THE WURZELS – "Combine Harvester (Brand New Key)"

Yeah, you wouldn’t want to put it on to listen to, but when you occasionally come across it by chance then it does cheer rather than grate, I find. A particular pleasure is how the accents fit around the lyrics; “Wooiiygoddabrandnookombynehaaaarvestur” etc.

Ah well, you had to be there you see. ‘There’ in this case being the smoky back room of some Brissle pub, or preferably cider house. (Don’t know when

Unfortunately I really only have anecdotal evidence for this because I didn’t blow into Bristol until eighteen years later, but Bristol is that kind of place and Adge Cutler is revered even now. His Moonlight on the Malago is not easily forgotten – the Malago being a river, or more like a ditch, in South Bristol full of rusty supermarket trolleys and other detritus.

And there’s the rub – this could only really be a product of Bristol, a city that can’t make up its mind if it’s in Gloucestershire or Somerset; a hard-edged and gritty urban landscape with a popular bucolic image. The paradox is being milked, as it were, for all it was worth.

Of course, with a novelty record like this it’s always worth looking to see what’s on the B-side – I don’t know what it is in this case, but an innocuous A-side often provided cover for something lustier on the reverse.

Meanwhile, its first week of tenure was one of those watersheds in one’s life. On the first Saturday, which as it happens was the Saturday of the Lord’s Test against the West Indies and the day was completely washed out – an irony in view of what was to come, I was invited to a graduation party at the Reading University Boat Club. It drizzled all evening. I was being chatted up at one point by a public school type who mysteriously vanished when I revealed that I was a friend of Chris’s from Welwyn Garden City and left me wondering what the hell I had done. I was naive in the social niceties. On the following Monday, another dank drizzly day, I left Reading to go to Liverpool for the last time, to get my PGCE results (I passed, and so had a job to go to in September) and to collect the last of my belongings. I wouldn’t see rain again until August Bank Holiday, in Hull. On Wednesday I returned to Welwyn Garden City on one of those nightmare train journeys that took hours on a packed train whose air-conditioning had failed on a baking hot day and which was diverted via Leicester. No fun at all. And I was home in time to help my parents move to Reading on the Friday. Busy busy busy…

So here we have yet another folk-related comedy record. My best friend’s parents, despite not hailing from the West Country were keen followers of this stuff esp. The Wurzels & The Spinners (no not the Detroit ones). Luckily the nearest I got to seeing them were live concerts on the telly which told me all I needed to know (not being big on communal singalongs). I was just that bit too young for this to be a song you could drunk and sing-a-long to and just that bit too old to find it funny on it’s own merits (or maybe I just didn’t understand West Country ‘humour’). Certainly didn’t get the tractor/hay innuendo at the time – and that does seem to be the best bit listening to it now. Despite that it doesn’t seem much more than just ‘quaint’ now.

American readers may wish to be reminded that the cider spoken of here is not the innocent beverage that goes under the same name across the pond.

In 1966 the West Country spurted forth the Troggs. Ten years of watering down later, we end up with the Wurzels.

I am unsure whether this qualifies as a happy or sad ending.

Which one, though?

Plenty of laffs to be gleaned from the line “I threw my Pitchfork at your dog to keep quiet” I guess.

Adge Cutler and the Wurzels were, I believe, around on the Bristol pub/folk club circuit long before 1966. I’d imagine an evening spent with them was an evening well-spent – that’s certainly the reputation they had. What this kind of thing does very well is prick the bubble of those who take themselves far too seriously. A bit like Viz comic I suppose.

Rough cider was having a revival at the time and even spreading away from its roots to some degree. There was an anti-corporate consumer backlash going on – no doubt punk was part of this – and Camra were in the forefront against the bland uniformity being imposed on everything, and for the small independent breweries and local pubs with individuality and often live music by local bands who couldn’t or wouldn’t want to get a more orthodox venue booking. The backlash fizzled out in time and the megacorporations tightened the vice-like grip of the ‘brand’. This I consider a tragedy when I view the ranks of cloned ‘bars’ that have muscled the individual pub from most towns.

My mum’s family are all from Bristol and my uncle went on tour with the Wurzels at some point in the late 70s. There is a story about a very drunk Wurzel being quizzed by a policeman when their car was pulled over and giving him some lip, mercifully he was in the back and not actually driving.

It’s possible this story has been embellished into something more cartoonish than it actually was, but over the years has mutated into policeman essentially going “allo allo allo, what’s this then? Can you tell me why you’re not driving this vehicle?” and Wurzel slurring “I can’t reach the pedals from here”. I have never found this story as amusing as the people who tell it to me.

This thread’s bringing it all back for me. I’d forgotten about the summer of ’76 – standpipes in the street, sharing baths etc. The only reason I remember the standpipes so well is that I crashed my bike into one, injuring myself quite nastily.

My comments on here are pretty tenuous really, aren’t they?

I note that the summer of ’76 also saw a return to the top five of Somerset lad Mr Acker Bilk with his heartrending “Aria.”

Oh, and Number 2 Watch – Macca still had to wait for a post-Fabs UK number one as “Silly Love Songs” was held off by the Wurzels.

No Adge Cutler, no credibility!

