I swear I never even knew what drugs were…UNTIL I HEARD MUSICAL YOUTH. The rumour swept round school sometime after their Blue Peter appearance: the song isn’t about a “cooking pot” at all, it’s about… the other kind of pot. Did this fill us with new-found respect for Musical Youth and their song? Absolutely not, we all hated it. So instead what we believed was that while we, posh white boys from Surrey, knew about the “real meaning” of “Pass The Dutchie”, Musical Youth themselves were such chumps that they’d recorded the song in all innocence.
Reader, the chump was I: the Youth were wasted on the young. These days it takes about half a second of the song to bring a smile to my face – “THEES generation” – ker-WHUMP! “Pass The Dutchie” is gimmickry alright, but it’s gimmickry with ambition, the very best kind. It’s trying to fuse the tweenie energy of “I Want You Back” with the easy sunshine swing of “Uptown Top Ranking”, and throw in a dollop of social conscience too. Also, as will become apparent over some upcoming entries, a fight was on for what “pop reggae” might mean – a flavouring, a dilution, a museum piece? With those viral, Yellowman-style “biddly biddly bong” vocal lines – the primary source of my schoolboy disdain – Musical Youth were channeling more recent Jamaican sounds, more successfully, than any of their grown-up pop peers.
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hard to dislike – then or now – this being number 1 was a big news story at the time.
There’s an uncontrived DIY quality about the song which is infectious and which seems to have extended to the sleeve design as well.
And with this song we come to the happiest days of my life. From the start of October 1982 to the middle of June 1983, I was working as an English language assistant at a lycée in Vannes, on the southern coast of Brittany, teaching English to pupils who were not that much younger than me. It wasn’t always a ball – there were problems with accommodation that lasted until Christmas, and I arrived in the middle of the wettest autumn they’d had in Brittany for fifty years (and believe me, that is wet). But even on the worst days, a walk through the beautiful medieval centre-ville and around the ramparts that made the town look like an enormous castle were enough to restore the spirits – I was only going to be there nine months and was determined to enjoy it.
Following the chart suddenly got a lot harder – in those days, reception of British radio in southern Brittany was pretty poor, and beyond tuning in for the chart rundown on Tuesday evenings I kept to local stations, which (apart from major global acts such as Bowie) were still two or three months behind the UK chart – so Dexy’s and Yazoo’s summer hits had new leases of life. That meant I was a bit unfamiliar with new acts in our chart – in particular a band that had me going “Cadge a what?” as I struggled to pick up the name above the interference. Very few French hits were likely to go the other way, although I did pull off a coup writing to a friend in October saying that I’d heard a song which could be a UK hit – FR David’s “Words” was number 2 here six months later. Chapeau!
Anyway, I remember thinking that “Pass The Dutchie” was the kind of song that would make me want to leave the country if it ever made number one – and it hit the top in the chart that was announced a few hours after my ferry left Weymouth. Like you, Tom, I’ve had something of a change of heart – when I saw an 80s video compilation recently, this one had me smiling from the off at its vivacity, good humour (even if it is about peeps with no food) and sunshiney nonsense.
And really the song’s about driving from Belgium to Germany avoiding Luxembourg, innit? You go through Alsace and pass the Duchy ‘pon de left hand side… I’ll get me coat.
Number 2 watch – would have been a fabulous summer hit, and brightened up October no end – “Zoom” by Fat Larry’s Band.
Like Tom, this is one of the songs on Popular with which there is the most disparity between my boy and man reactions.
Musical Youth certainly recieved saturation publicity in October 1982. As children suceeding in a grown-up world, they were loved as a heartwarming success story by both grown-up and childrens’ television, explaining for the umpteenth time what a dutchie was, with a regularity that was grating to all but Musical Youth fans.
In all honesty, my annoyance with this was more due to cultural unfamiliarity than anything else, which is ironic as this was the first hit single made by my peers. Despite growing up in South London, my primary school was almost entirely white and all reggae and rasta culture was beyond my comprehension and slightly threatening to me – something to remind me that I wasn’t in Blackheath any more when I went to Lewisham! This wasn’t helped by the fact that I couldn’t follow any West Indian accent until I went to secondary school – any black person who talked to me as a child must have thought me a very vague and wary boy.
I find all of this embarrasing to recollect, but not shaming.
Anyway, I wasn’t going to like Musical Youth, because I was never going to be able to get a handle on them at that age. Now I can see just what funny and agreeable single this is, but I’ve learnt that rather too late in the day!
