Comments on: JACKIE WILSON – “Reet Petite”

By: vinylscot

vinylscot — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 20:07:13 +0000

Sorry to come to this one so late – has anyone else heard really strong echoes of this record in Paolo Nutini’s recent “Pencil Full Of Lead” ditty?

By: Jimmy the Swede

Jimmy the Swede — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 12:54:13 +0000

But of course Wilson was a Geordie! You’ve all heard of “Wor Jackie”, haven’t you?

By: anto

anto — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 22:47:20 +0000

Re :55 I wouldn’t say I can’t stand it but I don’t especially rate it.
I didn’t realise it was so well thought of. I assumed even Jackie Wilson fans considered it a bit lightweight.

By: abaffledrepublic

abaffledrepublic — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 19:41:43 +0000

Am I the only one here who can’t stand this record? I don’t know whether it’s the OTT vocals, the stupid naff horns that echo them or the overall feeling of enforced jollity that probably made it a big hit at Christmas parties. Whatever, I hated it at the time and still hate it now. The video gave me the creeps as well.

Much much better just around the corner though, and totally agree with all those praising the Oran Juice Jones tune, it’s absolute class.

By: wichita lineman

wichita lineman — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 17:04:13 +0000

I was thinking of her as part of the Live Aid era establishment, most safe and dull. I love the Yazoo stuff but, boy, did she become an oldster before her time. Quite a lot of warmth upthread for Is This Love, mind you! Still sounds like a 5th rate Cher album track to me, with the most unnecessarily loud snare in all pop history.

By: MikeMCSG

MikeMCSG — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 16:29:21 +0000

#22 wl – Alison Moyet was/is not a pre-punk oldster. Her first record was Yazoo’s Only You in 1982 a synthpop classic. It’s a shame she sullied her reputation with those awful supper club covers when she went solo.

By: Rory

Rory — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 14:29:51 +0000

Aha: its impact in Oz was regional, and it didn’t do well in Sydney, which suggests it wouldn’t have charted highly overall. #42 Sydney, #11 Melbourne, #17 Brisbane, #1 Adelaide, #29 Perth. No idea about Hobart, but that at least explains your memory of it, Snif.

By: Erithian

Erithian — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 13:59:23 +0000

For this and a lot of questions from my youth I turn to the back issues of Mad magazine. At a point in the early 70s when Howard Hughes was believed to be on the point of emerging from his reclusive existence, “Mad” carried a feature titled “Inside Howard Hughes’s Wallet” which purported to show the documents he’d collected prior to coming back into the public eye. The gag was that his world-view was stuck in the 40s – so for instance he wanted to do a TV interview with Milton Berle on the Texaco Star Theatre because he’d never heard of Johnny Carson. And in one letter to a friend he said he was looking forward to hitting New York because he had “a zoot suit with a reet pleat and a drape shape that’ll knock the bobbysox offa them!” So that’s what the word “reet” signified to me when I first heard this song sometime in the 70s – something vaguely affirmatory and definitely cool, albeit stuck in a time-warp.

As a record, yes I enjoyed it, if not as much as “I Get The Sweetest Feeling”, it was certainly fun. The video I didn’t go overboard for – yes it was fun too, but detracted slightly from the record as being somebody else’s interpretation of it. But, risking opening a can of worms here, is it really racist? Any claymation/Aardman-type animation is going to involve a degree of caricature, and if you’re caricaturing someone you have to focus on their distinguishing features. If you’re a political cartoonist, it’s almost racist *not* to lampoon Obama now and again, and if you do so you have to exaggerate facial features the way you would with Gordon Brown. With Jackie Wilson, it’s a portrayal of an individual black man rather than a minstrel “type”, and surely, too, it’s showing affection rather than ridicule.

By: thefatgit

thefatgit — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 13:23:45 +0000

“Reet” being Geordie for “right” is also listed on Babynames.com as the greek name for “Pearl” (and there’s me thinking it was short for Rita) who knew? I’m willing to guess that there are obselete meanings from the ’40s/’50s that we have no knowledge of (unless someone can prove otherwise).

By: Gavin Wright

Gavin Wright — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 13:23:06 +0000

Totally agree with #20 and #21 about the video – I saw it recently on one of those ‘Every Number One of the Eighties’ music channel countdowns and found it incredibly unpleasant. I’d agree with Tom’s mark for the song itself – it’s a great vocal, even if I prefer the other big Jackie Wilson hits.

As for the reissues thing, it was more or less standard practice by the time I’d started paying attention to the charts – in fact I remember when Madness had a hit with a re-released ‘It Must Be Love’ in 1992 I was confused that there didn’t appear to be a proper *reason* for it. Of course there was the then-new Divine Madness hits compilation (my first ever album as it happens) but I just assumed there must be an advert or film or *something* to explain the timing – of course it turned out to be the Madstock-era reunion but the idea of bands splitting up and reforming was alien to me at that point…

By: Rory

Rory — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 12:51:46 +0000

#43 – really? I’m amazed. Genuinely hadn’t heard it before, even though I was still keeping an eye and an ear out in ’87. Now if it had been ’89, I wouldn’t have had a clue…

So did it chart? I can’t find any stats online, and my old pile of Australian Music Report charts is long gone.

