Popular

THE SWEET - “Block Buster”

(#325, 27th January 1973) 

Sometimes you hear a flaw, a niggle in a track you love and it gradually sours you on the whole. I am worried that this might be happening to “Blockbuster”. For tens, perhaps hundreds, of plays, I had enjoyed this most wholehearted of tracks, and then suddenly, one day, I noticed that of course they’re not singing “blockbuster”, they’re singing “block Buster”. Whoever he is.

That irritates me. I won’t go into why, because I’m not even sure there is a why, but I wonder if it’s possible to somehow train myself not to notice it when I hear the thing. This is a related fantasy, I guess, to the “oh, imagine hearing it for the first time” one I sometimes have about favourite tracks that have become as worn and threadbare as an old stuffed toy.

Luckily I can remember hearing “Blockbuster” for the first time - I’d heard bits of it used here and there, the rhythm and the klaxons, but not the whole thing in its confident might. With the album charts pulling in more profits and more of bands’ and marketers’ attention, the singles charts had been left to recidivist stomp rock and to bubblegum - writers Chinn and Chapman’s big idea was to fuse them. The genius of “Blockbuster” is its easy combination of bolshy glam muscle and campy pop theatre (into which, yes, “block Buster” fits, though I don’t really want it to). The opening klaxons are an amazing headrush - the first time they’d been used like this in pop? - immediately turning the track into an event: clear the airwaves boys, this is what you want to hear. If the song had just stuck with the riff and the howls and the sirens it would be the first rave track (might be anyway), but then it starts getting teasy, flirty with you even (“Does anyone know the way?”) before stepping right into pantoland with the “doesn’t have a clue WHAT to do” delivery - and then cranking the frenzy right up again. Delicious, delirious. 9

26. Marcello Carlin on July 4th, 2007

    Come to think of it, I’ve never seen the two of them together in the same place…

    Incredibly, Sir Alex will pop up on Popular in the fullness of time…

27. Brian on July 4th, 2007

    Arghh…another song I don’t know. And it seems that my frustration will deepen if what Marcello says about two nations divided by a common language is true.

    I could be wrong but it seems to me that North America didn’t , shall we say, embrace the Glam side of rock as did the UK.

    Altough Elton John ,at his campiest, was holding down Canadian charts ( for 5 weeks ) at # 1 with Crocodile Rock , I can’t recall major North American Glam Bands. Please correct me if I am wrong …….as I know you will.

28. intothefireuk on July 4th, 2007

    Little known irrelevant fact - Brian Connolly went out with one of my neighbours at the time. However, knowing that BC was prob enjoying a rnr lifestyle, I’m not entirely sure what constituted ‘going out’.

    As regards JG :

    ‘it’s just ploddy pub rock dressed up to resemble newness and doesn’t betray any real understanding of how a pop record works’

    That’s very funny. I’ll look forward to your dissertation on ‘how a pop record works’.

    Glam/Glitter rock didn’t really cross over to the States (it was prob too camp for Middle America) but it did sow the seeds in LA & New York for bands such as Kiss and the later Glam Metal scene. Ironically glam itself had been influenced by the US, Iggy & Stooges, Alice Cooper and ‘Americana’ generally. JG was written by Bowie in New York and itself features a raft of US influences.

29. Billy Smart on July 4th, 2007

    I always think that in some ways this is the first modern-sounding number one. It’s due to the way that the elements of it are seperated out in the mix, I think. A lot of sixties songs that I love can sound a bit trebly and squashed-together when I come across them by chance on the radio, while Chinnichap stuff always seems to attract my attention.

    Somewhere in Melody Maker in late 1989, Simon Reynolds, reviewing a glam compilation video, suggested that Never Mind the Bollocks owed a massive debt to ‘Action’.

    That YouTube TOTP clip isn’t the one most familiar to UK viewers, which contains the most amazing chrome yellow videographic flaring effect. I guess that Steve Priest’s swastica is something best not reshown

30. Marcello Carlin on July 5th, 2007

    IIRC SR also compared the Young Gods to the selfsame “Action.”

    Steve Priest’s swastika was decidedly at a Hogan’s Heroes level of aesthetics/messthetics. Certainly nowhere near as offensive as Polly Brown singing “Honey Honey” in blackface the following year.

    There was a heated Blockbuster vs Jean Genie debate in what passed for music press discourse at the time, viz. how dare those manufactured teenyboppers keep a Real Rock Star at number two with The Same Riff.

