BUCKS FIZZ – “The Land Of Make Believe”
If “The Land Of Make Believe” is – as lyricist Pete Sinfield later claimed – a song about Thatcherism, then he has to be congratulated on one of pop’s more thorough veiling jobs. Thing is, the song doesn’t need added significance to be a striking and successful lyric: “Something / Nasty in your garden’s / Waiting / Patiently till it can have your heart” – strong stuff, especially sung in Bucks Fizz’s blandly chipper tones.
Of course not many people listen closely to the lyrics, and why should they? “Land Of Make Believe” works just fine as a romp, something for panto season. If all you remember is the dayglo chorus and the cumbersome beat, then you’ll still have had a good time. It’s more than just the words, though, that hint at something a little darker. A few years later Bucks Fizz re-recorded “Land” with cleaner, sparklier, cheaper production, and it just didn’t work: there’s an oddly foggy thickness to the sound on this song which makes it slightly hard for your ears to focus but works in the record’s favour. And then there are the drums – sudden jagged clipped beats which cut alarmingly through the sonic murk, not disrupting the song exactly – but when you’re listening for them, they start to dominate it.
“The Land Of Make Believe” is Bucks Fizz’s best song, but it’s far from perfect – the verses outshine the chorus, the inserted character names are awkward, the kid at the end is a spooky-ooky touch too far, and Bucks Fizz themselves do a professional job but can’t be said to add much. For all its occasional clumsiness, though, the record is a success, conjuring resonance and even a little mystery out of not a great deal.
7
Tom in FT / Popular • Pop • 2,192 views • Share/Save
There are a couple of versions up on the Spotify playlist now: http://open.spotify.com/user/freakytrigger/playlist/1g1jmJMWwXfia21cDWfVVq
It’s got all out of order which I’ll sort out at some point. Anyway you will find the rubbish Allstars version BUT also a mental version by a young Celine Dion in French. Hurrah!
Light Entertainment watch part 2: Here are the other Bucks Fizz performances that I didn’t list last time;
THE BIG TOP VARIETY SHOW: With Bernie Winters, Bucks Fizz, David Essex, The Dingbats (1981)
CHEGGERS PLAYS POP: With BA Robertson, Bucks Fizz, Coast To Coast (1981)
CHEGGERS PLAYS POP: With Bucks Fizz, Altered Images (1982)
THE CHILDRENS ROYAL VARIETY PERFORMANCE: With Stanley Baxter, Jimmy Cricket, Roger the Dog, Bucks Fizz, The Grumbleweeds, Rod Hull & Emu, The Krankies, Fulton MacKay, The Malibu World Disco Dancing Champions, Marylin, Musical Youth, Donny Osmond, Gary Wilmot (1983)
CRACKERJACK: With Stu Francis, Bob Carolgees, Bucks Fizz, Smokie (1982)
LIVE FROM THE PALLADIUM: With Jimmy Tarbuck, Patti LaBelle, Bucks Fizz, Maggie Moone, Louie Anderson (1986)
MARTI CAINE: With Marti Caine, Bucks Fizz, Juan Martin, Gene Pitney (1982)
MISS UNITED KINGDOM 1987: With Peter Marshall, Alexandra Bastedo, Bucks Fizz, Mark Wynter (1987)
THE MULTI-COLOURED MUSIC SHOW 1982: With Noel Edmunds, Barry Took, Richard Stilgoe, Bucks Fizz, The Jam, J Geils Band, The Police, ABC, Shakin’ Stevens, bad Manners, 10CC, OMD (1982)
SUMMERTIME SPECIAL: With Bucks Fizz, Randy Crawford, Lena Zavaroni, Faith Brown, Lenny Windsor, Victor Ponche, Sylvia (1981)
SUNDAY SUNDAY: With Jenny Agutter, Tim Brooke-Taylor, Jamie Lee Curtis, Rodney Bewes, Bucks Fizz (1983)
THE TUBE: With Jools Holland, Lesley Ash, Bucks Fizz, ZZ Top, REM (1983)
Wichita that’s so right about the death of New Pop coinciding with the horrible reappearance of long rock hairstyles in 1984 – if I remember correctly they were often mullets a hairstyle which I’m glad to say never caught on with anyone below 30 in the UK (obviously not the case in the rest of Europe or America) give or take the odd British sportsman.
