Last night by chance I came across an old favourite from New Zealand in the Seventies: Mother Goose singing their slightly ludicrous “Baked Beans” – which just goes to show you can make a rock song outof anything!
I had forgotten about Mother Goose, but they actually did pretty well for themselves, having coming up with the idea of mocking themselves by dressing up ridiculously when they performed in the South Island city of Dunedin and then nationally.
The more they made fun of themselves, the more popular they became: they broke attendance records accross Australasia, and their debut album “Stuffed” was Mushroom Records’ fastest selling album.
When they went to Australia, what later became top bands queued up to be their support acts, like Midnight Oil, Cold Chisel, Men At Work and The Angels.
Their first national tour was with international, i.e. British, band Supercharge – this particularly got my attention because a flatmate of mine in Bamberg, Germany in the early Eighties was later in a blues band that had a number of gigs with Supercharge, including when they toured with Chuck Berry.
Mother Goose moved to the USA in 1978 for a year and did very well, with members of Kiss and Devo becoming fans of their shows in New York.
After returning to Australia the band continued to attract huge crowds there and also on tours in Canada, eventually breaking up in 1984, with a reunion in 2007 as part of a celebration of 30 years of the “Dunedin Sound”.
Here now is the “Baked Beans” video, which was so well received it even got shown on TV between prime time programmes in Australia and New Zealand:
Just to show they didn’t just do humour, here is “This Is The Life”, live in Dunedin, New Zealand:
Glad I chanced on this one again, hope you enjoyed it too. 🙂
I don’t know a lot from Nils Lofgren, just two songs really, “No Mercy” and “Keith Don’t Go”.
Nils Lofgren, who has had a long solo career, also worked with Neil Young in the Seventies, as well as playing in Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band for 25 years.
But I didn’t know that until just now…
Actually I first got to know his 1979 track “No Mercy” (from the album “Nils”) a year or so later through a band I used to write some songs with in Bamberg, Germany, who played it.
I still remember hearing it the first time crammed into a tiny cellar with just enough room for the band, their equipment and a couple of other people, i.e. right up close!
Here it is, “No Mercy”, recorded in 1979 (with lyric subtitles in German, how fitting):
And here is a live version of “No Mercy” twelve years later on German television in 1991:
The other Nils Lofgren track I am familiar with actually came out a year earlier in 1978.
It’s from his fourth album “Night After Night”, and is called “Keith Don’t Go” (Keith being Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones):
Nils Lofgren also plays this one on the acoustic guitar, so here is “Keith Don’t Go” unplugged:
Which do YOU think sounds better, electric or acoustic?
I think it was 1978 on a trip to Germany, before I lived there, that I came across German band United Balls, whose 1981 album “Pogo In Togo” I would later acquire, with songs like “Blackbird”, Good Understanding”, “Gisela” and the title track “Pogo In Togo”.
What I of course couldn’t know was that I would later meet them and even sit with them at the dinner table a few years later. They were really nice, down to earth guys.
A few years later, living in Bamberg in Upper Franconia in the north of Bavaria (I am being quite specific here as the Franconians, while part of Bavaria politically, don’t consider themselves Bavarians!), I got a copy of the United Balls album “Pogo In Togo” on tape.
Can’t remember the circumstances, but I have it!
The tracks are both German and English, sometimes mixed up in the same song, and have a kind of staccato, more or less punk/New Wave sound. (The late Seventies and early Eighties were after all the period of Neue Deutsche Welle/NDW, or German New Wave.)
And then in either 1983 or early 1984, while working as a roadie for a local dance band, we were playing in a little place called Hollfeld, just south of the main road from Bamberg to Bayreuth.
We had two or three gigs there sharing the stage with well-known bands from Munich, such as Relax and MĂĽnchner Freiheit, and on this occasion United Balls.
Whereas the other acts came with all their gear and their own roadies (on one of these occasions one of our microphones disappeared), United Balls turned up on their own in a VW van, plugged their guitars into our amps and their drummer used our drum kit.
Simple but effective, and definitely economical – and sounded just as good.
Here’s the van (on this occasion photographed in Hamburg):
At first I could only find videos of two songs from that first album (two others followed), and a couple of others I didn’t know, but then I turned up a few more after all.
The title track from “Pogo In Togo” actually reached Number 1 in New Zealand and Australia – in Germany it “only” got to No. 14, but they still sold over a million copies altogether.
The chorus is very simple – Pogo in Togo – and one of several cover versions changed it to “Dio in Rio”.
Here is the original of “Pogo In Togo” (keep your eye on the blonde guitarist on the left, more about him later…):
Don’t you just love the elephants!
And because it’s such fun jumping up and down, here they are again playing in front of a live audience in 1980 (after a pause at the beginning):
“Good Understanding” was the second track from the first album, also in English:
Another English track from the debut album, “Blackbird” (there’s no sound until about 20 seconds into the video):
Short and sweet, “Gisela” is one of my favourites:
They look like maniacs here, but singer and guitarist Horst Lindhofer went on to found biotech company Trion Pharma in 1998, which together with Fresenius Biotech was the first German biotech firm to develop and market a “recombinant antibody” to treat cancer.
After an almost 20 year break the band is playing again, as documented in this brief German language video (the sound of the music recording is a little hairy):
And this live video from July 2013 (Tollwood Festival in Munich, three weeks after ZZ Top played there):
Another one that’s short and sweet but nice to jump about to, “GänseblĂĽmchen” (“I’d like to pick daisies for my girl…”):
“No More Feelings” sounds like a bit like Gisela, but has it’s own charm:
I don’t remember this one, certainly another take on “Sur le pont d’Avignon”:
