December 75: Week Three

Monday 15th: 'Read OHMSS. Orchestra cancelled. Watch The Goodies in which they are buried in concrete for 75 years. 10 Days [to Christmas]'

The cancellation of the school orchestra practise was always a cause for celebration, because attendance kept us late at school every Monday evening, and being in the orchestra was a ball ache of epic proportions. As I’d opted to do music ‘O’ level, I was obliged to be in the orchestra, and in order to do so had taken up the clarinet, simply because there happened to be a clarinet available: it had once belonged to my Grandad.

Orchestra was presided over by the school’s ageing music teacher ‘Doc’ Terry. To this day, I have no idea if he was a genuine 'doctor' of anything, but it seems unlikely: he'd once owned a shop selling records and sheet music, and had played in dance bands in the 1930s – my Grandad remembered him. If he had any feel or love for music, it was undetectable in his crotchety, ill-humoured demeanour. "You're about as much use as a sack of potatoes" he would inform someone whose playing wasn't up to scratch ("a sack of potatoes is quite useful" we muttered to ourselves). A bout of throat cancer had left him with a strange croaky voice that sounded oddly like W.C. Fields, but he still smoked a pipe during lessons, unthinkable in this day and age. Music lessons consisted mostly of our listening to ‘set pieces’ whilst following them in a score while he polluted the air. When we weren’t doing that, it was ‘orals and aurals’ which meant singing notes that Doc played on the piano. The only worthwhile thing he ever did for me in three years of music lessons, was telling me I had perfect pitch – I could name any note he played. But that hardly lets him off. My abiding memory of those ‘orals and aurals’ is of Doc hammering the keyboard so hard as to risk destroying the instrument whilst bawling ‘IS THAT THIS NOTE? IS IT?’ at one of our unfortunate classmates who was tone deaf and couldn’t sing a note in tune to save his life (or ours). 

Cartoon of 'Doc' Terry, circa 1977. No idea who the portrait behind him was meant to be.
He called everyone 'Tommy' so as not to have to remember our names.

The orchestra was diabolical. We’d have given the Portsmouth Sinfonia a run for their money. The violin section was the worst, consisting of a few youngsters hopelessly scraping away. Everything was taken at a funereal pace; years later, if I should ever chance to hear a professional orchestra playing one of the pieces in our repertoire, I’d always be surprised at how fast it sounded. Doc’s manner was little better during these practise sessions, but softened somewhat when we were joined by members of the Girls’ Grammar on the other side of town, to whom he presented an avuncular air, whilst keeping his beady eye fixed on the rest of us. He was, without a doubt, the worst teacher I ever had the misfortune to encounter. This blog marks his sole appearance on the internet... which is probably just as well.

Tuesday 16th: 'Carol Concert in evening. No school, really: carol practice morn, games in afternoon. Read OHMSS. See that ATV is making a new Space:1999 series.'

The carol concert was, of course, presided over by Doc, but the choir sounded a lot better than the orchestra, especially when we were accompanied by the school’s impressive church organ, with its full complement of stops, diapasons and enormous pipes. I’ve no recollection of what we performed this particular year, but alongside the familiar carols, there was usually something exotic or ancient thrown in – one year, it was a modern carol by the composer William Mathias – another, it was Adam lay ybounden, a 15th century text with a modern setting by Boris Ord. 

A small announcement in the television column of this evening’s Birmingham Evening Mail offered up the potentially exciting announcement about Space:1999. If I'd known what was coming, I'd have been a lot less enthused...

Wednesday 17th: 'Stay at home instead of going out in evening. Finish special XL5 story. Watch the Benny Hill Show. Read OHMSS.'

‘Going out in evening’ actually meant accompanying my parents on our regular midweek trip to visit our Grandparents, who lived around half an hour away. There was a decent fish and chip shop just around the corner, from where we would usually get cod and chips, bringing it all the way home in the car. Saturday afternoon was similarly set aside, with the ritual of going down to the newsagents’ to fetch our Grandad’s copy of the Birmingham Evening Mail, plus whatever comics my brother and myself were reading at the time.

Thursday 18th: 'Break up! At 2.35 (report). Watch Space:1999, ‘Another Time, Another Place’ (from bk2), Love Thy Neighbour and a new Carry On Christmas. Play guitar. Read OHMSS.'

Yes, we got a school report at the end of every term. It might even survive somewhere, though (perhaps fortunately), I don't have it to hand...

Friday 19th: 'David comes. Go to Mere Green. Get mum’s xmas present. Read OHMSS. Watch Top Cat & It’s the Wolf. See a bit of King Kong.'

Where exactly did I get to see ‘a bit of King Kong’? (And which bit, one might also enquire). Consulting the programme listings for this evening, we find the last in a six-part David Attenborough series on BBC1 at 5.15, Fabulous Animals, which tonight looked at legendary and unknown creatures. Although the listing doesn’t mention Kong, and my diary entry wasn’t more specific, this is almost certainly where I saw him: the programme followed Top Cat (which the BBC still insisted on billing as ‘Boss Cat’).

Saturday 20th: 'Watch Star Trek ‘Wink of an Eye’ and Laurel and Hardy ‘Another Fine Mess’. Go to Nanny & Grandad’s & Wilde [sic] Green. Get film edition of OHMSS. Do more to Supercar annual, leaving written stories until have got typewriter [for Christmas].'

‘Holiday Star Trek’ was a short-lived festive tradition that had got going the previous year (https://sundayinoldmoney.blogspot.com/2024/12/advent-sunday-in-old-money-day-23.html) and now made a welcome return. The season ran until 2 January, comprising a grab bag of twelve episodes from across all three series of which the best were Amok Time (22 December), Dagger of the Mind (23 December) and Operation – Annihilate! (24 December), all of them duly noted in my diary. 

As my diary also makes clear, I knew in advance what I was getting for Christmas – I’d asked for a typewriter, to assist in my comic-making activitites. I still own it to this day, but it hasn’t been used in a very long time. It last saw action when I photographed it to use in the design for the Network DVD sleeve of the series Jason King, (left) a typewriter having featured in the opening titles. The Silver-Reed model featured a ribbon that could print in black or red, the colour being selected by the small switch that can be seen on the far right in the pic below:

Sunday 21st: 'Read OHMSS. Change to Film Edition. Do more to home-made Supercar annual. Play guitar. Watch Holiday Star Trek at 12.00. Listen to the Double Top Ten Show with Hoots Mon by Lord Rockingham’s XI. Watch Goodies Rule – OK? & Punch review.'

