WINGS - “Mull Of Kintyre”/”Girls School”
This has the slightly dubious distinction of being the first record I ever disliked. I barely knew about records at all, I was four and three quarters: so my cynicism started early, if you like. This one was inescapable - number one for nine weeks, two million sold, flattening the opposition through Christmas ‘77 and then on into ‘78. I didn’t know what number ones were but I guess I just got bored of “Mull” being around, its comforting lullaby sway pushing into even our pop-free household*. I remember not being able to figure out what a Mull was, or a Kintyre: I’d been reading the Hobbit, and the Narnia books, so I reckoned it was an honorific, like King, or Tarkaan. And this dark haired guy singing it, he’d be the Mull, then? … read on …
A young - or maybe not so young - woman, settled in her own mind to unhappy but unruffled spinsterhood, finds her hopes unexpectedly awakened. Can she trust her instincts? Can she even read them? Can this really be happening? “The Name Of The Game”’s scenario is romance-novel standard, and its emotional territory is ABBA heartland, the twilit world as a relationship shifts between ‘on’ and ‘off’. ABBA regularly find unease where most pop strides boldly forward: “Name”, in its ambition as well as its mood, anticipates “The Day Before You Came” (which could be its narrative prequel). 
“Already told you in the first werse…”: I’m not sure whether “Yes Sir” is deceptively dumb or deceptively clever. On the one hand you can see why Goldfrapp, Sophie Ellis-Bextor and a generation of raised-eyebrow indie fans have been drawn to it. The arch and chilly fourth-wall breaking which inverts the song, recasting it as the hustle it always was, is smart stuff. On the other hand it’s not just pretending to be a low-rent “Love To Love You Baby”. 
I can’t help but wish this had been Elvis’ last single, though David Soul does a more than satisfactory job by himself. Where “Don’t Give Up On Us Baby” was a singer playing a role refracted through a TV character, “Silver Lady” drops the hearthrob palaver and sounds more like Soul’s just having a good time, singing the pop he wants to sing while his star’s bright enough to allow it. In that sense it’s closer to a lot of modern sleb-goes-pop material - chuck a saleable song the celebrity’s way, let them have a bash at it. 
Elvis’ first posthumous Number One is like a miniature of his career: a brilliant beginning, a saggy middle, and it ends way too soon. Elvis comes out fighting, swaying and swaggering over a roiling disco boogie - when the brass stabs in on ”all of my resistance” it’s a genuine thrill. His voice is still iconic: its slurs and mumbles an economical, broadstroke sketch of Presley past, but born of expertise as much as laziness. ”Way Down” is let down by its chorus, whose jauntiness sweeps all tension away and whose ending dispels any momentum: the song’s components just never really fit together. 
The format of “Float On” - each Floater steps forward, makes his pitch, retires beckoning - doesn’t just anticipate Blind Date, it’s also a basic formula for early group hip-hop: every member trying to outdo the last. For my money, the winning Floater here is surely Larry, largely for his magnificently self-confident use of the third-person. But your floatage may vary, and really there’s only one way to sort this one out:
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Without theft, there is no pop, but it’s still rather squirmsome to hear the more lumbering attempts. Brotherhood of Man’s - let’s be generous - tribute to ABBA fails partly because it doesn’t stick closely ENOUGH to its source material. ABBA records gain what emotional power they have from the force of the melody and performance letting you fill in what the lyrics miss out. 
One of the remarkable things about “I Feel Love” is that it still sounds futuristic now. Not because the effects and techniques it uses remain way ahead of what pop’s capable of, but because it helped fix the idea of what “the future” would sound like: its specific mix of voice and electronics evoking gleaming hedonism, endless clockwork pleasure. “I Feel Love”, like robots and spaceships on sci-fi magazine covers, represents a fixed future we can’t ever quite get past. 
Errol Brown brought angst to the dancefloor as regularly as Michael Jackson ever would, but Hot Chocolate’s neuroses were way more effortful, dredged up from some inner coil of dissatisfaction. The rising riff on “So You Win Again” sounds - in the best possible way - leaden, an anchor chain around Brown’s hopes, forever pulling him down. “Here I am again - A LOSER.” It’s not the best Hot Chocolate track - that might be the dystopic “Mindless Boogie”, or the uncomfortably pitiful “It Started With A Kiss”, or “Everyone’s A Winner”, this track’s savage flipside - but what it shares with the band’s best work is the sense of a man wearing a shabby overcoat of disappointment, doomed to misery.
A key player in Popular to come steps lightly onto the scene: Michael Jackson (with brothers) was already a star but his ball-of-energy performances on the Jackson Five’s hits had always just missed out on the UK #1. On “Show You The Way To Go” he’s a subtler presence, cajoling rather than exploding. His presence - still charismatic, still show-stealing - is a ripple of excitement in “Show You”’s smooth groove. Or maybe that’s just hindsight?
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