Two Princes (Spin Doctors, 1993)

Two Princes was one of the songs that got me back into pop music. Like most teenagers music had been my salvation in the 1970s. But after three years running the college mobile disco I graduated in 1981 and began to build a career as a theatre technician and designer. Music, especially pop music, receded from my life. This was partly a matter of peer pressure from music snobs: an actress once told me that the trouble with me was that I liked everything. I had always thought that was a good thing, but now I withdrew from my guilty pop pleasures.

 In 1993 I was beginning to feel that my theatre career had run its course, and that may have been responsible for a renewed interest in what was happening in popular music. I had missed the late 1980s and early 1990s but now I began to buy compilation tapes – yes, cassettes – to keep me company on tour. There was an alt country one I’d love to find again which introduced me the likes of kd lang and Lyle Lovatt; a dad-rock drive-time effort from Dino Records where I discovered the joys of Ten Sharp’s You and Wilson Phillips’ Hold On; and a glorious indy set from EMI in 1994 called Unlaced (a mash-up of MTV’s Unplugged strand and Doc Marten footwear which was pictured on the cover).

 Unlaced was a delight, full of modern music which I’d never heard and which I could actually like instead of tolerate. I’m tempted just to list its contents, each one a discovery and a reminder of the importance that music had once represented in my life. Blur, Pulp, James, Radiohead, The Levellers, EMF, The Charlatans, Suede, no Oasis: music was back. I was back, back in my own skin again.

 Two Princes is a simple love song in which a penniless suitor begs the object of his affection to choose him over a wealthier rival. “You marry him, your father will condone you, How 'bout that now? You marry me, your father will disown you, he'll eat his hat, now.” It’s the oldest story.

 The Spin Doctors were marketed as indy rockers to broaden their appeal, but in truth they are just a damn good pop-rock band in the fine tradition of The Sweet. Two Princes wasn’t an articulation of any liberal socialist agenda but a fairy tale inspired by the romantic tradition of English literature. Lead vocalist and lyricist Chris Barron was an admirer of the tales of King Arthur, the works of JRR Tolkien and the plays of William Shakespeare. There’s more than a touch of the forbidden love of Romeo and Juliet between the protagonists of the song.

 It may be a simple love song, but musically it’s all-rockin’. It has a lot in common with The Sweet’s Ballroom Blitz: the snare-drum call to arms which introduces it, and the rhythm-heavy guitar which answers the call. In both songs sections are sung to a drums-only backing as a prelude to rebuilding the rhythm to a climax. And both songs fade out with the insistent guitar ringing in your ears.

 The constant refrain in Two Princes is the line “Just go ahead now.” Its inspiration was Mickett Wilder, the older brother of the band’s bass player, to whom they all looked for a lead in style and fashion. When Chris Barron asked Mickett’s advice about a girl he fancied, Mickett told him to follow his heart. “Just go ahead with that now; just go ahead now.” With that ringing in my ears, two years later I quit theatre for good and went back to college to study applied art. Rejuvenated, I turned forty in the company of twenty year olds, graduated in 1998 and boldly set out on a new phase of my life as a craft potter in rural Cumbria.

 It was a complete disaster; but I can’t blame The Spin Doctors for that.

The Ballroom Blitz (The Sweet, 1973)

The success of The Ballroom Blitz was that it straddled pop tribes – camp enough to appeal to glam fans and (thanks to Andy Scott’s guitar work) more than acceptable to rock fans. Even I and my prog-rock peers in Glasgow liked The Ballroom Blitz, and it was raw enough to survive the arrival of punk rock a few years later.

 As a DJ I played it regularly well into the twenty first century, either as part of a glam rock segment or as the ideal track before or after the Spin Doctors’ Two Princes, whose rhythm and tempo it matched perfectly. Music historians might prefer to segue between The Ballroom Blitz and Bobby Comstock’s Let’s Stomp from 1963, to which the Sweet hit owes quite a debt. The introductory snare rhythm and the guitar riff, played by horns on Comstock’s track, are almost identical.

 Are you ready, Steve? (“Uh-huh.”) Andy? (“Yeah.”) Mick? (“OK.”) Alright fellas, well let’s GO-O-O-O! Brian Connolly’s exhortation to the rest of the band kicks off a straight-ahead piece of power-pop rock from the experienced pens of writing duo Nicky Chinn and Mike Chapman, who almost by themselves wrote the soundtrack to the glam-rock era.

 Chinn and Chapman had already written seven hits for the band when, on a UK tour in early 1973 the band were hounded off-stage in the Grand Hall, Kilmarnock by a belligerent bottle-throwing audience. When they recounted the incident to Chinn and Chapman, the songsmiths turned it into yet another hit, which got to #2 in the UK chart later the same year.

 Everything about the track says “punch-up!” and it’s no wonder the song has cropped up repeatedly on the soundtrack albums of light-hearted action films like Wayne’s World and Daddy Daycare. It has been covered, sampled and lampooned innumerable times, as in Armageddon Days are Here (Again)  by The The, which begins, “Are you ready, Jesus?” “Uh-huh!” “Buddha?” “Yeah!” “Mohammad?” “OK!” “Well alright fellas, let's GO-O-O-O!”

 The Grand Hall is a handsome ballroom, Kilmarnock’s former Agricultural Hall attached to Kilmarnock’s former Corn Exchange, now the Palace Theatre. History does not relate the cause of the riot which forced The Sweet back to their dressing room, but it was not the first in the entertainment complex of this rough and ready Scottish town. When a promoter misled a 1920s audience into believing that American film star Mary Pickford would be appearing in person at the Palace, it was only the stentorian insistence of a police officer in the stalls which prevented a disappointed rabble from storming the stage.