    But in fact to make pop work an instinctive grasp of timing, rhythm and variance of sonic angles is often far more essential than a thorough knowledge of pop history. Knowing how to move through a pop record has more impact than the knowledge that went into its construction. Since Bowie is essentially an unreconstituted Yardbird-worshipping Mod (as he demonstrated later in the same year on Pin-Ups) he can’t pretend that Cyril Davies never existed and thus “Blockbuster” has the unprecedented sirens and klaxons which KIDS HAD NEVER HEARD BEFORE, whereas “Jean Genie” has the lumpen harmonica which twentysomething rock critics found more secure because it tied them back into an umbilical sense of Seven Ages Of Rock lineage (as opposed to, say, Harry Pitch’s sprightly and light harmonica on “Groovin’ With Mr Bloe” which works as pop precisely because he’s not bothered, or even knows that much, about Rock History).

31. Billy Smart on July 5th, 2007

    There’s an amusing scene in the Steve Coogan comedy ‘Natural Born Quizzers’, where a pair of obsessive-compulsives (Coogan and Patrick Marber) attempt to sing Blockbuster from memory and render all of the parts correctly.

    One thing that I particularly like about Blockbuster is the feeling of setting out on a quest that it evokes; the call to arms of the siren, the battle cry of “Does anyone know the way?”, and the massed response of “aaaaahhhh!”

    It will be interesting talking about this again when we get to 1988. Whatever its disputed merits, Jean Genie wouldn’t have fitted into Doctorin’ the Tardis!

32. Waldo on July 5th, 2007

    Marcello - Please understand that “the deluded insurrectionists” were certain union leaders and not the poor bloody workforce, of which I am one. Your comment about tax evasion I entirely agree with.

33. Marcello Carlin on July 5th, 2007

    1971 Industrial Relations Act to thread.

34. FT's pˆnk s lord sükråt cunctør on July 5th, 2007

    i think what’s obnoxious abt “part of the union” is (as much as anything) that it purports to be an attack on complacency and smug luxuriation in power, which is itself (in tone) enormously complacent (they’re adopting a narrative “we” which leaves the actual singer we utterly unexamined), and yes — the singers went on to luxuriantly muckity-muck with Actual Real Power™

    in other words, what’s ugly about the song is somewhat distinct from i. either the political allegiance of the singers (arguably you could fashion a NON-smug anti-union song which, i don’t know, argued that the workers’ true interests lay elsewhere) (i’m reaching a bit here maybe), or ii. the accuracy of their ahem “analysis” (on one hand the power the song claims to nail proved pretty mighty and fugitive when push came to shove; on the other, the 70s was actually a time of extreme class tension WITHIN unions; the defeat of the unions arising precisely bcz Actual Real Power™ could turn divide and conquer, and siphon off a significant percentage of union members at key times, on key issues)

35. FT's pˆnk s lord sükråt cunctør on July 5th, 2007

    sigh: “pretty mighty and fugitive” shd be “pretty fugitive” or “mighty fugitive”, depending on yr taste in british understatement

36. Erithian on July 5th, 2007

    I hadn’t expected a heated debate on the Strawbs’ politics to arise from this thread, but the wider the discussion the better! I’ll leave the union debate to one side (aside from noting that the power to bring governments down did seem to lie with the unions at this end of the 70s) for a brief look at the statements of Strawbs spinoff band Hudson Ford.

    From memory, “This Is Not The Way”, the B-side of “Pick Up The Pieces”, was a touching condemnation of Bloody Sunday (“no individual on earth deserves to die / by a bullet from a soldier’s gun”); the title “Burn Baby Burn” caused a bit of a fuss in the US since it was the slogan of those burning their Vietnam draft cards; and they went on to be The Monks, the supposedly punk oddity who did “Nice Legs Shame About Her Face” – not very PC but still pretty funny.

37. FT's pˆnk s lord sükråt cunctør on July 5th, 2007

    the power to bring down the government lay with the voters, where it’s supposed to! heath went to country asking “who governs?” and the country said “well not you obviously”

    but actually the whole time a strangely similar story — of a powerstruggle between factions, between regions, between generations, between rank-and-file and upper echelons* — was also unfolding in the unions in general, in the NUM in particular: the state’s counter-attack in the mid-80s exactly battened on this split

    i very much associate with the strawbs with my family moving house from the house i loved as a kid, to the house my dad still lives in, which i have never liked — before we moved, there was a gothish girl who worked in the centre we had a flat in, who occasionally babysat me and my sister, and was very unhappy and picked on, and stole stuff, and loved the strawbs; after we moved, my sister’s best new friend’s brother (farming family) was a big fan, and talked a lot to me abt how great they were; i remember him driving me somewhere and playing the one that has a william blake image on the cover, on eight-track! (i know eight-track is a big nostalgia cliche but !!!) anyway i think i think of them as the “kind of music that ordinary people who AREN’T MOVING HORRIBLE HORRIBLE HOUSE like”, which doesn’t make sense but i was 12 so BUG-OFF)

    *originally here i also put “between official and wildcat” but tho this happened a LOT in other unions i’m not sure it did in the NUM: boyler or carsmile to thread?

