SHAKIN' STEVENS – "This Ole House"

he was a great mover, Shaky. Not a fan of his although my feelings towards him have mellowed. I positively detested this at the time. Now, it doesn’t sound too bad.

A good professional production by Stuart Coleman, and a vibrant performance. 4’s about right.

While it doesn’t fit with the prevailing new romantic/new pop, there were a handful of rockabilly revival hits in early 81 – Stray Cats in particular, which is edgier than Shaky of course, and Polecats (who were in the chart with a cover of Bowie’s “John I’m Only Dancing” at this point).

And the drum beat is pretty close to “Do The Hucklebuck” and a certain bubbly cocktail heading this way soon….

This feels like the eighties getting under steam again after the lengthy throwback. Not an eighties of innovative synth-pop but an eighties of off-the-peg, mass-produced bubblegum that will never go away as it passes through Stock Aching Waterlogged even unto to our own present day of smug oaf Cowell and his marketing chums. Not that I care much about them anyway except in an eye-rolling way.

This was the age of conformity of course. Even the TV game shows, tosh like “Family Fortunes” and “Hollywood Squares”, were aimed at production-line conformity, rewarding sheep-like behaviour and penalising original thinking. Shaking Stevens seems to me the very epitomy of the idea.

The same score as Rosemary Clooney got for the song? Come off it – Rosie did it with so much more panache. 2 from me.

Fun but I preferred his one after next which I just looked up and found out the bunny prevents me from mentioning.

Just because I want to talk about Bryan Ferry some more don’t you think if he put on a few pounds and wore a denim jacket (“Never!” cries our Bryan) he would look a bit like Shaky on that sleeve.

There was quite a big Rockabilly scene in England which I think Shaky once had some respect in. Until the hits anyway.

In the Kelly Marie thread Tom discussed his pre-Top of the Pops days when his main exposure to pop was through the likes of Swap Shop. I’m a couple of years younger than Tom but my initiation into pop was similar – this is one of the first Popular entries that I can definitely remember from first time round as Shaky was a regular on Swap Shop/Saturday Superstore.

It seems odd that the rebellious music for teenagers of the 50s turned into safe music for six-year-olds, but that was what Shaky was. I thought he was great as a kid, and can’t really bring myself to dislike him now – the six year old Lurker had no knowledge of the original rock’n’rollers and I find it difficult to bracket Shaky with them now.

This is the first #1 where I seem to feel as if I have a memory of seeing it on TV at the time. But I wasn’t even quite 3 years old so I’m still not sure about this. Nevertheless I’m fairly confident that Shakey was ‘my’ first pop star in terms of awareness of who a person was and what they were for and I definitely loved this song for a brief time (as he was very soon to be usurped as my infantile perception of a pop idol by a dandy highwayman).

Now where’s that clip of him beating up Richard Madeley?

This seems like the start of the “modern era” to me ironic considering it’s a cover of a pre-rock record by an old rock n roller starting to peddle a kind of pop that defintely wasn’t new. It may be because the ‘Lennon period’ (which I myself enjoyed greatly)appears like an interregnum which conveniently divides up what went before and the period when the era of the newpop/New Romantic/new pop got into its stride (even though Shakey himself was hardly part of that himself). Personally for me I was also a couple of months from leaving school so I associate this with things starting to happen for me too.

Shakey looks an awful lot like my Uncle Ron did in the 80s. I was briefly rather confused as a nipper to whether he was actually related to me or not.

Hurray! After that last maudlin Roxy effort, this is how to do a cover!

Obviously, ‘Kids In America’ would have been a better way to pick things up after the Lennon wake, but you can’t have everything. What we do get here is a jolly (even if it is about inherant decay, no-one is going to listen to this alongside ‘Magic & Loss) song (even if the Rosemary Clooney version is evidently superior, this is a sprightly run-through, of a song that was already relatively obscure by 1981) performed by somebody with a certain welcome showbiz professionalism.

It’s not a single which outstays its welcome, although it must be said that the singer went on to do in his career.

Eight year old Billy reaction was one of enthusiasm, universally shared around school. Indeed, this is, I think, the first singer on the list who I can remember imitating in the playground…

Light entertainment watch: As you might expect, a long and distinguished career for Shakin’ Stevens. Sample appearances include;

DES O’CONNOR TONIGHT: with Mike Yarwood, Paul Nicholas, Michael Barrymore, Shakin’ Stevens, Don Deluise (1985)

DES O’CONNOR TONIGHT: with Ray Alan, Joe Longthorne, Rose Marie, Shakin’ Stevens (1987)

LET’S ROCK: with Lulu, Joe Brown, Alvin Stardust, Shakin’ Stevens (1981)

LET’S ROCK: with Lulu, Joe Brown, Alvin Stardust, Shakin’ Stevens (1981)

LIVE FROM HER MAJESTY’S: with Petula Clark, Shakin’ Stevens, Dana, Bobby Davro (1985)

THE MAIN ATTRACTION: with Larry Grayson, Roy Jay, Modern Romance, Elaine Paige, Shakin’ Stevens, Shields and Yarnell, Charlie Drake, John Junkin, Anna Dawson (1983)

OH BOY!: with Alvin Stardust, Shakin’ Stevens (1979)

OH BOY!: with Alvin Stardust, Shakin’ Stevens (1979)

OH BOY!: with GBH, Don Lang, Fumble, Freddie ‘Fingers’ Lee, Alvin Stardust, Shakin’ Stevens, Johnny Storm, Rockin’ Shades (1979)

WOGAN: with Norman Tebbit, Anthony Andrews, Julie Walters, Shakin’ Stevens, Bonnie Tyler (1984)

er yeah. possibly she did get to stay overnight too.

re #18: I wish Shakey had been performing with Norman Tebbit.

