Any Major Dude With Half A Heart

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.

In part one of my nostalgic trip to 1977 I recalled the sudden death of my father and how I shoved my rival out of the way in a race for my first true love’s favour. Puberty’s hormones had started to rage in my 11-year-old body. One day in early September I bought a copy of the teen magazine Bravo, familiar to me from the posters that used to cover my older sister’s bedroom walls. This one had Linda Blair from The Exorcist on the cover, and inside the first of a four-part series of Smokie posters. Apart with providing me with excellent sex education, buying Bravo turned me from a casual music fan into an obsessive. My growth was rapid, as the first part of 1978 will show. I might regard most of the sings in this post with nostalgic affection, but I am not proud to associate myself with some of them publicly.

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Baccara – Yes Sir, I Can Boogie.mp3
Baccara – Sorry, I’m A Lady.mp3
I have told the story before how the poetry of Yes Sir, I Can Boogie ignited my passion for the English language, which by 1977 I had learned for a year in school. It was the word “erjitayshin” (as in “Meester, your eyes are full of hesitation”) that send me to the Langenscheidt Englisch-Deutsch dictionary. It caused me great satisfaction to have mastered a four-syllable word. From there, I’d regularly translate lyrics from the snappily titled Top Schlagersongtextheft booklets. As we’ll see in part 3 of 1977, my first celebrity crush on an adult involved the blonde from ABBA, but the Baccara lady in black also gave me strange stirrings, proving that I am not tied to a particular type of woman. The spoken admonition in the Spanish duo’s second hit, in which the white Baccaraette regrets that she is a woman of virtue, also seemed cute and, indeed, sexy to me. In short, Baccara represent the aural and visual stimuli to my nascent pubescent sexual awakening.
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Harpo – In The Zum-Zum-Zummernight.mp3
Flute! This is not one of Harpo’s better-remembered songs. It reached #13 in West-Germany in September, his last Top 20 entry there. Indeed, by 1977 – the year he spent a month in Swedish jail for refusing to perform compulsory military service – Harpo’s career was declining. Being a bit of a Harpo fan, I bought two more singles by Harpo after this — Television and a cover of The Troggs’ With A Girl Like You, neither of which were hits — and then the singer disappeared. A few years later he briefly returned to the news when he sustained serious injuries from being kicked by a horse he was training (he lost sight in one eye and his sense of smell). You and I might have boiled the horse down for glue. Harpo, in commendable contrast to you and me, named his next album after the horse, Starter. Apparently Harpo still performs (Northern German and Danish readers can catch him on 30 July at an Oldies-Night in Süderbarup, near Flensburg).
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Boney M – Belfast.mp3
Like Woody Guthrie before them, Boney M had a message of politics. “Got to have a believin’, got to have a believin’, got to have a believin’ all the people ’cause the people are leavin’. When the people believin’, when the people believin’, when the people believin’ all the children cause the children are leavin’.” Right on! It took 20 years for the conflicting sides to listen to Boney M with open hearts and minds before they signed the Good Friday Peace Accord. On this song, Marcia Barrett got to sing lead instead of the more ubiquitous Liz Mitchell. It was co-written by Drafi Deutscher (who in the1960s recorded what may well be the only ever world-class Schlager, Marmor Stein und Eisen) specifically for Barrett, intended for her to sing even before she joined Boney M. Its original, less snappy title was Londonderry, which might locate Deutscher either on the Protestant or the Oblivious side.

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Rubettes – Ooh-La-La.mp3
When successful acts died commercially in Britain, they lingered on for a while in Germany. The Rubettes benefitted from such loyalties when their Ooh La La La became a hit well past their sell-by date. I thought the chorus was quite catchy, but I obviously did not take the time to translate them. “I’m contemplating having her my bride; she’s got great big tits, that’s what she has. Yes, when it comes down to lovin’, anything goes and everyone knows it, I swear now, for she has a thing about shedding her clothes.” Tom Waits was not going to perform a cover version of that, but it was pretty risque for the pop charts in the 1970s. And then, Rubettes Man engages himself with her clothes-shedding temperament: “I heard my parents footsteps coming down the stairs to see what all the noise was about. So I rolled over to the old piano and I said: ‘Ma, we’ve been playing the blues.’ My mother gave me a knowing glance and she said: ‘Son, is that how you play it with your trousers round your shoes?’” Surely a real mother would have given a knowing look and ask her horny son not to soil the rug…

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Bay City Rollers – You Made Me Believe In Magic.mp3
There are BCR songs I like because they make me feel like a kid again. But this song I like because it’s damn good. It didn’t do very well because by then even the German teen girls had begun deserting the group, though it apparently cracked the US Top 10 (but only #34 in the UK and even in Germany only #24). Soon singer Leslie McKeown would depart as well. So You Made Me Believe In Magic stands as a testament to what might have been. It has a great arrangement (I really like the strings) and the guitar solo – ostensibly by Woody, but I don’t buy that – is pretty good too, albeit rather of its time. In memory of BCR, here’s a great video of the band performing for OAPs; I suspect it was a funny response to their being a teenybopper band.

Anyway, BCR remind me of the Great Poster Debate of September 1977. Bravo carried four different sizes of posters: A4, A3, a double-sided A2 insert called the “Superposter”, and the Starschnitt, weekly pieces of a picture that glued together would produce a life-sized poster (the only one I ever collected was of the Beatles). Although I was not a little girl, there were BCR posters up on the walls of the bedroom which my younger brother and I shared. Although I bought the magazines, we’d take weekly turns in deciding which posters would go up; my brother’s bargaining strategy was that if he had no say, he’d veto any poster going up. One week, the Superposter choice fell between a garish picture of BCR clones called the Dead End Kids on the colour side, and a really cool monochrome photo of Jimi Hendrix (of whom I knew nothing yet, other than that he was dead). Alas, it was brother’s week to choose the posters (pictured on the Bravo cover here), and he opted for the fucking Dead End Kids. I tried all I could to persuade him that Jimi had to go up, even trying to emotionally blackmail him by claiming that our late father, an opera and theatre man, was a big Jimi Hendrix fan. To no avail. The Dead End Kids went up – comedy socks, skimpy cut-off denim shorts with rather too open legs and all. I never got to hear any of their records, but a lot of Hendrix’s.

