1969 Thunderclap Newman: Something In The Air

"Hand out the arms and ammo, we're going to blast our way through here" - 'Something In The Air' doesn't want for aspiration; it's motivation that's in short supply. As manufactured an act as you'll get, Thunderclap Newman were a band created by Pete Townsend solely to front the songs written by John 'Speedy' Keen, multi-instrumentalist and former driver for The Who. Yet for all its rabble rousing, Keen's vocal is whiny and hesitant, the voice of an armchair General longing for change but lacking the power, inspiration or motivation to initiate it. Change certainly WAS in the air in 1969, but 'Something In The Air' is a song more of hope than observation and, while by no stretch of the imagination an 'answer' song to it, the inherent lethargy of 'Like One Thousand Violins' (by neo psychedelic indie band One Thousand Violins from 1985) is nearer the tone of this with its "You say there's something in the air, that's just smoke from all those cigarettes" capturing the hesitancy of a narrator who finds every excuse in the book not to speak to the girl of his dreams. 'Something In The Air' has the same elegiac quality of regret at an opportunity not taken which, as the sixties dribbled to a close and the seventies dribbled into life, would see the repeated "we have got to get it together...now" acquire a hue of irony that probably wasn't intended and which makes 'Something In The Air' a song more fitted to accompany archive footage of civil rights violations rather than any victories of the people.