Getting To Everyone: Slade: "My Friend Stan"

And now, back to the Glam Slam; and yet, this is where the toll of such a sustained effort begins to show.  They had had a tough summer - Don Powell, their drummer, had been in a very bad car accident and spent most of the summer recuperating; in order to record this song he had to be helped to his drum kit.  This led to (or perhaps encouraged) Slade's next hit to be a piano-based arched eyebrow of a song, as opposed to a roaring stomping recorded-in-an-air-hangar beast that they usually provided the UK public with (the US public, despite Slade's best intentions, never did respond to them in the same loyal way).  It is a sly song, full of innuendo, sung by Noddy Holder with his usual gruff cheer; in trying to figure out who is who here.  Stan's father making him "work all night" means he can't do "it" right (no points for knowing what that means). 

"And from the way you blacked my eye/I know that you're the reason why" is the constant phrase (used after the next verses, wherein his friend Pete is weak and his friend Jack's got an ache in his back) - but who is being addressed?  If it's a girl then why is she hitting the narrator?  And why is she fixing everyone's ties (whatever that means) and otherwise "gettin' to him"?  I know I am asking a lot from what is essentially a novelty song about sex, but the song - I can't help but feel this - also has a subtext of The Man vs. the ordinary guy, who is being worked hard, is being exhausted, even becomes sick due to what The Man demands; and hence it is a political song, or at least whenever I hear it, it becomes one.  Slade stand squarely in favor of the working class; and here Slade, I feel, are talking straight to them, signifying if you will, about what is happening and how The Man is "gettin'" to everybody, fixing them up but good...screwing them over?

Again, I don't want to make too much hay of this song - but at this point in '73 I sense a rebelliousness underneath a lot of UK life, a willingness to try something new, along with resignation and The Fog.  Slade were to bounce back from this (a #2 hit for them was a miss, at this point) with a huge hit, their last one - and while the Glam Slam era continues here, it is ever-so-slowly disappearing...to be replaced by something that is, at this point, yet to exist.  Stan, Jack and Pete are all linked by someone, sure, but is it a woman, or is it something more...sinister?

Next up:  them's the limits.   

Hold Her Tight: Barry Blue: "Dancin' (On A Saturday Night)"

As this blog meanders into much-dreaded thing known as The Fog, there are some small comforts along the way, and this is one of them.  The mid-70s were not such a terrible time that songs like this couldn't be hits; indeed it was because of their somewhat slapdash naivete that people got through it at all, I sense. 

Not that Barry Blue (nee Green) was naive.  He had been working in the music business for years (much as Suzi Quatro had, and yep, they're born in the same year too) and was already probably figuring out that his real metier was in songwriting and producing; but this is an utterly charming song, unpretentious, with an odd nod to, of all things, Greek music (not since "Bend It" has this blog heard anything so Greek*) and the fact that he can't really dance that well is the clincher here - this is may be pop but it is the people's pop, if I may put it that way.  This is bubblegum in the best sense - fun, innocent, his "bluejean baby" being his center, his joy, the bliss of dancing being the one thing on his mind...as Bob Stanley (hello!) noted in his essay about Blue, this wasn't even supposed to be Blue's song - it was written by him and Lynsey De Paul** for the band Mardi Gras, but Blue decided to do it himself, and thus ended up on tv wearing a blue satin jumpsuit and coming across as the nicest Glam star around.  However, as the Glam era ended, he had the good sense to move back into producing and songwriting, and I will be getting to one of his best productions in 1977, which showed that he had an ear for funk as well as bubblegum - Heatwave's immortal "Boogie Nights."

Girls wearing blue jeans, dancing, good times - here it's catchy fun, but with the next song, it sounds as if it's a matter of life and death, no more, no less.    


*Greece had a kind of hypnotic hold on the UK psyche at this time - sure, it was a relatively nice place to go for a vacation, but then so was Spain.  Perhaps Greece was more hip at the time?  Seen as more exotic in some way?  (And now that I think of it, why was the cheese shop in the Monty Python sketch playing bouzouki music in the first place?)

**He and De Paul wrote her hits "Sugar Me" and "Getting A Drag" amongst others; songs that couldn't be further from this one if they tried.

We Are All Together: Medicine Head: "One and One is One"

It may come as a surprise, dear readers, that anything that isn't either Glam or Teen Idol material can show up here - in competitive, who-can-wear-the-most-outrageous-outfit-on-TOTP-this-week 1973, and yet here we are with...hippies. 