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Kenny Rogers – Lucille.mp3
Two years ago I was at a party when the electricity went off. The host quickly produced a guitar for an old-fashioned sing-along. But when nobody really remembers complete lyrics, these things tend to e short-lived. So as our host was idly playing as blues riff, I started singing along, making up lyrics as I went along to what I called The Muthafuckin’ Blues. The lyrics of my ditty were more country than blues. You know the deal: my dog gone died, my woman gone left me, and the crops in the field are being left unharvested. Later I realised that, apart from the deceased canine (and the bitter end that my woman who gone left me would eventually meet), I was riffing on the theme of Kenny Roger’s Lucille, from the point of view of the wronged husband.

My mother bought the single on a trip in October to Cologne, at the massive Saturn store, at the time Europe’s biggest record shop. It was our first family trip since my father’s death in June. Before departing, I had been given a new pair of black leather shoes which had a very distinctive smell. Lucille evokes that smell and the very particular memories of that trip.

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Hoffmann & Hoffmann – Himbeereis zum Frühstück.mp3
Carole King – Hard Rock Cafe.mp3
This German cover of the Bellamy Brothers rather good Crossfire played every morning on our radio alarm clock, a modern thing with green digital numbers. Almost like I Got You Babe in Groundhog Day. It was one of three songs that seemed to play in a loop at the time: Carole King’s Hardrock Café, a German cover version of Herman’s Hermits’ No Milk Today by a guy who played the fiddle, and this song. Although I was by now vehemently opposed to any German music whatsoever, I had a sneaking affection for this song. Raspberry ice cream for breakfast (which beats starfish and coffee, maple syrup and cream) sounded like just the thing to fulfill my nutritional needs. I was intrigued by the notion of rock ‘n’ roll in an elevator (you don’t think they meant something other than dancing to Bill Haley, do you?). Sadly, one of the Hoffmanns died young, having thrown himself from a Rio hotel window in 1984. He was 33. I can’t say I liked Carole King’s song much, though it sounds a lot better now.

Part 3 follows soon. And when we get to 1978, when the music will get a lot better.

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More Stepping Back

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1977, the year I turned 11, was a pivotal year in my life, perhaps more than any other. My family was torn apart by my father’s sudden death, I discovered love and became a serious fan of pop music. We’ll deal with the first two in part 1. As always, I must stress that all songs are included here because they have the power to beam me back to the time under discussion. Some I like, and some I most certainly do not endorse. Don’t despair, things will get better as I get older…
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Electric Light Orchestra – Livin’ Thing.mp3
Until this point, the Electric Light Orchestra had passed me by, and they would again do so until 1979/80, when I really liked their hits Don’t Bring Me Down, Confusion and Shine A Light from the Discovery album. There were other songs in between, and every friend’s long-haired, bumfluff-moustached older brother had a few ELO albums, alongside the ubiquitous Heart LP (the one with Barracuda, which to this day remains Annoying Older Brother music to me). But I didn’t dig ELO. Except Livin’ Thing. Perhaps not coincidentally, it sounds much like the Discovery era ELO. The production is brilliant, of course (the strings especially), but it’s the chorus that must have grabbed me then. For all values that I have come to appreciate about ELO since then, I don’t think they were that great with choruses.

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Bay City Rollers – Yesterday’s Hero.mp3
In West Germany, the little girls maintained a rivalry between the Bay City Rollers and Sweet. If churning out the better hits in 1977 is the yardstick by which we shall measure victory, BCR won, even as the song’s title was becoming increasingly apt. Yesterday’s Hero is a bit of a stomper in the Saturday Night vein. Written by Harry Vanda and George Young, it was originally recorded in 1975 by John Paul Young, who’d score a couple of worldwide hits in 1977/78 with Love Is In The Air and Standing In The Rain (an Italian cardinal was such a great fan, he adopted the singer’s name upon becoming pope in August 1978). George Young, incidentally is AC/DC’s Angus and Malcolm Young’s older brother. With Vanda, George had been a member of the Easybeats. They then recorded as Flash and the Pan. They also produced AC/DC’s Powerage and High Voltage albums.

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Bonnie Tyler – Lost In France.mp3
If any record my mother bought was going to excite me, then it had to be one that included the timeless lyrics: “Hoolay-hoolay hoolay-hoolay-dance”. It might have supposed to sound like ooh-la-la ooh-la-la dance, but Mrs Tyler (no doubt she was married, because she looked like a Hausfrau) gave the French phrase her own Welsh twist. Lost In France, which sounds like a Smokie song, was recorded before Tyler had an operation on her vocal chords, which gave her already smoky voice that distinctive rasp. Within a year Tyler had an even bigger hit, with It’s a Heartache, and in 1983 with the magnificent Jim Steinman production Total Eclipse Of The Heart.

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Frank Zander – Oh Susie (Der zensierte Song).mp3
While my interest in German Schlager had diminished by 1977, I couldn’t escape the likes of Peter Alexander, Roberto Blanco, Costa Cordalis and Howard Carpendale on the radio or TV. Compared to those ingratiating chumps, Frank Zander was fairly cool. With his almost tuneless voice and faintly amusing lyrics (well, up to a point), he certainly stood apart from the chumps. He had first come to general notice in 1975 with Ich trink auf dein Wohl Marie, the supposed humour of which resided in his supposed drunkenness (hell, at nine years of age, I was amused). Two years later, he had moved from the adult Marie to jalbait Susie, of the “uncensored song” which through the medium of country-pop operates on the fun to be had with bleeped out double entendres. Oh, how we almost laughed. An “uncensored version” was also released, with Zander voicing over the supposed words that were bleeped out, but those were not really objectionable either; a comedic double bluff, in other words. Zander later became a full-time practitioner of the novelty song, doing unhilarious spoof covers of Trio’s Da Da Da and, under the pseudonym Fred Sonnenschein released particularly inane Scheiße.

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Lynsey De Paul & Mike Moran – Rock Bottom.mp3
Ah, the days when Britain still had a shot at winning the Eurovision Song Contest; before bitter regional enemies in the Balkans would divvy up the highest numbers of points between one another (except this year, when Germany won). Rock Bottom was the runner-up in the 1977 contest. France won that year, with Marie Myriam’s L’oiseau et l’enfant, a song I would not even pretend to recognise if it stuck its tongue down my throat while humming itself. And while Croatia is happy to give Serbia 12 points, Ireland gave Rock Bottom nil points. Austria’s entry, Eurovision cliché watchers will be pleased to know, was titled Boom Boom Boomerang. Mike Moran went on to produce David Bowie and write the theme for crime TV series Taggard. De Paul had already enjoyed a career as a singer and songwriter (including Barry Blue’s hit Dancin’ On a Saturday Night). At around the time that Moran co-wrote Kenny Everett’s not entirely welcome Snot Rap, De Paul was singing songs for the Conservative Party.

