Reupload - The Saucers - Spring Has Sprung/ Major Breakthrough

 

Cheggers and Philbin on a New Wave tip

Label: BBC

Year of Release: 1982

The curious thing about fluke novelty hits is that the performers seldom accept their fate as flash-in-the-pan artists.  Instead, they have a tendency to try to milk their limited template dry - hence Lieutenant Pigeon spent years releasing (actually quite entertaining) singles with honky-tonk pianos that nobody really bought, The Firm's attempted follow-up to "Star Trekkin'" entitled "Superheroes" was just more squeaky sci-fi/ fantasy stupidity which didn't get played enough to even annoy anyone, and the less said about Edelweiss' attempts to go for a second gold the better.  

Noel Edmonds had spent years hosting "Top of the Pops" and watching the limited fortunes of actors and TV presenters attempting spin-off novelty singles; therefore, you'd have thought he'd have been sceptical about Brown Sauce having another crack at the charts after "I Wanna Be A Winner" got into the Top Forty.  Perhaps he was, and perhaps it's for that reason that he fails to appear in the video or the credits for this particular effort - but nonetheless, Saturday morning Swap Shop regulars Keith Chegwin and Maggie Philbin feature, and his old chum BA Robertson is back on songwriting duties again. In all other respects, this is business as usual.

Unsurprisingly, this single completely failed to chart.  More interestingly, perhaps, it's actually quite good, even better than its predecessor.  Whereas "I Wanna Be A Winner" was essentially a silly, off-the-cuff joke created for the "Swap Shop" TV show which was only released as a single to cater for public demand, "Spring Has Sprung" is actually a reasonably classy piece of early eighties synth-pop, complete with hushed vocals, atmospheric fills and a similar demanding, stomping chorus.  You can tell that a lot more thought has been put into this - obviously, Philbin's hushed monologue about starched clothes and Chegwin's wittering about vests does threaten to push the whole thing into the realms of parody, but had this been issued by a serious pop act such as Dollar, it might have been a minor hit.  This does actually sound as if Robertson was taking the prospect of the celebrity couple Chegwin and Philbin having further hits seriously and had decided to push the concept as hard as he could.  The video for this single even features Philbin pouting moodily whilst dressed in new wave garb, looking like some kind of proto-Donna-out-of-Elastica.  

The B-side, to my amazement, is also a proper song rather than an off-the-cuff instrumental.  "Major Breakthrough" is a strident piece of marching New Wave which involves Chegwin pleading with Philbin's (presumably fictional) army father for his daughter's hand, whilst Philbin coos "Ooh Daddy, ooh Daddy dear!" girlishly in the background.  This has just the right level of bizarre, angular tweeness to bear vague resemblances to a nineties Teen C B-side.

Reupload - Graffiti - Come Together/ Dear Prudence

Smooth, slithering and effective mid-70s reworking of The Beatles track

Label: Beeb

Year of Release: 1976

I'm enough of a Beatles bore to continue to find the cornucopia of cover versions of their work fascinating. True, most are flawed and a horrible waste of vinyl, but once every so often I stumble on a relatively obscure cut which is actually worthwhile. 

This version of "Come Together", for instance, sounds like The Beatles in a parallel seventies universe. The original was reasonably raw and rugged, but there's a smooth and slithering creepiness here which highlights a sinister side I never sensed in the "Abbey Road" cut. The piano chimes, the guitar wails a new riff which wouldn't sound out of place in an early evening crime drama, and the backing rhythm cooks a tauter, meaner groove. Perhaps more crucially, the changes to the template are subtle rather than dominating, meaning you're nudged closer to what "Come Together" might have become as opposed to listening to a complete reinvention. 

The B-side "Dear Prudence" is less successful, but attempts to psychedelicise the original, adding rumbling analogue synths and vocal effects into the mix. For all its efforts, you can't help but be reminded that Siouxsie and the Banshees did the same to far greater effect in 1983. Still, you can't win them all. 

Radio Active - Ten Years After/ All Time Needletime Loser

Unexpected John Peel approved punk parody on the flipside of this celebratory BBC single

Label: Beeb

Year of Release: 1977

BBC Records and Tapes is a label with an absurd and fascinating history, and the singles that worked their way on to both the parent label and its Beeb imprint have been fully explained and catalogued in Tim Worthington's brilliant book "Top of the Box". It's a lovingly compiled tome which brings sense to what might otherwise seem utterly mysterious - so many of these released themes are for television series which have long since been forgotten, or in one case, never even aired.

While you don't need to have his attention to detail to immediately understand what this record is about - the clue is in the title, the release date, and Radio 1's launch - he does inform us that this was recorded by a band of BBC studio staff, including Radio 1 producers Malcolm Brown on guitar and Mike Harding on keyboards, with BBC Radiophonic Workshop's Paddy Kingsland on bass and assistant controller Bryant Marriott on drums.


The net result sounds rather like a piece of happy, catchy music which might have been perfectly serviceable as the theme to a documentary or a promotional jingle for the anniversary of the station, but was a slightly optimistic single release. Were the kids really going to rush out and buy a ditty about Radio 1 being ten years old then dance around their bedrooms to it in celebration? Auntie Beeb obviously thought so - lyrics like "With your top DJs and the toons they play" and "if you love us you must join us/ raise your glass and say cheers" litter the disc, but it sounds more like the kind of thing you'd find on a High Street bank's freebie flexidisc than a record most people would be willing to shell out money for. I've no criticism of the production or even the songwriting here, which serves its purpose, but it's not a chartbound sound.

