by Bob Stanley
West Germany had no musical heritage, at least none that it was comfortable with so close to the war. As the sound of schlager – oompah, bierkeller pop – dominated the German chart, musicians decided to create a brand-new sound by using the newest musical instruments they could find. If prog was maximalist on pretty much every level, bands like Neu!, Cluster and Can were its opposite, with a stripped-down aesthetic based on modern synthesizers (the first stop for anyone trying to create something entirely new in the seventies) and repetition, which built energy as a tension-containing machine from the endless chunk-a-chick-a of modern industry. Compared to Pink Floyd’s pyrotechnics, it was very off-the-cuff. Spontaneity was key. One morning, soon after singer Malcolm Mooney had left the band, Can members Holger Czukay and Jaki Liebezeit were enjoying a coffee at a pavement cafe in Munich. They heard a commotion and looked up to see a wild-looking Japanese man singing on the street corner; his name was Damo Suzuki. They asked him to join Can immediately. Suzuki made his debut that night. No prog qualifications required.
Can were canned as ‘Krautrock’ by the British press, regarded as an interesting sideline but something of a novelty – so far beyond traditional rock boundaries, referencing Stockhausen and John Cage, that they simply didn’t fit any pop criteria. Smart, brave, funny, relentless, it really was a new kind of music. That was an achievement in itself. The influence of Can and Neu! in particular would slowly, slowly permeate Anglo-American pop, not taking a real hold for the best part of two decades. In 1975 a lank-haired kid in Manchester called Mark Smith had already decided this was the sound for him: ‘Repetition in our music and we’re never gonna lose it’ would become the Fall’s one-line, Kraut-born manifesto.
1 The majors weren’t necessarily favouring art over commerce – the profit margins on albums were much greater on albums than singles.
2 Exhibit A: Van Der Graaf Generator’s ‘Refugees’, which epitomises a golden, early-seventies utopian sensibility: ‘West is Mike and Susie’.
3 ‘She brings the sunshine to a rainy afternoon, she puts the sweetness in and stirs it with a spoon’, the opening couplet of 1969’s ‘Sweetness’, is a peach.
4 They didn’t doubt their own abilities. Sat in the studio listening to a playback of Gabriel’s first solo album, King Crimson’s Robert Fripp, after a suitably reverential silence, muttered, ‘A cosmic concurrence.’ Producer Bob Ezrin turned to them both and burst out laughing.
5 Tubular Bells was the breakthrough album for Richard Branson’s Virgin label. Unsure about a totally instrumental record, Branson asked Oldfield if he could sing on just one track – the petulant Oldfield’s answer was the ‘caveman’ section.
6 Pop’s ultimate lost boy, Syd Barrett kept it together long enough to make two albums of what would now be called outsider art. While living at his mum’s house in Cambridge, growing fatter and balder, he became the founding father of indie dropout culture. Both The Madcap Laughs (1969) and Barrett (1970) are engaging but unsettling listens. Syd Barrett’s lack of classic song structure and incapability to extend the sound experiments of The Piper at the Gates of Dawn makes them a simpler (ergo, easier to mimic) but far less exciting inspirational flavour.
7 See also Yes’s Tales from Topographic Oceans, Gentle Giant’s Interview, a 1976 concept album about the futility of being in a rock band, and Emerson, Lake and Palmer’s fitfully funny trashing of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition.
8 Graham Gouldman had written some of the era’s most melancholy, story telling 45s: ‘Look through Any Window’ and ‘Bus Stop’ for the Hollies; Herman’s Hermits’ ‘No Milk Today’ and ‘East West’; ‘Heart Full of Soul’, ‘For Your Love’ and ‘Evil Hearted You’ for the Yardbirds. All sounded influenced by his Jewish upbringing in Salford, and all were huge hits.
9 Jonathan King – who had signed them to his UK label – had a dream in which an act called 10cc were the biggest band in the world. It sounded better than Grumble, anyway.
10 One possible way forward was to make modern music that was ‘Beatlesque’, an adjective that would become common in the ensuing decades. British prog-poppers Supertramp (‘Dreamer’, ‘Give a Little Bit’, ‘Breakfast in America’) were clearly in thrall to Paul McCartney’s songs for Magical Mystery Tour, specifically ‘Your Mother Should Know’ and ‘Fool on the Hill’, while Cleveland band the Raspberries impressively merged the Who’s pyrotechnics with ‘Twist and Shout’-era Beatles to score US Top 20 hits with ‘Go All the Way’ and ‘I Wanna Be with You’. Most successful were the Electric Light Orchestra, or ELO – the group Roy Wood had formed, then quit, in 1972. Under Jeff Lynne’s leadership they made a career largely out of condensing and regurgitating Abbey Road on singles like ‘Mr Blue Sky’, ‘Wild West Hero’ and ‘The Diary of Horace Wimp’.
