Hi Ho Silver Lining (Jeff Beck, 1967)

A lot of DJs make the last slow dance of the night the last record of the night. Maybe it’s because I wasn’t involved in the snogfest going on all around me that I always thought that a rather low key end to proceedings.

I always tried to finish on an up-tempo, cheerful note whenever possible, ideally something in a sing-along which people could still be humming on their way to the car park after the houselights had come up. It should leave customers with a smile, and make them less likely to pick fights when they got to the car park.

In my first incarnation as a DJ, from 1978 to 1981, that final record was often Jeff Beck’s Hi Ho Silver Lining. It was a disco standard at the time, more than a decade after its original release in 1967. It made the UK Top 20 then and again on re-release in 1972.

Jeff Beck was one of the best known guitarists of his generation, having been one of the Yardbirds’ two lead guitars. The other was Jimmy Page. Beck’s bass player on Hi Ho was John Paul Jones, who with Page formed the game-changing band Led Zeppelin a year later. Rod Stewart contributed backing vocals to Hi Ho. Page, Jones and Who drummer Keith Moon appeared on the B-side, Beck’s Bolero. 

Beck’s melodic guitar solo on Hi Ho was almost as well known and sung as the words of the chorus; and at many a gig, air guitarists could be seen cranking it out in the darker corners of the dance floor.

It remains Beck’s biggest single hit and not much like anything he has recorded subsequently. He considers it something of a millstone around his neck. But everyone knew what to do with it in the 1970s. The DJ snapped the volume to zero at the start of the chorus, exposing the audience who, knowing that this was going to happen, were singing their hearts out: “And it’s HI HO SILVER LINING”. You had to be ready to bring the volume back up if it looked as if they didn’t know the next line too. These were the final two and a half minutes of many happy gigs at Corstorphine Rugby Club, where our mobile disco Radio Claudine was a regular entertainment. At some gigs they knew all the verses too.

In the days before digital music it was quite hard to cue up Hi Ho Silver Lining so that its famous tango guitar rhythm would start precisely on the last beat of the previous track. The rhythm was preceded by a single chord played backwards, an old recording trick. Instead of being struck suddenly and loudly and fading away, the chord appeared to fade in gradually and rise in volume to a sudden end. On a DJ’s much-played vinyl copy of the record, the start of the fade-in could be hard to hear; and experienced DJs learned to rely as much on the surface noise, the crackle and hiss of their copy, as on the recorded music.

Hi Ho Silver Lining was still appearing on dance party compilation CDs in the mid-1990s, so when I started DJ-ing again in 1999 I looked forward to closing gigs with it once more. But I wasn’t in Edinburgh anymore, and it seemed that my Cumbrian audience didn’t like being exposed in that way. As soon as I dropped the volume, they stopped singing and stared at me as if my amp had blown. My big finish was a busted flush.

I tried a few other tracks. Back in the 1970s when life was simpler and sillier, Zorba’s Dance often worked as a final circle dance, and it did once again at a Tennis Club disco (or was it hockey?) in the King’s Arms Hotel, Kirkby Stephen. British prog-rockers The Enid had a rousing rock-and-sound-effects version of the Dambusters’ March which, being completely undanceable, signalled clearly that “this is fun but it’s the end”. But in the 1990s I was no longer playing for willingly uninhibited students.

The solution was hackneyed, but reliable. A novelty song that you couldn’t dance to but had to sing along with, Monty Python’s Always Look on the Bright Side of Life closed out almost every gig I did between then and 2006 when I quit DJ-ing. Its chorus message was perfect, its mood uplifting. Its simple music was not pop, and couldn’t be danced to like other records. It said, from every angle, “Go now and be happy.” And it worked every time.