Fear not, though, for nestling on the flip is an unexpected quickie punk parody which John Peel managed to get his hands on and plug on his show rather enthusiastically. "All Time Needletime Loser" leans more towards Eddie and the Hots Rods styled pub rock than pure punk, to be honest, but is still surprisingly raucous, with all concerned clearly showing an aptitude for the form. It proved that while Radio 1 took tentative, nervous, circling steps around punk like a cat casing out a potential threat, they had staff who understood where it was coming from, and were old enough to remember the more caustic sounds of The Who, The Kinks and The Stones and reappropriate them accordingly.

Richard Stilgoe & Valerie Singleton - Suffering From Inflation/ Statutory Right of Entry

Label: BBC

Year of Release: 1975

Richard Stilgoe is one of those strange popular figures in British life who is famous despite never selling millions of records or having his own TV series.  Rather, his best known output was confined to regular brief appearances on television shows such as "Nationwide", "That's Life" and "Pebble Mill at One", usually singing light-hearted satirical ditties about the frustrations of the day. His gentle mocking of society began to seem dated by the early nineties, prompting the comedian David Baddiel to mock him with the character Richard Stillnotdead who sang the song "Why Do People Leave The Cap Of The Toothpaste Off?" on "The Mary Whitehouse Experience". Nonetheless, from that day to this, he has a loyal audience and fans, some of them rather unlikely figures such as members of cult indie bands or modern day poets and spoken word artists.

Stilgoe's media presence was arguably at its peak in the mid-seventies, when his bearded and somewhat casual Jeremy Corbyn-esque appearance cropped up constantly on early evening television. One of his prime achievements at this point - his "Bohemian Rhapsody" moment, if you will - was a song called "Statutory Right of Entry", which involved a cascade of multitracked Stilgoe vocals harmonising about a rather unlikely problem.

A "Nationwide" researcher had found out that numerous people in public jobs had a legal right to enter people's homes on demand. These included people working for the gas and electricity boards, and various other less likely characters besides. You would suspect that this wouldn't prove a problem for most home owners, but Stilgoe's ditty turns the situation into an epic and somewhat unlikely farce, with the home-owning Stilgoe character finding himself avalanched by public professionals cluttering up his property across the working week. The song gains comedy value tenfold if you can see the accompanying video clip, though, where an army of officious Stilgoes authoritatively dance and prance around.

For all the comedy value in the situation, it's hard to understand quite what either "Nationwide" or Stilgoe were worried about. If I had a broken gas meter or faulty wiring in my house, I wouldn't treat a public official appearing on the scene unprompted with any stress or anxiety. To be honest, I'd just be stunned by their efficiency. It also seems somewhat unlikely that they would set up camp in my home all week, unlike the builders I'm presently paying a small fortune to repair and renew my horrible, broken-down bathroom. Still, it's an incredibly memorable piece of melodic farce as a result of stretching the problem to breaking point, which is probably why people still remember it in the year 2017.

Less remembered is the actual A-side of this single performed with Valerie Singleton, "Suffering From Inflation". It has a strangely fifties arrangement, complete with harmonising bass vocals. Nonetheless, shorn of its original context, it's aged quite poorly as a piece of satire. Life in Britain in the mid-seventies (when it was the "sick man of Europe") was chaotic and unpredictable, and as an historical artefact the single is interesting, but it's low on laughs now compared to its OTT flipside. 

Thanks enormously to Tim Worthington for providing some background on this single in the fantastic "Top of the Box" book, which chronicles the facts behind every single that BBC Records and Tapes ever released. If you're a collector of odd and esoteric vinyl and don't have it on your bookshelves, you should remedy that immediately. 

Syzygy - Light Is All Around/ Instrumental

Label: BBC Records & Tapes

Year of Release: 1981

BBC Records and Tapes is a rum little label. For every release that makes sense - the theme tune to a well-known TV show, or a performance from one of Broadcasting House's best known stars - there's another that has been labelled so poorly it's impossible to understand what it relates to, particularly with the distance of time. The Beeb didn't really seem to understand marketing as well back in the seventies and eighties.

And this is an example of something I stumbled across a copy of and spent ages trying to obtain some context for. I drew endless blanks until Henry29 on the 45Cat forum told me. And it's like this: Syzygy consist of Dominic Glynn and Justin Mackay. Glynn eventually became known for his arrangement of the Series 23 Doctor Who theme. This was then subsequently used as a piece of incidental music throughout the 23rd series of Who, "Tardis Delta Core", in 1986 - although what it was used for in 1981 at the time of release is still staggeringly unclear.

The track itself is very much of its time, and the instrumental flip without the singing children is, for me, the preferable version.

Glynn and Mackay also had a very successful career composing music for computer games for the Commodore 64 and Atari. Mike Harding, credited on the label, is apparently not the Mike Harding (as in seventies folkie-turned-comedian) which is something of a pity, as I like the idea of his dour moustachioed figure grappling with mixing some synthesisers and exclaiming "Bugger me!" a lot.

KLF and Robert Anton Wilson fans may like to note that the Timelords "Doctorin' The Tardis" video featured Ford Timelord with the number 23 painted on his bodywork in a few areas. This record, on the other hand, was a piece of incidental music from series 23 of Doctor Who. And when we featured Driver 67 many moons ago, I made the point that the last car to be called on the tannoy on the record is "Car 23". Where is all this leading to? Who can tell… The light is all around, readers.

Except, of course, Dominic Glynn got in touch with me on Twitter to say that absolutely none of the above is correct. This is a different Syzygy and this record had absolutely nothing to do with him whatsoever.

This is turning into a wild goose chase, so if anyone does know why this record was issued and who created it, please do let me know.