are technically in the '73-'74 period, but the Osmonds are going backwards. 

The group, as you know, were first discovered at Disneyland after having been rejected from the Lawrence Welk show; they worked for and with Disney for a while, and then were on the Andy Williams show for a few years.  Then Mike Curb came along and saw potential in them beyond mere harmony singing; he booked them in at Muscle Shoals in the fall of '70, where Rick Hall figured out how to make their sound a lot more contemporary.  It worked:  "One Bad Apple" was recorded there and went to #1 in the US, and Osmondmania was born.

Osmondmania spread around the globe, striking particularly hard in the UK; by this time, the spring of '73, it was a genuine mania, with seemingly any family member able to get a big hit...even Little Jimmy Osmond, who is about to turn ten and does stuff that is...well...cute.  I think the whole point of Little Jimmy was to be cute, although some might just think of him as bothersome or even a cause for minor despair.  The Osmonds were and are an industrious bunch and they all had to do something;  if growling and singing like a miniature Jimmy Durante (the song is from 1954) was going to charm the grannies in Arbroath, well, so be it.  (It wasn't a hit in the US, however; such rinky-dinkism was where the line was drawn, so to speak.)  It got to #2 on the Luxembourg chart, as a follow up to his also rather unnecessary but popular "Long Haired Lover From Liverpool" got to #1, earlier this year. 

The smooth sound of the Osmonds - such a toothy and together family, four square and utterly undisturbing or threatening - was just what girls wanted; I was far too young to know about them at the time, so their appeal isn't really something I can understand, save for there will always be nice boys for good and not-so-good girls to go utterly crazy over, and the Osmonds were those boys at this time.  (They were rivals with the Partridge Family, specifically David Cassidy, about now, as we shall see.)  "Let Me In" is a song that the band wrote itself for their progressive rock album The Plan; by now they were ambitious enough to want to join the ranks of Yes, Pink Floyd etc. and while it may indeed be a head trip, this song sounds anything but far-out; it is a very typical love song, with Merrill doing the lead vocals and the rest coming in for a warm, gentle barbershop-ish harmony.  It screams "I'm a nice guy and you don't have to worry with me, oh please love me" that would of course have girls flocking to their local record emporium to buy the single, if not the album.  (The Plan was a hit of course, though it too has fallen into The Void; I doubt if Radio 2 will ever have a show featuring it as a 'classic' album.)  "Let Me In" was #2 behind...the older and more introspective David Cassidy, who did get a number one album as well (Dreams Are Nothin' More Than Wishes) and whose own fanatical fans would overwhelm him; the Osmonds had power and faith in numbers that got them through some utterly insane times.  (How insane?  Girls tried to mail themselves to the Osmonds.) 

In the midst of all this boyband hysteria came Marie Osmond; the second-youngest and still just thirteen when she recorded "Paper Roses" - a song of maturity and knowledge, a song of disappointment, that maybe other girls...understood?  I am always wary of songs of such world-weariness being sung by girls who probably haven't even had a boyfriend yet, but here we are, it's the 70s and a girl born in 1959 is singing a song from 1960, originally a hit for well-known-for-many-things Anita Bryant.  Seeing her do it, made up to look a lot older than her age, makes me wonder just who did buy this, beyond country fans, Osmond maniacs and...?

By now, it must have seemed to the UK public that the Osmonds would not go away, would never in fact stop having hits; and I am sure those ideas filled some with happiness and others with angst.  However, there is only one more #2 hit for the family to discuss here; and that is the even more confusing/disturbing "I'm Leaving It (All) Up To You" - a hit for Donny and Marie in '74.  It's disturbing because...are a brother and sister supposed to be singing a song like this to each other?  And to those who remember the song from 1963, when it was a #1 in the US...well, it was #1 just before the Kennedy assassination*.  There is something odd in bringing back these memories, though I imagine most of the girls buying this single had no idea about its first sorry fate. 

I think you can see, dear readers, that apart from their own works the songs here are all from the pre-Beatles era; effectively, before those awful 60s happened, when things were nice and serene and uncomplicated.  An awful lot of the early 70s is caught up, one way or another, with nostalgia for this time, a time before not just The Beatles but Dylan, hippies, miniskirts, and all kinds of other moral outrages that middle America (the Osmonds are from Utah, that state where Bill Bryson, in The Lost Continent, finds his utopian nice USA town, or comes closest to it) never had much time for**.  The Osmonds are miles away from any genderbending glam platform progress, and yet were just as popular during the Glam Slam era, causing hordes of female fans to scream so loud that they had to play louder than anybody outside of The Who to be heard.  But the screaming pretty much ended in '75 for The Osmonds; Donny and Marie had a variety tv show starting in '76 and the rest worked on the show with them, behind the scenes. 

