The Rocky Horror Show’s London cast album was released in fall 1973, just weeks before Richard and Kimi O’Brien emerged in their own right as the duo Kimi and Ritz, and the first of the three singles they would record over the ensuing eighteen months. (See previous chapter.)
They in turn kicked off what amounts to a micro-industry of Rocky Horror Show–related recordings, sufficient now to jam a well-stocked record collection, and featuring no less than five of the original London cast, beginning with Columbia, the groupie turned headline attraction.
Getting the Fever
Little Nell gained her first extracurricular studio experience in 1974, when she was recruited as a guest vocalist on the single “Tuff Little Surfer Boy” by a UK band called Truth and Beauty.
Another of O’Brien and Co.’s Rich Teaboy Productions, Truth and Beauty was, in fact, a one-off outfit featuring actors Jonathan Kramer and Perry Bedden—a Transylvanian in the Picture Show, but later to establish himself as the longest-running Riff-Raff in The Rocky Horror Show’s history.
Their record went nowhere, but Little Nell’s recording career was off and running. Signing to A&M Records (who distributed Ode, the label that carried the movie soundtrack), she released the first of four singles spread out between 1975 and 1978, almost all of them springing from the pens of Richard Hartley and Brian Thomson.
“Do the Swim,” “Stilettos and Lipstick” (both compiled onto the EP The Musical World of Little Nell (Aquatic Teenage Sex and Squalor) in 1976) and “See You Round Like a Record” all bear the unmistakable imprimatur of Columbia, a voice that one either loves or loathes, loaded with a gigglesome quirkiness even when she wasn’t singing.
But her take on the old standard “Fever,” all whispered purr and pout and set to a slinky disco rhythm, was a huge club hit, and while none of her singles sold especially well, Nell did win a savage slice of televisual controversy when she appeared on British television’s London Weekend Show to perform her debut single, “Do the Swim”—and accidentally reprised the pool scene in the Rocky Horror Picture Show by exposing her nipples to the watching audience.
“Who would have thought that forty years later, we’d still be talking about that too?” Campbell asked ripitup.com.au when the subject came up in an interview. “That bathing suit that didn’t fit properly! That blooper became a little cult itself . . . I look at that now and it’s so charming and I look like such a trooper.”
Teaming up with Richard Hartley, Nell herself cowrote “Beauty Queen” for the 1980 movie The Alternative Miss World; it was released that same year as her final 45, while she also performed a single song, “Kid’s Good” (a duet with Beth Porter, playing her boss, Kitty) in Rock Follies of 77, the second of the television series that finally brought Julie Covington, the original Janet in the first London cast, the mainstream attention she deserved.
Rock Follies
It is one of the great tragedies of Rocky Horror history that no recordings exist of Covington’s tenure with the show. Certainly her costars have all spoken glowingly of her contributions; and, remembering that she was first and foremost a singer, and a jolly fine one at that, one can only imagine what power she must have brought to her role during the five weeks in which she played it.
She was already contracted to appear at the South Bank Theatre, though; then moved on further, to a costarring role in television’s Rock Follies.
The brainchild of writer and lyricist Howard Schuman, with music by Roxy Music’s Andy Mackay, Rock Follies was, when it first showed up on the TV schedules in February 1976, considered something of a shocker. At least if reasonably bad language, mild alcohol and drug use, and vaguely sexual situations are to be our guide; because, in the mid-1970s, that was often all it took to get the tabloids hot and bothered.
Rock Follies purported to tell the true-to-life story of just what it meant to be a female rocker in the male-dominated world of serious (as opposed to frivolous, frock-wearing pretty pop) music. And not just a single female rocker, either; Rock Follies focused on a full band of female rockers—or at least a full front line, a three-girl vocal attack.
The musos themselves were, sadly, all guys, which sundry watching cynics reckoned immediately pushed the Little Ladies (as they were, so unfortunately, known) into a very poor third place in the boogie babe stakes, behind the American rockers Fanny and the cartoon combo Josie and the Pussycats.
Nevertheless, the show worked.
Covington, Rula Lenska and Charlotte Cornwell were the ladies in question, all considered unknowns at the time, at least in the eyes of the mainstream media, but also amply equipped to deal with it.
