JJ BARRIE - “No Charge”
I was aware of this song long before I heard it - as a young boy it was quoted at me by my Dad should I ever object to tidying my room. Since my room was rarely tidy, I became very familiar with the central notion of “No Charge”. Like my Dad, I can find immense amusement and pleasure in this style of song - talking country with a sentimental edge - but this is far from a great example.
You might think, at first, that the style stands or falls on the strength of its concepts: not so. “No Charge” has a fine concept - mawkishness and moralising are assets here! - but where JJ Barrie falls down is on development and details. Once our young entrepreneur has presented his list, and been slapped down by Mom, the track has nowhere to go, and explores that nowhere thoroughly for two minutes. Contrast it with something like “Teddy Bear” by Red Sovine, where tears are ruthlessly jerked right up to the final words. Barrie, on the other hand, adds no new details and just repeats himself. This is partly because “No Charge” is a cover version, and you can hear what I assume is the original melody being hollered in the background: it sounds rather as if it’s trying to escape.
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Tom • 2,668 views •
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Jonathan King? I don’t even believe when he slags something! It’s purely if it serves JK!
Say no, kids! For many reasons!
But who would do it then? Gary “GO WEST TURN THIS UP NOW” Davies? Bruno “playing Oh Happy Day on the morning after the 1992 election” Brookes? Peter “Jack Your Body is NOT music and I RESIGN” Powell?
I am of course available at competitive rates…
Mike Read?
(I know, I know)
Mike Read used to do an excellent oldies prog on Radio 210, it went way beyond the usual strictures (let alone the ones in place now). Conrad Veight, the occasional Beatles bootleg single (How do you do it), Sim&Garf’s Tom and Jerry stuff, oh etc.
Not one to baulk at Donald Peers OR “Death Disco” I tell ye.
Mike Read who had his Eric Clapton moment last year when railing against immigration apropos his failed Mayor of London campaign. No thanks.
Also we’re talking eighties/nineties here and Clifftastic Read strikes me as someone who wouldn’t quite have been in sympathy with post-Madchester developments.
Let alone major developments in the singles charts of late 1983/early 1984.
Actually, how about Ken Livingstone? He’s not got anything on just now!
ooer
# 223 - I’m afraid that mentioning JK, Dale and ” a better fist” in the same sentence is courting disaster…
Yeah, I know, ooer!
Rob Brydon used to be a DJ, and chose interesting things like ‘Flowers of Romance’ when he curated Top of The Pops 2. That might work.
Unfortunately the best man for the job - David “Still A Kid?” Jensen - is already doing it (and very well) on the Capital Gold show.
Sarah Kennedy would be entertaining. Trouble is, she’s completely fucking crackers and will surely die alone at home and have her undiscovered corpse eaten by her cats. The Twilight Zone’s got nothing on Sarah. Bonkers.
Sarah K is DEFINITELY someone who would have spent all of the eighties and nineties grooving to the Mike Sammes Singers and Bert Kaempfert.
I suppose the return of Jimmy Savile’s Old Record Club is out of question (”owowowowoo, Manic Street Preachers, The”)…
pete waterman would be my candidate for presenting saturday potp. i love hearing him getting teary-eyed in his enthusiasms (as he was recently doing about the feeling on ready steady cook to a very uninterested dr fox) , he’d be quite happy to play SL2 or whoever (i imagine his reaction at the time would have been ‘why didn’t i think of that/what can i nick from it for my next record’ rather than outrage) and he could be relied upon to be rude about dreary indie (i remember him being very offended at the existence of embrace). plus he was pretty much always there, from northern soul nights to the early days of the specials to glossy 80’s pop to 90’s teen pop to 00’sreality pop. and he might go off on one about steam engines at any time.
Yes but he’d spend most of the time playing his own records and would quickly become insufferable I think.
Tommy Vance is sadly missed.
Please to God don’t give the gig to Maconie (”Doctor and the Medics? What was that all about? Eh? Eh?”) or Lamarr (”not northern soul not rockabilly not ska therefore is shit”).
or jupitus!
Perhaps a cheerful, non-racist/paedophile DJ that was happily consuming 100% of chart fodder at the time? *cough* *sticks up hand* Or is there some sort of minium age limit on being a Radio 2 presenter?
Not strictly speaking but it helps if you’re a celebrity since the Controller of Radio 2 likes her celebrity presenters. And George Lamb but let’s not go there.
I met Tommy Vance at a Sad Among Strangers gig once (c.1985) and he was very aproachable and pleasant. A top bloke.
Agree totally about Waterman. He would lose the audience very quickly indeed.
Mark “Class Warrior” Lamarr is nothing but a Peely wannabe, who tries his best to bamboozle his audience just for the fun of it. I can take him in spurts but I entirely agree that he would be totally unsuitable for a mainstream show and almost certainly would not want to do it anyway for the reasons MC has outlined.
I nominate Fiona Talkington, for reasons outlined above.
She’d never cope with having to play the sixth of eight top 40 hits by the Nolans.
Ah, the great Late Junction Schism: are you a Fiona person or a Verity person? Have to say that we’re more of a Verity household. She has a touch more… edge.
Fiona is more likely to pull Captain van Vliet out of the bag. But I’d be happy with Verity. There’s a bloke wot does it sometimes and then I’m inclined to turn off.
