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 • 6,304 views
Rob #147:
While I’m not going to claim the idea as my own or necessarily defend it, I’ve heard it said more than once that Yoko is the godmother of punk.
But speaking of “No Charge,” my mother once got the idea to fine me (probably no more than a penny or two) for particular infractions, but this practice didn’t last long since in a day or two I complained, “But you don’t pay me when I’m good.” This stopped her in her tracks. “You’re right,” she said. “Fines are a bad idea.”
Btw, if there’s anything to the idea that “punk” – i.e., the British punk rock movement in ’76 – “had” to happen, it wouldn’t be “No Charge” but the Grundy thing. Which is to say it was extremely puzzling for me to read about, since, though I could imagine a similar incident in the U.S. causing some outrage, I couldn’t imagine it causing nearly as much, or there being any comparable sense of achievement in having caused the outrage. Of course, maybe I’m wrong here. And also my reading Duncan Watts and ilk on information cascades I’m now willing to consider that the Grundy uproar was a fluke – i.e., maybe it was just a slow news day, and a day earlier or a day later and the incident would have been lost.
A quick look at Canadian Charts shows that we were still in the dying embrace of disco. But there was still great music being made but not really for the singles market. Seems that the #1′s were being pulled from successful long-players.
If I was half serious about music and I was force-fed JJ Barrie and The Wurzels ( and most of the other # 1 crap about this time ) , I think I would have started a revolution, too.
grundy itself — the actual TV part — looks just impossibly insipid and disregardable today, so yes, there’s probably something in that, frank: not so much that it was a slow news day as that grundy itself was a pretty small story perfectly shaped of the fun of manufactured outrage: all the tabloids picked it up instantly and monstered it massively (famous next day mirror headline: “the filth and the fury” –> story of angry man kicking his TV in in rage, story almost certainly made up)
i think you also have to take into account the charged dynamic of uk tabloid papers (no real — national — equivalent in the US maybe; the new york post has far more responsible gravitas than the sun); they had (not so much now) something of the reach and gleeful irresponsibility of fox news in its heyday (tho the mirror was ostensibly a left-ish paper then), and hunt in a pack, egging each other on (who has the most “shocking” story; combine this with mclaren’s very rigorous willingness to feed the flames (for MONTHS) rather than back off or douse them or apologise
also of note, the uk rock weeklies’ fairly solid backing for pistols from the other side — setting themselves up as a counterculturalcultural forum to ALL grown-up papers (broadsheet and tabloid), and a general sense among “youth” that SOMETHING needed to be coming along and change the pace (and/or reflect the clogged *conflictedness* of the wider culture more truthfully) (and punk would do to be going along with)
worth noting if it hasn’t already been said that a bunch of the older writers on the rock papers had graduated from the underground papers of the late 60s (oz, frendz, IT etc, and really DID see this fight in 68-ever-onwards terms… i don’t have the numbers on any of these comparisons, of course — but i suspect that the combined heft (for UK youth) of the rock weeklies in the late 70s was AT THE VERY LEAST a match for the heft (for US youth) of rolling stone in the late 60s: your one-stop shop for sidestepping everything you wanted to escape, about “official” or “grown-up” culture
so i think i would prohably argue that some kind of catalytic breach in pop culture was in the offing — and that whatever it had been would have allowed SOME of the same forces to array against each in a similar way, but that the pretext might easily have been quite different, and all manner of different elements charged with different meanings as a result
(but the sense of oppressive brooding storm gathering, and impending breakdown, was widespread, and found in plenty other areas of social life)
Oh, and another thing….these debates are bound to get heated as the median age of the contributors comes into play. Now that most of your “remember” these songs and they have emtional connections to them – the less you’ll be able to stay objective.
When this thing started only me, Doc Mod ( nice to hear from you ) Frank and Rosie were ” present ” – methinks !
re. Grundy – the corrupting influence of TV was a hottish topic in ’76, wasn’t it? This would be about the time that Mary Whitehouse’s Viewers And Listeners Association was in fullest cry (certainly it was around this time it claimed the scalp of Dr Who’s production team, who were attracting 14 million viewers a week sending the Doc up against a series of scified-up Hammer Horror villains with appropriate levels of violence and grue) (i.e. hardly any by modern standards).