Within less than a year of Rock Follies’ debut, with the soundtrack album already a proven hit, Covington was offered the lead role in the latest Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber production, Evita. She turned it down, but nevertheless topped the UK chart with her reading of the same play’s “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina.” Lenska was star of the upcoming horror spoof Queen Kong, and Cornwell was starring in a series of Bernard Shaw plays in repertory.
Not that any of them took such successes for granted. Even before she read the Rock Follies script, Covington, in particular, had firsthand experience of just how harsh the music industry can be, whatever one’s gender. She told the TV Times magazine, “My first memories of the music business were after I made my first record and was out of work. I ended up in a store in London, actually selling my own record. Painful business, music.”
The original onstage Janet, Julie Covington (left), with Rock Follies costars Charlotte Cornwell and Rula Lenska.
© GAB Archive/Getty Images
Running to two seasons of six episodes apiece, Rock Follies’ popularity among the viewing audience was not necessarily repeated critically. Indeed, it is still reasonably fashionable in certain circles to cite Rock Follies among the principal reasons why television should never be allowed to try and depict the truth about rock ’n’ roll—namely because the bits that are actually worth televising would never get past the censors, and most everything else eventually becomes no more thrilling than any other job of work.
For the same reason that plumbers do not write songs about plumbing (again, at least in the pre-cable age; today, there’s probably a reality show coming right at you), and few people would ever want to watch a housepainter at work across the course of a thirteen-week season (ditto), even the most successful rock ’n’ roll career essentially boils down to an awful lot of time spent doing some awfully mundane things. The travel, the arguments, the tuning of instruments . . . it’s boring. Move along, please; nothing to film here.
Rock Follies (and its clunkily titled second series, Rock Follies of ’77) itself wasn’t boring, but even writer Schuman admitted that it wasn’t especially real life, either. He told the New Musical Express, “It’s not intended to work on that level. It’s intended to be a representation of the rock world.”
In fact, Rock Follies began life as a television play called Censored Scenes from King Kong, featuring Covington and several other Rock Follies regulars, but destined to be canned by the BBC. A stage version, however, was subsequently reprieved for a 1977 run at the Open Space in London, featuring Little Nell and offering a brand new origin tale for the Little Ladies, as the Spectator’s review makes plain.
[It] is about a man’s search for certain clips from the film which, he believes, show the ape having sex with Fay Wray. He’s discouraged by the skepticism of his friend Benchgelter who is trying to launch a new girl band. At first we share that skepticism, but as Stephen pursues his search . . . and finds himself uncovering not just an act of censorship but a global heroin racket, we begin to think he’s on to something; and the revelation that the man behind the heroin racket is none other than Benchgelter is of course a classic Chandler-type climax.
“It’s a play that deals with, among other things, a guy who tries to manipulate two very unlikely women into becoming a pop group,” Schuman told the New Musical Express. “I was interested in developing that style—which was kind of surrealism—which is directed toward a realistic view of life . . . this is the birth of the style of Rock Follies, which on one level is a kind of pastiche of a Hollywood musical and then turns upside down to make some points about where we are in the ’70s.”
A lot, in fact, like The Rocky Horror Show. Only with less transvestites. Or maybe not.
Short-haired and bearded, leather jacketed and street savvy, a million miles removed from Doctor Frank-N-Furter, Tim Curry made a guest appearance in Rock Follies’ second series as the out-of-touch but arrogant rock star Stevie Streeter.
So did Little Nell, appearing as secretary Sandra LeMon, whose responsibilities include making the gold records that pop stars hang so proudly on their walls. She doesn’t, incidentally, use any gold.
Elsewhere, Angela Bruce, London’s second Magenta, appeared as Gloria; James Warwick, the second Brad Majors, was Nigel. It was not quite a case of “hail, hail, the gang’s all here,” but it came close at times. And Rock Follies really is a lot better than many revisionist histories would have you believe.
Covington’s own musical career continued in top gear. “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina” was followed by chart entries for both Rock Follies’ “O.K.” and her own cover of Alice Cooper’s “Only Women Bleed.” Her eponymous debut album in 1978 included a delectable version of Richard and Linda Thompson’s “I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight” and a cover of Kate Bush’s “The Kick Inside,” recorded just months after the newly launched Bush released her own version. Covington also originated the role of Beth, the Parson’s wife, in Jeff Wayne’s musical version of The War of the Worlds.
