OLIVIA NEWTON-JOHN AND JOHN TRAVOLTA – "You're The One That I Want"

Hmm… That’s funny. I share Tom’s instinctive hatred, but the chronology of my dislike is a bit different. When I was 5 I found this music instinctively jolly and appealing, and the dance routines that you could see on ‘Screen Test’ and ‘Top Of The Pops’ super fun to watch, and I found that it was their appeal to the older children gave these songs a certain cultural cachet for me. My 16 year old sister would get furious when she heard this, though…

Move forward to 1989, though, and a big Grease revival occurred, seemingly unbidden amongst the sixth formers of Crown Woods School. (Why was this? A TV screening? Parents?) God, the scorn that I felt when someone put a tape of this on in the smokers’ room – couldn’t they play something either good or contemporary? And there was something about us Londoners aping the model of the American high school that offended me, too.

I know now that that serious 17 year old was wrong, and I theoretically understand that there are clever and appealing things going on in these songs, but I still can’t bring myself to investigate further. It would have to take loving somebody who loves Grease for me to lose all of this accumulated distaste.

Much as I loved the movie, “You’re The One That I Want” has always left me cold. For starters, it sounds nothing like the 1950s – which bothered me greatly at the time, as I felt that history was being erased before my very eyes, and that this was further evidence of a dumbing down of culture. (I know, how rockist!) In this respect, the Grease soundtrack set the template for the similarly history-denying likes of Dirty Dancing, which could barely be bothered to function as a period piece.

But above and beyond that, it’s such an undistinguished jumble of ideas, half-heartedly executed. Without the (admittedly great) accompanying film clip, it would be as nothing, and so its status as yet another of 1978’s Best Selling Singles Of All Time is as baffling to me as “Mull Of Kintyre”.

But 1978 really was the year of the Mega Hit, wasn’t it? A peak year for the singles charts in terms of sales, which clearly has elevated certain singles above their natural station – but why this year? Why 1978?

And just to contradict my own comment: I’d forgotten that while “YTOTIW” topped the charts in June, Grease the movie didn’t open in the UK until September.

(“You’re the one WHOM I want”, surely?)

I’ve got this slightly flimsy, half-baked theory about how chart pop tends to drop down a generation towards the end of each decade, roughly at the point where the year ends in an 8 – at which point, the generation who had been following the charts in the expectation that the music would always mature and grow alongside them will suddenly go “Eurgh, what is this Kiddie Shit, the charts aren’t what they were….” and start to drift away.

If that’s even partially the case, then maybe the success of Grease was my own first experience of having to drop a generation in order to get the point. Up until then, I’d been increasingly inkie-music-press mature, what with my Devo & Pere Ubu obsessions and all… but, aged 16, and with most of my younger sisters’ friends all going mad for Johnny T (and most of my classmates getting the hots for Livvy N-J), I made a conscious and mostly successful effort to engage with the phenomenon…

(that’s assuming they were increasingly common by then as has been suggested)

The appearance of the song and routine at the end of Grease are as unsettling a jolt into the present as “Good Vibrations” or “A Day In The Life” appended to the end of their respective works of selective nostalgia. Suddenly we are thrust out of the camp fantasia of 1961, complete with the obligatory self-mocking Frankie Avalon, and into a scenario which doesn’t really belong anywhere, except perhaps in the more ornate dreams of Ed Wood. It’s as if Guy Peellaert had wandered onto the Happy Days lot with some stray black and scarlet paint.

