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. 🙂
With Bryan Ferry and Roxy Music I’m never sure where to start, there’s so much, and I keep discovering more.
I mainly know some of their songs from the late Seventies and early Eighties, but I’ve also taken some of their work from the early Seventies here.
In the early years Brian Eno was in the band, but he left after the second album, “For Your Pleasure”. From then on, Phil Manazanera and Andy Mackay began co-writing, but Bryan Ferry continued to write most of the material.
The first single, which went to No. 4 in the UK in 1972, was “Virginia Plain”:
Also in 1972, album track “If There Is Something”:
Some of the guitar on this makes me think of the Beatles “Abbey Road” album. I like it. In fact, the more I listen to it, the more I like it!
From the 1973 album “Stranded”, here is “Psalm”, quite a bit different from some of the later stuff:
Also from 1973, Roxy Music’s second single “Pyjamarama”:
A major single in 1975 that peaked at No. 2 in the UK was “Love Is The Drug”:
Here is a somewhat later live version of “Love Is The Drug”:
Also from 1975, “Both Ends Burning”:
“Still Falls The Rain” was a track on the 1979 album “Manifesto”:
“Dance Away” (UK No. 2 in 1979, also from “Manifesto”) just makes me melt away….
I also quite like “Over You” (No. 5 in the UK, from the next album, “Flesh + Blood”):
And this has got to be my favourite Roxy Music song ever…. “Oh Yeah” from 1980. I love it! I still remember hearing it on a stormy night in a pub in Broadford on the Isle of Skye off the west coast of Scotland. And in a small bar in Nuremberg below the castle, while waiting for a concert (might have been Led Zeppelin, not sure). “Oh Yeah”:
“Same Old Scene” was the third single from the “Flesh + Blood” album:
Shortly after John Lennon was shot, Roxy Music sang a tribute version of one of my favourite Lennon songs, “Jealous Guy”, taking it to No. 1 in the UK and Australia:
And now for something completely different – Klaus Doldinger and Passport, a German jazz formation that has been compared with the US band Weather Report.
I won’t claim to know the individual tracks, I only heard Doldinger’s music for the first time in 1983, and liked it.
Here are some tracks I have found from the Seventies (the band was formed in 1971) and the very early Eighties.
“Uranus” (1971):
“Schirokko” (1973):
“Mandragora” (1973):
“Ataraxia”, at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1980:
For some reason that one reminds me a little of Deep Purple (as does the name of Montreux…. “We all came down to Montreux on the Lake Geneva shoreline…).
Klaus Doldinger produced the theme music of the 1981 movie “Das Boot”:
Squeeze are a UK band (I always thought they were called UK Squeeze) who began charting in the late Seventies with songs like “Goodbye Girl”, “Cool For Cats” and “Up The Junction” and continued to record in the Eighties and Nineties.
Actually I’ve just seen that they were called UK Squeeze initially outside the UK to avoid legal conflicts with other bands in North America and Australia, this must have been the time when I first became aware of them.
I don’t know any of the songs from their first album, “Squeeze”, but I do recognise numbers from the second, “Cool For Cats”.
Two tracks from this one reached Number 2 on the UK charts, “Cool For Cats” and “Up The Junction”.
I remember the live band at the Majestic Hotel in Palmerston North, New Zealand, playing “Cool For Cats” in 1979.
Most of their other songs I know I actually taped off a live show in Germany a few years later.
Here’s the 1978 track “Goodbye Girl”:
“Cool For Cats”, from the album of the same name, went to No. 2 in the UK and 5 in Australia:
Many Squeeze songs tell a story, and the 1979 track “Up The Junction”, another No. 2 hit, is no exception (if you’ve heard of the big railway junction just south of London, you’ll get the play on words in this one) :
The following year Squeeze again had a number of singles, one of them was “Pulling Mussels (From The Shell)”, sung here live on TV a few years later in 1985:
Another Squeeze favourite from around this time is “Tempted”:
And “Black Coffee In Bed”:
“Annie Get Your Gun” is a typical Squeeze track:
And this is “Annie Get Your Gun” live in 1982:
I hear Squeeze are together and touring again, must keep an eye out for them…
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”:
