A strange, not all that successful mixture of boys past, present, and future: a song from teenpop’s hungry birth, big beats and self-consciousness from the fag-end of glam, and a mid-tempo harmony-heavy arrangement which hints at Westlife to come. The slowdown and rhythmic emphasis shifts the mood of the song from excitement to confidence: Holly’s original is a sack of jumping hormones and itching palms, Mud’s update is more self-assured, self-satisfied and a lot less likeable, even though the harmonies work pretty well. On this YouTube performance the band look awkward, even in the comedy drag bit: pop’s brave new rollerworld really didn’t suit them well.
Score: 4
[Logged in users can award their own score]
For some reason the usual ways of putting pictures and special fields (like the mark out of 10!) didn’t work on this post.
I will amend but for the record:
#369, May 3rd 1975, 4/10.
what went wrong? (added the data now. not the image tho)
I don’t know! It all worked well except when I tried to add the fields it just reset to “enter custom field” rather than them showing up.
I’ve always harboured a grudge against this one since it managed to keep one of my all-time favourite singles – “Lovin’ You” by Minnie Riperton – at number two. At this late stage all I can really say about this is that it’s a fair enough try to do something different – I think this was their “we don’t need Chinn and Chapman” moment – but it doesn’t really work; it sounds underpowered and a bit naff, particularly Ellie Hope’s profoundly unsexy voiceover halfway through. The basic beat was used much better by RAK labelmates Arrows on their contemporaneous “I Love Rock And Roll.”
Consider how bad it could have been as a straight cover version, and how close it comes to actually working.
Yes, it’s the almost machine-like harmonies that make this version. I also love the anticipation/hesitation before “hesitatin'”, although someone will probably now tell me this was also a feature of the Holly original.
(lord sukrat meanwhile overcome with a wave of joan jett appreciation)
Minnie Riperton’s offering is one of my all-time favourites too and it stays well ahead of the incumbent in my affections regardless of its highest chart position.
As with the last Mud number one, I was familiar with this for years without realising it was Mud. On the other hand I’m not sure I thought it was anyone else because I always associated Mud with Tiger Feet and both this and Lonely This Christmas don’t sound anything like that!
A few years after this, it’s in the back of my mind when I’n arranging Oh Boy! as a novelty musical ensemble performed by the teachers for laughs at a school concert. I played recorders, crumhorns etc in a mediaeval band that played around East Riding folk clubs at the time, and the idea was to give a familiar tune an offbeat twist and I did an a capella version (billed as taken from the Ilex Gemmata, a mediaeval manuscript recently discovered in the annals of York Minster) without much thinking I was directly imitating something so recent. I don’t think it came off a fraction as well as the other one of these novelties I did – Falling In Love Again as a Haydn minuet.
Anyway, back to the matter in hand. It’s ever so clever, isn’t it, although I like the a capella bits that top and tail it much more than what comes in the middle. The trouble is, it’s got no soul. And you can take that how you want to.
Swerving: as I write I’m listening to a feature on Radio 4 about the 6.5 special, the Saturday tea-time BBC proggy which would have been my very earliest encounter with pop. This would be before I started school, I think, and I only saw it because my big sister watched it, but I remember titles very well, and the music that went with it “The six-five special comin’ down the line”. (Actually I now realise I’ve heard this before and perhaps even commented on it but you have to remember I’m getting old!)
I thought that the story with this is that they’d left RAK and Chinn & Chapman, but this was an outtake that was lying around that got released anyway – something like that. IIRC Chinn or Chapman says in Barney Hoskyns’ Glam! book that they had a lot of time for The Sweet, because they left them for the sake of art and to write their own songs, while Mud just left them for the money.
Anyway, this is one of those singles that’s interesting to hear without any way becoming affecting. Mud weren’t quite finished yet, though; ‘L-L-L-Lucy’ is a hilarious swagger of fun, ‘Show Me You’re a Woman’ is a silly attempt at a moving ballad that it is surprisingly easy to enter into the spirit of, and even their version of ‘Lean On Me’ is really rather good.
Even so, at the risk of offending older readers who were around and about at the time – and speaking as someone who’s generally keen to reappraise neglected corners of popular culture – 1975 does seem to have been a particularly undistinguished year up to this point!
Sorry, but I don’t hear hints of future Westlife (uuurrggh!) or indeed the beat from I Love Rock’n’Roll, which is primal where this is almost stately. I hear a band trying out its versatility and coming up with a great new take on a rock’n’roll standard which preserves the vitality of the song in a different mood entirely. And it sounds as smooth as a strawberry smoothie. The TOTP performance with a charlady walking on with a mop and bucket (IIRC) to do the spoken bit was another example of their endearing way of mixing lovingly produced music with comedy. Yes, sorry but I’m a fan.
