MUD – "Oh Boy"

I’ve always harboured a grudge against this one since it managed to keep one of my all-time favourite singles – “Lovin’ You” by Minnie Riperton – at number two. At this late stage all I can really say about this is that it’s a fair enough try to do something different – I think this was their “we don’t need Chinn and Chapman” moment – but it doesn’t really work; it sounds underpowered and a bit naff, particularly Ellie Hope’s profoundly unsexy voiceover halfway through. The basic beat was used much better by RAK labelmates Arrows on their contemporaneous “I Love Rock And Roll.”

Yes, it’s the almost machine-like harmonies that make this version. I also love the anticipation/hesitation before “hesitatin'”, although someone will probably now tell me this was also a feature of the Holly original.

Minnie Riperton’s offering is one of my all-time favourites too and it stays well ahead of the incumbent in my affections regardless of its highest chart position.

As with the last Mud number one, I was familiar with this for years without realising it was Mud. On the other hand I’m not sure I thought it was anyone else because I always associated Mud with Tiger Feet and both this and Lonely This Christmas don’t sound anything like that!

A few years after this, it’s in the back of my mind when I’n arranging Oh Boy! as a novelty musical ensemble performed by the teachers for laughs at a school concert. I played recorders, crumhorns etc in a mediaeval band that played around East Riding folk clubs at the time, and the idea was to give a familiar tune an offbeat twist and I did an a capella version (billed as taken from the Ilex Gemmata, a mediaeval manuscript recently discovered in the annals of York Minster) without much thinking I was directly imitating something so recent. I don’t think it came off a fraction as well as the other one of these novelties I did – Falling In Love Again as a Haydn minuet.

Anyway, back to the matter in hand. It’s ever so clever, isn’t it, although I like the a capella bits that top and tail it much more than what comes in the middle. The trouble is, it’s got no soul. And you can take that how you want to.

Swerving: as I write I’m listening to a feature on Radio 4 about the 6.5 special, the Saturday tea-time BBC proggy which would have been my very earliest encounter with pop. This would be before I started school, I think, and I only saw it because my big sister watched it, but I remember titles very well, and the music that went with it “The six-five special comin’ down the line”. (Actually I now realise I’ve heard this before and perhaps even commented on it but you have to remember I’m getting old!)

Sorry, but I don’t hear hints of future Westlife (uuurrggh!) or indeed the beat from I Love Rock’n’Roll, which is primal where this is almost stately. I hear a band trying out its versatility and coming up with a great new take on a rock’n’roll standard which preserves the vitality of the song in a different mood entirely. And it sounds as smooth as a strawberry smoothie. The TOTP performance with a charlady walking on with a mop and bucket (IIRC) to do the spoken bit was another example of their endearing way of mixing lovingly produced music with comedy. Yes, sorry but I’m a fan.

After this it was downhill for the band – disputes in leaving RAK for the Private Stock label resulted in RAK re-releasing any old stuff (“Moonshine Sally”!) and getting in the way of the new label’s planned release schedule. A great throwback piece of glam rock (“L-L-Lucy”) came next, but they were revisiting old haunts after that – “Show Me You’re A Woman” was a less successful version of the Christmas hit, they returned to the harmonies with an effective reworking of “Lean On Me”, but the lame disco of “Shake It Down” suggested the writing was on the wall. Mind you, three number ones isn’t a bad return for a 70s pop career, and they’re fondly remembered by many. Les Gray passed away a few years ago and Dave Mount last year – Ray Stiles is apparently gigging with a version of The Hollies, and Rob (CGYOOMH) Davis hasn’t fared badly!

Who would have thought that it would be the one with the earring and the bathrobe who’d make good in the long run? And “Shake It Down” (not to mention subsequent non-hits like “Night On The Tiles”) does begin to point towards the dance direction which Rob D would eventually take.

In the sleevenotes of Mud’s RAK singles compilation it mentions that Ray Stiles is indeed now part of the Hollies and that “there is a small section in each show where he gets to sing a Mud hit.” Poor sod!

I’m not exactly encouraged by the comments to get to know this song (good as Buddy Holly is, and how much of glam comes right out of the 50s?), so I will mention a few US #1s of the time instead…

Ah, the Ford Administration…in Popstrology this is the year of Elton John, and around this time “Philadelphia Freedom” (an anthemic song that makes me cry) went to #1 in an unstoppable wave of Bicentennial fervor and general grooviness. Minnie did get to #1 in the US, with a song that went too high for my tastes at the time, but which is a particular favorite of mine now – whereas the original “Lady Marmalade” was an instant hit with everyone, and I remember my mom dancing around to it, as well!

