ONE MORE TIME
20 August 2006

Push The Button by The Sugarbabes is my favourite pop record so far in this decade. I would be quite happy to never hear another record by The Sugarbabes in my life. Does my love of this record undermine everything that I have written in this book so far?

In the summer of 1966 I was at a scout camp. Pop music was being discussed around the campfire. As I have said before, Strawberry Fields, released in March 1967 was my great awakening and before that I had never felt that passionately about pop music. It was what the girls in my class were into. With hindsight I would say that 1966 was the greatest year for pop music. I have also said often that every year is the greatest year for pop music, it just depends on your age. Nowadays I don’t know if any of these statements holds any truth.

One of the other scouts around the campfire asked me if I had heard The Supremes’ new record, The Happening. I said ‘Yes’ and he then asked me ‘Don’t you think it is the best record ever?’ ‘No’ I said, ‘It is not even the best record by The Supremes.’ He didn’t answer me; he just poked the fire and started to sing The Happening. I got up and walked away to climb a tree in the certain knowledge that Baby Love was the best record by The Supremes and there was no need to ever hear another record by them.

I don’t know if I ever thought through the theory of what I imagine was an obvious truth. If I had done, it would have gone something like this: why bother listening to another record when it is obvious that any other will only ever be a pale imitation of the great one and if you were to hear too much of that singer’s voice or the sound of the band or the production it would put you off them and in turn this would diminish your appreciation and love of the first one?

In this chapter, and it might be a long one, I want to try to bring a number of strains of thought together. These strands relate to girl pop, the one-hit wonder, the indescribable sound and the vision of the producer and how this all relates to The17.

From the top of the tree I climbed I could see for miles and nobody could see me. I kept singing that opening refrain to Baby Love over and over again – ooooh ooooh baby love, my baby love, especially the repeated descending ooooh bit.

Over the years there have been dozens of girl pop records I have loved with an intense passion. Not one have I bought or even wanted to buy. It is enough for me to carry the sound and memory of them around in my head.

Lyrics have never been a big thing for me, it has always been the sound of the record I go for. But if I was to do a little research I would find that with the vast majority of these records the girl is singing from a position of weakness. She has either been dumped or she has the boyfriend up on a pedestal. In at least two cases the boy has died.

Now this must say some pretty negative things about me and what I want from women but in real life I have always been drawn to strong women. Women who appear to know what they want. Baby Love was not the first of these records and I am sure that Push The Button will not be the last. Terry by Twinkle is one of the greats. Everything about it, her flat singing voice, the way she stood stock still on her TV performance, the fact she never had a follow-up hit to tarnish it. Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow? by the Shirelles; Past, Present And Future by The Shangri-La’s; As Tears Go By by Marianne Faithfull; White Horses by Jackie; Single Girl by Sandy Posey; Identity by   X-Ray Specs; Like A Virgin by Madonna; I Wanna Dance With Somebody by Whitney Houston; Bang Bang (You Shot Me Down) by Cher; It Should Have Been Me by Yvonne Fair; Clean Up Woman by Betty Wright; Band Of Gold by Freda Payne. I could carry on – there are dozens more – but I won’t.

Obviously some of the singers of some of these records went on to have massive careers, building themselves up diva or women-of-strength-and substance images, and so selling millions of albums. But only one of them has made more than a couple of good records. Some of them took it upon themselves to try to learn to be good singers. But for me it was when they sounded at their most vunerable or innocent that it worked.

Diana Ross, Whitney Houston and Madonna are the biggest examples of singers building up those huge and ridiculous careers, none of whom could now make a record in a century of Sundays that would make you want to cry. Terry by Twinkle pisses all over their careers after they sang on those records that touched my heart.

Maybe if I was a woman it would be different, I could then view the likes of Madonna as a positive role model. A woman succeeding in a man’s world on her own terms, but I’m not.

Now to sidestep the girl pop thing for a while –its thread will get woven back in later – and move on to the one-hit wonder – there should have been far more one hit wonders in pop music in whatever epoch they reached the charts. Give me a single one – Something In The Air by Thunderclap Newman – rather than the whole of U2’s career. If Dire Straits had only had recorded and had a hit with Sultans Of Swing, I would have remembered them fondly but they had to go and spoil it all by recording a whole raft of platinum-selling albums followed by what’s-his-face struggling on with a solo career.

