VALENTINE'S DAY 1976: THEY ALL HAD IT

It was a Saturday, was St Valentine's Day in 1976. I was on the tentative threshold of becoming a teenager, and about halfway through my first year at Uddingston Grammar School, which I really didn't enjoy (in my second year there I hit my stride, but that's another story). In that morning's post lay the only Valentine card I ever received in my youth. My mother was excited and wondered who had sent it. My father gave me a "that's my boy"-style wink and nudge. I was rather embarrassed by the misspelt, sketchy message written on the inside of the card. If you think I have an "h" in the middle of my first name then we're extremely unlikely ever to be making whoopee. Call me fussy; you'd be right. I was very careful not to mention it at school, nobody owned up to sending it and I therefore never discovered the sender's identity. There were several suspects but I think we've had enough memoirs of that ilk recently, don't you?

 

It was perhaps a month or so later that I ventured on my own into Glasgow for the first time. It wasn't much of a venture; I took the train from Uddingston to Glasgow Central, emerged out of the station and straight into Grant's Educational Bookshop, buying the book I was seeking (having saved up some pocket money to do so) and then getting equally straight onto the train back home. One has to begin somehow.

The book in question had been advertised in Record Mirror and was called 20 Years Of British Record Charts, compiled by one Tony Jasper. Its premise was simple; all the Top 20 singles charts, in order, published in Record Mirror between January 1955 and September 1975, complete with end-of-year summaries which read as though authored by Bob Danvers-Walker, or perhaps Major Benest. I was already a nut for the pop charts. I wrote out each week's Top 50 in the style of the Record Retailer posters which my local newsagent's set aside for me in 1969/70 (because at that time they had a selection of records at the back of the shop), even writing in mock-advertisements for new releases. My father had seriously discussed with me the possibility of going to the Mitchell Library, looking through the requisite music paper back issues and compiling a book of chart hits. After all, Joel Whitburn was already doing that with the Billboard charts in the United States. By this time rather fed up with being expected to be a child prodigy, I lazily sat on the notion, and a couple of years later discovered that Tim Rice, Paul Gambaccini and Mike Read had a similar idea, but crucially saw it through.

A Guinness (or whoever) book of hit singles written by a twelve-year-old would have been an immediate sensation, and I kick myself about that missed opportunity (along with many others) to this day. And for those who fear that this may represent replanted received wisdom, and yeah sure, MC, you did all that, well (a) I was, as intimated above, a child prodigy, so much so that I appeared on the covers of the Mail and Express in September 1967; deal with it, and (b) my chart interests were put in writing on the cover of the Hamilton Advertiser in May 1974; there is not only documented evidence that this happened, but also a photograph of me, on that cover, at my Smith-Corona typewriter in the kitchen, uneasily balanced on a coffee cup coaster, working on that very same idea for a book and wearing a ghastly top but it was 1974 and I was ten FFS.

ANYWAY, this is about the singles chart as it stood on 14 February 1976, and what certain people were doing there. The chart was announced by Johnnie Walker on his Radio 1 lunchtime show the previous Tuesday, and Top 40 revisionists should note that only the Top Thirty was broadcast on national radio until May 1978. If you wanted the full Top 50, plus bubbling unders, you had to get Music Week (as Record Retailer became - not easy in West Central Lanarkshire) or Record Mirror.

It would be so, so easy, as far too many books these days are attempting, to transpose What I Know Now over (and obliterating) What I Knew Then. I remain unconvinced that what I knew then wasn't much more than what I know now. Because this is how the human mind works; not in an orderly and rational way, set in place by education and experience, but directed on what I might call a supra-rational level by random indicators from our very early childhood.

I didn't look at the chart for the week ending 14 February, 1976, and smugly mutter good grief. I did take the weekly (and sometimes fortnightly and monthly) music press, and everybody in it seemed unhappy and exhausted. I wasn't ignorant of developments there. But none of it interfered with or superseded my childhood instincts when it came to pop music. It was what contemporary pundits would now call a liminal period, when you could literally throw any old thing at the hit parade and some of it would stick. It all sounded new, intriguing, exciting and great. You never knew who or what would come next.