I’d never heard Lord Rockingham’s XI’s festive hit until this year, as it had charted before my time and had never been revived in the years since. The XI were the house band on TV’s rock and roll programme Oh Boy!, led by Harry Robinson and featuring the legendary Cherry Wainer on organ. Harry Robinson later conducted and composed the backing for Nick Drake’s song ‘River Man’, as well as many different TV themes. The descendants of the real Lord Rockingham (a title defunct since 1782) mean spiritedly took the band to court over their use of the name. ‘Hoots Mon’ was the XI’s only significant chart hit, reaching number one at Christmas 1958. With its cod Scottish interjections, I think we can rule out a revival in this era of heightened sensitivity to pretty well everything...

Next time: an eight-hour day of television... and the worst Christmas Eve TV schedule to date

When Schedules Change

 

December 9, 1980

It should have been just an ordinary Tuesday evening’s television. The evening news at 5.40pm, followed by Nationwide. The 1966 Paul Newman film Winning was scheduled to air at 7pm, an action drama focused on the efforts of a racing driver to win the prestigious Indianapolis 500. The two-hour film was to be followed by a party political broadcast by the Labour Party, some eighteen months into what would prove to be a full eighteen years in opposition. After the 9.00 News, Play For Today presented the comedy drama of a researcher from the future who arrives in London in 1980 – The Flipside of Dominick Hide.

This was the BBC’s intended schedule, as published in that week’s edition of the Radio Times. What went out that evening was radically different, on account of a tragic event the previous night in New York City.

John Lennon had always believed the number nine held some significance in his life. “It’s just a number that follows me around,” he once said in an interview. His earliest address was 9 Newcastle Road, Wavertree. He was born on the 9th of October. There were many more significant number nines in his life, leading him to compose the songs 'Revolution 9' and 'No.9 Dream'. And although it was December 8 when he was murdered in New York, it was already December 9 in his home country.

On the morning of December 9 1980, I’d visited our local library. On coming out, around lunchtime, I entered Preedy’s newsagents opposite, where I saw Lennon’s face staring up in black and white from the top of a pile of the Birmingham Evening Mail’s lunchtime edition. The stark headline said it all: ‘John Lennon Shot Dead.’ I still have that newspaper. Returning home, I turned on Radio 1, where wall-to-wall Lennon and Beatles tracks were being played. I couldn’t believe what had happened. The world couldn’t believe it. Paul McCartney declared it was ‘a drag’ when doorstepped by the media, a remark he immediately regretted and certainly didn’t mean.

At the BBC, the evening’s programme schedule was torn up. Nationwide, originally scheduled to end at 7pm, was extended to ninety minutes, with much of the programme consisting of a tribute to the late Beatle. I’d got my first video recorder less than four weeks ago, and had blank tapes at the ready. I recorded the Nationwide tribute, which was followed by a special screening of the film Help! The Beatles’ lightweight comedy was not, perhaps, the most appropriate memorial, but it showed Lennon the way many of his fans would choose to remember him – as Beatle John, mop-topped and still a creative world away from 'Strawberry Fields Forever'. Over on BBC2, the scheduled edition of The Old Grey Whistle Test was hastily retooled, with Andy Peebles brought into the studio – he’d interviewed Lennon just two days earlier, talking about the recently released album Double Fantasy.

On BBC1, normal service, of a kind, was resumed at 9.00 with the news, albeit the bulletin was dominated by Lennon’s murder, and overran by some twelve minutes. The Flipside of Dominick Hide, originally scheduled to air at 9.25, went out instead at 9.37. The play, which was well received by critics, and went on to become a minor cult classic, can’t have benefited from the schedule upheaval and for many viewers would have been totally eclipsed by the news from New York. I finally got to see it myself two years later, when it was repeated ahead of its sequel, Another Flip for Dominick. I found it charmingly offbeat, original and different; but I certainly wasn’t in the mood for it on December 9, 1980...

Over on ITV, there was less to see. The commercial channel owned no Beatle films that could be shown, and with ad space having been sold in advance, the primetime schedule was non-negotiable. For the record, viewers in the Anglia region would have seen Crossroads at 6.30, followed by a quiz, Gambit, and a half hour comedy. At 8pm, there was a networked two-hour drama starring Tom Bell, The Sailor's Return, followed by News at Ten. It was only in the post-news slot that anything changed, with the scheduled late night film replaced by a very poor studio discussion about Lennon's life and work that hardly bore comparison with the BBC's fulsome tribute.

Somewhat ironically, the BBC's play, The Flipside of Dominick Hide, dealt with a visitor from the future who accidentally alters history and becomes his own destiny. History had indeed been altered on December 8 1980. For years, a Beatle reunion had been rumoured, denied and rumoured yet again. In the months before Lennon's murder, there had been renewed contact with Paul McCartney – and who knows what might have happened if events had panned out differently.

The BBC's Genome database, derived from Radio Times listings, still presents the evening's television as it was originally intended. Reading it is like receiving a communique from a parallel universe where John Lennon is still alive, and a loser from Hawaii was never born.

December 75: Week Two

Continuing my trawl through the pages of my 1975 diary for the month of December. The diary itself is now falling apart, and has to be held together with an elastic band. It wasn't even, in the strictest sense, a 1975 diary, since it only included numeric dates, without the days of the week, so it could be used for any year. It looks like it might have come from a discount warehouse – my parents spent a lot of time shopping for bargains in such places in the austere mid-70s.

Monday 8th:Read OHMSS. Watch The Goodies. Orchestra cancelled. Play Monopoly. Dave is away so retain Supercar Annual.'

The Monopoly set was a fairly recent arrival, a wartime 'austerity' edition that came from our Grandparents. The principal difference between this and 'normal' Monopoly sets was the playing pieces: when the original game was devised, they'd been chosen randomly from a charm bracelet, and were traditionally presented as tiny 3d objects – a Scottie dog, a racing car, a boot, etc. Our set had simplified pieces, printed on cardboard and slotted into coloured wooden bases. The houses and hotels were basic wooden shapes stained red or green that looked as if they'd been cut from strips of beading. Games could go on for days at a time...

In tonight's repeated episode of The Goodies, the trio took a satirical look at the film industry. 

Tuesday 9th: 'Read On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, David’s Supercar Annual & The Story of Pop. Wrap up Xmas presents. Nothing on TV.'

Wednesday 10th: 'Go to Nanny & Grandad’s. Read Supercar Annual & OHMSS. Nothing on TV.'

