Broadcast on Radio Four's Front Row April 2004
The glory days of the "Top Of The Pops" album
Broadcast on Radio Four's Front Row December 2001
Back in the early 60s you could only get Embassy records in Woolworths. Which was a blessing because they were terrible. Cheap cover versions of current pop hits knocked out by dance band musicians in their lunch hours - they were about as convincing as the camcorder version of The Godfather.
Still, your Mum would buy them for you on the grounds that they were cheaper and anyway wasn't it the song that was the important thing, not the name of the singer?
Come the 70s there was still a place for the cut priced long player full of last month's chart hits as covered in their lunch hours by a bunch of hard-up sessionmen, one of whom could do quite a good impression of Marc Bolan if pressed. Young Elton John used to make beer money impersonating everyone from Marcia Griffiths to Status Quo. Here, if you're interested, is his unsigned version of Status Quo's Down The Dustpipe.
I spent last night listening to records from the Top of The Pops series as well as Hot Hits, Chartbusters, Chart Hits and Pick of The Pops and I have to say they weren't actually as bad as I remembered. If this lot were booked to play a wedding reception you wouldn't complain to the agency.
A million miles away from the real thing, of course, but a sight better than HearSay.
The music wasn't the point really.
Most of the budget went on the covers which usually featured a girl in a bikini doing something that nobody ever does in a bikini. I have one in front of me now featuring a blonde woman doing archery in a bikini. Another one proposes a girl about to launch herself down a dry ski slope - in a bikini. My favourite has a girl with a cricket bat and pads about to despatch a rising delivery from Dennis Lillee through the covers - in a bikini. Happy days.
In the mid 70s I worked in a large record shop and every month the man from Hallmark, the company behind the Top Of The Pops series, would come in, show us the girl in the bikini and ask how many we wanted. We would suck the air through our teeth, confer and then say give is a hundred. Every month. You don't have to be Richard Branson to see that's a good little business.
Of course nobody who claimed even the slightest love for music would ever listen to these things. They were knocked out to Grannies or people running hospital radio stations in Beirut. We only used to put them on in the shop when we felt that the musicians were facing a particular stiff challenge like Bohemian Rhapsody or Shaddup Your Face or Anarchy In The UK.
And then the Americans came. Burly, gladhanding guys called Chip from companies like K-Tel and Ronco who asked you how many "pieces" you wanted. We didn't know it at the time but we were witnessing the arrival of marketing in the music business. These companies had made their fortunes by getting the rights to devices like the Ronco CarVac, buying cheap TV airtime, making ads that looked as if they had been shot in a Photo Me booth and then knocking out as many "pieces" as possible until the marketing money ran out.
They went to the record companies and licensed all their disco hits, put them on to compilations like Superbad, Disco Fever and Can't Stop Dancin' and they simply flew out of the stores despite the fact that they used to cram on so many tracks that the discs had the dynamic range of an Entryphone.
For near ten years these companies made hay but then inevitably if rather belatedly the copyright owners realised that they might be missing a trick and starting banding together to do it themselves. Thus we had the Now series and the Hits album and all the others and we have arrived at a situation where there are currently over 200 albums named after the island of Ibiza. You know the ones, the ones advertised on Friday nights on Channel Four with voiceover provided by that same girl, the one who talks as if she's ordering a Bacardi Breezer in the world's noisiest bar.
No doubt in twenty years time we shall be remembering her just as fondly as the girl preparing to decorate the Christmas tree on the cover of Top Of The Pops December 1974 - in a bikini. Or did I make her up?
In Defence of Dick Rowe
Broadcast on Radio Four's Front Row January 2002
What is it they say about wars? That history is written by the victors? Something similar happens with pop music. All it took was a couple of strokes of Brian Epstein's pen in his book A Cellarful Of Noise and Dick Rowe was doomed to wander the ages ringing a bell with a sign round his neck that announced " Yea verily, I am the man who turned down The Beatles and yes, it's true I signed Brian Poole and The Tremeloes instead. Now where would you like to kick me?".
Unfortunate scrote, Dick Rowe.
Because there but for the grace of God goes anyone whose business card bears the legend talent spotter or editor or commissioning editor or publisher. All will at one time or another allow the gold to slip through their fingers. Only Dick Rowe, poor sap, became world famous for it.
It didn't matter that he signed the Rolling Stones soon afterwards, hastily and on George Harrison's advice. It was too late to arrest the swell of public indignation around his decision. The sterling work that Rowe did with Lita Roza and Dickie Valentine - heavy sarcasm here - counted for nothing against the charge that his unforgivable lack of perception had almost resulted in the cancellation of the swinging sixties, the extension of the war in Vietnam and condemned an entire generation to cruel and unusual punishment at the hands of brylcreem, Dickie Henderson and the liberty bodice.
We, the great untried, like to think that ten minutes exposure to the Beatles in their raw state and we would have known we were in the presence of greatness and not just a bunch of scallies vamping their way through Red Sails In The Sunsnet and the Sheik of Araby. Course this is tripe - when it comes to hindsight we're all regular Hubble telescopes and the fact is that George Martin, who subsequently signed Epstein's boys to Parlophone, was acting more in hope than expectation.
The most weaselly of all the weasel words in the showbiz lexicon are "the first time I set eyes on him I knew" Nobody does.
The legend of Elvis Presley's discovery by Sam Phillips holds that this young boy walked into Sam's studio, they made a record and discovered rock and roll. That night. Actually it took a whole year of fruitless pottering before Sam Phillips hit on anything he even felt like wasting tape on.
The truth is that innovation involves lots of drudgery and cold pizza, charisma is the patina left by success and money and overnight sensations aren't.
Most of us can only see the product once it's been put together. The people who make their livings picking the ingredients carry themselves with great certainty to distract our attention from the fact they've got their fingers crossed. They hope they've reeled in the new Beatles but in the still watches of the night when they snap into the foetal position in a cold sweat under the duvet they contemplate the awful possibility that what they've really got on the end of their line is Splodgenessabounds.
The truth is enshrined in the words of screenwriter William Goldman when he said "nobody knows anything".
The next big thing, for a start, doesn't look like the last big thing.
When Dick Rowe said groups of guitars were on their way out, Mr Epstein (note that patronising detail that has attached itself to the legend) he meant that the Shadows were on their way out and they were. The man wasn't an idiot but he wasn't very lucky either.
And don't forget that the Beatles didn't think they had any divine right to a record contract. Their expectations were modest. George thought they might get a couple of years out of it and enough money to put a deposit on a hairdressing salon.
Paul was relaxed enough to say that he probably wouldn't have signed the Beatles anyway on the basis of the performance they turned in that snowy morning 40 years ago in West Hampstead. On the other hand, when somebody remarked to John Lennon that Dick Rowe must be kicking himself, John retorted "I hope he kicks himself to death". But then he always was the sensitive kind.