Let's all be supremely smug about Bohemian Rhapsody, which was still in that week's top twenty, or Mamma Mia, which had just come down from the top. Actually, let's not. At the time I thought Bo Rhap the greatest and maybe the saddest pop record I'd ever heard - such loss dormant at the core of its assumed insousciance - with the possible exception of I'm Not In Love, and though I didn't rate Mamma Mia quite as highly as S.O.S., it was good to see ABBA escaping the Eurovision trap. This attitude was helped in no small way by my hormones kicking into regretful action, such that I developed serious crushes on both Freddie Mercury and Frida (more so than Agnetha, who seemed so wistful and distressed; see the cover of their first Greatest Hits album to discern the essential differential). Not to mention Donna Summer, but all in good time...

Now of course I can look at that chart and wonder exactly what the Walker Brothers were doing there at number seven. They were far from being the only sixties survivors in the list; there were also the Four Seasons (with two other members singing lead most of the time, as stipulated in Frankie Valli's solo recording contract, which was with a different record label), the Miracles (minus Smokey Robinson), David Ruffin, Electric Light Orchestra (which evolved from The Move), the Who, the Small Faces (with a straight-up and possibly inexplicable reissue of Itchycoo Park, but I didn't worry about that then), Slade (who had been around in various guises since 1966), Yvonne Fair (who served her apprenticeship in the James Brown Revue), the O'Jays (who formed in 1958) and for that matter Manuel and his Music of the Mountains*, absent from our charts since 1960. Mike Oldfield might be said to be spiritually of the sixties (the Sallyangie album, Children Of The Sun, featuring both MO and his sister Sally, appeared in 1968). Even the token comedy record, impressionist Billy Howard's King Of The Cops, was based on King Of The Road, a 1965 number one for Roger Miller.

There was, I can now see, an unhealthy quantity of inherited and suffocating history in that chart. "Baby Face," souped up for discos by studio session group the Wing and a Prayer Fife and Drum Corps, was composed in 1926, and "Deep Purple," recorded by a Donny and Marie Osmond frantically grasping at the drowning reeds of popstardom, in 1933. "Answer Me," Barbara Dickson's first hit, had been a number one for both Frankie Laine and David Whitfield in 1953. Most notoriously, there was the reappearance, thirty-two years after he became missing in action, of Glenn Miller, with a three-track "maxi-single" (as E.P.s were still called then) of reissued tracks, an unlikely but logical follow-up to the Space Oddity/Changes/Velvet Goldmine package which had unexpectedly secured Bowie his first UK number one single three months earlier, which seriously irked Bryan Ferry - Love Is The Drug had otherwise looked set to take over at the top - and in part cancelled out an actual new Bowie single (Golden Years, which is about as perfect as pop records get).

I knew from reading James Hamilton's disco column in Record Mirror that there was a Miller revival of sorts, at club level. I didn't know about the Goldmine in Canvey Island, which if you were a kid growing up in Glasgow seemed about as far away as Mount Kilimanjaro, but did see that the DJ Chris Hill, the same guy who'd just had a novelty hit with Renta Santa, was making a point of playing old-school big band music. I was unaware of any links with what would be known as punk, of which in February 1976 I knew nought.

But this chart was all over the place. There was perky little Tina Charles, fed up with her bloke dancing when she preferred you-know-what, and whee-ing excitedly all the way to the top (I only found out a LONG time later that Trevor Horn was somehow obscurely involved in this). There were three entirely different stripes of first-class funk from War, Osibisa and the aforementioned O'Jays. Reggae was also enjoying a modest limelight - Paul Davidson's reimagining (as they call it these days) of the Allman Brothers' Midnight Rider is so much more convincing than the original, and the guitar solo (played by Davidson himself) was enough to convince the twelve-year-old Johnny Marr that he should like to become a guitarist. Moreover, Pluto Shervington's up-to-the-minute Dat was a welcome shot of relatively hardcore, but benign Trenchtown rock. For those whose thing it was, Bradford's Smokie provided some brown ale AoR, while pop-soul vocal group Sheer Elegance and their trousers emerged from the television talent show New Faces.

And yes, there were elements of newness. Sailor's Glass Of Champagne sounded like Virginia Plain performed by XTC and produced by Moroder. Love To Love You Baby - actually Produced By Moroder - came out of sixties mores (Hair, Je T'Aime &c) but sounded as minimalist and thrilling as any top ten hit since Rock On (Autobahn peaked at eleven, nitpickers). Mamma Mia taking over at number one from Bo Rhap was, in retrospect, the acceptance of a passing torch - the Queen record sounds as though summarising and closing an era of music.

