Any Major Dude With Half A Heart

There isn’t much I remember specifically about the late summer and autumn of 1980. We holidayed in Czechoslovakia and Austria, I despised school, my granny died, and I read English football magazines to brush up on my English skills. But I recall the vibe of that time, and these songs help conjure it.

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Kelly Marie – Feels Like I’m In Love.mp3
Here’s a great bit of trivia: Feels Like I’m In Love was written by Ray Dorset, the mutton-chopped frontman of Mungo Jerry, specifically for Elvis Presley. Alas, before Dorset could pitch the song to Elvis, the rhinestoned king died. But imagine Elvis singing Feels Like I’m In Love; with a different arrangement and perhaps slowed down a bit. Sounds like a hit to me. Of course, English disco starlet Kelly Marie also enjoyed a hit with it, a UK #1, and quite rightly so: it’s a very good song. I remember it being hugely popular at the funfair; when I hear it I smell candyfloss, sugar-roasted almonds and Bratwurst.

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Randy Newman – The Story Of A Rock And Roll Band.mp3
This is the bit where the threads of an American songwriter of wit and style and German football meet. Randy Newman was so much a fan of the Electric Light Orchestra that he penned a tribute to the band. The lyrics are, by Newman’s standards, fairly artless, but in his own way, Newman manages to recreate the ELO sound in an affectionate homage, while still sounding like Randy Newman.  Turn To Stone seems to Randy’s favourite ELO song, though he does recognise other worthy contenders. I was so taken by Newman’s tribute that I bought the LP, with its crap cover pic.

At the same time, my favourite football player – and when you’re 14, a favourite player is a semi-deity – was the diminutive but brilliant winger Pierre Littbarski, who played for my favourite club. Sporting exploits aside (and, at 20, he was not a star yet in 1980), there are three things I remember about Littbarski: he was a chocaholic, he supported the conservative CDU (boo!), and he was a huge ELO fan.

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Joan Armatrading – Me Myself I.mp3
Looking back, it seems that by now I was more into LPs than I was into singles. I bought Joan Armatrading’s  Me, Myself, I album on strength of its title track, with that abrasive guitar riff and Chris Spedding’s wonderful guitar solo , Cape Town-born Anton Fig’s thumping drums, the tempo changes and the catchy chorus. I still like the album a lot: All The Way From America, Feeling In My Heart (For You), and especially Turn Out The Lights remain great songs. At this point I had not yet become a Springsteen fan, though that was going to happen fairly soon. But the presence of Danny Federici and Clarence Clemons on the album would have been an added bonus. It also featured Paul Shaffer, David Letterman’s annoying houseband leader, on keyboards. At one point, all of those who appeared on the song were members of the houseband, having met while recording with Joan Armatrading.

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Styx – Boat On The River.mp3
Yeah, I know it came out in 1979, but Boat On The River didn’t get much airplay on German radio until 1980. In fact, on our local station at least, this was bigger than the megahit from the same album, Babe. Perhaps it reminded the playlist compilers of those Slavic-sounding Schlager hits that were in vogue a decade earlier. I bought the Cornerstones LP, but I don’t think I ever listened to it in full, other than Boat On The River and Babe.

In past instalments of this series, I described how my grandmother bought me my first single (see HERE) and how she helped finance my fast-growing singles collection. The Styx and Armatrading albums were the final music acquisitions she funded. She had actually given me the money to buy new trainers. But instead of purchasing the medium range shoes my budget allowed for, I decided to go for a bargain (still cool: yellow Pumas with a black stripe), and use the difference to buy the two LPs. My mom was not impressed with me. My grandmother died a few weeks later at the age of 85.

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The Police – Driven To Tears.mp3
Liking The Police in the West Germany of 1980 was the mature and cool choice. Many of my friends loved AC/DC (good) and Kiss (meh). And a few sung the praises of Gerry Rafferty, even though his City To City album, released two years earlier, was quite ancient. But mention that you like The Police, and people would respect you, much like the neighbourhood respected the teenage Henry Hill in GoodFellas. Soon The Police became really massive and I had to abandon them, but when they released their Zenyatta Mondatta album in 1980, I played it to death.  I also played it to my stepfather when we were wallpapering my room, seeing as he had enjoyed the music of Bob Seger which I had introduced him to. He assured me that he liked the album. Looking back, I think he was lying.

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Diana Ross – My Old Piano.mp3
Upside Down had already been a hit, but it was this track that turned me on to Diana Ross, whom I had hitherto regarded, in my unformed ways, as part of the musical wallpaper, the sort of star who is a star because she is a star. Well, it wasn’t really Ms Ross whom I loved this song for, but the production. It’s a great, catchy number, with the sort of funky bass and cool strings you’d associate with a Nile Rogers and Bernie Edwards production. And then there was the fantastic piano and guitar solo; I presume Rogers did the guitar part, and I guess the piano solo was either by Raymond Jones or Andy Schwartz.

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Nick Mackenzie – Hello Good Morning.mp3
This is a terrible song. And when I think of 1980 it sticks in my head like the fumes from the gas released by a decomposing body that sticks on the clothes of your favourite CSI agent. Personally, I think they are all rubbish, none more so that sunglasses juggling fool from the Miami franchise, though I have a theory that David Caruso might play him with a bit of wink, creating a sardonic self-parody to offset the stink of the preposterous scripts; rather unlike Lieutenant Dan over in New York, who seems to play his equally preposterous role with a straight bat. But I digress. So, yeah, Nick Mackenzie was, as his name fails to suggest, from the Netherlands where apparently he was alternately known as Henk van Broekhoven and Nick van der Broeke, which might be a pun on his surname involving the Dutch word for trousers. And that is pretty much all you need to know as you decide whether Hello Good Morning is any good. Take his name or my word for it: it isn’t.

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More Stepping Back

In past instalments of this series I have been very careful to issue a caveat about the music that I would feature, emphasising that the songs were chosen not because I endorsed them, but because they had the power to transport me back to a particular time or place. This caveat still applies, but it is becoming less necessary than before as the series goes on. This episode features some of my all-time favourite singles, and a few songs which I don’t mind hearing again. There is only among these eight songs from which I’d emphatically have to distance myself. During the second quarter of 1980, which is the time period we’re dealing with now, I turned 14. As ever, music and football were about the only bright lights in my teenage dejection.

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The Vapors – Turning Japanese.mp3
Sometimes you go through life with a fresh-faced innocence until your face doesn’t look so fresh any longer. And so it’s only a couple of years since I discovered that Turning Japanese is not an ode to acquiring a taste for sushi and saki (which in The Vapors’ case would have been quite visionary), nor   a narrative about the notoriously difficult act of assimilating to life in Tokyo, Osaka or Fukuoka. Turning Japanese apparently refers to the narrowing of the male’s eyes as he reaches the point of orgasm (in the case of the song brought about by masturbation). I cannot verify that this is indeed an accurate description of the physiological response to the point of climax, as I have no habit of observing other specimen of my genus as they engage in sexual activity, nor have I filmed or photographed myself in the act of copulation (and actors in movies of the pornographic genre cannot be depended upon to convey an accurate portrayal of the man in the throes of base relief).

Apparently, however, men’s toes tend to curl at the point of orgasm. I don’t suppose The Vapors had any bright ideas as to how ascribe that physical reflex to a racial or ethnic characteristic. “Turning poor Chinese girl whose feet are deformed so as to appear dainty to misogynist patriarchs” does lack the zip of the title the Guildford quartet had their hit with.

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New Musik – Living By Numbers.mp3
This is one catchy new wave song, before that genre demanded the application of extravagant make-up, overdoses of hair gel, silly facial growths (yes, you, Midge Ure) and often injudicious use of synthethizers. I dig the sound of Living By Numbers, with its judicious use of synth. One of New Musik’s former members was Nick Straker – he left the group in 1979 – who had a disco hit later in 1980 with A Walk In The Park.

The lyrics of Living By Numbers are perfectly situated in 1980: the paranoia of the 1970s anticipating the computer age of the 1980s. Towards the end, there is a series of different English-accented individuals proclaiming: “They don’t want your name” (they want “just your numbah”, apparently). I derive much fun from imitating the different voices as I sing along, with correctly locating the strangely shrill and nasal women’s moment at 2:46 being a moment of particular personal triumph.

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Marti Webb – Take That Look Off Your Face.mp3
In early 1980 our family joined the video generation. An acquaintance was selling his video recorder, with his video tape collection. I don’t know whether the man opted for VHS or the system with the flamboyantly futuristic moniker Beta 2000. I do know that the video reorder he sold us conformed to neither system. The clunky cassettes we got with the bargain included such films Psycho and The World of Suzie Wong, an instalment in the Angelique series, and a hardcore porn movie, the first I had ever seen and the dialogue of which has equipped my brother and me with a bunch of good catchphrases which obviously make no sense to anybody else (it also had a funny cartoon interlude involving a Sex Olympics for medieval knights). And one of the first things we recorded was an episode of the legendary German music show Musikladen, which ran on Thursday nights.

Those were exciting days: I watched that recording repeatedly, until the novelty wore off. It made such an impression that three songs from that show feature in this instalment, though I had already bought the single of one of them, Living By Numbers. I quite liked Marti Webb’s song, and I still do, cheerfully disregarding the fact that it was written by Andrew Lloyd-Webber (for the flop musical Tell Me On A Sunday). I hope the dreadful Lloyd-Webber produced this single, so that I can hold him personally responsible for one of the worst fade-outs of all time: just as Webb is hitting a big theatrical note, the song does a two-second fade out (normally a fade-out takes something like five seconds). It’s a song from a stage musical: it shouldn’t even have a fade out.

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Godley & Creme – An Englishman In New York.mp3
An Englishman In New York (no relation to the Sting number) was the other song we recorded from Musikladen that day. It’s a strange song, and was even stranger then. In fact, it sounds as though pieces of three different songs were cobbled together by the two ex-10cc men. The performance on Musikladen was even more bizarre, featuring mannequins playing instruments, as did the groundbreaking promotional video of the song (something like THIS).

Eric and Lol would later produce another groundbreaking video, for 1985’s Cry, which featured morphing heads (a technique later used in Michael Jackson’s Black And White video). They also produced videos for hits such as The Police’s Every Breath You Take and Wrapped Around Your Finger, Duran Duran’s Girls On Film and A View To A Kill, Herbie Hancock’s Rockit, Go West’s We Close Our Eyes, Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s Two Tribes and The Power of Love, and Sting’s If You Love Somebody Set Them Free.

