Countdown To Christmas Party Time - Paddy Roberts - Merry Christmas You Suckers

Label: Decca
Year of Release: 1962

The music industry has always welcomed - and ripped off - the most unlikely of figures, from singing postmen to school choirs to arrogant glove puppets, but Paddy Roberts is still a peculiar entertainment figure.  A well-spoken if curmudgeonly ex-World War II pilot, he wrote a number of big selling songs for artists such as Alma Cogan, as well as having a sideline career in what could only be described as filthy ditties, many of which can be found in the bargain boxes of your local record emporium if you dig hard enough.

If the honest truth be told, Robert's tunes seem incredibly tame by today's standards, often to the point of being bereft of any humour at all.  The sleeve for "Songs for Gay Dogs" - pictured below - seems to be abnormally suggestive by the period's standards, but was apparently caused by the word 'gay' not really having the same meaning it does today.  Personally I'm faintly sceptical and would like to believe that Roberts may have snuck the gag in under the radar of his employers at Decca, but popular opinion on the Internet is against me.

So then, his 1962 Christmas single is an unsurprisingly sneering view of Yuletide which features Roberts fruitily dismissing the frivolity of the season.  We are all "suckers" for going along with the ridiculous charade every year, making ourselves ill in the process, and the year we're blown up by a nuclear explosion won't be a year too soon.

Once again, it's fairly tame stuff by today's standards, although it's the closest Paddy Roberts ever came to sounding like Rik out of "The Young Ones", beating Mayall to the punch with his social observations by a large number of decades.  But one year's radical is another year's tired old pseud, and as Half Man Half Biscuit have observed, it's cliched to be cynical at Christmas.  Saying that, though... it's also cliched to want world peace and to wish there was a cure for cancer - are these sentiments wrong?  I'm inclined to side with Paddy myself.  Right on!

Somewhat surprisingly, this track is available on iTunes should you wish to buy it.

Thanks also to Sids60Sounds for uploading this little gem in the first place. 

Countdown to Christmas Party Time - Vic Reeves - Abide With Me

Label: Sense/ Island

Year of Release: 1991

Vic Reeves needs no introduction to UK readers, and I really can't be bothered to give him a detailed one for the benefit of overseas types. His comedy career has never really travelled successfully beyond these Isles, and isn't especially easy to explain to native newcomers, much less people with cultural barriers to contend with. Journalists tend to get around the problem by firing the words "surreal", "slapstick", "music hall", "dada", "Gilbert" and "George" around a bit in the hope it does the work justice, but in truth, it seldom does.

As somebody who had previously had a failed career as a lead singer for a variety of experimental and post-punk bands who never quite elevated themselves beyond the bottom of the bill in various small pub venues, let alone got a record contract, it shouldn't have been too surprising that Vic Reeves signed with Island when his career as a comedian took off. He had already been singing ironic cover versions (or were they?) of songs by The Smiths and Bryan Ferry in the "Vic Reeves Big Night Out" series, and the label must have been hoping for a pleasing Christmas stocking filler in 1991, perhaps consisting of similar material.

What we got was actually a very sympathetically produced comedy album in "I Will Cure You", which combined a number of party-pleasers with some oddball tunes of the man's own making, not least my personal favourite "Summer of '75" which combined rustic folk charm with crude Shane McGowanisms. "Abide With Me" featured on the album, but was a peculiar item, being neither funny nor frothy. The hymn itself was written by Henry Francis Lyte in 1847 as he lay dying from tuberculosis, and has since become something of a funeral standard, meaning that the associations many listeners have of it are not necessarily pleasant ones.

Uproar commenced from certain religious types in the UK when the track was then issued as dance remix single. "This is like dancing on people's graves!" shouted one Reverend, and a largely-forgotten campaign began to get the BBC to ban the record. Whilst the BBC never did officially ban it, I can't recall hearing it on the radio much during Christmas 1991, and Reeves was thwarted in his frankly bizarre attempt to get the number one spot that year, making do with the paltry number 47 position instead.

The song itself is actually quite enjoyable with its vocoder declarations of "Abide With Me!", its sampled and treated choir noises, and Vic's rather too spirited vocals, not to mention the groovy house piano noises The Grid layered on to the single. It does somehow manage to over-ride its slightly morbid tone and become a winter solstice disco number rather than a pean to death, but it has to be said that of all the ideas Vic Reeves ever came out with, this surely has to be one of the oddest. That Island thought it might be a hit is odder still. When Lyte lay dying in his bed, his last thought surely can't have been "And when I die, at least my song will be immortalised by a surreal Northern comedian in the next century".

(This entry was originally uploaded in December 2009).  

You can view the video here, and download the track by visiting iTunes.  

Countdown to Christmas Party Time - XTC - Thanks For Christmas

Label: Virgin
Year of Release: 1983

Hello readers.  For the next couple of weeks I'm going to don some tinsel around my head and fully get into the spirit of the season to bring you some reuploads, YouTube clips and new material which is suitably joyous.  Why?  Well, after all, it's not as if I have much money left at this time of year to splash out on new material to upload to this blog what with buying tat for my relatives, don't you know how hard the last few years have been financially?  what kind of person would I be if I didn't?  Scrooge, that's who.

This particular XTC track is an oddity in the band's canon in that the original plans for the record could have been a lot more quirky and adventurous than the final product.  Andy Partridge's original intentions were to get female members of the Virgin Records staff to issue the song under the name The Virgin Marys, but this was stonewalled by the powers-that-be.  Instead, the band took the opportunity to record the single themselves whilst testing out David Lord as a possible producer for their next album, the utterly brilliant and criminally undersung "Big Express".