38. FT's pˆnk s lord sükråt cunctør on July 5th, 2007

    this one:
    

39. Rosie on July 5th, 2007

    I have no recollection of Hudson Ford’s Pick Up The Pieces But I assume it’s not teh same as the Average White Band’s rather funky track of the same title? It not being to sort of thing I expect a Strabs spin-off to come up with.

40. Marcello Carlin on July 6th, 2007

    Hudson-Ford’s “Pick Up The Pieces” was a dolorously jaunty folk-pop bendy thing (like Medicine Head on Actifed) and nowt to do with AWB. “Floating In The Wind” was probably their best record but that stopped short of the 40. They reappeared recently with an anti-Euro record, featured on James Whale &c. so you can see they’ve/’re stuck with it. I can’t remember whether Rick Wakeman was still a Strawb when “POTU” came out or whether he’d already jumped ship in the topographic oceans.

    All very disappointing, coming from the rhythm section which played on the Flowerpot Men’s Peace Album - but then again their greenness may stem from a Zac Goldsmith-type perspective.

41. Waldo on July 6th, 2007

    “But then again their greenness may stem from a Zac Goldsmith-type perspective??!!”

    Of course, silly me. Only sanctimonious Lefties can possibly be genuine about matters ecological!

42. Marcello Carlin on July 6th, 2007

    Venture capitalism with benign overlay/flipside of keeping The Scum In Their Place = return to pre-1789 High Tory squirearchy as cogently detailed here:

    http://www.spiked-online.com/Articles/0000000CADD8.htm

43. FT's pˆnk s lord sükråt cunctør on July 6th, 2007

    eh? marcello isn’t saying zac g’s eco-concerns aren’t genuine, he’s saying they’re not combined with much care for the welfare of ppl in lesser income brackets than he (ie all of us)

44. Tom on July 6th, 2007

    I am torn between getting on with the next Slade entry and letting this one run and run ;)

45. FT's pˆnk s lord sükråt cunctør on July 6th, 2007

    IN PLACE OF S.TRIFE

46. Waldo on July 6th, 2007

    This is all about reverse snobbery, it seems to me. Zac G is an obvious target because he is close to “Call me Dave”, which is his problem and not mine. In fact guys like Goldsmith are a rarity. Many fellows (and young women) from his background are far thicker on the ground in the so-called Labour movement than they are on the other side. Perhaps this may change now that their great hero Blair has gone. The fact remains that had Zac not been a known Tory, he would not be so gleefully set upon when he espouses views with which Liberals would otherwise agree.

    I can’t understand the “Keep the scum in their place” reference at all. And “the scum” are whom exactly? This is the language of a Sixth Form Common Room.

    The trouble is, the politics in this country are so buggered up these days…Labour are The Old Liberals, The Lib Dems are Old Labour and The Conservatices are NEW Labour…nobody really cares anymore. I certainly don’t.

47. Marcello Carlin on July 6th, 2007

    You missed out the B*P as Old Conservatives there (’74-9 variety).

    Are the Plantagenets standing at the next election? I might give them a go.

    See also current Cameron policy recommendations to put up flight taxes, ostensibly to tackle carbon footprints but with the actual subtext of pricing air travel out of the range of us frightful proles (cf. routine howls of rage at EasyJet and all other National Express coaches with wings SPOILING THE SKIES when really they mean LET THEM HORSE AND CART IT).

