VIC REEVES AND THE WONDER STUFF – "Dizzy"

There is a fundamental problem with this reading of Dizzy for me – it doesn’t sound Dizzy at all. The original Tommy Roe version has a woozy quality that, quite properly, ties in with the lyrics – making it seem much more like the singer is actually dizzy in love with the girl. Kudos too for the drum break – which unless I am hearing things incorrectly, turns up on The Magic Number by De La Soul.

By contrast, I find this version to be bludgeoning; the sound of a drunk pawing some poor unfortunate at 1am in a sleazy nightclub, desperate to get his end away for the night. Frankly, this is laddism in excelsis, 2 or 3 years before the launch of Loaded and Damon Albarn telling us all how he used to be into books but was now into football and greyhound racing (and Oasis doing their part in their own way too lest people think I am not being even-handed). I guess we’ll get around to this topic at that point but, nevertheless, this prefiguring is not all that welcome to my ear.

I realise that Vic and The Wonderstuff are making some effort at shooting for comedy here but it doesn’t do it for me. It’s just aggressive – and not in a good way. I only really watched Shooting Stars of the Vic and Bob stuff. Whilst they could be caustic (particularly Bob who I have always thought the funnier of the two), I never really pegged them for aggressive. This just doesn’t seem to fit either the song or what I think of when I think of Vic Reeves’ comedy. For me, a resounding miss. 3.

The TOTP version that I have seen on Youtube also captures something else – Vic Reeves bawls out the song gracelessly but I found it interesting that he looks to be wearing a tweed suit. Not being familiar with Pulp prior to their big period: did Vic Reeves nick this look from Jarvis? Or did Jarvis nick it from him?

I was steeling myself against the inevitable kicking The Wonder Stuff would get, the same they get everywhere. I guess people may only know this and ‘Size Of A Cow’, but their ’88 debut Eight Legged Grove Machine is a a scuzzy pop classic, 15 punchy, hooky beauties. They were never all that serious, but back then it was sarcasm not tomfoolery that brought the smiles. And ’89’s Hup was nearly as good.

But to the record in point, yeah, fair enough, not great. An oddly joyless sledgehammer of a “birrovfun”. I bought it though, because my flatmate and I were by this stage the official university DJs and you needed stuff like this in your locker for the History Society Christmas Party.

Re: #2 I think Vic Reeves was always well into his tweed (still is!). Jarvis, back then was more sharp but quirky hipster nerd than the frightening bearded nonce he resembles nowadays.

would you trust this man round your kids: ttp://www.google.co.uk/imgres?imgurl=http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_iJPUPy50Gxc/TDObzZ-eszI/AAAAAAAAAkY/YcZEjjZ7Fgc/s1600/Jarvis-Cocker–002.jpg&imgrefurl=http://marineville.blogspot.com/2010/07/6-music-saved.html&usg=__vZWqpzlW4r48-lK1OR7pi07hdWM=&h=276&w=460&sz=35&hl=en&start=34&zoom=1&tbnid=a-pAwBQ9weT_8M:&tbnh=125&tbnw=167&ei=q43KTfe8MYiwhAfEm-CoAg&prev=/search%3Fq%3Djarvis%2Bcocker%26um%3D1%26hl%3Den%26safe%3Dactive%26sa%3DN%26rls%3Dcom.microsoft:en-gb:IE-SearchBox%26rlz%3D1I7_____en-GB%26biw%3D1020%26bih%3D567%26tbm%3Disch&um=1&itbs=1&iact=rc&dur=0&page=3&ndsp=18&ved=1t:429,r:3,s:34&tx=50&ty=46

This just confused me at the time. He’s a comedian? Is this supposed to be funny? Where are the jokes?
Now it seems like “harmless fun” or something along those lines – still not funny but probably the better for it. If I’d had to put up with it in indie discos for years I might be a lot less charitable though.
One of my housemates at university was heavily into TWS, we all thought it was very strange. There wasn’t anything else released between 1991 and 1999 which he preferred!? But then he discovered Semisonic and David Grey, which turned the divide into a chasm.

Re 2: I’ve always considered Reeves’ dedication to proper tailoring his sole redeeming virtue.

