Summer… the first (and other) times

'Nothing says summer like breaking up from school' – Alice Cooper's 1972 classic.

Having trashed Mungo Jerry’s summer 1970 hit last time around, I thought I’d look back through chart history to see if there has ever been such a phenomenon as the bona fide summer chart hit. There have been plenty of songs with ‘summer’ in the title, but they haven’t all charted in the summer itself, if you count the summer months as being June, July and August. To take a notable example, John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John’s Summer Nights, clearly aimed at summer chart success, didn’t chart here in the UK until mid-September. Others have been even further off beam. Percy Faith’s Theme From a Summer Place, which sounds like the essence of summer itself with its dreamy 6/8 string-drenched melody, charted in March of 1960, while Cliff Richard’s Summer Holiday entered the charts in February 1963. If this seems inexplicable, there is at least a valid reason in this case: Cliff’s song was the theme to a movie, and movies don’t do as well in the summer months when punters, quite rightly, don’t relish the thought of being stuck in the dark with Cliff Richard, Una Stubbs and Richard O’Sullivan. In the cold grey of February, however, with summer still a distant prospect, it’s a different matter.

Taking a random sample of songs that actually mention the ‘S’ word, I found that, on the whole, they tended to enter the charts in September, suggesting that record company timing has been historically up the spout. Mungo Jerry, sadly, got it exactly right, entering the charts at number 13 on 6^th June 1970, and reaching number one the following week, where they remained for another six weeks. It is somewhat depressing to relate that In the Summertime didn’t drop out of the charts until the middle of October, having spent the last last four weeks of its run in the lower reaches of the top 50.

Clearly, Mungo Jerry’s hit was a premeditated and cynical attempt at scoring a summer hit with a summer-themed song. Luckily for everyone involved with the release, May 1970 had been mostly dry, though with below average amounts of sunshine, while June exceeded the average and was notably sunny, apart from some heavy thunderstorms. Like ice-cream vendors, Ray Dorset and pals must have banked on a decent summer to assist sales of their summer song, but while June was mostly okay, July was changeable and cool. Nevertheless, the great British public kept on buying In the Summertime, as if in hope of appeasing some meteorogical deity. It worked, almost: August brought a return to warmer weather before turning wet in the third week, by which time Mungo Jerry probably couldn’t have cared less, their master plan having paid off handsomely. Incidentally, if you want to know where I get all this weather data, you can find it here: http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/learning/library/archive-hidden-treasures/monthly-weather-report-1970s

Writing a summer song in hope of a summer hit might have worked in 1970, but it wasn’t always the way. Taking late July as an average, and looking at the top 20, we find surprisingly few summer themed or titled songs during the 1960s and 70s. 1959 was, I am assured, a notable summer, and the records show that most of Britain enjoyed dry, sunny weather from June through to October. It was notably hot at times, and there was talk of a drought as farmers waited in vain for rain to come and water their crops. As a summer, it would remain unsurpassed until 1976. Hits of summer ‘59 included Bobby Darin’s Dream Lover, Cliff Richard and the Drifers’ Living Doll and Connie Francis’ Lipstick on Your Collar. Meanwhile, Russ Conway was up and down the charts like a yo-yo with Side Saddle, Roulette and China Tea all in the top thirty simultaneously. But in spite of the weather, there was nothing remotely summery about the songs in the charts.

With a peerless summer in ‘59, we might have expected to see more summer-themed chart action in 1960. But no. In fact, the only single I can find that overtly acknowledges the time of year is Brian Hyland’s Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini which was new in at 31 on 14^th July. It’s a similar picture in ’61 and ’62, and over the coming years about the only shameless summer-themed chart entry is Cliff Richard’s On the Beach of 1964. You may well ask where were The Beach Boys when all this was going on, a band inextricably linked with summer. Well, wherever they were, it wasn’t in the British pop charts, at least not during the key summer months. While Brian Wilson and his pals might have been fixated on surfing, it wasn’t a popular pastime here in the UK, and probably their most ‘summery’ hit of the 60s was California Girls, charting in early September of 1965. It isn’t until 1966 and the Kinks’ Sunny Afternoon that we find a bona fide summer single topping the charts at the right time of year; and while 1967 is familiar as the summer of love, and offered above average amounts of sunshine in June and July, there was little sign of sunny weather in the charts, where Procul Harum’s A Whiter Shade of Pale dominated procedings during the summer months.