More one-hit wonders would have brought more joy to our lives, more art and creativity to the world. All the best records have been made by artists who had very short careers. Yeah, yeah, I know about the exceptions. The trouble is the record companies hate them. They see a one-hit wonder as a wasted opportunity. What is the point of a hit being had, if a career cannot be built from it? A one-off hit is just taking up space that could have been occupied by an artist with a serious career.

Record companies now have to spend hundreds of thousands to get a career off the ground. It is no longer trial and error, no longer throwing mud at the wall to see which one sticks and then backing it. And once they have an act away, and a career seems to be blossoming, the last thing record companies want is that act straying too far from the brand sound and image they have already established. And this goes across the board for all types of acts, not just the genres you don’t like.

Ok, that’s enough about the one-hit wonder for the moment.

It was 1961, we had driven up from Newton Stewart to Ayr, the seaside town on the west coast of Scotland. We visited the skating rink. What I remember is standing on the balcony looking down on the skaters going round and round. The sound of the blades slashing across the ice and the big kids and teenagers screaming and laughing. Then this massive room, the biggest I had ever been in, was filled with an even bigger sound. It took a few seconds to realise the sound was music. Since the incident with the skiffle group in Penningham Prison I had become accustomed to pop music. Mainly via the picture house, Elvis Presley films and of course when the fair came to town. The fairground may be the best place to experience pop music still. All the lights and the movement and the throbbing generators and people screaming. It was in a funfair on Victoria Park, Hackney, that I first heard Push The Button by The Sugababes, while driving a dodgem.

But, back to the skating rink in Ayr and this sound that was music of some kind, that was bigger than the building itself. It made all the skaters going around and around go around even faster and scream even louder.

At first I thought there must be a band playing the music, but there wasn’t. It was an even bigger sound than when a bagpipe band marches past you only inches away from where you are standing on the pavement. I tried to work out where the music was coming from. Even at the fair you could see the music was coming out of the Tannoy speakers. But here in the skating rink the music seemed to be coming from everywhere all at the same time, it was like it was inside my body as well as in everybody’s bodies.

Then the record came to an end and it was followed by some drivel by Tommy Steel or something. I don’t know when I next heard that record or when I learnt it had been Telstar by the Tornados, it could have been years later,.

Flip back to what I was on about a few pages ago. Who in their right mind would ever want to hear another track by The Tornados after they have heard Telstar, let alone a whole album? Telstar was a total and compete statement, nothing needed to be added.

Now I want to fast forward to 1966. I’m sitting in our front room, on my own, watching Top Of The Pops, a weekly pop show on at 7.30 every Thursday evening. It featured bands miming to their current hits. Some weeks they would feature a film clip of an American act who were having a hit in the UK but were not over here touring, and so unavailable to perform on Top Of The Pops. This particular Thursday evening they introduced a film clip of a band that I had never heard of before. It was a black American act, but not like The Four Tops or The Temptations with their shiny suits and their corny dance routines. It featured a full band led by a man who looked like he would slit your throat for sixpence. There were three girl backing singers shaking their collective ass, to make a contemporary comparison, they made Beyoncé, at her most ass shaking, look like she was still in junior school.

And out front was a woman who was the most terrifying thing I had ever seen. Everything about her was total sex. Every part of her body shuddered and shook. Her lips and mouth were so big she could have swallowed me whole as I sat there on the sofa.

But all of this was nothing compared to the sound they made. It was a bigger sound than even Telstar by The Tornados in the Ayr skating rink. But how could this be? We had a black and white Bush TV with one little speaker in it and I hadn’t even turned the sound up to full. The song came to an end and then Jimmy Saville informed me it was Ike and Tina Turner performing River Deep, Mountain High. Although I never bought the record and was never bothered to hear anything else by Ike and Tina Turner, this, in my reckoning, is the third greatest record ever made.

It wasn’t until the early 1970s that I started to become aware of what a record producer was. If I’d heard of them when I was younger, I guess I would have thought of them as some very boring, straight, even posh types who were there to keep the band in order. Photos of George Martin, the Beatles’ producer, were often in the papers and he looked like some boring square whose job description was to stop people having fun and just get on with work. A traditional authority figure.

