TIGHT FIT – "The Lion Sleeps Tonight"

This is one of the earliest incidences of an ostensibly child-friendly song serving only to irritate me as a child. I think that the falsetto might have irked me more than anything else, in a chalk squeaking on blackboard way.

My scathing response whenever I came across my peers singing it was “A lion couldn’t sleep with that racket going on!”

No-one likes a smart alec, my peers would have been well within their rights to retort.

I still can’t bear this single, though.

What this brings to mind for me is the era when TOTP became a very self-conscious party, where you could barely tell the performers from the audience, who in turn were encouraged to deliver supposedly spontaneous whoops and yelps which threatened to drown out the song in places – hugely irritating. Not that the guy in the loincloth and the very-80s-glamorous girls were going to blend into the audience, but there were few parties more plastic than their version of this song.

Similarly shallow and overrated was the number 2 for the first two weeks of its run, Toni Basil’s “Mickey”. For some unaccountable reason a lot of people liked it, and I certainly wasn’t one of them. This dastardly duo of duds kept an absolute cracker at number three, Haircut 100’s “Love Plus One” – how to make pop that’s frothy, disposable and totally glorious.

Anyone who touches this seems to have the most slapdash career plan.

Have any other writers had more diverse number ones than Hugo & Luigi? The Stylistics’ I Can’t Give You Anything and this. Not that they really wrote it, of course, but by most accounts you wouldn’t have wanted to argue the point with them.

The Tokens are a curiously ambidextrous group, too. They followed this, after a fashion, by discovering, writing, and producing The Chiffons in 63; recorded a brace of Goffin & King’s more melancholy tunes (He’s In Town and You’re My Girl) in 64; leapt headfirst into paisley harmony pop (It’s A Happening World) in 66; discovered Tokens mini-me’s The Happenings (sunshine pop cover of I Got Rhythm); and ended the 60s with one of the first nervous-breakdown-as-pop albums, a very odd, very New York thing which they called Intercourse.

Tight Fit, meanwhile, had three of the most oddly diverse early 80s hits (this, Back To The Sixties, Fantasy Island) which could have all been the work of different groups. All rather rum.

Does anyone other than me have a soft spot for Karl Denver’s throat-shredding, folk-rockin’ take?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09SXTH699xE

At least he stuck to the sound that made him famous – until Sean Ryder called him up, of course.

Raiders Of The Pop Charts’ cover star was definitely more Steve Grant than Indiana Jones. The comp was such an unqualified success that the chap who compiled it was head-hunted by Richard Branson to leave Ronco and work on the embryonic Now That’s What I Call Music.

Another unlikely career move – TF’s Denise released a solo single under the name Chopper Harris.

I have a version of Mbube by Solomon Linda’s Original Evening Birds, from before WWII. I really like it. I don’t like Tight Fit’s version at all, and 4 seems a little generous.

this lion has been well and truly stuffed, moth-eaten and generally abused. The rhythm makes ham-fisted sound syncopated and the voice sounds processed and indifferent.
the totp footage is wrong in so many ways – it made me feel quite queasy

Re 8 and 9, It was often the same people week-in week-out on TOTP, strutting their stuff closer to the stage than the ordinary folk who made up the rest of the audience. I’m not sure this elite coterie of would-be pop stars…and soon-to-be actual pop stars democratised the process at all.

I have an old video of TOTP from Autumn 81 with none other than Boy George dancing along to The Jets’ cover of “Yes Tonight Josephine”. He’s even wearing his long white dress-over-trousers ensemble a full 12 months before unveiling it to the world from a few feet and a step or two higher up.

As for “Lion Sleeps Tonight”, I seem to remember a fair bit of Milli Vanilli-esque controversy over the singer performing on TOTP being not exactly the same person as the perpetrator of the record’s breathless falsetto.

The girl in The Tokens picture looks understandably vexed to suddenly find herself in bed with Parsley. I know that he was supposed to be a “very friendly lion” but fuck me!

We had the Karl Denver version of this refrain at home and I was very fond of it, so that when Tight Fit came along with their lion I felt quite malleable towards it. However, I too preferred “Mickey” for two reasons. Firstly, I considered it much cooler and grown up to walk around singing this than a nursary rhyme about a lion getting his head down and secondly, even at this early stage of my development, I was more than a little conscious of Toni Basil leaping around with her legs flapping all over the place. Conversley, I didn’t notice the Tight Fit girls at all.

1982’s Dutch entry in Eurovision was “Jij en ik” (You and Me) by Bill van Dijk. It might not have been all that splendid as it finished in 16th place (from 18 entries) with a massive 8 points. It beat the Danish entry and Finland’s fantastic nul-pointer “Nuku Pomiin”, by Kojo.

