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 • 6,270 views
The thing is music is intrinsically tied to associated memories & experiences and these have far more significance to the individual than any musical analysis, as interesting and objective as that may be. I enjoy reading everybody’s comments here but they probably inevitably say far more about the commenter than they do the music.
actually — and yes yes i have posted far too often on this thread and will stop (for a while) after this — the curious thing abt this emerging topic (how the newer younger posters will interact with and challenge the older posters) is that j.j.barrie’s record is in fact about exactly this dynamic, in a way which is entirely counter to pop world’s usual assumptions, which are:
i. the young know things the old don’t (swagger swagger)
ii. the old should not push the young around so much (mope mope)
i wonder how many other number ones (or charting singles as a whole) stake such a strong claim as “no charge” against i. AND ii? this song says “the young owe the old a bunch of stuff and shd respectfully behave so as to acknowledge this”
I really must edit my comments before I time out – yes I am stating the bleedin’ obvious !
Until recently I didn’t think being around at the time was an issue either- however of late i’ve felt many of the comments have been much more centered on personal recollections contextualising the tracks under discussion. This of course makes perfect sense for those were there and makes for v interesting reading for someone like me who can only view this period as ‘history’(hopefully “i woz a punk before you woz a punk” style comments will be kept to a minimum though). Basically I know the ‘theory’ regarding this period, but not the ‘practical’…
Ironically enough although we’ll be discussing hits i can personally remember shortly, at the time i was actually feverishly devouring the sounds from the era prior to the one we’re discussing currently i.e mid 60s to mid 70s!
Re:#98- how many contributors were actually aware of punk at this point? My dad always says he remembers with clarity the exact time he first heard Presley in ’56- was it the same w/ punk 20 years later or more a gradual growing awareness?
#104 Again it’s down to personal opinion but I would say there was very little awareness of punk until the Bill Grundy incident when it exploded onto the front page of the Sun – the filth & the fury.
There are all sorts of little epiphanies in this story. I’m not old enough to have “been there” for Elvis Presley but I do remember hearing the Beatles for the first time and sensing I was hearing something special, even though I was only eight. (Round about the same time I remember being bowled over by the key change in Ketty Lester’s Love Letters, although I had no idea at the time that it was a key change, just a musical moment that set my spine tingling. No doubt there are back-to-basics purists who would condemn that as decadent, never mind a stray augmented ninth!)
I have challenged the received assumption that punk “had to happen”, but punk did happen and I’m prepared to accept that it was inevitable given the particular state of social, economic and cultural tides at that particular moment. It was, however, just another epiphany and it wasn’t as all-embracing as some would like to think.
in the unending torrent of my blather upthread i thought i’d already said this but i didn’t: i first encountered the pistols in the shropshire star, a transcript of the grundy incident (and i was most agitated by their side-issue sneer at beethoven and spent ages fashioning in my head the arguments i would put to them to get them to see they were wrong)
How many contributors were actually aware of punk at this point?
I was certainly aware of punk at this point, crag. The Pistols and Ramones in particular were picking up a fair number of press mentions, and this was at a stage where Eddie and the Hot Rods were being placed in the same category.
Loads more that I could say on this topic, but to be honest I’m still a bit shaken by being on the receiving end of some of the unpleasantness upthread, so I’ll shut up for now.
My moments of real musical epiphany have tended very much to be not aligned with when everyone else had those epiphanies! I am a regular latecomer.
On the one hand, the more vitriolic than usual tone of the thread suggests that punk was and *still is* problematic, interesting, something that NEEDS to be thought about/intellectualised/trolled over.
On the other, I’m not going to spend my bank holiday weekend moderating flamewars, so please try and keep the disagreements civil and non-personal from this point on, thanks!
I know what u mean, Tom(#109)- it was a very awkward state of affairs for me growing up, listening to my friends rave about Erasure and Deacon Blue when my personal choice of listening at the time was “Trout Mask Replica” and “Electric Ladyland”!
I only started buying contemporary records round about ’89 and round about the same time, aged 16, had my own punk teen epiphany-about 12 years late!
Hey, its fashionable to be late though, isnt it?
This would be the wrong record around which to resurrect Resurrection Watch, but here’s an odd thing. I thought I didn’t know this at all (as with a lot of ’76 – wonder if this applies to others born in the early ’70s), BUT as I read Tom’s description, realised that it must have the same words as those I’d seen in one of those email circular thingies. You know, with animated GIFs around it, and in a daft typeface.
(I liked it in that form.)
Blimey, crag, Trout Mask Replica is a heady brew indeed – where did you hear it first? And more to the point, since everybody hates it when they first hear it and anybody who says otherwise is a liar, where and why did you listen to it a second time?
I’m not familiar with this tune but having had a butchers at the lyrics just now, Bells Be Ringing in terms of email forwards and general parental guilt-tripping. I have no desire to seek this one out, I have to say.
As regards the rest of the discussion: I’m 26 and obv didn’t experience punk first hand, but it already feels like a well-trodden path of discussion for me thanks to the above-mentioned Uncut/Mojo canonisation. The history is interesting and the music is alright for the most part but not particularly *exciting* or emotionally significant for me. Perhaps one *did* really have to be there? I’ve been thinking about this particular theme a fair bit whilst writing the Blog ’92 stuff but my thoughts still aren’t quite coherent yet…
Re:#113- I bought “Trout Mask Replica” on spec when i was either 13 or 14 after reading good things about it in the music mags i was already reading constantly. I’d already heard Beefhearts voice on “Willie the Pimp” from Zappa’s ‘Hot Rats’ a year or two previously-not that that really prepared me…
Don’t believe me all you like, Rosie but i genuinely didn’t hate it at all on first listen- I can’t say i LOVED it either and certainly can’t claim to having UNDERSTOOD it(whatever that might mean) on that first listen but I was intrigued enough by it and certainly enjoyed it sufficently to have no trepidation about listening to it a second time. After a further 4 or 5 spins it became my favorite album which it remained for many years(before i stopped worrying about things like having a “favorite album”) and I still greatly enjoy hearing tracks from it whenever they show up on my MP3 player now- “Veteran Day Poppy” turned up earlier today by coincidence and still sounded great.