I loved it, and I think possible performed it in a year assembly with four other all white musical youths. Ulp. I am pretty sure I did the biddly biddly bong bits.
(Of course, I was probably singing the other bits too being
a) hideously precocious
b) convinced that I could sing two vocal lines AT THE SAME TIME out of different sides of my mouth.)
I have to admit even though the druqs conversation went on around our school too, I tended to ignore it. For some reason I have an intense memory of this song coupled with playing Scalextrix (or more likely a knock off) round a friends house which they performed it on Blue Peter. I also remember thinking this was bad form, because Blue Peter was not a place for pop music.
Loved it at the time – probably a bit excited that they were kids/noticeably younger than any pop I’d encountered so far (was too young to remember St Winifred’s choir mercifully) and got a similar feeling from a young US boyband a year or so later. The appeal didn’t last long tho – certainly not something I ever returned to after it’s peak of popularity. Feels like the reggae-based #1s of the 80s have this sense of naffness that’s hard to shake off – probably just down to the timing (me going into the 90s as a young teenager unimpressed by the inoffensive sunny simplicity) from my pov. Too hard to hate now and wouldn’t want to.
TOTPWatch: Rather oddly, only one late appearance for ‘Pass The Dutchie’ on Top of the Pops;
December the 25th, 1982. Also in the studio for that edition were; Spandau Ballet, Shakin’ Stevens, Bucks Fizz, Duran Duran, Dexy’s Midnight Runners, captain Sensible, Culture Club, Soft Cell, Haircut 100 and Cliff Richard, plus Zoo’s interpretations of ‘I’ve Never Been To Me’ and ‘Yellow Pearl’. ‘The Radio 1 DJs’ were the hosts.
(Incidentally, this marks Zoo’s penultimate appearance. The final one is interpreting ‘ Walking on Sunshine’ on December the 30th 1982 and – with that – the age of the TOTP dancing troupe was sadly over)
there’s an element of sadness for me, as a grown-up, because this was an example that played out in real-time of the Industry gobbling up likeable people and spitting them out raw and bloody: the LP — which we rushed out eagerly to buy — was really quite patchy, though we willed it to seem better than it was; and the Youth failed to adapt and prosper, and one of them went into unreversible decline, dead at just 24, which is melancholy…
among my very knowledgeable reggae-snob pals at the time, there was of course much pressure to acknowledge that the original was much better (plus i was still an PUNK ROCKER sorta kinda and hence disapproved mightily of drugs and etc)
Tick vg from me – I first heard this during the 1993 ragga revival on a compilation tape. Although I was fairly sure this was not a song about a cooking pot I didn’t really twig that it was druqks, but then again vast reams of rap and reggae stuff (Shaggy, Snow, Shabba Ranks) were impenetrable to me and I didn’t care, I just sang along with the closest approximation I could work out.
Althea & Donna (on the same compilation tape!) were better though.
Reissued in the early nineties as i recall (Now 26? Now 27?) The first time I heard it was with my mate Danny Dutton who excitedly informed me that a dutchie was a spliff. I remember thinking they sounded a bit young to be tokin’ de herb…
The five year-old me LOVED this, especially since my little brother was toilet training at the time and we’d all run around the house singing “Pass the potty on the left-hand side.” TRUFAX.
the original is by the mighty diamonds btw — and haha i just found a version by sonic youth i see what they did there
This confused me more than anything else but don’t blame the yoof. Having swallowed the cooking pot line, I was stumped by this jolly little song about a group of ravenous black kids from Brum sharing a meagre warmed-up pot of yesterday’s soup with each other. This perceived wisdom, hastily released by the group’s management (and total shite, of course), undoubtedly saved it from the ban which that sanctimonious git Mike Read was to successfully apply to a bunny-embargoed piece known to everyone. The innocence of the whole affair seems now almost charming, especially when one considers the all too recent advent of “gangsta rap”, the application of which is not in doubt and several times more unpleasant than a gang of young herberts having a communal puff, a sensation, I would suggest, not alien to some of my fellow contributors..
The sad line about Musical Youth, as Mark has said, is the fact that one of these boys made a very early trip to Boot Hill, another became a guest of Brenda’s without the luxuary of passing GO, and sundry others ended up in the sort of occupations which most lads of an insignificant education are obliged to accept. Basically, the industry was not good to them after Shylock had been and gone.
Erithian – Your Luxembourg gag was a cracker, mate.