‘Nothing on TV’ was a common complaint in my diaries of this era, and shouldn’t be taken literally. There wasn’t a strike on or anything like that: just an evening’s worth of programmes that held no appeal for me. So what, exactly, did ‘nothing’ consist of? ITV’s primetime schedule for Wednesday 10 December 1975 began at 7.00pm with This is Your Life: a must-see programme for many viewers, but one that I never bothered with. Coronation Street followed at 7.30 – the soap was this week celebrating its 1000th edition, an event which earned it the cover on the TV Times. Benny Hill followed at 8.00pm, but as we were visiting our grandparents, I didn’t get to see him. The rest of the evening consisted of a documentary about Mongolia (9pm-10pm: imagine anything like that being on ITV in 2025!) followed by News at Ten and football coverage from 10.30. 

BBC1 offered us the wartime movie Ice Cold in Alex, which I discovered a year or so later (and was coincidentally scheduled this past week), followed by the 9.00 News and Sports Review of 1975 (which definitely equated to ‘nothing’ in my book). Tonight at 10.45 was followed by The Sky at Night. BBC2 was a decidedly dry affair, with the evening programmes beginning at 7.05pm with Trade Union Studies, followed by Newsday and The Vera Lynn Show (looking decidedly anachronistic in the schedules of 1975). Arena at 8.35 examined the career of ballet dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov, followed by Face the Music, a rather erudite quiz which I’m only now discovering via repeats on BBC4. At 9.30, Globe Theatre presented ‘a season of distinguished television productions from overseas.’ Try finding anything like that in the schedules of today! At 10.25, In Concert featured ‘a young Australian singer/pianist’ John Christie, whose career can’t have been helped by his sharing the same name as the notorious Rillington Place murderer… Newsnight followed at 10.55: this wasn’t the discussion programme that’s still going today, but a 15-minute late night news summary.

And that’s ‘nothing on TV’ for you... 

Thursday 11th: 'Watch Space:1999 ‘The Full Circle.’ Finish drawing second story in S Car Annual. Read Supercar Annual & OHMSS.'

Space:1999’s first bona fide stinker premiered this evening. I abhor anything with cavemen in it (making an honourable exception for 2001), and tonight’s episode had the crew of Moonbase Alpha transformed into gurning, grunting, animal skin-wearing neanderthals, after venturing into a patch of mist. Naturally, the script offered no explanation for any of this. 

Friday 12th: 'Start on giant-size Fireball story for exhibition. Last film before Xmas, ‘When 8 Bells Toll.’ Watch Sykes & Tom & Jerry. Read OHMSS.'

The 'giant-size Fireball story' was probably the biggest comic strip I ever drew, taking up an A2 piece of art board, and drawn in the manner of Mike Noble. I don’t recollect what or where the exhibition was. I do know that the comic strip hung around the art room at school for a long time afterwards. It may still be there for all I know. There is, however, no chance at all of its being sold online as a Mike Noble original...

When Eight Bells Toll was presented by the school film society, about which I shall expound in greater detail elsewhere...

Saturday 13th: 'Put up tree & decorations. Watch Tiswas with Captain Scarlet ‘Attack on Cloudbase’. Go to Erdington. Get Xmas TV Times. From green market get 2nd Man from Uncle Annual. Also get cuban heels & sweater. Watch Dr. Who.'

Captain Scarlet was one of the first episodes I was able to see in colour. It had been stripped, somewhat incongruously, into Tiswas since earlier in the year, and I’d managed to catch a couple of episodes this way, although to do so meant having to sit through much of Tiswas – and I may be unique amongst my generation for never really liking the programme. A lot of my friends at school used to tune in, but their appreciation was always of a post modern ironic variety.

Cuban heels? In 1975? This looks like an early indicator of where I would be heading, sartorially speaking, a few years down the line...

According to the diary, I’d already put up the decorations on Sunday 7^th, but those were almost certainly a small tinsel tree and some dusty old paperchains that went up in my bedroom. Today’s efforts involved the ‘big’ tree, a five foot example dating from 1961 and made of green paper rather than tinsel.

Laurel and Hardy's chart success is reported in the Birmingham Evening Mail, 18.11.75

Sunday 14th: 'Listen to Double Top Ten Show & Top 20. Nothing on TV. Do special XL5 story. Play guitar.'

Listening to the top 20 countdown on Sunday teatime had been a ritual in our household since the late 1960s. During autumn 1975, I’d not been able to watch Top of the Pops because it clashed with Space:1999 on ITV. So the Sunday top 20, still presided over by Tom Browne, was my guide to what was happening in the pop charts, which were getting all festive...

Greg Lake’s future classic ‘I Believe in Father Christmas’ had entered the top 40 on 30 November, but would be kept off the top spot by Queen’s ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ which had taken up residence at number one the previous week. By Christmas, the chart was bedecked with numerous festive offerings dotted around the top 40 like fairylights: Laurel and Hardy’s ‘Trail of the Lonesome Pine’, extracted from the soundtrack of their 1937 feature Way Out West, vyed with Greg Lake for the number two spot. Although not festive in content, the L&H single had clearly been released with the Christmas market in mind.

Dana’s dreary ‘It’s Gonna be a Cold, Cold Christmas’ peaked at a respectable number 4, while Chubby Chcker’s ‘Let’s Twist’ again was exhumed for the party market. Judge Dread, whose records were subject to a blanket airplay ban by the BBC, offered up ‘Christmas in Dreadland’ for anyone into his particular brand of reggae with filthy lyrics. Steeleye Span’s ‘All Around My Hat’, whilst again not referencing Christmas as such, clearly aimed to take advantage of the season of goodwill to all folk rock groups, while Mike Oldfield’s ‘In Dulci Jubilo’ was unambiguously seasonal, soon to be taken up by the BBC as a festive music bed for their Christmas programme trails.

The Wombles were slipping: ‘Let’s Womble to the Party Tonight’ only managed number 34 and would prove to be their last chart entry of the 1970s. The Carpenters did no better with their cover of ‘Santa Claus is Coming to Town’ (peaking at no.37), and Freddie Starr’s unnecessary cover of ‘White Christmas’ didn’t deserve its highest chart position of No.41. The Band of the Black Watch attempted to hitch a ride on the Laurel and Hardy bandwagon with their version of the comedians’ signature tune ‘Dance of the Cuckoos’, but only managed a position of No.37. If Christmas 1975 taught any lessons to the aspiring stars of the era it was that you didn’t need festive trappings to secure that coveted Christmas number one – just originality and panache, as evidenced by Mr. Mercury and friends.