Hard to believe that such a godawful tune has spawned 249 comments, innit?
My take on the punk thing. While pop (and dance/disco) was largely unaffected, the rock world most certainly was completely changed. Look at the Reading lineup for ‘76 to ‘80 to see the effect. We’ve now got to the point where there is no outstanding musical genre that dominates the scene completely, and people are generally tolerant of everybody elses (extremely widespread, these days) taste.
I’d say we’re living in Pistols World right now.
It’s punk wot won it for JJ.
I think in tribute, we should compose a punk version of NC, which finishes with the child, who having just been fobbed off by Mom, goes in to one with: “IT’S NOT FAAAIIRRRR!!! BUT I DON’T CAAAARRRRREEE!!!” etc.
“For taking off my safety pin this week, $3.95…”
I thought Verity Sharp was alright until I saw her patronising Scott Walker on The Culture Show on BBC2 and now she needs to be hanged for the greater good.
How DARE she! I’ll have to take your word, MC, as I didn’t see the broadcast, but anyone who fails to worship at the temple of Scott (never mind patronise him) deserves to be scraped to death with a blunt razor blade.
Sorry, but it’s always been Frank Sinatra’s world we’re living in.
Not Joe Brown’s then?
In any case, Sinatra was only renting the world from *insert safely deceased mobster of your choice*
“For not gobbing on the postman, a dollar twenty…”
I see James Whale’s now available for work, if anyone at Radio 2 is interested.
Don’t know if anybody else is currently listening to the proggy on Radio 4 about John Cooper-Clarke and his links to the Manchester punk scene, but I’m sure it will be on Listen Again, or whatever the BBC are calling it this week. Fits nicely with this thread, I think.
James Whale has been signed up for a shopping channel on TV apparantly.
Yes, wouldn’t it be fun if we had to deal with John Cooper Clarke on Popular? “Beasley Street” at number one, I’d have liked that. Or “I Married A Monster From Outer Space” -
“We could even have taken a different race / But, f— me, a monster from outer space!”
Judge Dale: “it was a bit unusual but we all loved it.”
Didn’t Dale say that about Napolean XIV?
It’s his code for records he hates.
Possibly a bit late but I wasn’t around when you were doing 1976 or not posting anyway.To me punk etc was just an intra-tribal fight - a lot of punks were just the younger siblings of the same rock press reading, gig going types of people who they slagged off. This seems to be confirmed to me the way that it was so quickle claimed by the rock canon. And the way 12 or so years a large proportion of them reacted to Acid House in the way their elders had to punk.
This is completely different from what happened in 1988 and afterwards with Acid House/Rave and which now over 20 years after it kicked off remains so alien to the keepers of the rock flame that you know you’ll never be hearing it on any Radio 2 playlist any time soon.
Surely that was the major rupture in pop music to me and a lot of those involved in 1988-92 and afterwards all punk did was to keep the tired old conventional rock warhorse alive…
re 50, 53 and 54 the Glenn Miller revival WAS kicked off in Canvey Island (at the Goldmine) the south-east’s most legendary pre-1988 dance club (I finally got there myself in about 1983). The Lacy Lady in Ilford was one of Chris Hill’s other big nights.
Always happy for Popular’s Longest Ever Comments Thread to be revived, Andy!
Didn’t Radio 2 do a history of dance music special just recently? I think that era’s music is starting to creep onto their playlists - the ‘acknowledged classics’ like Pacific State and Voodoo Ray at any rate.
Yes(and this is not meant to disparage those 2 tracks because obviously they were genuine parts of the scene and in ‘Voodoo Ray’s case a very early part)but then they’ll try to link it into ‘Madchester’ or something and try to pretend what happened from 1988 onwards had something to do with the Stone Roses and the Inspiral Carpets etc (because you know “they were proper musicians and played guitars”) when in reality you’d have had as much chance of hearing them at a genuine dance event as Val Doonican. I must admit I didn’t hear the Radio 2 series but Im going on when I’ve read/heard similar type things from the “rock” perspective and it’s like they’re desparately trying to fabricate a notion of the scene that fits their own ideas of how things were/are/should have been.
The Mojo/”real music”/pathetic “get-the-”decent”-’Hallelujah’-Campaign-to-Number-One” mindset of the punk-loving generation who run Radio 2 would no more start slipping Landlord ‘I Like It’, Cry Sisco ‘Afrodiziact’, House Crew ‘We Are Hardcore’, Sy-Kick ‘Nasty’ or a million other similar tracks into their playlist than start a Simon Cowell for prime minister party.
That said, the most enjoyable moments on Radio 2 this year for me have been when Dale Winton has been compelled to play SL2/ Altern8/ Orbital on Pick Of The Pops on a Sunday afternoon.
Re 269: the odd thing is that while on an intellectual level I agree with you entirely and Radio 2 clearly does have a public service obligation to the age group it is meant to serve, my ears tell me that house music (and it’s offspring) blighted my twenties, and with – admittedly a fair number of exceptions, including the aforementioned Voodoo Ray – I’d be a happy man if I never heard a banging four-four beat again.
Two hundred and seventy-one?!
Can somebody sum it up for me? Lordy.