Why I wrote 'Yeah Yeah Yeah'

A few years ago I reviewed a DVD box set of Tony Palmer's mid-seventies TV series All You Need Is Love for the Guardian. An epic history of twentieth century popular music, it ended with Stomu Yamashta and the ambient drift of Mike Oldfield's Ommadawn as Palmer gamely predicted the pop music of tomorrow. By the time the series aired in 1977, punk rock was at its peak and Palmer's prediction - his entire series, even - seemed a grand folly. How could it have been anything else? It was like trying to capture lightning in a bottle. Pop music by its nature is unpredictable and ever-changing, and I concluded that it is a fool's errand to ever attempt a written history; it would be out of date by the time it was published. The day after my review ran, a publisher and a literary agent both got in touch to say I was wrong, that it could it be done, and that, as a pop obsessive, would I like to give it a go myself?

This was a challenge which dominated the next five years of my life, resulting in Yeah Yeah Yeah: The Story of Modern Pop. The narrative of how and why pop music developed hadn't been attempted for decades, and Tony Palmer stood before me as an example of how deeply you can dig and still get it wrong. I knew I had to avoid other pitfalls, too, which may not have been so obvious to writers in the seventies and eighties. There were snobberies and anti-snobberies at every turn - soul and R&B historians tended to be afraid of that dread word 'manufactured'; the mod take on pop was basically a ranking of cool, scared of any mess; while the traditional rock history was largely suspicious of electronics, and even the intellect (with David Bowie as the key dividing figure).

The simplest way around this was for me to base my book on the charts, singles and albums, an engine of pop which dates back to the critical year of 1952. That was also the year when the first New Musical Express was published, the first seven-inch, 45rpm singles were issued in Britain, the first portable record player - the Dansette - was launched, and the NME printed the first Hit Parade, with Al Martino's Here In My Heart at the top of the pile. These four mediums formed the very basis of modern pop, and the music (in 1952, largely ballads, film themes and novelty records) would eventually catch up with their new, plastic thrill on Bill Haley's Rock Around The Clock three years later. For the next forty-odd years, the charts would remain the closest we could get to a pop consensus, and give us a sense of direct participation in popular culture.

Where to end the book became apparent as I was writing a list of contents. The year 2000 had always promised to be a line in the sand and so it proved, though not necessarily for musical reasons - the first number one of the new millennium was Westlife's cover of Seasons In The Sun, after all. But 2000 was the year iTunes was launched, with the iPod arriving a year later, rapidly ushering in the digital revolution and leaving the music industry – which had barely changed in almost five decades - in turmoil. Since the dawn of the digital age great records have continued to be made, of course: the current number one act, Katy Perry, is a model pop star; Blurred Lines and Get Lucky will be party regulars for years to come. Pop lives on. Yet there is little sense of community, and it has become easy to stop caring about the Top 40. Pop has become less wantable.

We are in a state of what writer Douglas Rushkoff calls 'present shock': the past is now a constant, re-fashioned to our current tastes and needs, while no one talks much about how music will sound in the future – the sense of pop's evolution and progression has gone. The feel and grain of the modern pop age, from the fifties to the end of the nineties becomes gradually harder to recall. With Yeah Yeah Yeah, I wanted to capture how it felt to live through that era, through the bad and the ugly as well as the good. Context is crucial in understanding how and why pop developed, and can be easily lost in the digital age.

Most importantly, though, I didn't want to write a dry history of 'classic pop', leaving it "sitting on its ass in a museum", to quote Claes Oldenburg. My opinion on who has been influential in pop may not chime without everyone else's. No one in the world is going to read Yeah Yeah Yeah and agree with everything in it - not everyone likes Del Shannon or T Rex or the KLF as much as I do. But this is how the era felt to me, and how it has ruled my life, firing playground spats and pub arguments, filling my home with the iconography and detritus of pop music: posters, records, cassettes, biographies, ticket stubs, box sets, a lifetime of devotion. I knew that one day I needed to get all this stuff out of my head and into a book, and the result was Yeah Yeah Yeah.

Sparks: 'Kimono My House'

"Heartbeat, increasing heartbeat." Sparks put the fear of God into pre-teens in 1974 with their debut Top Of The Pops appearance. As pretty boy Russell Mael flashed his eyes and the agitated, almost oriental glam of This Town Ain't Big Enough rang out, the whole nation wanted to shout "Watch out! Hitler's sitting behind you! And he's playing the piano!" You had to laugh or you'd be terrified.

Ron And Russell Mael were child models, and later ice cream salesmen, born and raised in southern California. They formed a band called Halfnelson in 1968 and were soon taken under the aegis of eccentric rabbit-boy Todd Rundgren. After two low-selling albums and a name change - to something midway between the Marx Brothers and pure electricity - someone smart suggested they try their luck in England. "It was a fantasy" says Russell, "we were real Anglophiles. And we were too naive to be paralysed by thoughts of failure."

It was 1973. Initially they were holed up in Beckenham, Kent. It may have a proud musical tradition (Bowie, Siouxsie, Haircut 100) but it held little allure for our Hollywood exiles. "We got tired of catching the 10.49 from Victoria every night. So we moved to South Kensington, to the basement flat of Kenneth Tynan's house."

Impressively, Sparks earnt themselves a month's residency at the Marquee Club straight away, which led to an Old Grey Whistle Test performance. "In the US we'd played to six people at the Whiskey A Gogo; in London there were queues around the block. We started a new life." With the rest of the original band heading home, the Maels placed ads and found Adrian Fisher, Martin Gordon, and drummer Dinky Diamond. Island Records signed them and very soon they had recorded a blinding third album.

Even compared to the quickfire pop of the previous records, Kimono My House was hyperactive. There's a theory that British bands play higher, tighter and faster than American counterparts (think Beatles vs Byrds, Sex Pistols vs Nirvana) because it's the best way to keep warm in a damp, cold rehearsal room. Ron Mael claims the faster pace was purely down to the classical music he was listening to - but maybe, thirty years on, they've forgotten the biting reality of the English climate. Their first UK-honed single in April '74, This Town Ain't Big Enough For Both Of Us, was an astonishing blend of old Hollywood, Roxy Music, and Monty Python which fulfilled pop's primal needs by getting ever louder, faster, and shriller over its three and a half minutes. With the greatest of ease, it hit the Top Three within a month.

