The success of Elvis’ reissues – a promotional gimmick which actually managed to hack the charts – made a strong case that the new pop of 2005 simply wasn’t able to capture the wider public imagination. This record makes it inarguable. The best selling single of the year – the only million-seller, a 7-week leviathan in an age of minnows – is a song which barely scraped the Top 20 in 1971, with a fictitious credit for the comedian in the video as the only link to the present day.
Nothing musical about “Is This The Way To Amarillo?” speaks of an idea whose time had come. The song reached a mid-range position on release because, for those early 70s charts, it’s a mid-range song, catchy and muscular but monotonous too. As a ’71 hit “Amarillo” sits at a midpoint between the cloying singalong of Tony Orlando and Dawn and the coming whomp of The Sweet or Slade, with some light country elements in the songwriting and a trouper’s performance from big-voiced Tony Christie.
It’s the kind of record people didn’t make any more, and that was entirely the point. Amongst its contemporaries, the beasts of an earlier age, “Amarillo” cut an ordinary figure; it wasn’t even Christie’s signature hit. Awoken from its slumber and unleashed on the low-selling, fanbase-tossed charts of 2005, it was a kaiju. Oasis and McFly might style themselves in their different ways as classicists, but nobody making contemporary records would come up with that wordless, pub-ready second chorus, let alone finish it off with that final tacky stomp. A producer like Richard X might build a knowing version of the 70s aesthetic, distorted and filtered through the decades of accumulated pop knowledge since, and fans like me would absolutely love it. But here was the real thing.
Peter Kay was an aesthetic technician just as much as Richard X, though. Early-00s comedy was very often a construct of vibes; you built a character not just around what they did or said but around the kind of things they would be into. I’ve written in previous posts about how British entertainment in the Blair years was marked by a fascination with ‘real life’, or at least the skewed, mediated version of it put forward via docudramas, reality TV and talent shows. I think the big comedy hits of the early Blair era – Phoenix Nights, The Office, The Royle Family, I’m Alan Partridge – shared some of that feeling, the metropole waking up to the existence of life in Slough or Bolton or Norwich, and commissioning shows that operated at different points on a spectrum of affection, curiosity and scorn.
Kay and his series Phoenix Nights was at the affectionate end of that scale. His comedy is in mocking, but loving conversation with an older style of cheap-and-cheerful entertainment, and the people who made and bought it. His signature routine involved his Dad on holiday, flummoxed by the exotica of garlic bread. And his breakthrough role, as Northern working men’s club entrepreneur Brian Potter in Phoenix Nights, was one of British comedy’s long line of Del Boy-style vainglorious dreamers. But while the show took the piss out of Potter’s pig-headed self-belief and the wretched acts he booked, it was more affectionate about the milieu and traditions those hopeless wannabes inhabited. Fashions come and fashions go, but family fun days and wild west nights are forever. And so are the people hoping to make a few quid off them.
Phoenix Nights brought “Amarillo” back into circulation, sung by two characters in a pivotal scene. Brian Potter would have approved of the song landing at Number 1. So would his customers. And if Peter Kay’s family holiday happened in 1971, his Dad could have heard and liked it too. Tony Christie’s song wasn’t a big hit in England, but in Germany and Belgium it was a Number 1, embraced as a rare example of English schlager. People sometimes like to say there’s no real UK equivalent of schlager, but a glance at the No.1s lists suggests that whatever you want to call it, jovial sentimentality finds a regular place in the hearts of the British public. In any case, Christie spent most of the late 70s and 80s in continental exile, at least in the career sense, releasing singles only in Germany and the Netherlands.
In 1999, though, he made a return to the UK charts, Jarvis Cocker and the All Seeing I writing “Walk Like A Panther” for him: a song that fictionalised Christie’s own situation, turning it into a scenario straight out of Phoenix Nights. The returning singer, disgusted at the low state his town and his profession have fallen into, snarling at a new breed of performers who lack respect and nous. Like many Cocker songs, “Panther” feels double-edged, proud of a threatened world of working-class entertainment while acknowledging that it was threatened: the song only works by casting Christie as a remnant, in the same way Phil Oakey in companion single “First Man In Space” is both a genuine pioneer and a castaway in the end-of-the-90s world.
But now it’s six years later, and Christie the remnant is sweeping the charts before him, with the help of Peter Kay’s bumptious charity video. It’s worth comparing the “Amarillo” video with a previous all-star video extravaganza No.1, 1997’s “Perfect Day”, as both of them feel like products distinctly of their time. “Perfect Day” was a statement of intent by a newly confident BBC coming off the back of an era when music felt central to British cultural identity (certainly in terms of column inches and export figures). Everything from the choice of song to the diversity of its singers communicates a notion of curation – the Corporation as something that selects, brings together and packages its idea of the best, creating juxtapositions that only the BBC can.
