Turnpike - Big Machine/ Lazer Thereza

Folk Rock angst about dating glamorous celebrities

Label: Fontana

Year of Release: 1974

Fontana feels like a label which has been around forever, from the jazz and pop records it issued in the fifties right through to its eighties and nineties incarnation as a comfortable home for "serious" or alternative acts. Somewhat strangely, though, it was virtually wound down and reverted to a very sleepy release schedule after 1970, shoving out only the occasional Nana Mouskouri disc (whose contract I can only assume was very specifically worded). 

It was suddenly reactivated in 1974, though, issuing a brace of singles from unknowns such as Old 88, Wheeler St James, Porridge, Ice Cream and Shine. Amidst all these one single wonders Mouskouri's release schedule continued unabated and Brian Bennett also briefly visited the label with his top golf theme "Chase Side Shoot Up". Nonetheless, nothing it put out was a big money spinner for its parent company Philips and was discontinued again the very same year, only re-emerging in the eighties as a home for all things AOR and alt-rock. 

Due to their fleeting and limited presence on record store shelves, many of the groups of the 1974 Fontana era have huge question marks against them, and Turnpike are among them. The artist Tim Hollier seems to have a songwriting and production credit here which would suggest very heavy involvement and possibly even group membership - Hollier was a folk artist whose imaginatively titled LP "Tim Hollier" came out on Fontana in 1970 with the follow-up "Skysail" emerging on Philips the following year, so it figures that he may have been taking advantage of various options on his contract. 

Also getting a credit alongside him are a Voyantzia and a Petrovitch, however, and while I wouldn't want to make wild assumptions, their surnames hint towards the fact that Turnpike might not have been entirely British in origin; but don't ask me for more information than that, because I've drawn nothing but blanks so far.

Not to worry. "Big Machine" is a very interesting single indeed, beginning like a standard slice of rainy, folkish grumbling before gradually building in a bigger and more menacing rock pean to the woes of dating a top female celebrity (and I'd hazard a guess that the odds of a member of Turnpike having experienced this are about as high as those of me dating Zooey Deschanel, but perhaps I'm making assumptions here). It's a bruiser of a track and wastes no time in listing the downsides of a life in the celebrity shadow, to faddish diets, having to be seen in the right places and never having any time to yourself. Perhaps it's not about celebrity at all and the group just managed to prophesy Instagram influencers.

The group seem to have been a bit obsessed with the topic of tricky relationships with ladies as "Lazer Theresa" on the flipside is scarcely more flattering with its depictions of a woman destroying gentlemen everywhere. Was there a whole LP of songs like this in the can, I wonder?

We'll probably never know. All I can tell you is that Tim Hollier moved into the music business not long before this single was released and seems to have spent most of his career managing the Songwriters Workshop project (involving the likes of Peter Sarstedt and Maggie Britton) and later the Filmtrax and Screen Music Services music publishing companies. 

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