Kimono My House - released in June - was no letdown, a hypoid, Dada-ist stream of potential 45s: Amateur Hour was also eatern-guitar-flavoured (plucked to become their second top tenner), and a tribute to adolescent dancefloor hell; Here In Heaven was sung by a dead lover to his girlfriend on earth who had chickened out of a suicide pact; the dense, superloud Thank God It's Not Christmas was a straightforward thumbs-up for the 364-days-a-year party life. "Their music is so obviously and totally different from anything we've heard before" said Todd Rundgren. So clever and sharp, so quirky and immediate, such intense fun. Anita Loos would have adored them.

"We had the screaming girls and other fans who thought there was a deeper side to what we were doing. They didn't like the screaming girls." Ron and Russell soon settled into London life. Once they went to a cinema and a rat ran over Russell's feet - "that didn't really happen in southern California. Or stores closing on Sundays. Reality hit us after living in England a while. But we got to see Roxy Music and the Sweet, who were really good, and we were fans of Indian food. So that was on our positive checklist. Tandoori chicken... sorry, Morrissey. We've since cleared up our act. There are very few chickens in our lives now."

As a bona fide pin-up Russell was asked to contribute a weekly column to girls' magazine Mirabelle. "Heady stuff. Favourite sweets. The pro's and cons of pies. Colours - do you like them?" Moustachioed Ron, unsurprisingly, was spared the ordeal - it is likely that no feature was written on Sparks in 1974 that didn't mention Hitler, or child molesters, at least once.

By the year's end the band started to fragment with the acrimonious departure of bassist Martin Gorman, but - barely pausing for breath - they released another fine album, Propaganda, in November. Melody Maker voted them brightest hope for 1975 as the utterly beautiful Never Turn Your Back On Mother Earth graced the Christmas Top 20. Guitarist Fisher was next to go, ahead of the Indiscreet album which delved into Gilbert and Sullivan and flapper ditties, maybe a little too deeply. The kids didn't need their own Hinge And Brackett, and 1976 saw Sparks disappear from the charts completely. For a while it had all fitted just so - the shock, the ambiguity, the thrill of the falsetto - and by the dawn of punk it was all used up. The Maels returned to the States in '77 to lick their wounds and await the first of several rebirths.

The sauce and cheek of Kimono My House ("You mentioned Kant and I was shocked, because where I come from none of the girls have such foul tongues") had a strong effect on the young Morrissey. As a neighbour in LA, he was invited chez Mael to hear the premiere of 2002's Li'l Beethoven, a beat-free album which bore no resemblance to any previous Sparks album, or anything else in pop for that matter. Russell considers it "unique and bold" and it's hard to disagree.

The Maels' bravery was rewarded with international praise and an invite to play Morrissey's Meltdown. "We're both kind of detached from the real world" reckons Russell. They settled on Kimono for the first set, the whole of Li'l Beethoven for the second.

"Kimono My House was an important album in Morrissey's formative years. We had mixed feelings about doing it - we were really flattered, but we've re-established our group as a current creative force. We didn't know how we could justify doing it to ourselves, but doing both albums made it an interesting and conceptual show. Li'l Beethoven" concludes Russell, "is a modern equivalent of what Kimono My House represented."

He sounds a little fidgety and unsure, like he took a lot of persuading. Ron, a silent and slightly eerie presence up until now (as if you would expect anything less), finally speaks. "It took me a lot more. But people grabbed me by the shoulders, and they shook me. Physical force always works on me. Eventually."

Croydon Municipal: a new record label

Tomorrow sees the first release on the Croydon Municipal label, which will specialise in unearthing forgotten albums, lost 45s and 78s from the mid 20th century.

There is a bottomless treasure chest to rifle through - plenty of shonky enterprises are doing it badly, not enough are doing it well (an honourable mention here for the Elvis specialists Memphis Recording Service), so I thought it was about time I started a re-issue label and had some fun of my own. My aim is for Croydon Municipal to put the past back together in unexpected and exciting ways. Though, of course, I might also put out a collection of every American number one hit from the 1940s. It's all waiting to be done.

The first compilation is the fourth in the "Saint Etienne Present..." series. Songs for a Central Park Picnic is seasonal, and beautifully described in Kieron Tyler's review for the Arts Desk:

"This is the perfect compilation for days when heat brings an enervation so overwhelming it’s possible only to bask like a seal flopped on a rock. Songs for a Central Park Picnic’s 25 tracks capture moods of calm and wistfulness, something to help you take it easy. Yma Sumac’s swinging “Gopher Mambo” and Sammy Davis Jr’s “Bee Bom” are uptempo, but their relaxed groove won’t induce a sweat.

"The picnic kicks off with the definition of cool. On Vince Guaraldi’s “Softly as in a Morning Sunrise” (right) notes peal from the piano like ice cubes plinking into a glass. The Paris Sisters’ “Yes I Love You” has the drifting, surreal beauty of a David Lynch contemplation. This is the sound of pre-Beatle America: not that of out-and-out rock ‘n’ roll, but of uptown, jazzy, Philadelphia cool and the beaches of the South. Lalo Schifrin and Henry Mancini rub shoulders with Southern country-soul pioneer Arthur Alexander (whose superb “Where Have You Been” is included) and beach music stars The Tams."

Songs for a A Central Park Picnic will be followed by a brace of albums in October after which there will be at least one a month including, I'm fairly sure, a festive collection in November - something sweet to soundtrack the wrapping of presents.  I'll keep you posted.

Britpop before Britpop

1991 was a golden year for dance-based chart pop - the KLF, SexKylie, N-Joi's Anthem - but less so for guitar-based bands. Manchester and baggy were past their best, shoegazing was an intriguing but niche noise, and self-absorbed but extremely loud American acts like Mudhoney were beginning to dominate indie discos. This isn't too surprising when you consider the UK alternatives, which were mostly grimy, colourless, and entirely unambitious: Ned's Atomic Dustbin, the Wonderstuff, Mega City Four, the great unwashed. The Family Cat had a single out called Colour Me Grey and that set the tone. It was dire and, with Saint Etienne just finding their feet after two singles in 1990, gave us a target to take out.

There were exceptions. 5.30 had prescient mod leanings but wrote songs with titles like Cuddly Drug, Catcher In The Rye and Junk Male ("I'm just a junk male, I'm just a junkie"). The equally angular but far better Manic Street Preachers were eminently quotable, despised the "toilet circuit" and wanted, rather charmingly, to go "straight to the medium-sized venues".