But what were the Walker Brothers doing there, at number seven?

The reunion didn't quite come out of the blue. It was apparently John Walker who set the ball in motion sometime in the second half of 1974, watching a late-night television screening of the tacky spy-horror film Deadlier Than The Male, from 1967. Reconstituting Bulldrog Drummond as a stolider James Bond with a tangled plot out of Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! to faintly nauseating effect, the only thing the movie really had going for it was its theme tune, performed by the Walker Brothers. Listening, John was struck by how good he thought they still sounded, and tentatively contacted Scott about a possible reunion. In 1975 Gary was persuaded to join in, and their record label boss, Dick Leahy at GTO (then flush from success with Fox and Dana), installed the trio in a flat above a restaurant in Parsons Green to plan their return.

There was initially genuine goodwill - none of the three, Scott included, was thriving particularly well at this stage - and the group's exquisitely pained reading of Tom Rush's muffled lament No Regrets seemed a suitable comeback. They promoted the song on a number of television shows, most notably a Vera Lynn Christmas special on BBC1. In the New Year the song quietly intruded into the lower end of the chart, and patiently and politely climbed its way upward. There was no screaming rush, as there might have been a decade previously, teen idols not really having been expected to "grow up." Their No Regrets was solemn, authoritative and vulnerable, the contrasts brought out more squarely in Alan Parker's concluding guitar solo than the voices themselves (articulating the inexpressible, again).

Those who knew, even then, of whom only the Walker Brothers would have qualified as accurate observers, could guess where they might be going. In February 1976 the Walker Brothers meant to me a bunch of moody pop guys from the sixties and Scott Walker in particular was a light entertainment balladeer and not much else. So much of British culture that month could be termed light entertainment, and I do not mean that as a bad thing - it's actually one of the most difficult things to pull off.

So what escape route for the Walker Brothers was indicated in the singles chart for the week ending 14 February, 1976?

Observant readers will recognise that I have missed one single out of that top thirty - and it's the one at the very top. Slik were a Glasgow band who already had a decent local reputation; their previous The Boogiest Band In Town sold well enough to make Radio Clyde's "Tartan Thirty." But the Bay City Rollers had passed their imperial peak, and were on their inelegant way down, having jettisoned their main writers Bill Martin and Phil Coulter. Looking for something else to do, the pair alighted upon Slik in the hope perhaps of making them into a slightly edgier Rollers.

Forever And Ever really is an extraordinary pop record verging on bipolarity. It alternates between sombre, funereal organ and Gregorian chants, with Midge Ure's mutter of a stentorian vocal atop - in truth quite reminiscent of some of Howard and Blakely's work for the Herd and Dave Dee et al - and a trademark. if slower, hands-in-the-air Rollers chorus. It felt uncomfortable and unwieldy, yet there were just about enough teenypoppers-verging-on-adolescence to push it to number one, albeit only for a week. The follow-up, Requiem, was actually quite scary - yes, Lieutenant Hindsight, you can clearly see Midge's Ultravox crawling out of the verses' gloaming - and still less satisfactory a compromise (a chorus Pickettywitch could have done) and it scared enough people off. Next came "The Kid's A Punk" (oh dear) and you know the rest; this isn't Wikipedia.

Yet in 1978 Midge Ure went on to hear The Electrician - the final Walker Brothers single - and was sufficiently struck by it to compose his own tribute to the song. You may have heard of it; it's called Vienna. Then, in between Ultravox albums in 1982, Midge came up with his own version of No Regrets, which he does with an angrier guitar and as though Ultravox had covered...The Electrician. Thus did New Pop square everything. Not that Morley or anyone else had thought of anything approaching New Pop in February 1976.

*Manuel and his Music of the Mountains was really Geoff Love and his Orchestra, although I recall many people at the time, not all of whom were in my classroom, who believed that it was Andrew Sachs from Fawlty Towers. His four-minute condensation of the second movement of Rodrigo's Concierto de Aranjuez nods astutely to the immense influence that piece might have had on Morricone. The featured guitarist on the record, then sixty-seven, was Ivor Mairants, best known to Londoners for his Musicentre guitar shop in Rathbone Place. The physical shop closed at the end of 2019 but the business remains active online.