DAVE STEWART AND BARBARA GASKIN – "It's My Party"

It’s hard to like this one when you grew up with the Lesley Gore original, which is a classic of sorts so I don’t very much.

I have, without shame, enjoyed a lot of the stuff that this Dave Stewart did previously and have a very fond memory of an extraordinary gig at Liverpool Uni in which Hatfield & the North supported Stomu Yamash’ta, the Japanese percussionist who seems to have sunk without trace. Popularwise I much preferred the bunny-embargoed fare of the other Dave Stewart but then I would, wouldn’t I?

And in a disturbing departure, the man with the electronic noise-making machine gets himself billed ahead of the singer. A sign of things to come (although I am aware that Ike Turner had pulled this stunt a generation earlier)

the prog lineage is about the only thing of interest about this. I always got a sense that they were slumming it and got lucky – which probably confirmed their sense of superiority to ‘pop music’ without understanding its richness and potential, something that Soft Cell, who were slumming it in a different sense, understood completely.

in the swing era and before, danceband leaders actually often got pre-eminence over singers, who were after all generally their employees (and didn’t get to sing on all numbers: instrumentals had not at that time been purged from the top of the “charts”, insofaras they existed) — this isn’t totally cut-and-dried, the heirarchy somewhat dependent on genre, but the switch TO singer-as-top-of-bill had been a departure in its turn

(in classical and light classical, the composer is still placed above the performer: i think this back-and-forth tension is highly interesting, because it really is an acknowledgment of a struggle for control, artistic or box-office-derived — there’s a similar power-tussle in film-making, between the big-name actors you need to get the project made, who are billed in big names as “executive producers”, and the “director”, who may end up not getting final cut, and almost never gets his/her FACE on the billboards, or name in large letters…)

incidentally: sleevewatch!! eep!! kate bush in “not equivalent to aneka” shenanigans called!

This is a classic example of a simple song that is better off being kept simple, and doesn’t respond very well to being fannied about with (see also: every version of “Over the Rainbow” since Eva Cassidy’s). The Lesley Gore version says it all about teenage parties (of the 60s at any rate) and the fact that it’s not the end of the world anyhow; this one gives it what we might call the emo treatment and it doesn’t work!

Number 2 Watch – imagine what we would have been saying about pop records with odd noises on them if Laurie Anderson’s “O Superman” had gone one place higher. Followed by three weeks at two for the delightful “Happy Birthday” from Altered Images. Two different songs with the same title stopping at 2 inside three months.

I have zero memory of “O Superman” from the time, unlike of this. Or of Black Lace’s “Superman” for that matter.

O Supermanchiros

This is a lot weirder than I remembered and that opening is another contender for the “most atonal #1” slot. Not a patch on The Flying Lizards and I sort of admire its random cut-and-paste quality without actually liking it much.

Re-evaluating this (released within a year of Robert Wyatt’s exquisite cover of At Last I Am Free) in a Canterbury context is rather like furrowing your brow over late period Freddie Garrity (Little Big Time, anyone?) because he sprung from the same scene as The Beatles.

In any case, weren’t Hatfield & The North lame Wyatt copyists rather than comparable contemporaries?

The Original Dave Stewart, as I like to think of him, had form – his cover of What Becomes Of The Brokenhearted (with Colin Blunstone also receiving second billing, so no sexism at work here) had been Top 20 at the beginning of the year. It was interesting, earnest, and not that good. Whereas It’s My Party was (bracing intro aside) po-mo piffle, spoil-sporty in the way it audibly sticks its tongue out at both electropop and Girl Group melodrama. Most scenes die on their feet when a cash-in/comedy record scores big, and this surely sounded the death knell for New Romantics/Futurists.

As for the Lesley Gore version, got no idea on Gold, Gluck and Wiener but a lot of its impact is down to the crisp, punchy arrangement/production by Quincy Jones, who will crop up again in a year or so…

O Superman’s Top 20 stats (18-2-3-15) would explain why people don’t remember it any more than they’d remember most mid-ranking chart hits. I don’t recall ever hearing it on daytime radio (I was at school, I suppose) but Peel and Skinner and/or Jensen played it every night in the splendid autumn of ’81, along with Orange Juice’s LOVE and New Order’s Procession/Everything’s Gone Green. Ahhhh!

It adds insult to injury that this kept ‘O superman’ off the top slot. I think the big jump may have been down to Noel Edmunds (again) who started plugging it on his weekend show – although I believe it was John Peel who initially gave it airplay. It still sounds great (and relevant) today.
Years later I bumped into Laurie Anderson at Tate Modern where she was trying to get a light for her fag before heading off to give a talk. Great looking woman.

Great double bills that never were – Hatfield and The North and Kilburn and the High Roads.