Girls screamed and swooned at The Sweet’s heavy make-up and glittery stage persona, which may well have upset the male members of the Kilmarnock audience. As the lyrics report, “The man at the back said ‘Everyone attack!’ and it turned into a ballroom blitz.” This was the age of glam and The Sweet were in every sense the musical movement’s poster boys. Behind the scenes, Chinn and Chapman were responsible for ten Sweet hits before moving on to write for Suzi Quatro. Their songs also charted for other glam rockstars including Mud, Arrow, Smokie and Racey, all on pop entrepreneur Mickie Most’s RAK record label.

 The Palace Theatre in Kilmarnock is a fine traditional proscenium-arch variety theatre which has hosted major stars – Ken Dodd, for example, who always overran his allotted time and for whom the audience was always willing to miss its last bus home; and Rolf Harris. Part of Harris’s act was to paint a large picture with broad brushes and rollers, humming as he did so and occasionally asking the audience, “Can you tell what it is yet?” On a backstage wall at the Palace he daubed a self-portrait and dedicated it to the resident stage crew, who used to show it off proudly to visitors like me. (I suspect it may have been painted over now, in the light of Harris’s conviction for sex offences a few years ago.)

 I too have played the Palace Theatre, to rather less audience opposition than The Sweet. I was the stage manager on several tours of a wildly successful stage comedy called The Steamie by Tony Roper, which I think played the Palace a couple of times. The play was about the hopes and fears of a group of Scottish women in a public laundry on the eve of the 1960s, and I accompanied its first three Scottish tours of one-night stands. One of my nightly duties was to call backstage over the theatre tannoy at the start of the show, “Are you ready, lighting? (“Uh-huh.”) Are you ready, sound? (“Yeah.”) Are you ready, actors? (“OK.”) Alright ladies, well let’s GO-O-O-O!

 

Blame It on the Boogie (The Jacksons, 1978)

 Don’t blame it on the sunshine, don’t blame it on the moonlight … Irresistibly up-tempo with a joyous chorus, this song straddles my two careers as a DJ.

It was released during the first, when I was one of a team of DJs for the mobile disco owned by the Students’ Union at Queen Margaret College on Edinburgh’s Corstorphine Hill. The college is now Queen Margaret University, in a different location on an out-of-town campus; and if it still exists, I hope the disco has a new name. Back then (I matriculated in 1978) it was called Radio Claudine, a nod to the pioneering pirate radio station Radio Caroline and to our beloved principal Claudine Morgan. These are the subversive satires to which spotty students aspire.

During her tenure (1971-1985) Ms Morgan transformed the college from a finishing school for young ladies into a genuine place of higher education. Under her the college became Queen Margaret’s, where until 1972 it had been the Edinburgh School of Cookery. She greatly expanded the range of courses available, mostly therapeutic in nature – physiotherapy and speech therapy for example – but including the one I attended, a Diploma in Drama. She may have regretted the addition of theatrical students who were frequently in trouble for their attention-seeking antics, and for providing most of the testosterone at the college. There were less than twenty male drama students in a total population of around a thousand which was overwhelmingly female by virtue of the caring professions for which it prepared Edinburgh’s youth. I cannot honestly say that as a kid in a sweet shop I always behaved with restraint and honour.

Blame It on the Boogie celebrates the infectious joy of dancing, which is after all at thet heart of what DJs do. It was written by British brothers Mick and David Jackson (no relation to the Jackson Five) and Elmer Krohn, and first released under Mick’s name. They were aiming high by hoping to catch the ear of Stevie Wonder with it.

The Jacksons, formerly the Jackson Five, scooped up the song after their manager heard Mick Jackson’s recording of it at Midem, a music industry convention. Quickly re-recorded it became the lead single from their new album Destiny. Their version was almost identical to the original, but with the added dusting of magic which only the Jacksons could bring.

The two versions were released within weeks of each other in both the US and the UK and performed equally well in both countries. Mick Jackson got to #61 in the Billboard Hot 100, just behind the Jacksons at #54; and in the UK the Jacksons made #8, ahead of Jackson at #15.

In Britain the fortunes of both singles were boosted by the press, who seized on the same title being released by the same surname to declare it the Battle of the Boogie. Ultimately it was the lead vocal of Michael Jackson, not Mick, which won the day. The insistent drum track on the Jacksons’ version is by legendary session percussionist Rick Marotta.

Even in 1978, the Radio Claudine joke was thin and dated but no one seemed to notice. The very expression “mobile disco” sounds old-fashioned now. Nevertheless, twenty-one years after Blame It on the Boogie was in the charts, I became a mobile DJ once more. I moved to Cumbria in 1998 and was eager to play my part in the rural community of which I was now a part. When the village of Crosby Garrett was planning its Millennial celebrations for New Year’s Eve 1999, I volunteered my services, first for a fancy-dress fund-raising disco a few months earlier, then for the evening itself.

Both were a success and I started to advertise for further bookings. I hoped to catch people’s eyes in the local paper The Westmorland Messenger with the titles of songs about dancing, among them Ballroom Blitz by The Sweet – and Blame It on the Boogie. The latter stuck, and for the next six years I made a small but very happy living playing golden oldies for weddings and birthdays the length and breadth of the county. Sunshine! Moonlight! Good times! Boogie!