1970-71: You can stretch right up and touch the sky

History has not been kind to the Seventies. While we look back on the Sixties in black and white, and the Eighties in pastel colours, TV clips suggest the decade in between was experienced in various shades of brown.

The UK economy seemed to be permanently in the red and with the Cold War in full swing, future prospects looked black. It was the decade of my teenage years, unspectacular though they were. With the family, I moved to a new town and new schools; O levels, A levels, illness and, right at the end, the difficult transition to university. Thank goodness for music!

It’s easy to summarise the Seventies as simply classic rock, glam rock, disco and punk. Yes, they formed significant chunks of those years but the glory of music is that we all have different tastes, and so the charts – album or singles – reflect that diversity. Glam, disco and punk certainly touched my life but there was far more to Seventies music than these three genres.

The Beatles may have split but John, Paul, George and Ringo were still very much in evidence. Nevertheless Lennon and McCartney gave way to a new genius songwriting partnership in Abba’s Anderson and Ulvaeus, and Bowie, John/Taupin, Lynne, Lea/Holder, Stewart, Bolan and Cook/Greenaway were also now raking in the UK royalties.

Yet while Slade, Rod, T Rex, Elton and co were undoubtedly familiar faces on Top of the Pops, in many ways the performers I most associate with the Seventies are 10cc, Showaddywaddy, Status Quo and Hot Chocolate. Not necessarily my favourites, but part of my teenage years as much as acne, unattainable girls and Maths homework. Short-lived crazes like Rollermania, ska, Glitter, Osmonds and Grease punctuated the decade but the fun of recalling the 70s comes in the rich supporting cast of songs and artists that entertained me through the age of beige.

But the decade didn't have the brightest of starts. Looking back at what was in the charts at the start of 1970, there was plenty to look back on with fondness. However, without the benefit of the Double Top Ten Show or even Google and YouTube, the artists and titles start to look more and more obscure. 

There were some really big hits at the start of the decade, yet most failed my personal memory test. I can’t believe I made a conscious decision to stop watching TOTP nor was I banned by Mum and Dad! We moved house in November 1970, so perhaps the upheaval played a part. Nevertheless, we moved just up the road to Billericay, Essex, not to a cave in deepest, darkest Borneo so I must still have heard the chart music at the time. 

It is utterly possible that the songs haven’t stayed with me because, as I listen now, they were just awful. Well, let’s be charitable; they are not to my taste, either aged ten or fifty-five. There was a lot of stripped-back rock or blues, boring Motown and yawn-inducing MoR material which did nothing for me. It’s like there was a bleak backlash against the colourful ‘60s. Even had I been ten years older, I doubt very much I’d have been enamoured of the album artists so beloved of ‘The Old Grey Whistle Test’ or John Peel’s radio show. Atonal claptrap like Captain Beefheart? No, thanks! 

It is perhaps symbolic of the mostly chronic state of the music scene that a few snippets lodged tightest in my brain came not from hit singles, films or even TV commercials. They weren’t even proper songs. Rather, advertising jingles, although for public information films. In February 1971, Britain experienced a one-off seismic shift to a decimal currency and, to ensure the population was familiar with the new coins and how they related to the old ones, the BBC broadcast a series of short films called ‘Decimal Five’. They were sprinkled with ditties performed by my old friends The Scaffold telling us things like “One pound is a hundred new pennies, a hundred new pence to the pound”. It must have worked because I can still sing a few of them forty-five years later! Perhaps Roger McGough can be called upon to write more of the same should the Brexiteers contrive to take Britain back to the world of shillings, crowns and the thr’penny bit. 

Anyway, I’m going to concentrate on the stuff I know I liked, with a passing nod to acts I remember and which made even my younger self cringe ever so slightly! The first new number one single of 1970 is a perfect place to start the story, one which very soon veers into bizarre territory. 

Edison Lighthouse came from nowhere to the pinnacle with ‘Love Grows (Where my Rosemary Grows)’. Indeed, the group was so obscure they didn’t even have a fixed line-up. The voice belonged to session singer Tony Burrows and it’s him on the above vintage TOTP clip. Persevere through the embarrassing Tony Blackburn intro and footballer Peter Marinello (whatever happened to ‘the new ‘George Best’?!) prize-giving and enjoy! ‘Love Grows’ is an under-rated Seventies classic, unashamedly happy. It works ‘cos it makes you smile.  