After this it was downhill for the band – disputes in leaving RAK for the Private Stock label resulted in RAK re-releasing any old stuff (“Moonshine Sally”!) and getting in the way of the new label’s planned release schedule. A great throwback piece of glam rock (“L-L-Lucy”) came next, but they were revisiting old haunts after that – “Show Me You’re A Woman” was a less successful version of the Christmas hit, they returned to the harmonies with an effective reworking of “Lean On Me”, but the lame disco of “Shake It Down” suggested the writing was on the wall. Mind you, three number ones isn’t a bad return for a 70s pop career, and they’re fondly remembered by many. Les Gray passed away a few years ago and Dave Mount last year – Ray Stiles is apparently gigging with a version of The Hollies, and Rob (CGYOOMH) Davis hasn’t fared badly!
Vic Reeves once told a touching story about seeing Les Gray filling up his car at a petrol station, and thinking that he saw the great man do a little ‘Tiger Feet’ jig as he went about his mundane business.
Who would have thought that it would be the one with the earring and the bathrobe who’d make good in the long run? And “Shake It Down” (not to mention subsequent non-hits like “Night On The Tiles”) does begin to point towards the dance direction which Rob D would eventually take.
In the sleevenotes of Mud’s RAK singles compilation it mentions that Ray Stiles is indeed now part of the Hollies and that “there is a small section in each show where he gets to sing a Mud hit.” Poor sod!
TOTP watch: Yes, you’ve guessed it, neither of Mud’s two performances of ‘Oh Boy’ survive. Also in the studio for the edition when they were number one (8 May 1975) were Mac & Katie Kissoon, Hot Chocolate, Stephanie De Sykes, Desmond Dekker, Slade, Chips (who they?) and Shirley Bassey, with Jimmy Saville presenting. Sounds like a good show.
I’m not exactly encouraged by the comments to get to know this song (good as Buddy Holly is, and how much of glam comes right out of the 50s?), so I will mention a few US #1s of the time instead…
Ah, the Ford Administration…in Popstrology this is the year of Elton John, and around this time “Philadelphia Freedom” (an anthemic song that makes me cry) went to #1 in an unstoppable wave of Bicentennial fervor and general grooviness. Minnie did get to #1 in the US, with a song that went too high for my tastes at the time, but which is a particular favorite of mine now – whereas the original “Lady Marmalade” was an instant hit with everyone, and I remember my mom dancing around to it, as well!
However the #1 at this exact time was by Tony Orlando and Dawn, a song I don’t remember called “He Don’t Love You (Like I Love You)” which may or may not be as scary as their previous hits…
The Orlando one was a retitled reworking of the old Jerry Butler song “He Will Break Your Heart” which the British public wisely decided to give the bum’s rush – needless to say, it’s much better to stick to the original.
This was rather like the Temperance Seven topping the chart fourteen years earlier with music from a bygone age. It would appear that the main purchasers of “Oh Boy” would have been older than the profile for single buyers at that time. I personally remember being surprised by how well this did; but credit to Mud for pulling a rabbit out of the hat with this. They gambled on nostalgia and were rewarded handsomely with what I would say is a good effort, to be fair.
Minnie Ripperton’s lovely song was lended more pathos when Minnie was diagnosed with breast cancer soon after and did not survive the condition. Simply tragic.
Wasn’t it a bit early for Bicentennial fervour? Just around that time (while the Rollers were number one here I think) they’d had the evacuation of the US Embassy as Saigon fell, which they can’t have been too happy about.
Another reworking of “Oh Boy!” was being performed by a Number 1 artist of the near future who was soon to get his UK-wide break on the Parkinson show:
“I’ve got piles, you’ve got scabies,
The wain’s got the measles and the dog’s got rabies – oh boy…
All of my life I’ve been a-kissin’
Your left tit ‘cos your right one’s missin’ – oh boy…”
Yes, the Vietnam war was ending – which was itself a difficult and exhausting time – but CBS had started to run “Bicentennial Minutes” in ’74 and by April of ’75 people were looking for a reason to like their country and be proud of it…
More here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicentennial_Minutes
Sadly none are on YouTube (save for the last one), but I remember them well and they (along with Schoolhouse Rock) were my introduction to American History…
Well, I absolutely ADORED “Oh Boy”, perhaps assisted by never having heard the original. (Indeed, I think this may still be true; there’s a glaring Holly-shaped gap in my musical knowledge.) But this was, to a large extent, circumstantial. I’d been at boarding school for six months by now, and hence with far less control over my exposure to music than I had been used to. Thursday night TOTP’s were rationed to the first ten minutes, after supper and before prep, when dozens of us literally sprinted out of the dining hall each week, and straight into the TV room to catch every second. And on Sunday evenings, there were enough radio sets knocking around to ensure that we heard the the Top 20.
