glam Rock | The Great British Songbook https://www.greatbritishsongbook.com Celebrating the Songs of The Great British Songbook Thu, 11 Jul 2019 20:57:17 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.5.5 https://i0.wp.com/www.greatbritishsongbook.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/cropped-GBSBFav-1.png?fit=32%2C32&ssl=1 glam Rock | The Great British Songbook https://www.greatbritishsongbook.com 32 32 157986397 SUGAR BABY LOVE https://www.greatbritishsongbook.com/sugar-baby-love/ Wed, 06 Mar 2019 18:19:49 +0000 https://www.greatbritishsongbook.com/?p=585 The post SUGAR BABY LOVE appeared first on The Great British Songbook.

]]>

First a warning – if you run a Google search for details of Sugar Baby Love make sure you specify it’s The Rubettes 1974 chart topper you want. Let’s draw a line under that one, ok?

Secondly, despite the follies of fading memories, The Rubettes were not one hit wonders (nor at one time were they only one band – an acrimonious law case allowing two versions to tour as long as the band’s name was prefaced or followed with the “original” member claimant’s moniker.

Yes, whilst most if us only remember Sugar Baby Love, the band notched up nine hit singles totalling 68 weeks in the UK charts and one hit album of one week’s chart duration (does a peak of four count as a hit? Yes.).

BUBBLEGUM POP

Sugar Baby Love can easily be dismissed as pure bubblegum pop – but once heard it’s not easy to forget. It comes in the category of “Not Worth Its Salt If You Don’t Join In.”

That’s not to say you needed to buy a white suit and daft flat cap like they trademarked their Top of the Pops debut with – and lifted a dormant single into a rocket speed hit.

No, it’s more up there with the double denim hips and shoulder thrust of just about every up tempo Status Quo song, Michael Jackson’s slithery moonwalk, Rocky Horror’s invitation to do the Timewarp (again), Freddie and the Dreamers’ ministry of silly leaps, or even Bucks Fizz’s memorable Eurovision skirt removal routine.

No, in this case it’s the lead vocalist’s tonsil rattling falsetto we all wanted to emulate. After all they did make Frankie Valli’s contributions to the Four Seasons’ canon of hits seem like a karaoke contestant.

And what about that backing chorus of “bop showaddwaddy” (which is now claimed to be the semantically different “bop-shu-waddy” probably because the rock revival band had actually turned down the chance to record the song in the first place).

Sugar Baby Love was recorded in autumn 1973 and released in January 1974 as the debut single of the previously non-existent Rubettes. Written by Wayne Bickerton (then the head of A&R at Polydor Records) and Tony Waddington and produced by Bickerton, engineered by John Mackswith at Lansdowne Recording Studios, and with lead vocals by Paul Da Vinci, it was the band’s only number one in the UK, spending four weeks at the top (Juke Box Jive later in the year reached number three).

Bickerton and Waddington had been writing songs together since they were both members of the band formed by The Beatles’ original drummer, The Pete Best Four in Liverpool in the early 1960s.Their biggest success had previously been Nothing But a Heartache, a US hit for The Flirtations in 1968 and a bit of a Northern Soul cult hit in the UK.

ROCK ‘N’ ROLL MUSICAL

In the early 1970s, they came up with the idea for a rock ‘n’ roll musical and co-wrote and produced a demonstration recording of Sugar Baby Love with Tonight (its eventual follow up and number 12 hit), Juke Box Jive and Sugar Candy Kisses (which became a hit for Mac and Katie Kissoon).

They originally intended to submit it for the Eurovision Song Contest but instead offered it to Showaddywaddy and ex-Move member Carl Wayne, who both turned it down..They then offered it to the recording session’s musicians, provided that they would become an actual group. By then the recording’s lead singer Paul Da Vinci had signed a solo recording contract with Penny Farthing Records and only John Richardson, who played drums and spoke the “people take my advice” line would sign up and later become a leading member of The Rubettes live band.

Waddington paired the group with manager John Morris, the husband of singer Clodagh Rodgers and under his guidance, the band duly emerged at the tail end of the glam rock movement, wearing their trademark white suits and cloth caps on stage (hence the name of their first album – Wear It’s At (geddit?)

The song also made the American top 40 as well as reaching number one in Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Austria and Belgium and number two in Australia, South Africa and Italy.

At the time of recording it they weren’t sure it would be a hit at all. Bickerton said: “We had Paul DaVinci singing in that incredibly high falsetto voice and then a vocal group sings ‘Bop-shu-waddy’ over and over for about three minutes. Gerry Shury, who did the string arrangements, said, ‘This is not going to work: you can’t have a vocal group singing ‘Bop-shu-waddy’ non stop.’ A lot of people said the same thing to us and the more determined I became to release it. The record was dormant for six or seven weeks and then we got a break on Top of the Pops and it took off like a rocket and sold six million copies worldwide. Gerry said to me, ” I’m keeping my mouth shut and will concentrate on conducting the strings.”