“You’re The One That I Want” is a sci-fi fantasy – emphasised by John and Olivia’s car leaving the company behind and taking off into the skies á la Chitty Chitty Bang Bang in the closing sequence – which sees Olivia Newton-John the way Travolta, and I expect the vast majority of her male following (though not necessarily me), desired to see her; grinning temptingly and conspiratorially, leather-clad, booted, literally dragging a boggle-eyed Travolta along in her wake. Like arcane ideations of the battery of whips and handcuffs in Anne Murray’s closet, Olivia had hitherto come across so clean and spotless that everyone wanted her to get a little dirty. Despite the near-unique situation of having two entirely parallel and separate careers in two different countries – in America she was the massively successful but still credible singer of superior AoR such as “Let Me Be There,” “Have You Ever Been Mellow?” and “I Honestly Love You,” while in Britain she was landlocked as Cliff Richard’s idea of a Virtuous Lady, doomed to Saturday evening TV specials flowing with MoR gingham and pigtails and made to sing bierkeller odes to the Salvation Army for Eurovision – she was clean and spotless, as indeed her character Sandy is throughout most of Grease (as epitomised on “Hopelessly Devoted To You”) until she is so irked by Travolta’s apparent coolness that she changes everything about herself to get him.

Given her British reputation as Cliff’s Aunt Sally, it is doubly ironic that “You’re The One That I Want” does not appear in the original musical but was written specifically for the film by long-time Cliff and Shadows associate John Farrar. Yet as a pop single it works spectacularly well. Nothing about it is really ascribable to rock ‘n’ roll or pre-Beatles teenpop – its general gait is excitable bluegrass-pop, as per Jerry Reed’s “Guitar Man,” though that is disguised well in the rapid-fire progression of the song. If “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart” represented courtly courtship of good humour – there is never any doubt that Elton and Kiki are adults – the epileptic, jittery drive of “You’re The One That I Want” (in many places the record sounds as though it’s being played at 78 rpm) symbolises the oozing urgency and dizzy ecstasy of being young (though neither Travolta nor Newton-John were exactly teenagers). Travolta’s vocal is more of a stunned yelp than anything else, scrabbling frantically while jumping yodel octaves – his shriek of “’Cos the power you’re supplying/It’s electrifying” recalls both Iggy on “TV Eye” and the Sweet’s Steve Priest on “Ballroom Blitz.” His singing is high-register and boyish, which is little wonder since for him it is evidently five o’clock on Christmas morning. When he prepares for the chorus by yelling “Nothing left! Nothing left for me to do!” it sounds more like “Double love!” or even “Devil love!”

Meanwhile Olivia is cool, methodical and patient, stretching out her syllables: “If you’re fiiiiiiilled with affection/You’re too shyyyyyyyyyy to convey,” before she kindly crouches down to meet him, “Meditate in my direction”…followed by an unspeakably sexy whisper of “Feel your way” before abruptly pulling him up by the collar and advising “You’d better shape up!” She has indeed collared him and their voices combine in something approaching orgasm towards the fade (in the film, hips happily wound around each other’s waists, they are as good as already doing it). It opens up the stream of sex to which the entire film has been slowly building up through multiple red herrings of camp; enough record-buyers considered it a sufficiently liberating release that they gave the record yet another nine-week run at the top. Here Travolta manages to look infinitely freer than Tony Manero could ever have imagined – and we cheered him on accordingly.

“best used” = “best usage” bah

(sorry vinylscot)

“Tell me about it, smurf…”

Working back from seventies memories, I do remember the original Smurfs comic strips by Peyo being pretty good… Maybe they’ll eventually turn up in the FT guide to comics. I suspect not, though.

I was given a flop Smurfs single, ‘Smurfing Beer’, for my sixth birthday;

“Smurf, Smurf, Smurfing beer!
You don’t get drunk, and it isn’t dear!”

Also, Smurfing beer is made of honey and tea, the cheery blue fellows sang informatively. Sounds quite tasty, actually.

The B-Side, ‘Smurfing Tango’ was less inspired.

Yes I would have preferred the Smurfs! My Dad decided to help me learn French by buying loads of albums of Les Schtroumpfs in the original Francais when we went on camping holidays over there.

Best Smurf story: “The Black Smurf” – it is terrifying!! A Smurf goes on holiday to Jamaica and gets his – *exit pursued by a bunny*

OK no there is a terrible plague that turns Smurfs black and…erm…savage… there isn’t really a good way to spin this one actually.