It was in my late teens, when I had tired of rock bands and all their boring pompous antics, that I became aware of, and drawn to, these mysterious people who worked under the job title of record producer, the most famous being Phil Spector. There have been billions of words written about Phil Spector. I have no interest in reading those words or knowing anything about his life. All I need to know is there were a handful of records by artists in the 1960s – artists who never went on to have meaningful and lasting careers – who each in their own way touched pop nirvana. This handful of records were all produced by Phil Spector. I learnt that Telstar by The Tornados was produced by a man called Joe Meek. And then I learnt that out there somewhere in the twilight zone was a force known as Shadow Morton who was responsible for producing Leader Of The Pack, Remember (Walking In The Sand) and Past, Present And Future by the Shangri-Las!

As with Phil Spector, I wasn’t interested in learning anything about Joe Meek or Shadow Morton. It was all there in the records they produced. These records had massive vision. They took what was seemingly a trite form and turned it into the highest art form that existed at that time in the world. Cinema, painting, photography, ’serious’ music, jazz, poetry, novels, theatre – none of them could touch what these pop records achieved. Or that’s the way it seemed to me on certain days when I stood by the side of the road with my thumb out attempting to hitch a ride to some vague destination. And especially if it was raining.

Through the first half of the 1970s I gradually learned there were dozens more of these producers who had been working across the cities and states of the US. Joe Meek seemed to be the only British one with a similar breadth of vision. I have no idea what motivated these men. Whether it was the regular fame and fortune that people usually think of as the great motivators, or if it was some indefinable higher goal.

Before Phil Spector, the recording studio was just a place where what musicians played was recorded. Everything had been arranged, musically speaking, before the recording session began. Spector changed all that. He used the musicians and singers as his tools, his paints. The studio was his instrument. The musicians and singers were always exploited, maybe not financially, but for whatever could be squeezed out of them to make the producer’s vision a reality. But after Sergeant Pepper by the Beatles most of what these producers could do was redundant. The music industry wanted bands that could sell vast amounts of albums. The industry didn’t want visionary producers with their epic singles. The market place wanted bands and singer-songwriters with artistic integrity not pop singing puppets.

These visionaries could only work with bands and singer-songwriters they could dominate and meld. Rock bands had their own visions, they weren’t going to be putting up with some wanker telling them how they should be playing guitar, or even worse that the recording didn’t require a guitar part in it at all.

Sexual politics came into it as well. These visionary producers worked best with the solo girl singers, ideally those who had no aspirations to write their own songs, girl singers who they could control in almost every sense. According to the few accounts that have strayed my way, Joe Meek was so sexually fucked up he worked best when there was no singer, let alone a real band. Being a producer of hit singles as a form of creating great art existed across the then-dominant genres in popular music, from r&b to country & western, taking in folk and pop along the way.

Because the big bucks in the record industry by the 1970s were to be made out of real bands and singer-songwriters, this whole producer with vision way of making records was pushed to the margins and was to only find international commercial favour in the disco boom of the mid 1970s. Once again records by artists we had never heard of before came hurtling from nowhere on to the dancefloors and into our hearts and the charts. Three months later their careers were back to where they had been before the hurtling. The greatest of these disco records is the exception that proved the rule as the artist in question had more of a career than the visionary producer might have thought she deserved. The record was I Feel Love by Donna Summer, produced by Giorgio Moroder. The greatest disco record of all time.

By the time I Feel Love had been a number 1 hit in the UK in 1977 I was already in Big In Japan. And sadly it was becoming a real band. When we knocked it on the head I was fuelled with enough punk attitude of ‘I don’t need to ask anybody’s permission to do whatever I want’ to decide to form my own record label. This was done in partnership with Dave Balfe who had been the bass player with Big In Japan towards the end. There were numerous small American labels that I was a fan of, most producing local r&b and country acts. Most of the visionary producers seemed to have their own labels.

Balfe also seemed to have a thing about the visionary producer and disco. We settled on the name Zoo Records. Before Balfe had decided to come in with me it was to be called Bill’s Records.

Other than sticking out some old Big In Japan recordings the first record I wanted to make was with Pete Burns. Pete and I had talked about it and I had half a song written that was a bit like You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real) by Sylvester. Pete Burns worked in Probe record shop round the back of Mathew Street in Liverpool. He used to come on a lot of the Big In Japan away gigs with us. He also seemed to have star potential although I never heard him sing. The recording never happened. Pete decided I was persona non grata for some reason I don’t know and he went on to be the face and voice of one of the best records of the 1980s.

There was another half-conceived song that I had. It was one that I originally thought could be done with Big In Japan but it was definitely something that could never be done as a live song at a gig.