“the corrupting influence of TV was a hottish topic in ‘76, wasn’t it?”
And wasn’t it about this time that a weekly comic called “Action” (I think, happy to be corrected) started, which caused some outrage at the carnage depicted therein? It was ultimately scuttled and made way for the legendary 2000AD.
On these sunny shores, ABBA were in the middle of their 11 week stint at No 1 with “Fernando”.
Here’s one of those ‘What if’ questions. Apologies if I seem to be playing devil’s advocate here.
The Pistols only appeared on the Bill Grundy show because Queen dropped out at the last minute and EMI wanted to put another band on the show. How would punk have broken in the tabloid and mainstream press if Queen had appeared on the Grundy show instead and simply promoted whatever their contemporary single was?
Producer of the Today show at the time was Tommy Boyd, who on his much-missed TalkSport show mentioned once or twice that he manoeuvred the whole thing into being since he knew the people in Queen and also McLaren and “persuaded” Queen to stand down and let the Pistols come on. But there may have been an element of wind-up here which with Mr Boyd is not unknown.
And at roughly the same time (possibly in the same week? Robin C to thread), elsewhere in the same studio complex, Hughie Green was recording his “Stand Up And Be Counted” routine on Opportunity Knocks which is still the most genuinely frightening thing I have ever seen on British television.
Good morning. Boy did I miss a punchup here. Anyroad, here is my truth, tell me yours (oh you just did…)
Mid 1975, someone asked me (I be 14), what the next big “musical thing” would be, I said “Heavy rock, but played by kids” as that was what most of the ‘musical’ kids were into. Deep Purple, etc. But the kids bands back then would all sing of “woman from Tokyo” or “can’t get enough of your love” and so on, which struckk me as a blatant lie.
In early 1976, I wrote a song called “Pogo Sticking” which was a novelty song based around Chris Spedding’s “Motor Biking” again, for kids, but without having any direct cops from it. And, in retrospect, was definitely punk. 2 note guitar solo and all. (one electric guitar, barely amplified, and everyone else on one bongo each)
This came from a ‘satire’ album (ok, cassette) called “The A.D Rip-off” which was only one step away from the rock and roll swindle…
Anyroad, come whenever it was that Eddie and the Hot Rods’ “Live at the Marquee” e.p. came out, and “Get out of Denver” was on TOTP, I went “Yes! Finally!” and the rest is geography.
So, OK I wasn’t there for the first gigs, but I WAS THERE! You dont need to be a weather man (etc)
Brian # 155 – Depends on what you consider “present”, of course, but I was in my stroppy middle teens when this was all kicking off and if that is not “present”, I really don’t know what was.
I think Brian may be talking about the beginning of Popular. I was there but Haloscan has erased all the comments I made.
Also I see no disproving of my initial suggestion that to UNDERSTAND it you had to be there at the time. This does not preclude LIKING something but you won’t de facto get the same feeling as you would have done had you actively (been able to) respond(ed) to it at the time, e.g. I was a toddler in ’66/7 so I will never fully know the wonder of “Strawberry Fields” etc. being newly out and about in the world. This is distinct from understanding something in retrospect from a historical/historian’s perspective using available evidence.
re. sinker #154:
One very noticeable thing about the UK music press well into ’77 was the delayed reluctance of much of the ’68 post-Oz/IT crowd of writers to get into or just get punk (were Caroline Coon and Jonh Ingham the only weekly broadsheet writers to be applauding it in actual Burchill/Parsons-excepted 1976? I think they might have been) and still hoping secretly that Racing Cars or Lone Star (or even the parallel and stupidly neglected development of the Deaf School/Doctors of Madness line) were the true way forward.
It’s like Patti Smith’s Horses album.
I borrowed it off the local library, but was kind of underwhelmed. This was in 1999 or so.
I got a cheap copy of the ‘deluxe’ edition, with the second disc being a live performance taped recently. That one I enjoyed greatly.
