Reupload - Prince The Wonder Dog - Sausages (Wheels)/ We've Got A Dog

 

A novelty single by an actual real-life talking dog! - Well, kind of...

Label: Columbia

Year of Release: 1979

The TV programme "That's Life" washed endless pieces of absurd popular culture flotsam ashore in the seventies and eighties, but few have lived on in the public imagination as much as Prince the talking dog. Owned by the mild-mannered Paul Allen, a man who looked like a member of a twee indie band before such things really existed, the canine apparently had an impressive human vocabulary and was especially obsessed with the word "sausages". 

In reality, of course, all of the dog's words were formed by Paul Allen manipulating its jaw while it growled. He confessed to "That's Life" that his long-term ambition was to teach the dog to say the words by itself, but inevitably this plan never really came to fruition. This is deeply unsurprising as scientists also haven't managed to get dogs to talk of their own accord either - if nothing else, Allen was a man with lofty ambitions. You can see a full clip of his "That's Life" appearance here.

Prince ended up becoming a huge hit with viewers, to the extent that a single was almost inevitable. Amazingly, BBC Records and Tapes passed on the possibility and EMI took the dog on instead, resulting in this peculiar single. The A-side is a two-and-a-half minute musical skit on the dog's experiences in a recording studio dealing with a "music industry mogul" (inevitably, one of Esther's comedy stooges putting on a Hollywood voice). It should be abysmal, and there may be readers out there who will argue it is - it was certainly featured on the "World's Worst Records" blog several years ago - but I find it unnaturally funny. Something about Allen's gentle, understated manner, the use of the song "Wheels Cha Cha Cha" (always a good comedy stand-by) and the dog's ludicrous vocalisations make it far more amusing than it has any right to be. It's unashamedly cheap sounding and unbelievably silly, but if Danny Baker had discovered Prince The Wonder Dog rather than Esther Rantzen, a lot more of my readers would probably be appreciative of his existence. 

Prince The Wonder Dog - Sausages (Wheels)/ We've Got A Dog

A novelty single by an actual real-life talking dog! - Well, kind of...

Label: Columbia

Year of Release: 1979

The TV programme "That's Life" washed endless pieces of absurd popular culture debris ashore in the seventies and eighties, but few have lived on in the public imagination as much as Prince the talking dog. Owned by the mild-mannered Paul Allen, a man who looked like a member of a twee indie band before such things really existed, the canine apparently had an impressive human vocabulary and was especially obsessed with the word "sausages". 

In reality, of course, all of the dog's words were formed by Paul Allen manipulating its jaw while it growled. He confessed to "That's Life" that his long-term ambition was to teach the dog to say the words by itself, but inevitably this plan never really came to fruition. This is deeply unsurprising as scientists also haven't managed to get dogs to talk of their own accord either - if nothing else, Allen was a man with lofty ambitions. You can see a full clip of his "That's Life" appearance here.

Prince ended up becoming a huge hit with viewers, to the extent that a single was almost inevitable. Amazingly, BBC Records and Tapes clearly passed on the possibility, and EMI took the dog on instead, resulting in this peculiar single. The A-side is a two-and-a-half minute musical skit on the dog's experiences in a recording studio dealing with a "music industry mogul" (inevitably, one of Esther's comedy stooges putting on a Hollywood voice). It should be abysmal, and there may be readers out there who will argue it is - it was certainly featured on the "World's Worst Records" blog several years ago - but I find it unnaturally funny. Something about Allen's gentle, understated manner, the use of the song "Wheels Cha Cha Cha" (always a good comedy stand-by) and the dog's ludicrous vocalisations make it far more amusing than it has any right to be. It's unashamedly cheap sounding and unbelievably silly, but if Danny Baker had discovered Prince The Wonder Dog rather than Esther Rantzen, a lot more of my readers would probably be appreciative of his existence. 

Ten Years of Left & To The Back - "Where Do You Get This SHIT FROM?!"

Hello readers. We're continuing our journey of some of the most interesting moments on "Left and to the Back" over the last ten years. What? Did I hear someone at the back mutter "self-indulgent"? Of course it is. I don't get paid for this, you know.

The title of this blog entry is borrowed from one of my wife's catchphrases. She tends to shout these words out when she walks into a room while I'm playing a record featuring a falsetto singing German clown, or a fictional Finnish death metal band, or a cheesy disco cover of a Beatles classic. The delivery of the line tends to change depending on the nature of the song. Sometimes it's shocked, sometimes despairing, sometimes downright angry (in these cases, it will be followed up with the line "Just... just take it off, for Christ's sake").