Other than that, it was a wasteland, dominated by overheard prog leaking from the studies of the senior boys… and eventually, the mono turntable in the common room, which turned up during the Easter term, but which was almost entirely controlled by the Cool Police in the year above (I think one of them owned it).
They were an unusual Cool Police, though. Top power plays included The Allman Brothers’ Brothers And Sisters, Sha Na Na, the first New York Dolls album… and Mud Rock Volume One, which didn’t really fit any of the prevalent definitions of cool at all, but there you go: someone in charge liked them, so Mud were allowed.
This extended to the 7″ of “Oh Boy”, which the Cool Police played and played and played, and played again some more. During the 20 minute morning break period, it was sometimes played as much as three times… and, for whatever reason, all of us loved it beyond all reason.
Maybe it was just – as sometimes happens with chart pop -an almost arbitrary assignment of an anthem, which somehow made us feel that much more aware of the thrill of living in the present. (If that makes any sense at all.) But I do think that it’s stuffed full of great moments, such as the a capella intro and outro bookends (the outro mirroring the intro so closely that it somehow wanted to make you immediately play the whole thing again), and yes, the hesitation on “hesitating”, and the silly breathy voiceover from Ellie Hope (later of Liquid Gold), and really just the lovely crisp choral cleanness of it all. As with most of Mud’s best moments, it felt like a party to which all were invited.
Objectively a 7, subjectively a 10.
(And you can certainly trace a clear line from “Shake It Down” to “Groovejet”…)
I was once on a bus when a mentalist starting singing this song. The odd thing was that when he got off the bus he looked around with an irritated “who the fuck was that mentalist?” facial expression.
Waldo, I’m not sure that in 1975 this would have felt to me like something from a far and alien past: Buddy Holly was in the past, to be sure, far enough for his death not to be something I remembered but rather something that was a fait accompli when I first became aware of him. But he was, all the same, a pop icon and his songs (and also, I think, the residual Crickets) had cropped up from time to time within my musical memory. So not a Temperance Seven moment. But we will be having something Temperance Seven-like in the not too distant future, won’t we? One much more sublime than this too. For me, anyway, and also very affective in a deeply significant way. More of that anon.
Ah, yes. I shall be donning my tuxedo.
Rosie – this is another illustration of the elasticity of time depending on the observer. In 1975 the original “Oh Boy” was just 18 years old: the equivalent today might be The Feeling doing an a capella version of the Stone Roses. It feels recent to most of us, but if that 18-year time span includes your childhood and even your birth, it might well feel like the distant past. (And besides, pop surely travelled further and faster between 1957 and 1975 than in the past 18 years – or is that a cat-among-the-pigeons statement?)
The Temperance Seven were harking back to the 20s in 1961, and it did indeed seem like a bygone age. To find someone harking back 40 years today, you only need to look at the current Number 1, and whatever you think about that, it doesn’t sound prehistoric. Buddy (and Dusty) have influenced so much of what pop music has been since their time that they’ve never really been away. You’re right, more of this in a couple of entries’ time…
Kathy Kirby chewing a brick while being stung by five wasps is a more apposite precursor of Duffy but that’s just my opinion.
(Memo from Rod Argent: he’d quite like his Time Of The Season riff back thank you)
Um, I have no idea what’s the current number one…
But yes, I know what you are saying, and it’s something I’ve often reflected on. Let’s see, forty years ago today the number one was… oh, let’s not go there! Although Buddy Holly was a bigger influence on what was contemporary in 1975, I think, than Art and Dotty Todd or the Ink Spots (yes, there’s a Temperance Seven moment coming much sooner than the one I and Waldo have in mind, I think…)
Visit Mike’s excellent Troubled Diva site for a comparison of the number ones of today and 40 years ago (and the rest of the top tens and a lot more besides!)
Oh, I gather from your post, Rosie, that the Temperance Seven moment you were thinking of was in early ’77 rather than two entries’ time? I did wonder about your calling it sublime!
A quick NO SPOILERS I think! 🙂
Oh come on, Tom, we’re steering around it as carefully as we can.
I will not ‘ave spoilers in this jungle! (whoops…)
Sometimes it’s hard to be a blogger…
It’s probably safe to say that retro was at least one distinct flavour of the hiatus between glam and punk. It’s not just a passing fad either – a pungent whiff of the forties will still be around when the first wave of punk dies away, and it will carry us well into the eighties.