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Ramones – Baby I Love You.mp3
For some reason I had no idea at the time that this was a cover version of The Ronettes’ 1963 hit, even as I did know Be My Baby. So, to me, Baby I Love You will always be firstly a Ramones song. And I love their version, which appeared on the punk pioneers’ album End Of The Century (a point in time not all of them would live to see), produced by Phil Spector. The Ronettes’ version was, of course, also produced by Spector. It seems none of the Ramones except for singer Joey appear on Baby I Love You. Dee Dee later expressed his hatred for the cover version, and for the album in general. He also claimed that at one stage during the sessions, Spector held him and Joey at gunpoint – a claim which we now know is not as outlandish as it might have appeared when Dee Dee made it. It’s safe to say that the recording sessions were not a happy time for either Spector or the Ramones.

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Dexys Midnight Runners – Geno.mp3
This is my favourite single ever. Now, when I call Geno my favourite single ever, I am not saying that it’s the best single ever, or even that it is my favourite song to be released as a single. It is my favourite single because never before or after have I loved a single — as an item and a song at a particular place and time – as much as Geno. I remember clearly buying it and sitting on the bus home, anxious not so much to play it, but to own it, to place it in my collection of singles, as if this new acquisition was going to complete it.

The song may be somewhat derivative, but it sounded like nothing I had ever heard before: the stirring yet sad brass, the urgent chants of the titular name, and then Kevin Rowland’s distinctive style of staccato singing. It caused a weird sensation in my guts. I’ve heard Geno many, many times since then, but I can still feel that sensation. Incidentally, the line “You were Michael the lover, the fighter that won” refers to a track called Michael (The Lover) which had been a UK Top 40 hit in 1967for the subject of the song, soul singer Geno Washington.

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Johnny Logan – What’s Another Year.mp3
Before it became the cultish reality TV circus it is now, it used to be the righteous option to criticise the Eurovision Song Contest for producing horrible, banal music. Still, winners have included such greats as ABBA and Sandie Shaw, and the 1978 winner, Izhar Cohen’s A-Ba-Ni-Bi, was quite excellent as well (I’ll even confess to having a soft spot for Brotherhood of Man). The year after, Cohen’s Israeli compatriots Milk & Honey won with the utterly wretched Hallelujah, and then it was Ireland’s turn, with the clean-cut, Australian-born Johnny Logan.

At the time, I thought What’s Another Year was a pretty good song (though evidently not good enough to buy the record). It isn’t really, though. It is by-the-numbers US soft rock, but of the kind which Christopher Cross and Air Supply might have scoffed at for being too soft. It even has a saxophone solo which sounds like those featured, by some unwritten law, in every hip film of the 1980s starring members of the Brat Pack. Kenny G certainly has done an impressive job turning the coolest musical instrument of the ’80s into the lamest ever since. Anyway, Logan made music history when he won the Eurovision Song Contest a second time in 1987, with an utteerly forgettable ditty called Hold Me Now.

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Frank Zappa – Bobby Brown.mp3
Incredibly, Bobby Brown received extensive airplay on West German radio. I can understand why the terminology of “golden shower” or “she had my dick in the vice” went over the heads of the German censors. But were they really happy to pass a line like “I’ve got a cheerleader here, wants to help with my paper. Let her do all the work, and maybe later I’ll rape her”? Zappa was not endorsing the sentiments of his protagonist, of course, and recording Bobby Brown was his prerogative (yes, I just did that). I’m sure Zappa, who is delivering a great vocal performance on Bobby Brown, was tickled to know it was being played on foreign radio. It’s a nasty and incredibly catchy song.

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More Stepping Back

The series now hits 1980, which was a pretty good year for pop music. Good enough to warrant four instalments, I think. It was the year in which I turned 14.

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Cheap Trick – Dream Police.mp3
This was the first record I bought in 1980. Cheap Trick probably were the first hair metal band. I didn’t really dig them very much, but I did like Dream Police, even if I had no idea what the song was about. It had a good guitar riff, a catchy chorus and some amusing sound effects. The term “dream police” has been used to describe a state on an LSD trip when the brain figures out that it’s not in charge anymore (or something like it; what the hell do I know about LSD trips?). But I think the lyrics are far better applied to describe a state of schizophrenia, with its paranoia and controlling inner voices.  The half-minute interlude at 2:50 certainly sounds like mental illness. Or, indeed, an alarming drugs trip.

Electric Light Orchestra – Confusion
And this was my second record of 1980. As with Cheap Trick, I’d never been much of an ELO fan. Don’t Bring Me Down changed that, and I liked Confusion even better (and perhaps still do; I prefer whichever of the two I’m presently hearing). Strangely, I didn’t buy the LP the songs were from. Later I discovered, as it were, that it’s a pretty good album. The purists don’t like it, I believe, because they thought that Jeff Lynne had sold ELO out to disco. Funny enough, disco often incorporated strings, which Lynne mostly dropped for the Discovery album. I’ll grant that Shine A Little Love and Last Train To London are a nod to disco, but for the most part it’s a wonderful pop album (Horace Wimple excepted).

Cherie & Marie Currie – Since You’ve Been Gone.mp3
In later 1979 and early 1980 there were two versions of the Russ Ballard-penned Since You Been Gone (or Since You’ve Been Gone, as some have rendered it. You can get Ballard’s original here). The excellent Rainbow version was the more successful, and apparently South African popsters Clout had a single of it out as well. I bought this single, by former Runaways singer Cherie Currie with her sister Marie (whom you will remember if you saw the recent biopic of the Runaways). I think the Curries’ cover can just about compete with the Rainbow record. I’m not sure why I bought this single though. In the face of compertition by Rainbow, who were huge in West Germany, it wasn’t a big hit. Perhaps I saw it on the Musikladen TV show on which the sisters appeared in December 1979; but if I liked it, I’d have bought it right then, not in January (somehow I always had money for a single). Perhaps I bought it on strength of Cherie Currie, seeing as I liked The Runaways back in the day. Maybe I just like the cover…

AC/DC – Touch Too Much.mp3
Bon Scott was my first rock death as a fan. Of course, people whose music I had known had died before. Elvis, of course. Marc Bolan of T. Rex. Keith Moon of The Who. I had known their music, but I wasn’t a fan at the time. However, when Bon Scott died on 19 February 1980, I was something of an AC/DC fan. When the others died, I had no interest in their next record, but I was very much looking forward to the next AC/DC record, with Bon Scott on vocals, maybe featuring as great a song as Ride On from Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap. When the next album came out, with undue haste later that year, I had mixed emotions. The songs – Hells Bells, title track Back In Black, and especially You Shook Me All Night Long – were great, but to my mind new singer Brian Johnson was a pale imitation of the great Scott. I still think he is. So I started 1980 mourning the death of a favourite singer. I’d end the year in mourning an even more favourite singer.

Marianne Faithfull – The Ballad of Lucy Jordan.mp3
Like Since You Been Gone, The Ballad Of Lucy Jordan was a cover version, in this case of Dr Hook and the Medicine Show’s original penned by Shel Silverstein. Marianne Faithfull’s version is beautifully arranged, and the melody is lovely, but it was, of course, that broken voice which raised the song to another level. At the time I hadn’t heard of Faithfull’s history with the Stones. When I did, I went off Mars chocolate bars for a bit. Faithfull insists that the story is an untruth spreads by the London narcs after they raided Keef’s Redlands mansion. The singer says she is far too prudish to do that. In her biography she wrote: “It’s a dirty old man’s fantasy… a cop’s idea of what people do on acid!” Anyway, at the age of 13, Faithfull seemed to me so ancient as probably being close to death’s door from natural causes (of course, her drug use might have killed her). She was only 33, four years younger than Lucy Jordan…

Kenny Rogers – Coward Of The County.mp3
I never bought the single, though the chorus was pretty catchy. But buying a country record? Not very likely. It’s a jaunty little number that rather cloaks the disturbing lyrics. You don’t get many pop hits about gang rape. And that’s what happens in the song to poor Becky at the hands of the ghastly Gatlin boys. Trouble is, Coward of the County’s dad was a bit of a troublemaker in his time and on his deathbed extracted from CotC an oath of rigorous pacifism, with Uncle Ken serving as a witness to the pledge. So what does a pacifist do when the Gatlin boys violate his girl? Ah, I shall not spoil the ending for you, but it does not involve a visit to the local police station followed by a judicial process. We are not told whether Coward ensured that Becky would receive appropriate counselling.

Georg Danzer – Zehn kleine Fixer.mp3
I was a year late with this one, but what a good song it is. Danzer was an Austrian singer-songwriter – or Liedermacher (song-maker), as they say in German – who had a good reputation for producing accessible songs with sophisticated, sometimes funny and often socially conscious lyrics. He died of lung cancer in 2007 at the age of 50, having been a heavy smoker for years. In Zehn kleiner Fixer he sings about “ten little junkies” who die one by one. His tone is sardonic: while he shows little compassion for the junkies, but blames the ills of society for their condition.

Here’s my clumsy translation of the lyrics:

Ten little junkies sat in a boat. Ocean Desperation, homeport Death.One of them jumped overboard and sank like a stone. “Shit” was his final word; then there were only nine.

Nine little junkies; among them were girls. One was just 13, couldn’t break free.Went out on the corner, froze to death, then there were only eight.

Eight little junkies, one just out of jail. Parole officer let him down, no money for rehab, parents written off; he saw no other way out, then there were only seven.

Seven little junkies were so fed up with their lonely desert in the high-rise ghetto. One, they say, suffocated on wine and biscuits and indifference; then there were only six.

Six little junkies, one ended it with a golden fixall on the station toilet. Some tramp who found him took his shoes and socks, then there were only five.

Five little junkies, left all on their own, had neither hope nor money. One walked into a bank and “asked” the cashier who didn’t hesitate; then there were only four.

Four little junkies sat in a boat. Ocean Desperation, homeport Death. One reported a dealer to the police; when he was released again there were only three.

Three little junkies on the final tour; among them they had just one more fix. Oh, the heroin ran out and they capsized the boat.
Love was never their home, and now they were all dead.

Ten little junkies were now gone. Clearance sale, urban garbage, just lowly filth. But how long do we want to sweep them under the carpet? One day, when they rise again, they will strike back.