While the "World's Worst Records" blog should always be your prime go-to source for howlingly terrible discs, I'd like to think I've done a little bit to spread some misery into the world too. It's been a constant source of fascination to me over the years how much absolute shite executives at record labels have signed off as suitable for the public at large. Indeed, some of this stuff possibly shouldn't even have been thought up, never mind recorded, which brings us neatly on to our first single.

1. Pierre Cour - Letter To A Teenage Bride (Charisma)

Words almost fail me. On the surface, this appears to be a single about the rough marital rape of a reluctant teenage bride pining for her parents, with the monologue delivered by someone who sounds like Kenny Everett's character Marcel Wave. Well, I say "on the surface"... if you think further listens reveal hidden artistic depths, subtle satire or perhaps a joke lost in cultural translation, you'd be mistaken.

I'd never heard this single in my life before I played it on my stereo, and after the first listen I stayed rooted to the spot in a state of shock for about thirty seconds wondering if I'd really heard correctly. It's as if Pierre Cour heard Peter Wyngarde's "Rape" and felt the track was far too subtle for its own good, and needed a decent narrative and some extra layers of vulgarity to really hit home.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, female staff at Charisma Records refused to handle the publicity or marketing for this one, and it didn't get a proper release as a result. If you don't want to listen to it, I frankly wouldn't blame you.

2. Derek Jameson - Do They Mean Us? (Polydor)

With its sleeve apparently depicting a dishevelled and seemingly drunken Jameson masturbating outside Number 10 Downing Street, you'd expect some sort of political message from this record, however basic and coarse. You'd be disappointed, though, as "Do They Mean Us?" just features Jameson ranting and rambling indecipherably across three minutes while occasionally demanding "Show us yer British bottle!"

As I said at the time: "It's like being drunk and tired in the back of a black cab, dozing off while the cab driver shouts his various grievances to you, then waking up again only to find that you've lost the thread of whatever the fuck he was talking about in the first place, and he's moved on to something else... then repeat to fade."

The B-side "Yes Virginia There Is A Santa Claus" shows Jameson's sensitive side and at least makes some coherent sense, but is no less odd, not least because by the time it finishes his quivering, emotional tones force you to suspect that he really does think Father Christmas is real. What a strange man he was.

3. Grahame Lister - Fish 'n' Chips In Spain (Bark)

Conceptually, there's nothing all that wrong with "Fish 'n' Chips In Spain". It's just a harmless novelty record about a fun holiday abroad, filled with daft quips ("Si Si señorita Monty Pyfon is me bruvva-in-law") and a bit of a line-dancing groove.

For some reason, though, I've found it particularly potent in its ability to irritate, not only due to its naff jokes and nudge-nudge-wink-wink-say-no-more atmosphere, but also the bar-room musical arrangement (just wait to hear that "b-dum bum bum" bass guitar solo as the song reaches its crescendo). Lister had been involved with The Firm's "Star Trekkin" so you could argue he was no stranger to irritating records, but this doesn't so much take the biscuit as push an entire family pack of Party Circles down your throat all at once without taking off the outer wrapper. Rumour has it that Lister presently works for Putin and is successfully composing songs so teeth-grittingly annoying that they cause the heads of Russia's enemies to explode.

4. Buster Gobsmack Eats Filth - We Wanna Be Famous (BBC)

For some reason, the studio audience of "That's Life" found punks hysterically funny in the late eighties, hooting with laughter whenever one of Esther Rantzen's smiling stooges vox-popped them in the street. In fact, by 1987 the only time you seemed to see non-celebrity punks on mainstream television would be when Adrian Mills asked one of them to yodel outside their local Woolworths, which caused one spiky young man to tell him to piss off and stop being so silly. ("Good, I'm glad somebody's actually told him" - my Mum).

Perhaps mindful of this, Mills and his cohort Grant Baynham recorded this point-missing monstrosity for an episode, which doesn't really sound like a parody of a punk single so much as two drunken tramps bashing around on some random instruments they've found while shouting about Terry Wogan and Sue Lawley. It does feature the inspired but faintly inexplicable line "We're gonna spit at the camera-man!", though, which is its sole saving grace. Otherwise, one of the most diabolical records I've ever heard, and the fact that it achieves that status partly by design doesn't excuse it.

5. Jimmy Cross - I Want My Baby Back (Wanted)

No real surprises here. "I Want My Baby Back" won Kenny Everett's World's Worst Records programme in the seventies, and it hasn't aged well either. However, in my opinion the four records above it are worse, proving that the more time passes, the more dross miraculously escapes from record company headquarters.

"I Want My Baby Back" is about the tragic death of a young man's girlfriend in a vehicle crash, and takes the death disc concept to a whole new level with its ghastly punchline. Like "We Wanna Be Famous", this single clearly wants to be disliked for humorous effect, but what's seldom mentioned is how much of a one-play wonder it is. Once the joke is revealed, there's nothing here to really make you want to play it again. It's a slightly trite, bad taste comedy sketch committed to vinyl, the sixties equivalent of an attention seeking sicko YouTube video.

