10cc – “Dreadlock Holiday”
On one level the ‘plot’ of “Dreadlock Holiday” is hugely important to any judgement of it. On another, not at all, but let’s recap anyway. The narrator is a tourist in Jamaica – he gets mugged for his silver chain and returns to the comfort of his hotel where a woman tries to sell him weed.
Nobody comes out of the story well: the song’s parent album was called Bloody Tourists, and the narrator is a simp, trying and failing to fit in (“concentrating on truckin’ right”) and then fleeing to the hotel at the first sign of trouble. But the island isn’t exactly a welcoming place either, and the message seems to be that if you’re a white tourist, any approach is misguided and nowhere is entirely safe from the scary dark other looking to hustle you at every turn.
This, to my mind, makes for a rather mean-spirited song, a lose-lose game whose main purpose is to make 10cc seem clever and cynically realistic. I haven’t ever been a great fan of 10cc, precisely because I feel there’s this callous smirk behind a lot of their music, and “Dreadlock Holiday” crystallises the feeling for me. That makes me dislike it more than whatever racial or cultural politics might or might not lurk underneath the song: I am sure an extensive comments thread will tease them out!
On the other hand, “Dreadlock Holiday” is often superlative popcraft: that shimmering, unmistakable percussion intro that makes the song a sampler’s or mash-up act’s dream, and the massive chorus – seized on out of context by Sky Sports for an effect darkly comic enough that I’m sure the band enjoy it greatly. Even here, though, the cynicism runs deep. The song, light reggae which slides skilfully from awkward bounce to clammy paranoia, is an inversion of the lyrics’ theme: if you want to be a tourist, it says, stick to the studio and you can happily steal stuff from them. “Dreadlock Holiday” is in some ways the unpleasant opposite of 1978’s other reggae-related #1, “Uptown Top Ranking” – a wiser, crueller denial of its open celebration. Impressive work in its way, but it leaves a nasty taste.
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Tom in FT / Popular • featured content/Pop • 2,916 views • Share/Save
Those very early issues of Smash Hits weren’t great, it has to be said (I was vaguely embarrassed about buying them) – but it didn’t take very long for the mag to hit its stride, either. (Ooh, I’m straining at the leash!)
#75 – it was a 12″ reissue of the original track, double A-sided with another classic whose name escapes me (but it might have been Nicole & Timmy Thomas “New York Eyes”). I shall root around in the attic this evening…
Anyhow, it was part of a series of double A-sided classic 12″ re-issues, many of which I snapped up.
EDIT: I am WRONG! The Old Gold reissues were 1991, but “New York Eyes” was teamed with Cheryl Lynn’s “Encore”. The 1996 version was indeed a remix package, including mixes from Todd Terry and dreary old workaday hacks Love To Infinity…
Those early Smash hits were great, actually.
The very idea that all this punk and new wave could actually be sold to the teenypop audience, was what kept one end of it alive! It all moved from that to the bright fluffy 80s pop we all remember on those TV shows if we’re famous enough, as a direct result of pic sleeves, which begat pop videos and an outpouring of creativity in many directions.
The words to The Fall’s “New Face in Hell” in the alternative page, for blummin sake!
#78: Mark, I’m talking about the first three or four issues only, which I think were still monthly at that stage. The cool specialist alternative coverage hadn’t started yet, and the mag was more like a glossied-up Disco 45.
“Got To Be Real” unfortunately was also the musical inspiration for Modern Romance’s 1982 #37 smash “Queen Of The Rapping Scene (Nothing Ever Goes The Way You Plan)” though I much preferred its use on “Dibidibidize (How We Gonna Make The Black Nation Rise?)” the same year by oh God what was their name again? Brother D and the Collective Effort, or similar…
Yep to you both.
Although, the pre-rap part of the song was one of the few ModRo songs I thought was OK. Perhaps because it was short.
“unfortunately”?????????????
Brother D and the Collective Effort, yes! Thank you for unlocking that memory, as I’ve been trying to remember who sampled “Got To Be Real” for the past couple of hours or so, and the closest I could get was the original 1986 Source/Candi Staton version of “You Got The Love”, which didn’t.
“Um the quinn, um the quinn, um the quinn of the reppin sin” was sort of great, really!
This even got a release in Jamaica and sold well so I don’t think they found it racist or offensive. It isn’t like anybody got shot in the song.