Just because the 60s ended technically didn't mean hippies disappeared; at this point, in fact, they are slowly but surely the cause of all sorts of things to come, things that don't really exist at this point but eventually will (everything from organic food to recycling to flotation tanks and crystal healing; some of these will prove more popular than others).  Hippies, as I understand/imagine it, may well have given up buying singles altogether in favor of albums; but this got in the chart, an anomaly to say the least, and an NME #2, as well.   

For those of you who might think that maybe this song is proof hippies can't do math, well, man, it's all about how love puts two together so they are one, dig? (Hippie declarations of love are of course the lower octave, as they'd say at the Omega Centre, of the higher octave of universal love, man*.)  Far from being a pompous blowhard-type declaration, this is as easygoing as a Sunday and may well be the first appearance of a jew's harp on MSBWT, if I'm not mistaken.  Medicine Head were a blues band, mostly, but this is pure pop, the lyrics all love-eagerness (more phone talk, "little darling") - if anything this is what a more lively Dire Straits would sound like, had they existed yet.  (The guitar here sounds a bit like the guitar on "So Far Away" and there are little organ blips and bleeps too, less frenetic than those on "Industrial Disease.")  The vocals are laid back, so much so they're almost spoken word, and it is a shame that the band (signed in the 60s to John Peel's Dandelion label) didn't get to build on this success; perhaps they were too offhand and hippie to compete in the Glam Rock/Big Important Album dichotomy of the time, and end up, effectively, as the kind of band only people (pardon me, "heads") from back in the day remember at all.  This song is thus part of The Void - I have yet to hear it on UK radio - drowned out by its noisy neighbors in the chart, from Suzi Quatro to 10cc, Wizzard to Wings.  There were other laid-back songs on the chart, of course, but none as lo-fi as this. 

Next up:  Did someone say hippie?   

*I'm not sure if the term "New Age" was being used in '73, but the Omega Centre is a New Age place in Toronto, in case you're wondering - in Yorkville, where people would go in the late 60s to make fun of hippies.  Things have changed...

Think Primitive, Act Local: Hotlegs: "Neanderthal Man"

It is, by now, late summer 1970; the new decade still beckons, but the 60s still hang over the year in certain ways that in two months will (sadly) be over. The bubblegum overlords Kasenetz & Katz have struck a deal with some Mancunians earlier this year that have seen their modest studio in Stockport, Strawberry Studios, fitted with some state-of-the-art equipment, all the better so that they may record there for the production team (instead of going to NYC to do the recording there). The bubblegum contingent are especially interested in one of them, ex-Mindbender Graham Gouldman, as he has been writing catchy and successful songs for others for years, and K & K want to make themselves more credible by having him on board. This doesn’t really work out that well, but as Gouldman is away on business, the other three – Eric Stewart (also an ex-Mindbender), Lol Creme and Kevin Godley (who were in The Mockingbirds together and knew Gouldman from school days) are at Strawberry Studios, eager to mess around and see what they come up with.  The 70s, at least in Mancunian terms, is about to get started.

The song starts with the drums and goes from there, though not too far – it is a drumtastic song with guitars, recorders and voices, the voices secondary to the beat. The beat is a slow shuffle*, not really funky as such but it catches the whole ‘back to basics’ movement of the time, only with one little caveat; it is impossible (especially knowing what is going to come from these musicians) just how much of this song is plain old songwriting in the ‘give the label/people what they want’ and how much of it is some kind of oblique commentary on the HRS man’s man’s mans world hooey that definitely still existed at this time, in Stockport and elsewhere. (The women in the video all look as if they are extras from The Flintstones, had it been a live-action tv series and not a cartoon.) Look at their faces (Eric Stewart going so far as to wear sunglasses indoors, that’s how nonchalant he is) and you can just see them veer from serious to kind of amused to near blank, and the song itself gives no real hint as such as to how seriously you (can) take it.

