David Bellamy - Brontosaurus, Will You Wait For Me mp3

MD
BWON1
1980



Ye gods! It turns out that The Dinosaur Record isn't the only time those songs got an outing.

There's this single from everyone's favourite climate change denier, hirsute TV naturalist (but not, as far as I know, a TV naturist), David Bellamy.

Led by squidgy 70s synths, Brontosaurus, Will You Wait For Me gives us Bellamy all over-excited and a tad forced-wacky, sort of like an adult trying to hide how much MDMA is still in their system as they have to amuse a toddler.

Flip the disc and we get O Stegosaurus. Eschewing the tender verse vocals of the Dinosaur Record's version, the bits between choruses feature Bellamy telling us some fun facts about Stegosaurii. Where they lived, when, how big they were (demolishing that 'half a mile long and ten feet tall' claim once and for all).

But, it's a Mike Croft composition. If we're not going to have a factual error about a triceratops inventing rock n roll or an 800 metre stegosaurus, what can we have instead?

Bellamy doesn't let us down. He tells us that stegosaurii were 'gentle monsters who always ate up their vegetables as they went about their everyday business in their own prehistoric world'.

The single is dated 1980, the same year as the album, so I don't know which came first. Did the single come first and then Mike Croft's own versions come later, much like Carole King kept us waiting for Tapestry before we got her own renditions of Natural Woman and Will You Love Me Tomorrow?

Or is it that the album came first and then Bellamy picked up on it, much like Aretha Franklin brought Otis Redding's Respect to greater prominence?

The cover (upon both sides of which original owner Susan Wooller has written her name - did she think people mightn't notice the first one, or was she expecting the cover to be torn asunder by a frenzied audience thus requiring her name on both halves?) says 'Dinosaur characters (Bron and Delilah) copyright of Dusty and The Dinosaurs'.

It turns out there's a 1982 book, Dusty and The Dinosaurs - Primeval Pop, by that same Mike Croft.

A book, an album, getting established stars to do the vocals? It's all gone a bit Jeff Wayne.

Then, like Thomas Pynchon, Croft kept us waiting. It was ten years before we saw the two sequels.

It was a heady time for Moses style two-tablet deliveries from major artists; almost as if it were planned, three of them were equally spaced over a year.

In September 1991 Guns n Roses simultaneously released Use Your Illusion I and Use Your Illusion II.

March 1992 saw Bruce Springsteen simultaneously release Lucky Town and Human Touch.

Then in September 1992 Mike Croft simultaneously published Dusty and the Dinosaurs - Drakula Island and Dusty and the Dinosaurs - Delilah's Rescue.

Proper music will return next post, promise.

[MP3s deleted to make way for new ones, sorry! If you want them emailed to you, leave your address in the Comments]