I also thought the anti-rock battle had been won in 1982 and then again post-1988 only both times to be proved tragically wrong.Although I think it took the full weight of big business to keep it alive/revive it in the latter instance…
Just be thankful we were mostly spared Hair Metal in the UK. Living in the States you realize with horror what a huge genre it was over here and only got killed when Nirvana came along (that’s according to the official VH-1 version of rock history anyway)
There’s an ad on TV here for a CD collection of Hair Metal ballads with a brilliant dramatic voiceover that says “They taught you how to ROCK and they taught you how to LOVE”
Re 29: Is that a current US ad?! There’s a good Mickey Rourke line in The Wrestler about how that son of a bitch Kurt Cobain ruined *real* rock, ie Guns ‘n’ Roses and, beyond that, hair metal. I was once completely turned off by a girl I really fancied who took me back to her place and played me a Blizard Of Ozz hair ballad. It was that bad.
The idea that Nirvana turned American rock around says so much about US/UK pop relativity. And here I am worrying about Tom Bailey’s mullet.
This may also explain why I take Nik Cohn over Greil Marcus every time.
Now trying to think what the US equivalent of dissecting Bucks Fizz would be…
I think it’s rather a shame – from a comments box point of view if nothing else – that so little hard rock (of hair, grunge or whatever variety) shows up on Popular. Hardly any of it got close! I heard “Every Rose Has Its Thorn” so often when it was a hit that I was sure it had gone top 5 at least but no, a feeble #13.
We will at least be discussing some real monsters of power ballads.
The Nirvana>>>Hair Metal assassination is pretty much accepted as fact here often which makes me think rock history here is an alternate universe. Everyone my age is so rockist. They all grew up on bloody Kiss.
guns n roses ARe real rock* and nirvana DID ruin them!
*slash grew up in stoke QED
ps blizzard of ozz are however not very good
#27: CRACKERJACK!
sorry, force of habit…
the wrestler story goes that Axl said they could use a GNR song in the film for FREE (rather than the usual six figure sum) but only if they slagged off nirvana…
sorry, number 1s, yes.
it’s been really hard for me to write about ANY of the last dozen or so just because they are SO central to my definition of pop, and i don’t think i really have the words to accurately convey how much some of them mean to me (sorry bucks fizz, this doesn’t rly apply to you). also i keep missing threads and don’t necessarily want to just say “me too” at the bottom of most of them…
also, not sure that this is the time or place (like that ever stops us!) but in what ways *didn’t* grunge kill hair metal? nevermind came out actually a week after use yr illusion I & II and a month later it was all over for them wasn’t it?
as wiki teaches:
“Mötley Crüe reunited with Vince Neil, and recorded the 1997 album Generation Swine, embarking on a successful U.S. tour. Poison reunited with C.C. Deville, and embarked on a successful 1999 tour of amphitheaters. A 2000 package tour featuring Poison, Slaughter and Cinderella sold extremely well.
“In the 2000s, coinciding with the new blood of glam metal bands, more groups from the original movement continue to perform, and others that broke up have reformed. Bands such as L.A. Guns, Ratt, and W.A.S.P. have appeared in package tours together, and Mötley Crüe and Poison are continuing to record material and tour, reaching the upper parts of the Billboard 200 with compilation albums. The Monster Ballads compilation series has sold well, with the first volume peaking at #18 on the Billboard 200.
“Rocklahoma is an annual festival that takes place in Oklahoma. In 2007, the four day long festival ran from July 12 through 15th and featured such bands as Poison, Ratt (reformed with Stephen Pearcy), Faster Pussycat, L.A. Guns, Bang Tango, Vince Neil Band, Twisted Sister, Jackyl, Quiet Riot, Britny Fox (reformed), Enuff Z’nuff and Y&T. Warrant and Cinderella co-headlined the festival in 2008 on July 10 through the 13th.”
Nothing lasts forever. Nothing goes away. pioson rox ur all ghey… This and this only is all the of the law.
