He was one of the main reasons I bought “Disc” originally, in preference to the other three.

Mike #3 (yes I know it’s a long way upthread but I’ve been away) - I know the style of the song clashes somewhat with the 50s setting, but then it is a fantasy at the end of which they fly up into the air in a car, so they can be as anachronistic as they want by this stage. Might as well criticise the “Camelot” routine in Python’s “Holy Grail” for not being minstrelesque enough. On the other hand, spot on about “Dirty Dancing” - that final “Time Of My Life” routine where they supposedly drop the needle on the Dansette or whatever it is, and out comes an archetypal 80s production which wasn’t technically possible in 1963… now THAT jarred.

I remember a Record Mirror cartoon entitled “If John Travolta was a real person and he went to the Barnsley Mecca”. In which Travolta tries to get into said nightspot in his Grease outfit and is kicked out, then returns in his Saturday Night Fever gear to shouts of “flash git” from the girls and the bouncer saying “You’re not gerrin’ ‘in ‘ere dressed like that you poof”. Moral: even if you’re John Travolta it’s still crap in Barnsley.

And as I am safe in as much as there have been no HSM number ones yet (HSM3 may change that), I think that there are at least three absolute show-stoppers in HSM, compared to probably just two in Grease (both of which weren’t in the original stage musical!)

#7 If you think “Grease hankers for a watered down fifties aesthetic which makes Happy Days look edgy” you should try being an empathetic parent to children who worship at the altar of High School Musical. My two girls like both HSM and Grease (which, I guess is better than them just liking the former) but there’s more musical meat on the bones of YTOTIW (one of the weaker songs on Grease, I reckon) than the mechanically-recovered autotuned dreck of HSM. (Also, don’t get me started on the latter film’s excess of self-obsessed “I-just-need-to-work-out-who-I-am” soliloquies – a far cry from the Grease teens who are actually Out There getting their hands dirty, rather than rehearsing what they’ll go on to say to their therapists when they’re old enough to have them).

Furthermore, I have to confess that the mere presence of this song in a film that was set in the late 50s/early 60s blinded me to the implausible genre-shift it represented. It only occurred to me a few years ago that it was a far more polished, muscular piece of pop than anything that could have appeared at the time. But because that didn’t bother me for so many years, it doesn’t particularly bother me now. It’s interesting (well, at least it is to me) that John Farrar, having written the song which transformed ONJ into a plausible object of desire, continued to write several ensuing hits which also fell into line with that perception.

From the Physical album, he penned (Landslide and Make A Move On Me). But the best song he wrote for her was A Little More Love, which – if I remember correctly – she premiered on Parkinson, and was eagerly awaited as her first post-Grease hit. Brilliant predatory guitar motif on the verses which comes back in halfway through the chorus – all the better for the fact that it’s slightly at odds with the desperation of the lyric and the urgency with which she sings it. Always thought that when RCA were vainly searching around for a song that Natalie Imbruglia could do – one that might possibly revive her flagging career after Torn – then this would have done the job. After a 20+ year gap, it was certainly “forgotten” enough for her to make it her own.

Finally, YTOTIW might not be a better song than, say, What Do I Get (and far worse than Teenage Kicks) but it effectively had a fantastic video and the promise of an hotly-anticipated film to support it – which must help account for its greater success at the time?

Popscene bombed because it was all (willful, overplayed) attitude and no tune. The Who were already on a losing streak with I Can See For Miles only peaking at 10 (a relative failure) and The Who Sell Out doing very little business compared to their first 2 albums. So, Dogs and Magic Bus, their 2 ‘68 singles, both made the Top 30 but did no more. Maybe wunnerful Radio One punished them after the openly pirate-worshipping Sell Out.

Also, Call Me Lightning was released as an early ‘68 single in the rest of Europe, where Dogs would presumably have made little sense (and once Walthamstow goes it’ll sound like a relic here, too). Maybe that’s why it’s been skipped on so many comps?

“There was nothing in my life bigger than beer, ‘ceptin’ you little darlin’”

A tragicomic knees-up, Dogs deserves a better afterlife. Rosie, you’re too hard on it. So many hooks. There’s the melancholy (Townshend sung?) section that builds up to “we’re a happy couple you and me, with a greyhound on either knee”, the rickety singalong intro, and the climactic choral, minor chord cymbal-splash finale is heart-twisting stuff (”yes it’s yoooou, little darlin’!”).

Of course, if a cross between Heroes & Villains and The Boy I Love Is Up In The Gallery sounds bad on paper then it won’t tickle your fancy. But it’s much warmer, genuinely affectionate, and more loveable than Lazy Sunday. Or Popscene, for that matter.

My Mum had Meaty, Beaty etc. I used to walk past the hotel on that inner sleeve quite often, until it burned down.

(It’s surely the same “Substitute”, though? My parents had the original 7″, which I nicked and played to death in 75/76 - simultaneously with the album - and I never spotted any differences.)

yeah i’m probably overstating it mike — my memory is that this late-70s double Gst Hits my sister had, which i think was released to accord with quadrophenia and was quite a big deal (gatefold with a bound-in booklet of memoriabilia and everything) didn’t overlap as much as you’d expect with MMB&B… but i may well be expanding the lack of overlap in my head (ie it may just have been that “kids” wasn’t on it) (”dogs” not on either): she cleared it out long ago

my mum was a who fan, rather unexpectedly (well, “fan” — she liked em, but she didn’t do anything like going to buy their records and such)

They had to re-record the early material because of long-standing disputes with Shel Talmy (which is also why the My Generation album only got a proper CD release a few years ago) but “Dogs” is essentially their “Popscene” except they’d like to forget it rather than punish the public for not buying it at the time.

Butbutbut! 12 of the 14 tracks were hit singles, the only additions being “Boris The Spider” and “The Kids Are Alright”… and “Dogs” is the only single to be omitted from the album.

Forgive my scepticism DJP, but are you sure about this? (Google is not coming up with any supporting evidence.) Apart from the 7″ of “Squeeze Box”, MBB&B is the only Who record in my collection (I bought it around 75/76), and I’ve always taken the songs contained therein to be the definitive versions.

(can you say “a shenanigans”?)

If you want “Dogs” on CD you have to get the Maximum R&B 4CD box set - it’s routinely left off all their compilations (unless anyone knows different).