THE HOLLIES – "He Ain't Heavy, He's My Brother"

It’s not my favourite Hollies song, and the phenomenon of ‘classic’ reissues on the back of advertising campaigns is absolutely anathema to a healthy pop culture, but this song is still pretty good, an 8 even, when put next to (almost all of) the other #1s of 1988.

Another one that I bought in 1988. I think that I found the arrangement and Alan Clarke’s delivery conveyed a sense of genuine gravitas and engagement to me, such as was rarely found in contemporary pop – not even in Phil Collins’ slowed-down emoting of sixties source material – perhaps just because of its out-of-time feeling. I sort of still feel that now, actually. I really like the tension between the bluesy and the churchy in this song now, actually, like shafts of sunlight penetrating through rainy gloom.

That sodding advert really does kill the mood, though. Its the whacky larks and beery blokiness that repels me. I certainly wouldn’t want to emulate that drinker.

It was a great smoocher in 1969 but I don’t get the feeling Tom likes smoochers and several number ones have been marked down for a slow tempo. Those who conceived the notion of “Dance” music in the 1980s, as if dancing was a revolutionary act nobody had ever thought of before, seem to have stripped all the eroticism from it. A vertical expression of a horizontal desire no more.

It’s a long way from the Hollies’ best (I’d nominate Bus Stop myself – they survived the departure of Graham Nash just about but it didn’t last as they moved from the pop venues to the cabaret circuit. But behind the opportunities for getting to know your companion and the state of his intentions, it’s a nice song, well-executed, and if I wouldn’t go out of my way to listen to it, it would please me if I happened upon it. Thus making a good 5 or possibly 6.

The Hollies, I feel, were the most underrated of the big name groups of my adolescence.

Billy @4 – this was written by Bobby Scott and Bob Russell, not Cook and Greenaway, who wrote the Hollies US #1 “Long Cool Woman in a Black Dress”.

Neil Diamond’s version of this was quite good – it always made my mum cry…

HAHHMB is just a little too stately for its own good methinks (and isn’t the overall feel too churchy and also too familial for a successful smoocher as such?). Still it’s got some tasty chord changes and feels technically impeccably constructed. For example, bouncing the strings off the harmonica really works I find. It’s surprising, even ingenious or inspired.

Of course, the Hollies really mastered this style and tempo a few years later with ‘Air that I Breathe’ (which was kept off #1 by the wretched ‘Billy don’t be a hero’ apparently). *That’s* a gold-plated 10 I’d say, whereas HAHHMB is only a 6 or a 7. That (new to me) ad is truly revolting, just as Miller (let alone Miller Lite) beer is. Beware: Miller beer is not only watery/tasteless/weak, it also gives the most horrendous hangover headaches. It’s the worst beer I’ve ever had the misfortune to drink.

Not only is Miller Lite weak gnat’s piss but the ad makes me want to punch that bloke in the face. There were a lot of those “chirpy lads having fun” beer ads around at the time (Black Label, Hofmeister) when you knew that once they’d had a skinful they’d be down the local curry house loudly abusing the waiters and puking up in the road afterwards.

The record is probably an 8 from me though, I just love those bursting harmonies (especially “but I’m strooooooonnnnggg”), and the ad hasn’t stuck in my memory hard enough to taint it. ‘The Air That I Breathe’ would be higher.

Tom, it also got a sales push from being featured on DLT’s “Golden Oldies Picture Show” with a very literal video.

I agree with Rosie that they never got much kudos in their heyday so it was quite pleasant to see them back in the saddle for a brief moment.

Good time to mention “The Air That I Breathe” as two songs down the line we’ll be coruscating its author.

I’m drawn towards a 6 for this, admiring various aspects but with no desire to own it. Fortunately that awful ad means nothing to me, or that would be knocking it down a peg. As for being an anachronism, well, yeah, but 1988 was hardly a year where chronism was a virtue.

Not a real word, unfortunately, but it should be!

Boys Town Gang’s “I Can’t Take My Eyes Off Of You” would have got a high mark from me!

Also: my first encounter with the phrase, and the song no doubt, came at the end of “The Return Of Rico”, the Judge Dredd story in which his no-good brother gets released from space prison and Dredd ends up killing him in a shoot-out. At the end, Dredd, carrying his brother, says.. well, you can guess what he says. (But never having heard the song the ending seemed tonally off to me – the emphases suggested it was a phrase I ought to know, but I didn’t, but at the same time the set-up made it feel like a punchline more than anything else.)

Why The Reynolds Girls Had To Happen: From the artfully forward-thinking Seventies references of S-Express, The Timelords and Yazz, we’ve now had two consecutive backwards-facing Sixties re-treads, which must have delighted large chunks of Radio One’s ever-aging demographic. (See also: Why Matthew Bannister Had To Happen.)

However, my chief memory of this song concerns the time I saw Neil Diamond perform it, at Nottingham Arena in July 2002. So perhaps a nine year old re-release warrants an eight year old copy-and-paste job:

“There is a fine line between populism and schlock. This line comes perilously close to being crossed during the perhaps inevitable September 11 tribute, with its dedication to the police officers, fire fighters and service personnel involved. I feel myself beginning to wince, as each group is applauded in turn. As the crowd applauds “those brave servicemen who risk their lives, every day”, the nice lady next to me notices my half hearted clapping and nudges me. “That’s us lot he’s talking about”, she says, smiling, and motions towards my hands. I don’t suppose she gets thanked very often by her heroes. She’s probably more used to the poorly concealed wincing. Anyway, we’re not applauding the institutions here – we’re applauding the individuals. The tribute song turns out to be He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother. I get the message.”