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Space – Magic Fly.mp3
This was a bit of an instrumental novelty hit in the way that there always was at least one every year in the German charts. Unlike some of the others, however, Magic Fly is rather good. Space were a pretty cool French disco act whose music might well be sought out by aficionados of the genre. I had the single of this. It got stolen at the last church youth camp I bothered attending, in 1979. The youth leaders didn’t even bother to investigate the theft of my records (the violation of the commandments about theft and coveting thy neighbour’s goods notwithstanding). That annoyed me, because in 1976 they had a whole scene from The Shield going when some hapless goon stole a popular guy’s pocketknife. Nobody asked what the cool guy was doing with a knife in a church camp in the first place. But to the religious church camp regime, rightful ownership of weapon clearly was more important than pop music. So, you know, fuck them.

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Oliver Onions – Orzowei.mp3
I actually didn’t like this song that much; my younger brother was a great fan of it (and, yeah, the chorus is quite catchy, in the way choruses with the phrase “nananana-nananana-nananana-na-na” often are). Little bro’ was also a great Bud Spencer and Terence Hill fan, so he had an Italian obsession already which would only later incorporate the finer aspects of that country’s rich cultural heritage. Oliver Onions (named after the British writer) were Italian film writers Guido & Maurizio De Angelis, who wrote for Bud Spencer & Terence Hill movies. Orzowei was the theme song for what I think was an Italian mini-series titled in Germany Weißer Sohn des kleinen Königs, a story about a white boy brought up in an African tribe. It was a German #1 in late May and early June, which was, as we will see in the next entry, a rather significant point in my young life.

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Julie Covington – Don’t Cry For Me Argentina.mp3
In early June, my mother bought the single of this. One night she played it for my father, a theatre and opera buff who probably would have liked any of the crap inflicted upon us by that revolting grease-head Andrew Lloyd-Webber. And, indeed, Mom and Dad, sitting together on the green suede lounge suite, really enjoyed that song together. A couple of nights later (the anniversary of which is on Saturday), a shrill scream echoed through our house, alerting me to the notion I was now fatherless. My father had collapsed with a heart attack at work; we had been notified that he had been taken to hospital, but didn’t know that he made his final, apparently artificial breath in the ambulance.

In the subsequent weeks, my mother was totally obsessed by Don’t Cry For Me Argentina, playing it over and over and over, her loud sobs disregarding Evita’s injunction not to shed tears for her or, by extension, my father. I cannot have an objective opinion of that song’s merits. I love that song because it evokes such intense emotions. And I hate it for the same reason. Catch me on the right day, and you’ll find that the strings that open Don’t Cry For Me Argentina can still produce a lump in my throat, a knot in my stomach, or a tear in my eye.

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Smokie – It’s Your Life.mp3
Readers who are familiar with the oeuvre of Smokie will rightly question my good judgment in including this song, and, if there had to be Smokie, not one their bigger hits of 1977, Living Next Door To Alice (and you may very well ask politely who is Alice) or Lay Back In The Arms Of Someone, both far less rubbish tunes than this. But the point of the series is to include songs that have the power to transport me back to a particular time. It’s Your Life, a tempo-changing mish-mash of cod-reggae, bubblegum pop and Beatles-homage, does just that. It evokes the summer of 1977. When it comes to the bridge, and the backing singers start singing: “How does it feel…” I am inclined to continue “…one of the beautiful people”. The fleeting similarity to the Beatles’ Baby You’re A Rich Man is not subtle. And the chorus borrows more than a bit from George Harrison’s My Sweet Lord (or, indeed, The Chiffons’ He’s So Fine).

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Rod Stewart – Sailing.mp3
Yes, I know, it was a hit in 1975. Yet it belongs here. In August 1977, my brothers and I went on a church camp. The regular reader may recall from the 1976 installment that the previous year’s camp (the one with the pocketknife incident) had been intolerable due to my older brother’s Gauleiter complex, bullying me mercilessly. This year, he was totally cool. The whole group of about 40 kids from 9-15 was great and grew close over two weeks. It was one of the best fortnights of my life. And I fell in love with the lovely Antje, with her dark hair and little freckles on her nose. Of course I was too shy to do much about it, other than carving her name on my bed’s headboard (and anywhere else I found suitable). A night or two before our departure — the day we received news of Elvis’ death — we had a disco evening. I was intent on asking Antje for a slow dance, and practised with one of the youth leaders, the generously bosomed Doris, to Ralph McTell’s Streets Of London. The next ballad would be my cue.

After loads of Sweet and T Rex songs, played by my DJing older brother, the opening notes of Rod Stewart’s Sailing sounded. Being totally sexy in my tight white jeans and navy T-shirt, I got up and made a beeline across the dancefloor for the lovely Antje. Halfway down, approaching from the right flank, came a chap called Roland. I had not known that he too had taken a fancy to the lovely Antje. For all I knew, he might have had his sights on any number of girls cliqued together in the lovely Antje’s vicinity. Still, somehow I sensed his intended target right at that moment.

It was like High Noon; tumbleweed blowing as nervous eyes darted here and there. Little me and big Roland, both after the same girl, with the entire crowd watching from the sidelines. Our paths met. Instinctively, I shoulder-charged my rival out of the way. As he tumbled away I reached the lovely Antje, stood in front of her and boldly asked her to dance to Rod Stewart’s Sailing. She looked inquiringly at her best friend, who nodded her consent. So Antje and I had our awkward first — and, alas, last — dance, with all my pals giving me the thumbs up, and Roland plotting a revenge which never came. After the camp, I never saw Antje again. But not a year goes by when I don’t think of her, of the feeling of my hands on the back of her slightly clammy T-shirt and her soft breath brushing against my neck.

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So when I think of 1977, the shock and grief caused by my father’s death comes to mind, but also the intensity of my puppy love and the comfort of my holiday with a great group of people. The year had awoken in me an intense consciousness of life, and I would soon direct that intensity towards the fanatical acquisition of music.

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More Stepping Back

The long, hot summer of 1976 brought changes in my life. I had graduated from primary school, and at the age of ten would attend a high school which included in its student population bearded old hippies, some of them as old as 18. And in the summer we were packed off to a church camp while my parents went on holiday in France, the first time we didn’t all go on holiday together.

