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 in FT /Popular • featured content/Pop • 6,272 views
in ref “why punk had to happen” — as a punk absolutist at the time (17 in 77) i am VERY suspicious of the endless retro-fitting of this argument, which has been adapted and re-adapted and re-re-adapted to justify grown-up (non-chart) tastes in the present (1985, 1990, 1995, 2000, 2005… ), and which actually locks pretty closely into Guilty Pleasures as an ideologically conformist pressure today
(this is a “where were you on the barricades when it mattered?” argument and shd be taken with a punch of salt probbly)
i don’t even slightly consider that punk — as truly an properly understood then and now (ie by ME) (if no one else heh) — is particularly anti-novelty or anti-sentimentality at all (or indeed anti-ABBA): it was anti claims to intelligence that weren’t that intelligent (or that confused being smart with being dull), and it was anti toleration of pro forma boredom (which would be a frustration with the charts as a whole — as a tapestry of all its contents — rather than any given feeble song)
i think at school we quite enjoyed this song as it was very easy to parody and use as a vehicle for jokes and so on
also i was just listening back to the red brain ep of slugs of time and haha bad brains are totally and awesomely in command of their instruments and musicianship! (bit of a special case possibly as i think they were jazzfunkers b4 they became punkers)
(weirdly enough slug-guest dave q and i were discussing derek jewell before the show began: a piece DJ’d written comparing three successive pink floyd shows on a pseudo-musicological level)
My idea of punk in actual 1976 as I knew and lived it: Mike Osborne and Stan Tracey Saturday afternoon duo set at Bracknell Jazz Festival where they sent all the tradheads scattering with half an hour of WAKE UP free noise clarion calls which WITHOUT PUSHING A BUTTON IN THEIR HEADS very naturally ended up with their playing “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat” as quietly and tenderly as anyone could ever have played it.
ISTR James Hamilton covered the Glenn Miller revival in some depth in Record Mirror – did he speak about it afterwards Mike?
No, we never talked about it (although JH also played a lot of veh veh posh parties for the County Set in the late 1960s/early 1970s, and was quite used to dropping a bit of big band tuneage).
It was the Melody Maker who went really overboard with excitement over the Glenn Miller thing, though: a certain residual faction had been waiting for The Big Band Revival ever since Elvis, and this was their shining moment of opportunity. I seem to recall a centre spread’s worth of recommended listening from the jazzer rear-guard…
Tom, I only raised the subject of punk on this thread because of the coincidence of “No Charge” being number one at the time of the seminal Pistols gig, but as an illustration of the contrast between what was going on “out there” and what was going on at the top of the charts, this is as good a place as any to start! But maybe we should restrict ourselves to the first wave of the new wave just yet. (I understand you’re not going to wait until autumn ’78 to feature punk on these pages, if Spoiler Bunny will let me ask?)
Fair play Erithian, yes there may well be a thread in which the question “Was punk any good?” can be met more head-on! Of course the question “was “No Charge” anything to do with punk?” can be and is being discussed here.
i suspect the recent long and digressive comments threads, plus our generally agreed-on feeling that something WAS wrong with pop as a whole (or a centre, a public space), do actually recapitulate the sense of the time: that pop was clogged, constipated, exhausted — for example even if you loved abba (as i did, before during and after being Mr Full-On Teen Punk), their dominance shades pretty easily into a sense that the charts no longer belonged to “us” (where “us” will turn out to be a highly contestable idea, torn between generations, and between niches, but this torn-ness wasn’t yet clear)
[apologies: re-edited to be in actual grammatical english]
If what’s coming up in the autumn of 1978 is considered ‘punk’ by some people then those people might be pleasantly surprised by my response to it. But I don’t see anything there within a million miles of the Sex Pistols and nothing that I personally would call ‘punk’ (since it isn’t wildly different to a lot of sixties stuff).
Some have challenged my stance on punk on the grounds that I was a fairly early admirer of the Velvet Underground and have always had a lot of time for Talking Heads (but weren’t the Heads part of what was being rebelled against?)
I don’t think this period was a particularly lean time for music, just a lean time for the singles market.
I had no idea a Glenn Miller revival was going on at the time, but this was the year someone loaned some new Miller albums to my dad, who then taped them (letting me choose the order of the songs, as I liked them too)…my father knew the music well but was too poor to buy the records at the time…so I heard “Elmer’s Tune” and “In The Mood” and so on…he also made some Duke Ellington tapes as well, so I heard “East St. Louis Toodle-Ooo” and “Mood Indigo” for the first time as well…
I don’t know today’s song and I don’t think I’m missing out on much…the current US #1 was “Love Hangover” and just previous to that was “Silly Love Songs”…
As for musicological analyses, I got my first introduction to the serious study of popular music tby being walked througha musicological analysis of White Riot by The Clash. It was fun, but I don’t really have the time or the ear for musicology. I know, however, what I like!
velvet underground = indie not punk!
