Come Back Tony Hadley, All Is Forgiven

It’s taken 30 years. But I think it’s time for me to forgive Tony Hadley.

I’ve held a grudge since 1983, while watching Spandau Ballet do True on Top of the Pops.

Top of the Pops, the now defunct flagship pop music programme of the BBC (1964 – 2006) was, despite its manifold shortcomings, essential viewing in the pre-MTV era.

The big drawback was that one had to endure parental satire while watching.

Aged Parent: Why can’t you get a nice short haircut like him? [“Him” being Tony Hadley, singer with The Spands]

Me: Fnnnnugh!

Aged P: And look! He’s even wearing a tie! Wearing a tie, short hair AND he's top of the hit parade!

Which was worse? Tony Hadley wearing a tie and being held up as a sartorial paragon? Or Aged P uttering the phrase “Hit Parade”? On reflection, I think the latter.

I am also a little better disposed towards True these days, having since discovered that it was a love song inspired by Clare Grogan of Altered Images.

Besides, I’m a grown man now with neckties of my own.

So… sorry Tony. It wasn't your fault after all. I blame my parents. My mother still insists on saying “Hit Parade”. They eff you up, your mum and dad, as Philip Larkin famously wrote. He was obviously no stranger to watching TOTP with his ma and pa.

So where does True fit in to my record collection? Nowhere… until I got married (more of that another day).

But I did buy Lifeline (1982), The Spands' big leap out of culty New Romanticism (i.e. chart failure) into mainstream pop. On TOTP Big Tone was dressed for grouse shooting – a look that was mad even for the 80s. The opening line of the songs stays with me to this day:

"Changing her colours she's off to the shore/He rides the soul train and she fights the law"

What is it all about? Still no idea.

Watch True on TOTP HERE.

Watch Lifeline on TOTP HERE.

Cool For Cats

Cool For Cats was the first coloured vinyl in my collection – the 12 inch version. I swapped it with a guy at school when I was 13. The deal was Cool For Cats for a Bill Haley compilation album and a couple of Elvis records – G.I Blues and Moody Blue (there was a mini Rockabilly revival happening around our way at the time). 

The three records that formed my end of the deal had been purloined from the family record collection. Theft, essentially. But I just had to have it. Pink vinyl.

Cool For Cats was the first Squeeze record I’d been aware of. I’d seen them doing it on Top of the Pops. I was 10. Chris Difford – the one with the dark hair and the voice like a Deptford scrap yard in full spate – took the lead vocal.

When I next saw Squeeze, Glenn Tilbrook – the blond one with the sweet voice – was singing lead on the kitchen sink drama of Up the Junction. “Oh look,” I thought to myself, “they’re giving the other guy a go at the singing.”

First impressions last – to such an extent that I’m somewhere still slightly confused when I see Tilbrook, “the other guy”, and not Difford singing lead with Squeeze. I just can’t shake it.

The topic of Squeeze also came up at school. For homework we were always given five words and asked to write each in a sentence. When presented with the word “junction”, a girl in my class called Lesley came up with the sentence “Squeeze had a hit with Up The Junction”. I thought this deeply cool. Not so the teacher, who chided her for the use of junction as a proper noun in a song title.

Harsh.

But it was an early lesson, if not in grammar then at least in what girls like. And girls like pop music. And so it follows… Pop music good.

The voice and the argot of Cool For Cats caught my ear vividly when I was 10. This was pop music without an American accent. The first verse seemed, to my child’s mind, to be about a western movie, which was indeed cool for cats for me, as we – my dad, granddad and me – loved westerns. Ditto the next verse about The Sweeney. The pictures were painted clearly enough for me to enjoy the narrative, even through the meaning was outwith my frame of reference: life never quite meets expectation and sometimes we have to clamber out of great torpor simply to carry on (this represented by the pseudo-prog instrumental of the middle eight).

The references to getting one's end away in the last verses were lost on me back then. But the music hall tone was clear: this was a funny record. Bleak, but funny.

Great fade-out, too, over Jools Holland’s spivvy, rinky-dink keyboard part. I’ve always loved a fade-out.

It was a record I loved all through my teens, despite the vagaries of fashion and fad, and is a record I love to this day.

Watch Cool for Cats on You Tube

The First… Record I Owned

Let’s start at the very beginning.

It’s a very good place to start.

The first record I ever owned.

Mouldy Old Dough by Lieutenant Pigeon. 1972. I was three-years-old.

