Turn on a Party (circa 1975)
Ah, the wonders of charity shops! The very cover of this album, the language of the deep-voiced pathetic Barry White impersonators who so dominated mid-70s TV adverts ("20 Chart Hits To Get Your Party In The Mood. And Keep It There All Night."), the flared dancers literally lost in the grooves, positively bleeds all the cliches of its time, which have obviously long since become unbelievably tired, the stuff of LWT specials and magazines like TV Quick. This album is a cut above many others of the time - it has the original recordings by the original artists, unlike the contemporary "Top of the Pops" and "Hot Hits" albums which were made up of cover versions by session musicians (and whose covers express the single most dated aspect of the era - the religion of "Pulling a bird", the very lifeblood of Teddington Studios). It includes Van McCoy's "The Hustle" and "Get Dancin'", Shirley and Company's "Shame Shame Shame", 5000 Volts' "I'm On Fire", Act One's "Tom The Peeper", The Rimshots' "7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 (Blow Your Whistle)", The Moments' "Dolly My Love" - fizzing, elastic pop singles, snapshots of the transition from soul / funk to disco. Admittedly, it leaves out Hamilton Bohannon's "Disco Stomp", and it includes Bachman-Turner Overdrive's "You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet" (a parody even then, and which ascended to the glorious point beyond all parody when Smashie and Nicey resigned to its strains), and contributions from Demis Roussos and Peters and Lee. But one song is particularly revealing about the Spirit of '75, that weird halfway point between consensus and pluralism, monopoly and diversity.
I love "Girls", a major hit that year for The Moments with The Whatnauts (although the latter group's collaboration is now held in some doubt). And I hate it. I drown in the loving, lavish, swimming-pool production. I swoon at the late Harry Ray whispering "Got to be where they go" and "The sunlight in their hair". But I cringe at the lines "I'd like to be on an island / With five or six of them fine ones / With one that ain't goodlookin' / They're the ones that do the best cookin'." When I hear "Give me one with lots of money / Give me two with lots of honey / Give me three that do them freaky things / Give me four fat mommas that like to swing" I can barely supress my anger, my disbelief that such grotesque attitudes could be expressed in a record I so love.
And there we have the essential paradox of the mid-70s - they were luscious and loathsome, succulent and subhuman, often at the same time or even in the same record. You can't separate them. "Girls" best demonstrates the paradox of nostalgia - love and hate are intertwined. Too many still don't realise the contradictions.
Robin Carmody, January 2000
Similarly:
http://www.elidor.freeserve.co.uk/past.htm
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