Naughty Naughty Naughty / Letters Of Love

Product Information

The three-TV channel decades of the 60s and 70s meant that if an artist became popular thanks to the show they were in, they became VERY big indeed and such was the case with Telly Savalas and his hit show, Kojak. The programme also ramped up Theo’s super-attractiveness to women with him having a glamorous, often non-speaking, ladyfriend driving him around in a sports car every week. It seems rather churlish to condemn such a prolific and, in many cases, noteworthy artist like Paul Nicholas, but this is a truly dreadful record. And this is why the charts have always been so fascinating (See ‘ The Sad Demise of the Singles Pop Charts‘) Sexy!

The guys in my year at school who knew about ‘serious’ music, the ones who walked around the playground with a copy of Rory Gallagher’s ‘ Blueprint‘ or ELP’s ‘ Brain Salad Surgery’ under their arm, would have taken the piss relentlessly out of me if they’d known I’d purchased it, but I loved it.

Sarney was born in Liverpool and started out as a folk/comedy performer in the Liverpool trio The Crabtrees in the mid-1960s, with her brother Hal and Derek Marsden. I still have the single, still love it and am immensely proud that this groundbreaking slice of hard New York funk was my first purchase.

They even came up with a punning anti-establishment name for the group, on The Band/ Banned, as well as pretending to publicise their anarchistic credentials. Mr Tambourine Man has to be heard to be believed and there is some serious acting going on in It Was A Very Good Year. In fact, one track from his album, the wonderfully titled, The Transformed Man, Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds, was voted the worst Beatles‘ cover ever by a Music Choice 2003 poll. It’s a strange thing about the 60s and 70s charts that often there could be two, sometimes more than two, versions of the same song in the charts simultaneously and it was all about who was getting the most plays on radio or maybe who was the most well known as to who had the bigge hit.It’s noticeable that Nicholas’s three hits were of a similar nature, unchallenging, slightly melodic and allowing him to perform his schtick with the bowler hat and cane.

Anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of Punch and Judy shows will know it as a rather sinister and violent seaside attraction dating back to the 1660s ( Samuel Pepys mentions the first one in his diaries).What I didn’t know was that SM were very much an experimental, avant garde band who released some interesting stuff in the 70s. For example, Dave and Ansel Collins had just made Number 1 with the first reggae song ever to do so, the brilliant Double Barrel, replacing T Rex‘s seminal Hot Love. Given that David Parton took the song, ripped the soul, the guts, the sophistication and the personal element from it qualifies it, in my book anyway, as a completely rubbish hit or at least an utterly awful version of a classic song. As a musical actor this probably wasn’t a bad idea but such performance props often result in a certain type of music.