Category Archives: Songs from 1977

Album: Baccara, 1977

Justification: Can you genuinely love something that you’re also laughing at?

There’s an accusation I’ve had several times with different people about my deep love for “outsider music” like Wesley Willis or Lucia Pamela in which that love is questioned in terms of “but aren’t you just laughing at the crazy people?” And it’s a tricky question because only the most humourless killjoy wouldn’t laugh at the first time they heard ‘The Chicken Cow’ or ‘Walking on the Moon’, but that laughter isn’t at the artists’ expense: what they’re doing is so outside the mainstream that the incongruity of what they’re trying to achieve and the context in which they’re doing it (a casio preset backing while a guy talks about a cross between a chicken and a cow, a one-woman ragtime concept album about going to – and ostensibly recorded on – the Moon) is so pronounced that it makes one laugh with genuine wonder and delight – or at least, that’s what it does for me. And while I appreciate both artists more deeply now than I did the first time I heard them, there is still part of my enjoyment of them that revels in the sheer, glorious, unselfconscious ridiculousness of their art.

On an unrelated note, wasn’t porn so much better in the 70s?

There’s nothing outsider about Baccara – they were a pair of Spanish television variety show dancers that transformed into a vocal group at the height of Eurodisco and had two enormous hits, including this one – but again, it makes me laugh every time I hear it. And it’s also legitimately one of my favourite songs.

It’s so slinky and breathy, in that gloriously oversexualised European disco idiom that was also pumping out acts like Boney M, and the lyrics so ludicrous for the most part, but there’s something utterly, inescapably joyful every time they build to that string-heavy crescendo in the chorus.

Also, as a sucker for songs-that-reference-the-art-of-writing-songs, I would argue that Leonard Cohen’s genius “it goes like this, the fourth, the fifth / the minor fall, the major lift” in ‘Hallelujah’ still has nothing on “…You want to know if I can dance / Yes sir, already told told you in the first verse / And in the chorus, but I will give you one more chance…” That is meta-post-modern to a level that few songwriters would dare try. Nice work, secret-power-behind-the-throne songwriters Frank Dostal and Rolf Soja.

Baccara’s time in the spotlight was predictably short: this and ‘Sorry, I’m a Lady’ were major hits in Europe but the second album didn’t do so well (despite the duo representing Luxumborg, for reasons I’m unable to discern, in the 1978 Eurovision Song Contest), and a dispute with Dostal and Soja saw the girls left with lesser writers until they split in 1983. However, both Mayte Mateos (the more singery of the two) and María Mendiola (more backups and humming) formed new duos called Baccara by the mid-80s. They never worked together again, although they’re apparently still friends. And yes, each of them are still touring as Baccara – Spanish copyright law, what on earth are you waiting for?

And the reason it’s been in my mind at the moment is because my girlfriend and I were just booked to DJ at a roller disco, and this is going to be the jewel in our set. Mark my words.

SONG YOU SHOULD HAVE REDISCOVERED THIS TIME IN 2010: OMD were celebrating their toe-tapping electro-pop ode to, um, the bombing of Hiroshima with ‘Enola Gay’.

SONG YOU SHOULD HAVE REDISCOVERED THIS TIME IN 2011: 19th was a Sunday, but the 18th was all about Gang of Four and the mighty ‘I Love a Man in Uniform’.

AND HERE’S THE LAST FIVE…

440. Real Life: Catch Me I’m Falling (6 Mar)

441. Baxter Dury: Francesca’s Party (7 Mar)

442. Archers of Loaf: Web in Front (8 Mar)

443. Blondie: Hanging on the Telephone (14 Mar)

444. The Handsome Family: Your Great Journey (16 Mar)

Album: Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols, 1977

Justification: There is so much baggage attached to the Sex Pistols these days that you’d never get them on a domestic flight. They invented punk music! No, wait, they destroyed punk music! No, they were a furious scream against Thatcher’s Britain! Wrong, they were an inarticulate yelp that did nothing to change the system but was a bit of attention from a band of wanna-be rock stars and a singer with two decades of chip on his shoulder! No, they were the real thing! No, they were the ultimate sell-out! And so on and so on. It’s a fun argument to have, incidentally, when you’re 15 – assuming any 15 year olds know what a Sex Pistol is these days.

John Lydon aside, the Pistols were a perfectly competent rock’n'roll band – had they turned up three years earlier they would have been perfectly suited to the pub rock circuit of the time, bashing out covers of ‘Johnny B Goode’ and ’20 Flight Rock’ like so many bands were doing, although the musicianship dropped once Glen Matlock was booted out and Sid Vicious installed in his place. Fortunately the band had pretty much recorded their entire discography by then. This was their third single, following the mighty ‘Anarchy in the UK’ and ‘God Save the Queen’, and is easily my favourite Pistols song – if only for that riff (which Matlock claims was ripped off of ABBA’s ‘SOS’, incidentally). And yes, Johnny, is sounds like you’re saying “cunt” in the title. You’re very big and very clever.

SONG YOU SHOULD HAVE REDISCOVERED THIS TIME IN 2010: T’was a weekend, so have a poke through the 1977 archives.