I remember everyone straining at the leash to write about 1978 a few entries back… now look at us, thinking about the early Smash Hits heyday when they’d print the lyrics to New Face In Hell… what ’78 were people looking forward to? I am kurious.
Malice, surely 10CC’s reputation was shot? No hits for Stewart or Gouldman after this apart from Bridge To Your Heart some years later. Even though Sunburn deserved better.
# 70 – Dread (Alex Hughes) had also been a minder/roadie to the Stones before his own career took off. He was indeed huge in Jamaica, in fact the first white artist to score a major hit there. He was simply enormous in my area where he was feted in the rasta community as practically one of their own. He cultivated close friendships with many of reggae’s great names and left this world (albeit far too early) as he surely would have wanted to, keeling over from a dodgy strawb having just walked off stage at the end of a show.
I think I recall the “monkey music” incident but wouldn’t have remembered it was Simon Bates, who, let’s face it, had the personality of a roll of wall-paper. The listener must have conveyed this despicable comment over the phone. It’s not even worthy of comment and if Bates’ silence was deliberate, I feel that that was far better than going into one about how ignorant this bastard clearly was.
And Judge Dread’s name appears (in slightly different guise) to this day in every weekly issue of 2000AD, which had only just recently started at this stage…?
“Big Seven” also sampled on “Ludi” by the Dream Warriors.
“The Winkle Man” was blinding. You can see where Dread’s going with this without even having to hear the record, which you certainly would not have done on Radio One.
I always loved it when Jimmy Savile came across a Judge Dread disc on his Old Record Club: “and this guy geezer decided to be very rude and so it was banned and I SEE-NO-REEEEEEA-SONNNNN why we should play it and howzabout that then?”
Dignified Don: “skrlrlgrglmrglkrnklskrlkmmngskrl Jim.”
#87 – 2000AD was well over a year old by this point – started in February 1977.
[Judge Dread was] the first white artist to score a major hit [in Jamaica]? Really? I’m amazed!
So, it would seem that “Dreadlock Holiday”, Boney M’s “Rivers Of Babylon” and Judge Dread were all Big In Jamaica. Where’s the JA version of Everyhit when you need it?
92, I somehow doubt this, this’d mean that no Elvis/rock and roll/Beatles etc had any kind of inroad into Jamaica.
Yes, correction. Dread was the first white artist to have a major REGGAE hit in Jamaica.
Sorry.
Ob La Di Ob La Da was big in Jamaica. I’d say it’s the Beatles’ most common Jamaican pressing, having never seen another Jamaican Beatles single.
It’s worth picking up because the b-side is Sexy Sadie, a unique and intreeeging pairing.
Of course the question is… is it reggae?
79, Smash Hits initially presented itself as primarily a place where you could read all the songwords to the latest hits. So, as a songwords mag, there wasn’t a great deal of editorial to begin with.
And it was also monthly to start with – both these things changed quickly.
Incidentally, the date for this entry is still wrong, I note pedantically.
May I point out that this song has a ‘truck driver’s gear change’ half-way through, i.e. it shifts up a key totally unnecessarily at the end of the middle eight?
I’ve recently discovered that this song was by 10cc which suprised me as I am more familiar with stuff like “I’m not in love” (all a bit before my time sorry!). Intriguing song – certainly different to all the safe, generic pap that’s released these days. Came across this article while trying to find out about the song after arguing with my partner about which band it was (I didn’t believe it was 10cc at first).
As someone who’s only recently discovered Popular, and getting to this a long time after the discussion ended…
but my take on this song has always been fixed in my mind by a moment in a pub in Oxford late that year, when this was followed on the jukebox by probably the best of the pre-No.1 singles by a band that will be commented on Popular a couple of years down the timeline, when the public gets what the public wants.
While the ‘boring old farts’ were wimping off about a stolen necklace and running home to the safety of a hotel swimming pool and a prostitute — in real life it smelt of pubs and Wormwood Scrubs, with his life swimming around him and drowning.
A cheap holiday — do it today…
It’s a moment that stands out really clearly in my mind: how utterly distant the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ had become. And the difference in their reactions — the one running away and seeking pleasure, the other consumed by anger and an urgent, infectious refusal to accept.
It’s a moment that stands in my memory close to the first time I heard “Anarchy” a few months after it came out, something I can only describe as a Taoist moment of understanding. It wasn’t about different types of music; it was about a different way of living.