PUSSYCAT – "Mississippi"

Wichita Lineman – another Dutch popsong which should had been massive was Mouth and MacNeals “How Do You Do?” from the early 70s – simple and rather childish but infuriatingly catchy.

Oddly enough it has recently been covered by Scooter, and can regularly be heard emanating from thirteen-year-old girls’ mobile phones on the back seats of buses everywhere in commuterland.

Another cruel reminder of how, next to “Dancing Queen,” nearly all the other number ones of this period could have come from the seventeenth century, or at any rate from the pre-rock era. And this one actually offends me more than JJ Barrie or the Wurzels or the other polite monstrosities to come because it’s so determined in its attempt to pull the clock back and off the wall/its hinges if necessary. It just squats there drearily like an abandoned pack of prawn cocktail Tudor crisps in a tepid puddle in Todmorden, plodding away at fake remembrances – I suspect the furthest west Pussycat ever went was the South Pier in Blackpool, out of season – of how Our Music Used To Be and Look What These Kids (such rancorous revolutionaries as, um, Leo Sayer and Lord David “Jeans On” Dundas) Have Done To It.

Squalid toss!

Re that Top 100 best-selling singles, which I was going to mention if you didn’t: it was to mark the 50th anniversary of the UK singles chart, and was as accurate a list as they could get of the actual sales figures. There’s no “White Christmas” which sold most pre-1952, and there were two records – Gareth Gates’ “Unchained Melody” and the re-released “Amarillo” – which sold enough afterwards to get on the list; beyond that, now that downloads play such a part (did Gnarls Barkley, Leona etc sell a million physical copies?) it’s as close as you can get to a definitive all-time list of UK singles sales. (The big downside was it was presented by that Bo Selecta bloke who’s as funny as a dose of the clap, and the divine Sarah Alexander only got to do a voiceover.)

And Pussycat, being no 100, provided the benchmark sales figure: 947,000. More than any single by Abba, the Bee Gees, Bowie or the Stones, none of whom featured in the top 100. I thought one or two of the girls were fanciable in a homely sort of way – not in yer Abba league but nice enough. And the blokes used to be in a heavy metal band called Scum, apparently.

There are a number of features I love about this song – the guitar player turning to rock’n’roll is cheesemungous; the lifted note in “you’ll be on my miiIIINND”; the soaring harmonies taking the last “until the end of time” without the instrumental backing. As musical history it’s nonsense, but then I guess it’s no more a musical history lesson than “Fernando” was a treatise on the Mexican revolutionary war.

And what the record conjures up to me more than anything was the start of the Multi-Coloured Swap Shop. It was number one when the show started and seemed to be played on heavy rotation.

(n.b.: I’m assuming that “Do It” is not a cover version of the similarly titled tune by Aphrodite’s Child nor indeed of the similarly titled tune by Chris McGregor’s Brotherhood of Breath)

Re – Aphrodite’s Child (again) and “Do It”. I bought their single “Break” when it came out and remember just about crapping myself the first time I played it at home, when a voice shouts out “Do It” rather loudly, a good few seconds after the end of the track. B**t**ds!!!!

Country had a strong fanbase in Britain for a long time, which only really died out (in terms of charting singles) in the 80s and 90s I think.

Something is telling me that this fanbase was mostly in Northern England, but this might be down to:

– my Dad moving to Merseyside to work in the 80s and pretty much immediately getting very into country.
– the Coronation Street plot in the early 90s where Bet Lynch starts dating a country-loving stetson-wearing trucker.

It’s more than plausible, Dan, it’s the same as the reason why imported R&B caught on in Liverpool. The R & B records, along with Superman comics and other cultural detritus, crossed the Atlantic as ballast on ships. The same applied to Belfast too (think Them) but I believe Country took a tighter hold over there partly because – as with the Scots – they invented it in the first place.

I like this more than I did when it came out. Just listened to it again and it’s…well, nice. Nowt wrong with that.

I always assumed they were American though.

As far as I know, this is the only Dutch UK #1, which is a pity. Other posters have already noted Dutch acts that were far more worthy. Shocking Blue actually hit #1 in the US (on some charts) with “Venus” (RIP Mariska Veres). The Tee Set’s “Ma Belle Amie” and George Baker Selection’s “Little Green Bag,” two light-weight but catchy pieces with a certain quirky charm, also scored hits in the US. (Even if the latter later gave us the unforgivable “Paloma Blanca,” which was really, really BAD.) Golden Earring has had several US hits, most notably “Radar Love” and “Twilight Zone,” and we can’t forget Focus’s “Hocus Pocus,” “Sylvia,” etc. And, yes, “How Do You Do.” There was quite a bit of high quality pop and rock coming out of the Netherlands, particularly in the early 1970s, mostly sung in English, that never got much of a reception outside the motherland–Alquin, Kayak, Brainbox, Cuby and the Blizzards among them.

(There are others, more recent, I won’t mention because of another event in progress . . .)