…but it wasn’t a load of bollocks a Dutchie (Dutch pot) is a Caribbean cooking-pot – they changed it from “kutchie” (sp?) which was the ganja
i’m not sure that “dutchie” WAS a name for a spliff when the record came out, though it quite soon became one: the original song was “pass the kouchie” and was pretty clear in its drift — “(How does it feel when you’ve got no herb?)”; the song MY recorded was called “pass the dutchie”, but the words were changed too — “(How does it feel when you’ve got no food ?)” — so the attempt to shift (or disguise) the meaning, to turn it into a song about hunger and friendliness in a poor neighbourhood*, wasn’t a hasty afterthought; it was a forethought, it came in the studio…
however too many people knew the original, and the older meaning bled up through the new one — too many people enjoyed “being in the know” for the cover to hold
*the food meaning isn’t entirely implausible or silly — a dutchie really is a small cooking pot, and communal food is just as much a sacrament to those who don’t always have it and need it, as weed is to those who ditto ditto, BUT i think the worthiness of the revised version is a wee bit of a sentimental deflation in the mouths of the singers in question; cheekiness was a better meaning and the disguise unravelled
I seem to remember (and heavens, is it really more than twenty-five years because it scarcely seems twenty-five minutes) always knowing that the song was about passing dope – either a spliff or some kind of pipe. What I don’t know is whether I assumed this in my cynicism or whether I heard it from somebody more authoritative than I. There was lots of authority on the subject of illicit substances in the Arbury/Kings Hedges area of Cambridge where I was living at the time – a district which the fingers of the University seldom penetrated.
I liked it at the time and I like it now. It has the sense of having an enlightened music teacher behind it, although I don’t know if that is in fact the case. If it is, it makes a good contrast with the St Winifreds train crash. Either way, it sits at some considerable distance from the Caribbean roots music I’d become familar with a couple of years hence.
I’m surprised to discover that Fat Larry’s “Zoom” got as high as #2, I’d always thought of that as one of those soul boy favourites that didn’t bother the proper charts, but I’m probably thinking of “Act Like You Know” instead. Which is odd because I have a vivid memory of slow dancing to ‘Zoom’ with this girl I had fancied for ages at a house party at the time and her letting me down gently when I confessed my ardour (ie: she said ‘no’)
This record did get a little annoying after a while but hard not be won over by its charm, at least at first.
I just had to go look up what I was doing in October 1982 and found I had just started my art Foundation Course at the City of London Polytechnic. Tracy Emin was there too, and was later to follow me to Maidstone College of Art (well, not follow me, but it was odd that she cropped up at the same college again)
Rosie at 16: I seem to remember that from the word go (ie from when it first entered the charts) that it was common knowledge that they’d toned it down (as kids were singing it) ie changed the lyrics from a spliff to a cooking-pot. It was just mentioned in passing in the tabloids/the music press… not as I remember as a ‘shock horror’ or anything.
oct 82 i’d graduated and was bumming around oxford on the dole — teaching a tiny little bit — while everyone else in the band was still a student: i spent a LOT of time hanging w.ppl* who smoked dope** and played non-stop reggae and soul… i remember that summer and autumn as being a kind of lovely mellow highpoint of both, actually (when it’s light i’ll dig out some tapes for highlights) (“How does it feel when you’ve got no bulbs?”)
i wanted to come to london to be a writer, but i hadn’t made any attempts to start this project —
*not really soulboys, at least in the usual sense of this
**i really didn’t, i didn’t drink either — or do heroin, which several foax on the edge of our acquaintance circle did (one i was a bit in love with: now more than 20 years dead)
Andy # 14 & Mark # 15 – Yes, I should have qualified what I said with regards “kouchie” and “dutchie”. The lyric was indeed changed to fit the innocence of the song for release, “food” for “weed” etc. But from the word go, there were always questions asked about what it was REALLY about, usually from people who knew only too well. Cooking pot and food for presentaion, yes, but pot all the same. To make matters even more absurd, I encountered my own “Dutchie” on a stand at a food fare in Eastbourne once. It turned out to be an inordinately large hot dog. Bloody bizarre.
hunting around i found kouchie, kuchie and kutchie — chances are all these can be found on record sleeves, which take a relaxed attitude to orthography
Was there something uniquely golden in the Autumn light of October 1982? It seemed so somehow.
Anyhow, didn’t know what to make of this at all when it jumped from 26 (I think) to Number 1. It was quite a shock, and not at all what I normally listened to. I really enjoy its good natured vibe now.