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Bellamy Brothers – Let Your Love Flow.mp3
The big summer hit of 1976, in its original form by the country music siblings and in its German version, titled Ein Bett im Kornfeld, by Jürgen Drews (like Boney M’s Liz Mitchell an alumnus of the Les Humphries Singers). I certainly wouldn’t have recorded this on my cassette recorder. In fact, it still reminds me of my miserable time on church camp, at which my older brother was a youth leader. For reasons probably related to his being a 16-year-old teenager on a power-trip, he asserted his fascist ascendancy through the brutal persecution of yours truly (my little brother, blond and the youngest in the group, enjoyed the protection of all the girls whom older brother fancied). Sturmtruppenoberführer Big Brother did get his just desserts towards the end of the camp when an insect bite gave him mild blood poisoning. He would be a youth leader again the following year, but that camp turned out to be one of the best fortnights in my life.

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Boney M – Daddy Cool.mp3
Much as I hate to admit it, this is a pretty good song. Indeed, if Boney M hadn’t jumped the Zugspitze after 1977 with shocking songs like Rivers Of Babylon, Hooray Hooray It’s A Holi-Holiday and the hilariously bad “We Kill The World”, they (or Frank Farian, whom we met in part 1 of 1976) might be remembered with greater respect. Daddy Cool, Ma Baker, Belfast and their cover of Sunny are fine disco-pop songs, even if the lyrics were exceptionally bad, especially those of Belfast. And to a boy about to enter puberty, the covers of the first two LPs, featuring the three exotic ladies in various states of undress, were rather appealing. Though I did hope that as a grown up there would be no circumstances that would compel me, by dint of being an adult, to wear anything as absurd as Bobby Farrell’s gold underpants.

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Johnny Wakelin – In Zaire.mp3
Mohammad Ali vs George Foreman. The Rumble in the Jungle. Back in the day, I was actually a Joe Frazier fan, and was delighted to find among my late father’s possessions an autograph by the great man (since faded, alas). He also had an autographed picture of the erstwhile Cassius Clay, obtained when he interviewed The Greatest in 1966 in London while covering the football World Cup there. Sadly, that autograph has gone missing. In Zaire is a novelty number, obviously (Wakelin made a career of novelty songs). And yet, the African percussive beat, though entirely hackneyed, were an innovation in the upper reaches of the pop charts of the day. Wakelin was something of a Muhammad Ali cheerleader: a year before In Zaire, he had a UK hit with Black Superman (Muhammad Ali)..

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David Dundas – Jeans On.mp3
As I mentioned in the introduction, after finishing Grade 4 I departed the safe cocoon that was primary school for the local gymnasium (the highest of Germany’s three tiered school system). My father had gone to the same school, and my elder brother was a student at the converted medieval monastery. My father, whose politics were centre-left, knew that the school’s teaching body comprised many old Nazis, people whom he knew back in the bad old days. Still, he sent me to that hell hole. The teachers were gruseome. The severe German teacher, who’d enter the classroom with big strides and purposefully bang his bag on the table by way of intimidation; the unpleasant religion teacher (doubtless one of the old Nazis) whose forbidding theology I could not follow because I was hypnotised by the strand of white slime that invariably moved between his lips; the geography teacher (definitely a Nazi) who had us standing to attention when he entered the classroom, stopping short from having us salute him with a raised arm; and the biggest bastard of them all: the coach, who systematically robbed me of all my self-confidence because I was not quite the legendary sportsman whom he believed my father to be. And David Dundas’ Jeans On provided the soundtrack to my miserable time there.

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Sherbet – Howzat.mp3
I am certain that if cricket had caught on in Germany in good time, the country would have become quite excellent at it. Look at the German national football teams who have a way of hitting form at just the right time. That’s the secret to test cricket: winning the decisive sessions, coming back from setbacks, maintaining pressure on equally or more talented opposition. Basically the attributes that made Australia so domineering a side for a decade until a couple of years ago. Cricket fans will know why I’m yabbering on about what really is a minority sport (but huge in India, so in terms of numbers, it’s a significant discipline). The word “Howzat” is typically shouted by bowlers (they are like the pitcher in baseball) when the ball hits the batsman (that’s the guy with the bat) on the leg in a certain position, which the umpire may declare illegal and give the batsman out. Sherbet, being Australian, employed that cricketing term to give a cheating girlfriend “out” (they use another cricket term when they inform the girl: “I caught you out”). None of that made sense to me at the time, of course, even had I known about cricket. After all, I had started learning English only a couple of months before this became a minor hit in West-Germany.

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Tina Rainford – Silver Bird.mp3
If one wanted to locate a song with English lyrics as a good example of what a German Schlager sounds like, Silver Bird would be a most astute choice. Indeed, it was written by a Schlager producer, Drafi Deutscher (an old friend of Rainford’s whose ’60s hit Marmor, Stein und Eisen is one of the few truly great Schlager), under the pseudonym Renate Vaplus. It is a song of its time, recalling the likes of Pussycat and the George Baker Selection — and, indeed, ABBA in their Schlager phase. It was a massive hit. Quite bizarrely, Silver Bird also reached the top 20 of the US country charts. I had long forgotten about this song, so when I heard it again, it proved the powerful impact of music on the long-term memory as all kinds of feelings came rushing back, beaming me back to our living room.

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Ricky King – Le rêve.mp3
German-speakers of my generation who may be reading this will not thank me for posting his. Ricky King was a German guitar virtuoso located firmly in the muzak genre. The Fender Statocaster wielding King, known to his granny as Hans Lingenfelder, had been a session man for assorted Schlager types when he released Verde (an instrumental adaptation of a song by the improbably named Italian duo Oliver Onions) and this song, Le rêve. I suspect the only readers who will be interested in this are fellow nostalgist on a quest to recapture the feeling of the autumn of 1976. For everybody else, Ricky King is to Jimi Hendrix as Richard Clayderman is to Al Kooper. Bernhard Brink, who sported a blond afro, recorded a quite horrible vocal version of Le rêve.

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Marianne Rosenberg – Marleen.mp3
As mentioned in Curious Germany Vol. 2, Marianne Rosenberg began her career as a maidenly teenage singer, trilling songs about Mr Paul McCartney. After doing the standard Schlager thing, Rosenberg turned to disco in 1975 with the marvellous Ich bin wie Du (also in Curious Germany Vol. 2), all the time maintaining her secretary-next-door look. Today she is a cult legend in Germany’s gay scene, a status she seems to embrace. Marleen follows the same story line as Dolly Parton’s 1974 hit Jolene (note how Marleen more or less rhymes with Jolene). Marleen is in love with Marianne’s man, and the latter begs the more beautiful (less housewifey?) Marleen to abandon her romantic designs on Marianne’s man. Just hear Rosenberg’s tortured, drawn-out cry of Marleen. And all that is set to a gentle disco beat, so that we may dance and weep at the same time. The song, like many in the Rosenberg catalogue, was co-written by Joachim Heider, whom we met previously as a member of Krautrock band Glory Be in Curious Germany Vol. 3.