Next time... from the school orchestra to Lord Rockingham's XI

December '75: Week One

Fifty years ago, I was keeping a diary. Mostly, it's a record of what I watched on TV, the books I was reading, the music I was listening to. I never imagined myself re-reading those entries half a century later, and in many respects little has changed: I'm still watching many of the same TV series, and playing the same records. For the month of December, I'm going to revisit my entries week by week, looking at what's changed and what hasn't, what deserves to be remembered and what doesn't... 

Monday 1 December: 'Ill. Watch Clapperboard (with an excerpt from A Hard Day’s Night) + Batman. Do Supercar annual. The Goodies in Big Bunny.'

It was unusual for me to watch Clapperboard, Granada’s film review series aimed at younger viewers, partly on account of the fact that Clapperboard tended to be shown at around 4.20pm when I wasn’t yet home from school. On this occasion I was off sick. Back in 1975, it was worth tuning in just to see a small snippet of A Hard Day’s Night: I’d only seen the film once, and wouldn’t get to see it again until a BBC2 season of Beatles films at Christmas 1979.

Monday nights through autumn 1975 had meant a date with The Sweeney, but the series had ended the week before, with the deferred episode Thou Shalt Not Kill – its original scheduled transmission had been cancelled on account of a recent real life hostage situation, the so-called ‘Spaghetti House Siege’ which lasted between 28 September and 3 October. The Sweeney’s intended series finale, the semi-comic Trojan Bus, had been shown in its place on 3 November.

Tonight’s episode of The Goodies was a repeat of Invasion of the Moon Creatures AKA Big Bunny, first seen on 8 December 1973 and never repeated again after this broadcast. Following their chart success with ‘The Inbetweenies’/’Father Christmas Do Not Touch Me’ the following year, and more notably, ‘The Funky Gibbon’ in March '75, the trio were aiming at the charts again with ‘Make a Daft Noise for Christmas’, which only just scraped into the Top 20. 

Tuesday 2 December: 'Watch The Invisible Man ‘Klae Dynasty’ and the return of a series of repeats of Are You Being Served, Up Captain Peacock. The Staff Bog.'

US import The Invisible Man had been in residence on Friday evenings since late September, and now began a couple of weeks of being shunted around the schedule as the BBC raced to cram in all the available episodes before Christmas. The premise was unnecessarily clunky: in order to make himself ‘visible’, scientist Daniel Westin (David McCallum) had to don a rubber face mask and wig (presumably fitting the latter over his existing invisible hair?) If ever there was a case of the creators of a series not thinking their concept through properly, this was it. Only twelve episodes were made, and the show was replaced the following year by the very similar, but more straightforward Gemini Man – who only had to flick a switch on his watch to activate his invisibility. Personally, I find posting anything on social media works just as well...

Tonight’s repeat of Are You Being Served, Up Captain Peacock was one I already regarded as a classic: Peacock is rewarded for his twenty years’ service at Grace Brothers with the key to the ‘executive washroom’. This provokes the ire of the much longer serving Mr. Grainger, who at one point in the episode grumpily informs Captain Peacock that he’s going to ‘the staff bog!’ Hence my diary entry.

Wednesday 3 December: 'Film, Our Man Flint with James Coburn about trying to take over the world by controlling the weather on an island. Read Dr. Who and the Abominable Snowmen.'

It seems hard to credit now, but Our Man Flint (1966) was ITV’s big film of the week, earning its star James Coburn the cover of the TV Times. The two Flint films from the mid 60s, tacky cash-ins on the Bond phenomenon, are mostly forgotten today; and who needed Bond by numbers anyway when ITV was giving us the real thing. Dr. No had been on only weeks before, next to which Our Man Flint had all the credibility of Carry On Spying. Probably not even that much, actually...

James Coburn is also largely forgotten today, a name that seldom if ever troubles the compilers of pop culture retrospectives. His star was already well in the descendant by the mid 70s by which time he was in a relationship with the singer/songwriter Lynsey de Paul, even assisting her with her songwriting. As she put it herself in one of the UK’s less impressive Eurovision entries: ‘where are we? Rock bottom…’

Dr Who and the Abominable Snowmen was, of course, the classic Target paperback novelisation of the Patrick Troughton adventure which, in its televisual incarnation had been junked by the time I came to read it. Re-reading the book for the purposes of this blog, I find it hard to understand why the serial is such a fan favourite. There's the usual amount of to-ing and fro-ing, with characters getting locked up, escaping, and so forth, and the Yeti making occasional incursions – but as monsters they simply don't do enough: they can't speak, they use no weapons and whilst they might well have worked on screen, on paper they never come to life. The story is the usual schtick about an alien intelligence trying to take over the Earth, this time by smothering it in goo.

Thursday  December: '2 weeks to break up. Read Dr. Who and the Yeti. Space 1999 ‘Earthbound’ & Dr. On the Go A Run for Your Money. Start OHMSS again.'

Tonight’s Space:1999 was one of the best episodes from series one, with a memorable ending that saw returning character Commissioner Simmonds (Roy Dotrice) blackmail his way onto an alien ship bound for Earth, with disastrous consequences.

Dr. On the Go was rather less memorable. A fun series to watch at the time, I’ve never felt the need to revisit it, despite having owned it on DVD for nearly twenty years, and have no recollection of this evening’s episode.

Having finished with Dr. Who and the Abominable Snowmen, I returned to another snow-covered setting for my second reading of Ian Fleming's On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, easily the best of the Bond novels. My choice of books was sadly not reflected by the weather, which remained resolutely dull, dry and mild. In Greg Lake's Christmas hit 'it just kept on raining', but the Met Office monthly report tells us otherwise: rainfall totals for December ‘75 were below average and the monthly summary was ‘mild in north, cooler in south: mainly dry’. This would not be a white Christmas...

Friday 5 December: 'Read OHMSS (2^nd time). Borrow Supercar Annual off David. Read Supercar Annual & do more to own version. Go to Nanny & Grandad’s. Trinity Tales.' 

Trinity Tales is a red herring, because I didn't get to see the series until a repeat run in 1977, and the diary entry was added later on, simply to note when the episodes had originally been shown. Alan Plater's serial was a modern day take on Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, following a group of rugby supporters on their way to Wembley for a cup final. En route, each occupant of the supporters’ club mini bus tells a story, which is acted out by the cast, of which Francis Matthews and Bill Maynard were the stars. A forgotten series today, it’s probably worth a revival on BBC4 or even Talking Pictures...