#7 .. I thought I remembered it as keeping ‘The Bitterest Pill’ from No 1 and how it leapt from No16 to No1 after a play on TOTP. A jump up the charts of that ilk was quite rare back then?
Very much enjoyed its lemon-and-lime summeriness at the time, and its easy appropriation of the Jackson Five vibe. Can’t remember the follow-up, but Never Gonna Give You Up from the following year was equally charming.
Re 22: It must have been a crisp autumn because I’d have laid good money on this being a late summer hit. I associate it with watching (the rather dire) Tucker’s Luck.
As for Zoom, I couldn’t get past the awful lyric (“All of a sudden we were on the moon, flying high in a neon sky”). If it was a parody of moon june spoon, Jonathan King did it better on Everyone’s Gone To The Moon, but I think Fat Larry’s were just trying to sound icky-sweet.
You’re both partially right – up from 26 to 1, keeping “The Bitterest Pill” at 2 while “Zoom” went from 17 to 3. Survivor dropped to 4 and Shalamar’s “There It Is” was 5.
Katie #11 – so it’s not just me that alters lyrics for babies’ functions! In early 2000, while up to my elbows in my twins’ by-products, I took to singing a revised version of Britney: “I was born to change your nappy”…
24, The Yooot of Today – a really good follow-up.
23, I think Billy lists the studio appearances of acts on TOTP, as opposed to their representation on video.
I’m sure the “Pass The Dutchie” video would have been shown the week it entered at 26 (though I don’t remember it at all).
Erithian, some great disco/electro in the chart at this point. Loved “There It Is” and bought the “Friends” album on the back of it. Also, you had such choice items as “Do You Wanna Funk” and “Love Come Down”.
thinking about that autumn last night — and this whole coming year for me really, sep 82 to sep 83, the year i hung around in the scrappy margins doing almost nothing while the band sat its exams and decided its fate — sent me off on a full bittersweet internet search for the lives now of my companions then
of the nine people who ever* took the stage as a jazz insect, two dead (suicide pact), three (inc me) not unsuccessful in their chosen sphere, four vanished beyond reach of google (for sharing names with too many others: unless the drummer has magically shed 30 years and become a super-cute male model); i trust the latter are content and comfy where they are, and dunc i should actually call up and go see, as he is a lovely man
*more than once, anyway — i think the wow fed guitarist depped for me in brighton once when i had an exam or similar frippery, and have doubtless forgotten other similar occasions
AWESOME – how often does it update?
Hmm comment #28 was posted to the “Populist” thread and showed up here…
I thought Tucker’s Luck was an interesting attempt to do something Boys-from-the-Blackstuffy in yoof TV – straight out of Grange Hill and onto the dole, hanging around grim shopping precincts all day long – but this is based on a hazy memory of 1st episode only, and yes, interesting rather than ‘good’
Without getting too nostalgia-fest, can anyone remember the name of a series from around this time featuring two boys, once called Johnny leaving school & signing on, one of them eventually becomes a moderately successful musician writing songs about the other one’s dead end life: featuring a rather jaunty song that went something like “Johnny gets the post every monday morning / he’s hoping things are gonna get better / like waiting for a lover who’se a long time gone / to send you a begging letter”? Also fairly dire, but one likes to nail these memories down if one can
It was ok – the chorus was/is a little irritating and the novelty value of the ‘drugs’ ref didn’t seem to last long. My chart reggae of choice would have been ‘Walking On Sunshine’ at this time and there seemed to be much better singles in the chart for me to spend with i.e. Duran, Talk Talk, Simple Minds, Depeche Mode, Dexys, Kid Creole, Mari Wilson, Shalamar, Evelyn King, Fat Larry and even, shock – horror, Dire Straits (Private Investigations).
I was 12 or 13 and just old enough (or, put it another way, had a big brother old enough) to have heard Musical Youth on John Peel and to know they had had a single out on 021 records (home of the Au Pairs! I liked the Au Pairs). I also had a nascent indie-ist’s sense of the importance of something being cool and real/proper.
So I was kinda sorta wary of the naff elements of the way MY were presented (why did they have to colour code the lads?) but their having grown out of something which fell into the “cool” bucket gave me an excellent excuse to think this record was good. That was a result, because I really liked it, and still do.
