It's Half Term, so no time for any Cynical Self Help this week. Instead, here's a Celebrity Jukebox I've been meaning to run for the last few weeks, but people keep dying and overshadowing it.
He might not be my favourite Bond, but he's certainly the best Dad Indiana Jones could have had. And he was the best Russian submarine captain with a Scottish accent I've ever seen at the cinema. When Sean Connery left us in 2020, he left a legendary legacy of roles that went far beyond Bond... The Untouchables, The Name Of The Rose, The Rock, Highlander... and let's not forget the fashion faux pas of Zardoz.
But how does the Celebrity Jukebox remember the Man Who Would Be King? Predictably, with lots of rappers claiming to be as cool as he was. Hell, even Robbie Williams tries to get in on that act...
(At least, I think that's what he was trying to do.)
Allez Allez were a Belgian funk band in the early 80s whose debut album was produced by Martyn Ware of Heaven 17 and the Human League. Singer Sarah Osborne then married Glenn Gregory and the band went their separate ways. However, as the law states that all 80s bands must reform at some point in the 21st Century, Allez Allez came back in 2019 with this. It's great, but one has to wonder if it was the final nail in the Connery coffin...
In truth, it's not the best batch of songs this feature has ever thrown up. In fact, I was getting ready to close with this, from a 90s George Martin Tribute album I got as a promo copy back when I worked in radio...
Yes, that is Sir Sean himself, doing one of the better Beatles songs in his own inimitable sh-tyle.
Fortunately, the day was saved, not by James Bond, but by The James Dean Driving Experience, a short-lived band (fondly remembered in some dusty corners of the interweb) from the late 80s. This was their final single, from 1990, which pedants will argue was still the late 80s...
One of the best-selling authors of the 20th
Century, and the 6th most translated author worldwide*, Dame Barbara
Cartland wrote a grand total of 723 novels in her 98 years on earth, and holds
a Guinness World Record for Most Books Published In One Year (191 in 1977).
*In case you’re
wondering, Agatha Christie is at
#1, Shakespeare is at #4, just below Jules Verne, and I’ve never heard of the televangelist “author” at #2. I was at least
pleased to see Enid Blyton keeping Barbara out of the Top 5.
Just as I’ve never read any Henry Miller, I’ve never read
any Barbara Cartland either. So Barbara, what would you say is the biggest
difference between you and Henry?
“My heroines are always virgins; they never go to bed
without a ring on their fingers—not until page 118 at least!”
No wonder Princess Di was such a fan. I wonder if the former
Lady Spencer owned a copy of Babs’s debut LP, recorded in 1978 with the Royal
Philharmonic Orchestra…?
New York folkster Christine Lavin seems a far more
traditional Barbara Cartland fan…
We’ll read Barbara Cartland novels Cry at the end of every chapter With heaving bosoms, the lovers “Lived happily ever after” We’ll believe it when she writes that
Perhaps the most amusing reference I found to Ms. Cartland
though comes from a changed lyric in a famous cover version. When Abba originally recorded The Day Before You Came, Agnetha makes reference to reading the work
of radical feminist author Marilyn French to help her get to sleep…
I must have read a while The latest one by Marilyn French Or something in that style
You could write a book about the difference between Marilyn
and Barbara… but I haven’t got time. Because I’ve got 80s punk band The
Gymslips to listen to. Who better than to pay tribute to the delightful Dame
Babs?
I find it hard to believe that hundreds of songs have not been written about Olivia Newton-John. Anyone who was a teenager in the late 70s and became a pop star in the 80s should have written a tribute. The boys because they were in love with her, the girls because she was such a powerful role model.
For example, Juliana Hatfield recorded an entire album of Olivia covers. And it was a truly great record...
Olivia was also occasionally saddled with the "hilarious" nickname Olivia Neutron-Bomb. A nickname that inspired both a professional pillow fighter (thanks, the internet), a musical artist who needs a better publicist as I can't find any information about them at all online, and the following tune from a defunct Glaswegian indie band...
OK, perhaps I found a few more than a handful. Apart from the Beautiful South and Helen Love tracks, they were all new to me... and with the exception of Busta Rhymes and Robbie Williams, they all bear further investigation. Particularly Avi Vinocur and Laurie Shaw.
However, the song I had in mind when I started this post is the one below. Batley Bob got out the steel drums for this tribute / critique of the 80s workout video craze led by Jane Fonda and soundtracked by Olivia's Physical.
