In each entry I'm going to take a record, CD, cassette or handful of 7"s, listen through and share my thoughts. I've decided to colour code my spreadsheet with my reviews as I go, so I can keep track of what I've listened to already. My colour system is as follows:
Pink - if I was asked to choose my all-time favourite song, these are the ones that would be in the running.
Purple - songs I love - musically perfect or special to me but not quite number one.
Blue - good songs that I'm happy to hear, but aren't my favourites.
Green - average quality songs that I still like.
Yellow - average quality songs that I have nothing against, but I won't be upset if I never hear them again.
Orange - songs that would make me press skip or turn the radio over.
Red - songs I hate that I'm actively angry about having to listen to.
Brown - reserved for the most irredeemably bad songs of all-time. Red was going to be the lowest tier until I started scoring and then I realised I was going to need an eighth colour.
Rather than work my way through the collection in any sort of order I'm going to randomise my selections to keep things interesting (that way I won't get stuck listening to the same artist for days on end!). The only limitation right now is that my cassette Walkman is locked in my desk drawer at work, and Coronavirus has kept me out of the office for 4 months now so I can't listen to tapes until I retrieve it.
My first assignment comes from my dad's 7" record collection. We have over 2500 singles in the house, most of which are his collection, starting with Seventies glam and novelty records and ending with whatever he was into when I was born (coincidentally the year that saw the first UK #1 that wasn't released on vinyl). Each time I go to the 7" single vault I'm going to take 5 singles, which works out at about an album's worth of songs. My dad meticulously kept a record of all of his vinyl by writing the new titles on a numbered list which is stored in a red ring-binder, so each batch of singles I choose will be grouped together on the list so that they come from the same time period, or at least they were acquired at around the same time. Today I've picked out singles #396-400 from the list, which are:
Polecats - John I'm Only Dancing / Big Green Car
The Specials - Ghost Town / Why / Friday Night Saturday Morning
Small Ads - Small Ads
Queen and David Bowie - Under Pressure
The Psychedelic Furs - Dumb Waiters
That's right, we're going to 1981!
#396 - Polecats - John I'm Only Dancing
I've not listened to Polecats before, at least not that I can remember. Their sleeve is cute and based on the name and image I'm expecting them to be a rockabilly revival group in the vein of the Stray Cats, who were doing that sort of thing in 1981. The only thing damaging their rockabilly cred is that the two at the front are so baby-faced and young, and one at the back left has a look of 1985 Dave Gahan about him - so again, baby. The vinyl is thick for a 1981 7" single - it almost feels like the heavyweight vinyl that everything is pressed on these days. John I'm Only Dancing is a David Bowie cover but it's not a song I'm familiar with (it's not in the collection that I'll be covering in this project either - we do have it on some Bowie best of LPs but they're tidied away in the roof space out of reach).
As expected, the record has a cool Fifties sound with good yelping from the vocalist. With it being a Bowie cover though it has a glam stomp and the Seventies sound keeps creeping in despite their best efforts to make it sound more retro. After the abrupt finish, I couldn't really remember how the song went, although I did have a little dance to it while it was on.
Score: yellow - fun but forgettable.
AA Side: Polecats - Big Green Car
Big Green Car starts with the sort of jungle drums that you might expect to hear on an Adam & The Ants or Bow Wow Wow record from around this time, before kicking in to the Fifties rockabilly sound that I'd come to expect. Like John I'm Only Dancing, this is also a cover (it's credited to Anon, arranged by Polecats). I like this better than their Bowie cover though - I'd be happy to dance to this and I could see it sounding good on a mixtape of songs from this era. While looking up the group to write this post, I've discovered that one of the baby-faced frontmen is Boz Boorer who is best known for playing guitar with Morrissey's band. I hope he's paid well because I wouldn't want that job.
Score: green - they should have led with this one!
