TINA CHARLES – "I Love To Love"

Well the whole song is an extended metaphor really (“I Love To Come But My Baby Just Wants To…” and you can fill in the rest)…

She sang lead on the late ’75 European hit (and “Black Is Black” ripoff) “I’m On Fire” by 5000 Volts and was understandably narked at Luan Peters appearing as the public face of the band, miming to her vocals on TOTP etc. However, it was all good publicity and she got signed up in her own right to CBS where she was mentored by Biddu, who thus scored his second UK number one as producer (“Kung Fu Fighting,” as you may recall, was the first).

All bouncily harmless – it’s a sort of Home Counties “Rock The Boat” – but at least she sounds as though she’s having fun (her “Whoo!”s towards the end don’t sound forced) and Biddu was never going to be Nile and Bernard but he doesn’t do a bad job here, and the various pings of syndrums and the vague angularity of the string arrangement certainly put me in mind of the young lad, just down from Durham, who at the time was putting in the hours as trainee tape op/engineer/producer under Biddu’s tutelage and also played bass in Tina’s touring band – although he was a little peeved since he was basically a Yes fan and wanted to be Jon Anderson. His name was Trevor Horn.

This is also the moment where the first of my previously mentioned “phantom” number ones occurred – the one which was top at lunchtime but demoted to #3 by teatime when the BMRB remembered to include the missing day’s sales data – so a word for the late bandleader Geoff Love, who under the moniker of “Manuel and his Music of the Mountains” spent four hours at number one with his interpretation of the second adagio movement from Rodrigo’s Guitar Concerto d’Aranjuez, which was to the Miles Davis/Gil Evans version as “I Love To Love” is to “He’s The Greatest Dancer.”

I’m feeling a bit like death warmed up this morning (usual thing, slight cold turns to chest infection turns to all sorts of respiratory problems) so anything that cheers me up in an undemanding way goes down well. This manages it rather well, if you don’t listen too closely (and it’s clearly for dancing to after all, not for semiotic introspection, and the actual words don’t matter much. It would work just as well if Tina were singing in Swabian, and the important thing is that she sounds like she’s having a really good time, and it’s infectious. You can’t not feel happy.

Sketches of Spain is indeed a little musical miracle and as the version of the Concierto d’Aranjuez contained therein isn’t performed on guitar then it should be jusdged as sui generis, perhaps. Certainly Geoff Love’s rendering doesn’t bear serious comparison with a performance by, say, John Williams (the real one, not the Hollywood hack composer).

The reverse situation appears in Jim Steinman’s Dance In My Pants:

I’m a lover not a dancer
Don’t want to be on my feet when I can be on my back

While his girl just wants to dance. In a real Vertical Expression Of A Horizontal Desire way.

Tina was a RUBBISH dancer I seem to recall, so I’m not surprised her baby was always out dancing alone. I quite like the song though. 6 is about right, maybe I’d go 7.

Was the song not deliberately unsubstantial? It was, IMO, supposed to be a bit of throwaway pop, with a nod the the European end of disco rather than the American end.

Tina herself was one of these unlikely popstars who certainly didn’t have “the look” and would never be cool, but who would no doubt have had a decent session career anyway. In addition to the 5000 Volts song, she had also been (with Linda Lewis) a backing vocalist on an earlier no1 – Steven Harley and Cockney Rebel’s “Make Me Smile”.

I don’t particularly like her performance of the song, but it does have some significance to me because of its connection to later pop/rock/mad superstar Bjork.

Legend has it that she got her first break at age 11 after her teacher sent a recording of her singing this to an Icelandic radio station. They played it; she got picked up by a record company, and made her first album at age 12.

There were a sudden spate of songs where people decided they wanted to go out and “DANCE” and not “fuck” in very small lettering.

Nolans, GMichael/Wham, ooh….

Strangely enough, yesterday’s Capital Gold retrochart show, which I always try to catch since they are good enough to play the WHOLE Top 20 rather than a sanitised “Pick,” David Jensen was doing the chart from March ’76 (they don’t strictly go by the “this week x years ago” rule) and the studio guest was – Tina Charles!

She still sounded pretty keen on Trevor – at the time this hit number one, they did have a thing going on and were living in a little flat in Streatham – and also confirmed that Geoff Downes was her touring keyboard player, so basically this was where Buggles started!

She’s now a grandmother, which made me feel even older than I normally do!

About PopIdol etc. I have nothing to say at the moment except that it’s a major tragedy that Alison Moyet will play no direct part (and only one indirect part) in Popular whatsoever.

I’ll go on strike if it doesn’t.

Presumably it was Michelle McManus that Rosie heard on Woman’s Hour. I would say that the combination of the emphasis on powerhouse ballads plus the underdog factor actually makes reality TV pop friendlier to a wider range of types than the 1990s music industry (as well as those mentioned by Tom, I’d add the mountainous American Idol winner Ruben Studdard). It’s after the contest is over that singers face the pressure of bullying management and the press.
Also, as Tom says, the Brit school bunch include the likes of Adele and Amy Winehouse, who was never a living Barbie even before the tats and permanently tired-and-emotional state.

See also second John Howard album which involves both Biddu and Horn and is markedly better than other Biddu things like “Summer Of ’42 BUT DONE DISCO STYLE”…

I think more of Amy W as a noughties version of Carmel, if anyone remembers her.

Perhaps if she engaged the services of decent writers and producers rather than singing over old Helen Shapiro backing tracks her talent might become more apparent.

Butbutbut surely Duffy = The New Carmel? (BTW, it was good to hear this year’s Norwegian Eurovision entrant covering Carmel’s “More More More” at The Scala on Friday night.)

