by Bob Stanley
But the cracks started to show very quickly. According to their manager, Tam Paton, the Rollers kept their peachy complexions by drinking pints and pints of milk. Paton was old-school – like Maurice Levy, like Bill Sykes. In a Channel 4 documentary twenty years later, Rollers singer Les McKeown was brought face to face with Paton: exasperated by Paton’s flaky excuses about the Rollers’ lost millions, McKeown resorts to asking, ‘Where’s my fucking money? I want my fucking money.’ Paton lived in luxury from the Rollers’ first flush of fame until his death in 2009. McKeown remembers Rollermania – never sleeping, not having Christmas off, the band being given speed to keep them going. Paton also forced his charges to go through the humiliation of guesting regularly on a US kids show called The Krofft Superstar Hour.7 Their co-star was a green-faced woman called Witchiepoo. They looked like they were about to cry in every scene. Far worse, McKeown ran over and killed a near neighbour, seventy-six-year-old Euphemia Clunie. And the band played on.
What pervades the Rollers’ records, and what a nostalgic air freshener fails to cover the smell of, is the cynicism. After a bracing start with their early 45s (‘Shang-a-Lang’ still has a Womble-esque idiot joy), the records are rarely more than tepid, and no one – least of all the group – sounds as if they enjoyed making them. The hack work of ‘Give a Little Love’, the sleazy Paton back story, the drugs, the death, the inevitable fallout and lifelong bitterness – was any of it worth it?8
By contrast, boy bands of the eighties and beyond – and there was a mighty long gap between the Rollers and the next major teenybop bands, New Edition in the States and Bros in the UK – seemed to enjoy what they were doing. New Kids on the Block looked like B-boy wannabes, and their lame but child-friendly beats matched their aspirations. Beyond them, Boyzone and Westlife quietly went about their business with professionalism and an air of confidence, certain that their music had a stamp of quality. In this way, they were entirely pre-rock, more in tune with David Whitfield than David Essex.
But what Bolan had made explicit, and what Cassidy was lambasted for, would be built upon in the nineties by Take That. At first they seemed like just another manager’s plaything, Muscle Marys with cute faces who took an eternity to score their first hit. This, it turned out, was in their favour – by the time ‘A Million Love Songs’ reached number seven in ’92 they had assumed their roles: there was singer/writer Gary Barlow, the rather clumsy, pudgily earnest front man; Mark Owen was the girlishly pretty one; Howard was hirsute; Jason was chiselled; and Robbie was the class clown. While they still played hard to the gay audience (packing the ‘Pray’ video with homoerotic imagery, calling up gay icon Lulu for a guest spot on ‘Relight My Fire’ – both UK number ones in ’93), they had something for everyone. Take That weren’t for children – these were real men and, once they ditched the overtly queer videos, they became beloved entertainers. After a ten-year hiatus they came back in 2006, by which time Barlow’s songwriting had matured and his puppy fat had gone. Off the bat they released three singles (‘Patience’, ‘Shine’, ‘Greatest Day’) which all reached number one; all had an easy charm and milkman-ready melodies, and all trounced the hits they had scored in the nineties. They became the first – and, to date, only – teeny bop act to mature, to naturally grow older with their fans, expanding their appeal and becoming the everymen of pop in the process; twenty years on from their first hit, the statesmen-like Take That could still pack out arenas.9
The Bay City Rollers, meanwhile, have skidded through alcoholism, prison sentences, court cases. You rarely hear their music, even on oldies stations. Their significance was more about female bonding than it was their music, and in this respect they maybe had as much of an influence on girl groups as Frankie Lymon had twenty years earlier – I’d lay money on Bananarama being fans for a start. Progenitors of riot grrrl? That’s probably stretching it. But if you found yourself in the terrible state the former Rollers ended up in, then you’d be clutching at straws for your place in pop history too.
1 It’s notable that pop was not the only source of pin-ups between 1969 and 1971: Paul Newman, Alias Smith and Jones star Pete Duel, even Please Sir actor John Alderton were flirted with by Rave and Fabulous, as chart sensations Jethro Tull and White Plains were never going to be the stuff of teenage fantasies.
