Having had 'Alone' in my head all day yesterday I think perhaps I was too hasty in my 45-years-in-the-making outburst on the Numbers the other day. Perhaps what I'm really annoyed about is that they didn't have a proper trajectory in the vein of the Undertones, for instance, who packed so much progress and development into a few short years. Or the Buzzcocks, though they changed less.
I suppose it's possible the Maybe Dolls fill this criteria (for people too bored by this to care to look it up, the Numbers was basically siblings Annalisse and Chris Morrow, and after the initial Numbers ended after two albums and some minor hit singles, they reconvened a decade later as the Maybe Dolls for another hit single and an album (actually they recorded two albums but the second one wasn't released).) (But if you were too bored by this to care to look it up, why have you read this far? Just silly).
OK I'm going to buy that UK Numbers album, what's money anyway, and I'm going to grab the Maybe Dolls album too, I'll get back to you.
I've been listening to the Numbers CD Numerology in the car. It's a 2008 compilation released on Aztec which brings together most of the two Numbers albums, The Numbers and 39-51, alongside an EP that predates them.
I could be wrong - this never occurred to me before and I don't know why it has now - but the first album now seems to me to be skeletal and undercooked, and the second album is a lot more polished and worthy. But in both cases it strikes me the band was let down by production - I normally never say things like that - and hung out to dry. It's weird because they had decent producers (Cameron Allan for the first, Graham Bidstrup for the second).
They had two big hits in 1980, nowhere near as big as, you know, Dire Straits but their biggest hits. 'The Modern Song' is, by standards now and I suspect then, bizarrely stark. Annaliese's vocal is way back in the mix, the whole thing seems muffled and weird. 'The Modern Song', their other hit, is a little more conventional in sound, a mid-tempo pop number, with some catchily strange lyrics. But personally if I'd been the producer (I was 15 and very cluey) I would have put more instrumentation on there to bring out the best of the tunes, and I would have sent Chris Morrow to Byron* for a week to work out some endings for these songs and also some middle 8s or similar - just something to make them more punchy and memorable. They already are punchy and memorable, and Simon Vidale's drums are massive both in volume and impact, but the spare nature of these recordings just makes them seem threadbare rather than vital. Worst offender actually is 'Mr President', which was my favourite of their singles in this early phase - such a great record, but half the record it could be, mainly because its chorus is unvaried and the whole thing, once again, doesn't end with any aplomb. It needed aplomb.
The singles off the second album are way better. 'Big Beat' is probably my favourite, though 'Jericho' is brilliant too. 'Alone' is once again let down, IMO, by the production. Both these albums really sound like someone got the band into the studio to bash out their live set, and as a live set, you get all the tricks - they're such memorable tunes and the lyrics are often calculated to make you go 'huh?'
I have heard some tracks of The Numbers in a later incarnation when they were joined by John Bliss and Colin (Polly) Newham formerly of The Reels. Now, that was an amazing version of the group, and I only wish they had recorded properly because it was incredible.
I'm aware it's lame as to criticise something 45 years later like it's anyone's fault. I don't even know why I bothered starting writing this. I just really like them. If they'd signed to Mushroom or something like that, it all might have been very different. Look, I probably just don't get it.
Anyway TIL there was a British release by The Numbers which seems to be a blend of the first two albums. I'm almost tempted to buy a copy and listen to it just to see if anything is different in the sound or perhaps even recording - ? I'm like that.
*Or Bulgaria, just away somewhere to consider what could add to these great songs.
Well me, I vaguely remember it and I've always felt a little bit deprived that it has never really been available since it first emerged almost 50 years ago, but I also think, now's kind of the time for it to be seen again, because apart from anything else, it deserves reappraisal now all the fools above are, if not gone, probably a bit less upset.
There should be a word for the kind of memory I have of the show's Harry Butler parody - like, I know it happened and not because someone told me. I also remember the Mo McCackey episodes and that he tried to avoid bringing Norman Gunston in but ultimately he couldn't avoid it, and he did bring him in, in later eps.
Anyway it's all at the National Archives and I'm going to watch a few. I'll tell you all about it when it happens. Oh, and here's one more religious objection:
I have to admit the podcast about missing Dr Who episodes from the 1960s is a real guilty pleasure for me. Apparently there are now just under 100 missing episodes, because they just found a couple more, and they got Peter Purves (I had no idea that he had been a cast member of Dr Who)* to watch a couple under false pretences, so they gazumped him, but he enjoyed it.
I lost interest in Dr Who in about 1977, gained minor interest in its revival whenever that was, but I am not in any sense a whothusiast. But I do love hearing people nerd out over nerdy things, and the men (all men - yes, all men) who staff the missing eps podcast are a beautiful blend of pedantic, cosy-complacent and smug, unashamedly obsessed and sometimes amusingly critical (not of themselves but of choices made in Dr Who 60 years ago - hold the front page!). I also enjoy hearing experts exert themselves imaginatively trying to figure out what did or didn't happen in particular episodes where they might only have images or sound or text (scripts) to help them along. (Wondering what that noise is - did actor x stumble on the way to the cell door? Etc).
I also love the way it lifts a lid on film collectors.** So, I just read a press release from the organisation that found the two 'new' missing eps in the private collection of a man (now dead) who owned films, looked after them very well, had no interest whatsoever in Dr Who, but had six episodes of it in his collection... freak. Presumably he didn't watch them, but in that he is no freak, because I have tried to watch Dr Who from back then and if you don't know, I gotta tell you, it is boring hackneyed rubbish. If it hadn't held on through to the end of that decade and, I guess, John Pertwee it would be remembered now as nothing more than a stilted, silly exercise, daleks or no daleks.
But you know, boring hackneyed silly rubbish is pretty much the main game for humanity, so, respect.
*When my family lived in Britain in the mid-70s PP was one of the presenters of Blue Peter, a show I did not mind watching, but now in my memory I get him mixed up with the other male presenter, John Noakes, and then I think of that Derek and Clive sketch of 'I'm Alfie Noakes' 'No I'm Alfie Noakes' and then ultimately it all falls in a heap of messy shallow memories of names of things. I just went on wikipedia to check the spelling of Peter Purvis' name (luckily - because I had got it wrong) and found this beautiful piece of writing about another Blue Peter presenter, Valerie Singleton: 'To say how long Valerie Singleton was a presenter for is up for debate. Some people say it was 3 September 1962 to 3 July 1972. Making her time on the show 9 years, 304 days. But some people say it was 3 September 1962 to 20 October 1975 making it 13 years, 47 days. Some people say she presented the show till 29 December 1975 making her time on the show it 13 years, 117 days. Some people go as far and say she was a presenter till 7 June 1981 making her time on the show as 18 years, 277 days' I particularly like that there is no full stop at the end of that sentence.
** It also lifts the lid on how the BBC sold shows throughout the Commonwealth in the 60s-70s and where shows went - Australia bought them, then sent them on to Zambia, or whatever. Nutty people are trying to trace them all over the place. Also, there are amazeballs theories about various collector types who reputedly have various eps, but won't admit it. So funny (not to the presenters of that podcast, not really, though they try to appear amused).
Union House at the University of Melbourne was where I saw my first ever live music show...
