Just in case it wasn’t already obvious, “Excerpts from a Teenage Rock Opera” is no more. It has, like Monty Python’s infamous parrot, “gone to make its maker”.
A lack of time and an inate lack of ability to concentrate on anything for more than 5 consecutive minutes means the sojourn into my crappy teenage years is now over.
Plus – and to be honest – having glanced at my later diaries things start to get a little too “personal”, and thus not entirely suitable for broadcasting, so to speak.
I thank all EFA70sTRO readers for your time and ludicrous patience. Sorry the ride was not as lengthy as you perhaps expected.
Family issues have taken precedence over my normal ‘lazy’ existence and so I am finding myself with less and less time to sit at a computer and tap out new EFA70sTRO entries. Plus, to add a little difficulty, I am some 4000 miles away from where my diaries actually reside.
Thank you to everyone who have sent me messages varying from genuine concern as to my whereabouts all the way to surprising (to me) “love this blog, when is it coming back”? remarks.
Hang in there folks – I’m going to try and get back to it as soon as 2012 ‘life’ allows me to! Apologies for the extended ‘hiccup’ in delivering you my own excuse for literary nonsensicality.
“Work. Got the new Sparks and Roxy Music LP’s – both great. Nig came round in evening and we went down the Clock. Got quite pi–ed”
What a great day! Two important albums added to my burgeoning collection then drinking until drunk in the evening!
Sparks’ Indiscreet – with it’s bizarre cover (where DID they get a scrap plane from?) – is perhaps my favourite of their output as it is crammed full of some fabulous memorable songs. Here’s a few highlights…
Things kick off in grand style with the military two-step of “Hospitality On Parade“, Ron Mael’s sly dig at America’s independence and its later obsession for mass consumerism. For me, this has always represented one of THE weirdest album openers I have ever heard but it does set out the table for the feast of great songs that follow it.
“Without Using Hands” carries the refrain “Oh, what a lovely city, city, city, city”, referring to Paris, and is a snappy little number if somewhat bizarre in lyrical content, mixing as it does certain ‘sexual favours’ with that of someone’s personal disability following a terrorist attack. No, I am not making that up.
“Get In The Swing” was the second big hit single off the album. A real cracker of a pop song it was too!
“Under The Table With Her” is beautiful. It would appear to the be the tale of two dogs hiding underneath a banquet table at a fancy-schmancy gathering of bigwigs. The strings are so crisp and becoming it suckers you in just long enough to spit you out with a premature finish.
“How Are You Getting Home?” is another Ron Mael ode to ‘getting some’, in this case from a girl he’s met at a party to whom he want to give a ride to. In every sense of the phrase.
“Tits” is as close to a drinking song as you’ll ever get from the Mael brothers. Apparently set in a bar it tells the tale of two beer buddies slowly getting drunk with one of them complaining that his wife’s …erm… breasts are now for the sole pleasure of his new-born child. Motto: May as well get drunk instead!
“Looks, Looks, Looks” was the biggie, the single which sent sales of the album soaring. The single reached #26 in the singles chart, whilst the album eventually peaked at number 18 in the album chart.
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Roxy Music’s “Siren” was – as far as I am concerned – the last of what I consider to be their ‘classic output’. (For me, 1979’s “Manifesto” represented the beginning of the end of Bryan Ferry’s songwriting skills).
It’s a bit hodge-podgy and not helped by the presence of Ferry’s then- girlfriend Jerry Hall gracing the cover. I never, ever thought her to be attractive and certainly not a patch on previous Roxy cover girls like Marilyn Cole or Kari-Ann Muller.
I have waxed lyrically about the album’s opener “Love is the Drug” before, and I maintain that it is one of THE finest album openers of all time.
“End of the Line” features some nice violin and slide guitar but is a little too ‘ploddy’ for my liking, plus Ferry’s vocals are double-tracked somehow making the sentiment of the lyrics diluted.
“Sentimental Fool” finds Ferry trying a little bit too hard to emulate the ‘noisescape’ pioneered by Brian Eno on the debut album, the song itself taking forever to get going and turn itself into anything melodic. And then when it does it’s… well, disappointing.
Side One’s closer “Whirlwind” is MUCH more like it. Loud, bouncy and fun, Ferry’s quirky vocal stylings to the fore.