Fast forward to the notable summer of 1976 and we find a similar picture. The only bandwagon-jumpers of the season appear to have been Steve Harley and Cockney Rebel, whose cover version of Here Comes the Sun looks suspiciously like a cash-in, entering the charts on August 1^st. Assuming the band acted at the first sign of a prolonged heatwave and picked an obvious fine weather song to cover in haste, they had every chance of recording, pressing and releasing in time to pick up sales on the back of the enduring fine weather, which indeed they did.

In fact, it wasn’t that song, but another which seemed to embody the long, warm weeks of 1976 as far as I was concerned. That song was Afternoon Delight by the Starland Vocal Band, which despite peaking at a meagre No. 18 on the chart, still sounds like the spirit of summer ‘76 whenever I hear it.

This illustrates a point: in the absence of cynically crafted summer hits like those of Mungo Jerry, Steve Harley et. al, we make our own. The summers of my childhood are imprinted in memory by such diverse waxings as Manfred Mann’s My Name is Jack, Scott Walker’s The Lights of Cincinatti, Jethro Tull’s Living in the Past and Vince Hill’s The Importance of Your Love. One of the few actual summer songs that did the job for me was Bobby Goldsboro’s Summer (The First Time) [don’t forget those brackets] which began its ten-week chart run in August 1973. From the opening bars with their ocean-drenched crashing wave sound effects to the final reprise, this song says summer in every bar (sorry if that sounds like a chocolate commercial...) Even the key, B major, sounds like summer. I doubt any other artist will ever nail it the way Bobby Goldsboro did, without the slightest hint of a cash-in.

Another song that did the job admirably, and tactically avoiding mentioning the ‘S’ word (in the title at any rate) was Alice Cooper’s 1972 hit School’s Out. Unsurprisingly, this timely release reached number one in the UK, and includes one of my favourite ‘bits’ in a pop song – the ‘no more pencils’ refrain, which is musically straining to break free, rising on two suspended fourths (C and D) before breaking back out into the home key of E minor. You can almost visualise the Bash Street kids bursting through the doors at the key change. School’s Out was, in fact, a brilliant move on the part of Mr. Furnier, who rightly recognised that nothing says ‘summer’ quite like breaking up from school. It was an observation worthy of Chuck Berry.

Just behind School’s Out in the charts of summer ‘72 we find a much less creditable effort, a blatant attempt to snare some seasonal sales by Terry Dactyl (actually Jona Lewie) and the ‘Dinosaurs’ in the form of Seaside Shuffle. Even at the time of its release, I could sense the ghostly presence of In the Summertime looming over the proceedings, and whilst it gave less offence than its predecessor, I was still aware that there was something faintly distasteful about Seaside Shuffle – the pop equivalent of a ‘kiss me quick’ hat. Fortunately Lewie would recover himself with some aplomb, albeit it would take another eight and a bit years for it to happen, and when it did, it was with another ‘seasonal’ single (although not intended as such when originally recorded), Stop the Cavalry.

Mention of Christmas brings us bang up to date and Roy Wood’s I Wish It Could Be Christmas Every Day which has just been given a ‘summer’ makeover in the name of a Boots commercial. As cynical moves go, that leaves Messrs T. Dactyl, M. Jerry et al well in the shade... one ten in the shade, maybe?

Take it away Mr. Goldsboro…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQvGyEKO79w

In the Summertime… of 1970

Star Trek Sugar Smacks – one of the better aspects of 1970 (although this packet dates to 1969)

When I think on the nostalgic quality of pop songs, I can never quite decide what it is I’m responding to. Is it that the songs evoke the times in which they were first released, or is it that the songs themselves are the times? Increasingly, I’m coming to the latter conclusion.

Growing up in the 60s and 70s, it was hard to escape from pop music: not that we particularly wanted to. But the songs in the pop charts were all around you: on the radio at home, playing in shops or amusement arcades, an inescapable soundtrack to whatever you were doing: going to school, going shopping, going on holiday. My point here is that I retain better memories of times when the music in the charts was of a higher quality, and, correspondingly, less pleasant memories associated with those times when the charts seemed chock full of rubbish. It doesn’t matter what was happening to me personally at any given time. But as I look back, I find memories shading from pleasant to unpleasant within a matter of months with the shifting landscape of the pop charts. By unpleasant, I don’t mean anything actually traumatic... it’s more a sensation that life wasn’t quite as enjoyable at certain moments, almost as if, to coin a phrase, there was ‘something in the air.’

Ironically, Something In the Air by Thunderclap Newman is associated in memory with a particularly pleasant few months during the hot summer of 1969: a week in Llandudno, the school summer holidays, long, warm afternoons in the back garden at home. But there was something less pleasant in the air a year later, and I can only attribute it to the music that surrounded me at the time. I’m thinking of the summer of 1970.

