GILBERT O'SULLIVAN – "Get Down"

…….and this is almost where I enter the fray. Almost, because although this was the first record I’d ever bought, I can’t entirely claim ownership as it was in fact a Mothers Day present ! Yes that was obv my idea of a pressie for my long suffering Mum. What a little treasure I was. Still, I can’t deny that I actually thought the Synth/Electric piano riff was actually pretty nifty. So I have a soft spot for it that not even the ‘now’ (or perhaps even ‘then’) laughable Pans People rendition can ruin. It still bounces along without a care and I have never been too ashamed to play it in company (well perhaps for a couple of years in the 80s I was).

I am extremely grateful for SR’s guilty pleasures CDs as they did round up a number of tracks I’d loved during the 70s and had never owned. Maybe it’s my age but I can’t feel guilty about any of them. Why is it though that it’s almost exclusively 70s tunes that we are supposed to feel guilty about liking ? I’d feel much more guilty about liking some of the terrors lurking around in the 80s. I then took GP to generally be shorthand for well crafted, skilfully played & beautifully produced pop songs that have been criminally ignored until now. Have I got this horrendously wrong ?

What annoyed me about the Rowley shtick is what Tom talked about as the “shared narrative” – he always bangs on about how tiresome is to go round to people’s houses and “see the same Clash albums”. Really? That strikes me as Sean having an awesomely narrow group of friends rather than a national problem of people being unable to admit to liking the music they really like. And indeed, to have a hidden love for that music, you’d have to be a close contemporary of SR’s (he’s 45) – I never heard of the Alessi Brothers, for instance, before the Guilty Pleasures radio show. (To be sort of fair, a look at the track listing for the recent programmes shows Keep On Running [sic] by Five, and the Sugababes’ Push The Button – what kind of idiot would hide liking that?)

The US equivalent I guess is the Rhino “Have A Nice Day” sets – which Ned Raggett gave me (in naughty digitised form) as a wedding present and which has seen much happy service since! A very mixed bag those but certainly no guilt narrative attached.

The GPs sets are pretty much identical to a host of other 70s comps that have been available for ages – “Super 70s Summer” was where I first heard several of them – with the occasional relative obscurity like Brian Protheroe’s terrific “Pinball” thrown on.

I certainly believe “guilty pleasures” – in the wider sense of records that you’re really conflicted about liking (for social or ethical or whatever reason) – exist, but I think giving them their own little category and filling it with fun pop is a way of avoiding that conflictedness.

(Obviously “Well I grew up and I don’t care about it any more” is a perfectly credible way of resolving the conflict, I’m not saying people should worry at these things obsessively.)

Thanks! Still, I’ve never heard it on the oldies show I listen to on CHFI – the only one of this they play is “Clair” for some reason. (I was too young to pay attention to the charts in ’73..)

I think that Get Down has a rather limited shelf life. I can remember the day that I bought a Gilbert O’Sullivan greatest hits album in the M&VE 50p basement in the late 90s, and playing Get Down again and again. Whenever I hear it now, though, it yields no fresh surprises – unlike, say, Ring Ring by ABBA which is based around a similar bouncy piano motif. So 5 is about right.

I can think of number one singles that I’d classify as ‘guilty pleasures’, though probably not for the same reasons as Sean Rowley. I’m looking forward to the time that we discuss the most problematic of these when we get to 1978…

I don’t think Rowley or his audience even include the ‘difficult’ stuff on their radar Marcello! Of course I applaud the “see how it all fits together” approach (& you do it excellently), but I really don’t think the GP ‘ethos’ (such as it is) takes aim at the noisy and difficult stuff “we” were told to like – nobody, I think, has ever told the people buying GP records to like Anthony Braxton or Carla Bley! Of course both GP and “the Canon”, in their orbits around one another, marginalise those more difficult artists, but this is my point too – shared narratives ignore the margins, and GP especially ignores the tricksy individual reasons for embracing and rejecting things.

(& I do admit in the review that my anti-DSOTM fantasy is petty! But I really don’t think it’s a good record.)

Well, Rowley does do his Joy Of Music late night show on BBC London where he does delve fairly intensely into the “margins” of music, both past and present, so he is clearly aware that GP isn’t the whole story (naturally my standard critical approach is to ignore the chimerical/demographic concept of “margins” altogether). So the question arises as to whether he’s purposely talking down to his GP audience, or whether the GP “day job” pays for all the other stuff.

I caught a bit of his GP radio show on Sunday (there being no FT Resonance show at present boo) and he was talking about an album he’d just bought out of a charity shop which had an inscription written on it; obviously it had been a present from someone to his partner/wife and Rowley was laughing at what he’d written, I think more out of embarrassment than malevolence (the album was that charity shop staple Don’t Be Cruel by Bobby Brown).

But then I thought, and this is particularly relevant when talking about the reasons why individuals embrace and/or reject things; well, the relationship might have fallen through and she might have taken the record into the shop in disgust – or, given that it might have been a Cancer Research or Trinity Hospice or British Heart Foundation shop, whether one of them wasn’t actually alive any more. So really he ought to have thought out more thoroughly what this record was doing in a charity shop, and why he picked it up (I tend to avoid items with inscriptions and/or IDs on them unless they’re so devilishly difficult to obtain by other reasonable means), since really you’re dealing by necessity with fragments of other people’s lives – do you reassimilate them into your own story as thoroughly (and unsentimentally?) as possible or is it simply easier just to giggle at the presumed numptiness of others?