This is most certainly not the vibe of Kay’s video for Comic Relief, which revels in joyful, populist tackiness. A beaming Kay in a purple suit jogs toward the camera miming the song against an ever-changing green-screen background, flanked by a cast of celebrities from Coronation Street’s Ken and Deirdre to Heather Mills. Music is represented, with Shaun and Bez from the Happy Mondays and Brian May and Roger Taylor from Queen. But most of the impromptu cast are comedians, cabaret turns and kids’ entertainers: Jim Bowen, Mr Blobby, Bernie Clifton, Keith Harris and Orville. These are familiar faces, but not fashionable ones; many are presenters or comedians whose stars fell as alternative comedy rose in the 80s and 90s. Kay’s video is a sign the wheel has turned again: light entertainment is back, back, back.
In that sense “Amarillo” is pulling on the longest thread in this whole blog series – the way Britain’s light entertainment establishment, centred on the BBC, is so crucial to pop and to the charts. The infrastructure of British pop was born from it, from the old music hall venues pop stars performed in, through the Light Programme their records were played on, down to details like George Martin’s background as a Goon Show producer. For a long time it felt like ‘light ent’ was a skin UK pop had shed, transforming itself into something new and young and highly exportable. But when you take ‘what’s popular’ as your metric, you find that light entertainment is always there, tapping patiently at the window of pop. We’ve never been far away from TV hits, talent show winners, comedians, family entertainers: not many of the Amarillo line up were best known as musicians, but they’d all made records.
What we’ve seen in the 00s is the light entertainment tradition partially re-absorbing British pop music. Auteurist pop, as we’d understood it from the 60s to the 90s, was simply outgunned on a sales basis by the singles reality TV spawned, though a limited public appetite for multiple shows meant the reality-pop glut of 2001 and 2002 scaled down to an annual Winter infestation. But the reality TV shows at least pretended to be about looking for new, contemporary stars. What makes “Amarillo” extraordinary isn’t just the way it has no engagement whatsoever with current pop – most Comic Relief singles are fairly tenuous about that – but that despite this, in fact because of this, it’s easily the biggest single of the year.
The chart success of “Amarillo” feels like a broad public rejection of contemporary pop, though this probably wasn’t Peter Kay’s intent. The video, I’d say, makes that rejection part of a broader cultural mood, a backlash against the 90s conception of cool. Its parade of pre-loved old stars might have felt ironic on first encounter, but you can’t sustain irony for seven weeks. In the second week of “Amarillo” at No.1, another old BBC icon joined Jim Bowen and Keith Harris and The Two Ronnies back in the spotlight: Doctor Who was on Saturday teatimes again, with a Northern star, telling us that the kind of everyday people you see in reality shows might save the Universe if you give them the chance. It was a time of nostalgia and national treasures, and the “Amarillo” video caught the mood.
Yet some national treasures bear curses. You can see the video for “Is This The Way To Amarillo?” easily enough on YouTube, but you won’t find it as the official upload. That version is an edit, carefully removing one Sir James Winston Vincent Savile OBE KCMG, the worm at the centre of light entertainment, a man who’d embraced his national treasure status as a means to prey on hundreds of children. The tracksuited, wrinkled, cigar-chomping, chain-rattling spectre of Jimmy Savile – instantly familiar to anyone who was a late 20th century kid – is a moment to shudder at in the video, even when you know he’s coming. Kay to this day regrets putting “that shithouse” in the film, but how could he not have? Savile was in his charitable element, a predator who used charity, the BBC and the British public’s unbending belief in fun to abuse his way to the grave.
The 2012 revelations of Savile’s crimes became part of a decade-long (and continuing) era of attempted reckoning with abusive men and their ability to work within and through the structures of the media. Abuse thrives on the imbalance of power; few industries work as hard to conceal how power operates within them as the media, and so few offer such opportunities to the abuser. The fact British light entertainment prided itself on being so jovial and anodyne made the reveal of monstrous acts more shocking, but every branch of the media contained men who could match Savile’s drives, if not their stupefying scale.
I could pretend the crimes of Savile are an albatross for the song, but it would be manifestly untrue: “Amarillo” would shrug the attempt off and keep on jogging along. The “Amarillo” video has survived Savile to become a meme. In fact this happened almost at once: some BBC staffer knuckles were rapped in 2006 over something called “Is This The Way To Al-Jazeera?” and that same year Christie himself popped up again with “Is This The Way To The World Cup?”. Away from the spotlight, the video format is never far away from the thoughts of those poor souls entrusted with leaving do videos or digital Christmas cards. It’s been particularly popular with NHS workers, and Kay put together a Covid-era fundraiser featuring key workers doing the Amarillo Jog. And the jaunty record in the middle of all this is both completely insignificant next to that video and also a year-straddling hit, a song that you can connect to so much else in 2005 while realising that, in the end, it refuses to be anything other than what it is.
Score: 4
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