However the #1 at this exact time was by Tony Orlando and Dawn, a song I don’t remember called “He Don’t Love You (Like I Love You)” which may or may not be as scary as their previous hits…

This was rather like the Temperance Seven topping the chart fourteen years earlier with music from a bygone age. It would appear that the main purchasers of “Oh Boy” would have been older than the profile for single buyers at that time. I personally remember being surprised by how well this did; but credit to Mud for pulling a rabbit out of the hat with this. They gambled on nostalgia and were rewarded handsomely with what I would say is a good effort, to be fair.

Minnie Ripperton’s lovely song was lended more pathos when Minnie was diagnosed with breast cancer soon after and did not survive the condition. Simply tragic.

Yes, the Vietnam war was ending – which was itself a difficult and exhausting time – but CBS had started to run “Bicentennial Minutes” in ’74 and by April of ’75 people were looking for a reason to like their country and be proud of it…

More here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicentennial_Minutes

Sadly none are on YouTube (save for the last one), but I remember them well and they (along with Schoolhouse Rock) were my introduction to American History…

(And you can certainly trace a clear line from “Shake It Down” to “Groovejet”…)

Waldo, I’m not sure that in 1975 this would have felt to me like something from a far and alien past: Buddy Holly was in the past, to be sure, far enough for his death not to be something I remembered but rather something that was a fait accompli when I first became aware of him. But he was, all the same, a pop icon and his songs (and also, I think, the residual Crickets) had cropped up from time to time within my musical memory. So not a Temperance Seven moment. But we will be having something Temperance Seven-like in the not too distant future, won’t we? One much more sublime than this too. For me, anyway, and also very affective in a deeply significant way. More of that anon.

Rosie – this is another illustration of the elasticity of time depending on the observer. In 1975 the original “Oh Boy” was just 18 years old: the equivalent today might be The Feeling doing an a capella version of the Stone Roses. It feels recent to most of us, but if that 18-year time span includes your childhood and even your birth, it might well feel like the distant past. (And besides, pop surely travelled further and faster between 1957 and 1975 than in the past 18 years – or is that a cat-among-the-pigeons statement?)

The Temperance Seven were harking back to the 20s in 1961, and it did indeed seem like a bygone age. To find someone harking back 40 years today, you only need to look at the current Number 1, and whatever you think about that, it doesn’t sound prehistoric. Buddy (and Dusty) have influenced so much of what pop music has been since their time that they’ve never really been away. You’re right, more of this in a couple of entries’ time…

Um, I have no idea what’s the current number one…

But yes, I know what you are saying, and it’s something I’ve often reflected on. Let’s see, forty years ago today the number one was… oh, let’s not go there! Although Buddy Holly was a bigger influence on what was contemporary in 1975, I think, than Art and Dotty Todd or the Ink Spots (yes, there’s a Temperance Seven moment coming much sooner than the one I and Waldo have in mind, I think…)

Sometimes it’s hard to be a blogger…

Indeed – shall we return to this in a couple of entries’ time?!

Thanks for the retrospective plug, Erithian. I’m rubbish at self-pimping, my entire global promotional campaign for this year’s “Which Decade Is Tops For Pops” project consisting of a single tremulous e-mail to Tom.

(It runs every mid-February, folks. Put it in your diaries for next time.)

I was thinking more in terms of giving all your love to just one blog (oh drat!)…

i think the hosts job in that situation should have been to put on a brave face and pretend there was nothing untoward about expecting people to guess the name of an obscure glam rock drummer- they didnt do this i.e they didnt do the right or “decent” thing so they ‘didnt have the decency to not look a bit confused and embarressed by it’.
Not perhaps the best written sentance i have ever written but I must say i don’t mind people not pointing out things like this..(btw many thanks for not mentioning that i also missed out the apostrophe in “didn’t”. The shame would have been too great.)

Mud Rock Vol.II was a crashing disappointment, though. Tame, dull, straight-up revivalism with all the fun knocked out if it. So that’s pretty much where I gave up on them.

* 40

That’s OK, a lot of people did not point out this, or even things like this, so I don’t include myself on that list of not people who didn’t not point out things that were like this.

And nor do I.

Just a quick word to add about the US Bicentenial fever in 1976. Living next door in Canada it was pretty well a non-stop cultural assault of Americana for years ( certainly all of 1975 ) before the actual event July 04, 1976. Almost as bad as the preambles to the Olympics we are currently suffering through.

I’ve not heard the song, but maybe , just maybe, they chose Buddy Holly as he , along with Elvis , Sinatra, Ella , Apple Pie and the Bible , were being pimped non-stop in the U.S. as cultural icons in the run up to the party of century.

…and I’ve only just discovered that Mud came second on OpKnox in the late 1960s…

The Stones’ Not Fade Away is a cracker. I have a soft spot for Blondie’s version of I’m Gonna Love You Too and there’s a good sound affective reason for that.