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
Lack of airplay didn’t hinder them six months later but they had time to build a fuller public profile in the meantime, as did punk in general.
At the end of ’76 the mainstream charts weren’t quite ready for punk yet in terms of major hits.
This of course doesn’t stop contemporary Radio 2 from playing “Anarchy” in their continuing attempt to rewrite history by pretending that things like “Brown Eyed Girl” and “Teenage Kicks” were huge hits instead of minor or non-hits kept out of the charts and off the airwaves by Ken Dodd or the Barron Knights.
Well, maybe so but isn’t it all about what sounds good now? As opposed to relaying hits of yesteryear?
Nostalgia is overrated. Or rather, it is nowadays.
I think we ought at this point to salute JJ Barrie for smashing through the 200-posts barrier. Phenomenal stuff, not that it’s got much to do with JJ. I’d like to have heard his take on “Anarchy” though. (Alberto Y Los Trios Paranoias did a doo-wop version which went down very well when I saw them.)
I don’t want what sounds good now to fiftysomething Tory voters.
I don’t want a publicly-funded radio station telling lies and pretending things happened when they didn’t or that they played music which they went out of their way to ignore or bury when it mattered.
I don’t want cynical recycling of yesterday’s news denuded of all the context and radicalism which made that music worth bothering with in the first place.
I want the truth.
I don’t recall any big hits by Ken Dodd in the 1970s. The Barron Knights may have had a couple of their usual Christmas hits, pricking the the bubble of the pompous as they usually did. But a Barron Knights record worked at the time and doesn’t keep.
Me, I never listen to Radio Two so I wouldn’t know if there was a stalinist conspiracy to rewrite the history of popular music. I suspect that what they play now is what they think their target audience wants to hear.
Ken Dodd viz. “Brown Eyed Girl.”
Radio 2 should be playing what their target audience didn’t know they wanted to hear. Either that or be honest and go back to wall-to-wall Ray Conniff.
#206: I remember “Think of me, wherever you are” which is scary stuff. On a bus to work? Think of Ken Dodd. Having a cup of tea? Think of Ken Dodd. Making love with your wumman? Think of Ken Dodd.
Mind you, Mark, that last one could help sort out a common male problem.
Punctum, I’m struggling to see your point. How is what they played 30 years ago relevant to what they should play today? Radio 2 wasn’t cutting edge then but that’s no reason why they shouldn’t now play stuff that they wouldn’t have played then. I wouldn’t fancy re-runs of Waggoners’ Walk or JY’s Raymond going “This is what you do!!”
What Dale plays for Sunday afternoon audiences might not match what Radcliffe and Maconie would pick out of an old chart – a pity but that’s life I guess. (And what the hell has the audience’s supposed voting tendency got to do with it?)
Marcello @205: I would rather permit myself to be strapped down[1] and forced to sit through an evening at a James Last tribute event than vote Tory, but I am fifty-something, and I think you are getting way over the top here.
I don’t suppose Radio 2 were playing Anarchy in the Uk – would you have wanted them to? The Radio 2 audience was the enemy after all – people like my mum. Somebody was playing it though, because it was familiar to me and I wasn’t exactly frequenting the wackier kind of club.
[1] Or even constrained in one of Mr McLaren’s designer bondage outfits ;)
MC’s broad point, I think, is that acceptance erases the struggle for acceptance, and that this suits the accepters very well indeed.
so you get The Stooges’ “No Fun” advertising CBeebies, and um, that sort of thing.
Which is actually pretty similar to Rosie’s view that the incorporation of punk as central to an accepted historical version of the 70s does the decade a disservice. Rosie seems to be saying that it overstates punk-as-rupture, Marcello than it understates or betrays it.
(My own view, as someone who grew up wholly in the post-punk evironment, is that the mythology of punk-as-rupture is a self-fulfilling prophecy: it’s that mythology that creates a changed environment as much as the thing itself.)
Tom, isn’t the central paradox of a struggle for acceptance that acceptance is the last thing the strugglers want?
I wonder what life would be like in Pistols World if they had succeeded in overturning the old order?
# 205 – “I don’t want what sounds good now to fiftysomething Tory voters.
I don’t want a publicly-funded radio station telling lies and pretending things happened when they didn’t or that they played music which they went out of their way to ignore or bury when it mattered.
I don’t want cynical recycling of yesterday’s news denuded of all the context and radicalism which made that music worth bothering with in the first place.
I want the truth.”
Sorry, Marcello, but that’s just as scary as Hughie.
I disagree – rather righteous with a small r than Righteous with a bold, italicised, capital R for Right as per Hughie any day.
Radio 2 are essentially (supposed to be) catering for those who would have grown up listening to Radio 1 in the seventies or eighties or blimey even the nineties now but the point here is that Radio 1 wasn’t playing all this worthy stuff 30 years ago in the first place whereas Radio 2 are more than happy to play it now because it no longer threatens or challenges anyone or anything. And I think that’s wrong on such a fundamental level but I’m going to chew over this at greater length in my blog later today.
I dislike POTP’s tactics because they represent a very deliberate and selective rewriting of history.
