THE TIMELORDS – "Doctorin The Tardis"

Where the initial wave of New Pop sought to question and remodel the style and content of a pop song, its not entirely unexpected second wave launched an assault on form – what exactly constitutes a “pop song,” how should it develop (or should it even need to develop?), what is the relationship between a song and the record on which it is pressed, should its sociopolitical ramifications determine form and content, or should the former naturally arise from the latter?

Three years of tiring Soul, Passion and Honesty would suggest that the latter was a far more viable course for pop to take, and it was right that the new wave should not only arise in tandem with, but also take full advantage of, developments in contemporary dance music. “Doctorin’ The House” bears the same relation to Chicago House as Lennon’s “Twist And Shout” does to “La Bamba”; through choice and circumstances, something new has accidentally, or not so accidentally, been invented.

What do you mean, Chicago House? It’s Glitterbeat! Well, “Doctorin’ The Tardis” also began life as a House record, or at least an attempt to make a House hit out of the Doctor Who theme, though the KLF quickly realised that its triplet structure would be far more amenable to what we now know as a schaffel beat, and in particular that pioneered by Gary Glitter and Mike Leander (which latter, as has already been noted, did the string arrangement for the Beatles’ original “She’s Leaving Home”) on 1972’s shattering minimalist archaeology-to-make-the-future masterpiece “Rock ‘N’ Roll Part 2.” It remains unclear whether the concept for The Manual had been thought through before they made the record or whether it was written as a conceptual afterthought, but after a year of (glorious) limited edition Situationist sniping (all based on deep, deep love) they fancied a proper mainstream hit record.

They approached it in exactly the same way as Bickerton and Waddington had approached “Sugar Baby Love,” and it was only fitting that several Rubettes, most notably keyboardist-turned-programmer Nick Coler, were on hand to assist Drummond and Cauty; carefully surveying the trends of the moment (spring 1988) with seventies revivalism poised to take its first tentative stranglehold they pieced together elements of Glitter, Doctor Who (which itself was about to enter its seemingly terminal Sylvester McCoy period at this stage), the Sweet’s “Blockbuster,” Harry Enfield’s Loadsamoney and even the shortly-to-be-late Steve Walsh’s “You what?” war cry and credited the single to a 1968 Ford Galaxy car complete with police siren – the third non-human number one single, in the wake of the Archies and Spitting Image.

The single was fiendishly clever and fearsomely catchy. Note how Drummond and Cauty use the “Loadsamoney” and “Exterminate!” memes as a springboard for a telling critique of Thatcherism and the yuppies who worshipped at its soiled shrine (“We obey no one! We are the superior beings!”) – and the sight of Bill Drummond’s unquestionably mad eyes glaring from beneath his top hat on TOTP is unlikely ever to be shifted from my memory – while simultaneously celebrating the trash which was always art. Eventually a “Gary In The Tardis” remix featuring the double G himself appeared, and Glitter even guested with the Timelords (now hooded in monks’ cowls) on TOTP the week they went to number one (remember, at this stage Glitter was still a cherished national treasure). The scene liable to celebrate or eat itself? Who cared? Edelweiss, Kon Kan, Scooter, even Xenomania…the post-Manual list continues to flourish.

As a straightforward novelty single in the lineage of “Star Trekkin’,” “Doctorin’ The Tardis” would scarcely be worth further comment…and yet it was as uncompromising an assault on the concept of the “pop song” and “pop record” as “God Save The Queen,” and from its pores seep an instinctive understanding of the inherent magic of the pop record, what can be done to and with it in the right (or wrong!) circumstances and how deeply it can affect someone else’s world.

[Right, posting this pre-written comment before even reading anyone else’s!]

I’d always assumed that this was one of those songs that everyone loved, so was surprised to learn from Wikipedia that the critics reviled it at the time, as if it were a novelty track as execrable as ‘Star Trekkin’. They got it wrong, wrong, wrong, but it’s not that hard to guess why. Critics of 1988 would have been of an age to remember Gary Glitter from first time round, and must have considered him a has-been hardly worth reviving; and they must have been too old to be going through the throes of intense Doctor Who disappointment.