The Supercar Annual was a thorny issue: my friend David had nabbed it literally from under my nose at our grammar school’s Christmas bazaar, and I had to make do with a 1967 Avengers Annual instead. As a form of atonement for sniping the Supercar Annual, David had lent it to me for a week or so while I set to work creating an original one of my own. Today, you'll easily find that old Supercar Annual on eBay, but back in the 1970s it was a rare find indeed, and it took me years to track down a copy (thank you Nostalgia and Comics...)

Saturday 6 December: 'Go to Lichfield in morn. Get: Dangerman ‘The Exterminator’ from a book bargain place (must go again), ‘Thunderbirds’ paperback from a bazaar, the 3 Drs and Dr Who Monster book. Go to Sutton in afternoon. Get Space:1999 6. Watch Dr. Who. Film, The Last Voyage. Supercar Annual.'

The Last Voyage (1960) is another largely forgotten flick, a disaster movie before the term had even been coined. Robert Stack, Dorothy Malone and Edmond O’Brien starred in a spectacularly destructive epic depicting the sinking of a cruise liner, directed and written by Andrew L. Stone (a highlight in a mostly undistinguished career). A condemned liner, The SS Ile de France was destroyed in the Sea of Japan for the purposes of the film, grievously annoying its owners who issued instructions that no such practise would be allowed in the future, and insisted that the vessel’s name be obliterated before filming could start. Stunts like this didn’t come cheap: the film had a budget of over a million dollars, but took two million at the box office. I remember it as a decent, if unsubtle effort, the most memorable scene being Robert Stack attempting to reach his young daughter who is trapped on the far side of a massive hole that’s been blown through the decks of the liner. The special effects were much praised at the time of the film’s release, and had the virtue of being done for real.

The Last Voyage was once a staple of BBC action/adventure film seasons and matinees, and was scheduled no fewer than eleven times between 1970 and 2007: 1970 (10 January), 1975 (6 December), 1979 (19 May), 1983 (18 June), 1993 (29 Jul), 1995 (7 September), 1998 (11 April), 2000 (14 Oct), 2004 (18 February), 2005 (9 Sept), 2007 (9 Sept). These days, you'll struggle to find it anywhere.

Sunday 7 December: 'Watch Laurel & Hardy ‘County Hospital’ & Tom and Jerry. Read Supercar Annual & OHMSS. Do more to Supercar Annual. Put up decorations. Listen to Top Twenty & D.T.T. show.'

Just a typical Sunday in 1975 – Jimmy Savile at lunchtime, Laurel and Hardy in the afternoon. When I wasn't watching television, I was drawing, or putting up some old Christmas decorations in my bedroom.

Next time: Christmas in the pop charts... Captain Scarlet in Tiswas... and Space:1999 serves up a stinker.

 

Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody is half a century old. In all that time, no other artist has ever created a rock song comparable with Freddie Mercury’s extraordinary operatic achievement – even Queen themselves could never repeat it. No one else has ever tried.

Rock opera was a concept much bandied about by rock musicians in the late 60s and early 70s, with the likes of Pete Townsend and Ray Davies both making claims for the form. But whilst their compositions may well have been operatic in construction, they didn’t go beyond the boundaries of rock music in terms of sound. And this is what sets Bohemian Rhapsody apart – unlike anything that preceded it, the song sounds, at times like a bona fide operatic work, yet is able to slide seamlessly between opera and full-on hard rock, without ever sounding contrived or incongruous. The song begins as a slow ballad, before reaching the operatic middle section, then exploding out into heavy rock, before settling once more into the gentle ballad form on which it bows out.

Over the years, many people have asked what it all means. A BBC documentary, made in 2004, even brought in a panel of Oxbridge academics who pored over the lyrics without reaching any definite conclusions. Yet the song is essentially easy to understand – it is a straightforward dramatic narrative concerning a young killer who confronts his guilt and wrestles with the demons of his own imagination. What follows is my personal interpretation of the song: 

Prelude: The narrator introduces himself and his personality. He’s confused and struggling to define the boundary between fantasy and reality, as he prepares to confront divine judgement (‘look up to the sky’) for the crime he has committed. At this stage in the song, we hear only the voice of the narrator. 

First section: In a flashback, the narrator gives a laconic account of his crime, apologising to his mother and friends. He knows he must face up to the reality of what he has done, whether through judicial process in the real world or in a nightmarish courtroom scene where his inner demons take substance and place him on trial for his life. 

Operatic section: The key to understanding this section of the song is delivered in the first lines of the lyric: ‘Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy.’ Up to now, the song has been grounded in the hard reality of a young man who has committed murder. Now, the boundary between reality and fantasy begins to blur. Are we in a court of law or inside the young man’s fervid imagination? Whichever is the case, this section of the song takes the form of a courtroom scene. For the first time, voices other than that of the narrator are heard: ‘I see a little silhouetto of a man’ – this is clearly a reference to the protagonist, a tiny shadowy figure against the titans who sit in judgement. He is fey, an almost clownlike figure (‘Scaramouche/ will you do the Fandango)’ – Scaramouche being a clown character from the commedia dell’arte.

In a sense, some of the lyrics here could be interpreted as a kind of ‘classical word salad’ intended to convey feel rather than specific meaning, although the repetition of Galileo’s name is interesting, Galileo having stood trial for his belief that the Earth revolved around the sun rather than the reverse. Here, our young man, with his nihilist belief that ‘nothing really matters’ seems to believe that the Earth revolves around himself. ‘Figaro’, on the other hand, is probably just an operatic red herring, while ‘magnifico’ suggests the protagonist’s self-aggrandising ego.

Now the protagonist pleads on his own behalf, supported by the Greek chorus. Having previously assured us that ‘I need no sympathy’, the defendant now falls back on self pity (‘I’m just a poor boy, nobody loves me’), his plea reinforced by the chorus (‘he’s just a poor boy from a poor family’). He pleads in the name of God (the literal meaning of ‘bismillah’) to be spared, whilst the titans who sit in judgement refuse his plea (‘we will not let you go’). Again, his ego bursts forth defiantly in another ‘magnificio!’ The tug of war between defendant and judgement continues, with the defendant arguing that his ultimate punishment will be to live with his guilt and his demons through all eternity (‘Beelzebub has a devil put aside for me’). With this shout of defiance, the fantastic courtroom scene collapses into a frenzy as the song finally rocks out.

Now our narrator kicks back at his accusers (‘so you think you can stone me and spit in my eye?’). He is determined to escape judgement, but his anger is short lived, and subsides as a softer intrumental passage takes over. Ultimately, the protagonist realises he is left with nothing more than his nihilist philosphy of life: ‘nothing really matters to me’, with the last word coming from the chorus (‘any way the wind blows’): he will continue to drift aimlessly through the world. The gong signifies that judgement has been delivered: the young killer will have to live with himself and his demons for eternity. The song ends where it began.