The Rubettes’ success encouraged Bickerton and Waddington to set up State Records, so that 10 months after the release of Sugar Baby Love, the fourth Rubettes single I Can Do It was on it.

In 1994, the song’s profile was revived by its inclusion in the hit film Muriel’s Wedding. It was also featured in the 2005 Neil Jordan film Breakfast On Pluto soundtrack, and in a popular Safe Sex commercial directed by Wilfrid Brimo, which was awarded a Silver Lion prize at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival in June 2006.

On 28 March 2008, Sugar Baby Love was declared to be the most successful oldie of all time by the German television station RTL.
Still better be careful about that Google search though!

WRITERS: Wayne Bickerton & Tony Waddington
PRODUCER: Wayne Bickerton
GENRE: Glam Rock, Bubblegum Pop
ARTIST: The Rubettes
LABEL Polydor
RELEASED Jan 1974
UK CHART 1
COVERS Wink

The post SUGAR BABY LOVE appeared first on The Great British Songbook.

]]>
585
MERRY XMAS EVERYBODY https://www.greatbritishsongbook.com/merry-xmas-everybody/ Mon, 04 Feb 2019 18:42:20 +0000 https://www.greatbritishsongbook.com/?p=413 The post MERRY XMAS EVERYBODY appeared first on The Great British Songbook.

]]>
For most of us a pension fund is something we contribute to on a weekly or monthly basis with varying degrees of enthusiasm but a firm eye on the hoped-for future. For anyone earning a crust in the fickle world of popular music things are slightly different. Lest Dame Fame looks the other way it seems all they have to do is write a song with the words Christmas or Xmas or Snow or even Winter) in the title and they are made for life (or at least retirement). Supermarkets and shopping malls ring out the festive favourites from what seems like Easter through to New Year and whilst most of us can still turn a deaf ear to the goodness-knows-how-many seasonal ditties Saint Cliff Richard has released over the years it has always (well, since 1973 at least) been impossible to ignore the less than dulcet invitation of Merry Xmas Everybody offered by Slade’s raucous frontman Noddy Holder together with his quieter co-writer Jim Lea and the less well remembered guitarist Dave Hill (apart from his daft hairstyles and worryingly stage outfits) and drummer Don Powell. Obviously for every Christmas cracker there’s a whole host of Xmas puddings – being accepted in the Cool Yule compilation catalogues isn’t easy. The albums may well be called “The Best,” and “Now That’s What I Call Christmas” but their limited space is less accessible to change than Masonic membership. Just try telling Jonah Lewie that his Stop The Cavalry is no longer Christmassy enough or that Ronan Keating and Marie Brennan should leave Fairy Tale of New York to The Pogues and Kirsty McColl. It’s unlikely though that there’s ever likely to be a usurper prepared to snatch the holly berried royalty crown from Slade. Even when it was first released in 1973 it felt as though it should have been around forever. Well, after a lifetime of Andy Williams, Bing Crosby and Dean Martin crooning their way through anodyne years of Two Way Family Favourites wasn’t it just wonderful to hear Noddy bellow: “Are you hanging up your stocking on your wall It’s the time when every Santa has a ball Does he ride a red nosed reindeer Does a ton up on his sleigh Do the fairies keep him sober for a day?” No wonder it beat Wizzard’s equally timeless I Wish It Could Be Christmas Everyday to the top spot. The timing couldn’t have better. By 1973, having long since shed their brutish skinhead image, Slade were one of the most popular bands in Britain, having achieved two number one singles – Cum On Feel The Noize (yes, they had a winning way with spelling) and Skweeze Me Pleeze Me – in three months. They had both entered the charts straight at number one, a feat unheard of since The Beatles with Get Back in 1969. During that year, manager Chas Chandler (a former member of The Animals) suggested that Slade write and record a Christmas song. Hill and Powell weren’t keen until Lea came up with the basis of the song while taking a shower combining the verse melody with a song Holder had discarded in 1967 when the band were named the ‘N Betweens. Buy Me a Rocking Chair was Holder’s first solo work and Merry Xmas Everybody used the melody of that song for the chorus, with Lea’s melody as the verse. Speaking to Record Mirror in 1984, Lea revealed: “Nod had written the chorus of it in 1967. In those days it was all flower power and Sgt Pepper and Nod had written this tune. The verse was naff but then he came to the chorus and went ‘Buy me a rocking chair to watch the world go by, buy me a looking glass, I’ll look you in the eye’ – very Sgt. Pepper. I don’t use tape recorders, I just remember everything and if something’s been written 10 or 15 years ago, it stays up there in my head. I never forgot that chorus, and I was in the shower in America somewhere thinking – Bob Dylan, Bob Dylan – and suddenly out came “are you hanging up the stocking on the wall” and I thought that’ll go with that chorus Nod did in ’67. So I rang Nod and said what about doing a Christmas song and he said alright, so I played it to him and that was it.” Holder added in a 2007 interview with the Daily Mail: “We’d decided to write a Christmas song and I wanted to make it reflect a British family Christmas. Economically, the country was up the creek. The miners had been on strike, along with the grave-diggers, the bakers and almost everybody else. I think people wanted something to cheer them up – and so did I. That’s why I came up with the line ‘Look to the future now, it’s only just begun’. Once I got the line, ‘Does your Granny always tell you that the old ones are the best’, I knew I’d got a right cracker on my hands.” A cracker which shows no signs of fading away and has seen unlikely covers including Oi! band The 4-Skins, Oasis, Girls Aloud and even Tony Christie. As for that pension fund Holder is the first to admit it’s not a bad one. In 2015 it was estimated that the song still generated £500,000 of royalties per year and it has been credited with popularizing the annual race for the UK Christmas Number One Single. Not bad for something Melody Maker described as “another stomper” and “highly danceable.
WRITERS: Noddy Holder, Jim Lea
PRODUCER: Chas Chandler
GENRE: Glam Rock , Christmas
ARTIST: Spade
LABEL Poly doe
RELEASED July 1973
UK CHART 1
COVERS Oasis