I used the pages of Leeds Student to berate the readership for listening to The Wonder Stuff. Didn’t do any good, obviously. They were poor, though.

Re 6: Struggling to like albums (and resenting it) – that’s a good point. It’s why I grew to actively dislike Led Zep, among others, rather than just letting them pass me by, as I guess my equivalent now would.

My favourite “Dizzy” cover – barring the unrecorded version that Dolly Mixture performed in their early years – remains Boney M’s juddering electro version (“DEE! EYE! ZEDZED WHY!”) from 1984. Meanwhile, I tried quite hard to find Night Out-era Vic & Bob funny, mainly because I couldn’t bear to let its absurdism defeat me – I’d loved “nonsense” humour (Milligan/Lear) as a child, after all – but I don’t recall my laughter being anything other than forced. I had similar struggles with The Wonder Stuff, almost succeeding in convincing myself that “Size Of A Cow” and “Caught In My Shadow” were Good Pop. As for “Dizzy”: I bought it, keen to be in on the joke – but really, it was only good for sticking on party tapes for friends.

Finally, a unsubtle cross-site plug: the follow-up to “Dizzy” will soon be under discussion within my Which Decade Is Tops For Pops? thingy, which has recently rumbled back into action on the main FT site. If you feel like participating, you’ll be very welcome.

This one’s new to me. Pretty unpleasant/irritating really. Trying to think of something illuminating to say about it (while listening a couple more times) has actually put me in a really bad mood, so the hell with these guys:
2 or 3.

“The Size of a Cow” from “Never loved elvis”

I’m positive that the radio used to play a version that had a “jailhouse rock” ending, but then it got replaced by a simple end chord and I never heard the first version again, ever.

Does anyone else remember this?

It will surprise maybe no one that this song is making me really, really wish there was an option on Popular to award 0. Utterly grim in concept and execution. I thought this at the time and if anything it’s gotten even worse over time.

Hmm, apart from the Proclaimers, I bet that the atrocious house music of some kids from Cumbernauld out of their faces on E and Irn-Bru, TTF, a.k.a. The Time Frequency, wasn’t inflicted on student disco goers south of the border either.

(I think they had one semi-big hit UK-wide. I suspect they were inescapable in the Glasgow area or anywhere you could get M8 magazine)

#18 that rings a bell, but I can’t help with specifics, unfortunately…

Vic’s album I Will Cure You is on Spotify despite being out of print for some time, and just in cast list it’s remarkable – the Grid producing a cover of Abide With Me, Phil Oakey likewise for Black Night, BJ Cole and Jonathan Ross both get credits, and on a few tracks there’s essentially only a Derek Bailey short of a free jazz supergroup, led by Steve Beresford and Evan Parker. Against all that this seems even more of a bludgeoning claw hammer to the inner ear.

Dizzy – the only Grebo number one?

A friend said to me recently that he’d just realised that the Wonderstuff had come up with the worst album title in pop history.

“Yes, you’re right!”, I exclaimed. “Never Loved Elvis. Awful. Was it a boast? Was it meant to provoke ageing teds? What was the point?”

“Err, no… not that one…”

No? Oh, I’ve got it… The Eight Legged Groove Machine. Horrible! The kind of name you’d think up for your band age 13 and hope no one remembered it a couple of years later.

Again he said no. The ‘correct’ answer was If The Beatles Had Read Hunter. Where to start with THAT little gem? For a start the Beatles almost certainly DID read “Hunter”, which presumably was meant as a knowing first-name ref to Hunter S Thompson (though they quite probably read Hunter Davies’ Beatles biog too). Presumably they thought their singles comp sounded better than the Beatles? I’d suggest it falls short in some departments.

So The Wonderstuff make up the entire Top 3 of worst album titles ever. Impressive work.

As for Miles Hunt, he once arrived at the studio to find Shampoo there (they’d gone to meet producer Pat Collier). He told them to leave immediately (not his exact words) as “girls don’t belong in studios.”

And he has such a kind face… who’d have guessed?

To be fairer no-one would bat an eyelid if The Eight Legged Groove Machine were a Funkadelic album title.

Maybe Never Loved Elvis was a reference to the fact that most of Miles Hunt’s heroes didn’t appear on no stamps.

