Right from the opening two notes of the hard dark intro you know this is going to be a heavy deep drive of a tune.
The Flirtations were a genuine black American soul band who'd translocated to London. Back in the US they'd won a Supremes soundalike competition, but the lead vocal on Nothing But A Heartache is a world away from Diana Ross' velvet simper. It's a strong, solid brick wall of delivery that's perfectly suited to the brass punch of the production.
The producer was Wayen Bickerton, who co-wrote the song with Tony Waddington. This duo would squander their talent but rake in the dosh by writing all that Bay City Rollers/Showaddywaddy style twaddle for the Rubettes in the 70s (though any reasonable person is still in awe of that high voice at the start of Sugar Baby Love, almost as much as the packet-tastic kecks they wore presumably to facilitate hitting the aforementioned run of high notes).
Nothing But A Heartache, though, is a long way from all that. A dense, dynamic soul corker like the toughest end of Motown's tunes, it's nonetheless got something of a British production to it, that plucking bass sound (bass amplification was just being invented), falling-down-a-stairwell drums and epic pop-soul vibe that we heard on stuff like Love Affair's Everlasting Love (for an illustration of what a fabulous bombastic difference the production makes, compare Love Affair's version with the Robert Knight original).
Despite not being a hit, Nothing But A Heartache became the title track of the Flirtations album (Deram, DES-18028) in 1969.
At once ominous and euphoric, it passes that best of Northern Soul tests; when it finishes there's nothing you want more than to hear it again immediately. As long as nobody makes you incongruously dance about on the remains of a 12th century Welsh abbey's pillars while you sing along.
Sometimes Youtube lets you down. There are all these recent performances of people doing their classics from decades ago, lacking the power of the original. Yet to the uninitiated, and to the future, these pedestrian geriatric videos will become what we were excited about.
It's recently struck me that for Elvis this actually happened before the internet. Since the 80s, Elvis impersonators have all gone for the rhinestone jumpsuited 70s Vegas Elvis. If that's all Elvis had been nobody would ever have paid any attention to him.
Several years ago I went off on one about precisely this point.
The thing that gets me is that all the Elvis impersonators are 70s Elvis in flared catsuits and shades.
Elvis hit so hard because he was a fiery pioneer. This was a guy who went round in a pink shirt and bolero jacket - clothes that'd draw flak in contemporary cosmopolitan environments - when he was an unknown teenager in the postwar Deep South.
Elvis took all the dark, brooding libidinous rhythm and outsiderness of the blues and added the tension that only white culture's repression can generate. This incendiary hybrid is the basis of rock n roll. Elvis served it up with explosive sexuality and dynamic power that swept away all that came before it.
The young Elvis' swaggering kinetic energy is impossible to imitate. So feeble unimaginative twats devoid of talent do an 'Elvis impression' by putting on a rhinestone studded romper suit and going uh-huh-huh. It makes Showaddywaddy look like authentic rock n roll.
The prevalence of these half-arsed half-brained tosspots shifts the popular notion of what Elvis was. We've seen so much of this that it's come to be the first image in our minds when his name gets mentioned.
Just like Grease, this lame light entertainment disconnects us from the fire and fury, the passion and drive of rock n roll. A social revolution is morphed into predicatable entertainment, mild amusement at stale cliches; everything rock n roll came to save us from in the first place.
Look at this and tremble, then. It's straight outta Brooklyn from 1981, one 12 inch slab of clear vinyl, two teeth-gratingly clumsy disco medlies of Elvis songs.
Gregg 'The King' Peters doesn't bode well at first glance. I couldn't help noticing that he has two Gs in the name just like the marginally less wrong Old Gregg, and even on the badly photocopied sleeve he looks nothing like Elvis. Then the needle hits the plastic and he ritually slaughters Presley classics in the manner of a Vic Reeves pub singer with the added tremolo of a man driving a tractor sideways over a rutted field with lead weights tied round his conkers.
Their claim to be 'on long play' is immediately undermined by the bold capitals on the cover saying EXTENDED PLAY SINGLE. Mind you, small mercies and all that. Ten minutes of this crime against ears is twenty minutes too long. An actual LP of this bowel-tremblingly inept cackfest is an unthinkable abomination that was edited out of the draft of the Book of Revelations on grounds of decency.
Catalogue number is RR-1003, implying it's the third record from Reelin and Rockin. What the hell else had these taste-free fuckers released?
Of course, it could be a ruse like they do in the porn movie industry of making something appear good enough to warrant a sequel. If you call your movie Transsexual Horse Lover 2 (a real title, by the way) it implies there was an earlier one that was so good that they made another.