That so many girls and guys loved the Osmonds and that they have effectively been written out of UK pop radio (save for chart countdown shows) is a shame; they were the well-scrubbed conservative face of US pop, to be sure, but they were just as much part of this time as anyone; and nowadays it is Glam that gets the respect and museum exhibitions, while the nice Osmonds, with their Mormon concept album and puppy-doggish charms are consigned to the "you had to be there" whitebread nostalgia corner, alongside the Patridge Family and so on.  But it's hard to feel too much nostalgia for songs that were themselves covers of songs from before things got messy.  I can sense the UK's lasting preference for Glam over the US family-style pop is due to Glam's being British and therefore tough and ridiculous and ironic - and in effect more masculine, as opposed to the sweet feminine "girly" US pop of the time.  And I can imagine girls waiting for the Osmonds to appear on TOTP, just as the guys were waiting for...well...you know...

Next up:  popcorn double feature.                 


*And it's not just these songs; think of Donny's solo hits, all of them from the early 60s/50s, from "Young Love" to "The Twelfth of Never."  I have no idea if these songs were picked for their nostalgia factor, or just because Donny could sing them.  The Osmonds were a kind of smiley-face-button of pop, albeit one that tugged heartstrings pretty mercilessly, particularly ones of young girls. 

**Dale and Grace were in Dallas that day, young and in love with a number one single, and a few moments after having waved to the President & First Lady everything changed; radio went silent for days, their single was obviously no longer popular, and they broke up a few months later, instantly outdated by the arrival of The Beatles.  

Here Comes Everybody: T. Rex: "20th Century Boy"

Lately I have been reading Rob Sheffield’s Talking To Girls About Duran Duran, and in it he discusses how girls respond differently than music in their fandom than boys; that girls, fickle as they can be, are hugely loyal to artists and bands they love – that love, even if slightly ironized by time, never really goes away.  (This kind of love can verge on the possessive; certainly in the 50s and 60s it did.)  Sheffield’s book concerns itself with the 80s, so I have no idea how loyal T. Rex’s female fans were, or even if they had many female fans – I am guessing they did, or how else would “Trextasy” happen?  If fandom is like an addiction - it needs new singles all the time to feed it and keep it going – then this was the last ecstatic song, one that was rock enough for the boys (more on them in a minute) and feline enough for the girls.  (Of course, many girls were caught up in this time in the David vs. Donny brouhaha, and I will be addressing the latter’s whole family in the next entry.) 

“I walk like a rat, crawl like a cat, sting like a bee*” he claims, and while I am not sure any girl would be interested in someone even remotely like a rat, but there is such swagger in the song that it doesn’t matter; the growling guitar announces itself immediately, and the band and backing singers (including a very audible Gloria Jones) make a wall of noise that could break down anyone’s resistance.  Is he trying too hard?  It can seem that way (to those who prefer the more laidback T.Rex of yore) but this is not a song that could be done with subtlety.  Who the friends are who are saying “it’s just like Robin Hood” are or just what is like Robin Hood is beyond me – and doesn’t it sound like he’s saying “rock ‘n’ roll” almost, instead?  This is about as pagan as Bolan gets here – after all, the song is about the 20^th century, it’s about being a “toy”** - an object of fun and desire, created for mischief (maybe this is where Robin Hood fits in).  If he is screaming at the end, he ends it by drawling the lyrics, as if he is Elvis and for sure this time he’ll get to the top spot…only to be confounded by little girls who want a nice ballad on one hand, and boys who want to make noise on the other.  (This was an NME #2.)  But the older girls needed that pure adrenaline wave of a hit, and this song - which is like an essence of T. Rex - was more than enough, for now... 

But the boys who were his fans were loyal, perhaps more loyal than the girls; an amazing number of them went on to form bands, as if imprinted by Bolan at some important stage in their development.  What they went on to do varied from Goth (Peter Murphy) to Socialist Pop (Dr. Robert), from Stadium Rock (U2) to Indie Subversives (Mark E. Smith, Johnny Marr) to Punk itself (practically everyone).  Glam was a movement as such, but there always has to be a heart of a movement, someone who can appeal to girls and boys, who can epitomize what it’s all about – and this song for me is at the center of it all, of the whole Glam Slam. 