Then there were a few groups who Simon Reynolds tagged 'retro futurist' and in my eyes they were true modernists - taking the best bits of the past to create something new. World Of Twist had emerged from the Madchester scene but would quote northern soul motifs rather than Funky Drummer loops, and put on a stage show that blended Peter Gabriel-era Genesis with working men's club satin and tat. At a party at Gordon King's Whalley Range flat, he put on Slade Alive, a move even I'd have been scared to make. Then there was Denim, whose singer and leader Lawrence had a penchant for Stephanie de Sykes, Lynsey de Paul, and Rings Of Saturn by Underground Resistance project X-102. "It's a new kind of music" Lawrence would say, excitedly, and often.

Lawrence seemed like an obvious pop star to me, as did Pulp's Jarvis Cocker. Saint Etienne and Pulp toured together in early '93, by which time their set included future classics like Babies, OU, She's A Lady and My Legendary Girlfriend. Jarvis was on such a roll that he had handed over Babies as a single for my 'boutique' Caff record label - we got as far as cutting an acetate before he realised its potential and changed his mind.

At a forgotten venue called the Gass Club off Leicester Square, Carrie and Jacqui Shampoo, Lawrence Denim, myself and Pete Wiggs were in attendance when Jarvis played Lio's Le Banana Split, Love Sculpture's Sabre Dance, and Lieutenant Pigeon's Mouldy Old Dough in succession, the most barking mad DJ selection I've ever heard. Kindred spirits, we all bumped into each other at gigs, all nighters, greasy spoons and ephemera fairs.

I remember seeing Bernard Butler at the Camden Underworld one night in 1993, having a quiet drink with his girlfriend. I strode up to him and started haranguing him about how we had the future of pop in our grasp, how we really could shape what happened next: Suede, Saint Etienne, Pulp, Denim - I mean, hadn't he seen that Select cover? People expected us to show them the way! 'You're quite drunk', said his girlfriend. 'I think you should go now.' And yet, Suede's next move was the epic Stay Together which, if it wasn't quite as skyscraping as it could have been, at least indicated grand designs. Released in February '94 it reached no.3 but somehow felt slightly out of sync. Something was changing at ground level.

Right now, in 2013, Oasis are at their lowest critical ebb, and it is fashionable to point to their bludgeoning noise and Beatle piracy as indicators that things were about to go awry. Their ascent from Creation's seven-inch-singles-in-a-plastic-bag act in '94 to biggest band of the nineties exacerbated their basic problems of self-regard and conservatism: Oasis have come to represent and emphasise Britpop’s limitations and its folly.

Noel Gallagher revealed the narrow parameters of his classicism in a Mojo interview; he recalled how a fan had given him a cd of sixties baroque pop group the Left Banke, and that – to his surprise – he loved it. Would it be an influence on the next Oasis album, asked the journalist? "Nah. The idea of Bonehead dressed in a cravat and a frilly shirt playing a harpsichord doesn’t do it for me." Nobody expected Oasis to collaborate with Metalheadz, but you wouldn't have thought the Left Banke was a massive stretch.

This startling lack of adventurousness was mirrored by Paul Weller's mid-nineties retreat into classic Britrock, the deification of the La's, and Ocean Colour Scene's switch from baggy voyagers to nu-generation Merton Parkas. A less obvious turning point in Britpop's swing from Caught By The Fuzz fizz to Drugs Don't Work dirge was the arrival of Elastica.

Elastica appeared at Britpop's peak. Drummer Justin Welch's belched percussion throughout Line Up on their Top of the Pops debut in February ’94 predicted the art-school sniggering of the late-nineties Hoxton scene, and took Blur’s sneering superiority to a colder level. They looked to the past to create a future but in a rather more blunt way than Pulp or Denim - all of their songs seemed heavily indebted to the late seventies, and debut single Line Up was so close to Wire’s I Am the Fly that they were forced to settle out of court.

Their arrival on the scene had a similar effect to Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers' impact on the London punk scene. Like the Heartbreakers, Elastica brought heroin to the party: they were cool, ergo heroin was cool. Pulp and Denim quit their wood-chipped interiors to party at Elastica's Kings Cross pad, a stones throw from where the new St Martin's would open two decades later. What had been speedy and boozy became a smacky scene. Ultimately, the art school strand was just as responsible for Britpop's decline into reductivism as Oasis's shortsightedness.

Early '94 gave us Elastica's steely-eyed magpie pop, Oasis's first two single and, most depressingly, Primal Scream's ultra-conservative Give Out But Don't Give Up. Screamadelica had been a launchpad for future pop just three years earlier - they followed it with a lame collection of rockist cliches, wrapped in a Confederate flag sleeve, which couldn't have been further removed. 'Yanks go home!' had been Select's cheeky rallying cry a year earlier. But were the Americans impressed when they heard Jailbird and Cry Myself Blind? No, they were laughing at us.

It seems rather naive in retrospect that I thought combining modern house and techno beats with forgotten corners of the past - whether it was Joe Meek's (only just released in '93) I Hear A New World, Giorgio Moroder's The Chase or ESG's You're No Good - was about to lead us into a dazzlingly fresh pop nineties. Once the box marked 'the past' was open, other people were bound to cherry pick rather less recherche inspirations - why bother drawing on forgotten Lynsey de Paul album tracks when you had the Beatles, the Stones, the Jam? With the first wave of Britpop we unwittingly set everyone up for Union Jack sweaters and endless re-runs of Quadrophenia. Sorry about that.

1976: the calm before the storm

When the Top Of The Pops re-runs began in 2011, a lot of people saw them as evidence that 1976 was pop's worst ever year. This could only have been said by people who hadn't lived through the cheap thrills of the Glam era only to be left high and dry by the tame, tawdry charts of 1975. To put 1976 in context, let me explain the desperation of pop music a year earlier. Only twice in my life have I left the charts alone - for a few months in 1987 when I was an indie puritan, and in early 1975 when I simply lost interest. I bought and devoured Shoot! and football took up all my headspace. Only for a few months, but for pop to have fallen off the radar of the ten-year old me so completely that I didn't know who was number one, still shocks the adult me.