Album: I Remember Yesterday, 1977

Justification: Oh, Giorgio Moroder: you’re a freakin’ genius. The pairing of the Italian synth master and the US disco diva was an inspired one and created some of the only music that sane people can throw into the faces of those who argue that all disco music is awful without having to rely on kitch appeal. This could have equally well been ‘Love to Love You Baby’ but this was the track that I fell in love with in the early 80s, even when Bronski Beat and Marc Almond did a not especially good cover of it in the 80s. But I always wondered how the sequencer worked on this, and then saw that bit at the beginning of the future with Moroder just playing it on a monophonic synth and went “ah!”. That would have been one painfully tedious session.

This was for the “future” bit of Summer’s concept album I Remember Yesterday, and dammit: it still sounds like the future to me.

THIS TIME IN 2010: Well, it was a weekend, so here’s the 1977 archive for your lookin’ at pleasure.

Album: Plastic Letters, 1977

Justification: This is one of the little-celebrated Blondie singles, and it’s always been my favourite. I don’t know why I’m such a sucker for it: it’s lyrically trite (“kismet”? Oh, please!), it audibly speeds up and it’s not ‘Atomic’ or ‘Rapture’ or ‘Heart of Glass’ or any one of a dozen popular faves. I think it’s just that chorus, to be honest, and my easy seduction by anything with a 2-4-root chord progression. That, and the profligate use of punctuation in the title.

It was written by founding bassist Gary Valentine, who was replaced by Nigel Harrison shortly after the recording of their Plastic Letters album. And the themes of the song aren’t limited to his music: Gary Lachman – for that is his real name – is a writer on mysticism and magic (or possibly “majick”). Which means this song is haunted, right?

I’ve not read any of Lachman’s work, but his writing has been compared to that of fellow occultist Colin Wilson. So I’m assuming, if it aspires to similarly lofty standards, that it’s filled with half-truths, outright lies, wild speculation, a whole lot of ghosts-are-a-form-of-energy stuff pulled wholesale from his arse and pseudo-profound musings on what’s behind the veil.

Where Harrison stands on questions of the dark powers running rampant in the human world is unknown. Let’s assume he’s “pro”.

THIS TIME IN 2010: A day off, for some reason. Hmmm. Anyway, go through the 1977 archives!

Album: Lust for Life, 1977

Justification: There are many songs that have enjoyed a second life thanks to films, with the trade-off being that it becomes impossible to separate the sound and the vision. Sometimes it doesn’t matter – it’s not like Air Supply’s ‘All Out Of Love’ had deep, personal meaning for me before soundtracking the creeping storm-about-to-hit horror of Animal Kingdom, for example – and other times it’s a little heartbreaking, such as the fact that I can’t hear the Jesus & Mary Chain’s ‘Just Like Honey’ without seeing Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson at the end of Lost in Translation. ‘Lust for Life’ skews slightly more toward the positive end of the spectrum, although these days I can’t hear Hunt Sales’ drum intro without imagining Renton and Spud barrelling through the streets of Edinburgh. Or, of course, Jet’s ‘Are You Going To Be My Girl’*.

This video is obviously the tie in for Trainspotting, but the song is a glorious, complicated celebration of the creative partnership of Iggy Pop and David Bowie (who co-wrote and produced). Lyrically it gets all meta on you – not only does it use William S Burroughs’ cut-up method, it does so with lyrics pulled from Burroughs’ cut-up novel The Ticket That Exploded (hence the appearance of Johnny Yen). And just in case the Trainspotting connection failed to tip you off, and like the previously-mentioned Stranglers’ classic ‘Golden Brown’, it’s a celebration of the dizzy joys of heroin (although supposedly both Pop and Bowie were coming off drugs at the time).

Of course, they’d both had it in their ear before.

*OK, cheap shot: both songs use that classic Motown drum pattern, best known as the rhythm to The Supremes’ ‘You Can’t Hurry Love’. Actually, it’s got a hell of a pedigree, that beat: it’s also the basis of the Jam’s ‘Town Called Malice’.

Album: Rattus Norvegicus, 1977

Justification: While “punk” in the UK generally meant the overdriven guitars of the Sex Pistols, the strident vocals of the Clash and/or the bratty energy of Buzzcocks, there were all these bands making equally-amazing music in the second tier. Bands like Wire, Siouxie & the Banshees and the Stranglers were as concerned with making art as they were with the everyone-can-play punk ethos, although the Stranglers were at a disadvantage because a) they were older, and b) they seemed to want to make a career out of music rather than bring society down (and also, mere months after the release of this single, they ran afoul of the right-on punk brigade with the leering follow up, ‘Peaches’).

This was their debut single and already had Hugh Cornwall’s snide, black sense of humour well to the fore, advising the listener to go form a band before pulling them up short with “but the money’s no good”. Which, coming out of a period when music was supposed to be the solution to many of society’s problems rather than having all sorts of problems of its own, was a pretty bold statement to make.

The band hit biggest a few years later with the stately ‘Golden Brown’ – but that’s another story.