If you are going to rekindle the mood of a particular year in music then you should play the whole Top 20 rather than pretend that Donald Peers or Altern-8 never happened. Why even bother doing the nineties if all you’re going to play are bland AoR ballads? Furthermore, isn’t that the FUN of it; hearing all those odd records you’d half-forgotten about for 20/30 years rather than the same, dreary parade of Phil and Rod and Whitney ad nauseam?
And if R2 think this is not suitable for a Sunday audience then how come Capital Gold do so well with their equivalent programme which is also broadcast on a Sunday and features a COMPLETE Top 20 (and usually most of the 21-30 section as well) as well as a guest in the studio who was actually in the chart under scrutiny?
I don’t like Dale slagging off things like SL2 and therefore by extension slagging off me and all other licence-payers for whom rave was the thing in the early nineties. I’d rather he didn’t do the eighties or nineties at all if he’s going to be like that.
My solution is as follows:
Leave Dale on Sunday to do strictly sixties and seventies and maybe even occasional fifties POTP – ONE year only with full Top 20 played.
NEW POTP on Saturday afternoon in the dead zone currently and uselessly occupied by the Radio 2 “Comedy” Hour focusing on eighties and nineties – directly inheriting Jonathan Ross’ audience, therefore wider scope for more adventurous choice of music. And again, ONE year only.
Result – greater audience satisfaction.
That’s better, MC. Far more reasonably argued. And I’m happy to say that I think you’re on to something, aspecialy with regards Saturday afternoon being dead on Radio 2. All we need now is a presenter for NEW POTP. And who better, say I, than Jonathan King??!!!
As Lew Grade said when McGoohan pitched the idea for The Prisoner to him: “It’s so crazy it might just work.”
There is an even better solution of course; don’t listen to Radio 2 if you don’t like its content!
The best music radio – and I wish to heaven there was more than six hours of it a week – is Late Junction on Radio 3. Anything can happen – from Gregorian plainchant to contemporary electronica via all kinds of points in between including Beefheart, Youssou N’Dour and The Buzzcocks – and usually does.
Is Late Junction still going? Always too worthy wellies for my liking, I’m afraid. Maybe they should get Desmond Carrington to present it.
As a licence payer I’m entitled to demand that R2 play content that I like, as well as everyone else.
Re. 219: As someone who shares his life with a Late Junction devotee, I strongly agree with Rosie. It is a glorious show.
I broadly disagree with DJ Punc (god someone should send out notifications as “now I am named this” as I am a slow get who cannot keep up.. anyroad..), but agree with parts…
POTP – Well, it is called “pick” so hey. But, it is clearly not the programme it was when Fluff ran it (from ‘pick of the chart hits’ to ‘pick of the album tracks by Yes/KCrimson/etc’) so it really should be playing Everything of a particular week. OK, lives may not be enriched by me hearing Donald Peers, but having never heard it, the chances of me actually hearing it one day is limited to it being on sale at oxfam for 20p, me having the money, and actually giving a. Dale by all means can diss stuff if he feels fit, he is of course a media person/ality, as long as he actually plays it. It wouldn’t really bother me, much like DLT not liking The Clash.
No, I don’t want ‘just the AOR ballads’ only. Just as much as I woudn;t want “only the pop/new wave” ont the other foot. That sort of reminds me of how they’d do The Indie Chart on the Radio 1 “charts show” with The Man Ezeke oh we hired him but stopped his prog, now what do we do with him show. And then they’d go to number 11 to play Tracy Ullman “They don’t know” to represent.
His broad point I disagree with? I don’t want Radio 2 to be ‘what I used to listen to on Radio 1 through the seventies/eighties” etc. I want to hear stuff I would like to hear. Stuff I’ve not heard, not disqualified because it used to be ‘scary’ to Radio 1 back then…
Radio 6 is wayy too ‘targeted’ for me. Want to hear “Going Underground” or “Town Called Malice”? You got it. Want ‘News of the World’ or “Strange Town”? Sorry, it’s not on the bringdown..
Christ, The Man Ezeke.
This is another reason why JK would make a better fist of it than Dale since he’s much better at the slagging off game. You already know that it would be “at number eight here’s a record which I personally made a hit after I featured it on my show Entertainment USA” alternating with “what a pile of crap this is at number seven” but that would be infinitely better than all this sneery, smuggy “but YOU bought it” stuff Dale does with nineties hits – it’s the equivalent of doing 1965 and only playing Jim Reeves and the Bachelors.
I remember Liz Kershaw on Radio 6 doing a Tony Wilson spot (this before he died). Fetched up a Crispy Ambulance 10″ single to play. Found that the ‘airplay’ sheet had one date stamped on it – Received date.
That’s the sort of thing that should happen! Not just for ‘documentary’ bits, but more of a random nature.
I have this “Silicone Chip” test: Where/ who would play Basement 5′s single “Silicone Chip”? I’m not saying it’s the best single ever made, but surely it deserves a hearing once in a while?
Certainly would make a change from “Rock The Casbah” or “Jean Genie” on the hour EVERY hour.