So there were gaps in my musical knowledge of 1975 (fully revealed when the first Guinness Book Of Hit Singles was published in '77) that I'd happily fill in years later - a no.3 hit by the intriguingly named Moments And Whatnauts turned out to be the priceless Girls, with its bright yellow string-machine chords and daffy sexist lyric. But much of it was a desert. My ignorance suggests the kids at school weren't paying much attention either. Clearly there was a pop deficit*. I'd occasionally hear something high in the charts and remain unimpressed - Bobby Goldsboro's lonely housewife murder ballad** Honey made it all the way to no.2 just seven years after it had oozed its way to the same position in 1968; Mud tied a lead weight around Buddy Holly's Oh Boy and somehow scored a number one.

Even the Bay City Rollers' simplistic mix of Spector and Glam, like a dessicated Wizzard, had seemed much more appealing, much brighter in '74 (Shang A Lang, Summerlove Sensation) than it did in 1975 (Bye Bye Baby, Give A Little Love) when they owned the chart as completely as the Beatles in '63 or Frankie in '84. Just a year before, Mud scored a streak of Glam classics - Tiger Feet, The Cat Crept In and (maybe best of the lot) Rocket. 1975 felt like pop's oxygen supply was low, for Mud*** and for everyone else.

Pop analyst Tony Jasper once posited that 1976 felt like a carefree, bubbly year for pop because most of us were blissfully unaware of the punk holocaust about to condemn the likes of Steve Harley, the Rollers and even dear old Mud to chart oblivion. Well, having lived through '75 and '76 I'll vouch for it being a breezy year, but maybe because something, anything would be an improvement on the year before.

So how did things improve?

There was one sparkling trend that stands out for me. Though it continues to split the jury clean down the middle, Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody - number one for nine weeks, straddling the end of '75 and the start of '76 - was unquestionably ambitious. It harked backed to a lost world when pop singles were complex structures, not just for kids, aiming to break the three minute barrier and smash the bluff blues base of R'n'R. Good Vibrations had set the bar unfeasibly high in 1966. Richard Harris's Macarthur Park and Barry Ryan's Eloise would stretch the blueprint thrillingly in '68, just as the new blues boom rendered this ornate style unfashionable.

10CC were first to revive it (Rubber Bullets, The Dean And I) but it was probably the influence of the Bo Rhap behemoth that made the extended, multipart single a feature of the 1976 charts. The Four Seasons had been brought in from the cold with a disco hit (Who Loves You) and a Northern Soul re-issue (The Night) in 1975; 1976 brought us their epic Silver Star (no.3 in May). A working man dreams, like Scott Walker's Humphrey Plugg, of being surrounded by beautiful women, "ecstasy on their faces". The bulk of the song is a galloping fantasy, but its middle section thumps out his "nine to five" job, seemingly sought out for him by a domineering wife. "Ain't living but I'm alive" he sobs.

Who else tried this lark? John Miles' Music (no.3) showed that, in the wrong hands, it could sound ungainly and pompous (though the first instrumental sections sounds like a dynamite TV theme); David Essex's urban psychodrama City Lights (no.24) was so long it became one of the first 12" singles, and a startpoint for Jeff Wayne's War Of The Worlds; Simon May's Summer Of My Life (no.7) sounded like Terry Scott concocting a Home Counties version of Macarthur Park; Showaddywaddy's Trocadero (no.32) minced up a '58/'68/'76 pop lineage, though not quite so thrillingly as that may suggest. Away from the chart, David Gates' Suite: Clouds, Rain picked up Capital Radio airplay. If for no other reason, this odd trend nullifies the idea that 1976 was a pop nadir.

There were plenty of women on the chart, but girls were nowhere to be seen. Tina Charles, though short and busty and cute as a button, was too mumsy to be a pre-teen dream; Dana's Fairytale (no.13) and Twiggy's Here I Go Again (no.17) provided late period hits for one-time teenage cuties, now definitely out of range from the realistic fantasies of sweaty 14-year olds. Kiki Dee, whose first single had come out in 1963, finally scored a brace of Top 20 hits. The 1976 'girl group' was an odd strain - none of them had members who looked under 25: the Chanter Sisters, the Surprise Sisters, Glamourpuss. Who were these acts aimed at? And how much thought went into their Top Of The Pops performances? The industry wasn't short of money, but very little of it was spent on a stylist for the poor Chanter Sisters whose excellent single Sideshow was sunk by a godawful TOTP must-see performance. None of them scored a Top 20 hit.

The 1976 charts behaved as if we had outgrown cute boy or girl-led pop. Stranger than the half-assed girl group revival was the lack of poster boys. David Essex and the Bay City Rollers had been the pin-ups of '75, but both had sharp drop-offs in '76 (Essex failed to reach the Top 20 at all). Flintlock scraped into the Top 30, just, with Dawn ("is breaking my heart"), even though they were on TV every single week on You Must Be Joking and Pauline's Quirkes. The Wurzels? JJ Barrie? Maybe they just primed a nation's pre-pubescents for the pin-up star of '77, the decidedly-not-young David Soul, whose appeal (I'm wildly presuming here) was that he could be your best friend's handsome dad. Whatever, 1976 produced no new teen sensations. Agnetha was the only true pin-up, but she'd first wiggled her blue satin pants on TOTP in spring '74, and again she was closer to Legs & Co's territory than Mary Weiss or Clare Grogan.

Disco 1976-style was a very varied beast and none the worse for it. The BPM count varied from Isaac Hayes' hyper, whip-cracking Disco Connection (no.10) to Andrea True's slo-mo porn'n'cowbell classic More More More (no.5). Neither used the patented Philly hi-hat, soon to be ubiquitous. Wild Cherry's Play That Funky Music (no.7) trounced any funk-rock hybrid before or since, while UK acts the Average White Band (Pick Up The Pieces) and the Climax Blues Band (Couldn't Get It Right) created genuinely timeless club hits, the latter with a neatly sinister feel - just what was it that they couldn't get right?****.

The hot hot heat defined another sound of '76, with the blazing summer surely affecting chart positions. Wings' Let 'Em In (no.2) was an exhausted sprawl on a day bed; Steve Harley's Here Comes The Sun (no.10) flounced; Dr Hook's prolonged sexual antics on the grisly A Little Bit More (no.2) left them "flat out on the floor" in temperatures consistently in the eighties; David Dundas' Jeans On (no.3) was another lazy mooch in the shade; and Elton and Kiki's Don't Go Breaking My Heart was as summery and all-conquering (six weeks at the top) as 45s get.