That the studio was partly owned by Stewart and Gouldman meant that these musicians – currently known as Hotlegs, but their more famous name will be 10cc – had the chance to work and experiment and mess around; there are some bands who enjoy doing this, and this is one of them. (They don’t really get going as a group as such for a while, running the studio and being the in-house band for whoever wants to use it, Neil Sedaka being the most famous guest in the early 70s.) This freedom is vital to understanding how music evolves, from this rather primitive song to things far more complex, away from any pressures from managers or labels; this is, in a way, the first step towards the kind of autonomy musicians have today**. Owning part of the means of production may have been a headache at times (due to a bad deal they didn’t make that much from this huge hit) but they kept on going, finding out that they worked well together, a joy in and of itself.  Whether this was a send-up or just a happy result of experimentation is hard to say, but under the auspices of bubblegum, a new band is about to be born; one that is bound to its surroundings and own inspirations and ideas far more than any producer or label.  Neanderthals?  Hardly.

*Speed this up a little and hey presto, there’s “Loaded” by Primal Scream, more or less.

**The Rolling Stones had a studio but it was mobile, theirs, and not part of a community (besides other rock groups); Strawberry Studios was open for anyone, from aunties to orchestras, to come by and use for a nominal fee. Tony Wilson admired them for keeping things local when they could have gone elsewhere; Joy Division would work there in the future, under the guidance of Martin Hannett.

Unboundedness: Elvis Presley: "Suspicious Minds"

"The panther's tread is on the stairs
Coming up and up the stairs."

"Pursuit" Sylvia Plath



…the advent of vinyl meant you could listen to a song whenever you wanted; you could of course listen for it on the radio, but with vinyl you could just listen to it over and over. The needle would be placed on the opening groove and the spiral nature of the groove would do the rest; the needle would lift at the end of the groove, ready to go back to its stand or be placed right back at the start…eventually a record was cut so that the needle would never leave, though, and that was called a locked groove; Sgt. Pepper ends with one, for instance. Theoretically, a locked groove could play forever, or as long as the listener could stand to hear the same thing over and over again…


…and over and over again, but there was something else the Beatles did too; fade a song out and then fade it in again* - “Helter Skelter” deals with a spiral descent, a relationship of hide and seek, indecision, and if it had been released as it was done in the studio, would have gone on for half an hour…


Music tries to reach infinity however it can. One piece is being played over several centuries**; but pop music was stretching out around this time too, from Jimmy Webb to The Beatles to Isaac Hayes. The go-go 60s where songs had to be around three minutes were still around, but to truly get into a song, to really be carried by it, more time was needed. This stretching of time implies many things; more time to explain, to have orchestral passages, to suggest that what is being said is big and important...which suits the end of a decade and what some may have sensed as the end of an era...

But yes, infinity. That which means "unboundedness" and loops around itself, swinging and returning, not so much a spiral as a length and a curve, a length and a curve...pop singles may be long but they are not infinite; the needle always dutifully leaves the end groove, and it is up to the listener as to whether they want to hear the song again. There is probably a limit to the number of times anyone could hear a song, even one they love, in a row***; but then there are songs that seem to keep revolving of their own accord, that could be listened to repeatedly, looping away, but even that will not work. They will just keep going, like a heartbeat, long after the record player is turned off...if the listener is trying to get a song into or out of his/her system, well, this one will just stay.

There is no beginning, as such; the situation is laid out pure and simple, as if you are walking into something that has already been going for some time - here is infinity, and now you are conscious that you are part of it, that you are (however obscurely) part of the "we."

It is dark; the very middle of the night; when time is not really the point. He's singing about himself, about her, sure, but he is singing so urgently that you can't help but become involved, and as it's an ever-looping situation then you can bet you're taken in, you are part of it whether you like it or not. You become her in a way, are that suspicious and disbelieving mind that will not rest and thus will not let him rest. Throw the clock away: you are like this all the time.

In the infinite world, so much of ordinary life becomes transitory, meaningless. Or almost impossibly stable; it was this way, it is this way, and it will always be this way. One constant - love - meets another one - jealousy - and neither can ever budge. There is no escape, there are only tears, tears that you cannot see, because men aren't supposed to cry in pop songs...can his love conquer her disbelief in the end? Our own dubiousness? How can either of them prove the other is wrong? It loops and loops, slowing down, he begs for their love to survive, praying to her, praying to the infinite itself to slow down, praying for something to break through...

...and then fades out...



...but it is still the night, still the middle, the endless stretching out until it cannot be seen or heard anymore, inaudible but there. The narrator in "Ruby" knew he was going to die and the question was how to take her with him. Death is not an option here; and there is no end to the song. Sure, the needle will leave to go home eventually, but hearing the song again will not prolong anything, because it's already there. Not even fading it out will work, not even the song technically 'ending' will do. The infinite has opened up and makes a mockery of things like 'endings' and for that matter, 'beginnings' - and you are part of it now, witness, if not actual participant, in the whole relationship here, with its looks and accusations and tears and pleas and insomnia...