The Wurzels-plus-Adge had been a familiar fixture on the telly prior to Adge’s passing, and so it was a surprise to see them back, Adge-less, and more successful than ever. Melanie’s “Brand New Key” was a relatively cool and funny choice, and it was a shame that they lurched downwards in terms of later source material.

Has anyone heard the double-sided single that The Wurzels recorded with British Sea Power a couple of years ago, in which each covered a song by the other?

(At around the same time, BSP were also collaborating with the avant-krautrock act Faust, and so there’s a pleasingly perverse path to follow there, even if it does come across as a little too self-consciously perverse on BSP’s part.)

On her first major tour of the UK, Macy Gray performed a cover of “Brand New Key”, to baffled winces all round. Someone really should have put her in the picture beforehand…

There is, of course, a world of difference between “I don’t find this song at all funny” (perfectly acceptable) and “this song isn’t funny in any way” (demonstrably untrue because it makes me smile even if others are immune.)

Something else amusing me it at the moment is the sound of those who charge Yes/ELP/Genesis with disappearing up their own arses, muffled by their own tightening sphincters. Naturally, anybody is welcome to disagree with me but if what I say really pains them, perhaps they’d like to go off to one of the many boards where nobody will disagree with them! 🙂

Melanie’s original, by the way, features one of the great mondegreens: “I don’t go to bed but I go pretty far”

The Acker one I remember specifically because I was doing Grade IV clarinet at the time and I had to learn the tune.

TOO. SPOOKY.

(“Just think, Mike: keep practising, and you could end up like that Acker Bilk from the Pop Charts!”)

By popular request! (See 12) here’s light entertainment watch. I imagine that this is only a representational list, rather than a complete one. The first show sadly did not survive, but all the others did;

GEORGE HAMILTON IV AND OTHER FOLK: Featuring Friday Brown, King’s Singers, The Wurzels (1973)

THE BASIL BRUSH SHOW: Featuring John Inman, The Wurzels (1978)

THE BIG TOP VARIETY SHOW: Featuring Gladys Knight and the Pips, The Wurzels, The Krankies (1980)

RONNIE CORBETT’S SATURDAY SPECIAL: Featuring The Wurzels, Hinge & Bracket, Tony Monopoly (1977)

SEASIDE SPECIAL: Featuring Terry Wogan, The Wurzels, Stuart Gillies (1978)

SEASIDE SPECIAL: Featuring Peter Powell, Petula Clark, The Wurzels (1979)

Peter Powell, oh the shame (“classic Wurzellie tracks”)…

I’m quite fond of Alexander Beetle myself.

I note that CD reissues of Candles in the Rain have Alexander Beetle at track 6 instead of Close To It All as on my cherished old vinyl LP with the cheap red wine stains. It doesn’t fit, somehow. I wonder what happened?

Ah, I’ve solved the mystery. ‘Close To It All’ first appeared on her first album ‘Born To Be’ and ‘Alexander Beetle’ is on the US version of ‘Candles In The Wind’. So it’s us Brits who have the skewed (but improved) version of her third album.

One risible “comedy” record follows another to the top of the hit parade. I could only put it down to the drought, which had started to take hold by now. This was to be a summer without parallel (ditto the winter of 1962-63 when Waldo was but a sweet sleeping babe). 1976 was bonkers and people were keeling over and dying. At Wimbledon (the first of Borg’s five) not one second of play was lost to rain breaks, the only time in history, I think, and I was on a school field trip to Arundel, Sussex. The farmer, whose property we visited as part of this, was almost suicidal. Ironically, his name was Snow.

At Westminster, Premiere Callaghan introduced a “Drought Minister” in the genial form of Denis Howell, whose brief at that time was Sport. It was one of modern history’s truly great political appointments, as no soon as it was made than it started raining cats and dogs and just wouldn’t stop. Howell was sacked and then it did. No wonder they called Callaghan “Sunny Jim”, the slippery old bastard.

Meanwhile back on the farm, the Wurzels came along and corrupted Melanie big style. Why they chose “Brand New Key”, I can’t possible imagine but the result was something which most of us could surely have done without. It always reminded me of an inferior imitation of a “Two Ronnies” sketch than a crap end-of-the-pier act striking lucky. Appalling.

A mute point, I think, Rosie, although to be fair to you, the “Drought” as we know it probably began around Wimbledon time (Last week of June/first week of July), as you are probably suggesting. In any case, Saturday at the Lords Test lost to rain notwithstanding, I can assure you that in some parts of the country even May was dammed hot, let alone flaming June when we were infested by Wurzels.

The winter of 62-63 – on the Wirral for me – meant sitting in the school hall for dinner time after dinner time for weeks on end because the playground was too icy. And the school milk in dinky little bottles arriving frozen, with the aluminium tops pushed out by ice. The bottles were thawed on the radiators and you had to drink it at morning break. I can feel the nausea wash over me even as I write. One of the two good things Maggie Thatcher ever did was abolishing the school milk! (The other was handbagging Iain Macleod when he was all set to strangle the infant Open University.)

But this discussion surely belongs to the wall-to-wall Cliff/Shads/Shads-spinoffs of early ’63 – is it any wonder a film called Summer Holiday was such a success at the time?