#397 - The Specials - Ghost Town
Here it is, the main event. It's hard to write about Ghost Town because it's such a classic. First off, it has a killer sleeve - definitely the coolest one from this bunch and would look great on a bootleg t-shirt. As soon as the intro fades in, this song is iconic; both musically and lyrically, it's perfect. From that slow tempo and spooky atmosphere to the captivating bassline and fade out to the sound of sirens, there's nothing I can fault about Ghost Town. Relevant to Thatcher's Britain and to the emptied streets and venues of the Coronavirus pandemic.
Score: purple - perfect.
AA Side: The Specials - Why
Why has a reggae rhythm and feels like a radical song to include on a #1 single, especially if it's technically an A-side. It's about racism and it's depressing to note that it's also still relevant to 2020 with its references to white supremacy and Nazism. I wish I could review and say I'm glad that we've put all that behind us, but alas. Still, the song is good.
Score: green - black lives mattered in 1981 and they matter in 2020.
AA Side: The Specials - Friday Night Saturday Morning
Bless The Specials for sticking three songs onto this single because this one is another banger. It has a really unassuming intro and meanders along, telling the story of a normal Friday night out. It's just an account of a man going out to a nightclub, getting drunk, watching the girls, getting a takeaway and going home by himself, but somehow the mundane realism of it is captivating. I've never been a young man who goes out drinking in nightclubs and yet I still relate to it, maybe because can see my friends standing at the bar and the taxi rank and the edge of the dancefloor where The Specials once stood. The biggest let down in this song is the keyboard solo, which has a 60s Doors-esque sound to it and is, let's face it, a bit shit.
I think the most interesting and perhaps startling thing about these three Specials songs is that they are all still so relevant to today that they could be written and released now and make perfect sense. It's pretty miserable that we still have Nazis and racists and no jobs and shit nightclubs after the optimism of Two-Tone.
Score: blue - relatable even though I can't relate.
#398 - Small Ads - Small Ads
I've never heard of Small Ads until now, and their single doesn't have a picture sleeve so I don't have much of a clue about how they're going to sound. Based on the band name alone I'd guess they're going to be some toytown punks - like they wanted to be The Adverts but that was aiming too high. The song opens with some jaunty piano and then an over-done Cockney vocal kicks in, singing about computers and girls and advertisements, or something. By the time I got to the chorus I felt like the song was childish - it has a real Saturday-morning-TV-aimed-at-young-boys energy to it, which I find grating. The fact that the name of the band and the song are the same suggests that they became a band just to put this song out, which makes me wonder if they might be a group of kids' TV hosts. The lack of info on them online suggests this isn't the case, but as this song got to number 63 in the charts and they were never heard from again, I'm not sure there's much point dwelling on it. This song does have a guitar solo with a heavy metal tone to it that sounds very out of place.
Score: orange - the children's playground chorus tipped me over the edge.
B-Side - Small Ads - Motorway Madness
Right from the intro, this is a better song. There's no contrived accent this time and it's very New Wavey and made me dance. Much better! I'm not sure exactly what it's about - the mentions of the arcade and the terrible food suggest maybe they're stuck at a motorway services, and unfortunately for them, Tebay isn't open yet so doubtless the place is filthy and cheap, instead of middle-class and unreasonably expensive. If they'd have put this out as a single it would have fit in nicely on punk compilations with stuff like 2-4-6-8 Motorway, and The Motors, but like Polecats before them, they picked the wrong song to lead with.
Score: green - if this were the A-side and I lived in 1981 I might have bought this!
#399 - Queen and David Bowie - Under Pressure
Dread. That's how I felt when I realised I was going to have to cover this. If I could wipe one band from existence entirely and have it be like they had never happened, it would be Queen (tough competition from Slade, but at least my hatred for them intensifies around Christmas instead of steady exposure all year round). The sleeve is alright with the stark lettering, but unfortunately I recognise it as the Queen font so I can't even enjoy that.