The post MERRY XMAS EVERYBODY appeared first on The Great British Songbook.

]]>
413
LIFE ON MARS? https://www.greatbritishsongbook.com/life-on-mars/ Tue, 29 Jan 2019 17:45:52 +0000 https://www.greatbritishsongbook.com/?p=357 The post LIFE ON MARS? appeared first on The Great British Songbook.

]]>

The first thing to say about David Bowie’s Life On Mars? is don’t forget to remember the question mark and always try and remember it’s also (somewhere) known as (Is There) Life On Mars?

It’s also worth saying that there’s probably nothing left to say about Life On Mars? because, as anyone who has ever bothered to launch a laptop search will realise, it’s pretty much already been said.

Yes, it might only be a “God-awful small affair to the girl with the mousy hair” but it’s worth 101 questions with barely a clear cut answer to any serious Bowie fan.
On the one hand its title sits easily in the performer’s sci-fi canon which includes Space Oddity of course and its later to become a junky Major Tom (in Ashes To Ashes), Starman, Loving the Alien, Hallo Spaceboy and even The Man Who Sold The World. On the other hand it was a hit two years after first featuring on the Hunky Dory album whilst Aladdin Sane was topping the long player charts and only three months before the re-issued novelty island item The Laughing Gnome was to reach number six.

But more than 40 years down the line we are still asking is there life on Mars (the planet) just as often as fans are asking what does the song actually mean. Because it must mean something right?  Well, one thing seems to be sure (apart from the fact that it’s a young Rick Wakeman providing the distinctive piano), it’s not about Mars.

Strangely, it also seems likely that without Frank Sinatra’s My Way, Life On Mars? may never have happened at all.
In 1968, Bowie wrote the lyrics Even a Fool Learns to Love, set to the music of a 1967 French song Comme d’habitude, composed by Claude François and Jacques Revaux. Bowie’s version was never released, but Paul Anka bought the rights to the original French version and rewrote it into My Way, the song made famous by Frank Sinatra in a 1969 recording on his album of the same name. The success of the Anka version allegedly prompted a clearly “pissed off” (his words) Bowie to write Life On Mars? as a parody of Sinatra’s recording. The liner notes for Hunky Dory indicate that the song was “inspired by Frankie”.

Not as easy to realize as the invitation to “look at those cavemen go” being a reference to Alley Oop by The Hollywood Argyles (whose line-up included legendary producer Kim Fowley), whilst Lennon being “on sale again” is either a reference to the former Beatles solo offerings or perhaps a mistranslation of Lenin!
Clearly much confusion then (not to mention the lawman “beating up the wrong guy,” or those bully boy sailors “fighting in the dance hall”).

Maybe he was just employing lyrical cut-ups much as author William Burroughs did with his novels? Maybe as one reviewer suggested the song was written after “a brief and painful affair” with actress Hermione Farthingale? Bowie more or less agreed. While on tour in 1990, he introduced the song by saying “You fall in love, you write a love song. This is a love song.”

It’s also a theme song, apart from featuring in umpteen big and small screen productions it inspired the long running tv series of the same name (and its sequel was, of course, Ashes To Ashes) and one of two numbers which Green Day singer Billie Joe Armstrong has shortlisted for his funeral (the other being Take This Job and Shove It by Johnny Paycheck).

One thing’s for sure if the young girl who is “hooked to the silver screen” had chosen a better film to watch when her dad booted her out to the cinema we might have been robbed of another timeless gem. And Neil McCormick, chief rock music critic of The Daily Telegraph, would have had to find another song to rank as number one in his “100 Greatest Songs of All Time” list

 

 

WRITERS: David Bowie
PRODUCER: Ken Scott
GENRE: Glam Rock
ARTIST: David Bowie 
LABEL RCA
RELEASED 22 June 1973
UK CHART 3
COVERS

The post LIFE ON MARS? appeared first on The Great British Songbook.

]]>
357