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.