It also stands out for me because the very same Mr Burrows cropped up in no fewer than four different groups who achieved top ten status in the early part of 1970. Four times he performed twice on a single TOTP. One minute he is as part of the long-forgotten White Plains and - would you believe it? – with the original version of Brotherhood of Man. He then crops up as one of The Pipkins, who released the quirky ragtime-esque ‘Gimme Dat Ting’. 

The UK music scene was beginning to become even more incestuous. The front man appearing on the TV broadcasts for the White Plains' ‘My Baby Loves Loving’ and BoM's ‘United We Stand’ clips were both Roger Greenaway, who co-wrote the songs with Roger Cook. Not sure why he took prime miming duties, because the voice belongs to Mr Burrows. However, it is Greenaway’s falsetto on ‘Gimme Dat Ting’. It gets even more complicated…. 

If Lennon and McCartney were the go-to songwriters of the Sixties, Cook and Greenaway were similarly prolific in the early Seventies. In 1970 and 1971, the likes of Andy Williams, Cilla Black, The Hollies and The New Seekers owed a lot of UK sales to the two Rogers. Greenaway may have limited himself to lip-synching on TV but his partner sang (without the studio help of Tony Burrows) in another band, Blue Mink. 

I distinctly recall watching them on TOTP performing ‘Melting Pot’ written –naturally - by Cook and Greenaway. Perhaps it was because I hadn’t seen a group fronted by a white man and black woman before. He didn’t have much of a voice, to be honest, but Madeline Bell most certainly did, even if I didn’t appreciate it at the time. Dad quite liked her, though! I probably didn’t ‘get’ the multiracial co-existence message either, but it’s a likeable dollop of British soul. I also enjoyed ‘Banner Man’ which reached number three the following year. A good old brass band foot-tapper, it was to provide an appropriate backdrop to the opening titles of the Nineties film ‘East is East’.

Shocking Blue’s ‘Venus’ (later given an Eighties update by Bananarama) and Pickettywitch’s ‘I Still Get that Same Old Feeling’ also got me jigging about in the Spring of 1970. Not because of the hot pants-clad singers, of course; it was always about The Music! These were further examples of straightforward, no-frills pop-rock, shorn of Sixties or Eighties-style orchestration and assorted gizmos. Sergeant Pepper, it ain't. You could imagine your average Spanish hotel band doing a passable imitation. 

Christie’s ‘Yellow River’ was another very catchy tune, simple but danceable. I don’t really recall them on TOTP but YouTube has revealed some interesting videos. There’s a performance of the song by one of my late-Sixties favourites and chart regulars The Tremeloes. Apparently they recorded it but didn’t want to release it as a single. Returning to the subject of musical incest, their guitarist-keyboardist was the brother of the group-who-became-Christie’s drummer. Jeff Christie had written the song so the producer (my namesake Mike Smith!) added the writer’s vocals to the original backing track and the rest is history. The Tremeloes must have been kicking themselves! 

Other songs I remember hearing with at best indifference, at worst downright antipathy, include ‘Wand’rin’ Star’. Taken from the popular musical ‘Paint Your Wagon’, it wasn’t exactly targeted at nine year-olds. Lee Marvin wasn’t even singing! We kids did love to mock the gravelly vocals but couldn’t fathom why it topped the charts for three weeks. It felt like a lifetime.

It was displaced by a song which many consider an all-time great, an opinion I don’t happen to share. ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’ has a beautiful first half, undoubtedly, but then it outstays its welcome, over-long and overblown. It bored me then but the public couldn’t get enough of Simon and Garfunkel. The album was the biggest seller not only of 1970 but also the following year. 