On the first point, I had no prior exposure to Gary in 1988, and loved the supremely chantable and danceable glam of this. And on the second…

Doctor Who was one of the cornerstones of my TV-watching childhood; some of my earliest telly memories are of Jon Pertwee whizzing around on his yellow hovercraft, and Tom Baker was like Olivier playing Lear to me. Even when Peter Davison took over, I stayed keen, enjoying his run as much as any from the recent revival. And then came the 18-month hiatus in Colin Baker’s tenure, which broke the spell. The ABC, which had repeated the Pertwee and Tom Baker Whos endlessly, never repeated Colin Baker’s, most of which I’ve still never seen; and by the time they reached McCoy’s, those only got a single outing as well. I caught a few of the early McCoys and felt they had gone seriously downhill; apparently they improved, but by then I’d moved on.

So by 1988, I (like many others, no doubt) was ripe for nostalgia for the good old days of Who. And not just the actors, but the music. By Doctors six and seven, the tinkering with the theme that started with Davison’s Doctor had got out of control, with the results now sounding badly dated in a way that the earlier themes never will, because they were so orthogonal to their times. My canonical Who themes were the modified Delia Derbyshire ones of Pertwee and Tom Baker, which you can compare with the others here. That’s what I wanted to hear.

And thanks to “Doctorin’ the Tardis”, which I helped send to number two in Australia, I could: the best Doctor Who theme merged with superior glam, with the very best Who monsters over the top. And not only were the juxtaposed results fun, they were funny. Electronic chants of “do what” and “dosh, dosh, dosh, loadsamoney” may not have been the height of Dalek-inspired humour, but until Mark Gatiss contrived to have a Dalek asking “would – you – like – a – cup – of – tea” earlier this year they were the best we had, at least on an actual recorded product rather than in a playground game. Not an official product, true, but then the unofficialness of “Doctorin’ the Tardis” was part of its charm: a song ostensibly recorded by a car, Ford Timelord (shades of Hitchhiker’s Ford Prefect), shown in the video mowing down Daleks cobbled together out of cardboard.

We didn’t know it then, but this was the first mash-up to reach number one, a direct ancestor of the DIY marvels of “A Stroke of Genie-us” and “Marshall’s Been Snookered”, and for that alone it’s a landmark. It’s also, of course, effectively the first number one by the KLF, and was the inspiration for Drummond and Cauty’s notorious Manual about blagging your way to number one. The song’s creators apparently don’t rate it either, but all that tells you is that artists aren’t always the best judges of their own work: “Doctorin’ the Tardis” was brilliant then and remains brilliant now, a perfect melding of its excellent parts, and I’m always happy to hear it. The only reason I’m not giving it 10 is that I know that some people aren’t fans of the show and might not…

Oh, sod it: 10. Here, have a jellybaby.

I don’t think the link to The Manual is working.

(incisive musical comment from flahr)

EDIT: and of course immediately after posting that I try it again and it works perfectly 😛 Move along, nothing to see here…

Best novelty record ever? I’m not qualified to judge really, but my sense is that it should be a contender. (Doctorin’ spent three weeks at #1 in Dr Who-besotted NZ.)

The *sounds* of sci-fi from Forbidden Planet through to Star Wars were often a lot more convincing than the visual fx (particularly on tv, with much smaller budgets). Dr Who had some great sounds, of course, but the record’s putting together *that* credits-opening filter-swept sound with the Tardis’s own roar, with (Frankie-like) sirens, with the glam beat and that bass-line is inspired. The first 30-40 seconds of this track are head-snapping and thrilling in equal measure. Nerds… er, everyone, please report to the dance-floor.