2 He was the star of a BBC Man Alive programme called Twinkle Twinkle Little Star which showed just how out of his depth the precocious, middle-class ten-year-old was when confronted with real-life ten-year-old girls. Given Cook and Greenaway’s decidedly adult ‘Something’s Gotten Hold of My Heart’ to launch his career, poor Darren was doomed, back at school, a failed pop star at twelve. Eventually he cut one great glam 45 called ‘Summertime Time’, but by then his five minutes were already up.
3 A bunch of singles for Fontana, Pye and Decca lack the intrigue of Bolan and Bowie’s pre-fame catalogue. ‘Thigh High’ from 1966, a music-hall ode to kinky boots, takes the cake.
4 As a fifties New Orleans rocker, Mac Rebennack had written Jerry Byrne’s electrifying ‘Lights Out’; by the late sixties he was Dr John, ‘the night tripper’, who played spooky swamp blues and whose stage show involved Mardi Gras costumes and voodoo ceremonies.
5 Debut album Rollin’, a number one that pre-dated their brace of number-one singles, included some self-penned songs. One of them, ‘Just a Little Love’, is sweet, shambolic and fragile, an unlikely precursor to the Glasgow indie sound of the eighties.
6 The move from teenybop to grown-up pop would be eliminated by Boyzone and Westlife, who scored twenty UK number ones between them by recording ballads that appealed simultaneously to soft-hearted pubescent girls, their mums and their grandparents (who were old enough to remember the Bachelors’ Irish ballad hits of the sixties). Westlife – Shane Filan, Mark Feehily, Kian Egan, Nicky Byrne and Brian McFadden – had their milksop style perfected on their debut single, ‘Swear It Again’, in 1999. Feehily explained the Westlife rules to the Guardian: ‘A piano intro, Shane starts the song, the drum beat kicks in for the second verse. I sing the second verse and maybe the middle eight, then there’s a key change, a gospel choir and some ad-libs, the end.’ They upset the art/commerce equilibrium. One day I may get round to trying to appreciate their craft, but not just yet.
7 Oddly, the Rollers only had hits in the States with their tougher 45s: ‘Rock ’n’ Roll Love Letter’, ‘Money Honey’ and – pick of the bunch – the foot-stompin’ ‘Saturday Night’, which made number one but flopped completely in Britain. Its chanted chorus became the base material for the Ramones’ ‘Blitzkrieg Bop’ and, thus, their entire career.
8 McKeown was talked into putting the death of Euphemia Clunie out of his mind, both for his sake and for the sake of the band. ‘They didn’t see it from a helpful, human way,’ he told the Guardian in 2005. ‘It wasn’t like, “We’re going to get through this together”, it was more like, “We need you on stage tomorrow, you wee cunt, so you better stop fucking crying.”’ In 1982 Paton was convicted of gross indecency with two teenage boys and served a three-year sentence. In 2007 he was accused, but cleared, of raping Rollers guitarist Pat McGlynn in a hotel room in 1977.
9 Cliff Richard is the only comparable pop figure. He grew older with his audience and expanded it likewise when he hit his eighteenth or so year in the business with ‘Devil Woman’ (UK no. 8, US no. 6 ’76) and later the new pop canary ‘We Don’t Talk Any More’ (UK no. 1, US no. 7 ’79). From the nineties onwards, though, his appeal narrowed more and more until it was largely limited to women around his own age. His legacy – saturnine pin-up in the fifties, clean-living movie star in the sixties, bouffant balladeer in the seventies and reborn MOR synth-popper in the eighties – became more tarnished with each passing year until he was pop’s favourite punchline, its softest target; claiming he was ‘the most radical rock ’n’ roll singer Britain has ever seen’ due to his clean-living lifestyle didn’t help. Take That’s revival has been based on humility – it’ll be interesting t
o see what the public’s perception of them is in another ten years.
35
SEE THAT GIRL: ABBA
The office is just what you’d expect of a Swedish record company whose main attraction is Abba. It’s all bright, clean, stripped pine efficiency. The only thing in the entire room that doesn’t fit with the squeaky clean image is a big, almost life size painting. It’s of a schoolgirl in a gymslip, crisp white blouse unbuttoned, and one breast is exposed. Her discreet and presumably masturbating hand has slipped under her skirt. The style is ultra realism. It’s the only sign of decadence in the whole Abba operation.