I often wish my ears were as open and receptive to new sounds now as they were in my teenage years…
When I’m asked to appear on Desert Island Discs I’m having Ella Guru as one of my eight!
In my role as tech support for A Major ISP, I have to confirm customers usernames and passwords, usually with clues. One such customer had a password of ‘ellaguru’ and I said to him as a clue “Think Beefheart” and he was surprised that I’d heard of it. I explained that most techies are musos too.
The first time I saw and heard The Pistols was the first time they appeared on the telly – Tony Wilson’s “So It Goes” program which came on late Saturday nights in London — and my sister and I were shocked by the Godawful racket they were making. I remember that far more vividly than the Bill Grundy episode. The next day the Sunday papers were full of this new youth scandal called “Punk” — “More Like PUKE Rock!” is one headline I remember. When punk hit the media it hit very fast.
Yes, my first exposure was also seeing the Pistols on So It Goes, in late August 1976. Earlier in the same show, there was also a brief item on the Ramones, accompanied by a snatch of “Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue”.
To be honest, I was more baffled than converted. The “conversion” had more to do with Eddie and the Hot Rods than it did the Pistols – their Live At The Marquee EP totally rocked my world. Then along came The Damned’s “New Rose”, the first British punk single, and in my case I can honestly say it was life-changing. By the end of 1976, I had renounced my prog past. I stopped buying albums and started buying singles (with a new numbering system: Live At The Marquee was Single #1, as far as I was concerned).
Simultaneously with all of that, I got massively into punk fanzine culture (particularly Sniffin’ Glue, which became my new bible). My local Cambridge record shop, which went by the unpromising name of “Remember Those Oldies”, had a separate room at the back for fanzines, and it stocked an impressive range; I’d venture to say that it was the largest outside London. The guy who ran the shop (Lee Wood) went on to start his own punk label, Raw Records, in the spring of 1977.
There are a couple of points that I’d like to reinforce, as they sometimes seem to get lost in the accepted versions of rock history.
Firstly: pre-Bill Grundy, only a tiny, tiny minority of people had any sort of interest in this stuff. Post-Bill Grundy, the overwhelming reaction to punk continued to be a strongly hostile one. Cloistered away at boarding school, I came in for a lot of stick for listening to punk (while being fully aware of the inherent absurdity of being a public school punk rocker). My classmates hated it – I mean, really HATED it – and I lost most of what little popularity I had.
(Of course, they all loved it two years later, when the threat had been neutralised.)
Secondly: there was no orthodoxy, and no single definition of What Punk Was All About (as the more tolerant amongst you might have gathered from that conversation with Lord Punkrat upthread, and I’m sorry if that got too detailed too quickly). There was an intellectual wing (you should have seen some of the fanzines!), and an equal and opposite anti-intellectual wing. An idealistic wing and a nihilist wing. A feminist wing and a misogynist wing. A fashion wing and an anti-fashion wing. An art school wing and a council estate wing. A “long live rock and roll” wing and a “we oppose all rock and roll” wing. A “let’s take over the charts” wing, and a “let’s operate on the margins” wing. It was about plurality, not orthodoxy – although the latter didn’t take long to establish itself, either.
Or at least, that was my impression of it all: 14 years old, too young to join in, reading and listening from the sidelines, in no danger of having my surging idealism tainted by messy reality. Which was actually a pretty bloody great way of experiencing it all, if you ask me…
Not as early as 1976, but probably by 1977 – and certainly by 1978, I was aware of punk rockers as folk devils, like football hooligans and skinheads; they had green hair, they spat everywhere, they couldn’t play their instruments and made a terrifying noise, and they wanted to kill people – especially the Queen.
I was only five!
Aged five in 1967, I had a similar view of the Rolling Stones, with Mick Jagger little short of the Devil incarnate…
The atmosphere in 76-77 could be very hostile. My sister’s mate Sue went headfirst into punk and had spiky orange hair, bondage trousers, the whole works. Walking down the street with her people would just stop and stare with this look of utter distaste as if they’d smelt something bad, at one point someone even spat at her. The King’s Road was a particularly tense and intimidating place, I was literally too scared to step foot inside Boy.
By the time I was five, the green-haired punk was still around as a comedy figure, although it’s probably safer not get too detailed about that time yet.
As the above implies, I don’t have any nostalgic horse in this race, but suspicious as I am of consensus I tend to the view that punk – or *something* – had to happen at this juncture.
I missed punk completely on the reasonable grounds that I was only five at this point and I we had just moved to Poland! But re: Mike at 119 – two things ring true here – the first being the huge range of people who were punks and for whom it represented a brief swerve away from their standard listening habits (Robert Elms, say). The second is it ties in with the conventional political theory that most major movements triumph as impossibly wide coalitions that starts crumbling the moment power is achieved because the disparate elements only ever agreed on the fact they were against the status quo (cf the French Revolution, the Iranian Revolution, New Labour; top Communist poster boy Che Guevara failed to get this completely and he and thousands of other people paid with their lives in futile uprisings that never had any chance of succeeding because there was no broad base of popular support.)
I’m also distrustful of the retrospective historical determinism in the idea “that’s why punk had to happen”. “That’s why punk could happen…” seems closer to it.