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More Stepping Back

If to me 1974 coalesced with 1975, then 1976 was a year of some change. For one thing, I got my first cassette recorder, which would set me off on a career of illegal copier of music (as we now know, home-taping killed music, stone dead. If only we had known!). In West Germany, pupils leave primary school after Grade 4, and that’s what I did in after the summer holidays — a very unhappy experience, as we’ll learn in part 2. And before that, I had my first holiday without my parents because they packed me and my brothers off to a church camp while they made a tour of France. It would be my father’s last ever holiday. I think I should apologise for the poor quality of the music that soundtracked my 1976. It will get better…

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Frank Farian – Rocky.mp3
Frank Farian had been trying for almost a decade and a half to become a famous Schlager singer. He had one minor hit in 1973, So muß Liebe sein, and then a big one in early 1976 with his German version of Austin Roberts’ tearjerker. But by then Farian had already branched out into the brave new world of disco. Recording under the name Boney M, his Baby Do You Wanna Bump (because the world needed more bump records), on which he did deep lead vocals and falsetto backing, became a minor hit in 1975.

Suddenly, Farian needed to send out a Boney M group to do gigs, and to front an album. So he drafted a bunch of West Indian female singers to lip synch on TV and at gigs. The line-up changed a few times before dancer Bobby Farrell joined to complete the group we all knew and despised. The latter didn’t appear on Boney M’s records — Farian did Farrell’s voice. But it wasn’t a huge secret, never mind a scandal. Notoriety would arrive with another group Farian had lip-synching: the Grammy-winning duo Milli Vanilli. The Milli Vanilli standard destroyed the lives of the two frontmen, but Frank Farian’s career continued merrily. In the ’90s he produced dance groups La Bouche and Le Click. And he never needed to become a Schlager star.

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Pussycat – Mississippi.mp3
On my tenth birthday I was given a cassette recorder; a rather simple bit of audio machinery with big buttons and no radio. It might have been simple, but to me it was pretty new-fangled technology. My mother has only recently given up on her eight-track machine, and this portable cassette recording lark was a damn sight more convenient than that. Once we got over the novelty of recording our voices (I thought I sounded like a complete dork; how I wish now that we had kept those tapes), I had to figure out the technology of recording music. The recorder had no futuristic gizmos such a wire which one might connect to a transistor radio, so the process of recording music required that nobody in the room would make a noise, preferable maintaining perfect stillness in contemplative prayer for no ringing telephones or barking dogs, as I would hold the cassette recorder close to the radio or TV or record player speaker.

My first proper test with illegal home taping came at the instigation of my older sister, who in the 1960s had amassed a fine collection of Beatles records, but now, at the old age of 24, no longer bought records. Dutch trio Pussycat would be performing their international number 1 hit Mississippi on TV (memory told me it was on the Disco 76 show, but Pussycat’s appearance on that monthly programme preceded my birthday). I was ready to tape the song, for which I had little affection. At my order, we all fell perfectly still, and the gap-toothed lead singer lip-synched her heart out. Like a great sound engineer, I allowed for the applause to fade out gently, and then clicked the pause button, rather than stop, because the former facilitated a smoother transition to the next song. Except all the other songs on the show were rubbish. In the end, my sister never collected the tape with my recording of Pussycat’s Mississippi…

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Bay City Rollers – Saturday Night.mp3
Mississippi was a rubbish song to the 10-year-old dude, remained a rubbish song throughout the fallow period before the rehabilitation of ’70s pop, and is a rubbish song still today. The Bay City Rollers’ Saturday Night, on the other hand, was a great song to the 10-year-old dude, then fell into disdain during the fallow period, and is a great song again, even if only for reasons of nostalgia (I can never be sure whether my good judgment is clouded by an emotional connection to the past). Originally released in 1973 with Nobby Clark on vocals, it had been re-recorded in late 1975 with Nobby’s successor Leslie McKeown on the mic — as a glam rock number when glam rock was on its way out. The people in glam’s homeland knew that: the single did not do well in Britain. But it topped the US charts and was a big hit in West Germany, which defiantly kept the glam flame glittering. Of course, Saturday Night is a bit of a Sweet rip-off. And the stuttering evokes Bowie’s Changes. But, hey, do we really expect artistic innovation from a BCR song?

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Harpo – Motorcycle Mama.mp3
Motorcycle Mama, Harpo? Really? At the same time every German primary school kid was singing a song called Meine Oma fährt im Hühnerstall Motorrad (My granny is riding her motorcycle inside the chicken coop)? The song is pretty standard pop stuff; our Swedish friend, who would perform barefooted because he had difficulties finding well-fitting shoewear, had a way with a catchy melody that was very much of its time, with a hummable chorus. The nostalgia-drenched lyrics on the other hand…oh dear. He remembers Jimi Hendrix from 1965? This was Harpo’s follow-up to the hit single Movie Star (which featured in 1975). Motorcycle Mama did not become a classic, but the far superior follow-up, Horoscope, was a big hit in West Germany. We shall encounter Harpo again in 1977.

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Slik – Forever And Ever.mp3
If Forever And Ever sounds a bit like a Bay City Rollers song, then that’s because it was written by the songwriting team Bill Martin and Phil Coulter, who wrote several songs for BCR — including Saturday Night (they also wrote Sandie Shaw’s Eurovision Song Contest winner Puppet On A String and Cliff Richard’s Congratulation). And like BCR, Slik were a teen-pop band from Scotland on the Bell label. Their frontman was one Midge Ure, future singer with Ultravox and the forgotten co-writer of Do They Know It’s Christmas. Forever and Ever was a #1 hit in Britain. I don’t know how well it did in West-Germany, but I recall seeing it on TV. Then I forgot about the song for a decade or so, and rediscovered it on a K-Tel type LP I picked up in a second hand shop. Cue memories flooding back…

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Nico Haak – Schmidtchen Schleicher.mp3
Among the Schlager dross of 1976, there was the novelty dross. Schmidtchen Schleicher was regarded as hilarious by Germans because of Nico Haak’s peasoup-thick Dutch accent and the “amusing” lyrics about the eponymous lounge dancer’s elastic legs sliding across the dancefloor by way of charming the ladies. I recall my mother and me being in agreement that this was all very funny, though clearly not so funny as to compel either of us to spent 5DM on the single. I might have recorded it on tape though. Alarmingly, this song seems to have some kind of cult status in Germany. Please say it ain’t so.