Does any of this even matter, though? Ultimately, the lyrics served as the props for Freddie Mercury’s grandiose ambition. He wanted to do a rock opera piece, and he needed a storyline on which to hang it. Their meaning is secondary to the effect of the song taken as a whole.

The famous video was as much of an innovation as the song itself. Taking its visual cues from the iconic sleeve of the Queen II album, it debuted on Top of the Pops on 20 November 1975, when the song stood at No.9 in the charts. It hit number one the following week, and the video duly appeared on every subsequent edition of TOTP until 22 January 1976, clocking up eleven appearances. Strange as it seems, I missed out on all of this, as I wasn’t watching Top of the Pops during autumn 1975 – it clashed with Space:1999 over on ITV. As far as I can make out, my first glimpse of the famous video came on Tuesday 23 December, in a special TOTP featuring the number one hits of the year. The song was, however, already very familiar from repeated plays on the weekly Sunday teatime chart countdown, and I didn’t think a lot of it. Queen’s theatricality and Freddie’s voice simply didn’t appeal to me at all back then. Given time, I got used to it, came in time to like it, and would even go so far as to work out Brian May’s guitar solos. Today, I would argue a case for it being impossible to dislike the song: sure, it’s grandiose, almost ludicrously so, and every phrase of words and music has become burned into the collective memory of several generations, but it’s the no holds barred, 100% commitment of the band that transcends mere personal opinion. Having an opinion about Bohemian Rhapsody is as pointless as having an opinion about Big Ben. It’s enormous, it's out there, it’s an icon, and there’s nothing you can do about it. Will anyone be celebrating its centenary half a century from now? Undoubtedly.

BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY in stats:

First week on chart 08/11/75

Reaches number one 23/11/75

Stays there until 18/01/76 (last week at number one)

Replaced at number one by Abba, Mamma Mia, pushing BR down to number 3

Last week on chart 28.02.76 (17 weeks in total)

From Squash to Lava...

 

It was in one of Birmingham’s department stores, sometime in the late 60s or early 70s, that I got my first look at a lava lamp. We were in the furnishings department where several of the lamps were on display, and switched on. I’d never seen anything like them before, and was immediately intrigued at the writhing blobs of coloured 'lava' inside them. Quite apart from the unusual nature of the lamps, I was struck by their shape. I’d seen something like it before...

In the mid 60s, I’d noticed bottles of ‘Tree Top’ orange squash on sale in our local supermarket, and seen the brand advertised on television. ‘Tree Top’ was sold in a distinctively-shaped glass bottle, wide at the bottom, tapering to a narrower top with a deep plastic cap. These unusual lamps looked exactly like those old squash bottles, right down to the shape of the cap, and I remarked to myself on the similarity. For some reason, the shape of those squash bottles had appealed to me, and I now found myself similarly drawn to these strange psychedelic lamps as much for their shape as for their shape-shifting contents. The resemblance wasn’t coincidental – it happened that Edward Craven Walker, inventor of the lava lamp, had tried out his idea using various empty bottles, in the process of which he settled on the ‘Tree Top’ bottle as being the ideal container for his novel idea. The squash bottle formed the basis of what later became known as the ‘Astro Baby’ lamp, with a larger version employed as the more popular ‘Astro’. It was these that I’d seen on display in that department store – but they weren’t around for very long.

Lava lamps belonged to a passing interior décor fad that might be characterised as ‘psychedelic kitsch’, covering everything from Ercol armchairs to the paintings of Vladimir Tretchikoff, and spanning a period from the mid-60s to the early 70s. The lamps themselves had gone on sale back in 1963, and were famously featured in the TV series The Prisoner, where they appeared in various niches within the dwellings of Number Six and Number Two, and were also employed as part of the ‘Rover’ birthing sequence that spawned huge malevolent balloons from the bottom of the sea. Craven Walker had been inspired by a novel egg-timer he’d spotted in a Dorset pub, where water and wax had been combined in a heated bottle, and after various experiments, managed to turn it into a feasible table lamp, setting up the Crestworth company with his wife to bring it to market. Original Crestworth lamps came in a variety of sizes: the popular Astro lamp was joined by the scaled-down, ‘Tree Top’ bottle-sized Astro Baby, and a cylindrical version. The lamp bases and caps were originally a shiny copper colour, before changing to silver.

I never actually saw a lava lamp in anyone’s home during the 60s or 70s. My parents were far too conventional to give one house room, and even my cool relatives with their Jensen Interceptor and groovy 1970s furnishings didn't have one. By the mid 70s, lava lamps were already beginning to fall out of favour as interior décor trends began to embrace ‘country cottage’ traditional styles where Laura Ashley and William Morris held sway. The last time I saw a lava lamp in action during the 1970s was in the sitcom George and Mildred (1976-79). The Ropers’ living room had been decorated in deliberately bad taste, including a small lava lamp which would be turned on now and again to annoy Mildred’s brother-in-law (Reginald Marsh). Thereafter, I saw no more of them, and assumed, wrongly, that they’d vanished from the scene.

In fact, the company never stopped making the lamps, although they scaled back operations during the 1980s as demand tailed off. I didn’t see them again until the mid 1990s, when I spotted one on sale in a shop in Walsall. It was in what I took to be the ‘traditional’ colour scheme of red lava in blue liquid, and was turned on, doing its ‘thing’. By this time, the company had been taken over and renamed ‘Mathmos’ (after a lake of lava in the film Barbarella), and the lamps were suddenly popular all over again, coinciding with a resurgence of interest in mid-century retro interiors. Chris Evans had them dotted around his studio set in TFI Friday, and their psychedelic appearance sat well with the Acid House generation, as well as being popular with older hipsters keen to revisit their youth.

My original orange lava lamp, doing its thing back in the late 1990s

I got my first example at Christmas 1997, orange lava in a yellow medium. I was surprised at first to discover that the famous bubbling lava effect took over an hour to get going. After being switched on for maybe half an hour, the wax in the lamp base began to grow into extraordinary stalagmites and spires. Was this how they were supposed to work? Another half hour or more saw the curious structures begin to collapse and melt, eventually coalescing as a large, writhing blob at the bottom of the bottle. As convection develops in the liquid medium, the wax slowly begins to rise up, breaking off in bubbles which ascend to the top of the bottle before sinking back and dissolving back into the blob at the bottom. After three or four hours, the bubbles get smaller and smaller, as the convection process speeds up (the instructions advised users not to leave their lamps switched on much beyond this stage). If left on long enough, the wax would settle back into a blob at the bottom of the bottle as the temperature of the liquid medium evened out, reducing the effect of convection. Something I didn’t realise until researching this article is that there is a small metal coil embedded in the wax at the base, in order to break the surface tension when the wax softens, thus allowing bubbles to form and break away.