Side Two kicks off with “She Sells“. Actually it’s more of a mis-kick. It sounds very weak until Andy Mackay’s sax kicks in to liven things up.
“Could it Happen to Me” feels like another sloppily-written song, pre-dating the whole ‘coffee table’ sound Ferry would later become FAR too enthusiastic about.
Then – almost unexpectedly – along comes another corker.
“Both Ends Burning” feels like classic Roxy. And by classic I mean ‘first three albums Roxy’. Soaring sax, choppy guitars, bongos (yes bongos!) and Ferry’s lyrics all over the place and yet in the same place all at once. I love it… and there’s no wonder it was plucked as the follow-up single to “Love is the Drug”. It’s maybe the only other cut on the album that would have sounded good on the radio at the time. It reached a lowly #25 on the British chart, failing to even make an appearance on the Billboard chart across the pond.
The penultimate cut “Nightingale” is another clunker and doesn’t prepare you for the mighty “Just Another High” which brings the album to a close.
I’m not surprised that Roxy disbanded as soon as the tour support of “Siren” was completed. The album has three, maybe four, worthy tracks, the rest all sounding very limp. Still, four and half albums of classic rock music isn’t too bad is it?
“A Touch of Class at college. Film was OK, nothing brilliant though. Got off again avec Caitlin. Broke panelling”
Another movie night organised by the college coffee club. Time again to get the film projector out of storage and fiddle with it endlessly until we could get the celluloid to run through all the cranks and gears properly. When it worked it was great… when it didn’t the audience would invariably heckle.
As my 1975 review suggested “A Touch of Class” was an OK film. In retrospect – I’ve watched it several times since – it very much feels like a film borne of the seventies. A little bit morally bankrupt but not so bankrupt it would offend. Glenda Jackson & George Segal play the main protagonists, a pair of illicit lovers, in a a relatively snappy comedy. The first hour of the story is really laugh-out-loud stuff then it seems to trip over its own discarded underwear and gets too serious for its own good. Shame really because Glenda Jackson is her usual brilliant self and it’s maybe 30 minutes away from being considered a classic.
I don’t think “broke panelling” was some kind of euphemism for anything ‘smutty’, but who can tell after 35 years?
“Wired up stereo at college. Talked to Caitlin. In the evening Nig came round. Roxy on TOTP”
Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be…
Don’t you find it amazing that Roxy Music appearing on Top of the Pops commanded a diary entry?
But that’s what it was like back in ‘the old days’. An ‘event’. A new song was rarely accompanied by any kind of video media, but even when it was you had to wait weeks – sometimes months – to see it. Any performance on TV was seen once – when it was broadcast – and then all you could do was somehow wish you might see it again.
3 television channels – BBC’s 1 + 2 and ITV – and that was it. Top of the Pops was on once a week – Thursday nights – and even then viewers were given no advance warning about what acts or what songs might be featured. You had to guess who might be on, based on how your favourites fared on the charts the previous Sunday. If a single went down there was NO chance of seeing it again. At least not for a couple of decades and the advent of both the VCR and the ‘television repeats’ culture.
Kids today have it MADE! Not that I am jealous of what they have over what we had back in 1975. Not at all.
In other news it looks like practised my chatting-up techniques on Caitlin and displayed my wiring skillz to be fellow students.
I know what you might be thinking, but no, this blog has not been abandoned.
At least I don’t think so?!
I just have so much else involving me at the moment it’s been difficult to find the moments to sit down and get into one of my pithy moods to write a handful of new posts.
I am a fifty-something ex-pat Brit transplanted into America’s Mid-West. When I finally got around to unpacking all the boxes I shipped across the Atlantic, I found the “schoolboy diaries” I dutifully wrote in during the 1970’s.
I decided, as a fun endeavour, to document, share and comment upon many of the diary entries.
Posts will be in chronological order starting in 1972 and will gently travel from my 14-year old insecure geeky phase through to my involvement in the UK ‘punk movement’ at the end of the decade.
I hope other people find the project to be entertaining
Don’t you find it amazing that Roxy Music appearing on Top of the Pops commanded a diary entry?
Excerpts from a 70's Teenage Rock Opera 