Summer Gold: Edwin Starr's 'H.A.P.P.Y. Radio'

Edwin Starr was best known of course for the million-selling (Vietnam) war protest song 'War', and so he should be. This is a remarkably fine pop record, however, particularly for its economy and drive. I particularly like the repetitive one-note horn (?!) line that is on the go when this fragment begins:


Just as the first ten seconds of 'If It's Love You Want' were, I'm almost certain, meant to make the song radio-playable, the whole of 'H.A.P.P.Y. Radio' is a record contrived to sell itself on radio, and to  briefly take DJs away from banter about stealing knickers off the clothesline and into reveries about how much their listeners love listening to the radio. To do so they must play it, and in playing it they make people want to buy it.

Starr had been living in the UK for half a decade when he made this record, which to my mind explains its tightness and fullness (am I getting too technical here lol) and also why, in the clip, the 'girls' behind Starr are white girls, which would have brought the army out in the USA or at least the Klan. They're two girls twice over, right? And the whole thing has been constructed so Starr can be bigger out in front, creating depth. Anyway I'm not here to talk about videos, but songs, and this is a fine little number that says nothing and therefore most things.

Unbelievably because it's so fucking hot, this record did not chart in Australia, but it was top ten in the UK.

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.

Ten Years Ago

I wonder if today will be as filled with questions and answers as 9 January 2007 was. Ron Tudor, by the way, is still with us. Also, I actually have no recollection of buying a 'set-top box' or what a set-top box actually is. 

Summer Gold: Flying Lizards, 'Money'

To be honest I admire this song's execution and delivery a hell of a lot more now than I did at the time. I saw it as a cunning piece of deliberately badly-made doggerel, but now I appreciate how cleverly the extra elements of the song are brought out.

I have just been reading Wilson Neate's 33 1/3 publication about Wire's Pink Flag (from pretty much the same period as this) and part of their ascetic bent was, 'no Americanisms'. This 'Money' drains all the americanism out of the song, with aplomb. But it's the crazy other noises (including the ridiculous string of sentences at the end - 'Give me your money', and so on - that makes the whole thing work beautifully.

 Wilmington, Delaware News Journal 20 Jan 1980 p. 60

Fort Lauderdale News 11 November 1979 p. 215

Summer Gold: Amii Stewart's 'Jealousy'

From 'Voulez-Vous' the summer gold runs hot into Amii Stewart's 'Jealousy' and once again, wtf? Another non-hit.

Stewart had two hits in Australia earlier in 1979 (I'm assuming Summer Gold came out late in the year, probably around October-November, because, like, the name apart from anything else). 'Knock on Wood' was number two in March, and 'Light My Fire' no. 11 in July. So old mate putting this collection together and kind of predicting the big artists and the big hits of late '79 would not have been crazy to imagine one of them would be 'Jealousy', a classy piece of work very much in the mould of 'Knock on Wood' at least. Unlike the hits from earlier in the year, for 'Jealousy' Stewart and her producer Barry Leng took a punt on a new song - still I suppose technically a cover because Stewart didn't write it, but like most of the tracks on her Knock on Wood album and the one this new single was from, Paradise Bird, the songs were written by Leng along with Simon May, who amongst other things was later known for writing the theme tune for the British soap opera Eastenders. On this track the two composers were joined by one 'Morris' who I assume was bassist Gerry Morris (but should one ever assume). 'Jealousy' was top ten in Italy and Switzerland and, get this, #18 in Flanders (?! Flanders has/had a chart?! Great!).

The more I listen to 'Jealousy' the more I get a frisson of 'Boogie Wonderland' from it, which I suspect is a question of synchronicity ('Boogie Wonderland' had been out about four months when Paradise Bird was released) more than imitation.

Stewart also did another non-intuitive sixties cover on Paradise Bird, the Box Tops' 'The Letter', which was her next single after 'Jealousy'. It didn't chart in Australia - came low in the top 40 in Britain, for what that's worth. Not much, right?!

Summer Gold: Abba's 'Voulez-Vous'

I've been really enjoying this 1979 Seven Records compilation recently and I've been researching some of the tracks/artists represented here. There are actually very few hits on the compilation, kicking off - surprisingly - with Abba's 'Voulez-Vous' which was not a hit in Australia, a fact that had eluded me I suppose because it's about as iconic as any other Abba single. I also note that, coincidentally, it's the only Abba studio recording made outside Sweden - it was recorded in Florida. 

The fact that it wasn't a hit is unusual not just because Australians were generally uncritical consumers of Abba material, even years after the Best of Abba/Arrival peak, because of the fact that Abba had three other big hits in Australia in 1979: 'Chiquitita', 'Does Your Mother Know' and 'Gimme Gimme Gimme (A Man After Midnight)'. They were all top ten. While the first two are, arguably, more pop than 'Voulez-Vous,' 'Gimme Gimme Gimme' is basically Laibach by comparison and I don't think there's much of a case for 'Voulez-Vous' frightening Abba fans away (there might be a case for it softening the 'Gimme Gimme' blow). 

In any case, this song kicks off the album in pretty fabulous fashion, although one does get the sense that here Abba are following a trend rather than doing anything sensationally original as is their typical wont. The strident nature of the vocal and the general 'tough' nature of the guitar line, etc suggests to me that the group were getting a bit sick of being described as sounding like Abba, when they could obviously sound like a bunch of hard-arse nonentities, too. Still. Cool song and a great way to kick off an album. 

tingles

Last Monday night/Tuesday morning Nancy scratched me. I don't blame her, I imagine she was lying next to me and I rolled on her tail or something equally traumatic and brutal. The upshot was however I got an infection in my hand, which made it swell up like an inflated rubber glove. It was always usable, but low-key painful, looked weird, and seemed to be getting worse until I got the antibiotics I needed.

The antibiotics lasted until a few days ago, and the hand almost completely back to normal. But the weird bit is the experience feels like it's triggered the old shingles response. Now, particularly in the knuckle of my middle finger, I have a weird itchy-internal pain (that's right, I can't describe it). To be honest, I don't completely hate it, which I know is a peculiar thing to say. I guess I would prefer it not to be there but it's also kind of interesting.

I won't keep you updated.