By: wichita lineman

wichita lineman — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 09:18:38 +0000

Re 40. Atmospherically? Both got sound effects, dead moody, about being in the rain, y’know…

By: Elsa

Elsa — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 23:09:08 +0000

Rosie: Crazy, man, crazy. How did Jackie end up using a bit of Geordie slang?

By: Snif

Snif — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 23:00:47 +0000

#23 and #43 – It also got plenty of airplay (and TV play on local music shows) in Adelaide!

I seem to recall reading/hearing somewhere that Nina Simone absolutely hated the Aardman film clip for “My Baby Just Cares For Me.”

By: rosie

rosie — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 22:48:48 +0000

Elsa @ 42: Beside the Tyne they say ‘reet’ all the time. Also, it is a few years since I attended jive nights regularly but I believe there is a still a dedicated band of lindyhoppers dedicated to getting in the way of their deadly rivals the lerocers!

By: Matthew K

Matthew K — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 22:38:43 +0000

#23 – Rory, I can assure you this song and its clay video were most definitely on the air and in my brain back in 1987 Tasmania. Probably as a result I can admire it for its pop brilliance and great performance, but I feel nothing but irritation when I hear it. I tend to prefer soulless music to soul any day.

By: Elsa

Elsa — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 22:30:14 +0000

I wonder when was the last time a man or woman on the street used the word “reet.” That bit of slang is deader than the Lindy Hop.

By: LondonLee

LondonLee — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 21:49:56 +0000

The version of ‘Grapevine’ in the Nick Kamen 501s ad was a sound-a-like cover version because, I think, record companies weren’t wise to the marketing potential and didn’t want their music cheapened by use in a commercial. They soon got wise obviously and ad agencies started to employ people to dig up oldies to use. I had two mates working at Saatchi & Saatchi at the time who were working on a Burger King campaign (think it was) and they came round my flat one night to dig through my soul records to see if any might be suitable. They ended up choosing “Me and Baby Brother” by War, but I assume the client didn’t go for it otherwise we might have been talking about that record at some point.

I hated this video back then, thought it turned Jackie Wilson into a novelty act though admitedly his operatic vocal style could get a tad cartoony at times. A lot of fun but I prefer him being more soulful like ‘I Get The Sweetest Feeling” and it’s thumping b-side “Soul Galore”

By: AndyPandy

AndyPandy — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 19:55:20 +0000

Oran ‘Juice’ Jones “The Rain” and the Dramatics “In the Rain” are completely different songs both tune and lyrics-wise – the former sort of a revenge song the latter the singer describing walking in the rain to hide his tears.

Parts of The Dramatics distinctive instrumentation has been sampled in on more than 1 occasion by hardcore and techno tracks.

It’s debatable whether this could be described as “soul” as we came to know it and by my time may have been played at a rock n roll/doowop club but definitely not a soul club.
Having said that “I Get the Sweetest Feeling” was one of the rare pre-1970s hits that you would hear at soul/funk clubs/weekenders while that scene still existed pre-1988.

By: Elsa

Elsa — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 16:59:42 +0000

In the States a lot of TV programs (as we call them) from the ’60s or earlier were never preserved at all on any medium and are lost. If they were on videotape originally the tapes were often erased to be used for new programming. Infamously, the 1968 appearance of Lennon & McCartney on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show when they were announcing the formation of Apple was not saved by the network.. the only version of it I’ve seen is a grainy film that some TV watcher made by pointing a portable camera at his TV screen.

By: wichita lineman

wichita lineman — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 16:24:46 +0000

Re 31: Good call. 1975 was a stinker of a year, though Young Girl and Fleetwood Mac’s Albatross had both gone Top 10 again in ’74. 1975 also saw Je T’Aime and The Israelites back in the chart, as if there was some weird 1969 mini-revival. One of the Top 40′s more obscure mysteries.

The doo wop revival, which was represented on Popular by Blue Moon, similarly saw oldies re-chart in the fallow period of 1960/61.

By: Billy Smart

Billy Smart — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 15:48:34 +0000

Because old videotape was so expensive, BBC programmes were transferred to 16mm telecine recordings until the early 1970s, which also meant that copies could be reproduced and distributed.

I’m not sure when precisely in the 1970s the practice changes, but I do know that the BBC started systematically recording and keeping all programmes on videotape in the autumn of 1977.

Each ITV company had its own archiving policy (ATV’s seeming to be “throw it away!”)

By: thefatgit

thefatgit — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 15:41:03 +0000

@33 Billy, is there a specific year when broadcasters’*archived recorded material switched to video tape? And was cellulose film used before then?

By: a tanned rested and unlogged lørd sükråt wötsît

a tanned rested and unlogged lørd sükråt wötsît — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 15:30:56 +0000

seventh seal watch: tich and quackers on bit-torrent

By: Tom

Tom — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 15:04:29 +0000

#33 Music’s actually a lot further along – while there’s a hell of a lot of old digitised TV out there to get the more obscure stuff still requires a good deal more legwork than music.