Number One in Red China
Rayner Bourton joined the record release party in 1977, as one-third of the trio Daryl, Rayner, Steve, with drummer Daryl Read and guitarist Steve Dawson. Their Let the Good Stones Roll EP was a four-song tribute to the Rolling Stones, taken from the soundtrack to the stage musical of the same name—a Bourton creation that played the Ambassador Theatre in London in 1977.
The record did nothing in its creators’ homeland, but it is said by some to be the monster hit in the People’s Republic of China that Bourton alluded to when he briefly returned to the role of Rocky in London, right around the same time. Penning his biography for the theater program, he described himself as having “the distinction of being the only useless monster based on the Frankenstein theme to have a No. 1 hit record in Communist China.”
And Wherefore Steven Streeter?
Tim Curry, too, had been busy on the musical front, although his career did get off to something of a stumbling false start.
In early 1976, with work on The Rocky Horror Picture Show complete, Curry went into the studio to cut a full album for movie producer Lou Adler’s Ode label.
It would prove an eclectic, even eccentric bag. The nine-song set initially threatened to pick up precisely where the movie soundtrack left off, with the best of Curry’s vocals stepping straight out of Doctor Frank-N-Furter’s diction and demeanor (the delicious “Biting My Nails”).
Then suddenly and, perhaps suicidally, it was all-change, as Curry lurched into a generic mid-’70s soft-rock vein, oddly reminiscent of some of Bryan Ferry’s more conventional moments. Which was fitting, because the younger Ferry, captured in full flight across the first couple of Roxy Music albums, was often reminiscent of Doctor Frank-N-Furter’s wilder excesses.
But it might also explain why the album never came out. It would be another thirty-four years before the sessions were released, as the aptly titled From the Vaults download, and fans could at last rejoice to the music’s most memorable moments.
Those that did dance on the edge of innuendo.
Those that were set against a musical landscape that flirted with reggae, R&B and rock, before slowing for a pout through the Supremes’ “Baby Love,” with Curry sounding like nothing so much as a sinister David Cassidy.
Those that made you wish for more of the same.
With his appearance in Rock Follies of 77 to whet both his and his audience’s appetites, it would be 1978 before Curry finally released an album. The predominantly covers-heavy Read My Lips was built around a storming version of the Move’s “Brontosaurus,” an impassioned lament through “Anyone Who Had a Heart” and a bagpipe-laden romp through “Wake Nicodemus,” all recorded with a superstar roster of accompanying musicians, including Nils Lofgren, former Lou Reed/Alice Cooper sideman Dick Wagner, sometime David Bowie colleague and keyboard player Michael Kamen, and producer Bob Ezrin.
Even with such firepower on display, it was not perfect. It’s never a good idea to reggaefy the Beatles, especially when it’s the gentle “I Will” that is squirming helplessly before you; and, while the smoky nightclub ballad “Sloe Gin” may have seemed a good idea at the time, a chorus that effectively repeats “I’m so fucking lonely” over and over again really does belabor the point beyond all redemption. Although it did allow the record company’s marketing department to attach a now-deliciously quaint warning sticker to the album’s front cover.
Dear Programmer: The songs ‘Sloe Gin’ and ‘Alan’ each contain one of the seven dirty words and are not suitable for airplay.
There’s seven? Oooh, hold on while I find out what the other six are.
Still, generally friendly reviews, the loyalty (or curiosity) of the burgeoning Rocky Horror Picture Show cult and a general audience that simply enjoyed the album for what it was prompted Curry onto the road for a US tour that delighted onlookers with both highlights from the album and a closing, piano and voice-alone croon through “I’m Going Home.”
A bootleg recording from his show at San Francisco’s Old Waldorf in 1978 preserves one such performance, the audience growing more and more excited as an extended instrumental intro teases them with hints of the melody, and then erupting into screams of delirium as Curry finally delivers the opening line. Plus, it’s such a perfect song with which to end a concert.