The Nolan Sisters – I’m In The Mood For Dancing.mp3
Now here’s a record I most definitely didn’t buy. I didn’t particularly like or dislike the song it was a hymn to my indifference. And yet the song stuck in my head for years. It was one of those earworms I found myself inexplicably singing at random moments. That kind of song. Some 11 years after this was a hit, I met my future wife. One day she randomly sang I’m In The Mood For Dancing. Then, a while later, she did so again. As it turned out, we had a shared permanent earworm of the random-singing variety (I don’t know the technical Greco-Latin terms for the phenomenon, I’m afraid). I’d like to say that I knew at that point that we would grow old together, but there were other, much better clues which did not involve the Nolan Sisters. Truth be told, I quite like the song now, in as far as inoffensive pop music from that era goes.

Peter Gabriel – Games Without Frontiers.mp3
Peter Gabriel – Spiel ohne Grenzen.mp3
This was my 100^th single. Now, that doesn’t mean it was the 100^th single I had ever owned or bought. But when I bought it, it was the 100^th single in my possession. Before that I had frequently swapped singles with friends (who exploited me; I gave away some really good records. So after that, I stopped trading). Others I had discarded for being too embarrassing to own, such as my Bay City Rollers records. But when I bought Games Without Frontiers in March 1980, it was single #100, a milestone. Within a year I would almost stop buying singles in favour of albums (though I’d rediscover the joy of the single when I lived in London in the mid-’80s).

Games Without Frontiers refers to an game show that was popular throughout Europe at the time in which village teams representing different countries were pitched against one another in bizarre action games, usually dressed in silly costumes. In French the show was called Jeux sans Frontiers and in German Spiele ohne Grenzen (both mean Games Without Frontiers); in England it was It’s A Knock-Out. Gabriel re-recorded his entire 1980 album, which also included the anti-apartheid song Biko, entirely in German. Hence the second file: the German version of Games Without Frontiers.

Tim Curry – I Do The Rock.mp3
When I bought this, I was blissfully unaware of that overhyped cult twaddle that is The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Indeed, I remained so until the late ’80s. So when Tim Curry visited a restaurant in London where I worked as a waiter in 1985, my excitement was based on my love for I Do The Rock. The 80-year-old owner of the restaurant, an old Australian whom we had nicknamed Mr Magoo, was dining on Table 15 at the same time, and somebody advised him that a celebrity was at Table 8. Mr Magoo moseyed over, stood before Mr Curry and his lovely companion, stared at them for a bit while pushing his rolled-up tongue back and forth through his fleshy and disconcertingly moist lips, as he habitually did, and then blurted out in an accusatory manner: “So, you’re famous!” Mr Curry responded gracefully that he was an indeed an ac-tor. Thus informed, Mr Magoo grunted, turned and waddled back to Table 15 to complete his meal.

The song itself was one of thise that referenced the celebs of the day – from Solzhenitzin and Sadat to O.J. Simpson and Virginia Wade to Rod Stewart, Mick Jagger, Liza Minelli and Charlie’s Angels – and a few characters from the past, including Joe DiMaggio and former English cricket captain Colin Cowdrey. I Do The Rock also acquainted me with The Dakota as the New York residence of John Lennon and Yoko Ono, a piece of information that would become relevant later in the year.

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More Stepping Back

And here we leave the 1970s. The first year of the 1980s would turn out to be a fantastic year. If I’m still going to run this blog (as I am writing, I am short on time and, to be honest, motivation), I’ll look forward to sharing the records that take me back to that year.

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B.A. Robertson – Bang Bang.mp3
A pal of mine tells a great story about he lost his virginity to this song, in a shed, of all places. Imagine that, losing your cherry to a song called Bang Bang about hanky panky. I suspect it was not a carefully orchestrated scene of romantic seduction. Bang Bang contains half of the plot of season 2 of Rome in two verses: “Tony and Cleo struck out for the freedom down Egypt’s way, but Caesar had squeezed her in Rome on his quilt for a day, hey hey. Now Anthony got really angry about old Caesar’s hanky panky. She told ’em she would use ’em, and boy did she abuse ’em. Fall in love and blew ’em away.” Can this be used as a Grade 8 tutorial for Shakespeare’s play about shenanigans in the Roman Empire?

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Boomtown Rats – Diamond Smiles.mp3
I had long been a bit of a Boomtown Rats fan, from the debut album, and welcomed the success of I Don’t Like Mondays, just so that I could point out to my less sophisticated pals that I had been a fan longer than they had been (and at 13, a year or so is a mighty long time). I Don’t Like Mondays is a great song, but spoiled forever at Live Aid by Geldof’s pregnant pause after the line “and the lesson today is how to die”. Bob, mate, it’s a song about a high school shooting, not about famine. A pregnant pause would’ve been appropriate at a Columbine benefit. In relation to famine, it was as appropriate as playing Too Drunk To Fuck would be at a wedding – there might be alcohol-induced libido inhibitors at wedding receptions, but it’s not the drift which the gentlemen from Dead Kennedy were hoping to impart. So instead silicon chips set to overload (in 1979, Geldof knew how to anticipate the halcyon ’80s), let’s hear it for one of a trio of outstanding tracks on the Rats’ The Fine Art Of Surfacing LP (the other being Someone’s Looking At You). Diamond Smiles is one of the great entries in the canon of suicide anthems. Keep it in mind for that essential self-annihilation mix-tape!

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Tubeway Army – Are ‘Friends’ Electric?.mp3
This Kraftwerk-influenced song was quite unique when it came out, and may well be regarded as the prototype for the New Romantic sound which would take residence in the charts the following year with acts such as Visage and Orchestral Manouevres in the Dark. Much as I liked Are ‘Friends’ Electric?, I later found it difficult to regard it fondly when Gary Numan revealed himself as a Thatcherite Tory. That, of course, raises the question of whether an artist’s politics should influence our appreciation of his or her music. I still resent Neil Young for his Reagan/Bush-supporting ways, and I would have none of Ted Nugent’s music even if it was actually any good. At the same time, I don’t care that Elvis or Sammy Davis Jr were in love with Richard Nixon. But they are Americans, a nation that votes for tax cuts for the rich at the expense of social services for the poor (and the difference between the two parties on that count is, in real terms, minimal). In Britain the battlelines were more clearly drawn:  you knew what your vote would get you. Numan cheerfully stated his support for the apartheid-loving, pro-rich and anti-poor Klassenfeind Margaret Thatcher. Are  “Friends” Tories? I damn well hope not.

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Buggles – Video Killed The Radio Star.mp3
Who said Americans have no sense of irony? This was first music video ever to be shown on MTV, setting out the new channel’s ideology of domination by playing a song that anticipated and bemoaned the age of the music video. Trevor Horn, who also anticipated the appalling advertising yuppie look of the mid-’80s, regretted the name Buggles: “I know the name’s awful, but at the time it was the era of the great punk thing. I’d got fed up of producing people who were generally idiots but called themselves all sorts of clever names like The Unwanted, The Unwashed, The Unheard… when it came to choosing our name I thought I’d pick the most disgusting name possible.” My brother gave this to me as a present, redeeming himself for his transgression in early 1978 of desecrating my Sex Pistols LP with a biro in revenge of some transgression that might have involved damage to his poster of Winnetou, the Native American character of a German TV show based on a book by a chap who had never even been to America.

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Status Quo – Living On An Island.mp3
When I was younger I spent much of my childhood at my grandmother’s place. As I’ve noted before, she lived her appreciation of the German Schlager vicariously through me, and later she helped finance my fast-growing record collection. I don’t know if Status Quo’s Living On An Island – their bid at mid-tempo AOR and a rather nice number – was the last record I bought while staying with her, but it’s the last one I remember bringing to her warm house that always smelled of freshly made coffee. I know it was in December; her last. Soon I visited her less and less. I was a teenager now, after all. And she didn’t like my new interest in politics, much less my leftist leanings. She was still my grandmother, but I had changed, and a gap had appeared in our once close relationship.

Living On An Island transports me to her flat, with the white-and-gold patterned wallpaper in the living room, the display cabinet with delicate porcelain figures (some of them nudes, which I found interesting), the veranda which looked out on the garden with trees and bushes which in summer would bear cherries, apples, pears, plums and currants (red, white and black, like the German flag my grandmother saluted in two world wars). I felt safe in that place, even at 13.

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Thom Pace – Maybe.mp3
This is the theme song of a TV series, The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams (known in Germany as Der Mann in den Bergen), which was produced in 1977/78 but came to German TV only in 1979, finding greater success there than it did in the country of its origin. Like the TV series, the title song is pretty soft. It can be enjoyed only in the pursuit of feeding nostalgia, though my grandmother was very fond of it (maybe this was the last record I bought while staying with her).  The single topped the West German charts at the height of disco. To be honest, though, I wouldn’t mind watching an episode of Grizzly Adams again – just for the nostalgia, of course.

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More Stepping Back

In the second part of three in which I revisit songs from 1979 that have the power to transport me back to the day, we’ll go back to the summer of that year. We had just moved into a new house which my mother, a woman of excellent taste and artistic flair, turned into a place that exuded both sophistication and warmth. And my younger brother and I attended the last of three summer camps run by the local church parish. As always, I take no responsibility for the quality of the songs featured.

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Lene Lovich  – Lucky Number.mp3
This was quite unlike anything I had heard before. Lene Lovich was a bit like an anglophone Nina Hagen, without all that which makes Hagen so unattractive (and, looking it up, I’ve just learned that Hagen covered Lucky Number). I remember hearing a radio interview with John Lennon around that time in which the semi-retired pop master mentioned a few acts he found interesting. Among them was “Lene Loverich”. I thought Lennon was a bit of a senile git for not knowing her proper name. But he was very old by then, almost 39. My stepfather, four years younger, didn’t even know any of the acts I liked (except for Bob Seger, whose music I introduced stepfather to). Lovich eventually gave rise to Toyah and Hazel O’Connor. You decide whether that was a good thing or not.

