Skip to main content

All Kinds Of Candy: “Playground In My Mind” by Clint Holmes

By Marcello Carlin


I didn’t say it was going to be a classic.

“My name is Michael, I've got a nickle
I've got a nickle, shiny and new
I'm gonna buy me all kinds of candy
That's what I'm gonna do.”

It’s a kids’ song, a nursery rhyme, which never played in Britain – the single did get a UK release but did nothing here – and which came out in the middle of 1972 but passed unnoticed until the Washington, DC radio station WWDC picked up on it the following spring (Holmes earned his living at the time singing on the DC/East Coast club circuit). Despite the song’s innately American character, Holmes was actually born of mixed-race parentage in Bournemouth (his father was an African-American jazz musician and his mother an English opera singer) before his family moved to Farnham, near Buffalo, in New York State. He went on to serve in Vietnam, albeit as a member of the US Army Chorus.

“Playground” is far more bewildering than enchanting. It was composed by Lee Pockriss and Paul Vance, who had a record of writing songs of this calibre – “Catch A Falling Star,” “Itsy Bitsey Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini,” “My Little Corner Of The World,” “Johnny Angel” (which I’ll be considering here very shortly) and even (bizarrely) “Kites” were some of the songs for which the two were in part or wholly responsible, and Philip Vance, the then nine-year-old son of Paul, is the voice you hear singing the chorus (as such) with Holmes.

It is, as you all know by now, the summer of 1973, and America was a profoundly confused nation; hence, I expect, the ardent desire of “Playground”’s singer to retreat to a world of colourful, uncomplicated childhood, away from the “real” (or “old,” presumably in either sense) world where “there’s no love to be found.” He sings of “a world that used to be,” “living in a world that I left behind.” Even in a 1973 context, this obsession comes across as unhealthy. The song would only pass muster now as a below-par excerpt (or outtake) from the soundtrack of something like Moana or Trolls, and Holmes sings it in the manner of a slightly tipsy Humperdinck or Tony Orlando. Actually it could easily have been sung by Tony Blackburn, the English disc-jockey and sometime singer who briefly inhabited the same mid-forties Bournemouth as Holmes and who had a long-running (if unsuccessful) parallel career as a crooner of questionable bubblegum.

Holmes went on to a successful career in Las Vegas which continues to this day, while connoisseurs of mid-eighties American television may recall him as the announcer on The Late Show With Joan Rivers. But “Playground” remains a disturbing glance towards an irretrievable past, and it is not even the last one which I will be considering this week. Nevertheless – how could the record have in part inspired this blog’s title and URL?  One of this blog’s missions may be to document and evaluate a world which the worst music, as well as the greatest, could inhabit. As far as “Raise…To The Stars” is concerned, though, you may need to wait for some while for the answer to that conundrum.

Date Record Made Number Two: 16 June 1973
Number Of Weeks At Number Two: 2
Record At Number One: “My Love” by Paul McCartney And Wings
UK Chart Position: None

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

“I Would Have Thought In The Middle Of The Atlantic In The Middle Of The Night That Rockets Must Mean Trouble”: “I’m Not In Love” by 10cc

By Marcello Carlin
"watching for night, with absinthe eye cocked on the lone, late, passer-by." (Sylvia Plath, "Prospect," 1956) This story begins in 1954, before most people had really recognised anything called rock, and a pop record which is half-perfect. That record, which stayed at number one in our charts for ten weeks, was “Cara Mia” by David Whitfield with Mantovani and his Orchestra and Chorus. Now, Whitfield was never the most subtle of singers and his in-your-face bellowing is somewhat distracting – it is significant that he was the first British reality media star (not from television, because at that time Opportunity Knocks was only broadcast on Radio Luxembourg) since his climactic high C at the end of “Cara Mia” is like a display of gymnastics, or an athletic field event; can he do that triple loop or throw that javelin beyond the stadium? It proves that technical prowess can often render itself unlistenable. But the magic here lies in the extraordinary ...
2 comments
Read more

A Disaffection, Or Fight Against Same: “Baker Street” by Gerry Rafferty

By Marcello Carlin
Even as a young teenager growing up in Lanarkshire, I was always listening out for music that sounded out of kilter, whether it was George Crumb’s Makrokosmos III (the closing section of which I heard on a Saturday afternoon on Radio 3) or anything which “irrupted” the top forty. From the first time that I heard “Baker Street” on the radio – I think it was Dougie Donnelly on Radio Clyde – I was immediately hooked, mentally noting that this song seemed to go as much against the grain of a standard pop record as anything coming out of punk or New Wave, and was probably just as angry, if not angrier. For forty years I harboured the notion – and this was from a time when visiting London, never mind living and working in it, was still a distant pipedream – that the song encapsulated the situation of the displaced Scotsman, marooned in a world he doesn’t really like or perhaps even understand. Make no mistake, this is undeniably a Scottish record, and seemingly all about someone...
1 comment
Read more

Threads Of Alligator Lizards In The Air: “Purple Rain” by Prince and The Revolution

By Marcello Carlin
The original idea was for a country-style collaboration with Stevie Nicks, to whom Prince sent a ten-minute instrumental backing track, asking her to come up with some lyrics. However, Nicks was overwhelmed by what she heard and feared that the task was too much for her to take on, so the song was reworked in rehearsal with The Revolution, utilising Wendy Melvoin’s guitar phrasing as a new guideline. The song appears to have existed before the film; Purple Rain the movie is best described as lucid hokum, but its soundtrack changed the atoms which constituted “pop,” far more so than much ostensibly radical music of the period. For many of that decade’s generation, Purple Rain the soundtrack was “our” Ziggy Stardust – better conceived, performed and produced in every way – and the title song, which closes the album, was “our” “Rock ‘N’ Roll Suicide.” It is such a patient epic, the song, and about a lot of things, and people – each of the verses addresses a different su...
Post a Comment
Read more