Serious, funny, sexy – this song has been covered all over the place, even by good ol’ 80s Canadian band Chalk Circle, a band who were usually quite serious but here they cut loose - well, as loose as they were ever going to get.  Even if you make fun of the whole rock ‘n’ roll concept (and Chalk Circle certainly know this is an Elvis song, through and through) it’s still an effortless song, with the kind of swagger that can be heard right down to Suede and Oasis. 

But for now this is one for the girls; even if they’re not screaming anymore, this song was theirs once too, and not just the dreamy boys who would go on to make a very different noise to come.

Next up:  just a normal family from Utah, that’s all.

*Or is it “Crawl like a rat, talk like a cat”?  That’s what I think he’s singing, but since he switches it around, I’m not sure. 

**I just realized what this song is leading to, but we won’t get to that song for some time.  That song was at the center of a whole other movement, which I will be discussing in a while over at Then Play Long.    

Behold The Colins: The Faces: "Cindy Incidentally"

Lately I have been pondering the term "bloke":  and while there are many varieties of bloke out there, I tend to think of some of them as Colins.  Colins are traditionalists, no matter what tradition it is they are following, and they tend to look with suspicion at any music that isn't traditional (I think they would use the word "authentic".)  If the Housewives of Valium Court long to be swept away in some sort of masculine cry of emotion, the Colins* regard music as something of a large mirror, reflecting and refracting their lives, lives too big for mere singles.  No, the Colins like albums** - they like the odd single here and there enough, but for their tastes and habits the album is the thing; a collection of songs that let him see himself, that are his soundtrack, the melodies and lyrics to his daily life. 

There is nothing wrong with this, of course; a lot of what makes music enthusiasts makes the Colins what they are, save that the Colins tend to stick to very particular areas, sounds, artists.  And they don't really evolve or change, once they are in their mid-20s.  Not all blokes are Colins, but all Colins are blokes and thus we come, dear readers, to this song. 

This is an anthem to change, to moving on, to leaving your dull town for somewhere else; and I can imagine it resonating with a lot of people, way beyond the Colins (who would have waited for the album Ooh La La to come out, being album people and whatnot).  It is hard not to hear it now as a song Rod Stewart is singing to himself, that he has to leave The Faces and indeed the UK; and this was to be the last album he did with them; on his own he was a star and the roughness of The Faces was something he wanted to leave behind***.  (Greil Marcus calls Stewart's albums with the band "let's go get drunk" music, and is willing to accept that far more than Stewart at the time did.)  Long before he did his Great American Songbook stuff, Stewart wanted to immerse himself in that smooth American soul sound, to make music in that tradition.  As much as the Colins love The Faces, they respect Stewart's need to do this - to adhere to tradition - and I suppose this makes Stewart a Colin himself. 

This song, where he tells the girl in question to pack up and move out with him, could be heard (I guess) as his wishing he could take The Faces along for the ride.  But what if it's otherwise?  How mean would it be to write a song about how dull your band is, and have them play on it?  As mean as calling the resulting album a "stinking rotten" one, and then saying that it could have been done better.  There is so much goodwill and bonhomie in the early 70s, but by now it is starting to disintegrate; and Stewart, who no doubt regards himself by now as a "professional" is eagerly anticipating the day when he leaves town, leaves his old once-friends behind and starts his life anew.

That life, according to Marcus, is one in which "he exchanged passion for sentiment, the romance of sex for a tease, a reach for mysteries with tawdry posturing" and thus betrays his talent.  Stewart isn't the only rock star who leaves the UK for the US but his decision to do so seems to me to be one he would have made even he actually liked what he and the The Faces were doing; that he didn't think they could do what he wanted them to just made it easier for him.

But what of the non-Colins who bought this?  Were they just as eager to leave their own dingy corners and head off to places elsewhere?  Anyone would have heard this at the time and felt some sympathy with the urge to go somewhere more exciting; a few though, would stay right at home and try to make excitement for themselves.  Rod Stewart is his own weathervane here, and his fans long for that freedom to move, which some may take up, others, not...the Colins will understand, even if their escape is mostly pub talk and their main dream is owning a shed or two.

Next up:  the Glam Slam continueth.           



*Named after one man who was niggling a point on a nationwide radio show, most likely Radio 2, which is in part a Colin-friendly station.

**The recent BBC tv and radio shows heralding the album were either wrong-headed (re-recording Please Please Me) or mind-boggling (one BBC broadcaster said that disco was the anti-r&b).

***It is interesting to note that the whole pub rock movement kind of takes off once Stewart leaves and The Faces break up; and that whole idea of dismissing a band because it can't play will rebound in a few years as well...