Surreal shapes appear during the 'start up' phase of any lava lamp:
this 'Astro Baby' created a scarily convincing nuclear explosion effect.

That lava lamp I got in 1997 is almost as old now as the originals were when I first acquired it, and it still works. The coloured water can occasionally fade over time, but the yellow medium in my example still looks more or less the same as it did nearly thirty years ago. As the lamps age, there is a tendency for blobs of ‘lava’ to get stuck at the top of the bottle, and if the bottle is agitated while the lamp is working, it can cause the clear liquid to become cloudy. What does one do with a lava lamp bottle when it reaches the end of its life? Don’t ask me – the four examples I own are all still doing their thing after more than a quarter of a century… I just know that you should definitely not pour the contents down the sink...

According to the Mathmos website, the average life span of a lamp is in the order of 2000 hours. I’ve used my original Astro sparingly over the years, and until recently, hadn’t switched it on for a very long time. It took at least an hour to get started, but once it reached the right temperature, it performed exactly as it always had. Assuming one leaves the lamp turned on for around four hours on a typical evening (they’re seen to best effect under low lighting), that 2000 hours equates to some 500 days’ use – around a year and a half if the lamp is used every day.

When lava lamps became popular again in the 1990s, it was soon possible to buy examples in a wide range of colours, and a few variants including one that included glitter flakes within the medium. The patent had lapsed by this time, allowing other manufacturers to get in on the act, and a lot of cheap versions soon appeared in the shops, retailing at less than half the price of the Mathmos originals. Of course, they were nowhere near as good to look at, and luckily the sales of these knock-offs doesn’t seem to have affected Mathmos, who continue to thrive to this day.

Edward Craven Walker died twenty five years ago, but his invention continues to delight anyone with an appreciation of mid century aesthetics. In an age when so many manufacturers get their products made on the cheap in the far East, it’s nice to be able to report that Mathmos lamps are still manufactured entirely in Britain. One might even call them the last gasp of so-called ‘cool Britannia.’ 

Now if only someone would reinvent Tree Top squash…

They Aint Heavy, They're the Hollies

 

The mid 70s was a good place to begin exploring the music of the 1960s. Pop was in the doldrums – glam rock had sunk into rock and roll revivalism, and the charts were easy pickings for any bunch of session musicians who fancied a crack at number one. On the album scene, heavy and progressive rock ruled – and I've always hated heavy rock.

It was in the spring of 1974 that I began to look back at the music of the past decade, beginning with The Beatles. I knew most of their singles, but didn’t own any of their records. This was soon set to rights with the acquisition of the 1966 compilation A Collection of Beatles Oldies. Over the next twelve months, my brother and myself would gradually acquire their entire back catalogue, with the curious omission of the ‘White Album’ and the more understandable absence of Yellow Submarine (after all, who wanted half an album of George Martin intrumentals?)

Jimmy Savile’s Double Top Ten Show had introduced me to the music of The Shadows, a band whom I knew primarily for their 1975 Eurovision appearance, and I didn’t need much encouragement to begin exploring their back catalogue in greater detail. Fortunately, almost all of their original albums were still readily obtainable. But when it came to bands like The Hollies, it was a different matter altogether.

Skimming through the record section in our local branch of W.H. Smith, I turned up numerous Hollies LPs – but they were almost all recent releases in naff sleeves. The only item of any vintage was the late 60s collection Hollies Greatest, with a sleeve showing the band’s somewhat risible attempt to look psychedelic. They looked as if they’d got dressed in the dark, donning random items from a jumble sale. I would soon come to realise that ‘psychedelic’ and The Hollies were uneasy bedfellows… but I wasn't about to let their image deter me from delving into their back catalogue...

A school friend owned a double LP of their hits, which served as my introduction to chart singles like “We’re Through” (the band’s first self-composed ‘A’ side), “Yes I Will” and “Bus Stop.” The same friend owned a vintage LP that he’d discovered in a local junk shop. Dating from summer 1966, Would You Believe was a very listenable collection of well-chosen cover versions and intriguing original numbers. Revisiting it this week, I realised that it’s a contender for the band’s best album. The playing is tight, Ron Richards’ production work excellent, and the always superb vocals are backed up by some fine instrumentation. Lead guitarist Tony Hicks had recently acquired a Vox Phantom electric 12-string guitar, and its jangling tones are all over the album. Elsewhere, he plays a Gibson ES-345, a guitar with a 6-way tone control that he seems to have kept set permanently on position number three. When, years later, I acquired the same model, I immediately recognised position three as the ‘Tony Hicks sound’. 

Graham Nash’s influence was beginning to make inroads into the band’s songwriting, as was the influence of Bob Dylan – the second cut on side one is the decidedly Dylanesque “Hard, Hard Year”. Nash gets to sing lead vocals on a couple of his self-composed songs “I’ve Got a Way of My Own” and “Fifi the Flea.” The latter really shouldn’t work at all, being a sentimental/whimsical tale of unrequited love between two fleas in a flea circus – but somehow, Nash managed to pull it off after Allan Clarke refused to sing it.

The cover versions were amongst the best in the Hollies’ catalogue, including a reading of Paul Simon’s “I am a Rock” that if anything surpasses the original. For me, on first hearing this album way back in the mid 70s, the track that really stood out was “Don’t You Even Care (What’s Gonna Happen to Me?)” a song by Clint Ballard Jnr. who had previously supplied the band with their number one hit “I’m Alive.” The song sounds as if it had been intended as a follow-up single, with a great arrangement and stunning harmonies – surely the Hollies' hit that never was.

This album really convinced me that The Hollies were a band I should be taking more seriously – but tracking down their original album releases would prove to be a challenge, demanding of both time and money. The best I could manage at the time was a borrowed pre-recorded cassette of their 1967 album Evolution. Both title and cover design hinted that change was afoot – suddenly, The Hollies had gone a bit weird...