It illustrates one of the principal findings of my music-listening career. Which is:

In the first half of life, music is a quest to stand out for all the right reasons while fighting a furious rearguard action not to stand out for all the wrong reasons

Standing out as the only Gaye Bykers On Acid fan in the village – good.

Standing out as the only would-be Goth/Punk/Rebel with The Kids From Fame Again in his record collection – bad.

I’m using The Kids From Fame Again as an example of the worst record I could think of, right? I never actually owned The Kids From Fame Again, right? Right?

Wrong.

The first girl I ever took to my bedroom – for bedrooms are where record players and record collections lived – immediately found my copy of The Kids From Fame Again album despite the fact that I had placed Sandinista (a borrowed copy) at the front of my record collection to create a great first impression.

Next day The Kids From Fame Again was duly binned, along with other offending records that would give me away. I was at war with The Kids From Fame. I had always been at war with The Kids From Fame. Only… in my mind’s eye I could still see the mark it had left behind, protruding upon my tastes like Trotsky’s elbow poking in to those hastily cropped pictures of the founding fathers of Soviet Russia.

After many years of such revisionism and covering my tracks (do you see what I did there? Eh? Tracks? Geddit?) this blog will deal with the whole truth of my record collection, good, bad and ugly. These records was all my sons – from Paper Lace and Billy Don’t Be A Hero (really) to the bat-shaped picture vinyl edition of Smell of Female, The Cramps recorded live at the Peppermint Lounge.

Which is why we start at the very beginning (a reference, of course, to The Sound of Music with which we WILL be dealing with later – if this were a TV documentary, I’d be filmed in shadowy silhouette to save me from shame).

The first record I ever owned.

My grandmother bought me Mouldy Old Dough by Lieutenant Pigeon at the age of three because I used to dance to it.

(Does that line conjure up an image of me as a toddler chained to a radiogram on a barrow at a fairground as my grannie tugs at a dog end, with which she will burn me if I stop dancing? Gentle reader, I danced of my own free will.)

I danced to the stomping drum beat intro seems to say “lemme see ya clap yer hands now!” an exhortation to that most deathly of things: compulsory fun.

I danced to the tin whistle passage as if following a pied piper for the tone deaf – enough of us, it would seem, to keep the single at the top of the charts for four weeks.

I danced to the churning piano, an instrument seemingly piloted by a pianist in oven gloves – actually the mother of one of the band members. And it is she who gives the record its memorable moment – the merest flash of rudimentary boogie-woogie piano on the second go around. (M.O.D is one of those tunes that has given us everything it’s got by the one minute mark. Thus spent, it has no option but to do it all again only LOUDER.)

Before making number one in the UK, it was a big hit in Belgium. Jarvis Cocker selected it as one of his Desert Island Discs on BBC Radio 4.

Am I passing this off as a so-called “Guilty Pleasure”? Never. The Guilty Pleasures fad is simply a fig leaf to cover the deeply exposing and therefore uncool fact that we sometimes respond to pop music on a purely emotional level. And sometimes that music is, well… a little bit crap.

If Noel Coward is to be believed, and there really is “nothing so potent as cheap music” then the simple oompah beat, the lurching pulse of M.O.D, can be bought at the musical equivalent of Lidl. And it spoke to the nation. 

M.O.D was the biggest-selling single of 1972 behind Amazing Grace by the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards Bagpipe Band. Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars was released the same year. Which leads us to another finding: when it comes to music, the vast majority of us are not cool.

And this is where I come in. Uncool and getting too old to care and blogging about a record that made me want to dance before I knew what it meant to be uncool or cared about anything.

In the spoken section of Are You Lonesome Tonight?, Elvis Presley mumbles that, “Someone once said that ‘All the world’s a stage’”. Indeed they did, Elv, and that someone was William Shakespeare and later in the same speech (from As You Like It) he declines the life of a man as seven sections and brings it full circle from birth to “second childishness”.

That’s where I’m going with this blog.

Mouldy Old Dough, 1972, Decca label, in a blue swirly “company bag”.

This where it starts.

From here the chronology will go haywire, like an iPod on shuffle – digital technology providing me with a metaphor for the musical pattern I have followed all my analogue days.

I hope you’ll enjoy it.


Mouldy Old Dough on iTunes

Mouldy Old Dough on Spotify

Watch Mouldy Old Dough on You Tube


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