#16. Radiohead ‘fessed up and the writers of ATIB are credited as co-writers of Creep …

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creep_(Radiohead_song)

still shocks kids of a certain generation (<30 yrs old) who've grown up with Creep when you play them ATIB …!

The Pixies have got a lot to answer for …

@20

“whose son Justin is now known as “Mr Tumble” on CBeebies”

Indeed, but it’s only in the companion role of “Grandad Tumble” where I feel that Justin really excels.

In NZ we never got the Miller Lite ad, but the song had a very earnest return to telly screens in 1991 as part of a spearhead PR campaign for the New Zealand Police and the recently-invested National government who’d made boosting their numbers a key election pledge the previous year. Apologies for poor quality video, accents etc:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9kv-ksrMhWU

I’m pretty sure the original ad as I recall it didn’t have the voice-over and was the more effective for it.

A song I didn’t fully appreciate when it was first a hit and one that seemed to have been around forever. I wasn’t particularly drawn to it on it’s 88 revival either and it did seem an incongruous and backwards looking number one. However it does have a sincerity and warmth which despite the semi-religious lyrics and overly nasal vocals put it head and shoulders above most of the rest of 88’s number one offerings. A comfortable 6 heading towards 7.

In Canada we got this song in a long-running anti-drug PSA: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6rO3TGDAHs

P^nk s has made a very valid point. The fact that I remembered HAHHMB more as an advertising jingle rather than a song in it’s own right (note I had heard the song before the ad, but I don’t remember being “affected” by it) means that any sentiment the song conveys is buried under a swathe of marketing nonsense. Shame really, because listening to it now (a very safe distance from the influence of the piss from Milwaukee) it’s a fine gospelly flavoured pop song. By this time in 88, I was sporting an acid-yellow bandana and board-shorts and anything with a smiley on it (ugh!).

A good solid 7, which is where this peaked in the U.S when first released. The word “nice” has been bandied about for this, and that pretty much sums up the whole recording.

lonepilgrim @42:

‘Meaning’ is such a fragile thing though, and the meaning you find in a song is synthesised in your head by the reaction of the song with your own experience.

I think Tom’s parallel between HAHHMB and Woodstock is a valid one. In 1969 the guard was being changed an a generation of pop was moving on as its dream faded. Much of the Hollies’ classic 60s canon was an evocation of innocence, young love, coming of age. This is that generation realising that the innocence of youth has been shattered and realising that they are faced with the task of making their way in a cynical world. For a later generation it’s just a catchy song from an advert, something different perhaps from what they’re used to, but for them it will be forever tangled with laddishness and pseudo-beer (it’s made from rice, FFS!)

Persse McGarrigle, the Parsifal figure in Small World, David Lodge’s Arthurian satire of the academic world, accidentally discovers post-structuralism when he slaps down the distinguished academic who is patronising him about his thesis. Oh no, he lies, it’s not about the influence of Shakespeare on Eliot, it’s about the influence of Eliot on Shakespeare and how could you avoid reading Hamlet through the lens of Prufrock. Or something. The example I like to quopte is Mistress Overdone in Measure for Measure, who “keeps a bawdy house in the suburbs”. Of course the meaning of ‘suburbs’ has changed since Shakey used it and now it’s impossibl;e not to think of Cynthia Payne.

There’s always the Vietnam angle (there always is with a ’69 single). Terence Davies’ Of Time And The City used it as a backdrop to the Korean War which, for some unlucky souls, involved British soldiers less than a decade after WW2 ended. It’s a flawed but beautiful film; it’s made me listen to this song afresh, and I think it would flush the Miller Lite memories out of anyone’s system.

Re 42: Far from Utopian, it feels like a song that audibly wades through mud, the biblical stuff tying it to centuries-old memories, trying to rise above (which is why the arrangement works for me – it would be a desperate trudge if it was ‘arranged’ like, say, The Weight).

As for Scott McKenzie’s San Francisco, it was written by John Philips, anticipating the forthcoming summer of love, as he was putting the Monterrey festival together. So the hippies were WRONG! It’s, uh, the real thing!!

I seem to remember this load of old guff also got a leg-up from being featured prominently on the charity appeals in the very first Red Nose Day tellyboxcast in ’88!!!! I must say by the end of the proceedings, I absolutely blooming sick of hearing that “harmonica going off-key” intro!!!!! And that was even before The Hollies appeared in one of the most tediously smug and self-satisfied performances I have ever witnessed on TOTP!!!!!! Even the tellybox directors colluded in the smugfest, carefully composing shots of the band singing in three-part harmony, JUST LIKE A CLASSIC SIXTIES BAND, KIDS!!! And even worse, the close-up on the face as he sings into tha camera “He ain’t heavy…. [smugface] He’s my brotheeerrrrr”, by which time the Old Folk’s home has turned into a vomitorium!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

@ 47 – I was about to say that. What turned me off this song at the time wasn’t the Miller advert, but the pompous TOTP studio performances, complete with furrowed brows, sincere stares, and long, lingering camera shots designed to hammer home the “seriousness” of the track. Much of this may have been down to the TOTP production team, of course, but a hell of a lot of the blame lay at the feet of the band themselves. “The Hollies,” as a friend of mine said at the time, “what a bunch of prats”. Thinking back, perhaps they were over-compensating for the way the Miller advert had trivialised the song – although the use of it in that context must surely have been their fault too.

Now that memories of both things have been pushed to the back of my mind, I have to say that I find this to be a really effective single. I’ve arrived late to this discussion, so many people have already commented about the arrangement and vocal delivery, although nobody’s mentioned that bassline yet, which seems to be slowly strolling ahead doggedly in a very determined way. Neither Hollies number one is their best work by a long chalk, but this still stands up perfectly well.