Novelty records seem to have been with us forever. The 60s and 70s were particularly prone to this form of chart entertainment, and produced a crop of singles from artists whose more usual stamping grounds were the worlds of comedy and light entertainment. In 1970, it was the turn of Clive Dunn, famous for the old buffer act he’d been doing since ITV’s Bootsie and Snudge in 1960, recently reinvented with a slew of catchphrases and mannerisms supplied by Jimmy Perry and David Croft, to delight audiences as Lance Corporal Jones in Dad’s Army.
In 1970, at a showbiz party, Dunn chanced to meet musician Herbie Flowers, who would later provide the rock world with one of the best bass lines of all time, the intro to Lou Reed’s ‘Walk on the Wild Side’. It was something rather less wild that Dunn had in mind: could Flowers write a pop song for him to deliver as his old man character? Flowers accepted the challenge, and after consulting an ‘easy primer book on composing’ was well under way. There was one stumbling block, though: he couldn’t find a hook for the tune. A quick call to his friend Kenny Pickett (late of psychedelic scenesters The Creation) provided the answer. When Pickett rang Flowers’ doorbell, the two-note chime gave them the simple melodic device they were looking for.
Everyone knows the sound of a typical two-note door chime: in musical terms, it’s a falling major third. The same two-note phrase is also the call of the cuckoo. It can be heard in songs like ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’ (‘Some day I’ll wish upon a star’) and, most famously, in Laurel and Hardy’s iconic signature tune. Trite and obvious, it's hardly the rocket science end of songwriting. Flowers and Pickett’s composition ‘Grandad’ is full of it: the falling third occurs in the chorus (‘Grandad/Grandad’) and occurs again half a bar later on the word ‘lovely’. The verse swings along in pure rocking chair fashion, and again, it’s made up of three ‘cuckoo calls’, B flat to G, expressed as a dotted quaver and semiquaver, as can be seen in the sheet music. After a dotted minim on B flat, the melody peaks on a sixth, C, falling a fourth to G. Below this, the chords perform a minor fall from E flat major to C minor, getting there by way of G minor with a D in the bass.
You may well wonder where all this is going. Well, that ‘cuckoo call’ melody in ‘Grandad’ is a bear trap that all songwriters should beware if they don’t want to end up sounding like Clive Dunn. Major thirds occur all the time in popular songs, but they don’t always repeat incessantly like the melody in Flowers and Pickett’s composition, and, crucially, they don’t often jump to the sixth note in the scale over a descending chord sequence. Once you’ve got all those elements in place, you’re in the bear trap. You've accidentally re-written 'Grandad'.
If it hadn’t been set in stone as a cheesy kiddie’s classic, there would be nothing inherently wrong with that particular melodic progression, apart from its being rather annoying. There’s something about that two-note chime that demands attention, which is probably why it’s so commonly used for doorbells. It’s also a bit dumb, as composer Marvin Hatley realised when he wrote the Laurel and Hardy theme. Songwriters go there at their peril. ‘Cuckoo’ was once a common term of derision to describe someone not quite in possession of a full deck.
It’s ironic that Herbie Flowers went on to work with Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, because Macca is, unfortunately, the most recent victim of what I’m going to call ‘The Grandad Trap’ if he did but know it, and Ringo is his partner in crime. Macca's just released single ‘Home to Us’ has a melody that goes ‘cuckoo’ fully eight times, then jumps to a sixth, before dropping a fourth. The minute I heard it, I thought: ‘that’s Grandad!’
He’s not the first. Back in the 1990s, the band Spiritualised (who coincidentally got a namecheck in my last posting) fell into the trap with the title track of their album ‘Ladies and Gentlemen we are Floating in Space’, whose melody again does that ‘Grandad’ thing across its first four bars. A few people, mostly snarky journalists, noticed the similarity at the time, but it didn’t stop the album from reaching number 4 in the UK charts and being acclaimed as one of the best of the decade. It just accidentally quoted the melody from one of the cheesiest pop singles of all time.
I suppose, being a grandad himself, it’s appropriate for Macca to quote from Clive Dunn’s kiddies’ classic, though I’m sure he did it unawares. The original was no slouch, reaching number one in the charts in January 1971, coincident with Dunn’s 51st birthday. But a lot of other horrible songs have made number one… In fairness, it took more than a trite melody to make 'Grandad' such a horror... the very idea of Corporal Jones making a pop record was bad enough, and then they gave us a kiddie chorus for good measure. Then again, even John Lennon had a kiddie chorus on 'Happy Xmas War is Over'. And lest we should forget, Macca did also give humanity 'The Frog Chorus'...
It may seem unfair to call out a legend like Paul McCartney for accidentally reproducing one of the cheesiest pop song melodies of all time, but no one can deny the similarity. Especially not now that I’ve pointed it out. My advice to him if he should happen to realise (or less likely, read this blog)?
“Don’t panic!”
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