Well, I know I’m a bit too young to have even been born when this came around, but I think this is a top tune. I can’t take it in context, but out of context, the only way I can see it, what’s not to like

*resists temptation to link to Spoiler’s ‘Electrifying’*

djp otm re: ytotiw, esp in the film. on the soundtrack it’s nowhere near ‘hopeless devoted to you’ or even the title track but in the context of the film dear lord. i can remember seeing this at 5 (at most) at a drive-in and when olivia emerges w/ ‘what’s it gonna be STUD?’ even then i knew THIS IS WHAT I WANT. even at 5 the ending w/ car ascending into heaven and john and olivia waving back to us seemed incredibly wtf. 20 years later when the rerelease hit theaters most of the film really didn’t hold up, the shoddiness was more apparent, the acne scarred drag racer less scary (esp since i now knew those were acne scars instead of whatever wild animal attack my 5 yr old mind had conjured), the gulf between the good actors and charismatic stars (thinking here esp of stockard channing) and the rest (thinking here esp of the non-travolta t-birds) seemed wider. but that final scene in any and every way held up.

wait did we really get this far down without mentioning Hylda Baker & Arthur Mullard? http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=x_MSi0MhM_c

Its probably another good measure of pop ubiquity of 1978 that Grease and Saturday Night Fever were so relentlessly parodied. And the relative ease of parody of both is due to them both being on the edge of ridiculous themselves – Grease certainly satirises itself at points (mainly with Channing’s occasional eye-rolls). This in turn makes it into terrifically useable pop culture – I remember playing Grease in the playground (specifically a track which shall not be mentioned yet), and not feeling self-consciously silly just as I might play at Batman with my parka hood up. The Grease role-plays (replete with singing and half remembered words) would normally devolve into Kiss Chase.

One of the things which contributed at this period to the death of the musical was its general inability to be contemporary. Grease managed to dodge this bullet via the Gibb theme tune and this number, though only just. The standard rock-crit story of 78 is the development of punk. The charts seem to suggest much more of an experimental spirit just to distract themselves from that nasty noise!

This was a major major hit in Australia, not least because it was Our Livvie singing, but also because it was written by Aussie John Farrar (who had a solid background in the OzPop 60s). I do recall reading that at the Australian premiere, ONJ was seen to bury her head in her hands when “Hopelessly Devoted To You” came on…couldn’t blame her really.

It was also about this time that I ventured to buy my first UK weekly music papers, just out of curiosity more than anything. It seemed that the entire UK was obsessed with a) Debbie harry and b) The Kids From Fame, and that some show called TISWAS was unmissable TV not least due to some saucy wench who co-hosted.

(Now that I think of it, the “Letter From Britain” column in an issue of American “Creem” magazine from that time opined that 1978 would be remembered as the Year of Grease and Boney M – looks like Mr Frith or Ms Valentine wasn’t far wrong)

As for “You’re The One…” Ii always thought the film clip let it down – we’re supposed to think ONJ is raunching it up, but does she walk? Does she run? No, She SKIPS hither and yon, which betrayed the whole look (unless it was supposed to). Never saw the whole film, and feel that at this stage there’s little point, as it’s just 30 years too late for me, and it would look like a bunch of twenty-somethings pretending to be teenagers.

The Kids From Fame came a wee while later – yes, all right, bunny, get your paws off my collar – but fulfilled absolutely the same function (I’m not sure whether for the same kids though; Fame tended to be lapped up by those just too young to have gotten Grease).

I have to say that although I understand exactly why boys my age would have reached for the Kleenex in an ONJ + leather keks situation she didn’t send my number 56 bus all the way to Shotts, if you get my meaning – whereas she was far more convincingly sexy in the “Physical” era; that video is so wonderfully daft it looks as if she’s actually having fun rather than being told to have fun.