48. FT's pˆnk s lord sükråt cunctør on July 6th, 2007

    it’s not about reverse snobbery at all waldo, it’s about the fact that eco-politics comes in a wide range of types, and by NO MEANS all of them give much of a fuck about the interests of the poor (viz the 18th-century landed gentry, great on trees and waters and beast and birds, evil towards the unlanded rural population) — absent zac acknowledging and STRONGLY repudiating his father’s actual real obnoxious and deeply harmful role in UK politics, the ghastly effects of his dad’s species of capitalism, it’s totally fair to join the dots (james goldsmith’s brother ran an eco-mag funded by JG throughout the era of JG’s most pernicious post-bang operations; if their politics weren’t in collision then, then we’re entitled to wonder about the content of the brother’s eco-pol in respect of anyone NOT massively wealthy)

    (i have other major issues with the spiked crowd to be honest; i don’t think frank furedi has the interests of the poor at heart either)

    marcello, hasn’t the plantagenet-in-question sed if asked he would not stand? i saw a TV prog where t.robinson of baldrick fame tracked him down in australia

49. Marcello Carlin on July 6th, 2007

    Oh yes, I think I remember seeing that…

    Ah well, nothing for it then but to cast my next vote in the direction of BEN & ESTHER’S IMPROV ICE CREAM ALL-NIGHT PARTY (n.b. franchise available at competitive rates)…

50. Erithian on July 6th, 2007

    Slade, Tom? Spoiler!! : )

    Go ahead – there’s no reason why both threads can’t coexist. This one has come a long way from glitter-pop, sirens and pumping iron with mike stands - I blame myself for mentioning the Strawbs…

51. Mark G on July 6th, 2007

    Is fifty the message limit? (edit: Ooh, seems not)

    “Action” Sweet: top track

    RWakeman had long gone by the time of the Strawbs hits.

52. Erithian on July 6th, 2007

    Tom – I had a feeling this would happen. Our office, and no doubt many others, has a firewall which prevents you accessing material it deems to be of a sexual nature. Could you please retitle the page for the next entry (with apologies to Noddy) “COME On Feel The Noize”?!!

53. FT's Tom on July 6th, 2007

    NOEZ MY ARTISTIC INTEGRITY AS A BLOGGER IS DOOMED.

    I will come up with a cumpromise solution. (ew)

54. FT's Tom on July 6th, 2007

    Any better?

55. Erithian on July 6th, 2007

    Triffic, thanks. Will you by any chance need to do something similar in 1977? – you did hint that you might do an entry on a particular record that didn’t *officially* get to number 1…

56. FT's Tom on July 6th, 2007

    I sort of think that blocking the word “sex” is a doomed enterprise but maybe less 90s and 00s hits have used it than I think…

57. Waldo on July 9th, 2007

    I actually think that the Old Consevatives have disappeared into UKIP rather than the nefarious BNP, who glean their alarmingly high support mostly from sons of the soil Labour people and certainly not Tories in the shires. The fact that they score highly in the Industrial North West as well as certain impoverished areas of the capital seems to underpin this. UKIP, meanwhile, are attempting to transform from a one-issue party into a catchment area for Conservatives who don’t like Cameron. This is why the next election is another gimmee for Labour, who are now everything to everybody.

58. Marcello Carlin on July 9th, 2007

    Current polls suggest that if Boris Johnson chooses to stand as Tory Mayor of London he would triumph over Livingstone on the basis of being more “fit” and “hott.” I have no idea what that means but it cannot be healthy.

59. FT's pˆnk s lord sükråt cunctør on July 9th, 2007

    it’s all about dirty dronerock bo(r)is!

60. Waldo on July 10th, 2007

    Marcello - Here we see eye to eye. Boris is what our Irish cousins would call “an eejit”. He is a character whom simply could not be created by Harry Enfield or the wonderful Ricky Gervais principally because he would not be credible. The prospect of this nincompoop as Mayor of London beggars belief but probably no more ludicrous than Arnie being Governor of California.

    I’m surprised that Boris would head any poll, even over Ken. But I’m sorry to say that most young people would be able to name Boris from a photo, whilst not recognising Cameron. The man’s an oaf but a very popular oaf.

61. Caledonianne on July 18th, 2007

    The Strawbs are playing Fairport’s Cropredy Festival (near Banbury) next month…

62. Doctor Casino on August 26th, 2007

    Tom - police sirens had been used in “Indiana Wants Me” in 1971, though not as an intro.

    Just checked it, as I love the R. Dean Taylor song, and in fact sirens are the first audible thing on the record. So no go for the Sweet, although pretty much everything else about the song is pure genius, even the business about blocking Buster that bugs Tom so much. The 9 is well-deserved I think.

63. FT's richard thompson on May 24th, 2008

    This period in time was my rock music awakening as from November 72 I was watching TOTP every week because the Osmonds were on there, it was Paul Gambaccini who said 73 was the nadir of the top twenty, a yank who thinks he knows everything, it depends on how old you were at the time as well.