It’s worthwhile comparing this effort to Def Leppard’s very corporate-feeling, 1974-pastiche Rocket, which was a huge album track at the same time (it became something like the sixth single and vid. off Hysteria in early 1989 IIRC – boy did that album sell and sell). It’s efficient enough, but hardly inspires the affection that Doctorin’ does:
8 (a bit lower score than most others here, but still easily my highest score for 1988 so far)

p.s. I’m looking forward to reading The Manual (which is new to me). Thanks for the link.

The problem with ‘The Manual’ is that Bill Drummond mortgaged his house previously to pay for a record. He also had a lot of experience in the music industry. So the book is somewhat dishonest. Yes, you can have a No.1 hit, but you have to have a background in classical piano (Edelweiss), OR friends in the music business (S Express), OR a house to mortgage (Bill Drummond).

Listening to the 12″ mix just now, which I’d never heard before, I’m noticing a subliminal similarity in some of the guitar sounds to certain Martian noises on Jeff Wayne’s War of the Worlds.

Sorry to be pedantic Tom but Davros didn’t appear until “Genesis Of The Daleks” which was broadcast in 1975 !

This is I think the last novelty number one not to be tied into Comic Relief or an official spinoff from a TV series.

The theme had been a hit before in a discofied version by Mankind in 1978 so this felt a bit second hand to me. Plus the whole police car concept grated on me; I have a low tolerance of that sort of art school humour.

# 10 You’re right Jezza , Bill Drummond was hardly a fresh-faced youngster. In fact he continued a remarkable sequence of number ones from the former members of long-forgotten Liverpool band Big In Japan (who only recorded about a dozen tracks) which will finally be completed when we get to 1996.

It sounds quite a bit like Blondie’s “Call Me,” which a surprising number of people were unimpressed with on the “What Decade is Tops” board.

Have just checked out the Mankind (1978) disco version of the Who theme on youtube (both 7″ and 12″ mixes), and to me it’s not a patch on the Timelords (I tend to think that the organic feel of late ’70s disco just isn’t what the track needs, but some studio great from the period like Bohannon or Edwin Birdsong or Moroder or Chic or Quincy Jones might have been able to stiffen everything up sufficiently I suppose). I’ve loved the TOTP Timelords stuff I’ve been able to find on youtube: Daleks ‘playing’ keyboards, very droll. If you’re a novelty you have to commit to your novel concept, and I think these guys did.

Shows you how good it is!

#10: probably, but, as I said in my original post, who cared? It was about the spectacle, the gesture. Also, and most importantly, it was a Good Story!

I know the scoring system was meant to be a bit of fun, but it’s become meaningless for me now. Tom’s objectivity is slipping. No collage of electronic noises is permitted to be less than a 9!

There was something strangely nu-whovian abt the ILx Picnic In The Sky*: location AND attendees!

Have to agree with the slightly less than entusiastic posters. This was fun, not genius. It happened to strike a chord, and good luck to them for that, but, really, endowing this with any deeper significance is stretching things more than a little.

..and I’m with rosie on the scoring – I know the marking is personal, but all objectivity has gone now. Many of the more recent (ridiculously high) marks are unfortunately devaluing the whole project.

@27: I don’t know if Tom has ever said anything about being objective, but he used to be bloody good at it when critiquing the pop from before his time.

i’m not sure that it’s worth, let alone possible, to be ‘objective’ about pop

#29: The answer is (pace Todd Levin): “I could have done this! BUT YOU DIDN’T”

#31 is also a pretty decent answer.

hmm. i do wonder whether i would think less of this if it wasn’t by who it was by and so didn’t have that extra aura that they give everything they do. i think might (though not much, i liked it just fine in 1988 when i’d never heard of the jamms), but the point is it *is* by who it’s by – giving a record a little extra credit because you like the makers’ conceptual tomfoolery is just a much as a valid pop reaction as liking westlife records more because you fancy…[here i realise i don’t know the names of any of westlife]…er, billy?

or to put it another way, there may be nothing except the text, but in pop, the text is just as much the singers’ haircut as his lyrics.

You could always start a blog where you review each of Tom’s reviews and mark them out of 10 (I jest..OR DO I?!).