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Art Garfunkel – Bright Eyes (Video)
This was the theme from the animated film that made everyone cry but me, Watership Down. The reason I didn’t cry is that I have never seen it, deterred from doing so by tales of people crying. The song sounds appropriately sad but tinged with a surge of hopefulness, which I understand ties in with the scene in the film it scores. At the time I thought it was the most beautiful song I had ever heard. Actually, I still think it is beautiful, though I have heard a great many contenders for the title since. Bright Eyes and I Don’t Like Mondays (which I won’t feature as the Boomtown Rats will be included in the third part) were my anthems for the summer of 1979. [Link removed by Mediafire]

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Amii Stewart – Knock On Wood.mp3
What did I know of the old soul masters then? This is one of the great cover versions, an explosion of disco joy, co-produced by Simon May, who wrote the theme of the BBC soapie Eastenders. And then there was the cover. I had seen exotic before, but Amii Stewart was something quite beyond that; she was flamboyantly beautiful while wearing silly headgear which only the spawn of royal bottom feeders would not reject as too daft. Knock On Wood was a massive hit almost everywhere, but strangely not in West Germany, where it stalled at #13. Amii Stewart is the step-sister of HiNRG queen Miquel Brown (whose Close To Perfection is an old favourite of mine) and thereby aunt of 1980s disco starlet Sinitta, she of much cuteness and modest artistry.

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Kiss – I Was Made For Loving You.mp3
By 1979 everybody seemed to buy into that disco thing. In retrospect it shouldn’t be surprising that a rock group whose members liked to wear chest-hair revealing leather outfits and wore far too much make-up should have dabbled in a genre that owed much to its evolution to the gay scene. But those were the days when fans of Freddie Mercury would be glad to resort to violence in defence of their hero’s honour should one have questioned the Queen singer’s uncompromising heterosexuality. Anyway, so in 1979 Kiss went disco in a bid to revive their flagging career. And it provided them their first UK chart entry (albeit peaking at only #50) and for me a birthday present for my little brother.

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Gibson Brothers – Cuba.mp3
Cuba provides a specific if slightly hazy memory involving a fair we visited after a boring afternoon at an old man’s garden allotment. I remember being bored at the fair, and how the Gibson Brother’s epic disco number lifted my flagging spirits. It is, of course, a most banal memory, as the reader will have noted already with a zeal that is almost rude. The point though is that sometimes music sticks with us not because of a significant event or constant exposure over a period of time, but because it just does. And Cuba still has the capacity to lift my spirits, though not as much as their next hit single, the brilliant Que Sera Mi Vida.

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Kevin Keegan – Head Over Heels In Love.mp3
American readers won’t know what to do with this, but German and British readers will luv it, just luv it. Kevin Keegan was a famous English football player (the football played with feet, not the one with the shoulderpads) who in 1977 transferred from Liverpool to the German club SV Hamburg. In 1979, he helped Hamburg win the German championship and was the country’s biggest football star. So Mighty Mouse, as he was known, crowned his sporting accomplishment by recording a single with Smokie, and it sounds just like the horrors that group used to perpetrate at the time. To Keegan’s credit, he could hold a tune better than he could hold a lead, as fans of Newcastle United would later discover. Here is a video of King Kev violating a poor woman as he sings his song in the Saturday night sports show Das Aktuelle Sportstudio, having been flown in from Bielefeld after Hamburg’s game there on 2 June 1979.

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Donna Summer – Hot Stuff.mp3
If Kiss could go disco, then Donna Summer could go rock. And I’d say that Donna rocked harder on Hot Stuff than Kiss ever did. The song reminds me in particular of the summer camp that my brother and I went on. The previous one we went had been a great experience. It had a wonderful group and I had my slow-dance with my first love, having shoulder-charged my beastly rival out of the way on the dancefloor (see the entry for Sailing in Step Back to 1977  Part 1). This time, the crowd was less lovely and some were absolute assholes. I had taken some records along for the “dance evening”; when I discovered that some had been stolen from my suitcase, the camp leaders took no interest in the violation of the seventh Commandment, perhaps being too busy worshipping craven images. We never went on another camp again.

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Umberto Tozzi – Gloria.mp3
When Laura Branigan had a huge hit with her English version of Gloria in 1984, I was quite annoyed. It’s Umberto Tozzi’s song. It has been covered many times in many languages, but in Tozzi’s synth-driven original it smells of sunshine and Pizza Margharita. Gloria was huge in the German summer of 1979; I didn’t buy the record, but welcomed hearing it in the background to provide the soundtrack for that rather dull summer. Where Branigan’s lyrics observe someone alled Gloria, Tozzi sings a love song to the eponymous woman. “Monkey to malaria,” as Tozzi so memorably sings.

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Cliff Richard – We Don’t Talk Anymore.mp3
The song German radio played to death. Apart from the fact that I have always resented the stardom of that feckless Cliff Richard, this was an insidious tune. Where some songs are earworms, this was an eartumor. But if I listen to the song with as much detachment and objectivity as I can muster, I must admit that it is a very good pop song. I must concede that the “Taaaalk anymore, anymooooore” bit at 3:14 is fantastic. It seems at least 5 million people worldwide agreed: that’s how many copies the single sold. In West Germany it topped the charts for five weeks, but it felt like it did for half a year.

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The Knack – My Sharona.mp3
Incredibly, the Knack were hyped as “The New Beatles” (part 85) when this came out. They had a couple of decent songs, but their quick return to obscurity cannot be described as an injustice. Still, “My Sharona” totally rocks, from the staccato guitar riff and vocal delivery to the “woooooo”s. And the cover of the single rocked even more, at least for a 13-year-old lad, depicting a gorgeous brunette in a vest with protruding nipples (gasp!). And, I didn’t know at the time, it was the Sharona of the title herself. Sharona Alperin was at the time Knack frontman Doug Fieger’s 17-year-old girlfriend. To German ears, the band’s name was a cause for mirth. Knack means pop (as in a popping sound), with the best variant being the adjective beknackt, which loosely translated means “off his rocker”, or Knackwurst, the sausage named after the popping sound it makes when you bite into it.

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ELO – Don’t Bring Me Down.mp3
I know that opinion is deeply divided about this song. ELO purists tend to disown it, normal pop fans love it. Don’t Bring Me Down has that great guitar, the drum loop, and that strange word that Lynne sings which sounds like “Bruce” (it is, if you listen carefully or read the LP linernotes, grooooss, which means nothing). Trivia fans will be interested to note that this was the first ELO single not to feature strings, apparently. Don’t Bring Me Down also reminds me of marshmallow mice I liked eating at the time, 20 Pfennig from the kiosk down the road.

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More Stepping Back

As we enter 1979 and the songs that take me back to that time, I’m still living in the house in which I had spent the first 13 years of my life. In early summer we moved into a new house. So this lot of songs are old-house songs. In May, at the end of the time under review in part 1, I went to Bavaria for a week or two on a “cure”, organised by the medical aid scheme, for stressed kids. Because a stressed kid I certainly was.

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Gebrüder Blattschuss – Kreuzberger Nächte.mp3
It was a time for comic novelty songs in Germany. Big-nosed Mike Krüger had Germans in a LOL hysteria with his instruction ditty playing on the word “nipple”, while swathes of Germans were engaging in a collective ROFLMAO at the frankly unhilarious antics of comedians Dieter Hallervoorden and Helga Feddersen in their cover of the Grease hit You’re The One That I Want (their hit riffed on the phonetic rendition of the English title, “Du die Wanne ist voll”, which roughly means – be still, chuckling heart – “Hey, the bathtub is full”), and some fuckwit from Hamburg split a nation’s side just by virtue of his moniker, Gottlieb Wendehals (you see, an uncool first name and a surname that means “twist-neck” is as close to Monty Python’s funniest joke ever as you’ll get). And the brothers Blattschuss joined the comedy revolution by singing this song about prolific beer-drinking in the working-class Berlin suburb of Kreuzberg, where the nights apparently are long. It includes a few good puns and a rousing chorus which even the most inebriated joker can sing, which elevates the song above the rest of the mirthless comedy. Obviously I didn’t buy or even like the record. I remember the song chiefly for its performance on the Disco music TV show, during which leadsinger  Jürgen von der Lippe, who’d become a big German TV personality, lit up a cigarette.

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Status Quo – Accident Prone.mp3
For years, the chorus of this mid-tempo number resided in my repertoire of permanent earworms, the songs whose lines I might absent-mindedly sing as I go about buttering my toast, or whatever. The critics didn’t love it – I’ve read that some believed Accident Prone to be the Quo’s nod to disco, but I really can’t hear that at all. It certainly is a Rick Parfitt song though, less boogie than Francis Rossi’s material. The guitar solo is pretty good. I bought the single, as I had bought Again And Again (featured in part 3 of 1978). Then I bought the If You Can’t Stand The Heat album, and never listened to it in its entirety. In fact, of the three Quo LPs I have owned (the live double set, Rocking All Over The World, and …Heat), I don’t think I ever listened to any of them in full.

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Thin Lizzy – Rosalie (live).mp3
Rosalie was my introduction to Thin Lizzy. This version is from the great Live And Dangerous album. Lizzy frontman Phil Lynott was one cool guy. He is so cool when he expresses his appreciation for the audience participation on this live version of the song written by Bob Seger (whose Hollywood Nights might have featured in this series, come to think of it). Of course, towards the end, Lynott was not cool, in the ways heroin addiction is not cool. His death in early 1986 (from pneumonia, not an overdose) was a tragedy; the man had so much more to give. So it’s much better to remember Lynot as the charismatic frontman of a great live band, not a tragic junkie. On that subject, can anyone explain to me why intelligent individuals ignore everything they know about the hyper-addictive dangers of heroin, and try it anyway? Fun trivia fact: heroin got its name from the German pharma-giant Bayer (who in their guise as IG Farben supplied the Nazis with the Zyklon B used in the gas chambers).

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Hot Chocolate – I’ll Put You Together Again.mp3
Man, I loved Hot Chocolate’s disco stuff. Heaven’s In The Backseat Of My Cadillac and You Sexy Thing and all that. I also loved the slower songs, especially So You Win Again and Emma. This was one of those slower songs, and I think I got the single for my 13^th birthday, on which my friends and I were allowed to share a bottle of white wine (well, it amounted to a small glass each). Errol Brown’s vocals are fine, but it’s the melody, which I’m sure was inspired by some piece of classical music, that really appealed to me. Brown had had a hand in writing all big Hot Chocolate hits other than this and So You Win Again (written by Russ Ballard). I’ll Put You Together Again was co-written by Geoff Stephens, one of those songwriters whose work is much better known than his name. Among the songs he wrote are The Crying Game, There’s A Kind Of Hush, Winchester Cathedral, Semi-Detached Suburban Mr James, Sorry Suzanne, It’s Gonna Be A Cold Cold Christmas, The Lights Of Cincinnati, You Won’t Find Another Fool Like Me, and Silver Lady.

