Telephone Bill & The Smooth Operators - Cruisin'/ Pinball Wizard

Bluegrass cover of The Who classic. There's something you don't hear everyday.

Label: Weekend

Year of Release: 1977

I'm sure I've mentioned it on here before - good God almighty, I've written over a thousand blog entries on here in the last ten years, you can't expect me to be Captain Originality all the time - but the mid-seventies were a weird gold-rush period for musicians on the light entertainment circuit. Any musical act whose innovative or thoughtful routines regularly featured on shows like "Pebble Mill" or "New Faces" tended to get a record contract, even if only for a few singles. Very few managed hits, but the seven inch single boxes of charity shops the length and breadth of the land are filled with the kind of acts who appeared on programmes like "Hi Summer" or were frequent interlude acts on mid-table chat shows.

Labels like York, run by Yorkshire Television, and Weekend, owned by LWT, tended to showcase these people as well, and while neither are great labels for prog, psychedelia or proto-punk, they do showcase some reasonably unusual things. Telephone Bill & The Smooth Operators are, it's fair to say, not a completely run-of-the-mill act. Performing a blend of folk, country and swing, their songs could whoosh past in the blink of the eye and the blurring of fingers on the fretboard. Such family-friendly energy caused them to be frequent guests on television and radio as well as tireless workhorses of the national folk circuit.

The A-side here is a piece of zippy, catchy Americana drenched folk which is pleasant but won't surprise anyone. It's the flipside that fascinates me, being a full-on bluegrass thrash through The Who's "Pinball Wizard". What sounds like a ridiculous proposition on the surface actually makes total sense when you hear it, however. Townsend's rock-out is replaced by a speedy barn hoedown which leaves the song sounding as if it was born to be performed in this nature, and the lyrics in particular sound as if they belong on a country record. Once you hear "He's got crazy flipper fingers" delivered in a redneck accent, it all makes sense.

Unlike most groups I've featured on "Left and to the Back", the group are still very much 'a thing' despite taking a very long break from the eighties until 2001. The BBC presenter Nick Barraclough presently fronts the group, and they regularly gig around the UK.