In May, the great British public had inflicted upon it the first of a seemingly endless stream of songs by football squads designed to build support for ‘our boys’ as they seek success in this or that competition. In 1970, England’s World Cup Squad were bound for Mexico, confident of retaining the Jules Rimet trophy. I can picture now the massed ranks of Bobby Moore, Gordon Banks et al miming way to ‘Back Home’. While I loved football, I didn’t really see the point of the players singing. In hindsight, it wasn’t the worst football song ever released. After all, I can still remember the tune and some of the lyrics. England didn’t win the World Cup, of course, but they did have a number one single.

Some time that summer, musical memories fade. I have no contemporary recollections of chart-toppers like Elvis Presley’s ‘The Wonder of You’, Freda Payne’s ‘Band of Gold’ or Smokey Robinson’s ‘Tears of a Clown’. I have since watched Free’s stoned TOTP performance of ‘All Right Now’ numerous times but it stirred nothing from my personal databanks. Similarly ‘Lola’ by The Kinks or the two classic rock tracks ‘Black Night’ and ‘Paranoid’, which were in the top four simultaneously that autumn. I wouldn’t have liked Deep Purple or Black Sabbath anyway; far too heavy for nine year-old me.

The absence of the big hits from my consciousness continued well into 1971. None of T Rex’s early glam rock glories, neither solo debuts by Paul McCartney (‘Another Day’) or Elton John (‘Your Song’) nor the MoR radio staples by Carole King and James Taylor. However, I must have been exposed to the charts via TV and Radio because some musical memories have survived. Indeed, there were two monster summer hits which were impossible to miss. 

I’ve no idea what the weather was like in June and July, but in 1970 the air was filled with the sound of Mungo Jerry’s ‘In the Summertime’. A simple structure, lots of easily imitated ‘da-da dee’s and of course the writer-singer Ray Dorset was so readily recognisable thanks to those sumptuous sideburns (or sideboards, as we called them).

A year later, the Scottish group Middle of the Road brought out one of the last great ‘bubblegum’ singles, ‘Chirpy ChirpyCheep Cheep’. The lyrics suggest a sad song, so why the bird song reference? That mattered not one jot. Everyone could sing along and to this day it remains for many a guilty pleasure. Note Sally Carr’s nervous-looking performance on TOTP, broadcast on my tenth birthday.

Another record in the Mungo Jerry mould emanated from Australia. With lots of ‘shhhh’s and ‘uh-uh-ahhh’s, ‘The Pushbike Song’ may not ride high in the pantheon of rock classics but The Mixtures took it to number two, thwarted only by George Harrison’s all-conquering  ‘My Sweet Lord’ early in 1971. It certainly appealed to young cyclists like me. 

As I mentioned earlier, I think ‘TOTP’ had lost its grip on me at this time but another programme which featured contemporary hits – after a fashion – was ‘Crackerjack’. Aimed squarely at junior school-aged kids, it was broadcast on Fridays at five to five, with a wound-up squealing audience of children. I was quite jealous when one week a few friends attended a recording. 

During the show, there would usually be a silly sketch routine punctuated by the stars singing (very badly) excerpts from current pop songs with the script written around the titles. I’m pretty sure ‘The Pushbike Song’ featured, and I can definitely remember hearing bastardised versions of Lobo’s ‘Me and You and a Dog Named Boo’ and Tony Christie’s ‘Is this the Way to Amarillo?’ on ‘Crackerjack’. 

By the end of 1971 my relationship with the older children’s Thursday night show was being repaired and the Christmas number one became a personal favourite for years to come. It was one of those songs, with an unforgettable accompanying video, which I could hear and watch over and over again. It was also one of those rare records with lyrics I could remember and recite at will. I still can. Thanks be to Benny Hill, ‘Ernie’ and let’s not forget his horse whose “name was Trigger, and he pulled the fastest milk cart in the West”. While the downtrodden hero was killed (by a lethal combination of Two Ton Ted’s rock cake and stale pork pie) and thus lost the love of his life, it was also somehow reassuring that Ernie could gain his ghostly revenge…. 

Perhaps this comedy gem shone a light to pierce the gloom of the previous two years. Certainly 1972 was to herald a lighter brighter era in pop. I’d somehow missed out on the likes of ‘Maggie May’, ‘Hot Love’ and ‘Brown Sugar’ but for me, ‘TOTP’ was now back in my heart where it belonged.