Label: Pinnacle
Year of (non) release: 1982
I couldn't let the 2021 festive season disappear without uploading at least one new Christmas non-hit, and this is as lost and obscure as things can possibly get. Not only is it not clear who Tree Man Army were (they never committed anything else to vinyl to the best of my knowledge) but this never got a proper release, emerging as a white label and then disappearing without offering an explanation for its existence.
The idea was simple enough and certainly in tune with a current phenomenon. 1982 was a huge breakthrough year for Musical Youth, a group who - for the benefit of the very few young and uninitiated readers of this blog - were school-age reggae performers from Birmingham. Their 1981 debut single "Generals" was issued by the local label 021 and produced by the Saltley Music Workshop, a local project designed to develop the skills of non-musicians in the community. John Peel promptly picked up on the single and brought the group to national attention, and "Pass the Dutchie" eventually followed on the major label MCA a year later, vaulting from number 26 to number one in the charts in October, remaining one of the biggest single week climbs to the top of all time.
The group were ideal television fodder for awhile, taking their sounds on to children's television and early evening entertainment shows, and the exposure sustained their success for a brief period. It quickly became clear that something was afoot, however, as interviews began to emerge from the camp containing grumbles about "being stereotyped as a novelty group". Young they may have been, but the band were not naive and seemed quick to understand the mechanisations of the music industry of the time. They were not being given the attention, PR or budget of an act MCA had any long-term faith in, and were instead treated as a short-term gamble - a group whose fame was likely to have come and gone before they'd even finished school.
For once, it's easy to see MCA's point of view - most of Musical Youth's strengths lay in their child-like innocence, and once that was lost they would have probably just have become another niche, hard-to-sell reggae act (and what would they have called themselves, even?) Some acts are harder to develop than others.
Still, the initial Musical Youth phenomenon cannot be understated. The group seemed to be absolutely bloody everywhere in late 1982, and enjoyed an extraordinarily diverse range of public appreciation from Peel listeners to pensioners who just liked seeing some cute, wide-eyed children performing distinctly adult-sounding pop. And this is where Tree Man Army come in, presumably seeking to cash in on one of the biggest reggae tracks since Althea and Donna's "Up Town Top Ranking".
"Pass The Turkey On The Right Hand Side" takes the track, drizzles it with Jona Lewie styled keyboard sounds and joyous background party chatter, but ultimately doesn't upend it completely. What you have here is something a less charitable person might consider a "cash in" rather than a reinterpretation, but it's not clear how much success it would have had on that level. Oasis' "Wonderwall" aside, cheeky covers of recent hits rarely succeed a couple of months after the original version bossed the charts around (and in the case of "Wonderwall", Mike Flowers reinterpreted the track so radically it can be deemed a clear exception to the general rule).
"Pass The Turkey", on the other hand, is a jokey bit of dabbling, fun for five minutes and it wouldn't be unwelcome at a Christmas Party, but deeply unlikely to get the public shelling out for the song a second time in two months. And maybe that's why Pinnacle ultimately decided not to release it. As it happened, they were a busy company over the period anyway, when another novelty tune - Renee and Renato's "Save Your Love" - gave them an unexpected smash hit and pissed off many of their more credible staff who didn't expect to be spending the season flogging its sub-Cornetto ad charms to record shops.
The dub B-side here is a bit more interesting as dub B-sides very often are, and from the comfort of 2021 this is an endearing curiosity, a strange example of another reggae novelty single that might have been but never was. And remember, you can still pass the turkey on the left hand side if you feel so inclined.
If the previews below aren't working, please go right to the source.
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