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Queen – Mustapha.mp3
My friend Arne was a big Queen fan, and introduced me to more Queen stuff than News Of The World, which I already had. So when Jazz came out, I bought it – and put up the poster of all the naked women on bicycles (or Fat Bottomed Girls on a Bicycle Race) on my wall. And my mother didn’t mind, tolerant woman that she was. Mustapha was the strangest thing I had ever heard in rock. It still is bizarre. Presumably inspired by Freddie Mercury’s experience as Faroukh Bulsara in his birthplace of Zanzibar, it sounds like a Muslim call to prayer which halfway through gets the pomp rock treatment. Muezzin rock, if you like.

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Suzi Quatro – If You Can’t Give Me Love.mp3
I liked Suzi Quatro back in the day. Too Big was my favourite sing of hers. Recently I saw her Top of the Pops performance of Devil Gate Drive, which sparkles with the exuberance and rocking choreography. Suzi Quatro opened doors for chicks with guitars (and I’m using the word in the nicest possible way). So her comeback in 1979 was anticipated. Alas, Suzi had grown pout of rock-chickdom. A few months earlier, she had recorded a duet with Smokie singer and fellow RKA label mate Chris Norman, Stumblin’ In, the contemplation of which makes me feel slightly ill. And yet, I bought the LP, titled If You Knew Suzi… Well,I thought I knew Suzi. High-kicking, guitar-thrashing, super-gurning Suzi. This was housewive Suzi whose Smokie music was going to appeal to our mothers. I couldn’t give her love, and I gave it to somebody else.

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Clout – Save Me.mp3
The South African band featured in 1978 with Substitute (and I’m still looking for the original of that by the Righteous Brothers, as well as for Gloria Gaynor’s take). Save Me was also a cover version of a Merrilee Rush’s 1977 original (she had the first hit version of Angel In The Morning, as recounted in The Originals Vol. 39). Rush’s version was a mid-tempo country-pop affair; Clout turned it into a proper pop song.  Save Me is almost as good as Substitute, which I’d designate as a perfect pop song. By now Clout had lost their gorgeous keyboardist Glenda Hyams, and wasn’t even an all-girl group anymore, with the inclusion of two dudes (who’d later join Johnny Clegg in Juluka). I don’t know what became of the Clout members, other than Cindy Alter, one of the lead singers, who now performs with South African pop veteran Stewart Irving.

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Gerard Kenny – New York New York.mp3
So good they named it twice, sings Mr Kenny as he fellates the Big Apple. I had this on a compilation album (titled Disco Laser, it also included hits by the likes of Leif Garrett, Racey, Supermax and Chic, among a whole lot of people that were never heard of again, such as Wallensten and Snoopy). I rather liked it as a companion piece to Billy Joel’s My Life, a favourite at the time. It really should accompany New York State Of Mind; either way, it belongs in the same genre as Billy Joel (with whom Kenny once was in a band, apparently). Gerard Kenny has been something of a prolific songwriter; his resumé includes Barry Manilow’s I Made it Through The Rain and I Could Be So Good For You by Dennis Waterman (off TV’s Minder). He continues to perform.

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Patrick Hernandez – Born To Be Alive.mp3
This was the anthem of every school disco in the West-Germany of 1979. I wonder if schools in other cities did that stupid aerobic dance: legs together and jumping from one side to the other, if possible in beat to the music. The song, by a French Euro disco singer with a football player’s bubble perm, was absolutely ubiquitous, and there are no words to describe how much I hated it. Just as I hated school discos, with their bad music, cheap crisps and ban on Coca Cola, because somebody decreed it was not good for 13-year-olds, whereas Fanta was. For that reason Born To Be Alive does not conjure cheerful memories, but today I can acknowledge just how good a Euro-disco song it is. Hernandez later gave the young Madonna her first break as a dancer.

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Dschinghis Khan – Dschinghis Khan.mp3
Germans have earned themselves a reputation of having slowly developed an awareness of and sensitivity to their country’s terrible history in relation to the Holocaust; the noble project of Vergangenheitsbewältigung (and bless the German language for its compound words). In 1979, all good intentions notwithstanding, West-Germany was not quite there yet. The country’s entry for the Eurovision Song Contest that year was a rousing ensemble number extolling the masculine virility of the Mongol warrior Genghis Khan, whose name the performing group adopted for good measure. All that might have seemed like a good idea at the time, except that the host city of the contest was Jerusalem. It does not send a message of Vergangenheitsbewältigungsbestätigung when Germany sends its minstrels to Israel to sing about a genocidal megalomaniac. The Austrian entry was much more sensitive with the title “Today in Jerusalem” (presumably not a protest song about the condition of Palestinans in that city).

In the event, the German entry placed fourth (ahead of Britain’s Black Lace, who took revenge a few years later with the appalling Agadoo), while Israel defended their title with Milk & Honey’s melodious and very annoying Hallelujah, a song a visitor to Israel cannot avoid hearing even three decades later.

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Frank Mills – Music Box Dancer.mp3
I think it’s fair to say that I bought some pretty decent singles when I was 13, though that will reveal itself only in parts 2 and 3. And amid all those cool records, I bought this, a record which Richard Clayderman must have condemned as too soft. I have no interest in hearing his cover version (of course he recorded one!), but by comparison it probably rocks hard. It has to. Musicx Box Dancer has as pretty melody, admittedly, and as such is a very dangerous earworm. It’s no accident that ice cream vans around the world are playing the tune. It’s not surprising then to learn that one town has declared ice cream van music illegal. Oh yes, if you signal the availability of soft-serve in Stafford, New Jersey, you’ll go down, man. “At no time shall a vendor be permitted to use a sound device, mechanical bell, mechanical music, mechanical noise, speakers, amplifiers or any other similar type of sound device,” The Man has ordained. You may use a bicycle bell, however. Can you play Music Box Dancer on a bicycle bell?

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George Harrison – Blow Away.mp3
As mentioned in the intro, in May 1979 the medical scheme packed me and a few dozen other kids from across West-Germany off to a cure in Bavaria. On the train journey there, we encountered a pederast who liked to suck the feet of pubescent boys (not mine, I’m relieved to report). In Bavaria I met for the first time a person named Adolf, our bus driver on excursions, though he tried to disguise his unfortunate name by inviting us to call him Dolf. He was a nice guy, so we didn’t even make jokes about him. The small town where we stayed, with the satisfying name Pfronten, had a small record shop. One day we were passing it when our group, probably headed for another bloody uphill hike through Bavarian forest, paused for a few minutes. I quickly jumped into the shop to see what was new. And what was new was George Harrison’s new single, which I bought unheard. Happily George’s bubble perm did not deter me, for Blow Away is a great song; indeed, it’s my favourite solo song by Harrison, with a great sing-along chorus.

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More Stepping Back

By the second half of 1978 I was clearly done with punk — much like the rest of the civilised world. Now the word was Grease, even if You’re The One That I Want became unbearably overplayed. Other than a really great roadtrip holiday, the latter part of 1978 seems to have been quite uneventful for me: I cannot remember anything interesting at all happening other than playing football in ankle-deep snow in winter.

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John Paul Young – Love Is In The Air.mp3
I knew this track by the Australian singer who prompted two popes to adopt his name in 1978 for quite a while before the event I associate it most with: a summer holiday in what was then East-Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Austria. Love Is In The Air was on a K-Tel type sampler cassette we played ad nauseam on that road trip in a Volkswagen camper, mainly because we didn’t have much else with us by way of musical entertainment. The tape also included J.J. Cale’s Cocaine, Eric Clapton’s Lay Down Sally, and Eruption’s cover of I Can’t Stand The Rain. I think the latter might have followed Love Is In The Air, because when Young’s song ends, I expect to hear the opening synth notes from the Eruption number. It could be that we gave that tape away to an East German family we met in Prague, with whom we struck up a friendship that extended beyond the holiday (I met the daughter again last year, for the first time in 29 years). To East Germans, all forms of Western media were like golddust. On our later visits to our friends, I’d smuggle Bravo magazines over the border, and act that was regarded as quite audacious, indeed almost heroic.  Love Is In The Air was also the first song I ever sung at a karaoke.

Clout – Substitute.mp3
In this series I have reported on my barely pubescent crushes on Agnetha of ABBA and Debbie Harry of Blondie. They were joined by another blonde in the form of the Glenda Hyam, the keyboard player of South African girl group Clout. The thing is, I turned out have a greater preference for darker women (not that I am inclined to discriminate on the basis of excessive pheomelanin). Alas, Glenda soon left the group, to be replaced by two much less fanciable but more hirsute blokes (who would later joined Johnny Clegg in Juluka). The dudes, no less curly than the rest of Clout, turned up for the follow-up hit Save Me, which will feature in the course of this series. Substitute, a great unrequited love number, is a cover version of a song by the Righteous Brothers. If anyone has the original, I’d be most grateful to receive it.

Supermax – Love Machine.mp3
Austrian disco, long before Falco! Goodness, this played everywhere in Germany, and at the time I hated it. Now I actually like it. Imagine Pink Floyd going disco (in which case the lyrics, with gems like “I am a love machine in town, the best you can get 50 miles around”, would need to be read ironically). Long-haired, moustachoid Kurt Hauenstein’s band was multi-racial (though not as predominantly black as the single cover would lead us to believe), and as such it became the first international multi-racial band to tour South Africa in 1981. It was a thankless venture. The apartheid authorities were not exactly pleased at the racial mixing – just imagine the potential of miscegenation among these degenerate disco hippies! – especially since the Austrians were also playing in the “homeland” of Venda, which is so off the beaten track that it probably has not seen any international music acts since. And the international artistic community failed to see the humour in anybody touring apartheid South Africa, racial diversity notwithstanding. Even if just a few years earlier the likes of Percy Sledge and George Benson had done exactly that.

Umberto Tozzi – Tu.mp3
A year earlier, Umberto Tozzi had enjoyed a big hit with Ti Amo. I liked that song very much. In 1978, Tozzi had a hit with Tu. By then I was wary of Italian balladeers whose schlock lent themselves to German covers by Schlager singers with an excess of blow-dried hair. Oddly, I don’t recall this being turned into a Schlager. Perhaps the absence of a chorus deterred the Schlager industry. Or perhaps they didn’t know how to translate “ba-badda-darm” into German. A year later, Tozzi released Gloria, which in 1984 became, much to my astonishment, a hit for Laura Branagan. I must confess that I do have a bit of a weakness for the Italian San Remo festival kind of songs.