6. Nadine Expert - I Wanna Be A Rollin' Stone (CBS)

If your wish is to hear an ex-associate of Bill Wyman's seductively yelping and purring her way through a disco medley of Rolling Stones songs (including an absurdly joyous rendition of "Paint It Black") while struggling to hit any of the right notes, then everything you could possibly want is here. The sleeve of this single is arguably the most tasteful thing about it.

Reupload - Buster Gobsmack Eats Filth - We Wanna Be Famous

Label: BBC
Year of Release: 1988

Ah, BBC Records and Tapes... so much to answer for...

Readers of a non-British origin may require me to brief them with some background about this single, and I'll do my best. "That's Life" was a British consumer programme which thrived in the seventies and eighties with its absurd and jarring approach of highlighting members of the public who had been wronged by bogus companies, spivs and ne'er-do-wells, then juxtaposing them with "light hearted" segments where they'd show clips of talking dogs or old ladies yodelling in the street. I'm not making any of this up or exaggerating for effect, incidentally - they really did. The shades of light and dark within the show were so extreme that it was a wonder the format succeeded for one series, much less the countless numbers which were eventually commissioned. Clearly somewhere out there a demographic existed for people who wanted to hear stories about people who had been left brain damaged after being run over by an articulated supermarket lorry and watch meerkats do some skateboarding. In essence, the show occupied the same kind of territory that the numerous oddball 50p grief-magazines which occupy newsagents shelves do now, and it's actually quite surprising that it hasn't been revamped and relaunched on that basis.

In 1988, towards the show's twilight years, one of their investigative items focussed on a dubious character who was apparently ripping off bands in Manchester by directing appalling videos for them for unreasonable amounts of cash (and in case you're wondering, the videos for The Inspiral Carpets "Joe" and The Stone Roses "She Bangs The Drums" were self-produced band efforts, so whoever he was, we can't blame him for those). To show the gentleman up for the rogue he was, presenters Grant Baynham and Adrian Mills promptly went forth and formed a dreadful punk band to highlight his activities. "Eats Filth" were born (being an anagram of "That's Life", in case this needs to be highlighted), a terrible video was created, and the man was humiliated and shamed on national television, with John Peel joining in by making his annoyance known. Job done. Or so we thought...

The story didn't quite end there, although it really should have done. It would seem that somebody at BBC Records and Tapes decided that the deliberately dreadful record - all one and a half minutes of it - should be issued as a charity single for MENCAP. As executive decisions go, the weakness of this one should not be understated. "Buster Gobsmack Eats Filth" were essentially a satirical parody of a struggling punk band, which in terms of humour was ten years out of date by 1988. A modern equivalent would be a joke band set up to parody the Teen C movement now. It's true to say that the "That's Life" audience still seemed to find punks disproportionately hilarious in the late eighties - the shrieks of laughter from the studio audience whenever a London punk was vox popped by Mills or one of his cohorts proved a baffling noise to hear - but they really weren't going to bother their stereograms with this nonsense. It sold next to no copies, and as in my opinion this is probably one of the worst songs ever committed to vinyl, it deserved to, charity or no charity. After all, there are very few people who would even give a homeless man making this sort of noise any cash.

Because let's not forget that the song in question is so utterly, mindlessly bad that it may be a work of genius. It's a squawking piece of drivel with scattergun lyrics a petulant six year old could have penned which starts and stops very quickly and without having made any particular kind of melodic point. To all intents and purposes, this is the celebrity equivalent of The Legend's singles for Creation Records - it's that atrocious.

The B-side "The Toreador From Japan" takes a different tack, but seems quaintly racist instead - you sense that all concerned probably thought they were having a light-hearted laugh, and that no harm was done, but ultimately the fake "Japano Spanish vocals" will cause people who dwell in the year 2010 to cringe (indeed, they probably caused quite a few people living in 1988 to blush as well). And please don't ask me what the B-side was connected to in the world of "That's Life", if indeed anything. I don't know, and I don't know if I want to know.

Still though - at least you can all now see what I meant when I said a few entries back that Kenny Everett's World's Worst Record Show should probably be updated and relaunched by someone.

[This blog entry was originally uploaded on 17th March 2010, and Tim Worthington put me straight on the origins of the absurd B-side: "To put you out of, or more likely into, your misery, this originated from an investigation into Spanish timeshare swindling, for which Adrian Mills was called on to affect an 'in character' accent. The problem was, he sounded more Japanese than Spanish, leading to deafening audience hysteria and, if I remember rightly, one of the other 'Nancies' having to finish his bit of the script as he was incapacitated with embarrassment…"]