THE FIRM – "Star Trekkin"

Scrape it off Jim.

I’m guessing the toilet humour appealed to a certain pre-pubescent age group. You can’t even credit it with a catchy tune. No redeeming factors at all. A richly deserved 1 (for want of a zero).

Thank Spock for that. Part of me was worried that this might garner an affectionate few points out of UK nostalgia. Not from me – it’s awful. And the plasticine video doesn’t even respect its own logic: one of Uhura’s lines is voiced by the McCoy figure.

Points to the creators for getting their self-pressed 500 copies to snowball into a million-seller, I suppose. But that’s it. 1987’s nadir by a long shot.

Number 3 in Australia. 1 from me.

(But au contraire, thefatgit: the tune is all too catchy. Stand by for Earworm Factor 9.)

thefatgit: Yeah, that and/or the chorus. Arrggh, let’s get onto the next one, quick.

That’s quality 1987 desktop publishing, that sleeve. MacPaint, by the looks of it.

I always wondered how The Firm got away with using their name when Jimmy Page’s band predated this by a few years. But it turns out these guys had an earlier 1982 hit, “Arthur Daley ‘E’s Alright”, which peaked at number 14 and was performed on TOTP. I can imagine how it goes – some kind of geezer knees-up, I’m guessing. Which is what this one is, isn’t it? Knees up Mister Spock, knees up Captain Kirk…

Re 7: I’ve got a feeling these are three different Firms. The man behind Star Trekkin’ is Brian O’Shaughnessy, who, a little later, engineered Primal Scream’s Loaded and has been the producer of Felt/Denim Lawrence’s Go Kart Mozart records. Shame that GKM’s Sailor Boy wasn’t the Simon Bates-backed novelty number one.

The sleeve for Star Trekkin’ looks EXACTLY like a 1979 DIY photo-copied A4 sleeve – the Thin Yogurts! Danny & The Dressmakers! Hornsey At War! – which makes me warm to it a little more than I ought.

Will I be the first person to mention Spizz Energi’s Where’s Captain Kirk? The first indie mega-hit not to trouble the Top 40: great tune, love the hiccupy vocal and all, but the lyrics confused me then and they confuse me now.

Serious Fun!

The man behind Star Trekkin’ is Brian O’Shaughnessy, who, a little later, engineered Primal Scream’s Loaded

*brain explodes*

yer freakin’ me out, man.

Hm, haven’t heard this for 23 years. Here goes.

God, that was depressing. If I was trapped on dancefloor with a lot of people who were enjoying this and finding it funny, it would push me over the edge. At least ‘No-one Quite like Grandma’ exploits an admirable sentiment.

I do quite like ‘Arthur Daley E’s Alright’, though. If only the “Propping up the bar, at the Winchester Club” line, not the poor quality impersonations of George Cole and Dennis Waterman.

They said it couldn’t be done… this is currently overtaking (undertaking?) St Winifreds on the Readers’ Worst Top 100.

Thinking about it, the whole “we wanna be free to do what we wanna do” sounds like something from a Star Trek episode where the whole crew accidentally swallows some ‘space’ pills – cure Spock in tears, Scotty drunk, Kirk and Uhura in illicit clinch. It all makes sense. Oh my gosh.

#5 Tom -absolutely right about Bannister and his cohort Dann. You couldn’t have fun on their Radio One unless it took the form of pretending to understand Danny Baker’s “inventive torrents of thought”/self-indulgent grandstanding (delete according to preference).

Another explanation comes from Haircut-turned-A & R-man Mark Fox as quoted in Tony Hawks’s “One Hit Wonderland” – “At the time of Stutter Rap (probably the last self-sufficient big novelty hit-Mike)most of the kids who were buying records were watching either Top of the Pops or The Chart Show or both.Now they are watching hundreds of different programmes on cable – or pissing about on the Web.”

My recollection is that it was actually Simon Mayo (Bannister’s golden boy ironically) that started bigging this up on his Saturday evening show but maybe Batesy was the first of the daytimers to pick up on it (sadly I was working by this time and wouldn’t know).

I don’t think it’s that bad- it’s a lot funnier than “Arthur Daley”, Rory, so approach that with care ! I agree with Tom vis-a-vis Doctor Who although that actually makes me warm more to this record because of the disrespect it shows (though I think most Trekkies were just delighted to think they might be fleetingly a part of mainstream culture and bought it). Blake’s Seven I thought was a great antidote to Star Trek – Avon’s ultra-cynicism the perfect riposte to Kirk’s indigestible moralising.