I never thought of GNR being strictly Hair Metal. Am I being pedantic? They certainly seemed to be taken a little more seriously, even though I couldn’t see it. I like the Wrestler story, but GNR had clearly burnt out and would have disappeared without Nirvana’s help.
Nirvana didn’t really hurt REAL rockers Metallica or Megadeth, just the poodle-permed likes of Poison and Cinderella. Most of them just seemed to be re-cycling UK Glam hits to unsuspecting Yanks. Even Ian Hunter’s Once Bitten Twice Shy got poodled up by someone. This does leave me with the unpleasant feeling that if I’d been 12 and living in somewhere like Des Moines in the mid 80s I’d probably have liked Quiet Riot etc.
Tom, you’re right, I wish we had the option of discussing Heart’s Never, or Alone, at length. I think the closest a Hair Metal-esque single got to the top was Alice Cooper’s Poison in summer ’89.
Re 36: Rocklahoma? There’s a documentary waiting to be made.
Lord Whatnot #36 – sure that Wiki thing hasn’t been doctored by the Conservative Party?
i trust in the distributed intelligence of the midwest bubbleglam massive
— someone on ilm (gareth, in fact — hi gareth!) made a tremendous argument that GnR were america’s answer to the smiths; they formed out of the bones of two la strip-metal bands but yes, are much more important and better than (say) enuff z’enuff or ver crüe or even ratt (or even nirvana)
Yes, I wouldn’t really put G’n'R in the hair metal gang, but I guess they were an accessible bridge between that and the harder stuff, namely Metallica etc. The constancy of Metallica through all of this suggests that Nirvana were a similar kind of bridging band, again between the hardness of METAL METAL, and the idiosyncracies of the Alternative scene. Since the alternative scene defined itself against hair metal, hair metal was doomed.
If G’n'R had not imploded themselves they would still be around today I don’t doubt. Not in the way they are around today.
In my brief stint as the (indie) singer in a metal band, I liked G’n'R the least of bands I was forced to listen to. They lacked the inherent humour of much hair metal, and in places seemed genuinely nasty. I guess that was the point really, that’s why they were successful, they were perceived (as Nirvana were after them) to be dangerous (aka sweary).
Oh and in case people think this is off topic, check out Jaye and Cheryl’s hair on the sleeve cover and tell me Sebastian Bach of Skid Row was not taking notes.
Nirvana plus Bill & Ted / Wayne’s World did it in for hair metal really.
#30 – i’m thinking the analogous american act would have to be the Jim Steinman axis (bonnie tyler, meat loaf etc). not sure i understand the bucks fizz phenomenon as an american, but their trajectory to fame went through light entertainment/showbiz/Eurovision correct? sounds a bit like Steinman’s theater background. bonnie tyler, in particular, had a string of brilliant hits in the late ’70s and early ’80s that, though given the same treatment afforded to heavy rock songs of the time, is today looked down on as bombastic pop fluff. not sure if i’m in SB territory here, but her biggest hit of the early ’80s is also one of the best tunes of that decade.
#40 – i was thinking the other day that there really aren’t many differences between the top alternative acts and the metal acts that immediately preceeded them. in most cases, the alt.bands were a slight modification to fit the times. alice in chains and nirvana clearly continued where GnR left off post-’Appetite’. the same can be said of Soundgarden filling the void during the five years it took Metallica to follow-up the ‘Black Album’. It’s no coincidence that classic rock radio in the US these days is a completely natural mix of Nirvana, Pearl Jam, GnR, Metallica, AIC, Jane’s, and Soundgarden.
There’s certainly at least one hair metal band that we will be discussing in a few years time, although they were not American.
#43. Yes, I agree that the lineage of grunge as a feeder to METAL metal seems almost more natural than the link between hair metal and metal. I think also part of the equation is Metallica distancing themselves from hair metal, not just with their sound but with their presentation around the Black Album. James Hetfield did not look (or act) like a metal star (prima donna that his is) and I think this set up the idea of a newfound seriousness of metal which mopey old grunge filled in. Soundgarden and Alice In Chains were basically metal bands cum opportunists.
Fantastic. Of all the places to discuss American Hair Metal – why, the Bucks Fizz thread of course!
Nirvana copped their best riff of Boston. I loved “Nevermind” for a while but despite all their Axl-baiting (I can well believe the Wrestler story) they never kicked ass (not a phrase I thought I’d use on Popular) like GnR.
