Burning On: Mud: "Dyna-Mite"

The main virtue of rock 'n' roll is that it's not supposed to be about technical excellence at its heart (though that can be stupefying, goodness knows) but about a kind of knowing-wink look, a sense that maybe what is happening is a little...dangerous. 

Mud aren't dangerous; certainly with this song the woman in question is explosive, but Les Gray's voice doesn't shriek or go camp - it is a plain voice (one from quiet suburban Carsharlton, no less) and poses no threat to any order whatsoever.  And so the woman's impact is tempered, made suggestive somehow, because of Gray's calm. 

This Chinn/Chapman song (rejected by The Sweet for being not quite rocking enough, I guess) sounds a little like Status Quo, a little like Suzi Quatro - when the Glam template was fresh every song was distinctive, but now that it has been worn smooth it has become a genre, as opposed to a movement.  Glam was still big enough to have real force in the charts (this was a #2 on the Radio Luxembourg hit parade) to matter and wasn't going away anytime soon (see the next two entries here) but emotionally it had to be more ooomphy than this (though the music going "on and on and on and on" with the Gray's voice going up and up each time is at least a good try). 

The sophisticated velvet goldmine era of T.Rex has given way to this handclapping/vaguely intimidating ode to a woman who can turn on a whole damn town, not just one man, with her flashing eyes and radiance - so much so that no one knows if she's "wrong or right" as she is so overwhelming.  This is again a woman-as-spectacle song (nowhere in the narration is there any interaction between the narrator and the woman) - she tells you to boogaloo and you do, and that's that.  She comes from nowhere and is beholden to no one.  She is a flash in the sky, but it's too bad the song is durably rock 'n' roll but not much more than that; this song is in The Void, as far as I can tell, for being too neat and tidy about a woman who is anything but.  She's on fire, as Alicia Keys will one day sing, and as Gray gets across backhandedly. 

Next up:  groove on me what?

The Promise: Springwater: "I Will Return"

It happens every so often; now that we are in The Void it happens with alarming frequency. I don’t know this song; in fact only in doing this blog have I been exposed to this song at all, which really must mean it has been forgotten by almost everyone, even radio programmers.  A #2 NME hit, an instrumental, a marker – once – of some kind of emotional barometer. It is lovely, plaintive, sorrowful, but with that title, something of a promise as well. 

“I Will Return” could be applied to so many things at this time, including the dying dream of the 60s.  That is how I hear this – as a farewell and a guarantee that what once was will come back, evolved and perhaps even mutated somewhat, but it will indeed return.  Of course it can work on the level of young people leaving home for the first time; of lovers who are parted, for whatever reason; even as a song of grief over the death of someone, and the griever’s longing for some proof their loved one is still alive in some way.  In order for something new to happen separation of all kinds is necessary; the 70s can’t really start until the 60s are mourned properly, and that mourning will take some time.  This song is just a tiny part of that general feeling of loss, and hope for renewal and rebirth, and signs of that rebirth are all over the chart at this time, from Slade to John Kongos – something slightly scary (not forgetting Redbone here) is coming to take its place, something big and insouciant and loud…something that has its roots in the 60s, but stomps into the 70s with no time to look back, as its momentum is too strong. 

Yet for now, this plays as the leaves fall; as the first wave of baby boomers have already left university and have headed out into the world, expectant and hopeful, knowing that in order for something to start, something else has to end.  The promise of return here is a harbinger of sorts, though at this point, one of the harbingers is on the King’s Road, fixed on the past rather than the future, which is still a puzzle, not yet a way out; another has just released an album called Hunky Dory, which won’t catch on for another two years.  “I Will Return” has been forgotten as indeed something did indeed return; and so it enters the Void like an invitation to a going-away party or a box of old money that is no longer in use.  Phil Cordell (aka Springwater) may have only had one UK hit (his main successes through the years came from abroad*), but it came at just the right time, between the dying of one decade and the beginning of another.

Next up:  whatever happened to the Housewives of Valium Court?

*Cordell was a multi-instrumentalist who had been in a band called The Prophets and they recorded a few sides with Joe Meek; "I Will Return" is in some ways as emblematic an instrumental of its time as "Telstar" was, though less well remembered.