#27, I’m not saying you were inventing it. Indeed, he either respected KMac more, or (more likely) Steve Lillywhite, her (producer) husband.

“Construction For The Modern Idiot” sounds like a Lennonism, maybe from one of his books..

Re 30: Their discography also includes “Radio Ass Kiss” (US Radio release only). Gawdelpus! Proper misanthopists weren’t they? No disco, no Elvis, no girls, no radio friendly pop…

Reeves & Mortimer – I liked the relatively late period Catterick quite a lot. It’s unexpectedly dark, which helps. And Bob Mortimer’s character is called Carl Palmer, a neat touch as there are no other ELP references in the programme whatsoever.

“Never Loved Elvis” did have the redeeming virtue of inspiring an Aston Villa fanzine, “Never Loved Ellis” (referring to the not-very-much-liked chairman Doug Ellis). Agree about “If The Beatles Had Read Hunter” being a dog of a title, though. Namechecking another band in your own album title is generally a no-no, and it complicates matters that “Hunter” was also the title of a porn magazine, or so I’m told.

I wonder whether the general Wonder Stuff dislike on here reflects a generational divide, in that much of it appears to be based on contributors’ exposure to actual Wonder Stuff fans in their student days. Being well past that stage, I wasn’t exposed to any of their fans and their nefarious activities, so could only judge from the music and the occasional sighting on TOTP, which I have to say I enjoyed a lot. I thought the aforementioned “Hunter” compilation was full of win as well.

As for Vic, my wife and I discovered Big Night Out shortly after moving into our first house, and it was very much a shared pleasure. Not everything was a hit or even comprehensible by any means, but the more you eased yourself into his world the more sense it made, and we still quote Man With The Stick routines and Bob’s Rick Astley impression at each other even now.

“Dizzy”, then, was a blast, not trying to be a comedy record, the vocal delivery of a bloke who knows he’s not the world’s greatest singer but won’t let it get in the way, and a musical arrangement that packs a punch, with the drum intro setting the tone. Neither the singer nor the band carries the negative baggage for me that they do with others on here, and I find it easy to like.

Some of the early singles, “A wish away” for instance…

Also, “Circle Square” had one of those videos that you could make at a ‘make your own video’ booth.

I remember those. It cost £20 or something like that, but it would cost £200 if you wanted to use it for proper promo, to pay for the copyright outright.

As Miles Hunt used to go out with a friend of a friend, I’m sitting very tightly on my hands while I read this comments thread!

#36 – Thank God for that. I thought I was going to have to wade into this thread with a positive comment all by myself. This record is far too easy a target, as – unlike “The One and Only” – it hasn’t really been reassessed by anyone yet, or reclaimed by a new generation. In fact, I think its main problem was its sheer ubiquity for about 5-8 years after it hit number one.

I was a huge fan of both Vic Reeves and The Wonder Stuff at the time this was released. The latter have slipped down in my estimations quite a bit since (they were my absolute favourites, you know) and now admittedly seem like a band a bunch of adolescents would have got a lot out of between 1987-91. Those knowing sarcastic lyrics, smug yet clumsy Bukowski references, sledgehammer arrangements – it’s pure teenage boy stuff, music for slamming doors and stomping your feet to. This is probably why I got a lot out of them at the time, but cringe mightily at some of their low points now.

For all that, though, “If The Beatles Had Read Hunter” does prove that, for the most part, they had some superb indie-pop songs in their arsenal. “Hot Love Now”, “Caught In My Shadow”, “Unbearable” (preferably the album remix), “Don’t Let Me Down Gently”… all are great, in the same way that their Midlands forebears Slade had a powerful and laddish yet wonderful way with hook-filled melodies. If it’s subtlety you’re after, you won’t find it here, but if some of these melodies had been owned by Madness they’d still be raved about. Ignore the clunkiness of the lyrics, and there’s a lot to love. I was actually listening to them on the way home from work this evening, perhaps in anticipation of this entry.

“Dizzy” was admittedly not a career high point, but I will happily admit that I prefer it to Tommy Roe’s original. Like a lot of Stuffies singles, there’s a sheer rush to it which is infectious – perhaps horribly so if you’ve been to too many student discos. As the song ploughs forwards towards that megaphone howl at the end, it’s actually reaching a sugar-rush of a high which still makes me smile with its OTT energy, pushing an already energetic record into the red. Reeves’ vocal, meanwhile, is competent enough to carry the song, and I’ve always thought his performance is ‘frustrated rock star’ rather than an attempt at comedy. He was in bands long before his attempts as a “TV funnyman” (which were largely the result of a happy accident).

