This week Brit peers at some short-sighted pop stars…
Oh blimey, I hope I haven’t done a Gervais in the title of this post. But I come to praise the visually-challenged, not insult them. Men, it has been inaccurately said, seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses. This is nonsense as we love the librarian look. But what about life as a young, specky four-eyed male? Pretty tough to impress the girls when lumbered with the Eric Morcambe look… Thank God, then, for rock n’ roll, since a Fender Stratocaster can confer instant cool on even the gangliest geek.
Thank God particularly for Buddy Holly. A Greatest Hits LP owned by my father, featuring Rave On and Oh Boy amongst others, was the first record that made me leap around the front room like a loon. I was four years old at the time and I still do it occasionally to this day. But would Buddy have been Buddy without the bins? Here he is rippin’ up the 50s with his “rock and roll specialists”, the Crickets…
The thing to do, if you’re a weedy scouser called Declan who looks like Where’s Wally, is to change your name to Elvis and learn the guitar. Here’s Mr Costello with the brilliant I Can’t Stand Up for Falling Down. Observe his super moves, living proof that indeed white men really can’t dance…
Graham Coxon was by far the coolest member of Blur despite being the only one with double-glazing (admittedly not hard when it contained a pair of prize Primrose Hill plonkers like Alex James and Damon Albarn). He’s released a couple of great poppy solo albums. Here’s a taste, sorry about the Ross…
But not all four-eyed popsters are so laudable. Would you trust this man with your microphone…
Thanks for the buddy holly clip, that’s amazing! Nearly 60 year old proto-rock showing that rock music in essence has not progressed at all since it was first invented, slightly depressing actually…
Lack of progress towards what, though? As you know, I don’t believe in the linear narrative theory of pop music.
Buddy even has a bit of a punky sneer in this. What a dude. We were robbed.
The curious vote goes to Rolf Harris.
Indeed, Holly looks very strange without the specs on that album cover, the one just called Buddy Holly. As someone who gained an extra pair of eyes at the age of 10, I took great comfort from Buddy, not to mention Hank Marvin. Less so from Freddy out of Freddy and the Dreamers…at least one Dreamer wore specs too if I remember rightly.
Nana Mouskouri, Stevie W…..no, sorry, bad joke.
Some say that they can remember exactly what they were doing, where they were, when Kennedy was shot, me, not likely. I can however remember precisely the day, the place, what was happening when, over the radio, the death of Buddy Holly was announced. One of the greats of rock and roll, his specs were worn throughout the land, the haircut endlessly copied, he set alight the knickers of mums of a certain age, that particular baton eventually taken up by Jim Reeves. Still have all of his music, on vinyl of course.
My mother was a lifelong fan, of Holly and strangely, of Elvis, considering the fact that she thought Debussy’s music was modern pop this is remarkable.
Thanks for the memory lane walkies Brit.
De nada Malty. I was trying to think of some female speckies, but I did Nana M a fortnight ago in the Greeks v Germans, and the only other one I could think of was Lisa Loeb and I don’t really like her hit song.
Malty:
Were you delivering newspapers; could you take one more step?
Bit of a shock when Jonathan King hove into view – I’d just put the clocks back and thought I had entered a parallel universe of crooked smiles with that other spook Lembit Opik – who at least is made of the right stuff, or so it would appear. How do people like JK get on and do so well, driving a roller around the West-End hoovering up rough trade, on the strength of one sappy record? * Where did I go wrong? Pity he didn’t take his own advice and go to the moon.
*I think the answer to my own question is that he had/has a bottom(sorry)less well of self belief
I remember a friend of my brother’s singing “Barry’s got four eyes” to him to the tune of Elton John’s Baby’s Got Blue Eyes. Bizarre how people wear lensless glasses as an accessory these days.
