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1969 Rolf Harris: Two Little Boys

Former UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher is renowned for many things, but pop punditry is not one of them. Nevertheless, of her few recorded pronouncements in this field, two appear within these pages. The first was 'Telstar', which she considered to be a 'rousing' tune, but she made the ultimate statement any music fan could make to Roy Plomley on 'Desert Island Discs' when she listed 'Two Little Boys' as her all time favourite song. How big a pinch of salt this could be taken with is debateable (and I'll ignore my own prejudices that usually regard Thatcher's approval of anything as the kiss of death), but clearly something within Morse and Madden's 1902 song struck a chord with her.

Originally made popular by Harry Lauder, 'Two Little Boys' is a fable of childhood friendship carried over into adulthood where a past kind act of a boy is reciprocated in later years by the man when the two go to war. After one is injured in battle, the other comes to his aid saying "Did you think I would leave you dying when there's room on my horse for two? Climb up here Joe, we'll soon be flying, I can go just as fast with two" - you can almost see the one time PM's head nodding in approval; mutual self help with no call on the state to lend a hand by paying disability benefits or providing funds for a new horse (and with the money saved probably used to fund tax breaks for horse breeders). Excellent.

Not that 'Two Little Boys' is right wing propaganda per se - it's a morality tale presented in simplistic broad brush strokes that a child would understand. And Rolf sings it in a good natured, unselfconscious 'can't really sing but I'll have a go' voice that any parent would use to sing their children to sleep, and in so doing there's an intimacy in his vocal that keeps the sentimentality down to acceptable levels. Not to the point that I myself would ever listen to this for pleasure you understand, but for the right person at the right time then chances are it can always bring a lump to the throat, especially at Christmas. And maybe such a simple tale of comradeship and togetherness is a fitting way to close the decade we know as 'The Sixties'; after all, as Auden wrote: "We must love one another or die".

1969 The Archies: Sugar, Sugar

Well let's shoo the elephant out of the room before we start - The Archies were not a 'real' band. Not only that, they weren't a 'manufactured' band a la The Monkees either; The Archies went even in that the fab five of Archie, Reggie, Jughead, Betty and Veronica were cartoon characters from TV's The Archie Show. And all some thirty years before Gorillaz. But then still further than that again, while the cartoon facade of Gorillaz was never meant to fully obscure the players behind it, the session men who gave life to The Archies remained suitably anonymous - we weren't meant to know who they were because The Archies were the band. Full stop.

Fine. I don't have a problem with that. And after the passage of so much time it seems futile to be still labour it - who remembers 'The Archie Show' now? Nobody in the UK anyway - the show was never screened here, meaning that the song was always the thing and, being of the bubblegum variety, it's not going to be everyone's 'thing' whether fronted by cartoons or not. After all, the Oxford Online Dictionary defines bubblegum as "chiefly North American pop music that is catchy and repetitive and designed to appeal especially to teenagers: rockers hate bubblegum pop". Ah. Now we're getting down to it. Hate on sight. Not 'proper' music. And so on.

A Jeff Barry co-write, 'Sugar, Sugar' has a lean, no fat pop engine that motors the song along its way, only stopping off at the detour of the bridges to pick up extra passengers for the journey and in such a way, 'Sugar, Sugar' builds nicely via the addition of those layers of instruments and vocals to the simmering pot. And I say simmer because 'Sugar Sugar' keeps a lid on its excitement to ensure it never boils over - the cumulative effect generates interest just to see where it's going next until it's almost a disappointment when it fades to a close without ever really letting rip . But that in itself provides a neat hook to play it again. And 'Sugar, Sugar' is choc full of hooks.

If you're the type of teenager it was designed to appeal to that is - if you're a 'rocker' who hates bubblegum then nothing here is going to convert (though even on this low heat, the background cries of "Pour a little sugar on it baby, I'm gonna make your life so sweet, yeah yeah yeah" has more life and vitality than hoary old rockers Def Leppard managed in their song of almost the same name. So one-nil there). But even if you think the genre is the work of the antichrist, it would take an exceptionally closed ear not to appreciate the detail this particular devil is springing from.

1969 Bobbie Gentry: I'll Never Fall In Love Again

Songs from the shows are there to be interpreted rather than covered. Just as we don't consider a Symphony Orchestra as 'covering' Beethoven, neither should we talk about (for example) Elaine Paige "covering" 'Memory' Not within the context of the show anyway. It's a point I could have made regarding no small number of the singles we've already encountered, and I'm only raising it here because I've literally this minute learned that 'I'll Never Fall In Love Again' is actually a showtune from a musical ('Promises Promises') and not simply another stand alone song in the Bacharach and David canon.

