One Hit No More, No. 50: No One Home at the Edison Lighthouse

Totally wizard, man.

The Hit
I’m pretty confident I’d heard “Love Grows (“Where My Rosemary Goes)” one-to-several times or another on the various local oldies radio channels I listened to down the years, but I couldn’t have connected them to an act called Edison Lighthouse, not even if that was the only way to rescue my kids from a hostage situation. As it happens there’s a pretty good reason for that, something I’ll get into below.

“Love Grows” is a pretty, catchy song from straight outta the late-stage bubblegum pop era and it takes liberal advantage of the ear-worm arsenal: e.g., the white-funky guitar riff, the soft, bright horns that swell into simple verses of nonsense (“she ain’t got no money/her clothes are kinda funny/her hair is kinda wild and free”) that opens up into a sticky chorus, and a basic toe-tapping rhythm that just about anybody can’t lose. It’s like somebody was tasked with writing a hit, so they listened to what was working at the time and got to work.

That’s not too far off, really, even if it jumps ahead of the main story by about an album and a tour.

The Rest of the Story
As much as I regret it happening on the 50th post in this series (who shits on a milestone?), I will not regret phoning in this one. On the plus side, I get to kill two birds with one stone courtesy of that editorial decision, thus saving me from having to listen to The First Class’ “Beach Baby” ever again. I mean, what sane man wouldn’t take that trade?

Unlike most of the bands discussed below, Edison Lighthouse was an actual band - even if the last one for the main person of interest to the larger story.

Tony Burrows started his career in pop music with The Kestrels, a band he formed between the English version of high school and a stint in the Army. Two of his bandmates - Roger Cook and Roger Greenaway - went on to become London’s answer to New York’s Brill Building songwriting machine, writing a string of hits for a generation of English artists, plus a couple for Eurovision contests and, with your friends at the Coca-Cola corporation, one of the most famous ad pitches in history. They’d also write several more hits with/for Burrows…but I’m getting ahead on him again.

Crash Course, No. 17: 70s (Is It?) Punk, ft. Runaways, Rezillos, and Undertones

Yes, and....but also, yes. I'm working on it...

[Ed. - For my sanity and yours, this will be the first post of two. The other one will be up by Sunday.]

I’ve decided to start with something I said I wouldn’t do at all: define “punk.” Ducking the question makes sense for countless reasons – losing “punk rock” as a genre shorthand chief among them - but members of a couple bands I looked into articulated the idea eloquently enough to make skipping it feel like a disservice. Here are some favorites:

“Punk rock is more of an attitude than a sort of music. The punk rock ethos is a do-it-yourself thing, and creativity comes first.”

- Fay Fife of the Rezillos

“I still hate that arrogant, swaggering rock star attitude. It annoys me when I see so-called-punk bands behaving like that. You’re the same as the audience, not some daft rock gods or whatever.”

- Captain Sensible of The Damned

“The problem was Malcolm McLaren's principle, which was to sign to a major label and then to rip them off. Everyone did that, but the major always ripped you off in one way or the other. You couldn't beat the system, so they all went in and within a few years they were all making very slick albums. The original 7" Do It Yourself ethos disappeared.”

- Robyn Hitchcock of The Soft Boys

The two main ideas I get out of that – the urgency of creating/making a statement as a greater good than musical proficiency and the outsider/(semi-pretentious) unpretentious sensibility – get closer to how I’ve always understood “punk” than any musical choice. For instance, I’d call this song as “punk” as anything Green Day ever did (not to pick on Green Day; examples abound). Going to the other way, this song feels punk in spirit, but so clearly from another genre that calling it punk (or anything else) feels like giving someone bad directions, maybe even out of spite. None of that changes the reality that an overwhelming majority of people will instantly flash to a very specific musical sound in their heads when they hear “punk rock” (e.g., fast, simple, sloppy, and with someone shouting off-key vocals over it). That’s useful when someone wants to quickly way to explain a band that sounds like that to someone else - and giving it up willy-nilly feels…unwise – but it also elevates one specific, time-based manifestation of the larger punk ethos over everything else and leaves…just a shit-ton of music homeless, and for bad reasons.

One Hit No More, No. 14: Jonathan King, "Everyone's Gone to the Moon," and He Should Have

NOTE: King does not usually look like Mitch McConnell, but...

“I have been studying the music industry for the last three years and it is one big joke. Anyone can make it if they're clever and can fool a few people.”

Back in 1965, a Englishman named Jonathan King wanted to be a pop star very, very badly, so he wrote a song called, “Everyone's Gone to the Moon.” It’s not a great song, one of those popular music hold-outs in the early(ish) age of rock ‘n’ roll that borrowed from it while still sounding like something your local radio station would play after a Petula Clark hit. Whatever I think of that song, Jonathan King understood how pop stardom worked. Maybe not in the most traditional way – and, as it happened, not without prison time(!) – but King gave one hell of a lot more to popular culture than that one cheesy song…

…if nothing else, you can thank him for the “ooga chaka ooga ooga” in his remake of “Hooked on Feeling.” (Even if his version wasn’t the most popular; paging Blue Swede.)

Born to privilege in 1944, King became obsessed with pop stardom around the time he was working on his A levels. He was already performing with a band, The Bumbles, as well as writing and producing for them. That accounted for King’s first crack at fame, a single titled “Gotta Tell” (which I can't find). That flopped, but it only took his third/fourth attempt to write the hit that made him famous. "Everyone's Gone to the Moon" hit No. 4 on the UK charts behind The Beatles’ “Help!” at No. 1 and, to deepen the foreshadowing introduced above (e.g., “prison time(!)”), King played on Jimmy Savile’s Top of the Pops. Wait for it…

The decision to flag “Everyone’s Gone to the Moon” as either King’s third or fourth attempt touches on a curious aspect of King’s career. King had persuaded Decca Records to release a 45 based on another song titled “Green Is the Grass”; when they’d asked him for a B-side, he delivered “Everyone’s Gone to the Moon,” which immediately became the A-side. “Green Is the Grass” flopped in the end, but the way King released his next hit – e.g., without his name attached to it; he didn’t even perform it – established a template that he’d return to throughout his career. That single was titled “It’s Good News Week,” by Hedgehoppers Anonymous. King continued to release hits under his own name – e.g., “Lazy Bones,” Flirt,” and “Hooked on a Feeling” – but he’d also put out songs under names like The Weathermen (“It’s the Same Old Song” (yes, it's a (bad) cover)), Nemo (“The Sun Has Got His Hat On”), Sakkarin (“Sugar, Sugar”), and St. Cecelia (“Leap Up and Down (Wave Your Knickers in the Air)”). There was a certain logic to it all: