Raise All Kinds Of Candy To The Stars

In Britain we adored “O Superman” but in the United States (and not even Laurie Anderson’s conception of them) people went for the theme from a comedy TV series about somebody thinking they’re Superman. The show never played in the UK and so I’ve never seen it, but this dismal précis of Reaganite can-doism doesn’t exactly inspire me to go check it out on YouTube, and I suspect didn’t suit the show that well. Mike Post wrote the music and Stephen Geyer the lyric. You’ve heard it even if you’ve never heard it. The trend for rather sentimental theme tunes to sitcoms would continue well into the nineties. The nascent Nuremberg pop that this record predicates has still not absented itself from the atrophying stage of contemporary music. It stayed on the chart for two years. Date Record Made Number Two: 15 August 1981 Number Of Weeks At Number Two: 2 Record At Number One: “Endless Love” by Diana Ross and Lionel Richie UK Chart Position: None

Anthems aren’t just records you remember dancing to at the school disco thirty-five years ago, in the same way that society has to involve everybody, not just those who make the “right” faces. Listening to 1968: The Year The World Burned , Jon Savage’s latest excellent 2CD compilation album, and in particular to “Everyday People” by Sly and the Family Stone (which is included). That’s a politely very angry record and, in the end, probably a Kirk Douglas-style call to arms – “I am ‘everyday people.’” Its message was presumably not lost on the teenage Nile Rodgers. While in hospital earlier this year I read several books to help pass the time and get me back to sanity, and one of those was Le Freak: An Upside Down Story of Family, Disco and Destiny , Rodgers’ autobiographical memoir. At times an exhilarating read, at other times unreadable (as in: this is not the sort of thing you should read while in hospital), Rodgers is nevertheless razor-sharp in his recollections, and re...

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...

“Aquarius…And my name is Ralph…Now I like a woman who loves her freedom…And I like a woman who can hold her own…” It sounds like Studio 54’s in-house video dating agency. It teeters dangerously on the tightrope of tackiness, but its modes persist into contemporary R&B, even though its dual camp and experimental factors enable it to fly far beyond those particular boundaries. “Libra…And my name is Charles…Now I like a woman that’s quite…A woman who carries herself like…Miss Universe…” The Floaters were lucky to get their one moment. A Detroit soul group formed by James Mitchell, formerly of The Emeralds of “Feel The Need In Me” (again, in Britain they had to be called the “Detroit Emeralds”) and featuring his brother Paul as well as Larry Cunningham, Charles Clark and Ralph Mitchell (no relation), their full-length album version of “Float On” lasts for over eleven minutes, and “Papa Was A Rollin’ Stone” it is not – although what it could be is a belated sequel to...

In many ways, this is a strange and rather old-fashioned song for the mid-seventies, even though the events which it describes were then only a year old. The SS Edmund Fitzgerald was for over seventeen years a Great Lakes freighter, transporting pellets of iron ore from mines near Duluth, Minnesota, to iron works in Detroit, Toledo and other Great Lake ports. On the afternoon of 9 November 1975, under the command of its Canadian captain Ernest M McSorley, the ship set sail from Lake Superior, bound for Detroit. But an early storm broke the following day; the ship filled up with water and then capsized – or possibly split – and sank, and although the wreck of the ship was found a few months later, none of the bodies of its twenty-nine-strong crew has ever been found. It sank in Canadian waters. Lightfoot read an article about the disaster in Newsweek , which helped unlock his long-standing writer’s block and inspire the song. He tells the story as simply as possible, though acco...

It’s odd how power pop, for all its alleged purity and perfection, never really became popular. Myself, I think it’s the charts’ loss, but the fact remains that when most people think of Alex Chilton they think of “The Letter” rather than Sister Lovers , to which “All By Myself” makes an unlikely companion. The song also reminds us of the age-old tradition of writing pop songs based on classical pieces; Barry Manilow had recently had a top ten hit with his Chopin adaptation “Could It Be Magic” and now it was the turn of Rachmaninoff. Again it is instructive to listen to the full seven-minute-plus album version of “All By Myself” since the long piano interlude in the song’s middle was actually the first thing that came to Eric Carmen’s mind. Working backwards, he then figured that the second movement of Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in C minor – “ Adagio sostenuto ,” no less – would form a good basis for the song’s verses, while the chorus was informed by, but did not...

Moving from 1975 to 1976, from Eagles to Donna Summer, is a bit like stepping out of a wagon and straight onto a spaceship. Neither did it hinder the success of “Love To Love You Baby” that its American release coincided with the onset of this new DJ invention called the twelve-inch single. It had already been released in Holland in mid-1975 under the name of “Love To Love You” – the initial lyric was Summer’s idea; Pete Bellotte wrote the music and Giorgio Moroder produced. However, the lyric was built upon and extended and Summer became reluctant to record the whole song, except as a demo for other singers. Nonetheless, she also provided a commentary which went beyond words, and Moroder was so impressed by her…exultation, let’s call it?...that he persuaded Summer that the record should be released internationally under her own name. Somehow a copy found its way to Neil Bogart, the head of Casablanca Records; the story goes that he was attending his wife’s birthday party a...