Not of the pops

By Paul Flower on Oct 17, 11 03:06 PM

A natural part of the aging process is the discovery that things you considered fundamental or essential in your childhood have no relevance at all to your children. There's a photo currently circulating in social-media-land which depicts a cassette tape and a pencil with the legend that 'our children will never know the correlation between the two'.

They're right of course but it goes further than that: my kids would barely have knowledge of a cassette tape anyway and their kids probably won't have much need for a pencil. I occasionally wander into this cul de sac of thought surmising on what the future holds and the past has left behind - the term cul de sac is appropriate, fitting both the dead-end nature of this thinking using a phrase that no-one uses or needs anymore. Not that I needed to explain that of course.

At any rate this process began with an episode of Top Of The Pops from September 30th 1976 broadcast on BBC4 last week as part of a repeat series they're undertaking week by week with old episodes of the programme. I sat and watched it with some horror in the company of my 15 year old daughter. Sadly it wasn't a classic.

As those who recall it will know Top Of The Pops was a key part of growing up and growing apart from the tastes of your parents. As there were only three tv channels at this point, far fewer radio stations and no internet, TOTP was the medium by which you monitored popular music and got to see the acts of that time.

In later years it would become much maligned and irrelevant but there can be little doubt that it served a purpose and allowed many acts to develop into big stars. Most of these were absent on 30/09/76 however, unless the girth of Demis Roussos can be factored in.

These repeats are relevant in capturing the cultural timeframe and the many anomalies of the musical landscape. It's easy to forget why Demis was a star, I can only assume he had a relevance to people coming back from their first ever package holidays, the kind of music the new 'travellers' were buying as a mark of their increased cross-cultural knowledge. Or maybe people had far less taste back then.

Aside from Demis's purple smock the fashions of the western world were equally eye-watering, if it's not the high-waisted bell-bottomed trousers of the bewildered audience shuffling out-of-time to the ballads of Randy Edelman then it's the bands themselves - witness Aussies Sherbert in their 3 piece suits having mysteriously forgotten their shirts.

It's a fact that time can be distorted within the memory, I recall their song 'howzat' with reasonable clarity - certainly the chorus - but would've placed it much earlier in the pop time-frame, never thinking it was as late as '76. Of course the true horror and embarrassment of TOTP was always captured by the dancing, not always that of the audience but the regular on-stage appearance of the TOTP dance act gyrating to one of the popular tunes of the day.

It's hard to know why they were such a regular feature of the show, but it possibly has a lot to do with the genesis of the programme being in the late 60's though it could also be a nod to 'light entertainment' and the variety shows and acts that people were more used to seeing as music-based programming.

Pan's People were inevitably the standard by which the acts were known and I was surprised to find that they'd largely disappeared by 1976 to be replaced by the above-featured Ruby Flipper a mixed sex group (only partly mixed as they featured two male dancers) who lasted about six months before themselves being replaced by the all-girl Legs & Co.

Although Pan's People stick heavily in my mind it is obvious that they were the generic name by which the dance acts became remembered as I was more likely to have seen a greater number of performances by Legs & Co. The latter's infamy abounds largely due to their use during the punk era, interpreting songs like Pretty Vacant and Bankrobber when The Pistols or The Clash deigned not to appear on the programme.

Sadly those performances are not captured by YouTube, so you'll have to make do with this gem to play us out.