… BTW, this is my third post (I think) and I think that I may have flouted FT etiquette by not announcing myself as a first timer on my first(My Camera Never Lies). Hello!

The 1992 edition of the Guinness Top 40 Charts book does mistakenly list Dr Hook as the number one for November 10, 1979 with Lena Martell dropping to number two. The chart used for that week in the Top 40 Charts book is the erroneous chart that appeared in Music Week, issue dated 10 November 1979, rather than the corrected chart. I believe the 1996 edition of Top 40 Charts also contains the same erroneous chart.

Unlike the 1976 chart mix-up which was corrected within a few hours, the Dr Hook / Lena Martell mix-up took 24 hours to correct which meant Music Week went to print with an incorrect chart. In those days the chart pull out in Music Week was displayed in many record stores. This led to Martell’s record company claiming that the mistake effectively reduced demand both from retailers for re-orders and customers for purchases of for her single and cost her the number one the following week.

Incidentally, the chart error was caused by some of Martell’s sales being added to Dr Hook’s sales and it was the fact that her label thought it suspicious that chart figures showed Dr Hook had outsold Lena Martell by such a large margin (by 150% if I remember correctly the reports at the time) that led to the chart compilers rerunning a sales count of those two records.

I still think this is bobbins though. I don’t particularly like his vocal anyway, and everything about this seems to go wrong – boring tune, all the good bits of which are copied from ‘Rock Your Baby’, awful lyric, smugness and a really flaccid production.

Magic Fly #20 – no, Ray Sawyer did actually lose an eye in a car crash in 1967. A friend of mine was helpless with laughter when he saw kids dancing to WYILWABW at a school disco by holding a hand over one eye and shaking imaginary maracas with the free hand.

Another favourite Hook quote I’ve remembered:
Q: “Why did you call your latest album “Bankrupt”?”
A: “Why did they call it “World War Two”? We didn’t have a dime.”

After the BBC banned it, some CBS bods recorded themselves singing over the track, the line “on the cover of the radio times”, pressed a few promos and sent them to the BBC.

The actual normal single is the same version as the USA version.

Listening to it even now, I can see what the writer is trying to do, but that’s because it’s signposted in thirty-foot-high letters; a little subtlety would not have gone amiss.

Hated it then; hate it now; one of these #1s that make you despair at the record-buying public.

99% of radio DJs gained cheap laughter from THAT opening line. And although it sees them belatedly attempt disco, the song is an exercise in sustained paranoia; she’s so beautiful that Locorriere can only feel insecure, as evinced by the dreadful emphasis that he puts on the word “’phone” in the couplet “You want to trust her/Then somebody hangs up when you answer the ‘phone” or the shivering triple moan he gives the word “lovers” in the phrase “faint-hearted lovers.” Thus it becomes a list song of all the arguments against falling in love – “You watch her eyes,” “You watch her friends,” “You look for lies,” and, finally and inevitably, “You go it alone,” because frankly, by the time the song ends, Locorriere sounds like (a) David Byrne and (b) a potential suicide bomber. Note the lack of citing of the Beautiful Woman’s feelings for him, if any. Musically, though, it drifts by as blandly and unquestionably as all of Dr Hook’s later works, and consequently my raising much enthusiasm for it is, as they say, hard. NEXT!

(still, props to the actual “Dr Hook” inventing Bez in the video)

Interesting that their early days had them tied in with Shel Silverstein.

Later, lead singer was showing up at state fairs as “lead singer from…”

And that’s about it.

As for “When You’re In Love…” – yes, I can well see how it could be legitimately interpreted as an example of dodgy gender politics, but I read it more as a breezy, light-hearted, shoulder-shrugging, somewhat self-deprecating skit on the perils of dating a few notches above one’s rightful station in the Hotness stakes. And as someone who was still carrying a massive torch for the athletic blonde hotty who popped my cherry in June (see the “Are ‘Friends’ Electric” post), with occasional long-distance re-matches still to be had, I related to this Big Time.

I played this again this afternoon, and found myself charmed all over again by its “Rock Your Baby” derived soft shoe shuffle, by its ridiculous innuendo – and especially by those fractionally overdone backing vocals, whose call-and-responses constantly teeter on the brink of absurdity, raising a smile every time.

A warm, fluffy, affectionate and unashamedly sentimental 7 from me.