And it gave us Brits a look in after a trio of US artists at the top.

I liked it then and I quite like it still – sure it’s silly and irritating and you wouldn’t want to listen to more than once but it’s made in a good spirit. I certainly prefer it to The Young Ones and Spitting Image.
I’m hoping that Marcello can reveal the free jazz connections to this one 😉

Well, well! Until five minutes ago I was blissfully unaware of this little, er, gem isn’t quite the word I’m groping for I think.

I don’t feel my life is particularly enriched as a result.

Dreadful, isn’t it!

So, what’s the final, ghostly, white, space-head image in the video? Is that (spitting image) Reagan with Mickey Mouse ears?

If it is then, notwithstanding the overall shittiness of the vid., I’d say it does finally get somewhere (perhaps matching the slight uptick in the music at the very end).

Approached from a slightly different angle, while the song does indeed use even-at-the-time shop-worn Star Trek one-liners, some of those one-liners – ‘ya canna break the laws of physics’ (always said just before something supposedly truly exceptional happens), and ‘we come in peace, shoot to kill’- do code up attitudes that Americans particularly on the right have: that America is (i) an exception to every rule, and that (ii) it is uniquely, even supernaturally a force for good and peace in the world, hence that all of the shooting to kill it regularly does is never less than fundamentally innocent/well-intended/justified etc..

The song isolates some of those near paradoxical ideas as they showed up in the original show, mocking them but also enjoying them as part of the original show’s guilty Team America: Galactic Police charm. The song’s pretty unlistenable, but I think it nonetheless captures something (which the vid. may pick up on in the way I began by describing). Maybe this deserves a low 2 rather than a 1.

[Note that if you follow how Obama gets criticized and suspected in the US these days, the ideas that he may not sufficiently fervently believe in (i) and (ii) are never far from the surface (see this nytimes blog from last year for some examples).]

-Homemade beats.
-High-pitched vocals.
-Attention-seeking videos.
-Idiotic repetition.

Hmmmmm in other words the sort of thing Liam Howlett and the Prodigy would be making a packet from within 5 years.

Never under-estimate how thin the line between novelty and credability actually is.

Wow, wow, wow. Never conceived of this as a #1, in fact never conceived of it really as a song that would have been recorded and packaged and sold – – – I knew it as a summer camp novelty song much as Tom knew “Lily the Pink” – just this odd thing that would get thrown into the campfire setlist. This would have been around 1992 or 1993, I think. Haven’t heard it, or even heard of it, since then. I think it gained a lot in its campfire version, without the dinky production and the bad impressions, and with the repetition working to help you learn the lyrics to sing along. Everybody! “Starrr Trekkin’ across the universe – HEY! On the Starship Enterprise, under Captain Kirk…”

“We come in peace, shoot to kill” used to make me laugh anyway. And, like #29, I too was thinking that it’s a very succinct description of American foreign policy.

I turned ten about that time. I loved it then, and for the pure reason of nostalgia, I love it now. Being ten, such records as this helped me get into pop music, scary as it is. I mean I can remember Europe, Whitney etc etc but they were about things I didn’t understand, which meant to me they meant absolutely nothing.

They were tunes to bop to and with lyrics I didn’t listen to. This was one of the first song I remember knowing the words to because it meant something to me. The first was probably Stop the Cavalry. It’s the same reason why I love Oh Yeah by Yello – in it’s case there are no verses really, so I didn’t need to worry about lyrics except the title ones.

All that said, I was and still am firmly in the Doctor Who camp. I still have all my books too.

A sort of comedy spin-off from the Rubettes, the principal Rubette ingredient being their guitarist Tony Thorpe, The Firm had previously had a Top 20 hit in that bleak summer of 1982 with the Chas and Dave soundalike “Arthur Daley (‘E’s Alright)” and applied similar precepts to their strange Star Trek parody. “Star Trekkin'” could essentially be described as an electro-vaudeville nursery rhyme, with its mock-pompous chorus alternating with various impersonations of various quality of various of the show’s characters, each of whom is given a catchphrase which develops into a kind of roundelay or fugue as the record progresses; as each character is added the song becomes progressively higher in tempo and key and therefore more frantic, cumulating in “Scotty”‘s yelps, following which the song explodes and we are left with strange, Chipmunk* (or the ghost of I Hear A New World?) speeded-up vocals floating into a psych-out meets ambient fade.