Mick Farren, NME, 1976
Abba: The Movie opened in 1977. My whole family went to see it on a Saturday afternoon. Unlike T. Rex, or Gary Glitter, or anyone who had starred in their own movie since the Beatles tore the heart out of the Brill Building world with A Hard Day’s Night, this was a pop film about a group with universal appeal. Still, it was hard to pinpoint exactly why Abba had got so big – if ‘Money, Money, Money’ hadn’t stalled at number three, Abba: The Movie would have been released on the back of six straight number ones. It came, it went. I’d forgotten everything in it apart from the songs and Agnetha’s metallic blonde hair and blue satin pants by the following day. It was boring.
Compared to Elvisitis, Beatlemania or even T. Rextasy, Abba’s planet-conquering success was a conundrum. What did we have? A striking but sulky blonde, a slightly saucier brunette who most of the time looked like she’d just baked a cake, and two men – definitely not boys – who were stereotypical seventies uncles. To a hard-nosed journalist who couldn’t give two hoots about their music, there was one outstanding feature: they were Swedish. Let me paint a picture.
Modern pop was an Anglo-American affair until the late seventies. Britain had more in common with the States – through proximity and, especially, language – than the rest of Europe. Britain absorbed and mirrored the American sound, spitting out the bits it didn’t get or didn’t like, and this was how American pop was filtered and passed on to mainland Europe. Paul Revere and the Raiders couldn’t buy a hit in Britain? Then there was no hope for them anywhere else on this side of the Atlantic. European countries added their own spin to this by adding ingredients – melody, harmony and rhythms – from their own folk and music-hall traditions. Sometimes this worked well, as in France, where yé-yé became a style all of its own, and in Italy, where writers like Gino Paoli and producers like Ennio Morricone concocted a rococo, cinematic ballad style. It also created a hellish kitsch, devoid of all black American influence, known as schlager, a polka-based music which was pop’s dominant European style in the sixties and seventies.1
All of this was a mystery to most locally holidaying Britons until the Eurovision Song Contest suddenly became a significant annual event, like the FA Cup Final. As was true in international football for many years, Britain had stood by and watched every other country compete with each other, sure in the knowledge that British pop was inherently superior. For years, Europe had its own culture of song festivals which were alien to Britain. Songs from, say, the San Remo festival were identifiably Italian – that was where Dusty Springfield first heard ‘Io che non vivo’, her only UK number one when it was retitled ‘You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me’. Britain was content to throw these festivals bones like Kenneth McKellar’s Caruso-in-a-kilt ‘A Man without Love’, our 1966 Eurovision entry. The following year, the BBC decided to up their efforts, screening all potential British Eurovision entries on the primetime Rolf Harris Show, with the hip and continental2 Sandie Shaw singing each one. When Bill Martin and Phil Coulter’s ‘Puppet on a String’, mulching every cliché of European pop, won the contest at a canter, it set a template: dumber than dumb nursery lyrics, and a backing that sounded as if it was played on a euphonium and a xylophone. Presto. The fabled Eurovision sound. It was all our fault.3
By the time Abba entered the contest with ‘Waterloo’ in 1974, Eurovision had become horribly predictable. Britain’s recent entries had seen the sultry Clodagh Rodgers sully herself with ‘Jack in the Box’ and Olivia Newton-John – on the verge of becoming a major country-pop star in the US – singing the none-stompier ‘Long Live Love’, seemingly backed by the elephant orchestra from Dumbo. Abba comprised two songwriters of some years – Björn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson – and their attractive girlfriends. They had the easy appeal and tightness of a family act. And they ignored the Eurovision norm by whacking together something that started like ‘Da Doo Ron Ron’, then quickly worked itself up into a brassy glam-popper with the odd Rachmaninov flourish from Benny on the piano. Roy Wood must have rubbed his beard and nodded appreciatively. It was as obvious a winner as ‘Puppet on a String’ had been in ’67, and it rewrote the rules for future Eurovision entries.
So Abba’s influence made the Eurovision Song Contest a lot more palatable for the next few years. That would not be enough to cement their place in the pantheon, not even for an avid telly watcher like me. Britain was ready to discount them as another Eurovision flash in the pan like Vicky Leandros (‘Come What May’, no. 2 ’72) or Anne Marie David (‘Wonderful Dream’, no. 13 ’73); it didn’t take to follow-ups ‘I Do I Do I Do I Do I Do’, or ‘So Long’, or ‘Ring Ring’. The reaction in Britain and America – using one of only two Swedish cultural totems they could think of (the other was to compare them to Ingmar Bergman, and that wouldn’t work, not just yet) – was to summon up porn references: ‘Belly to belly, butt to butt, Sweden sends us rock and roll smut’ ran a headline in Phonograph. As for the teen mags, Abba were far too old. Bearded Benny and gnomic Björn couldn’t even have been the fantasy subject matter of their own ‘When I Kissed the Teacher’.