Robert Palmer – Best Of Both Worlds.mp3
Much as I liked the song back then, it’s a bit of a mess, with its cod-Reggae beat and aggressively out-of-tune vocals. It was a fair hit in Europe, I think, but didn’t even dent the Top 75 in Britain. I think what I found most attractive about it are the minor notes 2:12 into the song. A year later Palmer had a bigger hit with Bad Case Of Loving You. At the bumper car rink at the local Rummel (as a travelling funfair is known in German) that year, the ticket-booth DJ held a name-the-artist competition when Bad Case Of Loving You came on. The prize was something like tokens for five free rides. Trouble was, I was already driving in a bumper car. To my frustration, nobody knew the answer, which I did. I called the answer out to my younger brother, but all I got in return was a deaf “heh?”. Of course, he wasn’t the idiot in that situation. I was. Obviously I should have abandoned my single ride in order to get five freebies – and the satisfaction of strutting to cash in my free rides knowing the answer to a tough question none of the assembled ignoramuses knew. File under “Regrets, I’ve had a few”.

Nina Hagen Band – TV-Glotzer.mp3
I must be honest: I don’t like Nina Hagen’s obnoxious vocals much. I bought this single (the cover of which seems to have been used for every Hagen release around that time) because it seemed the rebellious thing to do. There simply was very little of this kind of thing in German music at the time. The indictment of consumerism and the public’s passive, indeed mindless, acceptance of it appealed to my nascent leftist tendencies (translated lyrics are here). The consumerism must have been striking to Hagen, who had come from East-Germany only two years earlier after her singer stepfather, Wolf Biermann, was expelled by the communist regime. Backed by what would become the Neue Deutsche Welle band Spliff, TV Glotzer is a cover of The Tubes’ far superior White Punks On Dope.  So Hagen and especially TV Glotzer were hugely influential in the rise of the German new wave movement.

Status Quo – Again And Again.mp3
For the first three years of my record-buying career, I bought loads of Status Quo records. Then I went off them, righteously repudiating the Quo. By the time I was a young adult, I joined the consensus that they were rather ridiculous and easily spoofed cliché mongering two-chord wonders. What utter foolishness! What deprivation did I subject myself to? No good case can be made for Status Quo being rock & roll’s equivalent of Dietrich Buxtehude, but, damn it, for pure energy and fun it’s hard to beat songs like Again And Again. Denims on, strike pose standing with legs apart (position of mirror optional), engage air guitar, stand shoulder-to-shoulder with imaginary fellow guitarist rocking forward and backward, jump in the air with final chord, look in panic at doors and windows to ensure that they were shut…

Olivia Newton-John – A Little More Love.mp3
Livvy’s career was stuttering to a bit of a halt before her appearance in Grease. On strength of that movie I bought her Totally Hot album, which contained rather too much disco-pop and too little by way of quality ballads, such as the wonderful Hopelessly Devoted To You from Grease. It really set the scene for the later Physical, the opening chord for the ghastly ’80s. A Little More Love is one of those songs that suffers from a lack of direction. It’s not clear whether it’s supposed to be a West Coast rock number or a disco track. The pedestrian verses call to mind a b-side recorded under duress by Linda Ronstadt, but the glorious chorus sounds like it was written by the Bee Gees in their pomp, even though the song’s composer was John Farrar (who also wrote Hopelessly Devoted To You and You’re The One That I Want). As much as I hate Physical, I was pleased to see Newton-John appear on Glee last year; not as the sweet individual of her doubtless merited reputation, but as a bitch who outdoes the wonderfully ruthless Sue Sylvester.

Al Stewart – Song On The Radio.mp3
I had ended 1977 by buying singles by Harpo and The Runaways. I ended the following year by buying an Al Stewart album. I was staying with family friends in another city for a week or so over New Year’s Eve. They were quite different from my family. To begin with, they were communists. Not communists of the variety that had beards (even the men), carried Mao’s pocketbook and a displayed velvet poster of Che Guevara. These were proper activists, registered members of the German Communist Party, the DKP, and as critical of the corruption of communism in the East as they were of the capitalist society in the West. Communists of the ilk of Nina Hagen’s stepfather Biermann. I never adopted their politics, but I was influenced by them to see the word in a different way. So I was with them when I bought Al Stewart’s Time Passages album. When I asked them to play it, they appeared less than keen; much as I would feel if a 12-year-old asked me to put on their latest favourite record by what I would presume to be an autotuned muppet or derivative emo goon. When they finally relented, they liked what they heard and even asked if they could tape the LP (buying it would just have given profits to owners of the means of production, of course). I felt great validation that adults of intellectual character would like the music I bought.

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More Stepping Back

In the belated second part of the 1978 instalment in this series (in which I revisit songs that have the capacity to take me back to the time when they were hits), the 12-year-old version of Any Major Dude shows himself to be an eclectic sort. In the first part, which covered the first three months of 1978, we became reacquainted with Blondie’s X-Offender and songs by the likes of Uriah Heep, Bonnie Tyler, Tom Robinson Band, Sex Pistols, Wings  and The Stranglers. Here we revisit Blondie, Sham 69, Boomtown Rats, a couple of Italians, and some prog-rockers.

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Blondie – (I’m Always Touched By Your) Presence Dear.mp3
Blondie – Denis.mp3
In the first part of 1978 I described how it was the image of Debbie Harry that made me buy X-Offender unheard. I loved the song, and when on a trip to Amsterdam I bought the Presence Dear single (with the pictured cover) I became even more smitten. Deborah looks positively post-coital on the cover, though I don’t think that at the time I quite realised that. Her smile was appealing though. On the same trip I bought a fold-out Blondie fan magazine thing; a rather odd thing, because there wasn’t a big poster on the reverse side of all the photos and articles. And these were in Dutch, which I could more or less translate into German. Not that the text fascinated me much; far more agreeable were the pictures – and in particular a nude shot of the lovely Ms Harry (I have tried to locate in, unsuccessfully). Needless to say, it went up my wall; on the concealed side where I guessed – possibly incorrectly – my mother would not look.

I’m not sure about the release dates of Blondie singles. Most references date the release of Denis before Presence Dear. Perhaps the Dutch did things differently, or maybe they released Denis long before it came out in Germany. Anyhow, I bought the single soon after our return from the Amsterdam trip. By now I was so much a Blondie fan that I insisted our new kitten be named Denis. The song is one of those Blondie covers which the band chose astutely; that is, the originals tended to be not very well known. The original of Denis, by Randy & the Rainbows, was discussed in The Originals Vol. 1. Other Blondie covers treated in the series are Hanging On The Telephone and The Tide Is High. My unconditional love for Blondie reached an end a year later with Heart Of Glass, a discofied number which in a fit of misplaced self-righteousness I regarded as a sell-out.

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Sham 69 – Angels With Dirty Faces.mp3
Coming late into my barely pubescent punk career, this is still a favourite. I bought this single before it was a hit in Britain. It entered the UK charts in mid-May; I bought it in late April, even if I did so unheard and only because the cover suggested that this was a punk song (I might have listened to it on headphones in department store’s record bar though). I was so taken with the song that I bought a big yellow badge with some sort of reflector pattern and in red the name Sham 69, “the people you don’t wanna know”. It was the most disco item I have ever owned, but at the time the irony of that passed me by completely. I’ve often wondered about the name Sham 69. For many years I had no clue, and the idea that it refers to a faked position in the mutual administration of oral sex just made no sense. Apparently it’s lifted from a graffito that said, “Walton and Hersham ’69”, a reference to the band’s local football club winning an amateur league in 1969.

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Genesis – Follow You, Follow Me.mp3
In the mid-80s I left my record collection back home while living in London for three years. When I returned I found that almost all of my many singles and several LPs disappeared. I suspect they were stolen by a particular someone (ironically with the initials CD) and sold on to feed whatever partying habit he was maintaining. Among the few records he did not take were this and the late Gerry Rafferty’s Baker Street (which might have featured here, but I’ve heard it too often since to let it transport me to April ’78). The Genesis single was the first the group released after Peter Gabriel and Steve Hackett’s departure and the first with Phil Collins at lead vocals. At that point we had no idea just how unloved Collins would become among right-thinking people. There isn’t much Genesis v.2 has done that I approve of, and a lot I positively despise (I Can’t Dance and its supposedly satirical video above all), but I do like Follow You, Follow Me, especially Tony Banks’ keyboards.

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El Pasador – Amada mia, amore mia.mp3
At this point I must emphasise that the songs featured in this series are those that take me back, when I hear them, to the time when they were hits. Many of them I had on record, others I recorded off the radio. Most I still rather like. And then there are songs like this, the single of which I decidedly did not own (I mean, look at the guy’s comedy moustache!). But it was everywhere in the first half of 1978. I never owned the record, and much as I was a student of popular music, I never even knew the name of the performer until I came across the song by pure coincident a few years ago. And yet, when I hear it (preferably not too often), I can smell the corridor of my school, and taste the sickly sweet cold drinks the machine in the hall dispensed in flimsy plastic cups. I can feel the heat of the slightly more agreeable hot chocolate dispensed in the same flimsy plastic cups (the same machine also offered clear broth; surely nobody ever bought that). A Schlager herbert by the name of Roland Kaiser, who had a bit of a line in covering Mediterranean hits, made a German version of this, incoporating the Italian title in a feeble seduction routine. Some people thought it was very amusing; to me there was no mirth to be derived from Schlager singers; not until the following year when I was faintly amused, for a moment, by a song about drinking in suburban Berlin.

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La Bionda – One For You, One For Me.mp3
Likewise, One For You, One For Me wasn’t really my bag either. Though when the Italo-disco track was performed on the Musikladen TV show, I thought it was rather sexy, what with the cover girl cut-out’s nipple caps and the dancer’s very transparent blouse. Remember, I was 12; I would have considered surrealist art depicting deboned chicken breasts sublimely sexy. Surely the Zappa-lite on guitar and that absurd drummer should’ve persuaded me that there are sights that involuntarily and sometimes abruptly unsettle the libido.  I cannot say that my opinion of the song has improved greatly, though if it played at a retro party, I’d get up and boogie. The opening piano riff is actually pretty good. The La Bionda brothers, Michelangelo and Carmelo, apparently specialised in folk and prog-rock before jumping aboard the disco gravy train.