...and of course this comes from the same writer (Mark James) as "Always On My Mind" - there he is in another kind of infinity, one next door to this one - the Other is not suspicious there as lonely and ready to break up, to go. But here there is no going, he can't go even if she does, and the only sign of any resolution is in her suspicion...at least she cares, even if her caring is making him a nervous wreck.

Elvis is caught in a trap; how poignant that sounds, coming from a man who has just proved to the world once again that he is indeed the King; how poignant that he recorded this in a studio that no longer exists (not at home in Graceland, which would have been just too much). The song was recorded to approximate how he did the song in Las Vegas, the fade-out/fade-in in particular; it is a song that could in theory be sung forever...everyone is on it here, playing and singing as if they are just as desperate as Elvis is...he may well be caught in a trap - a trap of his own making, hapless...but he's going to make art out of it, one way or another...and he laughs at the end, happy, having escaped the song, if not the situation...

...it is a cliche, I feel, to say that music keeps going long after the musicians who created it; a lot of music gets forgotten, lost, after all. Musicians themselves forget lyrics, songs, whole albums (i.e. Robin Gibb and his Sing Slowly Sisters). Here Elvis presents us with a song that is right in the middle of everything, a song that once again everyone can understand (the old "Elvis is everyone/Everyone is Elvis" idea), that too many people have been caught in...and he rollicks through this live, like a figure in a great painting that knows it's in a great painting...happy to be in the infinite.

And here in the infinite is where I leave Elvis: but really, do I leave him here? He returns again and again in the charts and in music so much as to be part of the infinite himself, always indisputably there if only in theory, a monarch perhaps for twenty years but much longer than that in the imagination. (There are future #2s for Elvis, but they are all previous #1s and so I won't be writing about them.) It is only fitting to end here, end with him having reclaimed his right to rock, to sweat it out onstage and live out the music, to sing a song that never really ends (which he plainly understands)...a song that continues even after it ends, an ur-song, if you will. A song that everyone, including poets, understands:


"And you will never know what a battle/I fought to keep the meaning of my words/Solid with the world we were making./I was afraid, if I lost that fight/Something might abandon us."

"Fidelity" Ted Hughes



*Jimi Hendrix did this as well, on “Manic Depression.”

**Though not composed as such until 1987, Cage's work was, I'm sure, being thought of before then; the longest symphony in the regular orchestral repertoire is Mahler's No. 3, which can take up to one hundred minutes to play. Cage's work can be played much faster, of course, but even at its fastest takes nearly fifteen hours.

***How many times have you listened to a song the whole way through? Not because you had to, but because you wanted to...

The Language of Love: Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich: "Zabadak"

And now we turn from earnest psychedelic pop to...earnest pop? Seeing how last time they were trying to instigate nothing more than erotic chaos, to a Greek beat no less, here there is percussion galore and an attack on...lyrics themselves?

This NME #2 is predictably sweeping and loopy and everything you'd want/expect from these guys, the sort of song that could get played, no problem, on the new Radio One. It's an awkward thing in songs always to point out (in words, of course) that lyrics/words have less meaning than feelings, that love itself is more important as a feeling than as something expressed. Love, as a band we'll be getting to again soon, is all anyone needs, and words just get in the way...

...and this of course opens up a whole bucket of worms as to how important language is in songs in general as opposed to the feeling the song is trying to promote - that ultimate goal, Love. Do lyrics in songs matter as much as they should? Do they matter at all, ultimately? Are they dispensable? Are they a necessary but unwelcome part of a song? Lyric writers have the annoying position of working for hours on songs, only to have the public mishear them, misunderstand them or just plain ignore them altogether, which can be irritating if the lyric writer is actually trying to get something across*. (There are people I know who only listen to music because of the lyrical content, and others who tend to see it as superfluous because music is their main thing, not words.)

