I'm over it now - I think - but for a while I was repeatedly drawn to a youtube video of the Les Humphries Singers.
In part, of course, it's the way that the site works: if you like something, or seem to, it will be be offered again and again, and it saves the burden of typing something new into search. I can't say I particularly enjoyed the song, which is Mama Loo (1973), though I suppose what I can state is that I understand it: part Barbara Ann, as sung by the Regents and later covered by the Beach Boys for their Party album, and part Ready Teddy, Little Richard's ode to sock hop balls.
I recently heard a Capitol Records employee talking in an interview about the day Brian Wilson informed him that Barbara Ann was to be the group's next single. When this person suggested it could be seen as a retrograde step the Beach Boys' leader simply repeated his declaration more firmly. Presumably because he instinctively knew that the dumb simplicity of the song, which had hit him as a teen when listening to his magic transistor radio, could not but retain its impact for generations as yet unborn. And among the most touching of video clips around the Beach Boys' fiftieth anniversary reunion is the spectacle of the group, aided by Jeff Foskett, singing this number acapella in a TV studio.
Which takes us to the bridge of the Les Humphries number, which is the opening verse of Little Richard's Ready Teddy, one of my all-time favourite rock'n'roll records, present on the second rock'n'roll album I ever bought (thank goodness Fate led me to a Specialty compilation).
The lyrics for the new song fashioned from the above elements are, let it be admitted from the outset, wretched - especially that bridge, which isn't even included in an online version of the lyrics:
Ready, steady, go man go,"Nice to know"? It doesn't even seem to be a half-hearted attempt at innuendo, and in rock terms that's unforgivable. If there isn't an H.M. Bateman cartoon depicting a roomful of middle-aged ponytailed men reacting in horror to such a solecism then the universe has no meaning.
My Mama Lou's so nice to know
Before that, also part of the bridge, is a "hey hey hey" section which I'd imagine has also been borrowed from a specific fifties or sixties song, though I can't place it. Oh, and the instrumental opening puts me in mind of the riff from that lesser-known early Kinks song She's Got Everything, though Ray Davies may well have appropriated it from one of the R&B songs they used to play.
The rest of the lyrics come over like a twelve year old's attempt to put together a rock'n'roll song, with lines like:
She's gonna go farBut these elements - the lyrics and the music - are only part of the experience. So perhaps it's time to bite the bullet and submit to watching the thing:
Got a hot rod car
She's a rock and roll star.
With the exception of the lead singer, who presumably needs to concentrate a bit harder than the others, the group is very ... well, smiley. Very smiley indeed. Mine eyes dazzle. They are all young, from a range of ethnic backgrounds, dressed as though for a disco or a night out - smart but casual clothes, not obvious stage gear - and the demarcation line between group and studio audience is not absolutely clear: this could almost be a loose assortment of friends who are having a bit of a bop; it certainly isn't choreographed in any meaningful way. The overall impression is of an intense, almost overpowering, air of wholesomeness. Yes, they are dancing in a kind of loose-limbed fashion, which could be construed as vaguely sexual in intent, but their beaming eagerness to please and reassure seems uppermost: they are out to charm their audience, not to attract them.
Is the intention to transmit a message to older viewers that hey, for all their revolutionary declarations youngsters are basically okay, even if they're not wearing ties? Or might it be that the good cheer is directed towards a target audience a few years younger than the group itself? Can their behaviour be read as as an attempt to entice youthful record buyers by the device of striving to be less intimidating in manner than the average rock group whom elder brothers or sisters might favour? They could be after both the old and the very young, I suppose. But I suspect their records are less likely to have been sought after by their contemporaries: on the evidence of this video, for all the trappings of youth and fashion there's one thing the Les Humphries Singers don't seem, and that is cool. (The song was a hit in various European countries, incidentally, but doesn't seem to have done anything in Britain.)
That unrelenting radiation of bouncing bonhomie even seems a little disturbing, making you wonder whether some device might be hidden in the floor to administer a mild collective electric shock at any sign of those unnaturally high spirits flagging - a slightly higher-tech equivalent, perhaps, of that old carny Colonel Parker's hotplate to keep chickens dancing for a paying crowd's amusement. One trusts the group were well paid for their athleticism.
Yet this well-drilled display of "good vibes" - if you'll permit the jive jargon - is not relentless: some unintentionally comic moments do creep in. A male backing singer looking like Manfred Mann's Paul Jones on a Haribo high (top) has placed himself, or been placed, just behind the lead and is almost always in shot until near the end, when an impromptu revolution seems to be taking place.
Possibly it had been agreed that those who had not been picked up by the cameras earlier should, at a given signal, be allowed to claim their fifteen seconds, but whether deliberate or not the transition isn't smoothly done, and a few cracks show in the hitherto impenetrable wall of good feeling. There is also a single shot near the end which dwells upon a section of female anatomy, at odds with the near-sexless cheeriness of the clip as a whole.
That said, I may be misreading the situation. The hint of shambles could have been intended as a token demonstration of anarchy - because, after all, that's what young people are doing these days. Which reminds me of a phrase used around this time in an art school prospectus summarising the uses to which a hall might reasonably be put:
In a word, happenings.
