In Perfect Harmony: Singalong Pop in ’70s Britain

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In Perfect Harmony: Singalong Pop in ’70s Britain

In Perfect Harmony: Singalong Pop in ’70s Britain

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Someone needed to find out why Merry Xmas Everybody by Slade became the people's anthem in the age of the Three Day Week. Rampant inflation, perpetual strikes, fuel shortages, pollution, nuclear threats and racial tension – sounds familiar doesn’t it? Writing about Sweet producer, Phil Wainman, he quips “…he favoured rhythmic thumps so brutal they sounded like a cave-dwelling Neanderthal mum banging on a couple of rocks to let her kids know it was time to come home for some roast woolly mammoth. Will Hodgkinson is author of the music books Guitar Man, Song Man, The Ballad of Britain and the childhood memoir The House is Full of Yogis.

In Perfect Harmony takes the reader on a journey through the most colour-saturated decade in music, examining the core themes and camp spectacle of '70s singalong pop, as well as its reverberations through British culture. Against a rainy, smog-filled backdrop of three-day weeks, national strikes, IRA bombings and the Winter of Discontent, this unending stream of novelty songs, sentimental ballads, glam-rock stomps and blatant rip-offs offered escape, uplift, romance and the promise of eternal childhood - all released with one goal in mind: a smash hit. For those too young (or old) at the time to have clear recollections of the ’70s, In Perfect Harmony is a fantastic aid memoir, helping to re-ignite half-forgotten emotions as well as filling in the gaps with a plethora of enlightening details and reminiscences. I, and many, others would contend that the 1970s is the greatest era of recorded popular music, where everything from reggae to rock reached its apogee - and the records just sound better - but here giants like Bowie and Roxy Music are mere background figures, over shadowed by the hit machines of Slade and Sweet.He is a regular contributor to The Guardian, Mojo and Vogue and presented the Sky Arts television series Songbook.

In Perfect Harmony takes the reader on a journey through the most colour-saturated decade in music, examining the core themes and camp spectacle of '70s singalong pop, as well as its reverberations through British culture since. In Perfect Harmony is a definitive work; the rosetta stone for anyone interested in the true cross generational people's pop soundtrack of the 1970s. album releases, perhaps hoping to cop a bit of his accessible glamour in an era when it was in short supply.Pete Selby, publishing director, Nine Eight Books, said: “Will has lovingly crafted a truly exceptional and labyrinthine text on a most misunderstood period in British musical history. While Hodkinson makes sterling efforts to compartmentalise the information into chapters defined by genres and age groups (The Great Taste Of Bubblegum, Kids, The Disco Of Discontent etc), there are inevitably overlaps and the author often goes where the story takes him, resulting in an organic and fluid read. There's a fair and decent case to be made for Slade's strikingly coiffured and perma-grinning guitarist Dave Hill as the greatest rock star ever. Add into the mix the underlying fear created by the IRA bombings and it’s easy to imagine ten years of unremitting misery.

Someone had to explore the geopolitical significance of Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep by Middle of the Road. The decade of polyester and cheese is bookended by the huge hit singles ‘Grandad’ and ‘There's No One Quite Like Grandma’ and while it's hard to find much or anything to appreciate in either of those records, Hodgkinson has, on the whole, made a decent case for "bubblegum as high art. From bubblegum to brickie glam, suburban disco to cabaret pop, this is the music that soundtracked everyday lives and for that reason it has a story to tell.

If you are fortunate enough to be too youthful to have experienced all this first hand, the book provides an atmospheric and faithful insight into our relatively recent past with all the lessons, learnt or not, held therein. Punk does happen but, much like the swinging sixties, it doesn't happen for the majority so it doesn’t warrant the same space as The New Seekers, Tony Orlando or the "lingering ennui" of The Carpenters. The story of how Kenny Everett’s constant lampooning of the Bee Gees proved to be “…the death knell for the band who took disco to the masses as a serious proposition for years to come. This is something of an epic, weighing in at 532 pages, the concept album to the subject matter’s 7” single, and such is the author’s obvious enthusiasm and thoroughness that he could have undoubtedly penned 500 pages more.

However, if you’re not overly bothered about Clive Dunn’s life story or the trials and tribulations of Hot Chocolate and Hector, you can easily dip into the book with the help of the exhaustive index to find your favourites, be they Slade, Steeleye or Showaddywaddy. Online since 2010 it is one of the fastest-growing and most respected music-related publications on the net.The 1970s was a remarkable decade which saw Britain creaking under the strain of social and political turmoil. These were the songs you heard on Radio 1, during Saturday-night TV, at youth clubs, down the pub and even emanating from your parents' record player. The differences between the 1970s and the "new age of plastic" of the 80s are illustrated by comparing the main characters of TV high watermark Minder; Terry was the seventies, "forever bringing chirpy young women back to his dingy flat and being the kind of honest, ordinary Joe who you know would pay his union dues and join the picket line" and Arthur "with his flashy camel coat and clumsy attempts at sophistication" was the eighties incarnate. Hodgkinson, top music critic for The Times and regular Mojo contributor, celebrates the records that people actually exchanged money for at a time when money was as hard to get as it's about to be, arguing quite reasonably that “if a song chimed with the mood of the nation, doesn’t it say something about the time and place it came from”. Against a rainy, smog-filled backdrop of three-day weeks, national strikes and IRA bombings, this unending stream of novelty songs, sentimental ballads, glam-rock stomps and finely crafted pop nuggets offered escape, uplift, romance and the promise of eternal childhood - all recorded with one goal in mind: a smash hit.



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