But then ‘SOS’ turned up on the airwaves. It was certainly European, it lilted and swayed on a soft Mediterranean breeze, its descending piano intro recalled Georges Delerue’s Truffaut soundtracks. And it was a second hit, a number six in the UK and – more impressively – a number fifteen in the States. Shaking off their lowly Eurovision tag, they presented an eponymous album, a clean start, that no one could ignore: Creem said, ‘“SOS” is surrounded on this LP by so many good tunes that the mind boggles.’ The NME’s Mick Farren reckoned ‘their closest antecedents are the early days of Motown, or maybe Philles. It’s the structure that produces the music that I’m talking about – and also the fact that a frightening amount of work goes into each one of their records.’ From their log cabin in the Stockholm archipelago, Ulvaeus and Andersson now spent six years writing a collection of songs which were the best planned, best edited, most hook-filled, polished, economically tight hits of their era – maybe of any era.
A year after ‘SOS’, they made a record that placed them amongst the greats. ‘Dancing Queen’, from its split-second cascading intro in, never wastes a second. Counter-melodies were Abba’s best friends, and this fitted one into every conceivable nook and cranny – a string line here, a glissando there. ‘Dancing Queen’ also had a precipitous drop, in the style of T. Rex’s greatest singles, from major to minor almost as soon as the vocal comes in, leaving just enough time for the vital ‘oooooh’ to glide into your ear just before it pulls your heart down to your stomach with ‘you can dance, you can jive …’ It’s a rare and magical achievement.
Abba were magpies, always seemingly one step behind pop fashion but not slow enough to spoil the flow. They embraced disco in ’79 with ‘Voulez-Vous’ a year after Saturday Night Fever was the genre’s commercial peak, and mimicked California’s hazy sloth with ‘Name of the Game’ in ’77, just as punk rendered it passé. Even the nu-Spector sound of breakthrough hit ‘Waterloo’ had been perfected a year earlier by Wizzard. Yet their mastery of the studio (nothing has ever sounded more well drilled and glossed than an Abba production) and Stockholm’s distance from the heat and the action of Anglo-American pop ensured a subtly unique and removed sound; imitators from the Netherlands (Luv) and Britain (Brotherhood of Man, the Dooleys), aping the high, tight sound of the Agneth
a/Frida vocals, sounded shrill and weedy without the production meat and might of Ulvaeus/Andersson.
Their influences were hard to divine, and the men gave little away in interviews, but Agnetha and Frida’s harmonies were a mix of plangent Swedish folk and the high nasal cries of the Hollies, who had been bigger in Sweden than anywhere else. No one musician stands out on any of their hits because they don’t sound like anyone played an instrument on them; they all sound like a music box carved from ice. The most unusual ingredient in Abba’s strange magic was the coming together of the two couples, who then both split once the group had become the most successful singles act in the world. Much has been made of the internal ruptures and jealousies that informed Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours but, hell, this was nothing but a night on the couch compared to the full-on nervous breakdown of Abba’s post-split ballads.
‘The Winner Takes It All’ (UK no. 1, US no. 8 ’80) is an adult pop song. No room for doubt, this was the story of someone put through the mill, pop’s equivalent of Scenes from a Marriage, with its grisly, unresolved feelings of love, memories, jealousy and confusion. ‘I don’t want to talk’, it starts, as anyone going through a divorce invariably does before opening up with indecent candour. Its most naked moment is sung with an awful mix of hope and bitterness, just as the music dips to near silence, allowing its desperation to sound as raw as possible: ‘But tell me, does she kiss like I used to kiss you?’ It’s the sound of the Shangri-Las grown up, two kids upstairs asleep, a bottle of red wine open on the kitchen table. Sung by Agnetha, alone at the microphone, to her ex-husband in the control booth, ‘The Winner Takes It All’ was pure musical theatre, but frightening because it was clearly real – anyone listening knew they were intruding on the private grief of an ex-couple – and it outsold all of their singles from the previous two years.