The “Another Brick In The Wall (Part 2)” Popular article response will be interesting (150 comments by lunchtime, not all of them from oms)?

I wish I’d kept up that FT post I did about Floyd at Live 8 but Floyd generally, DSOTM inclusive, do still speak to me, and not just because of the knowledge that they/it helped pay for subsequent Bley and Wyatt records. I scoffed for thirty years at the received knowledge that DSOTM was The Greatest Record Ever but sometimes I play it and think they might sometimes be right (’67-’79 midpoint: “Love Makes Sweet Music” to “At Last I Am Free”).

Interesting year, 1978. A quick glance at the number ones for that year shows two bullseye 10s in my book, and to avoid spoilers I’m not saying which ones they are. I wonder if you can guess, knowing my tastes. I expect sharply divided opinions when the time comes though.

My 7″ copy of “Freedom” by Wham has an excellent CARTOON BEARD AND SPECS drawn on each of the protagonists’ faces 🙂 It’s actually an eerily accurate prediction of George Michael’s latter-day look.

This could be setting a new benchmark for the smallest proportion of any Popular thread devoted to the artist it’s supposed to be about! Hard luck Gilbert – nice song anyway.

Now, Guilty Pleasures – I’d heard of the concept/radio show/club night/franchise, but hadn’t seen the track listing until just now. If that list is a guide, then like others on here I can’t admit to feeling guilty about liking any of them, and with one or two exceptions I don’t remember them being considered as naff at the time either. It’s more like “Forgotten Gems” – the kind of thing you heard on the breakfast show, thought “oh, that’s good”, and a few weeks later they were in a respectable chart placing. Many of the acts were never heard from again, but they enhanced your pop experience when you were growing up, and now it’s a case of “blimey I thought I was the only one who remembered that” rather than “I never thought I could admit to liking it”. And I’m with you on “Pinball”, Tom – anything that brings that gorgeous song into more people’s lives has to be recommended.

Enjoyed P*nk Lord’s tales of hanging with the proggies at school. I used to get pretty good end-of-term marks, but then along came a lad in the year below whose marks were in the high 90s. He was a Yes fan and his name was Emerson – how much more prog can you get?

Er, Pommes Frites, anyone?

Marcello – “a beneign excuse for a Stalinist/Cameronite rewrite of musical history”??!! Oh, for crying out loud!

Rosie – Guesses for 1978, with all attempts to avoid spoilers. How about UTR and RT? Do I win a bun?

“Get Down” – My main memory of this thing is Industrial Action being taken (What? A strike in 1973?), which meant that TOTP was not broadcast for much of the period that this was Number One. I could never understand why Uncle Ray used the dog analogy to describe his bird… I can also recall being in a chemistry lesson and using the same bench as a little kid called George. George spent just about the whole 45 minute lesson singing this wretched song over and over without pause. I was just about at the end of my tether and reaching for a metal tri-pod in order to silence him (we comprehensive school herberts used to do these things) when I was beaten to the punch, quite literally, by an enormous lad called Errol, whose solitary blow ensured that George “got down” indeed. Happy Days!

Waldo, for me a stonking good top-notch song is a 9. A 10 has to come from out of the blue and make me want to fall over, add something special to something that’s already good to very good, or perhaps even be a borderline 1 that has something that makes it irresistible. This is by way of saying that your guess scores 19 out of a possible 20.

Hold yer horses there kids, the late seventies are a mere eight months away.

Anyway, one of the key points missing from this discussion is the Pans People interpretation of Get Down on Top Of The Pops. If you are doing a clip show, and want to show the literalism of PP, this is the one to go for.Aaaaah, doggies…

That reads a bit like an obituary, intothefireuk! GO is touring the UK and Ireland again later this year. He’s not given up, yet.

Re: Orb and PF, I distinctly remember either the NME or Melody Maker putting them on the cover together one week.

(sorry Gilbert o’sullivan)

I’ll consider amnesty if he puts “Central Park Arrest” by Thunderthighs on his next compilation.

Other things I expect to see on GP Vol 4:
Adriano Celentano – Prisencolinensenaiciusol
Dooleys – Love Of My Life
Polly Brown – Up In A Puff Of Smoke
Dee D Jackson – Automatic Lover
Guy Marks – Loving You Has Made Me Bananas
Sailor – One Drink Too Many
Richard Myhill – It Takes Two To Tango
Richard Barnes – Take To The Mountains
Geordie – Can You Do It
Slik – Requiem
Drupi – Vado Via
Reunion – Life Is A Rock (But The Radio Rolled Me)
Jasper Carrott – Funky Moped
Yin & Yan – Butch Soap
Imperials – Who’s Gonna Love Me?
Eli Bonaparte – Never An Everyday Thing
Errol Brown – From The Top Of My Head
Cher – A Woman’s Story
Laurie Lingo & the Dipsticks – Convoy GB
One Hundred Ton & A Feather – It Only Takes A Minute
Lighthouse – Pretty Lady