Who invented punk music anyway? We can be certain it wasn’t the Sex Pistols and The Clash, and glam-rock trash aesthetic embracers The New York Dolls definitely didn’t. Iggy and the Stooges? Well, there’s some credibility there. Maybe The Velvet Underground. That takes us back to 1967, but what about The Troggs? Of course, the real answer is “nobody” since, like all genres of music, punk is both an amalgam of what came before it and something emergent in its own right – there’s no unique progenitor, just a sequence of them. And there’s no correct answer to “Who invented punk”. But “Wild Thing” with its profoundly simple three-chord verse and two-chord chorus, played by a band who sound like they’ll never bother to learn any more, delivered with a snarled vocal over primitively-recorded instruments? Well, that sounds pretty much like the punk scene that would materialise a decade after Reg Presley and his merry band of troglodytes threw the hand grenade of “Wild Thing” at the public and then ran away gleefully to see what the explosive effect would be.
Q. What’s so great about “We Gotta Get Out Of This Place” by the Animals?
A. Everything.
I mean, as a band the Animals are best known for two songs and this one is probably, and appropriately, number two after “House Of The Rising Sun”. And there’s clearly no denying how great “House Of The Rising Sun” is, because that would be insane. It’s a melodramatic classic, full of brooding Southern Gothic, pain and loss. It’s an amazing song, and almost anything would be eclipsed by a song of that magnitude. And yet here’s “We Gotta Get Out Of This Place” popping up to prove that almost comprehensively wrong.
By some distance the best song covered so far, Petula Clark’s “Downtown” is an easy stand-out in 1964 music. If 1963 saw the start of what we think of as “the Sixties” in a cultural sense, 1964 is where that seed really bloomed. Everything in 1964 was the arrival of the Sixties. The vast majority of that cultural momentum comes, naturally, from The Beatles, and their complete domination over the first half of the year means hardly any other music even got a look-in. “Downtown” came out at the end of 1964, when things had calmed down a little, but so many bands that we think of as quintessentially Sixties really found their footing during this year. Some of them were high-quality mainstays of the music scene – The Rolling Stones, The Who, The Kinks – and some were destined to clog up cheap, tacky compilations and nostalgia television forever – Manfred Mann, Dave Clark Five, Herman’s Hermits and many, many others. The sheer number of bands that broke through in 1964 is remarkable, even while so many of them prove Sturgeon’s Law. Petula Clark falls into neither camp – more than simply nostalgia but never quite destined to be a name in lights for all time – and “Downtown” doesn’t fit conveniently into a year whose material is otherwise fairly easy to categorise.
Another feature of the charts which has been lost to time is the idea of multiple artists releasing the same song around roughly the same time. In this case we have the Number Two hit “Do You Want To Know A Secret”, a comparatively slight Lennon/McCartney* number from the debut Beatles album Please Please Me, which Billy J Kramer knocked out as a single the same year that album was released.
Tragically, contrast was only discovered in the late 60’s…
Some years are easier than others when it comes to choosing material. Ray Charles very nearly had it this time out, though it would likely mean discussing either “I Can’t Stop Loving You” or “You Don’t Know Me”, neither of which are remotely his best material and both of which are syrupy slop. Elvis rears his inevitable bequiffed head again but will not be distracting us. “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” made it to Number 2, though discussing it would consist of a lot of legal talk about how artists get screwed over copyright. Anyone for “The Loco-motion”? No? Fine, then let’s go with Chubby Checker, owner of the award for the most successful single in Billboard 100 chart history. That song – “The Twist” – isn’t what we’re talking about this week though. Instead we’re discussing “Let’s Twist Again”.
We could have been talking about Elvis. “A Mess Of Blues” made it to the number two slot, but it’s not a terrifically inspiring song and it’s exactly nobody’s idea of his best performance, despite some nice honky-tonk piano. We could have been talking about Roy Orbison. His voice is one of the great achievements of Western civilization, and even when the material faltered that most perfect of vocals never did – even up to his death he sounded perfect. And the song would have been “Only The Lonely”, which… well, it’s amazing. But no. Instead, we kick this nonsense off with Eddie Cochrane.
A series exploring the songs which almost – but not quite – made it to the top of the charts across the span of four decades.
Hello! And welcome to my latest excuse to ramble on about music with this, We’re Number Two. It’s a series of articles spanning four decades, from 1960 to 1999, covering a song which made it to Number Two in the charts. Hence, you know, the name. Plenty gets written about the chart toppers but sometimes it’s nice to spend a bit of time discussing the songs that almost – but never quite – made it.
The only criteria for entry is that the song in question must have hit the number two position on the charts in either the UK or the US – it doesn’t matter if it went in at Number Two, if Number Two was the song’s highest charting position, or if the song went in at number one and sank back to Number Two. As long as it’s held that slightly coveted position and that’s the song’s most meaningful position, it’s eligible. And I’ll be talking about songs that mostly interest me for whatever reason rather than necessarily that year’s best known songs, so anyone desperate to find out my stance on the Bay City Rollers will just have to be disappointed, I fear. There shall be no repetition of artists – solo artists who were in a band are eligible – so for example I could talk about The Beatles and John Lennon, but not two Beatles singles nor two John Lennon singles, and let’s not have the Plastic Ono Band making life any more difficult for us than it needs to be. As ever, I shall be dispensing with the twin straightjackets of objectivity and fan consensus.
The seminal and highly influential 70’s / 80’s series, introduced.
What’s The Topic?Blakes 7
Blakes 7 (or is it Blake’s 7? No.) is a British science-fiction series that ran from 1978 until 1981 on the BBC. Although not especially well known in the U.S. and often lumped in with the pile of the many, many, many sci-fi series that got knocked out in the 70’s it is nevertheless one of the more influential and well worth exploring. Babylon 5, Deep Space Nine, Firefly and, especially, Farscape owe a huge debt to its serialized storytelling, dark edge and focus on character, as well as its extreme pessimism. It was created on the spur of the moment in a pitch meeting by TV writer Terry Nation – best known as the creator of Doctor Who’s Daleks back in 1963, but also an absurdly prolific TV writer on both sides of the Atlantic – who described it as “the Dirty Dozen in space”. From exceedingly modest beginnings it went on to critical acclaim but suffered from an absolutely miniscule budget which often couldn’t keep pace with the inventiveness of the concept or scripts.
Electronica’s most enduring and successful stars, introduced.
What’s The Topic? Pet Shop Boys
It seems hard to imagine that Pet Shop Boys (never the Pet Shop Boys) have been around for thirty years and counting, but they have been, you know, and have gone on to be the most successful duo in British music history. Formed in 1981 and still turning out engaging, interesting, and challenging material all these years later, Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe’s somewhat unlikely survival in an ever-shifting pop and electronic music landscape is a testament not only to the quality of the material but to their inventiveness and their refusal to be pigeonholed or defined in any way but their own. The electronic band were a permanent fixture of the late 80’s singles charts, and while there best-known work remains their earlier material they have continued to turn out interesting, challenging, emotional, pop music.
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