So it’s rather sad that this pleasant, inoffensive but rather insipid trifle is one of the bigger successes uit Nederland. Even sadder that perhaps the biggest is (god help us) those “Stars on 45” things.

(I thoroughly enjoy the song “Dead Stars on 45” by the Australian group Eva Trout, but then again I can’t help love a group named after my favourite Elizabeth Bowen novel.)

Some day the great Dutch single will sweep the world–wake me up when it happens.

I saw Focus twice recently at the Ferry in Glasgow and they still play a blinding set – only two members from the 70s (Thijs Van Leer and Pierre Van Der Linden) and no Jan Akkerman, but two and a half hours of nostalgic splendour and silliness nonetheless. “Sylvia” still sends a shiver up my spine.

One for Marcello – Scooter as pick of the 2008 pops – I noticed they have a track entitled “How Much Is The Fish?” the line is uttered in a similar way to the original – unfortunately there is no “How much is the chips; does the fish have chips?” response. Who would have thought – Stump as Scooter influence??

The Dutch Invasion of the States included one of the truly cracked hit records of its era: Blue Swede’s “Hooked On a Feeling.” The awkward sorta-reggae and faux-David Clayton Thomas lead vocal aren’t the attraction – no, it’s the demented “Ooga chacka’s” that open the song, and then return near the end. There was a fellow DJ at my college radio station who had that bit on a cart, which he’d play while screaming, “They’re coming!! They’re here!! Help!!!” (I was easily amused.)

I, too, was a Mouth and McNeil fan. There were a lot of endearingly odd singles in the first half of the ’70s.

Ah. I read the title and decided I needed to listen to a recording before reading the post. “Okay, I’ve finally heard it – so *that*’s what Mississippi by Pussycat (or is it the other way round?) sounds like”, I thought, having seen it on lists of Number Ones and having failed to identify it at least once in a pop quiz environment. (Aside: I tried to listen specifically to the lyric in case it was pertinent to the discussion; it was, but even though I’d read a transcription online as it played, there was not a line of content that I processed. I didn’t really take it in as having lyrics – just some words for the nice lady to sing.) Then I read the post and remembered seeing the song on some TV list show and remembered thinking at the time “Okay, I’ve finally heard it – so *that*’s what Mississippi by Pussycat (or is it the other way round?) sounds like…”.

Who knows *how* many times I’ve actually heard this pissy thing?

(I maintain that recent Popular *was* the first time I’d heard Slik’s Forever And Ever, however. That you wouldn’t forget you’d remembered not to forget.)

I just hope it never comes up in a pop quiz.

Remind me: how does it go again?

Dr Mod didn’t mention whether any of those Dutchpop acts charted in the UK, but they were all solid hits in the Australian charts (perhaps they offload all the unsuccessful stuff on us?).

Dancing Queen was No 1 hereunder at the time, followed by a fortnight at the top for Bryan Ferry’s “Let’s Stick Together”.

wwolfe #27/28–

Doctor Mod forgives you, even if others won’t. Being big and blonde, I’m often asked–even by complete strangers–if I’m Swedish. And I couldn’t be mad at any fan of M&McN. I only wish I could find their albums on CD.

Going off on a wild tangent, I’m just listening to Annie Lennox (one of my absolute musical heroes) on Desert Island Discs, and as you (for certain values of ‘you’) might expect she is being a star.

It occurs to me that some performers are inseparable from, and define, their context. Others, like Annie, would have been successful in any context they might have landed in.

A potentially great talent spoiled by her forced “weirdness”, delusions of grandeur, and insistence on being taken seriously.

I saw her at the Apollo with the Tourists, and even then she was beginning to be a pain n the a**.

In my experience, almost all of her fans are female, and always have been – does she fit the “strong female icon” profile we discussed a couple of threads ago?

Rosie – she might not be in my absolute pantheon but yes, I’m a fan of Annie Lennox (one of the highlights of Live 8 as well) but maybe we can hold off discussion on her for nine Popular-years or so?

Among the Europop Dutch/Swedish hits mentioned above there was no mention of how a couple of them have been used – the “Ooga-chaga” bit from “Hooked On A Feeling” accompanied the freaky “dancing baby” sequences in Ally McBeal, and surely Dutch pop’s greatest contribution to popular culture (albeit inadvertently) was the use of George Baker’s “Little Green Bag” as the theme tune to Reservoir Dogs.

As for Pussycat, I seem to be in a minority of one in having very fond memories of it (and I’m not even that big a country fan). I’ll get me coat.

Annie Lennox in general makes me wish for nuclear holocaust in five seconds.

At the time of “Una Paloma Blanca” and in view of the absence of the George Baker Selection themselves from TV screens (JK’s version got all the publicity) I genuinely thought that it was George Baker the actor.

This site http://www.davidstjohn.co.uk/sitemap.html (especially the “Here Come The Groups” pages) gives a little view onto TWO lost worlds: the Southampton pop scene of the sixties and the internets of the late nineties.

The pages don’t make much of a case for Southampton as pop hotbed, but the meddyEVILS look amazing.