I shall forever associate Buddy Holly with the John Summers steelworks at Shotton in Flintshire. In late 1957, our class was despatched there by a headmaster hoping that we would be caught up in the rolling mill process and end up forming part of the track of the London to Manchester railway. On our way to the Works, sound from the old coach radio, probably built by Marconi, suddenly grabbed our attention: from out of the tinny speaker came Buddy Holly and the Crickets and That’ll Be the Day. Wow! Presley had shaken us the previous year; now Holly. To hell with the old order of: How Much Is That Doggie in the Window and Gilly Gilly Ossenfeffer Katzenellen Bogen by the Sea. Buddy had arrived, and the subsequent tour of the thunderous, fiery hell that was the John Summers’ steelworks took second place in schoolboy discussion to the amazing: That’ll Be the Day.
Early morning, 4th February, 1959, and in a few seconds I had burned into my conscience that Malty ‘Where was I?’ moment. I picked up the Daily Mirror and disaster! Front page: ‘Holly killed in plane crash’. Also dead were Ritchie Valens and The Big Bopper. But it was the loss of the exceptional Holly that really hurt: Oh Boy, Peggy Sue, Rave On, Everyday, Think It Over; I Guess it Doesn’t Matter Any More. But it did – Specky four-eyes had gone.
And ‘to hell with Three Coins in the Fountain’, and ‘O Mein Papa’. But what did the UK offer? Tommy Steele and Cliff Richard. And various re-named pretty-boys..Fortunately there were those who were listening hard to the blues in suburban bedrooms. Their time would come.
To hell with them indeed, Jonathon. There really was some utter tripe produced in British studios; an exception was Cliff Richard’s ‘Move It’, it was another ‘wow’ moment, but not because of Richard’s Presley aped vocal, it was the sound put up by The Drifters: it was, and still is, tremendously exciting. For a while I believed that the 16 year old Hank Marvin had played lead guitar on the recording, but discovered that it was a brilliant session man: Ernie Shear.
The time for the blues men certainly came.
Lived across the road from Tommy Steels mum, SE6, the posh end, I say posh end……This was the mid sixties, swinging, Kings Road, Railway Tavern Catford. Man them was the days, living it up. He used to wear an Oxford scarf, ba hons in cave manning no doubt. The upstairs neighbour who wrote children’s TV stuff, Fergus the fish (the series not the writer) took a fancy to Thomas, when Steele arrived for his regular visit he would dress in his best powder blue hipsters and gold lame string vest and mince up and down the lawn, pushing the mower, boy was I ever pleased, he stopped chatting up yours truly.
Little wonder Buddy Holly shone through, Lita Rosa, Marion Ryan, Frankie Laine, Jimmy Young, Mel Torme, Kathy Kirby the squawk club.
20/20 hindsight, Jonathon…sure, we knew at the time that Cliff et al were pale(ish) imitations, but they made some decent records. But there’s the stuff you always knew was great, the Elvises, Jerry Lees, Genes etc, and there’s also the soundtrack of your life – stuff that elbows its way in whether you like it or not. Listening to Johnny Remember Me or Don’t Treat Me Like a Child takes me back to a particular place just as well as Heartbreak Hotel. Besides, Johnny Kidd’s Shaking All Over, Billy Fury’s Wondrous Place, Shane Fenton’s I’m a Moody Guy are records that stand up pretty well by any yardstick.
Point wholly taken. Quality and/or artistic assessment being irrelevant to life’s soundtrack. Now – of course – you have me working on a playlist. And does the day in 1964 that someone got up in a school debate to give a speech which turned out – because I certainly didn’t yet know – to be the lyrics of ‘With God On Our Side’ count? Though to be honest (and doubtless predictable), life’s reading list that does it for me just as significantly.
Oh yes, that counts…and now you’ve got me thinking of the art teacher (complete with beard and what we must now think of as the Steve Jobs sweater) who turned me on to Dylan’s first album – and, less predictably, Lightning Hopkins, for whom he had a passion bordering on mania. Having done which, and having left me with a lifelong love of the blues, he went and got himself killed in a car crash at the end of term. We seem to have drifted rather a long way from spectacles…