For a very funny insight into the LA hair-metal scene of the 80s look out for “The Decline of Western Civilisation Part 2: The Metal Years”. It’s very entertaining – but it also highlights just how much GnR did to make rawk cool again (well, them and Jane’s Addiction, but Axl had the tunes).
“Appetite for Destruction” is a terrific album. I don’t think grunge killed GnR, Axl’s hairloss-induced reclusivity and his rampant insecurity did for that. If the original line-up resurfaced now, I’m sure they would pack stadia worldwide (not sure one could say the same for pearl jam)
Kurt, if he were alive today, would I am sure be a Popular reader. His insistence on Bjorn Again appearing with Nirvana at Reading Festival suggests he might have had a few things to say about Abba…
i’m in the middle of writing about chinese democracy* — koganbot’s argument is the gnr were the PUNK to metalgum’s glam, makin nirvana et al the POST-punk
*as well as everything else ever**
**not in the same piece
A pearl jam reformation would pack the stadium NEXT DOOR of people trying to get away.
The “Nirvana killed metal” thing is quite possibly a classic of mistaking an effect for a cause.
I never cared for Appetite For Destruction (one of the few CD’s I have ever given away), possibly because I realised how good it was and if I listened to it too much I might turn into a metal fan. This is why the other metallers in my band gave it to me. I could taste the dangers there and retreated to my Blue Aeroplanes albums. I like when bits come on now, but am still a bit scared of it. Its this retroactive poptimism that I still have trouble with – though G’n'R falling apart has made it easier to like them.
My 13-year-old chums S and K were very much into srs metal (Metallica, Soundgarden, GnR, Pearl Jam) whilst I preferred the ’soft option’ of Nirvana and Offspring. Dear me.
#48, Lord Whatnot, what do you make of Chinese Democracy?
…isnt this grunge killed Guns n Roses similar to the oft-quoted idea that punk killed off the stadium bands when many of the bands in question were actually even more successful during and after punk. Of those who did fade away many had just reached the end of their natural lives anyway and would have died out with or without punk.
That’s what I never got about the Grunge murdered Metal thing, to my ears Grunge was Metal. Just with shorter hair.
I think most stadium bands were just busy in the studio taking too long to make expensive follow-ups to their previous mega-selling albums during the height of punk. Then they all seemed to be released at the same time, post-punk. I remember the NME review of ‘Tusk’ had a photo of Christine McVie carrying some clothes with the caption “Fleetwood Mac take The Eagles and Led Zeppelin to the cleaners”
First, let me note that I have just turned fourteen, so everything from this year – even songs discussed here I didn’t know at the time – is of course GENIUS…
That said, I didn’t know this at the time at all…and am not sure what my fourteen-year-old self would have made of it. But there is no doubt that it is a sinister song; there is something uneasy-making about not just the lyrics but also the music – as if something, and I don’t know what, is about to go very, very wrong…even if this was in a language I didn’t know much of, but just enough to get *some* idea, like Italian, I would feel this way. It’s like oil being poured on water, but the water is churning, maybe thisclose to becoming a whirlpool…
If “Tomorrow Belongs To Me” was a proto-punk song (I’ve just read England’s Dreaming so I think I can claim that), then this is the waking nightmare after those people have indeed claimed what is now today; the spooky girl at the end (before Poltergeist, though there are girls like her before in horror film/literature I’m sure) is eerie, naive – what does she know of nuclear war or war in general?
It is a very, very strange record – not least because the four members of Bucks Fizz don’t appear to have any understanding of/interest in its darker undercurrents, treating it instead as a shlocky singalong for all the family. We’ll eventually be dealing with another UK vocal group in the late 1990s with a similar disinterest in their lyrics…
#55 – I don’t think it’s disinterest exactly: they’re reading it as pantomime, which is valid. Bucks Fizz weren’t ever going to rival Sinatra as interpretative singers but they knew what a lyric was about, cf “Now Those Days Are Gone”
#54 Lena if you have spotify access check out Celine Dion’s French version and see if the sinisterness transmits!
conrad i have not made up my mind yet! which is its own comment, i suppose, given how immediately i responded to appetite… more soon (“soon”)
On the subject of the lyrics, I wondered whether they really do have lots of corn in Carolina. A quick check proves that, yes, they do – so I guess Mr Prog had done his homework.