The aforementioned Surprise Sisters turned in one of the worst singles of '76 with their trashing of Got To Get You Into My Life. What on earth were they doing? Without any context, their crazed supper-jazz with forties burps made no sense. But there was a pre-war swing revival in the air - Essex DJ Chris Hill would pepper his soul sets with blasts of Glenn Miller, and his set was influential enough to push Miller's In The Mood into the chart; the swing legend's Tuxedo Junction gave Manhattan Transfer their first hit (no.24) in March); Maureen McGovern recorded a new version of Ginger Rogers' The Continental (no.16) which, chirruping from an Alba transistor radio, sounded like it was from 1935; Winifred Shaw's lovely minor hit Lullaby Of Broadway WAS recorded in 1935. The Chi Lites' You Don't Have To Go (no.3) had one of the year's strangest productions, with a trippy echo-drenched chorus and unexpected female squeaks on its extended coda, but also made room for a silent screen-era brass section. Beyond Chris Hill's contribution, and possibly the influence of Bugsy Malone, I can offer no explanation to this trend. It peaked and died when Manhattan Transfer went mainstream (to the point of being used as a Terry & June punchline) a year later.

Amidst these short-lived fashions, there were a few TOTP clues on what was to come. Heavy Metal Kids were proto punk, and had no obvious connection to the Pub Rock scene that birthed Eddie & The Hot Rods. I remember seeing She's No Angel at the time and thinking it really stuck out like a sore thumb, quite scary (too scary to crack the Top 50, as it turned out). The backing group looked like a fat Strokes, and singer Gary Holton was some kind of Clockwork Orange/New York Dolls hybrid. Not altogether GOOD, but still they had something that almost everything else on the show lacked - here was a bit of bleedin’ energy at last. And how much did Thin Lizzy's performances jumped out of the screen? Everyone was actually dancing, not just doing that sad TOTP shuffle, to The Boys Are Back in Town (no.8). Likewise, Status Quo's propulsive Mystery Song (no.11) was a hard diamond in the midst of smug piano-led ballads by John Christie and Randy Edelman.

Of course "what was to come"***** was a bunch of low-level chart positions for a mixed bag of acts, some of whom (Graham Parker & The Rumour? The Tubes?) would barely be tagged New Wave these days, let alone Punk. But the Top 30 countdown would have at least one representative of the new order most weeks from April '77 onwards. 1976 was a very light year, in all senses of the word, and things were about to get considerably heavier.


* there were good records released in 1975, but most were albums: The Hissing Of Summer Lawns, Blood On The Tracks, Gene Clark's No Other, Neil Young's Zuma, Dion's Born To Be With You. Even then, these were hardly heralds of a musical future.

** the singer has killed her, hasn't he? Listen to it again and tell me how's she died of natural causes.

*** Mud managed the rare feat of scoring six hit singles in 1975, none of which were much cop. 1976's sleek Shake It Down was a great improvement, and is a clear forefather of the later Rob Davis-penned hit Groovejet.

**** the intro was possibly pinched for Pink Floyd's much less oblique Another Brick In The Wall.

***** Noel Edmonds predicted it would be slimy singer-songwriter John Christie, and Tony Palmer's All You Need Is Love documentary saw great things ahead for Black Oak Arkansas and Stomu Yamashta.

There's nothing on telly

Like most kids my age I wouldn't have missed Scooby Doo for the world. But a couple of times a week - during what, in the 1970s, was called Childrens Hour - I would sit my portable cassette recorder on a stool next to the TV speaker and record the incidental music being played on BBC2. It wound up my sister - who, rather more conventionally for an eight year old, wanted to watch Black Beauty on ITV - but no one seemed worried about my sanity.

This might need a little more explanation in 2013. In the mid-seventies, there were still only three TV channels and very few programmes, even given this limited choice, during the day. For long periods there was nothing on the screen but trade test transmissions, largely there to enable TV shops to get the best possible picture on their display sets. These transmissions were made up of the testcard, with its instrumental soundtrack, and the occasional test film - like The Home Made Car, a 1963 Academy Award-nominated short which was shown no less than 182 times between 1962 and 1973. During the school holidays, or on Saturday mornings before your parents were up, there was little else for bored kids to do but watch the testcard and transmitter information - the music and the images became as embedded in the minds of a generation as The Monkees and the Robinson Crusoe theme.

I ended up with a collection of C60s containing things like (though I had no idea what they were at the time) Norrie Paramor's version of the Theme from MASH and Andre Brasseur's The Kid, probably the only record played both on the testcard and at Wigan Casino. The liberal use of European synth instrumentals, vocalese jazz, even bits of Bach, informed my tastes - the testcard may not have primed me for punk, but I really understood where the Pale Fountains and Portishead were coming from. Come the nineties and the lounge music boom, I was fairly sure I wasn't the only kid who'd been watching the testcard.

The most iconic image, introduced in 1967 with the advent of colour TV,  was called Test Card F. Its designer was a BBC engineer called George Hersee and, for a dummy run, he had included a picture of his eight year old daughter, Carole, at the centre of it. The BBC decided that replacing Carole's picture with an adult model was too risky - they needed something timeless, and 1967 fashions weren't exactly built to last. So Carole went into a photographer's studio: the result was the familiar image of a girl with an Alice band, playing noughts and crosses with a rather terrifying toy clown, surrounded by mysterious test graphics. Miss Hersee was unsurprisingly teased at school and, to her discomfort, the image was used on a daily basis until 1998. Now living in the New Forest with two daughters, she can claim to have had more screen time - around 70,000 hours - than anyone else in British TV history.

As a child the image seemed incredibly important. For girls, the Mona Lisa-like image of Carole Hersee was a role model - I know a DJ in Wales who dressed like her as a child, even carrying a cuddly clown around; someone else I know thought she was the most beautiful girl in the world (no, it wasn't me). Later on in life, the image of Carole Hersee became more associated with waking up on the settee at three in the morning with the telly still on and empty beer cans on the floor. Her face never changed; the game of noughts and crosses never ended. It was once compared to a Home Counties version of The Seventh Seal.