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Jethro Tull – Moths.mp3
I might have been on the cutting scene of punk, but I also took an apparent interest in prog rock. Hell, I had two Barclay James Harvest albums by then. I liked neither of them (except for their song Hymn), but pretended that they were spiritually enriching. But I did love Manfred Mann’s Earth Band’s Davy’s On The Road Again. Anyway, at around this time my older brother by six years began to introduce me to the music he listened to, mostly prog rock stuff (plus, I remember, Them and Donovan). When you’re 12, six years is a massive age difference, of course. Plus he was a DJ for the church youth group. And he had a party cellar populated by people with moustaches and girls with make-up who all smoked (Marlboro packets look really good when stuck on the ceiling next to each other) and probably drunk too. And perhaps had sex (even the lovely Sandra!). So when so cool a role model introduces you to the wonders of Jethro Tull’s Aqualung, and soon after you happen upon the brand new single by that group, you obviously buy it, unheard, to impress the old guy. Happily, the song was quite nice. Anderson looked a bit like the British TV character Catweazle, and I supposed that he might sound like Catweazle in the programme’s original English dub.

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Goldie – Making Up Again.mp3
More rock stuff, so these chaps are not to be confused with the British artist of dental misfortune and Strictly Come Dancing appearance. In fact, I don’t know much about this Goldie lot at all. I know they were label mates of Uriah Heep on the Bronze label, and that they were English (from Northumberland, a bastion of rock). Their founder, Dave Black, toured with David Bowie in 1976, which would have given the group some cool factor which their sole hit must have quickly negated. Their look, seriously rivalling that of REO Speedwagon, can’t have helped either. Making Up Again, a UK Top 10 hit, sounds like a song which Boston refused as being too soft. I may sound like I’m mocking it, but I actually rather like the song.

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The Boomtown Rats – Like Clockwork.mp3
The kind reader may regard this writer as an individual of entirely sinless record, but there were times when he deserved punishment. One such merited punishment included, apart from a good thrashing, the confiscation of my record collection, for the crime of redistributing the familial wealth. The cruel penalty would prove, contrary to initial threats, transient (a little over a month, perhaps). In the interim, my dear grandmother financed my unabated record-purchasing addiction, and in a spirit of clandestine conspiracy let me keep new acquisitions at her place, to be played on her gleaming old music box. It was a gorgeous piece of furniture, with a mirrored liquor cabinet that smelt of brandy. To access the record player, you had to press a button, whereupon the middle front of the cabinet opened. The record player had known opera and classical music, Schlager and the dreadful German Volksmusik that always seemed to include too much yodelling. Now it could add the pub-rock of the Boomtown Rats to its playlist. The alarm clock bell at the end of the song is pretty good.

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The Motors – Airport.mp3
In those heady days of 1977/78 any rock act that wasn’t prog or glam was prone to be called punk. Pub rocker Elvis Costello was initially called punk, for pity’s sake. So were The Motors. Look at their picture on the sleeve for Airport. None of them is likely to kill their girlfriend in a crazed heroin rush. They look like the third-choice goalkeeper for Rochdale, a geography teacher at a secondary school in North Wales, a trainer in telesales for Tupperware products, and a university economics major dropout battling his way through by working as a bus conductor to finance the modern arts course he really wanted to do but his father vetoed. All noble conditions of existence, of course, but unequivocally not punk (though the bus conductor might join the other arts students in being punks when he re-enters academic pursuits). And Airport is much better than most punk records. It’s a splendid song. In his marvellous memoir of growing up with vinyl, Lost In Music, Giles Smith recalls how he and his mates would endeavour to time the high-pitched background cries of “airport”. I did the same, as did a fellow with whom I discussed Airport at, of all places, the Dead Sea.

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More Stepping Back

In 1977 I started to build a record collection; in 1978, the year I turned 12, I began to be really serious about music, buying singles by the Sex Pistols and Jethro Tull alike. And I became a Blondie fan before anyone else I knew was even aware of them. In early 1978 I had my first kiss (which also was the last for a while), went to my first rock concert (ditto), and made a friend whom I recently met again for the first time in 29 years (but more of that at a later stage). The first part of my 1978 nostalgia trip – on which songs are chosen only if they have the power to transport me back to the time – covers the first three months or so of the year.

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Blondie – X-Offender.mp3
What a difference a couple of months make when you’re 11. In the autumn I had bought a single by teen herbert Leif Garrett; in winter I bought a single by NYC punk scene regulars Blondie. Or, better put, my not yet impressive penis bought it. I saw the cover of the re-released X-Offender single (it had originally been issued in 1976), and fell for Debbie Harry. Like a week or so before with the Runaways record, I tingled with excitement at the thought of hearing Debbie Harry sing. The very sexy spoken intro followed by the rapid drums and that guitar which sounded unlike anything I had heard before instantly broadened my musical horizon. I am still impressed with my nascent trendspotting talents: Blondie’s breakthrough with Denis was still a couple months off, but I already was a fan, even if I knew only X-Offender and the rather good b-side, Man Overboard.

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Long Tall Ernie & the Shakers – Do You Remember.mp3
A few years before Stars on 45 afflicted us, fellow Dutch nostalgia merchants Long Tall Ernie and the Shakers visited their Sha Na Na stylings upon us in medley format. Actually, it isn’t at all bad, as these things go. In the song lead singer Arnie Treffers introduces the notion of nostalgia and memories of Buddy Holly, and then the rest of the band lets go with songs like Little Richard’s Lucille, the New Beats’ Bread And Butter and the Everly Brother’s excellent Bird Dog (one of my constant earworms), occasionally enquiring of us whether we can remember. Obviously I couldn’t, having been not even nearly alive in the 1950s. In fact, those early days of rock & roll seemed very distant to me in 1978, so that the song was something of a history lesson for me. Considering that the songs in the medley were all about 20 years old at the time, today’s corollary medley might include songs by Tracy Chapman, U2, Kylie Minogue, DJ Jazzy Jeff & the Fresh Prince, Crowded House and Babyface.

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Uriah Heep – Lady In Black.mp3
Uriah Heep – Free Me.mp3
Originally from 1971, Lady In Black was re-released in Germany in 1977, and became a Top 20 hit. This and Free Me, which I bought in March or thereabouts, are the only Heep records I have ever acquired. But Lady In Black is important for a very good reason: it reminds me of my first kiss. I would like to say that it was a beautiful moment, like Kevin and Winnie’s first kiss in The Wonder Years. Alas, it was more the product of a bet. My friend, who was just half a year older than me but much more advanced, dared me and my “girlfriend” to French kiss. So we accepted the dare, rather unsure about what to do with our tongues once our open mouths met. Our tongues touched lightly before we both withdrew them in mild disgust, yet excited by the sensation. It was dark and it was winter. I felt her warm breath exhaling on my face, which was probably more sensual than the meeting of lips. And, er, her long hair was blowing in the mid-winter wind…

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Tom Robinson Band – 2-4-6-8 Motorway.mp3
Around the time I bought this, Tom Robinson was causing a bit of a furore with his song Glad To Be Gay, sentiments that were not often publicly expressed. At a time when punk was finally seeping into the German consciousness, Robinson’s proclamation was so counter-cultural as to include him in the movement. Of course, like many others who were included under the punk banner, Robinson was more of a pub rocker. Or pop rocker. Still, his lyrics were militant for their time (Motorway itself has a gay subtext, of course), and I think I can credit Robinson for making an important contribution to my unconditional rejection of homophobia.

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Bonnie Tyler – It’s A Heartache.mp3
In February 1978 I saw my first live concert, a multiple bill organised by Bravo magazine, headed by Slade. It was not in our city, so my friends Jens and Andreas and I took a train to the town where the gig was held, about 250km away. Jens, the leader was 12, Andreas and I were 11 (and some fraction which I’m sure we were willing to state as an indication that we were, in fact, closer to being 12 than 11). Times have changed, I think. I have no memory of how we found our way from the station to the arena, but we got there. The bill included a British teen outfit called The Busters (whose identifying gimmick consisted of having black hair and wearing identical denim jackets), Schlager singer Bernhard Brink (who had a white man’s ’fro) and Bonnie Tyler, who was just then having a big hit with It’s A Heartache. A year previously – hell, two months previously – I would have liked the song. Now I had tasted Blondie, and Jens and I were into punk. Tyler was for the housewives. We enjoyed Slade though. Dave Hill, he of the stupid haircut, no longer had a stupid haircut: he was now completely bold, at a time when shaved heads were very unusual. I cannot say whether it was a good gig, but I remember emerging from the hall into the cold winter’s evening air soaked in sweat.

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Sweet – Love Is Like Oxygen.mp3
My affection for Sweet was such that I bought the Level Headed LP when they made their comeback on the Polydor label, a big financial outlay which requireed much sacrifice (that is, at least that of three singles). By now, Andy Scott was wearing a middle-aged men’s beard, as though he was going to join the Beach Boys; Steve Priests looked sober and serious, and Mick Tucker and Brian Connolly were about to shear their locks. The music now was much more prog than pop rock. The lads obviously wanted to be taken seriously. Well, they might have been, had they not produced an album that was even more boring than one by Barclay James Harvest, and less deprived of the Zeitgeist than Emerson Lake Palmer. The lead single, however, was pretty good, like a song by the Electric Light Orchestra.

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Darts – Come Back My Love.mp3
The inclusion of Long Tall Ernie may have tipped off the reader that I rather enjoyed the odd bit of retro-rock & roll, even if I fancied myself at the time as a bit punk (though I didn’t dress punk, or act  punk, or hated society any more than my non-punk mates). Among the revivalists, The Darts were the greatest. I remember buying the Darts LP, alongside The Tubes’ What Do You Want from Live, on a trip to Stockholm. I still have the Darts album; the Tubes LP was lost long ago. Daddy Cool/The Girl Can’t Help It was the bigger hit, and it was that song which turned me on to Darts. But soon I preferred the cover of the Wrens 1954 song, which featured in The Originals Vol. 3 (as did the original of Daddy Cool by The Rays).

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Sex Pistols – No One Is Innocent.mp3
Sex Pistols – My Way.mp3
At the time it seemed the height of impertinence: Sid Vicious – we didn’t know yet just how undeserving of adulation that miscreant junkie was – first warbling and then quite amusingly violating My Way, by way of telling Sinatra: “Oi, old geezer, your song is shit!” We had no idea at the time that Sinatra himself hated the song and, if he had cared to acquaint himself with Mr Vicious’ interpretation, he probably applauded its defilement, in the principle of it, if not in execution. My Way just is too easy and obvious a target to be subversive, really. Roping in Great Train Robber Ronnie Biggs for what was initially presumed to be the a-side was a touch more seditious. Musically, the song was, well, not very good. Biggs deserved to be locked up just for singing in public.