I believe this was also a big hit in East-Germany, where Haak’s shtick certainly was a lot funnier than the regime there, or any of the misery guts on TV there. Yes, while we in the West had Niko Haak to entertain us, the good citizens of the DDR had the arch-polemic Karl-Eduard von Schnitzler, a joyless, goateed man of no discernible charm who in his TV commentaries peddled the ideals of an egalitarian, socialist brotherhood that was not evident in the workers’ and peasants’ state (not that Schnitzler’s West-German equivalent, Gerhard Löwenthal, was any more attractive). Haak, who possibly had no interest in all that, just managed to see the fall of German Democratic Republic before his death at 51 in 1990.

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Sailor – Girls Girls Girls.mp3
This is the only pop song I can recall my father reacting favourably to. He was more of an opera man. When I asked him about his favourite singer, he replied Maria Callas. Absent her regular appearances on Disco or the ZDF Hitparade, I had no idea who Ms Callas was. I didn’t expect the old man to dig Slade or even ABBA, but I had hoped he’d give me Mireille Mathieu or, hell, even Nana Mouskouri. Somebody I’d know. And then I saw him tapping his foot to Sailor. With the passage of years, I can understand what he saw in the song. My father was born in 1923 and loved the theatre. Girls Girls Girls evokes the sound of his childhood and it is grounded as much in a pop tradition as it is in the theatrical cabaret. To me it sounds like it belongs in the Muppets Show, which had yet to be launched. It’s a dangerous earworm, too.

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Tina Charles – I Love To Love.mp3
You have to love this disco-pop song alone for the Wooooooooooooo’s. I’d like Kylie Minogue to cover this, perhaps in a mash-up with the song’s spiritual cousin, Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go. Tina Charles was a member, mostly in invisible form, of 5000 Volts, who had a hit with the Euro-disco song I’m On Fire (as recounted here). I Love To Love was produced by Biddu, the man responsible for Carl Douglas’ Kung Fu Fighting. Before storming the charts, Charles used to sing on the Top of the Pops albums, the cheap LPs on which session musicians would imitate (often badly) current chart hits. Before that, in 1969, she released her first single on which an unknown Elton John sang backing vocals. And Charles, for her part, sang backing vocals on Steve Harley & the Cockney Rebel’s Some Up And See Me, alongside Linda Lewis.

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More Stepping Back

For the second part of my journey back to 1975, when I was nine years old, I dug out an old Arcade sampler of that year. A number of songs featured here were included on that album: I’m On Fire, Down By The River, Moviestar and New York Groove. Some other songs might well have featured here as well, such as Glenn Campbell’s Rhinestone Cowboy, Typically Tropical’s Barbados, Chris Spedding’s Motor Bikin’, or Billy Swan’s Don’t Be Cruel.

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Van McCoy – The Hustle.mp3
What a tune! Disco guitars, strings, flute, horns, a killer bassline and friendly ladies and imposing gentlemen commanding us to do The Hustle. Do it! It’s the sound of summer ’75. Before trying to peddle a dance nobody could really do, McCoy had been a songwriter, a producer and a label boss. He co-wrote such songs as Jackie Wilson’s I Get The Sweetest Feeling, Brenda & the Tabulations’ Right on the Tip of My Tongue, The President’s 5-10-15-20 (25 Years of Love), David Ruffin’s Walk Away from Love… And then, in 1979, McCoy died of heart failure. He was only 39.

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Bay City Rollers – Give A Little Love.mp3
When the sartorial disaster zone that was the Bay City Rollers had a hit with a ballad — a cover of the Four Season’s Bye Bye Baby — it was inevitable that they’d release another retro ballad. And it gave them a second #1 in Britain. Give A Little Love was not a patch on Bye Bye Baby, and yet I preferred it. I suspect I was showing my preference for the understated. Or I was just being in touch with my feminine side because, let’s face it, this song was for all you girls out there for whom it supposedly was a teenage dream to be thirteen. Lucky girls. By the time I hit 13 four years later, I discovered that it was a nightmare being that age. Anyway, in ’75 I might have liked the girly song, but within the next year and a bit, BCR would release Saturday Night and Yesterday’s Hero, two real bubblegum pop stompers.

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I Santo California – Tornerò.mp3
The holidaymakers’ import hit from sunny Italy in 1975. I really like this song. But I do have a soft spot for some Italian pop, supplementing my great love for Italy. I have no idea how desperately uncool it may be to like songs by Umberto Tozzi (“Ti Amo”, “Gloria”), but I do. There was a German version of Tornerò by Michael Holm titled Wart’ auf mich, but the melody is so essentially San Remo pop, it requires the sound of the Italian language. I wonder how many Europeans in their mid-thirties owe their life to Tornerò?

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Albert Hammond – Down By The River.mp3
Albert Hammond – To All The Girls I Loved Before.mp3
Originally a minor US hit for Hammond in 1972, the re-recorded version of Down By The River that became a über-hit in Germany in autumn 1975. The merry tune masks the fact that the song states Hammond’s ecological concerns. It’s pretty well done; starting out as a camping romance poisoned by the polluted river, Hammond ends the song in ways that might have given me nightmares had I understood English then: “The banks will soon be black and dead, and where the otter raised his head will be a clean white skull instead, down by the river.” The b-side could feature in The Originals series, but I’ll post it here, simply because I really don’t like Willie Nelson and Julio Iglesias’ awful duet.

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Harpo – Moviestar.mp3
A Top 30 hit in Britain only in 1976, Germans got to know the barefooted Swedish singer Harpo in late 1975 with this cheerful and sarcastic number, which apparently features Anni-Frid of ABBA on backing vocals. In Britain Harpo might be remembered as a minor one-hit wonder, but he had a string of hits in Germany between 1975 and ’77. In 1977 Harpo was jailed for four weeks for refusing to do his compulsory military service in Sweden. By 1978 his German career had fizzled out. I was loyal to Harpo beyond the call of duty, buying 1977’s Television and 1978’s With A Girl Like You, a cover of the Troggs hit. Both had pink and black covers, neither charted.