Using words to explain that ultimately words aren't as important as you might think is very Friendly Forebear, and Ken Howard & Alan Blaikley must have realized this when writing it - as T.S. Eliot's puts it, "I gotta use words when I talk to you." Even in trying to escape from language and make it sound like a bunch of nonsense, there has to be some kernel of meaning or the listener is going to wonder why you bothered to say anything anyway. (Even, God bless them, The Trashmen were saying something with "Surfin' Bird" although it's never going to be seen as poetry.) Even if you go by the Bangsian notion that rock 'n' roll is nothing but a huge indestructible joke that will go on forever because it's at bottom it's all about THE PARTY, there is still that basic message to relate, in one way or another.

So when songwriters reflect on the relative unimportance of what they are writing, there is another wall casually knocked down; one between the listener and writer, who here is saying that the feeling of love - love as big as an ocean - dwarfs anything he could write, and maybe that's '67 hyperbole but also, just maybe, it's true. Words can do a lot, but they can also only do so much, and the indescribable is sensibly left that way, to a lot of percussion and grinning and general good vibes. This is Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich's "All You Need Is Love"; but it's also saying that as a song it (in a way) is meaningless, next to the epic feeling that it's patiently pointing towards...

Next up: one last swim through balladsville, before the end...


*There are lyricists who love to write and others who leave it at the last minute, as for them it's a chore, not a pleasure (Jarvis Cocker and Rod Temperton are two I can name right off the bat). I wonder how many songs have been written where the words are seen as homework, something to just get done and over with.

You Can't Play That On The BBC part 3: The Troggs: "I Can't Control Myself"

"AAAwwwwOOOOOOOHHHHHHH NNNNNNNNOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!" screams Reg Presley, as if he is doing something he likes maybe a little bit too much and also maybe has done something wrong.

But it's not his fault!

This man is on fire, after all, and possesses (or is possessed by, more accurately) something way beyond anything he's experienced before. Unlike "Wild Thing" where he bosses the girl around, here she is an idol, a figure with naked hips and long hair and a way of breaking him down until he's helpless, swamped by a fervor so big it could "move a nation" (whatever thatmeans). In such a state he of course is going to scream and the bubblegum "ba bas" are like so much background noise to his passion. He is swamped by something he can't control (and this loss of control is fun, of course, as long as she's faithful) and if only she knew how it felt, her hair would curl. Well! He may be ridiculous to others but what the hell does he (or should he) care?

I can't say this is the beginnings of ye olde punk rock*, but I can't say this band (beloved of Lester Bangs, mais oui) isn't getting back to the basics even as the baroque and (shh-it's just starting now) psychedelic modes are beginning to take hold of the more famous bands. The Troggs knew where their bread could be buttered, so to speak, and it wasn't in anything that would take long to write or record. Mutant energies were working elsewhere; here the thudding bass and hapless howls are enough to make sure that rock 'n' roll stayed just as degenerate and disrespectable as it should be. His scream of pure pleasure at the end is miles away from anything normal radio would play. I wonder if it will return?

Next: more uncontrollable behavior, believe it or not.



*Chrissie Hynde dedicated this to Sid Vicious at the Pretenders' first gig; before the concert she found out he had died.

Now Is The Time: Manfred Mann: "If You Gotta Go Go Now"

There has been a man stalking the charts all this year; sometimes he is there himself, sometimes it's others covering his songs or being inspired to sing or write songs like him. If there is a simple divide - state vs. pirate radio - then there is another one - those who know and dig Bob Dylan, and those who don't. He isn't now (and I'm guessing wasn't then) to everyone's liking, but those who embraced his casual twangy sound and sharp lyrics could not help wanting to be him; even Lennon succumbed for a while, inspired by the sheer exuberant noise of his songs, not to mention the fact that he was usually saying something - something complex, never simple.

The Manfreds were the first UK band to cover Dylan and get him near to the top (they would get a number one with "The Mighty Quinn" a few years from now) and they have just the right blend of roughness and odd tenderness to make this work. He wants her, but not if it's going to put her off her stride; she's got to make up her mind, not him. He is happy no matter what. And that is the undercurrent here - happiness. He's poor, it's late, he's tired - but there is no Stonesy condescension or smugness, nor is he going to miss her and whine about it next day to his friends. There is - can I say this? - an American plain-speaking here that is quite refreshing and the candid way Dylan had in all songs of saying what needed to be said must have hit all UK bands and songwriters quite hard (not to mention his dress sense and general gnomic nonchalance).