34
YOUNG LOVE: WEENYBOPPERS AND BOY BANDS
Once Marc Bolan had unleashed the erotic, once he’d told twelve-year-old girls that he wanted to be a jeepster for their love, emotional anarchy was sure to follow. It was partially contained by a new breed of pop star, one aimed largely – if not solely – at pubescent girls.
Teen screams had followed Frank Sinatra and Dickie Valentine, been amplified by the Beatles, then the Monkees, and somehow quiet ened by the dawn of the seventies. But the sixties’ social revolution affected everyone, whatever age, and the next time a teenybop act was put together it was set to be considerably more charged and specifically targeted than planting a woolly hat on Michael Nesmith’s head.
The Jackson 5, a family band of good-looking boys led by eleven-year-old Michael and managed by father Joe, cut effervescent playground soul crafted by the Motown machine, and had four US number ones (‘I Want You Back’, ‘ABC’, ‘The Love You Save’, ‘I’ll Be There’) in 1970. They opened the door for an even poppier, even younger family band, MGM’s Osmonds, to become the biggest pop act in the UK, where the Jackson 5 had a few Top 10 hits but never a number one – it almost certainly helped their cause that the Osmonds were white. The Jackson 5 and the Osmonds were both real bands who played real instruments, but in both instances the focus was on the youngest, cutest member. Pubescent girls didn’t care about chops, didn’t care that ‘Puppy Love’, ‘The Twelfth of Never’ and ‘Young Love’ (all UK number ones) were uncool oldies, didn’t even care that the young Donny Osmond’s triple-tracked unbroken voice had no great emotional heft. Boys cared a lot, but that was irrelevant.
Clearly this was a very different pop game from what had gone before, one which possibly did have a magic formula for success. For managers and record labels this was a difficult learning curve – getting inside the minds of pre-teen girls – and it took decades for them to work it out: when they did, in the boy-band era of the late nineties, it become the most dominant style in pop and has shown no sign of letting up. The seventies, though, was an era of freakish experimentation. Most of the teenybop artists of the seventies weren’t old enough to buy a pint; some were too young to write their own songs, too young even to get on a bus without their mum. Elvis, Billy Fury, the Beatles and T. Rex had been pin-ups who were moulded – by management, by record companies – but not contrived; the Monkees had been put together, and were wildly successful, but then revolted and got even better. Boys in their early to mid-teens didn’t have the wherewithal to say ‘No sir, I will not,’ and, in the wake of the Osmonds’ success, record companies signed up battalions of them.
Most of them made quite awful records, but David Cassidy was not one of them. A little older and wiser than Donny Osmond, Cassidy was blessed with a girlish mane, thick mink eyelashes and golden Cali skin. He was also a smooth article – five minutes with him and a girl had a past. At first he was an actor and landed a role in an apple-pie sitcom called The Partridge Family, about a travelling family band. But he just happened to have a honey-dripping voice. Whenever he opened his mouth, birds suddenly appeared. He was the most swooned-over pop star, by his co-stars, by his tour manager, by boys and girls from six to sixt
y. Walking on the Paramount lot one day he was spotted by two of the Brady Bunch actresses. They fell to their knees and screamed.
The first Partridge Family spin-off single, in 1971, was a rickety circus tune with a neat minor-to-major twist called ‘I Think I Love You’, and it went straight to number one in America. Very quickly, David Cassidy was all over teen magazine Tiger Beat – they hadn’t had anyone quite so desirable since the Monkees.1 And in the tradition of the Monkees, Cassidy didn’t want to play ball. He was obliged by his TV contract to make records for Bell, never getting an advance from the label, not even for his solo recordings. When Rolling Stone approached him for an interview in 1972, he saw it as his chance to bare all – quite literally. Annie Leibovitz shot him naked, from the waist up, with just a hint of pubic hair. Even now it would be a sensation, truly subversive, an über-pop figure on the cover of the number-one underground paper. ‘There are people who carry around that issue of Rolling Stone and think it’s the coolest thing that’s ever been done,’ Cassidy said. But parents didn’t think so. Crucially, nor did his ten-year-old fans, who loved cuddly, misty-eyed David, not post-coital David with all that body hair. He had violated the trust of young America. Bob Hope pulled out of a planned Cassidy TV special. His profile plummeted, and he never scored another Top 20 American hit.