Does that make any difference? I think so - context is important; it's more convenient to judge an interpretation of such a song by reference to its context. Take (for another example) Steven Sondheim's 'Send In The Clowns'. In the context of it's parent musical 'A Little Night Music' it's a bitter song of jealousy and regret. The opening lines "Isn't it rich? Are we a pair?" were written to be hissed and spat staccato rather than have the syllables stretched out in an attempt to make them rhyme and scan pub singer style. Which virtually every singer who tackles this great song in isolation tries to do (check out the Martin Jacque's vocal in The Tiger Lilies version to hear how it should really be done).

So how is 'I'll Never Fall In Love Again' meant to be sung? Well not with bitterness for a start - how could what is one of my favourite rhymes in all popular music ever be bitter?* "What do you get when you kiss a guy? You get enough germs to catch pneumonia. After you do, he'll never phone ya": there's a good natured pissed off-ness about it, a self aware humour that suggests the narrator has been here before and that it's par for the course ("So far at least until tomorrow, I'll never fall in love again" anyway) and my views on any version always depends on how well the singer nails it - that 'ya' is as vital as Sondheim's 'rich' - 'I'll Never Fall In Love Again' isn't a song for the eloquent.

Gentry does ok, albeit in a humour-lite kind of way, but my reaction to this remains the same whenever I hear it; I like it a lot up to a point, after which it simply stops being enjoyable. Her take opens with a husky vocal of cracked soul that reminds me Dusty Springfield behind frosted glass. But then it gains confidence in its telling with the fragility replaced with a dry urgency that suggests Gentry can't wait to get to the end.

Whereas she invests the initial "What do you get when you fall in love?" question with a genuine wry confusion, by its final go round they've become just words on the page as she loses interest in their meaning both within the context of the song and as an artist. The playfulness evaporates and leaves nothing in its place. Maybe a certain indifference is to be expected - Gentry is a talented songwriter in her own right working outside her usual genre on this - but its an indifference that makes this a good version rather than a great one.


* For a prime example of how to make a total balls-up of 'I'll Never Fall In Love Again' then look no further than Ricky Ross's quivering lip delivery on Deacon Blue's angst soaked 1990 misinterpretation. Though on second thoughts, don't - instead, make a bargain with your god that you'll happily die four minutes before your allotted time in exchange for never having to sit through the four minutes of that song for as long as you live. It's a fair exchange, trust me on that one.

1969 Serge Gainsbourg And Jane Birkin: Je T'aime... Moi Non Plus

Us Brits have always liked a bit of sauce. In the dark, pre-internet days we had to get it where we could and the late sixties/early seventies were a fertile breeding ground for it to crop up in all manner of places. Hammer quickly realised that a flash of flesh from Ingrid Pitt or Kate O'Mara in their films would attract jaded punters perhaps not usually interested in the antics of vampires and such while elsewhere, the 'Carry On' series made a selling point of Barbara Windsor and her catapulting bra. For the ladies, the sight of Robin Askwith's ever pneumatic arse in the 'Confessions' films provided treats galore. All good clean fun.

Not smut mind. We Brits have never cared for smut. Not in public anyway. Sid James yakking over Bab's Windsor's bare backside was one thing, Maria Schneider's dairy based anal lube was quite another. No good clean fun there. And it took a landmark sixties court case to decide that "Nay nay! Fuck's only what you do. animals fuck. But cunt's a lot more than that. It's thee, dost see: an' tha'rt a lot besides an animal, aren't ter? - even ter fuck? Cunt! Eh, that's the beauty o' thee, lass!" was actually artistic and not obscene smut out to degrade all who read it.*

Which brings me nicely to 'Je t'aime... moi non plus', a song that to the powers that be fell on the wrong side of that sauce/smut highwire to become the UK's first banned number one. Yes, it was banned in a typical British knee jerk reaction to being faced with something different and a bit off colour (foreign too, and you know what they're like). Because it's fair to say that to date, there hadn't been anything quite like 'Je t'aime... moi non plus' in the charts before.

Music from the continent was no stranger to our shores, and the annual Eurovision Song Contest made sure that Europop had its fans, but that genre was basically our own Britpop (sorry, bit early for that I know), albeit with the substance removed and replaced by air to make it bounce harder. Cheerful yet disposable, it never found a willing wider audience in a country notoriously xenophobic to anything not sung in its own mother tongue. Whatever else 'Je t'aime... moi non plus' was, it wasn't Europop.