My opinion of Amy changed after seeing her live last spring (we were lucky enough to catch her on a relatively straight and sober night), and was further reinforced by her stunning performance of “Love Is A Losing Game” at the Mercurys. Up until then, I’d found her second album far too self-consciously mannered to sound convincing. But now, I don’t.

Mike, you beat me to it re Duffy as Carmel! I caught a few minutes of Duffy being “interviewed” by George Lamb on T4 yesterday – blimey, who gave him a job?

Re Amy’s personal failings – you’re right, Rosie, and she’s being helped on her way by some of the most intrusive papping anyone’s ever had. Slebs falling out of nightclubs is fair game, but who wants to see her buying chocolates at the all-night store or trying to open her garage while looking dog-rough?

Anyway, re “I Love to Love”: can’t agree with Doc Casino (#5) that the situation needs to be reversed – in itself it’s a nice reversal of the usual scenario, set out in previous Popular favourite “Come Outside” among others, where the girl wants her pleasures vertically and the bloke wants them horizontally. Beyond that it’s a nice little disco number, nothing special. GRRR books’ (Gambaccini, Read and the Rice brothers) tome marking the 500th number one observed that Tina Charles was possibly the shortest adult ever to top the UK chart, taller only than Little Jimmy Osmond who would now tower over her!

But it was good to see Tina get recognition after her uncredited appearance on the 5000 Volts record. It’s as if Loleatta Holloway had had a solo number one after a certain infamous 1989 hit which the producers couldn’t be arsed to spell properly (bunny says to stop there). The singer who appeared on TOTP, doing “I’m On Fire”, Luan Peters, had made a few flop singles beforehand but is probably best remembered as the guest whose breast is hilariously mistaken for a light switch by Basil in an episode of “Fawlty Towers”.

Number 2 Watch – Tina denied us the joy of seeing CW McCall’s “Convoy” reach number one!

Just a thought, as someone mentioned Grrr books…

When did they stop publishing? I was wondering if they ever did a ‘nineties’ volume, and how late did the ‘hit singles’ go up to?

Just went to Amazon. Someone called David Roberts seems to be ‘authoring’ the books now, and one came out in July last year.

Re #30 – I stopped picking up the Guinness Hit Singles books at about edition 12 or 13. Said edition was so riddled with inaccuracies it was a complete waste of time – actually detrimental, in fact.

B-b-but Tom, some of OUR anecdotes come from Kutner/Leigh! Said book is certainly better than the GRRR 500 number ones book. I also had, but have mislaid, a similar well-produced book of US number ones which began arbitrarily with “Rock Around The Clock” and ended with USA for Africa, as though that was the very last word. (to be fair, they had to stop somewhere)

My favourite “British Hit Singles” booboo was the year they listed Judy Garland as “US, male vocalist”.

My faith in the Guinness series was shaken when one volume omitted one of Abba’s big hits (I think it was “Chiquitita”) – and that was just on Page One. In fact, that edition was so error-ridden that a revised version was hastily issued. (Which begs the question: how can anyone muck up an annual copy-paste so badly?)

Guinness used to publish a book of complete week-by-week Top 40 singles listings, but I think that stopped a good few years ago. Far too useful!

It must have been around this time that the headline of one of the NME’s singles columns read “Don’t Look Now, But You’re Living In A Golden Age”. That did seem to be stretching it somewhat.

Meanwhile, and courtesy of a near-immaculately preserved collection of 78s which had just been exhumed from my gradmother’s basement (one of her former lodgers had left it behind a few years earlier), I was going through a major Sidney Bechet phase.

Yes, I am also surprised that “Convoy” did so well! It went to #1 in the US, back in January (as Popstrology says, it’s in the Had To Be There constellation). Meanwhile, a variety of songs followed – “I Write The Songs” by Barry Manilow, “Love Rollercoaster” by Ohio Players and Paul Simon’s “50 Ways To Leave Your Lover.”

A forum about hit singles?

I expect that there are forums for trainsp railway enthusiast where everybody has stories about errors in Railway World!

To Rosie at #40:

Well, quite, but it’s the eye for the minutiae, the statistics, and actually knowing better than the machine. Great stuff.

Listening to yesterday’s Gold countdown, “Dat” by Pluto Shervington was also hanging around in the top ten and I remember Record Mirror publishing translations of lyrics for both that and “Convoy” at the time.

Although the best record in yesterday’s top ten was “It Should Have Been Me” by Yvonne Fair – Christ, what a voice she had, what a performance, and a sight better than at least one certain wedding-themed number one to follow in the VERY long term…

Yes, the very same song.

“Dat” was a shaggy dog story, sung entirely in Jamaican patois, about a Rasta sneakily trying to buy some pork despite it being against the tenets of his religion but it was great fun and a fab tune. He also produced Paul Davidson’s holy cover of “Midnight Rider.”

We’ve touched before on the subject of the exoticism of US place-names, and part of the appeal of “Convoy” were the references to “Shaky Town”, Interstate 44, long-haired friends of Jesus, bears in the air and so on – which is also why the Laurie Lingo version appealed, with its counterblast of Newport Pagnell, Toddington and Spaghetti Junction.

In my hitch-hiking days I spent a fair amount of time listening to CB conversations on the road to the likes of “Brown Bottle City” (that’s Newcastle to you) as truckers would say things like “eyeball-eyeball 14-wheeler” and swap news of the road ahead. I also met one trucker who was having it away with his boss’s daughter. She wasn’t much to look at, apparently, but then “you don’t look at the mantelpiece when you’re poking the fire.” Kings of the road…

When we speak, we elongate the language. When we type, we go shortn.