But it was the testcard music that hooked me. The BBC regularly received letters from the public asking where they could buy the music; the short answer was, they couldn't. The man tasked with choosing the testcard music in the seventies was John Ross-Barnard, who worked in the BBC's Foreign Recordings Department: "People wrote in - can I have a copy? But it wasn't ours. It came from music libraries, and a huge exchange of material between European broadcasters. The public would receive a photocopied letter saying the music wasn't for sale. It was an embarrassment, in a way."

As is often the case, the BBC hasn't kept an archive of Ross-Barnard's tapes, but a group of enthusiasts called The Testcard Circle have spent years piecing them back together and occasionally issuing them on CD. They meet in Leominster every year and swap tapes and obscure scraps of information - Ceefax music from the eighties and nineties, apparently, is creeping up in popularity among younger members. People may have thought testcard music died out years ago, but it only went in October 2012 with the demise of Ceefax. What will replace Ceefax after the digital switchover, and how will the BBC fill those empty hours created by cutbacks? It's obvious, says Flannery: "They'll have to bring back the testcard."

The Teardrop Explodes' Wilder revisited

Julian Cope’s unlikely, uneven career over the last three decades - eco-warrior, psych rock savant, sire of the standing stone - has almost entirely overshadowed the music of his first band, the Teardrop Explodes. If Reward wasn’t such a “hits of the Eighties” compilation/pub jukebox regular, they might be as overlooked as other early-Eighties Liverpool acts such as Pink Military or Dalek I Love You.

Reward was a Top 10 hit in early ‘81, pushing motor-mouthed psych fan Cope, and his moptop, onto the cover of Smash Hits. The Teardrops’ debut album, Kilimanjaro, was re-issued with Reward added, and stayed in the chart for most of the year. Issued in November ‘81, their second album was going to be called The Great Dominions until a last-minute change of heart saw it switched to Wilder; blurred flowers on the sleeve, like an imprecise Power Corruption and Lies (New Order’s second album, released a few months later), also indicated a sense of indecision. And then there was the opening track.

Bent out of Shape is a decent enough recording, with a strong, melodic chorus and Kilimanjaro brass married to a clunk-funk backing. The problem was that it had been recorded a few weeks earlier for a Radio 1 Richard Skinner session - switch to that version on the second disc of the 2013 reissue and you get an idea of how things going wrong in the Teardrops’ camp.

The verse on the Radio 1 version is just Cope (“Oh my love I’ve been bent out shape, can’t you see it’s killing me?”) and a two-note church organ, while the chorus reaches for The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore grandure. There’s also a musically subtle alteration I can’t put my finger on - a ninth, maybe? - which makes it a very different proposition to the album version. This version is a masterpiece, while the Wilder version is OK. Who on earth couldn’t have spotted that, either in the band, their management, or at the record company? It’s day and night.

The rest of Wilder’s first side is patchy; Colours Fly Away has brass reminiscent of the end credits to Thunderbirds, a fine, high verse and a weak chorus; Seven Views of Jerusalem is a horrible, arid Talking Heads-alike; while Pure Joy is Cope indulging his love of garage punk, over inside of 90 seconds.

It isn’t until the last two tracks on side one that we start to understand what Wilder, née The Great Dominions, was meant to be - a psychedelic divorce album. Squelchy funk moves almost kill the lovely Falling Down Around Me, but Cope’s mournful ba-ba-ba’s save it, while The Culture Bunker is a highpoint, detailing the fallout between Cope and former bandmates Ian McCullough and Pete Wylie. “I feel cold when it turns to gold for you” he sulks, over a bit of Gatsby trumpet, a Byrdsian guitar motif and a solid, largely synth-free groove. It’s the only Wilder track that could have slotted neatly onto Kilimanjaro.

Side two keeps up the momentum, opening with their third hit, the very Happy Together-influenced Passionate Friend, before the mood dips again for the hushed and exquisite Tiny Children. As Wilder came out, Cope was also working on a Scott Walker compilation called Fire Escape in the Sky. It seems hard to believe now, but Walker’s classic solo albums had been out of print for a decade, for the whole of the Seventies, and he had been entirely overlooked by the music press. When Fire Escape... was released it was a revelation to many.

Putting the Scott compilation together unsurprisingly rubbed off on Cope’s songwriting for Wilder. Tiny Children is good enough that it could have been on Scott 4: “I could make a meal of that wonderful despair I feel, but waking up I turn and face the wall”. With gentle Christmas bells on the end, it would have been a brave but timely single. A few weeks after Wilder was released, Soft Cell’s Say Hello Wave Goodbye was at No 3 in the chart - there was a definite appetite for this kind of autumnal epic in 1981 - but the middling Colours Fly Away became the album’s second single instead, and stuck miserably at No 54. Tiny Children wasn’t released as a single until the following summer when it felt decidedly unseasonal. It hung around the chart for a couple of months, with support from Radio 1’s breakfast show DJ Mike Read, but couldn’t get any higher than No 44, and the group split soon after.

The rest of Wilder’s second side is similarly moody. Just Like Lela Khaled Said featured some of Cope’s battiest lyrics - “I showed an empty crisp packet and said ‘Christo was here’” - as well as one of the catchiest choruses on the album; And The Fighting Takes Over revisits the “wonderful despair” of Tiny Children; and the would-be title track The Great Dominions is another kettle drum and synth wash neo-psych gem. Cope parodies himself lyrically, and the 1981 music press had little time for lines like “I’m just stuck in this pickle jar on a paper carpet.” Me? I think he meant it.

Frustratingly, the second disc on the new reissue includes a few tracks from the third Teardrop Explodes album, which was never completed. On the strength of the eerie Ouch Monkeys, with its delicately terrifying choral samples and dubby drops, it would have been their best. Soft Enough for You is a discomfiting sea shanty; The In-Psychlopedia sounds like Blue Monday on 78; and Suffocate is a superior, string quartet version of a track that originally appeared on the US edition of Kilimanjaro. What we don’t get here are Log Cabin or Buchanan, both recorded in ‘82 for a Peel session, which should have made the cut.

So this new edition falls between two stools. The complete sessions for the lost third album would be a proper archival treat, though this release effectively kills the chances of that happening. The sessions were produced by Dave Balfe, Cope’s nemesis in his autobiography Head On, but a severely maligned character if Ouch Monkeys is anything to go by.

