A fox, a fox in a cardboard Box

You'll probably all have noticed that our mp3 hosts Box have recently undertaken one of their periodic redesigns and upgrades, and as is customary on these occasions, that has led to hiccups for a few readers (and for the first time, me as editor of this blog, so I share your pain). I can't begrudge web designers a living, but I do wish their best laid plans didn't so often lead to chaos.

Anyway, some of you may be constantly seeing a tiny cloud in the preview panes which you're being asked to drag into an even tinier cloud. Far from being some kind of "pin the dot on the tiny pixel" game I've set up to annoy vinyl nerds everywhere, it's actually a system error which can usually be corrected.

Please take one or all of the following steps below to view this blog in a more pleasurable way:

• Make sure your browser's up to date. 
• Clear your browser's cache and cookies, here are the steps. 
• Check if your firewall is configured. 
• Disable any plugins/add-ons/extensions. 

That should work. I've also updated the FAQ with other relevant technical information (and corrected other aspects which had fallen out of date) so please do go there if something else seems to be up. Or you want to know why the music you like hasn't been uploaded recently. Or anything else like that. 

Payola - Money For Hype/ Top Twenty

 

Incredibly silly DIY post-punk record by mysterious "group"

Label: NB Records
Year of Release: 1980

Payola was actually a relatively big scandal in the late seventies and early eighties, breaking out of the pages of the music trade press and becoming the topic of national headline news. So numerous were the cases that Frank Bough ferociously grilled a music business executive about it on "Nationwide", and the chart positions of some records in the official BBC chart - my legal friends have advised me not to name the group The Pinkees at this point - were called into serious question. 

While fiddling chart positions might feel like small beer compared to unemployment, the Cold War and city riots, there was a certain justification to the outrage. The charts are supposed to be a fair barometer of the popularity of both major talent and up and coming acts, irrespective of the label they sit on or the budget they have. If a clumsy punk recording on Single Sock Records happened to be popular enough to get inside the Top 75 despite being distributed by a low key organisation, then it should be allowed to do so and the group in question should get that promotional leverage, not be knocked out of the official chart by a group a major label had bribed record store owners to create false sales for. 

Perhaps it shouldn't be any big surprise that the artists most likely to produce an irritated satirical noise about this sort of thing were those in the DIY/ punk set, then. The mysterious Payola here (who are almost certainly nothing to do with the Canadian group The Payola$, despite other sites suggesting they are) deliver two sides of fumbling post-punk faux-irritation, so childish in its mocking that you can almost hear the giggling and glee in the studio. Both tracks are backed with a basic metronomic drum machine, some funky guitar lines, and lyrics pretending to be all for the joys of hyping - although the single created such a weak impression in the Tuesday rundown that I highly doubt any money exchanged hands to this end.

It's one of those low budget DIY singles that feels as if it exists because some individuals woke up one day and realised it could, therefore why not? In these days of YouTube, streaming and instant access to any idea somebody just had that afternoon (including my wittering on this blog) it's sometimes hard to appreciate that there were days where having a basic creative idea and getting it exposure was actually hard work which involved a certain financial outlay. In that context, "Money For Hype" is the sound of some people sat firmly outside the music business doing everything they could to poke it in the eye with a shitty stick. I highly doubt it made anybody at the major labels have a long, hard think about just how they'd behaved, but it probably helped to bolster the outsider's reputation of the indie sector.

Reupload - Paul Dean and the Thoughts - You Don't Own Me/ Hole In The Head

 

"Sorry Pen". It's an angry song by Paul Nicholas telling his partner what's what and what's not.

Label: Decca

Year of Release: 1965

Paul Nicholas is one of light entertainment's most flexible characters. From pop singer to stage actor to comedy actor to director, the man has jumped on every opportunity going, and impressively enough, managed to succeed at all of them. While the British public are most familiar with his charming but flawed character Vince in "Just Good Friends", his career actually began in the recording studio.

"Paul Dean" was one his early aliases, and "You Don't Own Me" is a very unexpected cover of a Lesley Gore near-hit. In Lesley's hands, it sounds like the defiant cry of an independent young woman who doesn't want to be saddled with a serious and possessive relationship. At the point of its 1964 release, it must have sounded like a fairly radical and powerful piece of work. Paul Nicholas swaps the gender roles around for his version, and it just sounds sneering and boorish, and at the point of Paul protesting that he doesn't just want to be an attractive piece of fluff on his woman's arm, slightly unusual (though he is Paul Nicholas, I suppose). It's hard to imagine female record buyers being attracted to it, and judging by its low sales, the men didn't bother either.