In retrospect, 1970 seems like a pretty okay sort of year, and in my memory, feels almost like an extension to the previous decade: an extra year of the 1960s, time off for good behaviour, as it were. The 1970s proper didn’t really get started until later – say ’ 72 or ’73 when the era-defining glam rock acts first began to dominate the charts. So that 1970 and ’71 occupied a kind of pop culture limbo. Look at any film shot in those years, and you’d swear it was still the 1960s.

That’s not necessarily the way it felt at the time. For me, 1970 and ’71 were rather mixed years, blighted in part by the arrival of a sadistic school teacher, whose methods were totally out of step with what was appropriate in a suburban junior school. These days, he’d be out of a job in a week, but in 1971 it was seemingly okay to inflict psychological torture on a class of ten-year-olds, just because a couple of them had made a mess of their science books. Somehow, the presence of this malevolent entity in my small corner of the universe seemed to be reflected in pop charts where a kind of drab, bland conformity had taken hold, and some pretty awful records held sway.

1970 got off to a pretty good start, with the likes of Love Grows, Leavin’ On a Jet Plane and Come and Get it riding high in the top 20 by early February, all of which have pleasant associations and evoke a particular moment in time. Even a ludicrous novelty like Lee Marvin’s Wandrin’ Star posesses potent nostalgia value. Oddly, though, it was the Beatles who sounded a slightly sour note for me at this time with Let It Be, which I didn’t much care for (and still don’t to this day). Slow spiritual music was definitely in vogue, but I preferred Simon and Garfunkel’s Bridge Over Troubled Water. By complete contrast, however, the single that came to define my memories of spring 1970 was Dana’s Eurovision winner All Kinds of Everything, which reached number one on April 12^th. Admittedly, my half-Irish DNA meant that I was genetically programmed to fancy Dana, even at the age of 9, but it’s the song I remember more than the singer. Even now, 47 years later, every time of hearing it is like the first. I can’t account for that. It also unlocks a cascade of associated memories, most of them centered on a craze for collecting small plastic space creatures from Star Trek branded packets of Kelloggs’ Sugar Smacks that was peaking at about this same time. In much the same way, I can’t hear Manfred Mann’s 1969 chart swansong Ragamuffin Man without recalling a rainy trip to Birmingham on the train in search of lego sets. So do the songs reflect the times, or are they the times themselves? Sometimes it’s hard to tell: but let’s move on a month or two.

By early July 1970, a kind of sullen, sickly feeling has descended, clouding my recollections of the times, and all attributable to one specific record. That record was everywhere in summer 1970, and not just here in England. It was a massive multi-million seller around the world, which perhaps serves to illustrate how far my personal musical taste had already diverged from the rest of humanity. Of course you know the song: In the Summertime, by Mungo Jerry. How can anyone hate such a feelgood, lightweight pop novelty, the perfect summer hit? Let me count the ways.

I hated every nano second of that song, then as now. Its omipresent singalong choon became part of the fabric of reality during its seven weeks – SEVEN WEEKS! Count them – at number one. A whole summer holiday, ruined by a song that took composer Ray Dorset just ten minutes to write. As long as that?

In the Summertime is the devil’s work, a viral ear worm that, once heard, is in your system for life, like musical malaria. I said I hated every nano second of it, but let me be more specific on that point: in order of loathing, I particularly hated: a) the tune; b) the ‘chit-chi-chit-uuh!’ refrain that runs like percussion through the entire track (and sounds like it was chanted by a choir of trained chimpanzees); c) Dorset’s singing voice; d) the plucked banjo that relentlessly shadows the vocal melody; e) every other aspect of the song not covered in the preceding four points. The whole hideous confection, with its cheery jugband, chugalong vibe, actually induces a state of nausea in me every time I hear it. Oh yes, and I also hated the name Mungo Jerry. Horrible. Can’t explain why.

Quite apart from anything else, it’s TOO LONG! Hearing it again recently, I noticed, as I always do, that there comes a point, about half way through, that feels like the song’s natural ending. Would that it were. Instead, the damn thing starts over again and cycles back through everything we’ve heard up to that point – a needless repetition, extending it to an almost unendurable three minutes and forty seconds in length.

