Summer Gold: Edith Bliss 'If It's Love You Want'

Edith Bliss, born in 1959 wikipedia tells us, is a classic case of a woman people now find funny because (1) she was a woman who dared to presume we wanted to see her perform and (2) because she is of an era (late 70s/early 80s) and a place (Australia) many of us regard with affection as 'naff'. Also, I guess her surname sounds strangely flashy and fake, though apparently it's her first name that was a concoction, and then only adapted from Eda (which I think is about fifty times better personally).

It's amazing how common Bliss' narrative is amongst celebrities: she attended a singing audition purely to support a friend, and was herself successfully auditioned. It seems she had hoped to take on the world of banking prior to this and also ran a shoe store (she'd just turned twenty when this record came out) but instead was, firstly, a mildly successful pop singer and secondly (and much more successfully) a reporter on Simon Townsend's Wonder World, a show I always felt slightly too old for, oddly enough (I was 14/15 when it started and it lasted long enough that a boy I went to school with, Phillip Tanner, was a reporter on it late in its life).

'If it's Love You Want' was released in November 1979 and was a minor hit, her only hit, though arguably her follow up 'Heart of Stone' was better, because it sounds like someone wrote a song after they heard 'Heart of Glass' once. 'If it's Love You Want' was written by Allan and Brian Caswell; I gather Allan also wrote the excruciating but enthralling 'On the Inside', the theme to the original Prisoner series (Caswell, via Prisoner, must be the reason the single was released on a Reg Grundy-related label). (I SIMPLY CANNOT WAIT to read his autobiography My Version of the Truth, or indeed any autobiography with that title).

I have to get her album Sheer Bliss as I am particularly intrigued by the production here (I should start by noting that this record sounds fuller, faster and altogether much more exciting on my car cassette player than it does in this youtube clip, which does no-one any favours: more below). The opening ten seconds intrigued me on the album, because it is so completely disconnected from the rest of the song but once I saw this clip it made perfect sense: it's for a male DJ (because they were all men then) to talk over the top of, introducing the song or making some comment about stealing knickers off the clothesline or saying rain should clear for a lovely day (of stealing knickers off the clothesline). It leads me to further fascinated thoughts about how, when the first ten seconds reputedly sell the song, the first ten seconds will often have been radically different on commercial radio and infused in some way or other with a unique meaning each time.

I don't want to go extensively into this thoroughly bland Countdown clip. I would say EB was a very inexperienced performer at this stage and for all we know someone gave her five minutes' instruction on hand gestures ten minutes before she recorded this mime. The disco balls, the dress Holly Hobby said was too prissy, the ingenuine facial expressions (I will have something to say, unless I forget, later about Dollar's clip for 'Who Were You With in the Moonlight' and the amazing weirdness of people smiling so cheesily through a desperately sad song) all seem to suggest 'fodder'. But actually the song resonates with me on a number of levels, because of that inherent sadness and hopelessness, that I also feel sometimes, and so do you. Put this up against John St Peters' 'You, You're the One', which I'll get to in a few days, and you get a very interesting pair of perspectives on submission and desire.

I would also posit (not that I listen regularly to contemporary pop) that any song on similar lines today would have to make some concession along the lines of: 'I know I sound like a saddo, but...' This song is kind of saying 'I'm a saddo. A smiling, simpering saddo. Women are.' But I think it's an incredible song, and doubly incredible in the context of 'On the Inside', by the way. Put those two together as two sides of the same coin. Whew.