Re: #25 My wife sings a version of “Super Trouper” to our 2-year-old entitled “Super Pooper”
Bless.
this is super lovely. i haven’t heard it for a while so i might be imagining this, but isn’t part of why it sounds so summery and cheerful because it uses that great staple of 80’s kids tv, the steel drum, in a way that most (even pop) reggae doesn’t really. (conversely i may be imagining this lack of steel drum use in most reggae).
i really can’t remember whether i liked it at the time though. biddly bong was certainly a big playground catchphrase, and i probably liked the fact they were also from birmingham (though to be honest, to nine year old me in solihull, aston may as well have been the moon), but i have a feeling that i didn’t really get reggae. certainly later, even until i was in my late teens, reggae was pretty much the only musical genre that i flat out didn’t like. it was a beautiful thing once i realised that it wasn’t reggae that was boring and plodding and dull and fatuous, it was BOB BLEEDING MARLEY (and particularly pretty much everything on ‘legend’).*
but anyway, did john peel break them? certainly the inner sleeve of the album features a great bash street kids style cartoon telling the story of the yoot, in which he features heavily (in a predictably avuncluar role).
when we were horrible teenagers we thought the band members’ sundry burglary convictions were hilarious and used to sing the chorus as “pass the telly on the left hand side”.
finally, i’m not sure whether no one’s mentioned this until now because it’s so obvious or because it’s crazy talk, but isn’t the “thiiiiis generation” intro (nicked from U-roy, btw) sampled to great effect by public enemy on ‘fear of a black planet’?
*er, possibly this view is not universally held.
Re #24 Hurray! Another Marleysceptic! I can sometimes hear good things in The Wailers musically, but he is for me the dullest and most platitudinous songwriter in the entire rock canon.
Re 25: 26 to 1, that’s right. I think Happy Talk went from 33 to 1 just weeks earlier, which may still be the biggest bound to no.1 in chart history*. Previous record holder was the Beatles’ Hey Jude which leapt from 27 to 1 (not wanting to re-re-stir a hornets’ nest!).
*Also seems to have only spent three weeks in the Top 10, two at number one, which was surely a uniquely quick rise and fall prior to the nineties when it became the norm.
Re 35: Another Bob Bleedin Marley sceptic here. I genuinely don’t get his legendary status, compared to an innovator like King Tubby – is it purely marketing? If it’s down to his making reggae better known around the world, I don’t see how that makes him any more significant than Bill Haley (who was surely more innovative). Happy to be enlightened. And I do love much of the Wailing Wailers album.
Has anyone seen the Will Smith film ‘I Am Legend’? I mention it because I caught it on cable the other day and Bob Marley features prominently in it. Smith’s character drives around a 28-Days-Later deserted New York in a SUV blaring out Marley tunes (all the obvious ‘Legend’ ones) and then he meets another survivor of the virus, a 30-something woman who has never heard of Bob Marley which would be ludicrous in itself if it wasn’t obviously just so Smith could give her a little lecture on what a great man ol’ Bob was because he believed he could cure hate with a song (I think Smith actually uses those words). Smith’s character is a doctor see, and he’s trying to find a cure for the nasty zombie virus. Get the connection? It was a rotten, stupid film anyway but that sent it right off the cliff.
Bunny Wailer “Blackheart Man”. One of my favourite albums of all time. An absolutely beautiful record.
I don’t mind Bob, but agree he gets a disproportionate amount of coverage.
The Marley-sceptic could check out the 1975(?) “Live at the Lyceum” album, as much for the raw energy and gusto of the band as Marley’s vocal performances. Much more to enjoy than on some of the too-nicely-produced studio recordings of the same period.
The Marley connection in I Am LEGEND is even more explicit, as his son, who he failed to save, was actually named Marley. Of course he should have called him Legend and then the film would have been “He Was Legend”.
The music links don’t stop there with I Am Legend. Will Smith plays Robert Nevil, who I am sure was known as Robbie Nevil in younger days. I am sure when he looked out at a deserted New York he could not help but mutter the words of C’est La Vie under his breath.