Bloody hell, I just about remember “Little Big Time” – I feel ancient.

The Tourists’ “Loneliest Man In The World” shoulda been a monster. Nothing third-rate about that one.

Was it Noel Edmonds who plugged ‘O Superman’? In my mind it was Dave Lee Travis, but that could be because he did a similar thing with Talking Heads’ ‘Once In A Lifetime’ and liked to take credit for it’s chart success.

‘O Superman’ popped up on my iTunes Party Shuffle yesterday and it sounded wonderful. Better than I liked it at the time.

Point of order! Dave Stewart was never really IN Gong. He did a tour with them in 1975, and he played with other Gong members on Steve Hillage’s Fish Rising album, but he never joined the official line-up.

(I knew something would drag me back into the commenting fray – how predictable that it turned out to be a matter of prog pedentary.)

I’m with the other surprisees on the Dave Stewart point. Wouldn’t this song have been more interesting if the much more likely Mari Wilson had covered it? I quite like this anyway, it’s interesting even if it isn’t wonderful, and that’s no bad thing.

Re 23: Yes, Ferry’s version is a bit Austin Powers (ie killing the thing you supposedly love), and could be a dry run for Gaskin/Stewart. River Of Salt was my favourite track on These Foolish Things, mainly because I was unfamiliar with Ketty Lester’s original at the time.

Judy’s Turn To Cry was a distaff Hats Off To Larry. Nasty!

I have a vivid memory of O Superman coming on the radio in the early hours of a morning in early ’91. As I lay there in the dark, reaquainting myself with its strangeness (I hadn’t heard it in a decade) it seemed eerily prescient of the Gulf War that was unsettling me on a daily basis back then (I had a tiny but niggling feeling I was going to be drafted). All those lines about petrochemical arms and justice and force and “American planes, made in America.” I was even convinced she said “George” at one point. And I remember listening to it ending, hearing those urgent, mechanical breaths, and suddenly thinking how much they reminded me of a life support machine, and how much I didn’t want them to stop…

I remember hearing “O Superman” being played at a Radio One roadshow – after which the DJ asked everyone in the crowd who liked it to raise their hands. Few did. “That’s very interesting”, said the DJ.

Anything at #2 in the charts is – at the very least – asking to be considered as pop! It might be that the answer is “NO”, but if that’s the case with “O Superman” it’s interesting to me that the system designed to reward pop records can also reward a record like that.

Re: 35. Like many others here I’ve always regarded pop as a broad church and as O Superman is catchy, instantly memorable and for a short while was extremely popular I reckon it qualifies, doesn’t it?

Either ‘O Superman’ is pop (if not Pop) or it’s beyond any kind of meaningful classification.

Am intrigued by this ‘Lepizig’ thing now tho!

Great Quotes Coined While This Was Number One:
“My father didn’t riot – he got on his bike and looked for work”
– Norman Tebbit at the Conservative Party conference reminding us why we all loved him so much.

Rosie at No2 as someone has since touched on there’s a history of the musician/musicians taking the main credit on recordings going back at least as far as the 30s/early 40s. For instance the very first American No1 in 1940 gave Frank Sinatra a far smaller credit than the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra and this was standard practice in the big band era.

At least in this case Barbara Gaskin gets more or less equal billing.
Far more glaring in its complete and utter lack of crediting, of who to the vast majority of record buyers would have been the primary reason for buying the record was ‘Street Life’ by the Crusaders where Randy Crawford isn’t credited at all. And without wanting to break the rules there was a No 1 in 1989/90 where again only the producer/keyboardist got any billing at all. AS it turned out in both these cases however their presence on the discs helped launch the respective singers’ subsequently much bigger solo careers.

This practice happened as a matter of routine on many disco/funk tracks with just the producer, saxophonist or trumpeter being credited (eg Tom Browne on ‘Funkin for Jamaica (NY)’).

And obviously post 1987 onwards although often there is a ‘featuring’ it it was generally accepted (see the unnamed No1 above) that the producer/dj was the ‘important’ one and the singers were often interchangeable (often literally, with them just being paid for the session and a model or someone doing the PA’s and Top of the Pops appearances etc)

I was rather surprised when I finally heard mod club hit Hear Me A Drummer Man by Phil Wainman. I’d always assumed it was an instrumental. You can hear Phil loud and clear on drums, but time appears to have completely erased the identity of the female singer (unless anyone knows different?).

Maybe it was a young Maggie Reilly.

Good disco/funk spots Andy. I’m assuming Quincy Jones didn’t sing Ai No Corrida, either.

Charles May sung the vocal for “Ai no corrida” though Chas Jankel wrote it and recorded it himself on the same label a bit earlier.