Luckily, he had only just broken in Britain, where girls were less likely to baulk at his naked torso, and so Cassidy became the all-time pin-up all over again. Teenyboppers in Britain, like British pop fans in general, were altogether more dedicated and obsessive. In short order, he had a number-two hit in ’72 with soft-rocker ‘Could It Be Forever’, followed by number ones with ‘How Can I Be Sure’ and ‘Daydreamer’. His wispiest, breathiest hit was called ‘I Am a Clown’. Poor, sweet, forlorn, sexy David – marshmallows could’ve bruised this sound.
Musically it hasn’t always scaled the heights of Cassidy’s powder-puff tower, but one of the best things going for the teenybopper boom was its iconoclasm. This wasn’t part of the NME’s plan for rock in the seventies – it wasn’t meant to be like this. It had been hijacked. And whenever this happens, whenever the gatekeepers try to keep newcomers from getting into the party, pop is the eventual winner.
In 1974 Charles Shaar Murray reviewed an Osmonds show for the NME. He was sniffy about everything from the ticket price to the band’s musicianship – ‘the best instrumentalist is Merrill, who’s about up to the standard of an average Marquee support band guitarist’. Refusenik Murray was just like Irving Berlin – that is, the Irving Berlin who tried to ban Elvis’s version of ‘White Christmas’ for being musically unsound. Teenybop pop found the rock press on enemy territory. They didn’t get it, and teenybop pop certainly didn’t need them – it was all over kids’ magazines like Look In and Jackie, where readers and punters were the same people.
Stared out by hundreds of under-sixteen girls and suspicious ushers at the Rainbow, Murray reported how the audience was ‘weeping and wailing with a terrifying intensity …’ It was a female reaction to pop that he couldn’t understand, and would prefer to silence with muso grumblings. The Osmonds as an entity (their solo records were usually covers of fifties ballads, often pre-rock, universally unimaginative) cut some of the hardest-ever teenybop 45s: ‘Down by the Lazy River’ (US no. 4), a version of Joe South’s ‘Yo-Yo’ (US no. 3), ‘Goin’ Home’ (UK no. 4) and, best of all, the eco-warrior wig-out ‘Crazy Horses’ (UK no. 2, US no. 14). They took the Jackson 5 sound, sped it up, threw in some pedal-heavy guitars and growled as fiercely as their sexless Mormon upbringing would allow.
David Cassidy and Donny Osmond both later made the classic move into grown-up pop, even scoring a couple of major hits (respectively, ‘The Last Kiss’, UK no. 6 ’85; ‘Soldier of Love’, US no. 2, UK no. 29 ’88). Groundbreakers for a new style, a new era, they survived and still play to an ever-ageing crowd. Lower down the food chain were manager/producers keen to discover the next Donny or David before he had any musical savvy or ambitions of any kind. EMI A&R man Colin Burn searched high and low for a British Donny, and ended up signing his son, Darren.2 Larry Page, who had managed the Kinks and discovered the Troggs, gave us the simian James Boys from Upminster, who looked like a pre-teen Supergrass and sang straight, unquestioning nursery pop like ‘Roly Poly’, ‘Shoog Shoog’ and ‘Lo-Lo-Lollipop’. Even fat, freckled Jimmy Osmond, who made number one in the UK with the unctuous ‘Long-haired Lover from Liverpool’ in late ’72, might have drawn the line. Asked by the BBC what reasons young girls might have for screaming at boys whose balls had yet to drop, the older James boy smartly replied, ‘Dunno – ask ’em.’ Jonathan King presented the far more appealing Ricky (son of Marty) Wilde, who cut some hyper, kid glam (‘I Wanna Go to a Disco’, ‘Teen Wave’) and later wrote a run of stunning bubble-punk hits for his sister Kim; another King protégé, Simon Turner, also outgrew his master and ended up recording soundtracks for Derek Jarman and David Lynch.
When it became clear that no one was about to step into Donny Osmond’s baby shoes, the poster-boy age went up a few years. David Essex was the total package. He was a natural charmer, playing up his Canning Town background something chronic on ‘Hold Me Close’ (UK no. 1 ’75) and its follow-up, ‘If I Could’ – ‘Oh we could have a lark, picnicking in the park’ – as if he was Burlington Bertie from Bow reborn in a white polyester suit. He also made some very good records. A stage-school boy, Essex had cut his debut as far back as 1965 but, unlike Bolan and Bowie, his profile was non-existent3 until his manager landed him a part in That’ll Be the Day, a porridge-grey evocation of fifties rock ’n’ roll Britain. Essex played Jim MacLaine, a teenager with a great deadpan delivery and a raging libido. Over the end credits ran an original song called ‘Rock On’.
