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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

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