Sweet Chariot - Angelina/ Young At Heart/ America

Extraordinarily high quality vanity pressed Salford progressive rock 

Label: TOG

Year of Release: 1977

Back when I first started writing this blog fifteen years ago, I quickly became suspicious of seventies vanity pressings. While they have a reputation for being bottomless gifts of both glorious tack and untapped potential, the reality is they're usually just some pedestrian cabaret band singing tepid covers of show tunes. 

Once every so often, though, you chance upon something so professionally produced, confidently written and arranged and punchily performed that you find yourself wondering why no proper record label wanted to go anywhere near it. This is one such example which is starting to get a little bit of attention in record collector's circles, though this is mainly for the flipside, a glorious mash-up of Paul Simon's song "America" (channeled through Yes's cover of it), Bernstein's song of the same name (channeled through The Nice) and, perhaps most unexpectedly of all, "Land Of Hope and Glory". All six minutes are as simultaneously daring and preposterous as you'd expect, and the group come across not necessarily as original thinkers - this is pretty much undiluted prog rock which owes a debt to the performances and interpretations of others - but certainly a powerful group. By the time "Land Of Hope and Glory" bleeds into the final moments, you're both laughing at the sheer audacity and applauding them. What daft, brilliant sods. 

The original material on the A-side is also noteworthy, though, with "Angelina" in particular sounding like an FM rock hit. In another dimension, those drum fills, fruity keyboard lines and impassioned, woebegone vocals would be heard regularly on late night local FM stations, interrupting everyone's cab journey home. Besides the more proggish elements, the group are clearly dining at the same messy bistros as Sad Cafe and having the same tough heartaches as Foreigner. 

This wasn't Sweet Chariot's only effort to grace vinyl; the group had a long history, starting as Dave Barron and The Chariots in 1962, before becoming Jackie Richmond and The Chariots in 1967, then morphing into Sweet Chariot by 1970. 

Their first recorded effort under that name was, somewhat bizarrely, a library music LP for the De Wolfe label in 1972 which consisted of vocal originals on Side A and instrumental versions of the same songs on side B. One of the tracks "What Would Your Momma Say" has worked its way on to YouTube and shows that all the components were neatly in place by then, though it seems unlikely their tracks got picked up for commercial use.

Mandy Montgomery - In My Fantasy/ Sail Away

 

Geoff Gill turns his studio skills to actress/singer Mandy Montgomery

Label: Rocket

Year of Release: 1982

Let's all take a brief moment to drink in that sleeve, shall we? The fascination with all things Futuristic in the late seventies and early eighties saw some interesting styles and designs being used which dated quickly despite everyone's best intentions. The calculator styled font on this sleeve would be one prime example, then there's the clothes and backdrop for Montgomery herself. I'm not sure I quite understand what's happening here - did someone have an interesting premonition about a Dyson hoover? - but full credit to her for managing to rise above it all and seem extremely charismatic and confident. You notice Mandy's powerful gaze before you really look at any of the other "stuff".

Of course, it's the contents inside the sleeve we should be more concerned about, and perhaps also another credit on the label. Geoff Gill was an ex-member of sixties group The Smoke as well as a house musician at Morgan Studios in London, cropping up on all manner of celebrated popsike ditties of the period. Later, he would go on to write "Heartbreaker" for Pat Benatar as well as see his sixties psych classic "My Friend Jack" covered by Boney M, both of which must have kept him in reasonable royalties ever since.

This is an interesting outlier in his later career, though, which is seemingly an attempt to score a synth-drenched rock hit with an aspiring young performer. "In My Fantasy" wants to have its cake and eat it, filled with soft rock hooks and flourishes, but also a lot of synthetic space-age whooshing noises and propulsive bleeps. If it has an obvious influence, it would probably be Kim Wilde, but interestingly a middle-eight hovers into view which sounds faintly like the Blake's Seven theme (which would remain untouched again until Pulp used it as a reference point in the nineties). It's a reasonable piece of work, just not quite good enough to cut through the piles of innovation occurring throughout 1982, probably one of pop music's finest years.