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Penny McLean – Lady Bump.mp3
The sound of Munich disco. Penny McLean was one of the three members of the Silver Convention (Fly, Robin Fly), and possibly not the most talented of the lot. The recurring scream on Lady Bump? Not Penny. The spoken bit? Not Penny. Which leaves us with some pretty ropey vocals. The scream was the work of one Gitta Walther and the introductory recital by Lucy Neale (of Love Generation). Penny McLean, you’ll be shocked to learn, was a pseudonym; the singer’s real name was Gertrude Wirschinger, not a moniker to inspire much by way of sexy disco fever. But she didn’t even use it in her career as a folksinger, as part of a duet with husband Holger Münzer called Holger & Tjorven in the 1960s. After her disco career fizzled out, McLean became an author on New Age twaddle, such as numerology. How fitting then that the follow-up hit to Lady Bump (a German #1) was titled 1,2,3,4…Fire.

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5000 Volts – I’m On Fire.mp3
Another disco hit, this one from Britain, and much better than Lady Bump, if one can get past the blatant rip-off of Black Is Black. 5000 Volts was basically Martin Jay (whom we would later encounter in Tight Fit and Enigma) and Tina Charles, who would soon score a huge solo hit with I Love To Love. And good for her: when I’m On Fire became a hit, Charles was replaced on the lip-synching Top of the Pops by blonde actress Luan Peters, who also appeared on most single sleeves (she is otherwise best known as the hot Australian over whom Basil Fawlty fawns in Fawlty Towers’ “The Psychiatrist” episode). The subterfuge caused a scandal at the time, with the German label replacing the single sleeves for I’m On Fire to depict Tina Charles with Martin Jay and another dude. I don’t recall whether I watched the Disco ’76 show of 5 December. I hope I did, catching in the process not only 5000 Volts, but also ABBA singing S.O.S. (months after having a hit with it) and Hello performing New York Groove.

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Hello – New York Groove.mp3
Americans are more likely to know New York Groove in the version by Kiss man Ace Frehley, but it first was a hit for the English pop group and BCR labelmates Hello, who were clearly aimed at the teenybopper market while holding for themselves higher aspirations. Three of the four Hello members were only 19 at the time, and had been releasing records for three years before having their first hit in 1974 with a cover of the Exciters’ Tell Him. New York Groove a year later became their only other hit. They also supported Gary Glitter on tour (good thing then that the drummer was ten years older than the other members). New York Groove was written by Russ Ballard, who to my knowledge never released it.

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Juliane Werding – Wenn Du denkst Du denkst, dann denkst Du nur Du denkst.mp3
Essen-born Juliane Werding was just 15 when she had her first hit, a German cover of Joan Baez’s The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down in 1972. After that she disappeared from the scene, completed her education, and returned in 1975 with this verbosely titled country number, which translates as “If you think you think then you only think you think”…that a girl can’t play cards. This is the storyline: like Udo Jürgens in part 1 of the 1975, Juliane fancies a late night drink. Unlike the Greek tavern dwelling Udo, Juliane finds a nice working-class Kneipe in which beer swilling men challenge her to a game of cards, thinking she’ll be easy prey. Of course, she beats them and proceeds to drink them under the table, giving cause for her good-natured taunting in the manner of tongue-twisting posers. In the middle of all that, a man interjects in a disconcertingly creepy manner that he’ll get her next time. On the ZDF Hitparade show, presenter Dieter-Thomas Heck does the creepy guy honours.

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Smokey – Don’t Play That Rock ‘n’ Roll To Me.mp3
I was going to write an essay about why Smokie were uttley naff (and fans of the group will know what I did there). And, of course, they were. But here’s the thing: some of their songs were quite good, in the ways of 1970s pop ballads. I quite like this Chinn/Chapman production, which borrows its riff rather too liberally from His Latest Flame. Anyway, the eagle-eyed reader will have noticed that the heading and the single sleeve spell the band’s name Smokey. As I recall it, the Motown legend Mr Robinson apparently believed that the name Smokey was his trademark alone, suggesting that the public might become confused between his high-pitched voice and Chris Norman’s pebble-garglings. Or that people might not properly process the picture of four white Yorkshiremen on a sleeve, and buy the record in the belief that they were getting a Quiet Storm. Faced with the threat of litigation, our four friends changed their name to Smokie. Incidentally, Sammy Davis Jr didn’t sue Robinson for appropriating the rather indelicate nickname Frank Sinatra called him by.

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More Stepping Back

The year 1974 morphed into 1975 without it making much of a difference. I became increasingly football mad, and I was still reading Micky Maus comics. I had the same kindly teacher, spent a large part of the week at my grandmother’s, and music didn’t mean all that much. It was there, I enjoyed it, but the passion that once was there had gone. At the age of nine, I was jaded, fallen off Planet Pop. And still I must cover the year in two parts. The songs in this series here are chosen for their ability to transport me back to the year under review. The songs here evoke the first half of 1975, the smell of spring and Easter eggs.

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ABBA – So Long.mp3
After winning the Eurovision Song Contest with Waterloo on 6 April 1974 and topping the UK charts with the song, ABBA thought they had made their big breakthrough. They hadn’t. Their next notable hit in Britain would be S.O.S., a year and a half later. In West Germany, however, ABBA were a permanent fixture. Songs that made little or no impact in Britain provided the soundtrack to my life as an eight and nine-year-old: Honey Honey, Ring Ring, Hasta Manana (featured in the second part for 1974), I Do I Do I Do I Do and So Long. These songs showed ABBA’s versatility, ranging from bubble gum pop to Schlager to glam rock. So Long is a fine glam stomper.

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Udo Jürgens – Griechischer Wein.mp3
Udo merits praise for investing some social commentary in his lyrics. Here he dealt German xenophobia a mortal blow, ensuring that Germans and Gastarbeiter would live in perfect harmony, like the keys on an oompah tuba. The song has Udo stumbling into a suburban Greek taverna whose noble patrons relate to him their longing for the old country because that’s where they are accepted. And the Greek wine — Retsina is horrible stuff, tastes like the sap of a tree — encourages them in their confessions of homesickness. I don’t think Udo thought that one through much, well-intentioned though his song was. In his representation, the swarthy immigrants (oh yes, he tells us of their swarth) are heavy-drinking emotive cliché-mongers who have no interest in assimilation, just trying to turn a buck so that they can go home again to live la vida loca. Exactly the image which the German xenophobes exploited in their bid not to accept immigrants.

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Rubettes – Juke Box Jive
You can set fashions by it: a decade will be revived about 20 years later. We see it now, with the ’80s revival (the ’90s revival has already started, in as far as that derivative era has anything worth copying). In the 1970s, the ’50s made their comeback. Sha Na Na, Grease, The Last Picture Show, Elvis’ death…and this song, which implores us to do the juke box jive just like we did in ’55. In 1975, that seemed such a long time ago. But if we playfully update the lyrics to do the juke box jive just like we did in 1990…gulp!