The intro to this song is, of course, iconic, but I wish it was leading to Ice Ice Baby. If the intro lasts long enough for the scatting to start, that's when I resign myself to disappointment. By the way, that scat singing that Freddie Mercury does throughout this song? Annoying. His falsetto in the second verse? I'm in hell. I've never paid attention to the lyrics of this song before, and they're helpfully printed on the back of the sleeve for me to follow along. I assumed they were going to be deep, considering how much praise this song gets, but they don't go anywhere. If Bowie had sung this alone, or even with someone else, it might have been bearable; his vocal climax is the best bit of the song after coming to terms with the fact that I'm not about to hear Vanilla Ice (or even Jedward, which would be preferable to Queen). And then they fuck it up again with a stupid piano and finger snapping outro. If you'd asked me to guess when this song came out I'd have said 1985 because it sounds like the sort of thing you'd premiere at Live Aid. I fucking hate this.
Score: orange - pompous stadium rock bollocks. The intro and the Bowie bits save it from the red zone.
B-Side: Queen - Soul Brother
I could have coped if the B-side was a Bowie song. Maybe even another duet. Even if they'd been lazy and just stuck an instrumental version on the B-side. But it's another Queen song. At first I thought they'd written a soul song that might actually be okay if it was sung by a soul singer, but the lyrics verge on parody. There's a section of this song where they go on about being under pressure, and I can't decide whether they're trying to stick to a theme or whether this song is built around discarded bits of the A-side. Either way, Freddie Mercury's squealing hurt my head. Nothing good to say about this.
Score: red - I loathe this band.
#400 - The Psychedelic Furs - Dumb Waiters
This record is immediately exciting because it has a playable sleeve, which has a sampler of the band's new (at that point) album, but more on that later. Dumb Waiters is vaguely discordant and messy sounding to start off with, and becomes a pretty good dark post-punk song. Richard Butler's drawl is fairly recognisable, even if his name isn't - despite their popularity, I had to go online to find out who their frontman was. This song isn't Pretty In Pink or Love My Way but it sounds good - there's some great screechy noises in it that might be violins or might just be guitars - but the outro is a bit too long.
Score: green - noisy in a good way.
B-side: The Psychedelic Furs - Dash
It took me a while to work out that this was an instrumental and not a song with a very long intro. The melody is played on the piano and it would have been much better with a vocal line; it sounds like they couldn't be arsed to write lyrics (maybe Richard was off that day) so they just jammed in the studio for a bit til they came up with something to stick on the B-side. The fade-out was a lazy way to end it too.
Score: yellow - I got bored listening to this.
The sleeve: The Psychedelic Furs - Talk Talk Talk album sampler
I couldn't not play the sleeve since it's such a cool gimmick. The image looks good - it's either a miniature version of the album cover or another photo from the same shoot as it uses the same colour blocking, but the mix of blocks of colour with the imprint of the vinyl is a bit much on the eye. The big challenge with playing this is working out where to drop the needle once the square starts spinning on the turntable, but I managed. The introduction has a voiceover (presumably one of the band) saying "This is a Psychedelic Furs commercial. Buy Talk Talk Talk". The first song sounds great - Shazam tells me it's a demo of All Of This And Nothing, which I'm sure is the name of the greatest hits CD of theirs I picked up but haven't played yet. The second song on the sampler sounded a bit like Handsome Devil by The Smiths and I wasn't able to get the name of it but the chorus was "I Just Want To Sleep With You" so I'm going to title it that - the song sounded pretty good anyway. Finally, Pretty In Pink. The sampler includes the first 2 verses and choruses, so they definitely knew they were on to a winner with that song. The sound quality from the sleeve is pretty poor (to be expected from what I think is a flexidisc stuck to the cardboard) but if I had got this in 1981 I would definitely have checked out Talk Talk Talk and the good news is that I have a cassette copy of it to play when I get the chance!
I can't score this as a song but I would definitely buy the record so as a commercial I'd say success.
R x