Suffice to say, "Thanks For Christmas" - issued under the name Three Wise Men - contains little of the angular edges of that album and is instead a delicate, chiming song which quite simplistically outlines the joys of the season.  This was released during a bleak period of the band's career when public and critical indifference to their output was at its height.  Andy Partridge had quit touring the year before due to ongoing anxiety issues and panic attacks brought on by stage fright, drummer Terry Chambers walked out shortly afterwards, and their future seemed somewhat uncertain.  Partridge has since admitted that the words "Bye bye" sung on the tail end of their 1983 album "Mummer" were a reference to the fact that he thought it may be their last release - and these were blurted out on a song ("Funk Pop A Roll") which also contained the bitter lines "I've already been poisoned by this industry".    Things were not exactly going swimmingly.

"Thanks For Christmas" isn't one of their finest singles, but it does act as a sweetener and a break between the clouds of that moment and the mayhem of the "Big Express" album, and did provide fans some assurance at the time that business was carrying on as usual in the XTC camp.  It is now apparently being played on some tapes in supermarkets and shopping centres hungry for lesser-heard festive tunes, a fact that thrills me no end.  It seems incredibly unlikely that this will ever nudge its way into the charts during the festive period in the manner that many old Christmas songs do, especially as it presently seems to be unavailable on all the usual commercial downloading sites, but it's still a seasonal offering from a very unlikely atheist source.  Oh, and the flipside, the strangely funky, breakdance-friendly "Countdown To Christmas Party Time" - which has loaned its name to this little sub-section of "Left and to the Back" - is also on YouTube if you're feeling curious.  

The Caste - Don't Cast Aside/ One Step Closer

Label: President

Year of Release: 1968

Timing is everything in pop. Have I said that on "Left and to the Back" before? I get the nagging sensation I may very well have said that on "Left and to the Back" before.  But forgive me, long-term readers with good memories, for in many cases it is entirely true.  If you accidentally invent the future, you can be damn sure that you won't be the person who coins the cash from your far-reaching ideas (Joe Meek would be able to tell you that if he hadn't shot himself, and I'm sure the BBC Radiophonic Workshop members aren't as wealthy as Kraftwerk).  There again, if you come up with a perfectly acceptable melody with a dated arrangement, the kids are going to kick your ass back to Hicksville, Daddio, unless you're deliberately pastiching a style which is at least fifteen years old.

This perfectly good single by The Caste suffers from the latter phenomenon.  The close melodies and gentle beats sail so close to the ballads which emerged at the height of Merseybeat that it's actually surprising it even got released in 1968, a time when beat had been usurped by psychedelia which in turn was about to be usurped by hard rock.  Whilst other bands of the period (such as The Tremeloes) did like to keep their songs sweet and simple, they were still usually given bolder arrangements in the studio, whereas The Caste have opted for chiming, stripped back minimalism here, guitars, drums and voice.

"Don't Cast Aside" is a pretty little single with fantastic vocal harmonies which recalls the earliest moments of the British beat boom, but even with Eddy Grant in session on lead guitar this was doomed to fail.  A deep shame, but from the safety of our radioactive bunkers in 2012 there's plenty to enjoy here. 

Me Myself & Me Again - Blaze Away

Label: Antic

Year of Release: 1978

From the rear sleeve: "'Me Myself And Me Again' is actually Vivian Fisher, a 26 year old recording studio engineer and frustrated musician.  Despite dabbling in cornet, french horn, trombone and piano, Vivian really always wanted to play every instrument. Then, one day when recording a marching brass band in the street, he discovered that the sound was actually recorded in segments as the band moved past.  This gave him the idea of a multi-track recording of himself impersonating the sound and character of the different parts of a brass band - and 'Blaze Away' is the result".

I try to avoid blandly slapping the notes of record sleeves on to my blog entries, but I've been sitting here chewing my fingers for the last half an hour desperately trying to think of what to say about this disc, and I can't.  I just can't.  Ridiculing the contents would be too easy (and in any case, they are impressively done - you wouldn't be able to immediately tell they were entirely the mouth-work of a recording engineer). Praising this record as being a lost classic would be ridiculous, unless of course you are a fan of the military marching band oeuvre.  It is, however, an utter gem in the world of eccentric novelty records, and a triumph of decadent seventies music industry mayhem over common sense.  Perhaps somebody within Antic Records or Warner Brothers (their distributors) expected this to sell in large quantities, but it's hard to clearly understand why.

In subsequent years - and largely thanks to Danny Baker talking about it on his radio show - this has become a much sought-after novelty record, to the extent that a copy in VG condition sold on ebay for £26 earlier in 2012.  The market has subsequently become saturated with the little bleeders ever since, to the extent that you can pick up copies for a much more reasonable price now (as I did).  The demand is explicable in that there's an innocence and eccentric frivolity to this which perhaps manages to remind people of a time when lowly studio engineers could see their name up in lights with one single daft idea - these days, of course, this would probably just end up becoming one peculiar YouTube clip buried among the wobbling pile of online attention seekers.

The B-side attempts to explain how the record was made by breaking down the individual components, but in all honesty, it's not essential listening.  Should the conjuror really give away his tricks, in any case?

Vivian apparently now works as a Sound Operator in the West London studio centre of BSkyB, returning to the back-room world from whence he came - but for a certain segment of the population, he will always be the one-man military marching answer to the Flying Pickets.  The time when he records an album of covers of songs by Nirvana and The Sex Pistols surely can't be far off.