In the mid-late 90s, my role at the station was split 50/50 between programming and commercial production. The programming side involved working on the phone-in, cataloguing music and attending playlist meetings. These were held weekly to decide which new releases should be put on the A list, B list, C list (evenings only) or restricted to "specialist shows" such as chart rundowns or our weekly "anything goes" indie/rock show. Usually present at these meetings were myself, D (drivetime presenter and "Head of Music", still a good friend of mine so many years later), J (deputy programme controller) and (occasionally) "Tim Allen", my nemesis (see previous post). The commercial production side involved writing (and occasionally producing) radio ads. I'll talk more about that in the future, but for now it's enough to say that while I worked in that department, I had three of the best managers I've ever had: P, M & I. Each was different, but each understood the fundamental nature of the business: writing radio ads is an utterly ridiculous job, so let's get it done as quickly and easily as possible and then have some fun. They were, each of them, the complete antithesis of Tim Allen, and I'll consider them close friends to the day I die (even though M has completely disappeared off the face of the earth and I doubt I'll ever see or speak to him again... but that was just M).
Anyway, the playlist meeting where I almost lost my job because of Robbie Williams... Iffypedia tells me this story must have taken place in early 1998. We'd spent a couple of years by this point fighting to get the likes of Blur, Oasis and Pulp daytime airplay, with occasional victories, but I'd never expected my greatest defeat to come via Robbie Williams.
This day, however, Tim Allen had elected to join the playlist meeting to contribute his own distinctive brand of ignorance. Bear in mind, for those of you who weren't present last time...
This man had NO INTEREST in popular music WHATSOEVER.
He also had no KNOWLEDGE or UNDERSTANDING of popular music WHATSOEVER.
And so we come to Robbie Williams - Let Me Entertain You.
Now I'd ask you at this point to put aside your own personal prejudices (whatever they may be) concerning Mr. Williams and consider the fact that, at this point in time, his career could not get much higher. After successfully escaping Take That, he'd build a solid repertoire of solo singles which were threatening to eclipse his former band. His previous single, Angels, had been one of the biggest selling songs of 2017 even though it was released in December and ended up selling even more copies in 2018. It had been A-listed by every radio station in the country, so playlisting its follow-up seemed a no-brainer to everyone in the meeting.
Everyone except Tim Allen.
Tim Allen did not like this song because it featured "heavy guitars". It was, he said, "too rock - verging on metal". It was not suitable for our station at all. "I wouldn't even want it playing on your little indie show, it's too loud for that."
(For the record, neither myself nor D would have considered playing Robbie Williams on the indie show... although we may have given his cheeky, rocked-up version of Back For Good a couple of spins.)
At this point, I rather lost my cool with Tim Allen. I tried to explain to him that given the success of Angels, Williams was guaranteed another big hit with the follow-up (and although it didn't sell more copies, Let Me Entertain You did eventually achieve a higher chart position than its predecessor) and we'd be foolish to ignore it.
"No," he insisted, "it's a godawful racket. He's a one hit wonder. Beyond Angels, nobody will even remember him in 6 months time. He'll be back in Boyzone before you know it."
OK, I made that last line up for effect, but the rest of it is verbatim. Even two decades later, I remember this bullshit word for word.
It was the "one hit wonder" line that did it for me. After that, I stopped listening to him. I may have tried to point out that Williams had had four Top 20 hits prior to Angels, or I may have just put my head in my hands and given up. For the rest of the meeting, I treated him with the contempt he deserved. I refused to speak to him. I refused to make eye contact with him. I sent him to Coventry.
Looking back on it now, it wasn't the most mature reaction, and much as I still loathe Tim Allen and everything he represented, I feel I could have been a bit more grown-up about it. But I was a young man, full of piss and vinegar, and he was an idiot.
Only much later did I learn that my behaviour in that meeting almost lost me my job. Apparently, on returning to his office, Tim Allen was so incensed by the way I'd treated him that he got straight on the phone to P, my other boss at that time (in commercial production), to demand that I was fired immediately. (For some reason, Tim Allen couldn't unilaterally fire me as I worked for two departments; it had to be a joint firing from both my managers.)
P, however, wasn't in. He'd gone out on a call. (Not that P would have fired me, ever - he would have fought my corner to the end. He had very little time for Tim Allen. Few sane people did.) A colleague took a message for P to call Tim Allen back, which then got lost, so P never even had the conversation. By the next day, Tim Allen had calmed down enough to decide he didn't actually want my head on a platter, though relations were even chillier than usual between us for the next few months.
Some years later, when Tim Allen finally left the station for pastures new, he remarked to another colleague, "I bet Rol's throwing a party to celebrate". And do you know what, reader? I did.
Here's a song I've never been able to listen to in the same way since. For all its pomp and cheese, I love it... perhaps just because Tim Allen hated it. What better reason could there be?