I never listen to this track out of my own choice these days due to its over-exposure, but for a time it was fun, and interestingly my Canadian wife plays it frequently despite despising Vic Reeves with every fibre in her body. She moved to this country utterly oblivious to this record’s existence then decided she liked it despite the individuals involved. That to me has always been proof that it has some kind of peculiar hold and was a natural number one.

I would launch into a defence of Vic Reeves as a result of some of the flippant dismissals above, but I fear I’d be here all night if I did. I still actually believe that he’s an astonishing talent, and own absolutely all of his shows on DVD which I rewatch many times and always find new details to admire.

(Also, only just noticed that thefatgit uses the “sugar rush” description as a criticism above. I don’t quite see it that way – like bubblegum, it can either be an insult or a complement depending on your viewpoint).

#43 – to be honest, I don’t think Britpop itself was largely any better than the bands you’ve mentioned. Certainly The Frank and Walters were better than Echobelly, and The Wonder Stuff were better than Dodgy. The Wonder Stuff were also sure as hell better than The Supernaturals, who were complete Stuffie clones musically speaking. Britpop to me was just three good bands (or three bands, some of them successful and some of them good, depending on your perspective) and a bunch of other middling acts riding on their coat-tails, some of whom could equally have belonged in the NME in 1991. Elastica (who I change my opinion about regularly) and Echobelly, lest we forget, had already been lumped in with the “New Wave of New Wave” movement.

The most interesting British material for me circa Britpop was the stuff which didn’t fit the sixties guitar pop model at all, and therefore wasn’t officially included in the genre at the time (Radiohead and Leftfield, for example). There did seem to be a hell of a lot of interesting homegrown talent around in the mid-nineties which wasn’t all second-hand sixties and seventies new wave riffs.

Interesting that this has come up in conversation, because Miles Hunt makes no secret about the fact he’s bitter that The Wonder Stuff aren’t given any credit for paving the way for Britpop. Commercially, they were one of the only British guitar bands to regularly break the top ten and therefore might have opened some ears, but stylistically I think they contributed relatively little (ignoring The Supernaturals here for a minute).

Here in Oz, I had no idea Vic Reeves was a comedian and thought Vic Reeves and the Wonder Stuff was an actual band. I wondered why this was their only song. It took me years to realise the truth.

So with Reeves taken out of context, I actually enjoyed this at the time in a jump around crazy kind of way. I liked my goofy songs back then.

@23daves, 42.
Also, only just noticed that thefatgit uses the “sugar rush” description as a criticism above. I don’t quite see it that way – like bubblegum, it can either be an insult or a compliment depending on your viewpoint).

I like your one word examples of something having a kind of hidden premise that reverses intent. I heard a radio piece by a linguist (Geoff Nunberg) on proverbial phrases that vary in the same way (so they’re always right!):
A rolling stone gathers no moss = good (you should be a rolling stone then!), because moss is horrible grungy polluting crap.
A rolling stone gathers no moss = bad (you shouldn’t be a rolling stone then!), because moss is warm fuzzy stuff that represents roots and connectedness (in other regions).

Proverbs about ‘bad apples’ originally counseled watching out for bad apples precisely because they’ll infect/taint a whole barrel of apples. That’s now completely flipped around to an (often implausibly exculpatory) image of non-infection, e.g. there’s nothing wrong with the police/company/marines etc., it’s just those bad apples over there.

Nunberg cited The Osmonds as a possible inflection point in how ‘bad apple’ proverbs were used, but I suspect that things like ‘sugar-rush’ and ‘bubble-gum’ that flip almost instantaneously from negative evals (by out-group members) to positive (by in-group members) are going to be the norm in the engine-room of pop and dance culture.

This is one of the things I like most about music (and writing about music, specifically) – the way pretty much any adjective becomes malleable in value. So “smooth” can imply luxury or tedium or both, “cheap” can be thrilling or ugly, and so on.