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 • 5,545 views
Waldo, I appreciate what you’re saying here, but I think possibly it’s a generational thing. Which possibly won’t affect tomorrow’s kids. Also, though, I think it’s a lot easier to push that “offensive” button when the material is weak, which I think this is. See also Typically Tropical, obviously.
I would quite like to hear ‘I Don’t Like Croquet’ though.
What Chris said, I understand what they’re trying to say with the song and don’t think it’s racist (or at least not intentionally) but it’s just done so cack-handedly that it doesn’t comes off. Instead of the social commentary they probably intended they sound like a bunch of smug rich white rock stars taking the piss out of Jamaicans and their culture.
It’s never sounded like that to me. Like you say I think they believed thir intentions were good and fans of the song settle for that. Basically I overlook the uglier aspects of DH pretty much the same way I overlook sentiments I disagree with or feel uneasy about in some Jamaican dance music that I enjoy on the same casual level.
But essentially the problem with Waldo’s argument is that it assumes a level playing field when we must all surely acknowledge that even in a crucial time when punks jumped up to meet dreads halfway this has never really been the case in this country to a lasting extent, even if the pop charts have occasionally suggested a greater balance of cultural understanding and harmony over the years. Hypothetical ‘but if Aswad did the equivalent’ counter is just silly because we KNOW it would never have happened and probably never will.
And to be vaguely equivalent it would probably have to be done as finger-in-the-ear folk or perhaps a Gilbert and Sullivan pastiche (admittedly this hypothetical track is just getting better and better).
As a kid I was never quite sure why it was called Dreadlock Holiday, there are no dreads mentioned directly in the song.
Did the Clash ever write a song inspired by their experience of recording ‘Complete Control’ with Lee Scratch Perry in Jamaica? It was apparently an alarming experience for them.
Not that I know of, though arguably they did record their own version of Dreadlock Holiday in Rock The Casbah.
Isn’t Safe European Home about Strummer and Jones’s trip to Jamaica the previous year, when they apparently hardly left their hotel room?
I didn’t hear this at the time at all – if you’d asked me about 10cc I would have said “Oh they did “The Things We Do For Love” and I haven’t heard a thing since.” But I was in the US…where “Grease” and “Boogie Oogie Oogie” were the big hits, later in the summer, after The Commodores…
…when I did finally hear this, it sounded kind of lightweight and pleasant, but my mind was being blown on an almost regular basis (this was around ’82) by other things, so it didn’t really stick out in any way – much like “Banana Republic” by the Boomtown Rats – I remember the music much better than the words.
Those “Safe European Home” lyrics in full: http://londonsburning.org/lyr_give_em_enough_rope.html
“Every white face is an invitation to robbery.”
“I’d stay and be a tourist but I can’t take the gunplay.”
I see with sadness that the Umpire has given Isaac Hayes the raised finger. I guess this means Isaac going into his local cemetery, pointing at a vacant plot and delivering the classic line:
“Can you dig it?”
Apparently this is about an incident when Graham Gouldman was on holiday with Justin Hayward out of the Moody Blues – but Hayward had been threatened, not mugged, and it was in Barbados, not Jamaica…
Dammit, I was offered an interview with Justin Hayward last week but turned it down. I could have asked him!
Was this why he went off summer and wished it was “Forever Autumn”?
*tumbling tumbleweeds, getting of coat, &c.*
Mike – Why did you turn Justin down? Were you offered Frank Ifield instead?
No, I was actually offered the ALL NEW FOR 2008! version of The Drifters, none of whose members were in the group before this year. And some WWF dude whose name I have already forgotten. I went instead with a young man who won’t be troubling Popular for many years to come. (But not wishing to tweak any whiskers, I shall, um, exit this instant…)
I think I’d have gone for Justin!
Thanks Will and Mike – I think that the Clash certainly win the ‘songs about being mugged in Jamaica’ battle!
“Summer Night City,” “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)” and “Hong Kong Garden” are all also on this chart – besides the big US songs they are practically the only ones I recognize! I looked up another song (anticipating its appearing on the charts in about three months’ time) only to find out it wasn’t a single in the UK at all, which I find baffling, as it was a US R&B #1! Same ocean, different shores, etc. etc…
.. which means you have bunny clearance…
Re. Smiley Culture – I remember Simon Bates playing “Police Officer” on his show one morning, and a few minutes later reading out a message from a listener who told him to “stop playing this monkey music.” He didn’t comment. That was the kind of audience Radio 1 attracted in the Derek Chinnery days.
Judge Dread? Big mate of Prince Buster, Lee Perry, Bob Marley and others; also pretty big in Jamaica. Went a bit Sid James in Dub Conference for my liking later on but “Big Six” and “Big Seven” still stand up pretty well.
HEE!
“Got To Be Real” by Cheryl Lynn, which I was hoping to transcribe and then say Billy M heard it, but I don’t know if he ever did.
The beginning of Smash Hits is just around the corner, as well.
First Billboard R&B number one of ’79 as it happens and looking at that year’s list it really IS the beginning of everything (as with everything else in that exceptional year but enough for now, let’s wait until we get there)…
Lena #71 – and didn’t Smash Hits begin with a pretty unlikely cover star for a magazine which wanted to build an audience? – Plastic Bertrand, whose unforgettable one-and-only hit entered the chart in the same week as John and Livvy IIRC. Plastic was one of the two giants of Belgian chanson alongside Jacques Brel (as I used to say to a Belgian friend mainly to wind her up) and went on to be the producer of Belgian Idol.
They won in the end, though, didn’t they?
Furthermore you’re being disingenuous – that issue was a test issue (I mean, a Sham 69 centre spread?) and the first issue proper had Blondie on the front.
The Cheryl Lynn track was/is brilliant – one of my favourite 12″s from around this time! I hadn’t realised it had missed the charts altogether.
I see it did briefly visit the lower reaches twice in 1996, as one side of two double a-side singles which came out then. They reached the dizzying heights of #117 and #191. I’ve no idea if these were remixes, but unfortunately they probably were.