In comparison with Spizz Energi’s “Where’s Captain Kirk?” which occupied the indie chart throughout most of 1980 and 1981 and managed to sell well into six figures without ever crossing over to the main chart, “Star Trekkin'” is crass, flat and juvenile. The question is whether all of this was intended. Given the involvement of other members of the Rubettes in the subsequent work of the KLF (as confirmed in The Manual), the probability that the Tony Thorpe who fronted The Firm is the same Tony Thorpe who went on to form the pioneering British house act The Moody Boyz and later became “Groove Consultant” to the KLF, and the uncanny vocal resemblance of “Scotty” to Bill Drummond, it is hardly surprising that some people at the time suspected “Star Trekkin'” to be another JAMMs stunt. But compared with the genuine wit and verve of “Doctorin’ The Tardis” the record would seem to belie this; it was 1987’s obligatory gruesome summer novelty hit, and should be regarded and left alone as such.

*Chipmunk as in “David Seville/Alvin and the…” rather than “Oopsy Daisy.”

#23 – Respect the Dan!

For many years I had this filed away next to ‘The Chicken Song’ and ‘John Ketley Is A Weatherman’ in the back of my mind, a vague childhood memory of novelty pop – however I had the, er, pleasure of hearing it again recently (twice) on one of the music channels (this was the same 1980s no. 1s run-through I mentioned on the ‘Reet Petite’ entry).

It really is a terrible record – I hadn’t remembered that there weren’t any actual jokes in it, just a set of catchphrases (well, ok, there’s “only going forward ’cause we can’t find reverse”, which is just rubbish).

Tom’s “cheapest record I think we’ll ever meet” assertion is food for thought – I think he may be right and I’d say this ties into the notion of records being ‘dated’ (something of a thorny issue I reckon). It’s worth imagining what the same single produced a decade earlier or later on an equivalent budget would have sounded like…

I was eight when this topped the charts; and that summer I got taken by the folks to a holiday camp in Bideford, Devon.
One of my over-riding memories was this record dominating the kids disco hour – I’m pretty sure it got played every night (along with the Birdy Dance, Nelly the Elephant etc.)
Even at my young age, I found this song grating. I also didn’t like the effect it had on some of my peers; the increased tempo towards the end sent them into an unpleasant, hyperactive rage.

Late last summer I had a week away with my wife and two young children to Majorca. After our first dinner we found the not unplasant open-air stage and disco area, got some drinks and sat down in the warm Mediterranean air. “This is alright” I though. Then The Kids Hour started, and my son asked me to go and join him on the D-Floor. And before long (I think sandwiched in between ‘Barbie Girl’ by Aqua and ‘Hey Baby’ by DJ Otzi) Star Trekkin’ got played.

My point is, the last time I had the misfortune to attend a kids disco at a holday resort, Star Trekkin’ was still getting played (alongside other ‘kids disco anthems’ mentioned above). I therefore believe that for certain DJs, Star Trekkin’ is viewed as dancefloor gold.

Maybe my favourite ‘annoying novelty’ #1 – at least I have great memories of it. The first (and only I think) 7″ my brother bought (by the end of the decade we just bought cassingles and the odd 12″). I’d seen little of the show but enough to “get” it. I did like how it ‘takes off’ (and nods even more vigorously towards Toytown Techno/Happy Hardcore with the increasingly high-pitched vocals) at the end and sounds like it really is drifting off into deep space. Annoying tho, yes, and I may never hear it again (I certainly don’t feel the need to) but for old times sake a charitable 5.

This thing with “The Firm”, is this the only example of multiple artists using the same monicker? Normally this kind of thing is frowned upon isn’t it?

I expect what happened was these guys got there first with their minor novelty hit in ’82 (Arthur Daley), then when Page & co. chose the name in 1984 their lawyers were able to buy off any protests (if there were any) from this lot; then when this Firm reemerged they could claim priority on the name and keep using it, especially as Page’s Firm was defunct by then. Or they just used it regardless for their 500 self-pressed copies, and the lawyers sorted it out after the event once this hit number 1. As for the 1996 hip-hop Firm, those were still the days when US and UK acts of the same name could co-exist and get tweaked for their opposite markets (e.g. the London Suede), before the internet made that impractical. And both the UK Firms were finished by then, anyway.