Of course, at the time I also had The Sex Pistols’ Never Mind The Bollocks LP. It is fair to say that my brother, two years younger than I, did not like their music much. So one day he scribbled on the vinyl with a ballpoint pen, apparently in retaliation to my alleged act of iconoclasm involving his poster of Winnetou, the noble Native American friend of Old Shatterhand dreamt up by the 19^th century German author Karl May (who had never been to the USA, never mind the Wild West, but whose stories are still hugely popular in Germany). As far as disproportionate responses go, my brother belonged in the camp of those who sought to exterminate and subjugate Winnetou and his people…

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The Stranglers – Nice ’n Sleazy.mp3
My friend Jens had a fine collection of punk albums, which I tried to match with punk singles. Of course, time would show that most of the stuff we called punk wasn’t punk at all. Still, Jens had albums by the Damned, Boomtown Rats, Ultravoxx and so on. I had Holiday In The Sun and later No One Is Innocent/My Way. And I had this single, a fine track with expert sneering featuring one of my favourite rock riffs ever, though I had no idea what sleazy was (till I looked it up and found the answer richly satisfying). The pun, of course, passed me by, seeing as I was still learning English. Same day I bought a single by an outfit called The Killers (not to be confused with the currently successful band). That single — it had a German shepherd on the cover – was utterly horrible.

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Brian & Michael – Matchstalk Men & Matchstalk Cats & Dogs.mp3
One of the great discoveries in 1978 was the weekly radio broadcast of the latest UK charts – it might have been the Top 10 or Top 20 – by which I got to know all the latest tunes (like Brian & Michael’s number) before they would finally make it in West-Germany. So I would sit with my grandmother’s cassette-radio portable and recorded most songs. The recorder very usefully had a fade-out button, so the shock of the inevitable cut forced by jabbering DJs was not as brutal as it otherwise might have been. At the time, I might have bought records by the Sex Pistols and the Stranglers, and by Gerry Rafferty and Kate Bush and the Rolling Stones – but I was still 12. Of course I liked Matchstick Men & Matchstick Cats & Dogs, even if I didn’t buy the record, because that certainly would not have been at all cool. And how could a song featuring a children’s choir be cool? Here it was the St Winifred’s School Choir, who would later torment Britain with songs about their collective grandma. On Matchstalk Men, they are singing the children’s song The Big Ship Sails On The Alley-Alley-O. Matchstalk Men, incidentally, was a tribute to the northern English artist LS Lowry, who died in 1976 and is mentioned in the song.

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Wings – With A Little Luck.mp3
I admit it: I liked Mull Of Kintyre, which I bought the week it came out in 1977. By the time With A Little Luck was released, Kintyre was still a massive hit in Germany, and I was beginning to get sick of it. In fact, I liked With A Little Luck better; so much so that I bought the London Town album (or it might have been on the Greatest Hits album, which I think came out before that, and which I also bought. Anyone know which came first?). It’s a charming little tune, with a synth that actually sounded warm. I liked the “with a-little-luck-a-little-luck-a-little-luck” bit, and the double “we can do it”, which sounds like it was a production mistake. Now, do I have an unnecessarily dirty mind when I detect a sexual meaning in this line: “With a little love, we could shake it up, don’t you feel the comet exploding”?

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More Stepping Back

Here is part 3 of 1977, the songs that can take me back to the autumn and winter of that year.

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ABBA – The Name Of The Game.mp3
This is my favourite ABBA song, with a rather endearing video of domestic bliss via a communal game of ludo (it’s the name of the game, you see; video here). I had a bit of a crush on Agnetha. Actually, I still do. I think it’s the way she furrows her brow when she sings, as though she is in pain or perhaps in the incipient throes of an orgasm. Agnetha was the first adult woman I really fancied (along with the dark-haired lady from Baccara from part 2). Another Swede was my first pre-pubescent celebrity crush: the girl who played Annika in the Pippi Langstrumpf (Pippi Longstocking) movies. Anyway, for all their talents, the members of ABBA seemed to be rather nice, ordinary people. They might have been your folks’ friends, the people you were allowed to greet before being sent to bed. One can imagine Björn getting a bit bristly, possibly due to the tight trousers he wore. He looked like he really should have been an architect. Agnetha looked like a dental hygienist (don’t even think of making oral jokes!), Annifrid like a hairdresser (or perhaps art teacher), and Benny like a truck driver who got promoted to an administrative office gig where he’d now mainly look at porn magazines. Yes, they did look like they could have been my parents’ friends. No surprise, then, that in 1977 my mother bought the ABBA – The Album LP, and the following year went to see ABBA – The Movie (though her review of it was scathing). My older brother, the DJ at the church camp disco that produced my first slow dance (story in part 1 of 1977), acquired the single as part of a whole bunch for more church discos.

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Amanda Lear – The Queen Of Chinatown.mp3
Amanda Lear pulled one of the great PR stunts in pop history when rumours, allegedly emanating from her quarters (as per an idea by Salvatore Dali), began to circulate that she was a transsexual, a notion supposedly supported by her deep voice. Then, to prove that these were just “malicious” rumours, Lear posed for nude photos, which were widely published. Even Bravo — for all its inherent conservatism not a publication shy of portraying nudity (the pederasts must have loved the covers showing naked teen girls; check out the ’70s Bravo covers) — ran some of these pics. Sure enough, Ms Lear was indeed all woman. The rumours of her transgendered birth persist, because it’s just too god to let it go.

All that calls to mind the South African runner Caster Semenya, the world champion who was publicly humiliated by having to undergo a test to determine whether she was a girl or a boy or transgendered (and I don’t buy the argument that a white athlete would have been treated in the same shameful manner). Last month it was rather quietly revealed that she is indeed female. In the interim this rural teenage girl was put through a hell of publicity, with even the standard bearers of political correctness feeling entitled to crack jokes at her expense. I wonder whether this gifted athlete and perfectly pleasant girl will ever recover from this experience? And the muck of wilful suspicion will not dissipate.

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Raffaella Carrà – A far l’amore comincia tu (Liebelei).mp3
Sometimes the songs you despised back then are very effective in conjuring sentiments of nostalgia. So it is with this song, which I absolutely despised as 1977 turned cold (I hated the German Schlager version by the ingratiating Tony Holiday, titled Tanze Samba mit mir, even more). Hearing the song now, it isn’t really that bad. It has a nice energy. Carrà’s stage personality didn’t really help much to endear her to me. She had an over-enthusiastic way of shaking her booty that hinted at coordination troubles, she dressed in disco clothes like a pre-menopausal startrooper on a final mission, and she disappointed me by not conforming to my stereotype of the dark-haired Italian. Carrà, who first recorded the song in 1975, later released the song in German as Liebelei (the word that incongruously was part of the original title).

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Leif Garrett – Surfin’ U.S.A..mp3
I remember the day I bought this atrocity very well. I had just bought a pop music magazine called, I think, Pop. That issue included cool stickers picturing pop stars and band logos, and (I’m pretty sure) an article about the Lynyrd Skynyrd planecrash. I read the mag on the bus to my maths tutor’s place. On the way back, I decided to stop in town and drop in at the local Karstadt department store to buy myself a single…this single. Leif Garrett, as the cover suggests, was a teen idol in the Shaun Cassidy mode, the kind that Tiger Beat fed on regardless of accomplishment or talent. Before becoming a recording star, Garrett had been a quite prolific child actor, playing roles such as Tony Randall’s son in the TV series of The Odd Couple. His singing career was not very successful, though his disco number In Was Made For Dancing was a hit in Europe in early 1979. My older brother borrowed this record, and in return introduced me to Them, thereby igniting in me a nascent interest in older rock music which would find fuller expression a few months later. Yet, when I bought this single, I had no idea Surfin’ USA was a cover of the Beach Boys song.

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Santa Esmeralda – Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood (single version).mp3
Santa Esmeralda – Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood + Esmeralda Suite.mp3
Santa Esmeralda– You’re My Everything.mp3
Handclaps, percussion, enter the Spanish guitars, wait for the riff and the strings, and then Leroy Gomez kicks in: “Baby, do you-ou understahand me now”. Wow. And it gets even better. Never mind Nina Simone, Santa Esmeralda’s is the perfect version of Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood. Here we have the 7″ version, which is all I can handle as I boogie furiously across the floor, and the even better full version, which comes with a heart attack warning. And in case I never get around to posting it, there’s also a very fine ballad titled You’re My Everything, which appeared on the LP (which included only four songs) and in some regions as the b-side of Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood.

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Umberto Tozzi – Ti Amo.mp3
I must confess:  I rather like cheesy Italian pop, and I have no idea whether the stuff is considered totally uncool or not by Italians (I suspect the latter). Ti Amo possibly is my favourite of the lot (but that may be the nostalgia speaking). Umberto really gets into it, too. He went on to have a few more hits in Germany, including Tu and Gloria, which later became a hit for the late Laura Branigan. South African-born Schlager singer Howard Carpendale did the obligatory German cover of it, retaining the Italian title but draining all the impassioned drama from the original.

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The Runaways – School Days.mp3
Having noted my return to music fanaticism, my mother gave me for a stereo for Christmas. It was a fairly basic thing by most standards, but a most welcome step-up from my now broken record player whose lid doubled as a speaker. This one had a plastic lid designed for no other purpose than to guard the system against dust. Cool. By now I was spending all my money on singles. Just after Christmas, I bought the Wings’ Mull Of Kintyre, a few weeks before it even entered the German charts, persuading me that I had an unerring talent for spotting a trend. And I bought the Runaways single. Having read about manager Kim Foley and the decimation of the original line-up in Rocky magazine, I rather liked the look of promoted frontwoman Joan Jett. I had no idea what the Runaways sounded like. But I wanted at least some Joan Jett. I remember sitting on the bus on my way to my grandmother’s (she still funded my record-buying expeditions, but acknowledged that she could no longer use me as a proxy for her Heino-loving ways), feeling a rather sexual excitement at the thought of hearing Joan Jett’s voice. She would not disappoint. And it would not be the last record I’d buy under the influence of hormones.