On the grunge/metal debate, I remember my instant reaction to first hearing Mudhoney being “Hang on, this is just undigested rock.” The same applies to Nirvana – Kurt may have spent his evenings listening to the Shop Assistants and Leadbelly and Abba, but the music he made still sounds like sludgy rock.
Hair Metal was massive in Mexico, although so was everything else on the rock/metal continuum. At my school the cool kids (mostly foreign) had no time for it; you either looked back to The Who and Black Sabbath or forward with Talking Heads. I suspect G’n'R would have got a more generous hearing…
Crikey, this is weirder than the “No Charge” comments box turning into a meditation on punk.
I have no thoughts whatsoever on Hair Metal, as I consider it an abomination in the eyes of the Lord. There are almost no genres left which I won’t touch – but that’s one of them.
My impression of hair metal – the looks and image rather than the sound, really – is that it probably made a huge amount of sense as a local LA Sunset Strip-based scene and then took on surreal overtones as it spread through American and then the world. By all accounts the bands involved lived pretty much the same lifestyles as local heroes that they went on to live as proper rock stars, it’s just they could now afford it rather than having to blag it to some degree.
#60 Looking again at that Bucks Fizz sleeve it doesn’t seem *quite* so weird…
To be honest don’t really like either of them but unlike grunge at least hair metal didn’t take itself seriously. Or let the American rock establishment think they’d found a way to breathe life into the tired old rock beast…
I would like to add my vote of support to the idea of Bucks Fizz as style gurus.
Re 58: Always thought the China/Carolina lines showed their close links to Guys & Dolls (see There’s A Whole Lot Of Loving, specifically) rather than acute criticism of 3m+ unemployed under the Tories.
More 70s model buffed up than future vision, which in retrospect is an aspect of New Pop that I really enjoy without the Tainted Love/ Don’t You Want Me overexposure getting in the way.
I’m puzzled as to how some of you are drooling all over this one, interpreting all sorts of things from it, as if it were the work of Nostradamus or Joyce instead of Brotherhood of Man Lite. For me (then and now) TLOMB is a puerile pop song, helplessly drowning in melted Red Leicester and nothing much else.
Erithian # 19 – I can’t allow you to liable Doddy. The Ticklish One was, of course, acquitted. Lester Piggott. Now THERE’S a fucking tax dodger, boy!
This is a superb pop record and ensured they would stay around for a bit longer and establish themselves as regular chart stars.
Behind Bucks Fizz were a very strong songwriting and production team and although they still hadn’t thrown away the eurovision image at this point, sadly when they did with much harder hitting songs, their popularity dropped until it went Bang and I’m not talking about the coach crash.
There was a coach crash?
Yes, Mike Nolan was seriously injured, but recovered.
This was a childhood favourite, but I can’t say I’d heard it for several decades until watching it on YouTube just now. I think Tom does a good job of making it sound more interesting than it is – the lyrics are a bit sinister, but they’re sung in such a cheery way any impact is lost.
Looking at the video, I was struck by three things:
1) The clip on YouTube appears to show it as number 19 on VH1’s 100 worst videos, which seems a bit harsh;
2) Cheryl Baker’s dress looks like a prototype for Liz Hurley’s famous dress;
3) Did the video inspire the cover of Echo & The Bunnymen’s Ocean Rain?
Re 69, point 3: Intriguing thought – nobody mentioned it when I did a piece about Ocean Rain cover for Q, but it is a source of inspiration they would want to keep quiet, I guess.
re 69, point 3 & 70: that was my immediate thought when I saw the video – is there a pop gumshoe we can put on the case?
these days this board is practically a popgumshoeshop
Please don’t laugh if I’m mistaken, but I’ve always thought Pete Sinfield partly based this on Led Zep’s D’yer M’ker!
ie. the (reggae-ish) rhythm and the hammering drumbeats
Any comments?
I can see where you’re coming from on that actually! Mind you, D’yer Maker is kind of where I draw a line with my recent Zep reconciliation…