I gave up trying to explain why I was never a Gerry Anderson fan years ago (even as a young boy, I couldn't suspend my disbelief that they were just puppets) because too often I saw the tears or rage or regret welling up in the eyes of those for whom Anderson was a god. I get that: if someone tries to tell me why they never liked Spider-Man, I'd probably react in the same way.
I'm not sure I can get my head around your love for the Joe 90 theme tune either. Other Anderson shows had far better tunes, surely? Thunderbirds? Stingray? Even Captain Scarlet's "This is the voice of the Mysterons" - that still manages to send a chill down my spine, even though the show itself left me cold.
One thing I do like is that back then, TV shows had proper intros. That's 3 and half minutes before the show even starts! No way would that be allowed in today's attention-span-deficit TV culture. I miss that slower pace.
Martin started the bidding with a very strong contender, Taking the title from one of Wham!'s greatest hits and updating it to show what Freedom meant to him now that he was a solo artist, this is an excellent demonstration of the way George matured as a songwriter. Yes, it's a year song, but the 90 meant much more than just "this is when I'm releasing this track".
1. Bow Wow Wow - C30 C60 C90 Go!
Congratulations to C for stealing the points for this one. And no, this won't pop up again at Numbers 60 and 30, because the rule book says no song can appear more than once... and because C90 was by far my cassette of choice. The mix-tape maker's dream!
Which brings us to 89. I think there's pretty much only one choice, but your suggestions are welcome...
The best tribute I've read to Sir Roger Moore came from The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw, who concluded: "The Connery Bond was feared and admired... but the Roger Moore Bond was loved."
Roger Moore was the Bond of my childhood, and he will always be my Bond. Yes, those films might seem cheesy and corny now, they certainly don't have the grit of Connery, but they have a lot more warmth. And let's face it: Bond is essentially a ludicrous character. He works if you play him with a raised eyebrow (and no one had better eyebrows than Roger Moore), but take him too seriously and he becomes an unpleasantly violent, misogynist killer with little regard for the lives of innocents... which pretty much sums up the last two Daniel Craig films for me.
Sir Roger's first starring role on TV was in a BBC children's series based on Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe. Way before my time, but probably not before Jeff Lynne's...
Bank job in the city Robin Hood and William Tell And Ivanhoe and Lancelot They don't envy me...
Apparently, Roger felt "a complete Charlie riding around in all that armour and damned stupid plumed helmet".
I know lots of people can't do with Robbie's cheeky chappie routine, or his humongous ego... but I find both quite endearing... in small doses... because I really don't think he takes himself at all seriously. Just like Sir Roger...
Y'all know who I am I'm still the boy next door That's if you're Lord Litchfield and Roger Moore...
I tried to avoid songs that just reference James Bond for this chart: there are loads of them and I wanted my tribute to be more about Roger than his most famous role. However, The Toy Dolls do mention Roger (and Sean) in this ridiculous cartoon punk song, so...
Roger wasn't just Bond. Here's Paul Draper name-dropping the role that made him famous... The Saint.
You've got more halos than Simon Templar You've said more Betty's than Frankie Spencer Your gun is bigger than Captain Scarlet's Your face is covered in cheap mascara
As if Robbie Williams wasn't bad enough, let's further irk the musos with a pure slice of noughties piano pop. In my defence, Scouting For Girls may be annoyingly catchy, but they don't really sound like anything else that's been successful in the 21st Century. In fact, they remind me of Gerard Kenny...
Since I was a boy I wanted to be like Roger Moore A girl in every port, and gadgets up my sleeve
In which Gaz Coombes gets trapped in a cloud with an eclectic selection of heroes, including Peter Cooke, Oscar Wilde, Marvin Gay, Joan Of Arc, David Banner... and good old Rog.
When asked why he thought Amy had included him in the lyrics of her hit single, Roger quipped that she must have wanted a word that rhymed with 'door'... or couldn't think of one that rhymed with 'Connery'.
By the time I'm out the door, You tear men down like Roger Moore...
Originally released in 1986 (yes, Pulp were around back then: this was just before their second album), just after my Bond hung up his Walther PPK for good. Roger Moore apparently hated guns and was often quoted, post-Bond, saying how he hated the way the franchise glamorised "men with guns". Maybe that's why he played up the comedic elements of the character. And I'm sure that's why he appealed to Jarvis, who always likes a good Roger...
I know a woman with a picture of Roger Moore In a short towel and dressing-gown pinned to her bedroom wall She married a man who works on a building site Now they make love beneath Roger every Friday night... oh!
1. Wings - Live & Let Die / Carly Simon - Nobody Does It Better
The two best Bond themes of the Moore era, from the band The Beatles could have been and the lady who found clouds in her coffee...
Now put your clothes on and I’ll buy you an ice cream.