I told Balfe about it and we worked on it together. I wanted it to be like one of those sad 1960s girl pop records that I loved but with a sort of disco beat. There was no singer we had in mind. Then we saw this girl in the street who looked weird and pretty and vulnerable with big sad eyes. We asked her if she wanted to be on a record. She said she had never sung. We said that didn’t matter because all she had to do was talk the lyrics, so she said yes.

We booked ourselves into Amazon Studios in Kirkby on the outskirts of Liverpool for two days. It was the first time I had been into a 24-track studio. It was going to cost us a fortune. We didn’t have a penny or any idea about how a disco record was made. We knew we wanted to have a bass drum that hit fours to the floor all the way through and we knew we wanted syn drums on it making that sound syn drums do on crap disco records. The girl was called Lori Lartey and she was on the foundation course at Liverpool Art School, or I think she was. Balfe and I had already decided to call ourselves The Chameleons as a production team. (I should add here that we were nothing to do with the rock band The Chameleons that came out of Manchester some years later.)

The record was to be credited to Lori And The Chameleons. The song was called Touch. The lyrics told the tale of romance across the cultural divide between the singer and a Japanese boy in Tokyo. We recorded it with the help of Tim Whittaker, the drummer from Deaf School, doing the drum parts, Balfe doing the keyboards and me doing the guitar bits. I revelled in my cod-oriental guitar hook.

Balfe and I thought it sounded brilliant. Even revolutionary. We thought it sounded exactly how pop music should sound. Fragile, mysterious, beautiful, sexy. I haven’t heard it for 25 years now and if I did, I am sure I would think it sounded quaint at best.

We released it on Zoo records. It got ‘single of the week’ reviews in the music papers. Warner Brothers wanted to license it from us and give it a major push. We agreed and signed a deal. Dave Lee Travis made it his single of the week on BBC Radio 1. That means he played it every day for a week on his afternoon shows. This, in our eyes, was major exposure. It got to number 70 in the official UK singles chart. But the next week it dropped out, but then Warner Brothers picked up the option of us recording a follow-up single. Balfe and I wrote the song together – The Lonely Spy. This time the lyrics placed Lori on the edge of Red Square in Moscow. She watched her boyfriend gunned down in a hail of bullets as he tried to escape into her loving arms from the clutches of the KGB. The Lonely Spy required Lori to sing. We had no idea if she could. We booked ourselves into Rockfield Studios in Wales. It took us three days. We thought we had made the greatest pop record ever made. It didn’t even dent the top 100 and never troubled a Radio 1 playlist.

I had wanted Lori and the Chameleons to be a one hit wonder. After two failures we gave up. A one-hit wonder should appear to have happened by accident, it’s not something to be worked at. This also meant my first stab at girl pop had failed. I was never to be responsible for something with the shimmering beauty of Terry by Twinkle or Past, Present And Future by The Shangri-Las or even White Horses by Jacky.

At the same time as our attempts to be the Shadow Mortons of the late 1970s we were putting out records on Zoo by our Liverpool peers Echo And The Bunnymen and The Teardrop Explodes. The Bunnymen got signed to a major with us in tow as their managers and producers. Nobody wanted The Teardrop Explodes so Balfe and I used the £4000 we got for doing The Lonely Spy as down-payment on recording the first Teardrop Explodes album.

It was another ten years before I would have a go at the one-hit wonder again. This time it was with Jimmy Cauty as The Timelords. Our one and only record under this name did get to number 1 in the official UK charts. Sadly, it was not girl pop of any persuasion but it mined another tradition of British popular music. It was a great stomping turd of a record that gatecrashed the national and international charts in a way only the rudest and crudest of novelty records can. For some it was one of the worst records ever made. For Jimmy Cauty and myself it was one of those fabulous pop moments, when stupidity and genius seem to be the same.

That said, it was no Telstar by The Tornados and should not be mentioned in the same book as the shimmering glory that is River Deep, Mountain High by Ike and Tina Turner.

On two or three of the pop singles that Jimmy Cauty and I were later to make we attempted to touch those heights that Phil Spector once reached. Not by trying to mimic his over-mimicked sound, but by throwing everything we had and plenty of things we had no right to have at the canvas while we worshipped at the altar of pop one last time. Even roping in Tammy Wynette was a nod to one of the great visionaries of record production, Billy Sherrill, who produced the greatest country record of all time, Stand By Your Man.

I will celebrate getting this text written by diving in the pool then getting a beer and playing in my head Push The Button by The Sugarbabes one more time.