“I am Babylon by Bus”
my reggae-snob pals upthread had a constant joke-refrain — possibly semi-derived from our pals 10CC — abt students (most of them were students too) coming up to the DJ (ie of them) and saying “Have you got some decent reggae? UB40?” — in their sourer moods this became “Have you got some decent reggae? Bob Marley and the Wailers?”
there’s actually a nice — if unlinkable — piece in the newest new york review of books about him (ostensibly about books about him, one by the great viv goldman), and his role as a third-world liberation icon: how a lot of his pan-global reach was because of his simplicity and translateability… it made me want to relisten, but i never got my 4-CD box set back off the guy who lived downstairs (cousin of lloyd coxsone) (he said)
A lot of Bob is played here at SOAS, and I have never minded him. But certainly what you say is true about his status, one wonders how much his untimely death also caused this (or stopped a global juggernaut that would have got even bigger). He was a terrific performer whose recordings are often a lot more anodyne than they needed to be, but perhaps this does bring in the universality of his music. It is important that he was a black superstar who was not American and made both is mixed race and African ties very explicit. So certainly he is seen as a non-violent liberation icon of many African students. Plus students love him as an excellent dope ambassador (though many overlook the potential links between excessive dope smoking and cancer, which Bob died of).
yes i meant to say that — he was 36 when he died! he would only be 64 now
he’d had time to shift his style and approach once, massively (the early all-wailers stuff is undimmed, partly bcz bunny w has such a fab voice)
pete you know as well as i do that it was not dope it was d4nny b4ker killed BM, by stampin on his toe playing football (it’s even mentioned in the nyrb! tho it shamefully redacts the name of the guilty party…)
I heard Baker killed Bambi too but I don’t believe it.
no 34: if that’s the “thiiis generation” which is followed by “rules the nation” it was sampled on a few hardcore tracks too – and all ths time I never realised it came from Musical Youth – I haven’t heard this track since about 1983 though!
Re#31- pretty sure that would be Johnny Jarvis which 9-year-old me found totally terrifing and depressing at the time with its none-more-bleak portrayal of the teenage and early adult life which awaited me-god, just thinking about it sends a shiver up my spine even now
Re#44- PTD was also sampled by Public Enemy on Revolutionary Generation in 1990..
i always thought my true love of pop music etc kicked off in 1983 so i’m suprised how clearly i recall the suprise and shock i experienced when this leapt from #26 to the top-helped by my big sister purchasing a copy. Like most comments here i liked it then(dont recall any drugs discussion about it at my school whatsoever though) and i still really like it now- Tom’s “I Want You Back”/”Uptown Ranking” interface description is spot on too. 7 seems about right.
Didnt MY do a version of the Jimll Fix It theme at the fag-end of their career btw?
Bob Marley’s not my absolute favourite either but it may be that some of the sceptics underrate his best work as a reaction to his legend status (and the fame of some of his less-great stuff)?
Some of those late ’60s / early 70s recordings with Lee Perry were important chunks of early reggae; he was there or thereabouts as reggae slowed into roots and hit its broadest Western audience; also purists may not like but the mid-late 70s period stuff with the slightly rocky overtones was the birth of “international reggae” as I believe it’s known.
I think Pete’s right about his status as a liberation icon, and that surely counts towards a lot of people’s fondness for him. The other thing is, the guy was an absolute, slam-dunk, charisma-packed *star*: it’s surely true that there were greater innovators in Jamaican music during the period but comparing BM to the great King Tubby (as I think Wichita does upthread, not meaning to be fighty) is maybe a bit like saying “I don’t get why Mick Jagger is this huge legend when Joe Meek was much more innovative…” The star thing is important, I think.
Lastly: Bob’s highest-profile work has not always been kindly treated by remixers over the years.
shd be “outernational reggae”, surely?
45 – johnny jarvis, yes. thanks crag. and 2 minutes of wikiresearch suggests a tucker’s luck link, in that mark farmer who played johnny jarvis was also in grange hill. (I can’t for the life of me imagine why everyone else is discussing bob marley rather than this sort of thing)
Perhaps already mentioned by one of the zillion other commenters is how Musical Youth got to appear on some schools and colleges ITV programme to talk about song lyrics and how they are like poetry and stuff, an effort to make the English language trendy with the young people. Sadly, the powers that be kept showing the programme long after Musical Youth ceased being even remotely popular, causing a whole generation of youngsters to turn away from English literature.
Re 46: Kinda sorta… but always easiest when it’s a combination of zeitgeist originality and star quality (eg Jagger w/Satisfaction). I was dangling the baldy, t shirt wearing King Tubby in the air as a floating stalking horse, and yes I agree w/Meek comparison. But that still doesn’t reeeeally explain Marley’s appeal beyond the cartoon student smoke haze and the odd great pop song (eg Is This Love). Must’ve been lots of better singers (from my vague knowledge) who would have been equally well positioned at the start of the 70s, politically and artistically.