Cope’s subsequent solo album World Shut Your Mouth was no slouch, yet was garage band, one-take stuff compared to the dark riches of b-side Window Shopping for a New Crown of Thorns or Soft Enough for You. It’s such a shame Balfe and Cope couldn’t hold the band together for another year.
If only Cope’s personal life hadn’t been such a mess (his consumption of LSD was notorious), if only he’d grasped the nettle and included the Scott-like take of Bent Out of Shape. At least now we can assemble our own preferred version of Wilder (add Screaming Secrets, delete Seven Views of Jerusalem, switch Bent out of Shape) from these two discs.

Cope has since said reforming the Teardrop Explodes would be like “having your mother wipe your asshole”. He has also said he never liked Scott Walker all that much. I’m inclined not to believe him, but I can’t blame him - who’d want to revisit a time when their marriage was falling apart and their freshly acquired pop-star status, the dream of a lifetime, was similarly out of control and disintegrating?

Now That's What I Call Music! 30 years on

With HMV and Woolworths having gone the way of listening booths and shellac, no one piece of public space could be said to represent modern pop. If you had to locate each of the primary colours of pop music you could look in student unions, or school playgrounds, or Cheeko's night club in Archway, but none would give the full picture.

The heart of pop, from the outset, has been found in the single and, in turn, the compilation album. An entirely commercial enterprise, the 'comp' is designed to sell as many copies as possible by including the greatest number of hit singles from the shortest amount of recent history, genres be damned. Thirty years old - and 84 compilations down the line - 21st century pop is defined by Now That's What I Call Music.

"I used to do a paper round" says pop obsessive, compilation collector and Universal Music employee Mark Wood, "and after two weeks I'd have enough money to buy Chart Explosion or Mounting Excitement, one of the K-Tel comps. When you're a kid, they're fantastic value - you could either buy three singles, or a comp with 20 hits on it."

Wood says that the market for compilations has never been stronger. "In a market that went down last year, comps held up. In 2008 Now 69 set a record first-week compilation sale - that’s ANY comp ever - of 382,000 in one week in March. And then in August Now 70 broke that record with 383,000 in week one. Now 71 ended up with 2008 sales of 964,000 in about six weeks. Unbelievable!"

The decline of the CD single has helped to keep comps in rude health - they are now the easiest way to find a physical, hard copy of many hits. In time, Now 85 will become a snapshot of early 2013; comps are social history time capsules. Another hugely successful series is the  British Hit Parade on the Future Noise label. These cd sets include every hit single from a particular year starting with the first chart in 1952 - the 1962 set came out in February. While the likes of Finders Keepers and Soul Jazz can re-shape and chisel the past, these comps give you a true and resonant idea of Britain in the early sixties. With every hit chronologically sequenced, Lonnie Donegan and Max Bygraves brush cheeks with Jerry Lee Lewis and Elvis. Totally inclusive, they are, in their own way, pop perfection.

Ashley Abram would have loved the option that public domain affords Future Noise - he has lost count of how many times he's been asked why Madonna hasn't appeared on a Now, the vagaries of artist consent and inter-label politics being beyond most people. Abram compiled the Now series from 1983 to 2012, leaving when EMI was sold off and split up. He was originally poached by Richard Branson from Ronco after his Raiders Of The Pop Charts comp had "knocked John Lennon off the top of the album chart." Not everyone is as sniffy as Madge about appearing on a comp: "U2 have gone on about the 'iconic' Now series" says Abram. "One of them, I think it's Larry Mullen, is really mad keen - some people just like the charts, I suppose. And Pride (In The Name Of Love) was on Now 4 so they've appeared on a lot of Nows."


He finds the collectors' market for early Now CDs "quite bizarre. Now 4 is the scarcest; even though it's a multi-million selling series, it sells for hundreds of pounds. And there's a mythical Now 5 CD but I've never seen it." The very first Now - Paul Young, Kajagoogoo, Men Without Hats et al - was issued on CD for the first time in 2008 to appeal to this lunatic fringe. The plan was for the other non_CD Nows, volumes two to seven, to follow but they never materialised.

Ashley Abram says there are "no hard and fast criteria" for a track to be included on a Now, but he liked to "keep the process a bit mysterious. We don't have a final track listing until three weeks before they hit the shops. All I do is go in for a day at Abbey Road, a long working day, and sequence it there. I usually make a few notes beforehand. Occasionally bands demand where they'd like to be on the CD. Queen used to."
Track one, by any chance?
"Yes! But we always agreed, and it always worked."

Now 85 is out on July 22nd.

*my favourite unlikely opening sequence is on Ronco's 20 Star Tracks from 1972: Procol Harum - Conquistador; Joan Baez - The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down; Royal Scots Dragoon Guards - Amazing Grace; Free - Little Bit Of Love.

How HMV can save itself

This is a piece I wrote almost exactly a year ago. I've left it intact as I think it's all still relevant, but please bear this in mind.

Not too long ago the flagship HMV shop on Oxford Street was a destination. If you were meeting someone in town you would arrange to hook up in the album section, maybe between B and D to browse the Beach Boys or Dinosaur Jr’s wares while your friend struggled with the vagaries of the Central Line. Those sections are still there, but the last people I arranged to meet in HMV were a pair of Fifties pop enthusiasts, both in their seventies, to whom a rendezvous at the store has become an old habit that they find hard to break.

The shop is so unattractive, and so unsure of its purpose, that it is wholly uninviting. I popped in at Christmas to buy some last-minute presents and breathed in what atmosphere there was. I saw two-tone grey carpet that may have been there since the Eighties. The aisles were ludicrously wide, as if they still expected people to jostle, three deep, to rifle through the CD racks. Staff wore shapeless, branded black T-shirts, meaning that a genre expert in the basement was hard to separate from someone who only started last week. When I looked for the Beach Boys Smile deluxe box-set I only found a piece of plastic in the racks that said “please ask at counter”. If you can’t display a beautiful item like that, you’re not doing your job properly.

The vinyl section I couldn’t find at all, but I’m assuming that there is one, tucked away in a grotty corner for minorities. Except that fetishists such as me will go to Sounds of the Universe, a nearby shop that advertises its vinyl products in the window, which plays records if you want to hear them, and where you’re likely to hear something new, something to raise your pulse, rather than the Rihanna album that you just heard in a café or a cab five minutes ago. The way we consume music has changed completely in the past ten years, but you’d never know it from walking around HMV.

