BILLY CONNOLLY – “D.I.V.O.R.C.E.”
The Tammy Wynette original has one of those gimmicks so deathless that every songwriter in Nashville must have wished they’d hit on it first. Connolly’s parody skewers it without sneering at it, and a lot of the spelling-out fun is just carried over from the source. It doesn’t have a great deal of replay value but it makes me smile, which is as much as you can reasonably ask of it.
In a way its gentleness surprises me - Connolly had a playground reputation for unbridled filth, the kind of comedian wicked older brothers would own albums by: I didn’t have an older brother so I never got to confirm or deny it. Surely “D.I.V.O.R.C.E.” wasn’t this clean live? Of course he wouldn’t have been allowed any more than the bleeps he gets, but anyhow this works better clean – an affectionate pastiche rather than a dunk in the gutter.
5
YAY Edwin!
I am confused re The Clash. Over here they are understood to be punk…
heheh…everywhere they are understood to be punk except by mark s…
(and ben w, and occasionally marcello c…) ;-)
Sigh. Clearly, I have much to learn. I don’t even know the original song here, let alone the parody!
it won’t agitate the spoiler bunny much to outline the korrekt line:
punk = b-side of “gary gilmore’s eyes” by the adverts
not punk = everything else
the category narrows every time you lay down the law :(
sorry I meant :D
if by “narrows” you mean becomes more precise and exact then wahey!
Hang on, I thought “korrekt” = anti-mark s!
While listening to this chart on Saturday’s POTP I came up with a theory.
I don’t have any evidential basis for this theory but there’s nothing wrong with light conjecture.
It’s a strange chart. Everywhere and nowhere, out of time. The aural equivalent of sitting in an airport where, if you didn’t know any better, it could be day or night and you could be anywhere. Determined anonymity.
And you can tell that things are slowing down to stasis and the arteries will clog up and freeze unless someone or something comes along soon to clear them.
“Imagine” at number six four years after it was recorded – why?*
“Space Oddity” at number two six years after it was recorded – why?**
“Bohemian Rhapsody” – what sense, if any, does this make in its original context?
Late 1975 Lanarkshire, first term at new school, unsure about where or whether I fit in. Not really getting on with anybody; no change there then.
The Christmas joys are still abundant but there’s the subtle foreboding that this might be the last of this kind – and this turned out to be correct.
*To promote the Shaved Fish compilation.
**RCA getting antsy about UK underperformance of Young Americans and maximising back catalogue profit (see also chart-topping licensed TV-advertised albums from Perry Como and Jim Reeves at this time).
“Bo Rap” remains the least explicable number one.
I don’t believe it means nothing but every time I hear it, the song seems to mean something else.
Six-minute advert for the group?
A long goodbye to a closing era?
Most certainly an element of the latter.
Glam, prog, Zep stadium metal…all slowed down to a Dark Side tempo and arrangement at the end.
SPEAKING OF WHICH:
“Space Oddity.”
End of sixties comedown, but some people he knew didn’t come down.
I have absolutely no quantitative evidence for this, but…
…that sliding, pinging guitar, especially at the end…
…and he did do “See Emily Play” on Pin-Ups…
…and this is the time of “Shine On You Crazy Diamond”…
Elephant in the Top 20 sitting room innit?
Lennon’s New Pop Perry Como armchair thing, finally a hit just at the moment he withdraws from public view.
Forward pointers?
”Love Is The Drug” and “Fly Robin Fly.”
Oh, there are already plans afoot.
And, right at the top, times are hard and so people want a laugh (see also contemporaneous number one album by Max Boyce, essentially Billy Connolly but Welsh with added rugby gags; there’s a story to be told about how British folk sidestepped into stand-up/sit-down comedy and I’ll be telling it when TPL gets there).
Crackerjack at five to five on a Friday and Peter Glaze is interpreting “Golden Years.”
Something had to happen.
That’s a great link from The Punkmeister.
I thought it was interesting how Blackburn simply announced this as being number one without really elaborating on it except to say that it was “Billy Connolly’s only number one”, which I thought was a rather odd thing to say. It is indeed a strange chart but looking down the list, it did remind us again of what a great record “Why Did You Do it” by Stretch was.
“We played it in the clubs and we loved it…” Oh no. Sorry. That was the other guy.
My favourite Peter Glaze interpretation? “Jealous Mind”, I think. D,OH!!
Stretch – possibly the best recorded example of counting to two.
Counting to six, on the other hand – a single that had got nowhere in 1975, but in the new era Marcello foretells above, it would fit right in.
And ‘New York Groove’ and ‘Sky High’! And few records are more, um, striking to my ears than ‘All Around My Hat’, featuring the least subtle arrangement in the entire history of pop music.
# 86 – “‘All Around My Hat’, featuring the least subtle arrangement in the entire history of pop music.”
Ok, Billy, I’ll raise you “Day Trip To Bangor”!
re # 86/87 Beauty’s where you find it
Didn’t Stretch go out on tour as Fleetwood Mac in ’75 when the real Mac were in disarray, their manager Clifford Davis having claimed ownership of the name? The fake Mac then changed their name to Stretch and had a bigger hit (Why Did You Do It) than any official Mac single (Albatross re-issue aside) in five years. This seems to be such a strange story I may have got it quite wrong.
As for All Around My Hat, the chapter in Rob Young’s Electric Eden on how Steeleye Span’s Rocket Cottage single-handedly killed the folk rock movement in Britain is maybe the best piece of music writing (funniest, deffo) I’ve read all year.