I don’t know what that means, exactly. Carry on.
re. Yoko: see John & Yoko in club sometime in ’79 and then-new release “Rock Lobster” comes on and John exclaims “hey Yoko! Your music’s finally come into fashion!”
(also of course here Slits and X-Ray Spex/parallel with women finally being allowed to be themselves in pop)
Our Alice was requesting “my mind is like a plastic bag” on the school run this morning.
agreed marcello; i think my argument would be that that extant 68-ers didn’t really line up behind it until the countercultural battlelines were officially drawn — pre-grundy, when uk punk was really fairly tiny and local, the older hands were indeed somewhat more stand-offish and seen-it-all-before (and america-centric)
Ye gods, this thread has sprouted since Friday hasn’t it?! I can’t have much more than a scan through the weekend’s contributions for the moment, but since we were discussing Becks’ 100th cap last time a thread broke through the 100 comments barrier, it’s good to note that this thread comfortably >>> Bobby Moore!
Re the Grundy show and how it came about – credit for getting the Pistols on once Queen pulled out has been taken by Eric Hall, then a press officer at EMI, later a particularly snidey football agent with the likes of Vinnie Jones and Dennis Wise among his clients. He did a “Who The Hell…?” interview with Q, ooh, a dozen years ago now, and among his other achievements claimed to have taken Derek Longmuir to see Frank Sinatra at the Albert Hall and appeared on TOTP with Marc Bolan while “wearing a frog’s head on me bonce”.
But punk was breaking through to public consciousness in other ways before Grundygate. The previous month the Sunday People had even had a punk on the front page with an article along the lines of: “You’re looking at a Punk Rocker – Britain’s latest disturbing teenage cult … the bizarre cult has sprung up in Wales [sic], where teens follow bands like Sex Pistol [sic]…” And I remember in the week before Grundy, the presenter of “What The Papers Say” picked up on a chart printed in a paper featuring “Anarchy in the UK” at something like number 36, and took umbrage at the explicit name of the group – he signed off with a quizzical look to camera saying “The “Sex Pistols”, ladies and gentlemen?”
Oh, and finally – the Hughie Green “Stand Up and Be Counted” was early in 1977. Sadly it was only obliquely referred to in the highly enjoyable BBC4 dramatisation of his life recently.
Blam: erroneous comment blitzed off.
spoiler bunny should put an official punk timeline in the FAQ!
i stick by my theory that it’s the highly unusual counter-pop anti-oedipal drag of this particular song that has caused the thread to metastasize
Pity – I was looking forward to Trevor Eve recreating the full horror.
N.B.: for those who weren’t there, Hughie Green ended one edition of Opportunity Knocks by going into this would-be patriotic monologue which railed against the Common Market, trade unions and so forth, over full Pomp and Circumstance orchestral backing and standing athwart a mass battalion of Army, Navy and RAF types in full uniform. I haven’t been able to find it on YouTube but it is VERY, VERY scary.
Can’t find the full “lyrics” on the web, but here’s part of it to give the flavour:
“Stand up and be counted
Take a fighting stance
This year of one-nine-seven-seven
May be our final chance …
… This is still the nation
Who in 1940 dark
Lit a torch with one last spark
Fanned it into life to mark
Freedom! Freedom! Freedom
In victory!”
Why punk HAD to happen apropos “fascist regime.”
were Caroline Coon and Jonh Ingham the only weekly broadsheet writers to be applauding it in actual Burchill/Parsons-excepted 1976? I think they might have been?
There was also Giovanni Dadomo at Sounds and Barry Cain at Record Mirror. The NME’s Nick Kent had been part of an early Pistols line-up, and Charles Shaar Murray was also broadly on-side (although he famously slagging off an early Clash gig, hence inspiring “Garageland” on their debut album).
again the sense of storm approaching — from a perspective fairly unattuned to the rock-club underground
cf also Culture’s “When the Two Sevens Clash”:
What a leave an bymebye
When the two sevens clash – it dread
What a leave an bymebye
When the two sevens clash – it bitter, bitter, bitter
What a leave an bymebye
When the two sevens clash – a man a go feel it
What a leave an bymebye
When the two sevens clash – you better do right
["What a leave an bymebye" --ie what will be left by-and-by]