‘Rock On’ was all about what wasn’t there. The rubbery bassline was an echo of something played in 1956, caught like a sound corked in a bottle and released as a gas twenty years later. The whole song was akin to a spectre in a photograph, with its cat-ghost strings and Essex’s half-asleep vocal summoning a lost era with random signifiers – ‘Hey, shout, summertime blues’. There were more questions than answers – ‘Where do we go from here? Which is the way that’s clear?’ – and ‘Rock On’, caked in echo and confusion, effectively, quietly, was the sound of Britain in 1973.
So was he an avant? Not quite. Essex’s producer was Jeff Wayne, and the two had been working on ad jingles for products like Us deodorant and Pledge furniture polish for a few years – the latter (as ‘Bring in the Sun’) even made it onto his first album. Besides, he was ever so pretty and became teen-scream material just as the NME ran their first serious feature on him; the rock media dropped him like a hot potato, equating him with Donny Osmond just weeks after they had called him ‘the English Dr John’.4
It didn’t matter to the NME that sequels like the Dixieland glam of ‘Lamplight’ (UK no. 7 ’73) and stuttering heartbeat of ‘Stardust’ (UK no. 5 ’74) were almost the equal of ‘Rock On’, Essex was suddenly a girls’ singer. He had the wisdom to turn this into subject matter: ‘Gonna Make You a Star’, his first number one in ’74, was a pithy put-down (‘Well, they say he’s into his music, but I don’t believe it. He just doesn’t seem to understand the rock media’) and became a youth-club classic in the process.
David Essex posters started to get taken off bedroom walls almost as soon as he released Out on the Street in ’76, a concept album that was to the alleys of Stepney what Bowie’s Diamond Dogs was to the ballrooms of Mars. The lead single, ‘City Lights’, was a seven-minute, string-driven piece of dark disco, as quietly apocalyptic as a mugging. Radio hated it, and it settled at number twenty-four and died, effectively killed by its own ambition. Girls felt betrayed by his new direction, his apparent desire for serious acclaim – didn’t David respect their adoration? Didn’t he understand that their love could always be withdrawn, that it was transferable? The next time anyone noticed David Essex he was playing Che Guevara in Evita, older, bearded, not
being screamed at. Eventually, almost inevitably, he landed a part in EastEnders. And once in a while he still made great records that sounded like nothing else on earth – the Weimar electro pop ‘Me and My Girl (Night Clubbing)’ from ’82 – but mostly he played up to the mums, made enough money to buy a house in New England and a flat in London. He was happy with that and nobody got hurt.
It wasn’t Essex, or Cassidy, or even the Osmonds who were to be the blueprint for future pin-up boy bands. Zero creative control, nothing to rock the boat, something for girls from eight to eighty (ignoring the ones between sixteen and sixty) – it was the Bay City Rollers, deflowerers of Scotland, and they would have no cosy Osmond/Cassidy afterlife. Their hits began in 1974 as fifties-fitted glam-lite (‘Remember’, ‘Shang-a-Lang’, ‘Summerlove Sensation’, ‘All of Me Loves All of You’ – all Top 10), with lyrics that looked to an idealised past. The Rollers had hits written by Bill Martin and Phil Coulter, veterans of Eurovision (who had written ‘Puppet on a String’ and Cliff Richard’s ‘Congratulations’); they had their own TV show, Shang-a-Lang, complete with passionate audience; and they had a recognisable and easily mimicked image – the Osmonds had teeth, the Rollers had tartan.
This effective combination worked wonders for them. None of the Rollers was especially talented,5 or even especially pretty, and it seemed to sum up the paucity of pop in 1975 that they merited such hard love and worship for eighteen months. Catching a bus as an eleven-year-old boy in 1975 was to run the gauntlet, there being a strong chance of every young female on board loudly singing ‘Bay City Rollers we love you’, tartan scarves in the air, their newly discovered sexual energy being publicly released en masse.
They scored 1975’s biggest-selling British single, a cover of the Four Seasons’ ‘Bye Bye Baby’, which stayed at number one for six weeks. It was followed by ‘Give a Little Love’, another number one and a landmark in its own sappy way – with its too-easy chord changes and Mattel-pop trundle from verse to chorus, this was the prototype boy-band ballad.6 Presumably it was aimed at expanding the Rollers’ audience to an older demographic – you can almost hear the lighters being waved in the air.