I’d also like to nominate this no.1 (the My Ding A Ling of folk? Try listening to it after the Humblebums’ gorgeous Her Father Didn’t Like Me Anyway), Max Boyce’s omnipresence and Mike Harding’s Rochdale Cowboy as nails in the cottage roof.
I think the fake Mac was a couple of years earlier. Who could forget a frontman named “Elmer Gantry” (everyone at the time, me included, thought it was a pseudonymous Alexis Korner on the record until the group turned up on TOTP)?
“All Around My Hat” is splendid; an Olde Englishe folk song which eventually became an Easter Rising lament, produced proto-punk style by the unknowing Mike Batt. See also “New York Girls”* from the parent album (Commoners’ Crown) featuring Peter Sellers on ukulele and assorted Goon voices. Electric Eden – isn’t that the book which says that the history of English folk music culminates in Coil? Maybe in another lifetime.
*which bpm-wise fits very nicely with “New York Groove” – subsequently covered by Ace Frehley of Kiss!
“Sky High”; hello, Lexicon Of Love (arrangement-wise)? Taken apparently from the George Lazenby movie The Man From Hong Kong. Blackburn: “No, I didn’t see it either.”
I think I like “Why did you do it” better than any FMac single, “Oh Well” excepted, possibly.
Interesting Wiki entry on Stretch and this song in particular.
and here’s a one for Danny Kirwain, tremendously unsung hero of early Fleetwood Mac.
90 …and hello Take It Away, McCartney’s 1982 hit, especially the wonderful brass arrangement on the fade
This discussion on 70s Mac gives me the opportunity to relate a moment from the great Peel-voiced Rock Family Trees doc from a few years back.
During Mac’s wilderness years Peter Green turned up at their rural retreat looking somewhat the worse for wear.
Then guitarist Bob Welch recalled in his wry, slow drawl:
“I knew he was in a bad way. He came to the door with a piece of cheese in his hair. And it was still there when he left
Now, I don’t know what cheese it was, whether it was caerphilly, cheddar or whatever but I do know that if I had a piece of cheese in my hair on Monday, I can guarantee that by Tuesday it would be gone.”
Bob Welch was one of the Great Train Robbers. Peter Green wasn’t. I bet Peely didn’t mention that in his tree!
Which reminds me of this forgotten yacht rock beauty.
I love the Fleetwood Mac story – you get beyond the Peter Green/Jeremy Spencer disappearances and there are still guitarists who refuse to go on stage (Danny Kirwan) or are sacked for developing ‘warm feelings’ towards Mick Fleetwood’s wife (Bob Weston). Lindsey Buckingham must have seemed stable and reliable by comparison.
Clifford Davis, the manager who put Stretch together as Fakewood Mac, released a single of Man Of The World b/w Before The Beginning in 1969. Peter Green gets the writing credits, but every other conceivable credit includes the words Clifford and Davis. So it’s not so surprising that he got up to such underhand antics five years later.
Not to be confused with Clifford Davis, the pannelist on “New Faces”.
Yep, I thought it was the same bloke until recently.
Is this the slowest thread to reach a century of posts, having taken 2½ years? With a nod to the Ashes starting tonight, this is the Chris Tavare of Popular!
Oh no, Chris Tavare! Dear God, I remember him well. During the 1981 Test series at Old Trafford (I think it was), Tavare was scoring so slowly that whenever he did eventually edge a single down to the third man boundary, white smoke was released from the chimney at Lords. He was the most boring man ever to pick up a bat. Mind you, looking at the parlous state of the current Test, as I write, we could do with the muppet at the crease just now.
Muppet At The Crease. Sounds like a Kevin Ayers album.
Oho! And then there was “Muppet At The Gates Of Dawn”…
Muppetty Woman
Muppet Sounds
Pastor of Muppets
All of them Days Of Muppets Passed, I think you’ll find, Mark!
The Immuppetulate Collection has some hits worth celebrating
In the spirit of Monsterpiece Theater:Twin Beaks, and Nine Inch Snails, I suspect that Henson productions might be able to do something with (the excellent) Pastor of Muppets.
At 255-1 in England’s second innings, maybe we can drop the muppet gags for now. My dad and I were at the first day of Old Trafford ’81, Botham out first ball and Tavare at his slowest. Two days later Both hit a classic hundred and I was watching it on the telly.
Yes, my muppet prayers have been answered. Strauss and Cook both make tons and Cook’s still there with Trott as we reach 309-1 at stumps, 88 in front. Phew!! Mind you,there’s always our patent middle-order collapse (Bell, Pieterson, Collingwood…) to overcome tomorrow as soon as the next wicket goes, so England are not safe yet.
Jimmy The Swede, News At Ten, Brisbane. Well…Eastbourne.
And so ends the best Ashes Test for many a long year. Astonishing stuff. And to think that Cook’s place on the tour was once in doubt.
Yes, bit of a statfest on those last two days wasn’t it?
Coming back at least partway on-topic, the last I heard of Billy Connolly’s old mucker Gerry Rafferty was that he’d been dangerously ill but was now off organ support machines. Hope he’s recovering.
Effectively, this is a ‘bump’. I don’t know if that’s against house rules, but as I stumbled across this thread (and I cannot remember why), I read concern (111) and kindness (89) expressed towards Gerry Rafferty. Maybe it’s fatuous, shallow and ill-timed of me to say this, but I was moved that people do not always wait until someone has died before paying tributes, and it seemed nice that goodwill was heading in Rafferty’s direction as recently as last November. Erithian and wichita lineman, your comments in retrospect seem very special.
And as much as I thought that all of these feelings didn’t add up to much, I thought I might as well post a posthumous tribute to Gerry Rafferty, as Popular won’t have a thread which can do so in its own right.