Last summer the Voices of East Anglia blog posted a set of photos of the original HMV Shop on Oxford Street through the years. They were quite beautiful. This shop is now a branch of Foot Locker, but the present HMV could pick up plenty of aesthetic tips from its heritage. From the exterior signage, to the listening booths, to the specialist sections (whatever the “Cosmopolitan Corner” and “Personal Export Lounge” were, you’d definitely want to hang out there), it looked inviting and exciting.

Record sales back then were buoyant enough to pay for the grand staircase in the middle of the store. The HMV Shop had been opened by the Gramophone Company in 1921, ten years before that label amalgamated with Columbia to form EMI, Britain’s most successful label. For decades it thrived, but the digital age has seen the market for physical music product drop precipitously. It isn’t HMV’s fault that Boney M’s Mary’s Boy Child sold 1.6 million copies inside a month in 1978, while Orson’s No Tomorrow notoriously reached No 1 with sales of fewer than 18,000 in 2006.

The key to HMV’s survival, even on a much-reduced scale, isn’t in a hankering for the past. Many shops — chain stores in particular — have struggled or disappeared in recent years. However, other shops are thriving. Last year I did a short trip around the country to check out the state of record shops. It was invigorating. With the exception of a couple, whose owners were in their dotage, all were staying afloat, and some were doing better business than ever before. It isn’t a myth that teenagers are buying vinyl and obsessing over it. Records are cool objects to own — anyone can have 20,000 songs dangling round their neck, but not everyone can own a limited edition White Stripes seven-inch or an original mono copy of Jimi Hendrix’s Are You Experienced?. These are desirable items and need to be sold in the right environment.

In Dalston, East London, two new record shops — the ramshackle Eldica and the well-appointed Kristina — have appeared in the past year or so. Down the road from them is Rough Trade East, a vast store, just a few years old, that has already become an institution. It has “world famous weekly mail-outs” on new releases, exclusive mixes and CDs on sale, an Album of the Month club (with invitations to members-only events), and in-store happenings that include book launches and debates on the future of pop.

Could HMV compete with Rough Trade? No, it has a bigger and broader customer base. Instead, it should let Rough Trade have a concession — after all, Rough Trade’s branches are way west and east of Oxford Street. HMV should act like it is the parent of Rough Trade, Kristina and Sounds of the Universe, because that’s exactly what it is. It should be proud of its history. The original store has a plaque on the wall that reads “Opened by Sir Edward Elgar in July 1921” — that’s impressive.

If vintage clothes can be bought in Selfridges, then why not vintage sections in HMV? There are plenty of second-hand dealers in London, working out of lock-ups or from home, who would not only have a ready supply of vintage vinyl but would love to have a Central London location in which to sell it. Some concessions could change on a bi-monthly basis, like an art show; bands could curate some departments, recommending their favourite music, and decorating the place as well as DJing or doing in-store shows. Domino Records ran its own radio station for a week last summer out of its offices in Wandsworth and it felt like an event — there’s no reason why HMV couldn’t do the same.

Beyond the CD racks HMV’s magazine section is an embarrassment. Yes, they stock the quarterly Elvis: the Man and his Music, which I buy every issue of, but they also stock Heat. Who would go into HMV to buy a celebrity gossip magazine? Borders, which used to be across Oxford Street from HMV, had an extensive magazine section, which is now entirely absent from any major West End store; you can buy Fantastic Man for an interview with Hot Chip’s Alexis Taylor from a stall in Islington, but nowhere on Oxford Street. It’s an open goal. Like the HMV of old, Borders was a destination purely for its magazine selection. Stock them and people will browse, spend time and probably end up buying before they leave. It gets customers through the door and, looking at the wide open spaces, HMV isn’t doing that right now.

Other than Rough Trade East, the shop that HMV should really be looking to for ideas is a few doors away. The basement of Topshop is like a crazy souk, only navigable through practice and feminine intuition, and within it are plenty of concessions, vintage areas and shops within shops. Topshop, which once appeared way below HMV on the cool register, has re-invented itself by moving quickly to get involved with designers and start-ups who are creating a bit of buzz. An example is Wah Nails, a super-hipster nail salon that has its main store in Dalston and now has a concession in Topshop. It opened in 2010; only a handful of blogs had written about it. Then a couple of months later there it was in Topshop.

Selling music isn’t quite like selling clothes, but HMV’s clumsy embracing of technology — dumping the CDs and vinyl to sell MP3 players and assorted hardware — is short-termist; there are plenty of other shops already doing just that. The internet, however, could provide it with some much-needed cool. Blogs have helped Topshop to get new items and ideas into the store before even keen fashion watchers know about them. HMV could look to aspirational, tastemaker sites such as Pitchfork and Popjustice to recommend music. Beyond that, there are plenty of well-written, enthusiastic music blogs that HMV could take a chance on. It’s a two-way street. At the moment nobody would want their music or playlists to be associated with HMV’s grubby-grey carpet-tiles.

It isn’t just about what you buy, but how you buy it. There is a café in the basement of Topshop. Rough Trade has a café and a bar too. If you can meet friends, chat over a coffee, swap notes on the latest sound sensations, and then purchase those sounds, having a seated social hub for groups of friends will bring in more revenue than lone customers wandering the empty aisles.

Again, HMV could look east and steal some ideas from the Pacific Social Club cafe on Clarence Road. The walls there are decorated with vintage 78-sleeves, and there is a stack of vinyl that you can put on yourself as you eat your banana and passion fruit on toast. The café could include listening posts, using Spotify and iTunes. There must be a way for HMV to work with these digital distributors.

The details can be discussed later. At the moment HMV is little more than a vast shop window for Amazon; you can browse the racks, make a mental note of what you want, then go home and buy it online slightly cheaper. It needs to change how it sells more than what it sells. Customers need to go in thinking of HMV’s expertise — they need to think of the shop in the way that people thought of John Peel. Anybody can buy what they already know from Amazon; they need a gatekeeper.

At £160 million in the red, it wouldn’t hurt HMV much more to take a chance on a revamp, splash a couple of million re-inventing the Oxford Street store, and hope that, like Topshop, it attains trendsetting status, with its influence trickling down to regional branches. Its one major advantage, and one that it hasn’t begun to capitalise on, is that people genuinely like HMV. They want it to survive. I don’t remember anyone getting particularly weepy over the demise of Zavvi, Tower, or even Virgin. HMV, like EMI or the BBC, is a British institution that’s fun to knock, but nobody would ever want it to disappear.