One Hit No More, No. 73: Jigsaw, aka, Probably What Punk Rock Responded To

They inspired this guy. Who cares what I think?

Loathe as I am to essentially re-write a Wikipedia post, I simply couldn’t find a lot about this band. I also spent a week listening to music I did not care for and I can’t let that be for nothing. At least the song has a decent back-story.

The Hit
I have no memory of Jigsaw’s “Sky High.” I like the tense opening - e.g., pure 70s action movie gold with horns swelling above; sets a good mood - and then that clears to make way for the first verse. A bar or two passes before the song hits a 70s-pop trot for the rest of the first verse…and into the chorus. Apart from the semi-nude beginning, all of that repeats into a second verse/chorus. Without further investigation, all that counts as an odd choice for what amounts to a break-up song. Boy meets girl, boy falls for girl, girl “blows it all sky high” by telling boy a lie. Seems awful standard…and yet…

As it happens, Jigsaw wrote the song for a 1975 “martial-arts action movie” starring George Lazenby - this was after his one-film spin as Bond, James Bond - which makes more sense of the musical choices (e.g., maybe the woman was a femme fatale). I don’t know that movie either (and neither does Netflix, as it happens), which makes all this seem extremely “period” - as in, a pure, perhaps wild animal of the mid-1970s.

And yet the song hit a solid No. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100, outperforming the single in Jigsaw’s native UK - though not in Australia (maybe the attachment to Lazenby goosed it?). It did even better in Japan, achieving the odd and notable feat of being a hit in consecutive years…

…but the undeniably coolest thing about “Sky High” is the fact that a lucha libre legend named Mil Mascaras used it as his theme music. I’d kill for that claim to fame. As would you…

One Hit No More, No. 65: Apollo 100, One Hit Versus 45

El Maestro.

The Hit
Apollo 100’s “Joy” dropped the year after I was born, but the whole “souped-up classical” vibe brought back vivid memories of hearing a disco spin on Beethoven’s 5th in the late 1970s (by Walter Murphy, titled "A Fifth of Beethoven"). While both got…let’s go with surprisingly popular, nothing connected the two outside the call-back to classical works.

I’ll get to who (or what) Apollo 100 very briefly was below, but the most surprising thing about their riff on “Joy” was the fact they weren’t the first band/act to do it. As noted in Wikipedia’sslim write-up on Apollo 100, their version of the song was “a nearly note-for-note remake of the pop music arrangement by Clive Scott of ‘Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring’ as recorded by the British band Jigsaw.” In other words, a cover of another song that, in pop culture terms, didn’t make a lot of sense. Jigsaw has a bigger, better story than Apollo 100, but the bounds of this project means playing the cards I’m dealt. About that…

The Rest of the Story
“But after those two albums, Apollo 100 was history, and what became of Tom Parker after that, the Internet is not forthcoming.”

Parker got the writing credit for “Joy,” but he was just one part of Apollo 100, “a short-lived British instrumental studio-based group.” He hailed from Newcastle upon Tyne, England, and bounced lower (jazz clubs) and higher (played with Eric Burdon and the New Animals) over a career that, as implied above, ended in both obscurity and Spain. Based on everything I saw, Apollo 100 was the main work of his career, a project he built with Vic Flick (guitar), Zed Jenkins (also guitar), Jim Lawless (“percussion”), Brian Odgers (bass), and, hold this name for the segue, Clem Cattini (drums).

The two albums alluded to above were Joy and Master Pieces, released in 1972 and 1973, respectively. Even after “Joy” blew up (No. 6 on Billboard), neither album sold well and, given that most of them held down regular jobs as session musicians (see below), it didn’t make much sense to stick with a limping project. As such, the pieces of Apollo 100 scattered after 1973. But a couple of the members had better days on either side of Parker’s project.