But whatever inclined them towards that indulgence in disorder of a sort it's hard not to feel that the Les Humphries Singers don't really belong on something as close to the harshness of the real world as videotape. Their natural habitat is film, with its more distancing effect: they are a library music version of pop or rock'n'roll, heard when a transistor is switched on and almost immediately interrupted by the announcment that a spooky killer is on the loose.
I have long been familiar with another Les Humphries Singers track. A relative was interviewed on the Jimmy Young Show in the mid-seventies, and the tape I made included the group's rendition of a slightly strange gospel/pop hybrid called To My Father's House. Which felt right: I knew even then that such a group belonged on Radio 2, not 1 - though these days, now that many former Radio 1 listeners have migrated to the sister station I can't imagine that Radio 2 would be likely to view this group as anything other than corny and inauthentic: youthful singers, but not for the young - and Jimmy of that ilk has long gone. The station's gradual mutation over the years has been expedited ed by natural wastage: when Cliff Adams died, no attempt was made to replace Sing Something Simple with a similar programme.
I have not, let it be admitted, researched the Les Humphries Singers beyond youtube, nor do I wish to lose the bloom of my ignorance (my head is already quite full of a number of things). But on the basis of my limited studies I can at least say that group membership appears to be a fluid thing, though that may simply reflect long spans of time between the preserved performances. The lead singer in this clip, who may or may not be an English singer called John Lawton, has the look of Neil Diamond but is wearing a hat associated with a member of the Byrds or the Band, thus covering several bases at once. Like the song, this seems to suggest a pop star assembled from a kit - though in fairness it's an accusation which could be levelled at many more revered figures: Donovan with his guitar; Alvin Stardust with his - well, everything.
But what you could say in their favour that there is a kind of purity about the Les Humphries Singers, in this performance at least. They, or their presiding genius - is Les their Brian Wilson, the Adge Cutler to their Wurzels? - has boiled down rock'n'roll or pop to its essence, removing it from its original context and produced something from which any self-conscious music fan would turn away, fearing opprobrium, and yet ...
Well, it's like the Diamonds' cover of Little Darling. Dave Marsh has said that the recording is dripping with sophomoric contempt, which may or may not be the case, but he makes the point that whatever the Canadian group's conscious intention the thrill is the thing, overriding considerations of coolness or authenticity: how you respond, not how you think you ought to respond when those older boys in army greatcoats are judging you with their cold, hard eyes in between wisps of cigarette smoke. To take an instance at random.
And whether or not the Les Humphries Singers were a cynical assembly of good-looking, non-threatening young people of different races in bright clothes, and Mama Loo a Frankenstein creation, a cut-and-shut composition, in the dark of the disco with sufficient alcohol on board to weaken one's defences, or during the fuzzy warmth of wedding celebrations where everyone wants a boogie, I have no doubt it would work.
It certainly worked with someone whose modus operandi was the same. I have saved till last another memory of hearing the Les Humphries Singers, and indeed this particular song, on the radio. The group's natural home may be Radio 2-as-was, but Mama Loo was one of the songs showcased on that Radio 1 staple Rosko's Round Table in the seventies. I recall that at least one guest didn't like it but someone with whom that assembly of lyrical cliches did find favour that day was none other than ... Jeff Lynne.
Which, when you think about it, makes sense: whatever his virtues Jeff Lynne is not someone to whom lyrics habitually take precedence over sound.
And there is a further connection between Les Humphries, or whoever may have assembled Mama Loo on his behalf, and Mr Lynne. ELO's Showdown is indisputably another cut-and-shut song. It works - as how can it not when its components have already been tried and tested? - but as John Lennon pointed out, Showdown is basically I Heard It Through the Grapevine and Lou Christie's Lightning Strikes with a side order of Walrus. The result may be more sophisticated than Mama Loo but the approach is essentially the same.
I don't know, however, whether it was conceived before or after he was exposed to the Les Humphries song. It seems that Showdown was recorded around April 17th, 1973, so if anyone happens to know when Lynne appeared on Rosko's Round Table that year (the Radio Times genome is of no help in this case) please get in touch; you too can feel, if only for a moment, a faint echo of what I daresay the likes of Mark Lewisohn must experience on a daily basis.
And Lennon did not draw attention to Lynne's musical borrowings by way of criticism. Not above borrowing convenient bits of others' songs himself, he said, on the New York station WNEW:
"'Showdown' I thought was a great record and I was expecting it to be #1 but I don't think UA [United Artists] got their fingers out and pushed it. And it's a nice group - I call them 'Son of Beatles' - although they're doing things we never did, obviously. But I remember a statement they made when they first formed was to carry on from where the Beatles left off with 'Walrus,' and they certainly did. This is a beautiful combination of 'I Heard It Through The Grapevine' by Marvin Gaye and 'Lightnin' Strikes' by Lou Christie, and it's a beautiful job with a little 'I Am The Walrus' underneath."Any further information about the date of Lynne's Round Table appearance shall be added in a postscript but for the moment, to quote Frankie Ebdon:
That's all. Bye Bye. And if you have been, thank you for listening.
Lennon quote from the Songfacts website.
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