Believe me when I assure you that In the Summertime is, for me, the worst song ever written or recorded, a feat that I doubt will ever be topped, even by the most desperate, commercial vapidity of Cowell, Bieber et al. It holds that status partly because I hate it as much today as I did on its release 47 years ago, and partly because of the way it blighted the whole summer of 1970. You couldn’t escape the damn thing. We were on holiday in Ireland, but I swear it was still everywhere, chit-chi-chitting out of every transistor radio in every café, on the ferry, on the car radio. It was still at the top of the charts when we got home. Would the damn thing ever go away?

Well, no. Dorset hit paydirt when he came up with In the Summertime – in effect, the opposite to a Christmas single, in that it will be guaranteed airplay at a certain time of year for as long as there are radio stations broadcasting on planet Earth, if not elsewhere. It’s probably beaming across the cosmos to other, unsuspecting civilizations, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, who even now must be drawing their plans against us.

In the Summertime may have been the worst offender, but for me, the summer charts of 1970 were filled with records that seemed shot through with a similar nauseous quality. I absolutely couldn’t stand Lola, by the Kinks. Not that its subject matter offended me (I had no clue what Ray Davies was singing about), it was more the lumpen, plodding production and the song itself – one which, much later, and with some reluctance, I took to performing in public. I still don’t really like it, but can at least acknowledge it with a kind of grudging admiration, unlike Mungo Jerry. Other songs that belong in the same sickly summer-turned-sour fabric of time include Christie’s Yellow River (probably best remembered in its later incarnation as a Yellow Pages commercial); Quo’s Down the Dustpipe; and Ray Stevens’ Everything is Beautiful, which just seems to strike a note of desperation with its insistence on a kind of universal ideal. If everything is beautiful, then nothing is. QED, Mr. Stevens.

The question I have to ask is this: were these songs solely responsible for clouding my recollections of the summer of 1970, or were there other aspects of the times that played a part? I’ve written elsewhere of a memorable thunderstorm that occurred in late spring of that year, and it was followed by a run of quite nasty storms peppered across the summer months. I had still to appreciate the spectacle of a really good storm, so these events, with their associated strange atmospheres of brooding afternoon gloom and menace, were certainly a factor that helped to shape my memories of summer ’70.

Another inescapable phenomenon of that year was the World Cup, the first I recall with any degree of clarity, not that it interested me in the slightest. Football just wasn’t a thing in our household, and I couldn’t even be induced to collect the commemorative coins given away by Esso petrol stations, engraved with busts of the England squad (curiously, their jaunty and wrong-by-a-country-mile pop single Back Home evokes a kind of pleasing nostalgia, for reasons that I can’t begin to explain).

A picture is slowly beginning to emerge: there’s thunder in the air, rotten music on the radio, and the nation is gripped by a phenomenon from which I feel excluded. Anything else?

The rot sets in… TV21 never recovered from this last, desperate revamp of summer 1970, that finally rendered the comic utterly worthless.

Well, it’s trivial, but there is. Since 1967 I’d been reading TV21 comic on a weekly basis. In the intervening years, it had undergone various changes in format, including a complete relaunch in late 1969, and by summer 1970 was in its death throes. The page size had shrunk to something slightly smaller than the Beano, and pretty well all the Gerry Anderson content (the comic’s original raison d’etre) was gone, pushed aside by dismal features that seemed to belong to papers like Buster or Smash, none of which held any appeal for me. Aside from Mike Noble’s vaguely inaccurate rendition of Star Trek, there wasn’t anything good left in it, but I was still being bought TV21 on a weekly basis. Watching its gradual decline into mediocrity was bad enough: watching it to a soundtrack of Mungo Jerry’s In the Summertime was almost too much to take…

Fortunately, summer 1970 wasn’t all crap pop and rotten comics: there were SpaceX toys, a range of pocket-sized plastic space hardware, derived from Project SWORD designs, and, for some unknown reason, available in huge quantities in the Republic of Ireland (where our family spent two weeks that year); also on the toy front, and also available in Ireland, were two dolls of the Men from UNCLE (you may recall that Ilya Kuryakin incorporated an unintended ‘Tiny Tears’ feature); and there was the first appearance in our household of The Beano, acquired on the ‘Munster’ car ferry. And as summer turned to autumn, my favourite programme, Fireball XL5, returned to television, after an absence of four years.

Pop music, however, was headed into a slough of despond, a kind of post-Beatles hiatus in which you could almost sense a lack of direction, and from which it would not recover for almost two years. So maybe it was this sense of unwinding, of having finally to come down from the 1960s trip that tainted the music of summer 1970. Whatever it was, I still feel faintly sick whenever I hear any of those songs…

 ‘Chi-chi-chit-uuuh! Indeed.