Incidentally, is that a transsexual who loves horses? Or a lover of transexual horses?
Frankly, a bestial transsexual or indeed a transsexual horse could do a better Elvis record than this.
For those masochists among you for whom this isn't painful enough, leave me your email address and I'll send you the MP3 of the even worse B-side, a 5 minute long 126bpm medley of Elvis love songs.
Kinnell, I feel like I've overslept by hours and come stumbling out of the house still clambering into my clothes with a piece of toast hanging out of my mouth. It's been a long long time since I put summat up here. Promise I won't leave it anything like so long next time.
James and Bobby Purify are best known in the UK for their only hit here, the heartmelting sweeping swoony soul of I'm Your Puppet. Many years earlier they did this springy, sprightly, shiny uplifting Northern Soul corker. It's another one of those exuberant Northern Soul tunes, like Do I Love You by Frank Wilson or The Tams' Be Young Be Foolish Be Happy, that give me an instant sunshine grin.
Time to clear the furniture and click your fingers as you show the floor what your booty's for.
A long time ago I posted another track from this album, Pete Townshend's acoustic version of Won't Get Fooled Again.
I explained then:
The Secret Policeman's Ball was a comedy/music fundraiser for Amnesty International. The four shows at Her Majesty's Theatre, London ran on consecutive days from 27th-30th June 1979. Two live albums came out from the gigs, one comedy one music.
Performers included Peter Cook, Rowan Atkinson, Billy Connolly and most of the Monty Python team for the comics, and Pete Townshend, Tom Robinson, Neil Innes and John Williams in the muso corner.
Tom Robinson performed on the last night, 30th June 1979, at the end of a varied month. On the 1st, his birthday, he'd performed in America on Tom Robinson Band's final tour. For Gay Pride Week, 18-23 June, he'd done a run of shows with jazzier arrangements of gay songs, released on the album Cabaret 79.
I suggested in that post of the Townshend track that I might do a Glad To Be Gay month here, posting all the various versions of the song that Robinson's done over the years. It is such a bold, pioneering song, so brazen and angry and militant, a stance simply without precedent in popular culture.
Well I've gone one better than a series of posts here. I've done a whole Glad To Be Gay website that's just gone live this week. It has all the versions, explains the references in the lyrics, MP3s, streaming audio, and a big interview with Tom about it all.
Robinson always saw the song more as campaigning journalism than art, and frequently updated the lyrics. There's no point in saying 'make sure your boyfriend's at least 21' in these days of an equal age of consent of 16. Other things would come along, like the Spanner trial, rampant tabloid homophobia and, especially, the onset of Aids.
There have been at least ten versions officially released, but for me the Secret Policeman's Ball one stands out in particular. It always had a special intensity, a laser focus and venom to it, but I didn't know why until I interviewed Robinson.
It's a quality you hear better on the record. In the video, his visual acknowledgement of the warm response from the audience - clapping along, singing on the chorus - tempers the impact. Until, that is, he gets to a verse reinstated after being cut from earlier versions of the song; here the video becomes more intense than the record.
Have you heard the story about Peter Wells
Who one day was arrested and dragged to the cells
For being in love with a man of 18
The vicar found out they’d been having a scene
The magistrates sent him for trial by the Crown
He even appealed but they still sent him down
He was only mistreated a couple of years
Cos even in prison they look after the queers
It's this verse that is the reason for the power of this version. Tom was furious that Amnesty asked him - the most prominent gay rock star - to perform for them even though they refused to acknowledge gay prisoners as human rights cases.
What happened to Peter Wells was a genuine scandal and a reason to be very fucking angry. But, specifically with the Secret Policeman’s Ball, Amnesty had ruled that gays did not count as political prisoners and therefore they didn’t support gay prisoners. That’s why I was singing it and that’s why I was so angry, because I was singing it to an Amnesty audience. Hence the venom. Amnesty asked me to come and perform, OK, well have this then.
Just to be clear, Amnesty now actively supports the human rights of LGBT people.
If you want me to send you the other Robinson track on this album, 1967 (Seems So Long Ago), leave your email address in the Comments.
= = = = = =
UPDATE: SPECIAL ONE-OFF LONDON GIG, 1st JUNE
As his career as a broadcaster and standard bearer for new music on BBC 6Music has taken off, his touring has declined. So it's something of a rare treat to have Tom perform a one-off concert at Shepherd's Bush Empire in London on his 60th birthday, 1st June.
There'll be an extensive set from Tom and band with assorted guests like TV Smith. As he hurtles towards retirement age he's called the gig - what else? - Glad To Be Grey.