I am not allowed to remind you who won that year, but UK finished in 7th place with 76 points, with Bardo’s “One Step Further”. It was one of those “we-wuz-robbed” years as there was no reason not to vote for Sally Triplett and her legs. No doubt we’ll discuss this further soon.

# 22 – “I am not allowed to remind you who won that year…”

Warum nicht? Och, ja. Das Kaninchen!!

Re 21, absolutely! March 1982 was the very short-lived peak of Haircut mania, with “Pelican West” and “Love Plus One” in the Top 3 and an NME front cover (and very entertaining interview with Paul Morley).

A couple of months on, in one of the less tasteful images of the year, the Sun proclaimed that Haircut 100 had flown into the hearts of British pop fans like an Exocet! Not that many of us would have understood that reference at this particular point in 1982…

Rosie – surely you’ll allow us our objects of lust in Eurovision? I dare say you’d vote for Sting even if he was singing Diggi-Loo Diggi-Ley or something. I felt the same way about Samantha Janus in 1991 even if the song was pretty naff.

i don’t know the detail history and politics of this, but essentially it began in the 50s as a song contest (and the performance was not considered relevant to the judgement; the judges based their decision on the sheet music) — but as sheet music became less and less the locus of the “real song”, this stipulation came more and more adrift

by the time the TV viewers were phoning in their votes voting, it had become a “performance” competition — i would argue between c.1965 and 1985 it was caught somewhere in the middle, but a map of the actual make-up of the judges and how voting was counted would tell us more

I cannot listen to this song without picturing Jim Carrey in a hawaiian shirt 🙁

# 30 – Samantha Janus remains horny. Astonishing to comtemplate that she did Eurovision all of eighteen years ago. Now to be seen in “Albert Square”, of course, where she has a storyline involving her being the mother of a young girl on one of the stalls. The daughter is lovely too but does herself no favours by wandering around with such a pained expression, she always looks as if she’s ready to jump off Beachy Head.

All right – I wasn’t being entirely serious myself either, but two things happened, coincidentally, during last week’s Michael Jackson hysteria. One was that Thriller and another track I won’t mention at the request of the bunny came up close together on my mp3 player and I realised how much I’d become engrossed by both tracks to the exclusion of what I was supposed to be paying attention to. The other was that somebody on Radio 4, possibly on Front Row, opined that it didn’t really matter whether MJ could sing on stage any more; what mattered was whether he could still dance. And I had a WTF moment because I don’t recall ever seeing MJ ‘moonwalking’ and I can’t visualise it. That doesn’t mean that I haven’t ever seen it, but it does suggest that my enjoyment of these tracks isn’t influenced much by it.

I’d say it meant I’m much more of an aural kind of person than a visual one, although that wouldn’t help to explain my abiding passions of classic film, photography and the written word, would it!

That much-cited essay on ‘rockism’ by Kelefa Sanneh makes a point about lip-synching (presumably as a device to maintain the consistency of the ‘brand’) I’m sorry – dismiss me as a rockist if you must, but what’s important to me about a singer is that she (or, of course, he) can sing. And if that means that each performance is slightly different from any other, then so much the better!#

Peter #36 – during a phone-in last week on the travails of ITV, an über-ITV fan said that the daughter, Danielle, had been moping around the Square for eight months without getting around to telling Ronnie she was her mother. If it was Corrie she’d have marched into the Rovers and told her on day one!

Sorry, way off topic I know…

Wales is protected from Telford by the whole of Shropshire!

love yr pal Lord Sukrat of the Western Marches, Count Clungunford, Marquis of Little Ness, Wem, Wigwig and Homer

Tears of a Clun, by Smokey Robinson?

Did you know Brian Eno covered ‘Lion’ – you can grab his version here
http://planetmondo.blogspot.com/2009/02/covered-up.html

Re 45: And there was talk of a Monkees-style TV series. Such a shame all the promise dissipated so quickly. The Flexipop version of Nobody’s Fool was a powerpop gem, much tougher than the (also pretty good) hit version.

Re 47: Early ’82 was also (until Brix joined) The Fall’s commercial high water mark! Hex Enduction Hour snuck them into the Guinness book for the first time and received unanimously good reviews. In 2009, though, much of it gives me a headache (And This Day, Deer Park) compared to the more playful, less Kraut-thudding Grotesque, or Slates.

Sad to say Pelican West sounds pretty weak these days, too. Too much sax. And yet, “Green escalator, yeah!” remains one of THE all-time top pop lines.