Tune thy Music to thy heart …
THOMAS CAMPION
In 1972, I bought my first single and began to study the charts. I lost sight of Donny Osmond and David Cassidy immediately. The single was Chicory Tip’s ‘Son of My Father’, stomping and repetitive but made strange by the swirls and wails of a Moog synthesiser, a ghost caught in a machine.
I was starting to see pop in terms of style and structure, and Top of the Pops was my map. I knew all those teenagers crowding around the presenter and the bands were real. They looked it – awkward, smirking, dancing as if they’d never heard music before. I began to understand pop as a construction. This was not a spontaneous party scene. These people had applied, had queued and were now being herded and prompted through the evening (which was probably not evening at all). Marooned among them were bands I was beginning to classify. Like a child filling a stamp album or collecting eggs, I needed to create order and name names.
Nursery
Melanie – ‘Brand New Key’
The New Seekers – ‘I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing’
Wings – ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’
The Royal Scots Dragoon Guards Band
– ‘Little Drummer Boy’
Playground
Benny Hill – ‘Ernie, the Fastest Milkman in the West’
Chuck Berry – ‘My Ding-a-Ling’
Vitamins
Michael Jackson – ‘Rockin’ Robin’
Little Eva – ‘The Loco-Motion’
Sulk
Alice Cooper – ‘School’s Out’
T. Rex – ‘Children of the Revolution’
Slade – ‘Mama Weer All Crazee Now’
Mott the Hoople – ‘All the Young Dudes’
Smirk
Hot Butter – ‘Popcorn’
Lieutenant Pigeon – ‘Mouldy Old Dough’
Sweets
Lynsey de Paul – ‘Sugar Me’
The Supremes – ‘Automatically Sunshine’
Oompah
Jimmy Osmond – ‘Long-Haired Lover From Liverpool’
Jeff Beck – ‘Hi-Ho Silver Lining’
Motorbike
Gary Glitter – ‘Rock ’n’ Roll (Parts I & II)’
The Shangri-Las – ‘Leader of the Pack’
Squirm
Love Unlimited – ‘Walkin’ in the Rain with the One I Love’
Roberta Flack – ‘The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face’
Who?
Don McLean – ‘Vincent’
Roxy Music – ‘Virginia Plain’
David Bowie – ‘The Jean Genie’
Bread – ‘The Guitar Man’
Elton John – ‘Rocket Man’
T. Rex – ‘Metal Guru’
10CC – ‘Donna’
?
Procol Harum – ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’
Diana Ross – ‘Doobeedoo’Ndoobe Doobeedoo’Ndoobe
Doobeedoo’Ndoo’
Gilbert O’Sullivan – ‘Ooh-Wakka-Doo-Wakka-Day’
Moody Blues – ‘Nights in White Satin’
What was a light fandango? Who was Vincent? Who was the Guitar Man, the Star Man, the Rocket Man, Jean Genie, Virginia Plain, Donna, the Metal Guru?
All these were in the charts in 1972. Some I associate with being six and some with being sixteen. I suppose at ten I was something of both.