I had the single of this. I lost ownership of it in unjust circumstances, in early 1978. My younger brother and I were eating soup when I made what must have been a very amusing comment, whereupon my brother spew his mouthful of soup all over my bowl. Naturally I refused to eat any more of the spitsoup. My mother, alas, was an enthusiastic enforcer of the empty plate rule. Seeing my problem, she suggested that we swap soups. That was a non-starter, because fraternal saliva would have polluted my brother’s soup as well — a problem when other people’s bodily fluids could induce utter disgust. So I struck a bargain with my brother: if he eats both bowls of soup, I’ll give him, erm, the single of Juke Box Jive by the mighty Rubettes. Seeing as he had a pathetic collection of records, consisting mainly of fairy tale LPs, he took the bait. I didn’t really like the Rubettes much anymore, but the loss of any record rankled nonetheless.

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Leonard Cohen – Lover Lover Lover.mp3
Laughing Len is not really Top 10 fodder; he never had a UK chart entry, as far as I know. But this was a massive hit in West Germany, his only hit there. I have no idea why, of all Cohen songs, Lover Lover Lover became a hit. Well, it is pretty good and quite catchy. I remember singing it in the street, rendering the chorus as luvvel-luvvel-luvvel. The lyrics are classic Cohen: “I asked my father, I said: ‘Father change my name.’ The one I’m using now, it’s covered up with fear and filth and cowardice and shame…He said: ‘I locked you in this body, I meant it as a kind of trial. You can use it for a weapon, or to make some woman smile’.”

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Barry White – You’re The First, My Last, My Everything.mp3
The sunny sound of the ’70s. Because of this song and “Love’s Theme”, and the Philly sound (the TSOP theme especially received much airplay in Germany), I associate strings in soul music with my childhood summers. Poor Barry White has become a bit of a joke in some ignorant quarters. The whole Walrus of Lurve nonsense deflects from White as a serious and gifted musician, the creator luscious arrangements and intricate melodies. And he was, of course, a great singer.
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Bimbo Jet – El Bimbo.mp3
I’ve mentioned before that every year there would be at least one (at least mostly) instrumental hit riding high in the German charts. In 1975, it was the unpromisingly titled El Bimbo by the French disco outfit Bimbo Jet. Apparently El Bimbo, a chart-topper in France in 1974, was based on a track by the Afghan singer Ahmad Zahir, titled Tanha Shudham Tanha. I have a recollection of a female singer, possibly Gitte, singing a German vocal version of this song.

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Sweet – Fox On The Run.mp3
A different version of Fox On The Run appeared on the group’s 1974 album Desolation Boulevard; the 1975 single was re-recorded, produced by the band. I wouldn’t have known it at the time, but it’s a song about groupies: “I don’t wanna know your name, ‘cause you don’t look the same, the way you did before. OK, you think you got a pretty face, but the rest of you is out of place; you looked all right before.” Charming.

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Shirley & Company – Shame Shame Shame.mp3
I think in 1975 the disco sound really crossed over. Where songs like Rock The Boat could be called soul, there was no such interchange between genres with songs like Shame Shame Shame. Shirley Goodman had been around for a long time as an R&B singer. By the late’70s she had retired. Shame Shame Shame was written by Sylvia Robinson, who in the 1960s was half of the soul duo Mickey & Sylvia. She had a soul hit with the very sexy Pillow Talk before founding the All Platinum Records label on which Shame Shame Shame was published. But Robinson’s place in music history is guaranteed as the co-founder of the Sugar Hill label, on which the Sugarhill Gang released Rapper’s Delight, the first rap hit.

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Teach-In – Ding-A-Dong.mp3
In about 1986/87, Heineken ran a very funny commercial on British TV featuring Spitting Image puppets performing really bad Eurovision Contest songs with nonsense titles, not unlike Ding-A-Dong. None of those were bad enough until the British entry, The Chicken Song, scored maximum points everywhere. Of course, Britain had previously enjoyed success with Lulu’s Boom Bang-A-Bang. Ding-A-Dong was Holland’s 1975 winner of the Eurovision Contest, held in Stockholm a year after ABBA’s triumph. There will be no sorrow if you sing a song that goes Ding-Ding-A-Dong, apparently.

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Kenny – The Bump.mp3
Listen to this and tell me that Robbie Williams took no inspiration from The Bump for that song he did with Kylie Minogue! The song headlined a short-lived dance, a strange throw-back to the early ’60s, when every dance fad produced a hit single. In 1975 there, of course, was also The Hustle, the disco masterpiece by Van McCoy.

The Bump was Kenny’s first hit, and apparently our five pals, still teenagers, had nothing to do with its production. The story goes that the song had already been released under the name Kenny, from a remixed backing track for an abandoned Bay City Rollers song and featuring co-writer Phil Coultier on vocals and backing vocals. The group Chuff was roped in, with a new lead singer, and renamed to present the song, lip synch style, on Top of the Pops. Kenny did not have much success: four hits in 1975 and, whoosh, they were gone — except in West Germany, where the group lingered on for a couple of years. Confusingly, an Irish singer by the name of Kenny had been releasing records just a year or two before — on the same label, RAK, as the group Kenny.

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More Stepping Back

And here is the second part of my recollections of 1974, the year I turned 8. As always, I’m at pains to emphasise that I am not endorsing all songs featured — they are here by virtue of their power to transport me back to the year, like a smell or a taste or the shade of a particular colour might. Read more…

It was a most significant year for me: I discovered two passions that have remained with me ever since: football (or what our American friends call soccer) and reading. The latter came first, in the shape of comic books. I never had much time for the Marvel comics type, which weren’t that big in West Germany anyhow. My first comic purchase, in 1973 when I was I Grade 2, was a rendering of Laurel and Hardy, known in Germany by the less than gratifying moniker Dick und Doof (Fat and Dim), which I bought on a train journey with my sister. But that wasn’t as good as the old film shorts which were shown on German TV on Friday afternoons. So I went on to the comic book version of Looney Tunes, with Porky Pig (or Schweinchen Dick), Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Yosemite Sam, Tweety and Sylvester, Roadrunner et al. This coincided with a failed campaign to persuade German TV not to pull the weekly Looney Tunes show from its schedule, a decision made due to the cartoons’ violence. Read more…

In 1973 I had my first proper party to celebrate my seventh birthday; after the summer I had a new teacher (for reasons explained in the 1972 review); and the German version of Sesame Street was flighted in most of West Germany as of January 1973. Read more…