I never had any time for Shakey: young adult me was pretty serious about music, and light-ent versions of old rock ‘n’ roll numbers just bugged me. His natural home seemed more alongside Des and Yarwood and Davro, as in the list above, rather than on TOTP. To be fair, he was a decent singer and a lively performer doing perfectly serviceable versions of songs I imagine he loved, so no call for my old sneeriness at all – but I still can’t get anything much from these records.

I remember that Jim’ll Fix It! The girl lived her Dream of being a POSH BOARDER! for a day and a night… there was a DISCO! where she and her new best chums jumped up and down a lot to the strains of an Oriental-flavoured future 1981 Number One… and Shaky made a second appearance after lights-out in the dorm, to make sure they were all tucked up snug and tight.

A strange journey, considering Shaky’s credentials as a respected R&R performer during the 1970s, Communist Party benefits and all. During the Punk/Ted wars of Summer 77, there was even talk of a Shaky/Pistols co-headlining “unity” gig, as noted with anticipatory approval by Sniffin’ Glue.

“This Ole House” wasn’t for me, but at least it’s executed with spirit and a sense of fun.

A Johnny Rotten radio interview from the Sex Pistols peak (after he’d picked a Peter Hammill song as his all time favourite song) ended with him saying he was off to see Shakin’ Stevens and the Sunsets that night.

This is kind of irresistible, isn’t it? I’m not at all sure if Rosemary C’s version is clearly superior, in spite of my recent pre-rock immersion. Bounciest death disc evs. Do you think he might have covered it because it includes the line – sung with Presleyan relish – “this ole house is gettin’ shaky”? It’s certainly not an obvious cover, nor was Hot Dog, his first hit, the original of which I only heard last week. Marie Marie, TOH’s predecessor, was very good indeed.

Lovely, elastic guitar parts – would that have been Dave Edmunds? TOH fits in with the Rockpile/Queen Of Hearts/Rocky Burnette late 70s school of r’n’r more than the emerging Stray Cats/Polecats strain which, in retrospect, seems more proto-psychobilly. A 7 from me.

i mean “tour” — my yes addiction is obviously getting out of hand again

That’s a shame, I thought the image of such a gig on a rocky outcrop on Dartmoor would have been quite something.

“Sprightly” and “bouncy” are two words used upthread, and they sum this up nicely. A great one for jumping around to at student discos when you’re none too self-conscious (see also “Antmusic”) and a lot of fun. So is the vid of Shaky dancing around the ole house in question, even if the backing singers get a bit cheesy.

As I mentioned yonks ago (and got spoiler-bunnied for it) in I can’t remember which thread, Shaky and the Sunsets actually predated the rock’n’roll revival of the 70s and went back as far as the time Sha Na Na were playing Woodstock. I’d forgotten before looking it up just now that he was also in the West End production of “Elvis” in the late 70s. With that kind of dues-paying, he deserved his time among the biggest pop stars in the country, and if he did become showbiz, he was entitled to. Bit of an ornery old bugger though, by all accounts.

(Still a fan of Danny Baker, but Six-O-Six rather than NME.)

I can’t believe you only gave this 4 – ‘This Ole House’ is one of the greatest number ones ever.

Wretched dross with a tired old rock ‘n’ roller, polluting the airwaves with his sound and the TV with his faded denim.
This makes Captain Sensible’s “Happy talk” seem classy in comparison but the saddest thing of all is there was much worse to come from Shaky.

As a closet New Romantic at the time I could not believe this was No 1. It was by far the worst record in the charts so how could it top the pile over classics like Reward, Einstein A Go Go and Planet Earth ?
I saw Shaky as a big threat (quite rightly as it turned out) to my hopes for the future charts being dominated by moody melodramatic synth-pop He was the bubble-burster on a par with General Galtieri a year later who destroyed my political hopes for the SDP.

I never forgave Shaky for this. He was the bad fairy of the 80s marring many an otherwise classic line up on TOTP with his stupid dancing like a middle-aged embarassing uncle turning up at his neice’s birthday party.

Of course at this distance I can appreciate that he was a very professional and hard-working entertainer who appealed to an entirely different pre-teen demographic from the rest of the charts. His records achieved high positions because he had no real competition for so long; they came through the middle when sales to teens were split between so many other artists.

When SAW came along and targeted the younger kids with Kylie and Jason he was finished and really he was the lesser of two evils.

#28 and 31 – ‘Hot Dog’ and ‘Marie Marie’ were both Top 30 hits in 1980 but there was another single between those two and ‘This Ole House’ – the airplay-only hit ‘Shooting Gallery.’ I remember that one but not ‘Hey Mae’ which came out in the spring of 1980, after ‘Hot Dog.’ Wiki states that ‘Hey Mae’ got to 83 and ‘Shooting Gallery’ 79, although I thought the published Top 100 only appeared for the first time in 1983?

Re-reading this thread on the back of TOTP ’81 on BBC4, I note Mike’s reminiscence at #26. Shaky visits a girls’ boarding school dorm after lights-out to make sure they’re all tucked up … on Jim’ll Fix It?! Might have seemed OK when Mike posted that comment in 2008 but you shudder now.

Hmm. Closer inspection of the thread reveals that it was me who introduced the Jim’ll Fix it story in the first place. As you were.