(sorry i will NOT turn this into a war for MY defn on punk) (i will try) (haha i will fail)
i agree abt music as a whole being richer than people think — what yr calling “singles market” is probbly not very different from what i’m calling “pop as a public centre”; a zone of cultural discussion and debate which — for some reason — rock as an intelligent* offshoot of chartpop had after glam dwindled totally ceded to non-rock musics (by no means all unintelligent, but rock shd have been more committed to the public examination of rock-form intelligence in all contexts inc.esp.the charts)
*for possibly on odd reading of intelligent
derek jewell’s musicology is ultra-bogus
“I, too, am sceptical about “why punk had to happen”, and I don’t really see how making random loud noises with musical instruments one doesn’t know how to play (presumably music lessons are so terribly bourgeois) while screeching obscenities at toothache-inducing intensity stops people who like novelty and sentimental records from buying them.”
Good lord, are you a time-travelling Sun journalist from the seventies?
“(but weren’t the Heads part of what was being rebelled against?)”
No.
i don’t agree with rosie all the time but i’m way more interested in hearing her reasons for disagreeing with what’s become by-the-yard music-crit orthodoxy than pseudo-amazed outrage that everyone doesn’t think the same approved thing
I would have thought & IIRC punk was aimed at the extravagance & up your own arse musicality of prog bands like yer Yes/ELP/Genesis types. Not at the pop charts. Amongst other things it was back to basics call to arms which sneered at prog for being elitist, over complex & not street enough.
Well, in the period immediately prior to punk, the status of the humble 45rpm single had certainly never been lower, at least in the eyes of your average rock listener. Asked to nominate his best single of 1976 in the end-of-year round-up conducted by short-lived inkie Album Tracking (QED!), Mike Flood Page snootily retorted “a contradiction in terms”, while (as I recall) the NME nearly didn’t bother doing a best singles list. So there was this massive schism between “serious” and “disposable”, based on an increasingly absurd premise – and this was certainly one of the reasons why Punk Had To Happen.
As a late 76/most of 77 punk absolutist myself, I saw it as a rejection of pretty much everything except punk (and reggae), based on the stance that the present was all that mattered, and that punk (and reggae) was the only music that addressed and examined the present in any meaningful (or at least “relevant”) way. All of which felt great to me as a 14/15-year old, gleefully ripping up the past in best crypto-Maoist fashion…
i’m arguing it was aimed at a lack or a gap in the charts (which prog sensibility contributed to)*: part of this back-to-basics was an insistent celebration of the “three-minute single” as the primary unit of/for value — ie not just as a loss leader for the coming LP
oops that pesky free-floating asterisk again: prog sensibility (and definitions of musicality good AND bad) leading to songs (or non-song work) that are way over three minutes and impossible to put onto singles
compression as a virtue: not in fact an unmusical idea
Unstrangely enough, if you look at this particular chart, the most clearly “punk”-sounding single in there is a then 19-year-old rockabilly novelty record – “Jungle Rock” by Hank Mizell – leased and put out I believe by Ted Carroll, from whom McLaren used to buy all his old 45s from his stall right at the back of Shep Bush market before he moved to the Rock On shop in Camden and thus alas helped invent Nick Hornby but never mind.
also: Ramones as Eno-esque art rock exercise in short/sharp pop minimalism are arguably UBER-PROG
or would have been if they’d been insufficiently smart to know it
Re. 43: I disagree that punk was a reaction to the state of the singles charts – perhaps the only area of agreement between old wave and new wave was that the charts were an irrelevant distraction – but I strongly agree that it initiated a change in status for the three minute single. It must have been around about this time – pretty sure it was June 1976, actually – that Stiff Records issued its first release, Nick Lowe’s “So It Goes”: a re-statement of faith in a) the three-minute 7-inch and b) the three-chord song, and as such an absolutely key John The Baptist moment. (The run-out refrain “But where it’s going, no-one knows..” thrilled me to pieces…)
“the only area of agreement between old wave and new wave was that the charts were an irrelevant distraction” <— SO NOT TRUE
haha defn of punk = no two real punks agree on its defn and WILL BITTERLY FIGHT IT OUT UNTIL THEY ARE USHERED INTO THEIR GRAVES
Most of the June ’76 hits can best be described as stiflingly serene. Lots of album tracks masquerading as singles, lots of reissues and new covers of old songs but few singles as things in themselves (funnily enough, one of the few which qualifies alongside “Jungle Rock” and “Love Hangover” is “Devil Woman” by dear old suddenly revitalised Cliff).
Wasn’t Chris “Renta Santa” Hill the main man behind the Miller revival (the Lacey Lady club in Canvey Island – I think? – where the definitive schism between future punks and future soulboys would go on to occur)? Siouxsie for one has definitely talked about this in the past – the thrill of dressing up (a thrill which they could not obtain from ’76 Roxy or Bowie) mutating into something greater, etc.