(BTW much like Vinylscot I don’t want a rush of defenders here either. If you like the writing keep reading. If not, don’t.)

(Sorry Tom)

er yeah, sorry for the defence!

“Fanboy-ism”. You have to be a bit of a fanboy to get a project like this off the ground in the first place. And here we seem to have 2 subjects which Tom cares deeply about:
a) Doctor Who
b) The KLF

There were bound to be incidents like this along the way. And did he not warn us beforehand about the late 80’s being a particularly significant passage in pop? Is he not allowed to be enthusiatic about his “Golden Age”?

I think Tom should be awarded a sizeable slice of slack here.

I’d love to ban the word ‘fanboy’. Whatever was wrong with ‘fanatic’?! Not a dig at you tho fatgit, jus saying…

#47 – I had a pop at explaining that in the review. They aren’t (just) injokes, they’re being used as sample sources – it’s the pop, not the joke, potential that’s being mined. The “we obey no-one” section is doing the same work as a line of kung-fu dialogue in a Wu Tang Clan track (say).

Given how long Popular’s being going and the amount of time certain regulars have spent here it’s amazing how many people still don’t get it.

In the Oxfam branch which Lena helps run there is currently a well-worn copy of Guinness’ 500 Number One Hits book from 1982. Each of the 500 entries sums up all the relevant information pertaining to each chart-topper and in terms of opinion doesn’t deviate from received views. The book is objective, confirmatory, non-judgmental and utterly boring and dead to read. I’m pretty sure someone else did a 1000 Number One Hits update and that was just as bad if not worse.

I mean, there are plenty of websites, many of which Tom links to here, which will give you all the information you need about number one hits and agree with your views rather than challenge them, if that’s all you want. I’m not saying I’m going to go all batshit teenage fanboy when Then Play Long gets to “my time” but if I feel like it I might, and, as stated above, other websites are available for those who don’t want to read me. I’d rather jump from a twentieth-floor window than read most of them and be bored to death but perhaps that’s just me.

For sure let’s all applaud the salutary “objectivity” of, say, Charlie Gillett’s Sound Of The City – and for those new to the book, it’s a cracking read, tells you the facts and the history in a way that turns it into a good story rather than a dry, dusty recital from the lectern – but you need the jive nutbagisms of Nik Cohn’s AWopBopALooBopALopBamBoom to balance out the picture and in fact make the music live and breathe. Just like I wouldn’t want a world with either Max Harrison or Frank Kofsky in it; you need them both.

Really, though, great music writing is almost by definition unhinged. It’s about twisting history to fit your visions (while at the same time doing due service to the music, a balancing act that’s way more difficult than it looks but Tom generally carries it off pretty damn well), it’s about unearthing ghosts, spotting lights that might lead to an unexpected future, about celebrating the body of the music and the writer’s direct relationship to it – and most importantly of all, it’s about the ability to communicate all of this in a way that is both captivating and profound (especially if you intend neither). As soon as you try to put up any sort of Customs gate or border patrol – boo, Tom likes the Timelords more than he does the Respected Relics of Rock, ‘snot fair, does he not know that Keith Elmore Muddy etc. – then music writing dies. Immediately.

TPL – again, an expressly subjective project which does its best to look at well-known and not so well-known records from a different angle – regularly receives dreary comments (all of which routinely go on the spike) from people who feel that they’re “entitled to their opinion.” I’m no Tory and I’m not necessarily having a go at VS here but I totally agree with what DavyCam said when he took over about the need for people to think less about “entitlement” and more about their responsibilities. If you’re not “getting” Popular then that’s your affair, but it’s grossly unfair to deride something which has from the word go expressly been a personal project – “marked on whim,” as it says at the top of this page – simply because it’s not reiterating the received history of pop in a way that you find palatable. For me Tom’s writing does make this “old” music live and breathe, and that’s got to be better than simply snoozing everyone into the grave with what we already know about The Beatles And The Stones And Cetera. When that happens, both music and music writing are fit only for the life support machine.