Writer Serge Gainsbourg was as French/Euro as the Eiffel Tower, but his song of love replaces the usually jolly oompah sound and fixed grin with an eyes half closed clipped bass and red light lit organ coo that personifies a stereotypical soundtrack to those smutty (not saucy) Continental films where girls of loose morals struggled to keep their drawers on. It sounds like smut all by itself, the high class muzak equivalent of David Rose's 'The Stripper', yet eyebrows would have been raised further by the sound of British born Birkin groaning in the throes of orgasm over the top of it.

And yet Gainsbourg's song was not intended to be a titillating seven inches of porn for the raincoat brigade; he himself claimed it was 'about' the impossibly of physical love, but whether you swallow that or not, there's a definite irony in the title's "I love you - me neither" that's lost both in translation and the heavy handed sounds of the boudoir that the song conjures up. Heavy handed, now that's a key phrase and one that sums up why I've never been all that fussed on this.

In 'Je t'aime... moi non plus' I can hear neither sauce nor smut, but neither can I hear the lofty ideals Serge was allegedly aiming for. The porn film (let's be honest) music sets a nice scene for Birkin's faux orgasmic gasps, but they ring with all the genuiness of a mid-price hooker with one eye on the clock and taken together they render the song into overcooked stodge, more Reader's Wives than Playboy. Serge himself sounds too wry and arch for the scenario he's found himself in, and though his remove may go someway to emphasise the point he was trying to make, non Francophiles have to take it on face value and on that level it's laboured and irritating. But still, good clean fun eh?


* From DH Lawrence's 'Lady Chatterley's Love', first published 1928 but not legally in the UK until 1960.

1969 Creedence Clearwater Revival: Bad Moon Rising

The archetypical American bar band, in my own crazed imagination I've always seen Creedence Clearwater Revival as a Hanna Barbera version of The Band. John Fogerty's songs are no less a faithful, rootsy de/reconstruction of American mores past and present than Robbie Robertson's, but rather than the sepia toned, copper plate photography of the latter, Fogerty's are brittle splurges of full colour music to chug-a-lug your beer to rather than soundtracking drowning your sorrows in it.

That's not to paint Fogerty as court jester to Robertson's wise elder - such simplicity is wide of the mark and 'Bad Moon Rising's forewarning of apocalyptic devastation being a case in point. "Hope you got your things together. Hope you are quite prepared to die" rasps Fogerty over an electric skiffle metal shuffle that's a short, sharp poke in the chest tailor made for the jukebox. Like most of Fogerty's songs, 'Bad Moon Rising' does nothing fancy, but it does it with great economy of expression. And if the world is going to end, then you may as well sing along as it all goes up in flames, preferably with a glass in your hand.

1969 Zager And Evans: In The Year 2525 (Exordium And Terminus)

Pulpy sc-fi and popular music aren't total strangers, but it's a rare example of the genre that gets to number one. But with the moon landings a contemporary concern, science fiction in 1969 was becoming science fact and 'In The Year 2525' jacks into the public interest in that 'nowness' quite shamelessly (the song was actually written in 1964 and originally released in 1968 so I guess it needed that 'stopped clock is right twice a day' good fortune to give it an unimproveable context).*

Not that we're obviously in the space age here - 'In The Year 2525' opens out onto a spaghetti western soundtrack of Spanish guitar and mariachi trumpet before locking into a rail straight beat that marches the lyric through the centuries like Rod Taylor in 'The Time Machine' as mankind hurtles toward its destiny. "In the year 3535, ain't gonna need to tell the truth, tell no lies. Everything you think, do, or say is in the pill you took today" - hokum then? Yes indeed, of 'Plan 9 From Outer Space' proportions, and it doesn't help that Rick Evans' high and mighty vocal casts him as a would be Nostradamus demanding to be taken seriously; it makes the clog handed lyrics and crowbar rhymes faintly ludicrous, especially when that highfalutin title promising something approaching quasi academic stature.

In its favour, 'In The Year 2525' eschews the temptation to go all 'computer font' and doesn't pander to any of the (then) new fangled futuristic strokes or gimmickry that would have dated (a 1983 version of this by Visage comes stuffed with boxfresh eighties synth washes and noodles and has aged with far less grace). And just as you wouldn't read HG Wells for scientific accuracy, there's a lot of fun to be had here. As long as you take it on its own terms and turn a blind eye to its overt humourlessness.


* Though the fact that David Bowie's 'Space Oddity' only made number 5 that year could be enough to blow this little theory out of the water.