Back in the 1990s, the music magazine Mojo used to run a column called ‘Lance Corporal Nutmeg’, which investigated albums that had, in its own words, ‘missed being Sergeant Pepper by a country mile.’ One of the albums they featured was Evolution – and they weren’t kind to it. Evolution had the extreme bad luck to be released on the same day as Sergeant Pepper, and for all its endearing qualities, it really couldn’t hold a candle to what the Fab Four had been cooking up in the studio next door. The psychedelic Hollies sounded as daft as they looked on that greatest hits sleeve. Luckily, Evolution still leaned heavily on the pacey, harmonised pop that had become the band’s trademark, but where it deviated from the norm the results were mixed to say the least. “Heading for a Fall” included the drone of bagpipes (!) and “Water on the Brain” featured a tuba solo (!!) ‘Twee nonsense’ was how Mojo described the harpsichord-led “Ye Olde Toffee Shoppe”, which was as gruesome as its ‘olde worlde’ title suggests. But the worst cut by a long, long way – and arguably the worst recording in the band’s entire catalogue – was Allan Clarke’s “Lullaby to Tim”. It would have been mildly innocuous had it not been for the inexplicable decision to feed Graham Nash’s vocal through a Leslie speaker with the tremolo effect set to maximum. He comes out sounding like a gargling Dalek.

For all its 1967 trappings, Evolution was still, at its core, a great mid-60s pop album – but The Hollies were only halfway up their ascent of Mount Psychedelia, the summit of which would be attained with the album Butterfly, released a mere five months later. Back in the 70s and 80s, this album was hard to find, and for a long time, I didn’t even know it existed. I finally tracked down an original copy at a vintage record store on Birmingham’s Summer Row. The front cover was clearly influenced by the late 60s mania for Edwardiana, while the rear sleeve was a shot from the same photo session that provided the greatest hits cover, with the band in their carnaby street togs.

Before I got as far as Butterfly, I had to backtrack somewhat. I’d still not heard the band’s 1966 collection For Certain Because… notable for being The Hollies’ first album to consist entirely of self-composed material. It’s been described as the Mancunians’ take on Rubber Soul, and that’s not a bad summary. Nine of its twelve tracks are straightforward jangle pop, and it’s clear that the Clarke-Hicks-Nash songwriting team had upped its game, as there isn’t a bad one among them. Tony Hicks’ distinctive echoing banjo that had featured on the single “Stop, Stop, Stop” can be heard on two other cuts, and is a musical signature that no other band ever attempted. New arrival Bernie Calvert adds echoing electric piano to the song “Pay You Back With Interest” (a single in some territories) which also features Bobby Elliott on tubular bells, chiming in with Tony Hicks’ twelve-string.

Beyond these standard pop productions, the band took its first steps into the realm of orchestrated production, signalling the way towards future efforts like “King Midas in Reverse” and “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother.” The results are a mixed bag – “High Classed”, opening side two, aims at a kind of New Orleans style, while “What Went Wrong” pomps up an otherwise average song with histrionic brass and timpani. “Crusader” clearly displays the influence of Graham Nash, and again hints at a future musical direction – albeit one he would follow alongside David Crosby and Stephen Stills.

It wasn’t until the late 1980s that I finally netted Butterfly. Of all the Hollies albums I’d discovered to date, this one was perhaps the most disappointing. ‘Self indulgent piffle’ was Mojo's opinion of tracks like the sitar-drenched “Maker” at the time of the album’s CD reissue some years later. The trouble with psychedelia was that it tended to encourage bands into one of two camps – serious or whimsical. The Hollies aimed for the former with tracks like the Nash-influenced “Try It” and “Elevated Observations?” but landed in out and out whimsy with songs like “Wishyouawish” and Tony Hicks’ “Pegasus”. On first play, I hated most of Butterfly. The overtly psychedelic tracks just sounded derivative, and elsewhere the band were veering dangerously close to cabaret, a direction they would pursue more vigorously in 1968.

After the comparative failure of Nash’s ambitious, orchestrated single “King Midas in Reverse”, The Hollies reassessed their position and decided that they should return to straightforward, commercial pop. The result was the single “Jennifer Eccles” and another substantial hit. But Graham Nash still haboured ambitions to be taken seriously as an artist. When he offered up his breezy, pot-fuelled travelogue “Marrakesh Express”, the band were having none of it, opting to cut an album of Bob Dylan covers instead. Thus ended their ‘classic’ era, with Nash departing for America to team up with Crosby and Stills.

With Nash gone, the band still cut some fine singles: but songs like “Sorry Suzanne” were more suited to acts like Herman’s Hermits, and clearly labelled The Hollies as a family-friendly cabaret turn. My own personal exploration of their back catalogue ended with Butterfly, although I later chanced upon the 1969 album Hollies Sing Hollies when it emerged as a CD reissue and found it to be a decent if slightly bland collection of self-composed material.

Ironically, it was their post-Nash 1969 hit “He Aint Heavy, He’s My Brother” that had properly introduced me to The Hollies. I’d heard some of their singles prior to this, but had never quite put a name to the band. I missed out on hearing their subsequent singles until 1974’s comeback hit “The Air That I Breathe”, by which time Allan Clarke had left, tried to make it as a solo artist, and rejoined. By now, The Hollies felt very much like golden oldies, but I was impressed with Tony Hicks’ guitar work on the track. As a budding player myself, I was far more influenced by players like Hicks than any of the era’s rock gods. His work was always tasteful, interesting and to the point.

A 1988 CD collection, Rarities, gathered together some of the more obscure odds and ends from the Hollies' back catalogue, including their one and only movie theme "After the Fox", that saw the band, accompanied by vocal interjections from Peter Sellers, perform what must surely be Burt Bacharach's worst ever composition... it certainly contains one the most perverse chord changes in the history of popular music. Judge for yourself:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0b4k91aGn_U

By the 1990s, the old Hollies albums were beginning to resurface as reissues, initially on vinyl, then latterly as CDs. To begin with, EMI licensed the albums to independent labels like BGO, but eventually put out a decent set of reissues that offered up both mono and stereo versions of the original albums on a single CD (it’s a pity they’ve never done the same thing for The Beatles). Alongside these, comprehensive collections like The Hollies at Abbey Road made every A and B-side available on CD, together with unreleased tracks and a few alternate takes.

I sometimes feel sorry for bands like The Hollies: they set out in an era of uncomplicated beat music and quickly mastered their art. Then along came The Beatles and the game changed. It was no longer enough to put out radio-friendly commercial pop – you had to demonstrate your credentials as a serious artist, and that meant making ‘statements’ in the form of albums. Yet there has never been anything wrong with a commercial, hook-driven, well-performed pop single, and few bands could do that better than The Hollies. If, like me, you choose to explore their albums, don’t look for artistic statements or cerebral concepts – you won’t find any. What you will find are some great collections of songs that could easily have been singles. And the beauty of those CD reissues is that you can skip over the embarrassing bits...