Tickets are £15. You can get them online via the gig's site. If you go in person to any O2 Academy box office and pay cash, you get them without any of the ripoff booking fees.
People try to tell you that the 80s was all Thatcherite greed and squeaky corporate Stock Aitken Waterman pop. Yet far more people were listening to Crass than making millions off privatisation. Still more were putting money in the collection buckets for the miners strike.
It's this 80s that spawned Fuzzbox (as they were always known due to their full name - We've Got A Fuzzboz And We're Gonna Use It - being too unwieldy for anyone to use).
As a teenager at the time, this first EP of theirs hit me like an amphetamine pessary. The songs were rough and playful, sleazy and aggressive, assertive and boisterous, big-hearted and defiant. I played the opening song, XX Sex, over and over and genuinely thought I might have found the greatest track ever recorded.
These were simple shambolic and heavy riffs. Like the Jesus and Mary Chain's seminal album Psychocandy a year earlier, they took classic pop structure and layered it with distortion.
Unlike the Mary Chain, this was four women conscious of having something to say. It wasn't from a swanky London major but on some provincial indie label. Their songs addressed sexism yet, like Strawberry Switchblade before them, they eschewed the brand of feminism that saw dressing up as a sop to male desire. It's no coincidence that the EP was issued with some copies on pink vinyl, some on blue.
They exuberantly self-defined even as they declared that they were still searching for who they were. More than anyone else, Fuzzbox paved the way for the Riot Grrl bands of the early 90s, yet unlike some of those they never got pretentious.
They got in there, made their point and fucked off. No noodling about. The longest song on the EP is short of three minutes. The other three clock in at under two minutes each. This was all the integrity of punk with a new pop effervescence.
Ignore their corporate makeover and plasticised comeback attempt a couple of years later. This is the real fucking deal.
A vintage Merseybeat style version of Zip a Dee Doo Dah? What more could you want in life?
And this is no twee Freddie and The Dreamers stuff, it's got that tough, bright, raucous jubilance of the Swinging Blue Jeans' Hippy Hippy Shake or I Want To Hold Your Hand.
Such is their beat music proficiency that you'd never know they were in fact German, they've got that transatlantic thing down perfectly.
It's no surprise, because The Rattles cut their teeth on the same hard Hamburg rock n roll circuit as the Beatles, and were the first German band to get a contract at the Star Club where the Beatles forged that punchy buoyant post-Chuck Berry rock n roll sound.
Zip a Dee Doo Dah is actually the B-side of The Stomp ('Stompin, oh yeah, Stompin...'), a track that sounds like you imagine it does. This track, though, is the one most likely to get you out of your chair and bouncing round the room.
After this they had a Thamesmen-to-Spinal Tap style makeover, and then came their only international success, a ploddy single called The Witch in 1970. And, like the Tap, they're still going.
It's a right old mix here. There'll be punk and pop and soul and weirdness. There'll be greatness and there'll unintentional comedy. There'll be peculiar cover versions and one-hit (or no-hit) wonders.
It will range from the 1950s to the 1990s with, I suspect, a bias towards 1980ish-1992ish, my prime record buying years. I'll add summat new every couple of weeks.
That's the plan, anyway.
How It Works
To download the track, right-click on the link at the end of each posting, then select Save Target As and put it somewhere on your hard drive. (If you're a Mac user, you control-click).
If you can be arsed, please leave a comment. I like it when people do that.
All MP3s are encoded at 192kbps.
Deleted tracks
Due to server space, older tracks get removed to make way for new ones. I'll leave everything up as long as possible, and will leave the write-ups on the blog permanently.
If you want me to email you a deleted MP3, leave your email address in the Comments for the track. I'll send you a link to download the track (so it won't overload your inbox). Watch out for an email from DoNotReply@TransferBigFiles.com with the subject 'TransferBigFiles.com - You have a file waiting'.
There's no catch with using Transferbigfiles, but if you'd prefer another proxy or to have the MP3 sent directly to you, say so when you leave your addess.
Once I've sent your track, I'll delete your address from the Comments so it can't be harvested by spam bastards. So if you're going to say anything interesting or flattering, put it in a different post so it doesn't get deleted.
This blog is about giving attention to records that deserve it. I've no wish to deny any artist royalties for their work, but for most of this stuff there are no royalties to be had any more. Almost every track here is long deleted and commercially unavailable.
If you like the track then I urge you to buy work that the artist has done in a similar vein. If you're the copyright holder of a featured track and want it removed, just ask.