Buoyed by such enthusiastic reactions, Curry quickly cut a follow-up, the self-professedly “thump and bump”-ing Fearless. And this time, there was a response. Two minor American hit singles spun off the LP, “I Do the Rock” and “Paradise Garage”—whose accompanying video included an appearance by Dori Hartley, one of the ringleaders of The Rocky Horror Picture Show’s Waverly Theater success.
It was a tougher, more confident album than its predecessor, with the returning Dick Wagner a fine foil for Curry’s burgeoning writing ambitions, as well as coproducing the set with Michael Kamen. Covers were kept to a Joni Mitchell–shaped minimum, and again Curry toured the United States, putting on an energetic show that highlighted the best of both LPs, but this time firmly omitting any reference whatsoever to The Rocky Horror Show—unless one counts the occasional tart comment or glance he aimed toward any audience member who might have the bad taste to request a movie favorite.
Indeed, he seemed to be taking the role of Rock Star very seriously indeed, with the distance he drew between himself and Doctor Frank-N-Furter presumably designed to encourage others to do the same thing.
Sadly, at that point in time at least, audiences and critics did not want Curry to be a straightforward rocker. They wanted him to be outrageous and camp, to mince and make remarks. To terrify Brad and Janet. And when he refused, they lost interest.
A third Tim Curry LP, Simplicity, was released in 1981, a glorious child of its times that tapped into currents being served already by the Police, Elvis Costello, Graham Parker and Squeeze (it even included a smartly rearranged cover of their “Take Me, I’m Yours”). Again, Michael Kamen and Co. offered up a backdrop that overwhelms with flash, an electrifying brew through which danceable beats and excoriating guitars (courtesy of former David Bowie axeman Earl Slick) slice through whatever you might have been expecting to hear. There’s a version of “I Put a Spell on You” that totally creams all competition.
And it went absolutely nowhere.
The second of many . . . the Rocky movie soundtrack helped kickstart a world of musical fantasies.
Author’s collection
The Musical History of Betty Blokk
Curry was not the only rock ’n’ rolling Frank, however. Ziggy Byfield, one of his successors on the Chelsea stage, scored a Japanese hit with his take on “Sweet Transvestite” in 1975 (and later released a most enjoyable album); and Paul Jabara, who replaced him at the Los Angeles Roxy, pursued a disco career in the late 1970s.
The most intoxicating of them all, however, was Reg Livermore. Australia’s first Furter maintained a solid stream of solo recordings through the 1970s and early 1980s, drawn from his one-man stage shows and effortlessly recapturing the sheer manic joie de vivre that was Reg Unleashed.
Across a dozen sides of vinyl, the albums that celebrated the shows The True History of Ned Kelly, Betty Blokk Buster Follies, Wonder Woman and Sacred Cow are largely performed in character, with all four glorified by Livermore constantly slipping between costumes and guises.
A mime, a clown, a bum, a ballerina and a “brassy belter” range through Betty Blokk Buster, for example, and the selected songs move effortlessly into each character’s repertoire. The impecunious “parakeet of high fashion,” Charity Reg, performs Cabaret’s “Money Money” as gloriously as the bare-bottomed Betty bemoans her addiction to nicotine, complete with appropriately phlegmy sound effects.
Included elsewhere in Livermore’s repertoire, again in the brilliantly realized guise of his various onstage characters, were an almost tender rendering of Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side,” a bevy of Leo Sayer covers, a cheeky version of Bowie’s Space Oddity” and a positively smoldering “Surabaya Johnny.”
And that’s before you encounter his squawking apes-at-the-opera ode to marijuana; his snappy stab at Elton John’s “Better Off Dead”; and the overall sheer love of song that Livermore then twisted through the needs of his work, to transform into an eloquent beast of breathtaking elegance.
Plus, nothing can eclipse the moment when the unsuspecting listener realizes he’s rewired Yvonne Fair’s disco classic “It Should Have Been Me” as a stentorian torch song.
Livermore also turned in a beautifully camp interpretation of Ray Davies’s “Celluloid Heroes,” the heart-stopping lament for Hollywood’s fallen angels that Tim Curry, too, was prone to perform during his 1978 American tour.
Play them side by side and stage your very own international Frank-Off.