Indeed – shall we return to this in a couple of entries’ time?!
another number1 from this period i must admit to having never heard before- i’m not a huge fan of the Holly original and this version doesnt do a huge amount for me either-a pleasent enough arrangement with some v nice guitar but IMO it doesnt fit the song- you wonder why they didnt just write a new composition round the same chord progression and cop the royalties for themselves.
Loved the Youtube performance clip though(any chance of making such links to clips at least a semi-regular feature?)- particularly Dave Mount’s camping it up. He’ll always have a place in my heart since a few years back when i was watching a late night quizcall type tv show of the “Q-Name something you might find in a womans handbag A-a balaclava” variety,where viewers had to call up and guess the correct “dead rock star” to win BIG CASH PRIZES!! and after numerous unsucessful guesses from callers which ranged from ‘Ian Curtis’ to, erm, ‘Jimmy Page’ and even ‘Jimmy Plant’ the presenter finally revealed the answer they were actually looking for was….Dave Mount. The collective gasp of “who the chuff is Dave Mount?” from the viewers round the country who stayed up wasting their cash and lifes trying to guess was almost audible- even the host didnt have the decency to not look a bit confused and embarressed by it..
Re. YouTube – yes! I usually intend to and often don’t have time. (Though it’s rare I use YT when writing the entry, oddly.) In fact should I ever be laid up with the sniffles one of the things I might do is go back and add YT links to anything I can find.
“Oh Boy” is kind of the Rawlplugs of pop.
Thanks for the retrospective plug, Erithian. I’m rubbish at self-pimping, my entire global promotional campaign for this year’s “Which Decade Is Tops For Pops” project consisting of a single tremulous e-mail to Tom.
(It runs every mid-February, folks. Put it in your diaries for next time.)
Marcello # 30 – …it’s just a silly phase you’re going through (whoops…)
I was thinking more in terms of giving all your love to just one blog (oh drat!)…
even the host didnt have the decency to not look a bit confused and embarressed by it..
trans:
even the host did have the decency to look a bit confused and embarressed by it..
i think the hosts job in that situation should have been to put on a brave face and pretend there was nothing untoward about expecting people to guess the name of an obscure glam rock drummer- they didnt do this i.e they didnt do the right or “decent” thing so they ‘didnt have the decency to not look a bit confused and embarressed by it’.
Not perhaps the best written sentance i have ever written but I must say i don’t mind people not pointing out things like this..(btw many thanks for not mentioning that i also missed out the apostrophe in “didn’t”. The shame would have been too great.)
Let’s leave grammatical points out of this! Anyway, I won’t hear a thing said against Dave Mount, and neither would anyone who bought a fitted kitchen off him. Very sad to hear of his death in December ’06.
On a lighter note, I never realised it was her out of Liquid Gold doing the spoken bit. One better than her band managed in 1980, and I bet she never tired of reminding them of it.
Mud Rock Vol.II was a crashing disappointment, though. Tame, dull, straight-up revivalism with all the fun knocked out if it. So that’s pretty much where I gave up on them.
“Dance Yourself Dizzy” by Liquid Gold – as I recall, Danny Baker’s NME Single Of The Year for 1980.
* 40
That’s OK, a lot of people did not point out this, or even things like this, so I don’t include myself on that list of not people who didn’t not point out things that were like this.
And nor do I.
I have looked ahead and whoa but this is a mixed-up year for #1s…some awesome, sublime even, and some I’ve never heard and never want to hear…and none of them made it to #1 in the US…
I hope I am not spoiling things by saying that Duffy’s “Mercy” is #1 right now, since by the time we get to it, I doubt if anyone will remember it…
Just a quick word to add about the US Bicentenial fever in 1976. Living next door in Canada it was pretty well a non-stop cultural assault of Americana for years ( certainly all of 1975 ) before the actual event July 04, 1976. Almost as bad as the preambles to the Olympics we are currently suffering through.
I’ve not heard the song, but maybe , just maybe, they chose Buddy Holly as he , along with Elvis , Sinatra, Ella , Apple Pie and the Bible , were being pimped non-stop in the U.S. as cultural icons in the run up to the party of century.
Lena – just don’t mention it to your other half, as he seems to have an aversion to it.
Brian – as it ‘appens, I read last night they lifted the idea from [renowned English folk-rock band] Steeleye Span, who’d done an a capella version of “Rave On” as far back as 1971. Anyone familiar with it?
…and I’ve only just discovered that Mud came second on OpKnox in the late 1960s…
What do people think are the best Buddy Holly cover versions, by the way? I’ve always been delighted by the Stones’ super-concise yet spacious ‘Not Fade Away’.
The Stones’ Not Fade Away is a cracker. I have a soft spot for Blondie’s version of I’m Gonna Love You Too and there’s a good sound affective reason for that.