I don't know if the Manfreds were the first UK band to record a Dylan song, but they were the right group to do so. Dylan's work is certainly a challenge to The Beatles (whom he has already met); they start to go more acoustic and self-reflective just as he takes up the electric mantle. This is a crossroads in pop to be sure, one that not every singer or band could step into, but once again the line has been drawn between us and them, in attitude as well as style. That attitude would soon explode, but for now all remains quiet...

Loud Hard Fast Rules: The Kinks: "All Day and All Of The Night"

The origins of genres of music are always murky; from the primordial mud that is this song - which rattles the foundations of rock itself - many things will flow, aided and abetted by other songs from The Beatles and bands we have yet to meet in this blog. This song the LEAPS out at you, it cannot and will not be resisted; there is something more than a little obsessive about the lyrics and the choppy way they are sung (choppy to go with the power chords) in what sounds like a big broom closet. This is rock pounced upon with glee (you can hear their joy in the break, in Dave Davies' no-holds-barred solo), as if rock itself was just invented last week and its almighty power to stun ears and energize listeners was there for the taking by anybody, even some young men from Muswell Hill.

And what are the results? Screaming chaos, at first, but you just know that garage bands across the world made yet another racket to bug their parents, some digging the speed (and thence to punk) and others the distortion and LOUDNESS (punk again but also heavy metal). Nobody knew about the latter at the time and a 'punk' was someone usually found on American cop shows (wearing a windbreaker/sneer and up to no good). The sheer attack of this song must have taken The Beatles and DC5 aback; but The Kinks themselves probably knew they could not just write knock-'em-out songs like this for long without being bored and/or out of fashion. Meanwhile I can see Mods dancing to this, future guitar heroes jumping on their beds with their air guitars, lots of play on pirate radio and lots of screaming girls caught between the relentless energy of the song and the slight smile in Ray Davies' voice, as if he knows he's wrong, but OH how it feels so right. Is obsession always such a bad thing?

Can't Live Without Them: Dean Martin: "Return To Me" and "Volare"

The accordions and girls are there, and Dean steps in, as into a comfortable pair of slippers, and sings. Or: he sounds a little more awake and lively, stopping all of a sudden to sing in his native tongue, to get his roots into the song and the song into its roots, words that blend and blur (to my ear) wonderfully, the way olive oil and garlic and parmesan and pasta do - words such as these:

"Penso che un sogno cosi non ritorni mai piu/Mi dipingevo le mani e la faccia di blu
/Poi d'improvviso venivo dal vento rapito/E incominciavo a volare nel cielo infinito"

The sky is blue and his heart has wings; his heart has wings because she has indeed come back to him. "Te amo" he sang in the first, and now his love is like a brave warm wind that can carry them both. As someone who has flown over an ocean to be with the one I love three times, I know (despite the dull practicalities of flight) how he feels - to fly, to get to what is real, to get away from the earthbound, to return to someone (though there was never any problems or quarrels, of course).

Of course, when Martin sings about getting away from disillusion, you have to wonder - in this time of existentialists and bohos and so on - how much "Volare" spoke to general post-war feelings that NOW was the only time, the past being a nightmare, the future all but unknowable. To live for the present is close - very close, in fact - to not actually existing in ye olde time-space continuum at all. To be and not to be; that is the Dean Martin $64,000 question, ultimately. And while the song is mainly about the blue in the air and blue paint making the narrator invisible, Domenico Modugno's Eurovision hit (my parents' song, by the way) is, I am guessing, a little bit more romantic - whereas Martin sings it with a nonchalant lightness that treads next to romance, yes, but you know that his ultimate wish to be off the earth, in the clouds and sky so blue is not just a lyric.

"Return To Me" is far more earthbound, Martin's warmth sounding like a man sitting on a chair on the street or perhaps standing underneath her window, longingly singing for her return - he is persuasive and there is no doubt she will return - it is as sweet as a Baci chocolate, complete with a message of love's durability inside. (It was co-written by Carmen Lombardo, so Canada once again sneaks in here, with no one noticing.)

I must note that these songs coincide with the height of what I guess might be called Italophilia in the UK; a mania happily shared by my husband's parents as well as my own. Even though I grew up as (and still am) a Francophile by nature, it is hard to resist anything Italian; not even Virgil himself could have written better lyrics here, and I am sure he would have taken more time to write them than their authors did. Rock, as previously mentioned, still rolled along, but the Vespa scooters, cappucino machines and pizza parlors would remain, along with the sense of blissful nothingness that just skirts something a little strange and unknown, but also warming as a June sky.