Naughty Naughty Naughty / Letters Of Love

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C. run out to at Boundary Park, it is banger racing’s theme tune, it was even used in New Zealand to advertise their national lottery and Charlie Watts named a racehorse after it. Now the first thing to say is that this isn’t a particularly bad record, the song is actually quite good.

Co-written with Jim Dale (of Carry-On fame) it lost out to the legendary John Barrie and Don Black‘s easy listening classic ‘ Born Free‘, a song that became Matt Monro‘s theme tune (more on Matt later). Often these records are one-hit-wonders that squeezed into the charts by virtue of some twist of fate, something in the wind that carried them out of the pit of obscurity that they richly deserved to be consigned to forever. And Georgy Girl (1966), from the very interesting 60s film of the same name, was a great tune which got to No.It’s strange how a straightforward exploration of an awful hit can mutate into something even more hellish. It was one of these many popular misconceptions that went around in the 60s that no one really bothered to check out whether it was true or not. As they needed two pianos, Woodward’s mum and piano teacher, Hilda was asked to sit in and the rest is Lieutenant Pigeon history.

Released just after the zenith of punk, it tried to jump on the bandwagon and made a pretty damn poor job of it. As is often the case, however, a further exploration of the record unravels a rather interesting MOR backstory (at least, to the likes of me…). While listening to Stuart Maconie’s wonderful ‘ Freakzone‘ on Radio 6 Music recently, he played a track by a band from the 70s I remembered vaguely, Stavely Makepeace. For example, Dave and Ansel Collins had just made Number 1 with the first reggae song ever to do so, the brilliant Double Barrel, replacing T Rex‘s seminal Hot Love.The formula was exactly the same, an MOR classic, this time You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’, with Telly’s sultry vocals and a Mantovi-type orchestral strings backing. It seemed an obvious single but clocking in at over 7 minutes, Stevie didn’t want to cut it down to suit the single format and released Sir Duke and I Wish from the album to great chart success. An obvious choice you might say and, yes, of course it’s obvious but that doesn’t make it less or more rubbish and in some ways its success was inexplicable but not in others. It’s the sort of band your grandparents would like because they played NICE tunes and they looked NORMAL (you know, suits, ties, short back and sides, Laura Ashley dresses).

Now it would be unfair to describe Telly’s effort, Bread’s If, as one of the worst covers of all time, but it is pretty awful. It was a particularly middle of the road (lower case) chart to be fair, but then again, the charts mostly were in those days. Initially, the lead singer of Sweet Sensation, Marcel King, was supposed to do the vocal but reportedly couldn’t get to grips with the song, leaving the door open for producer David Parton to do his own version. I know I’m being very critical about the cynicism of this record but I’ve not even mentioned the worst aspect of it yet. Irrespective of the source, all of our collectables meet our strict grading and are 100% guaranteed.A couple of other interesting entries in this chart of 13 June 1971 in which Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep was the song on everyone’s lips was Sweet whose ‘ Co-Co‘ ushered in Glam Rock, and at No. Anyone who has read this section of my little blog space will know that some of the titles featured are records which should have been strangled before birth.

This lugubrious equine annual bunfight even bumped Monty Python’s Flying Circus from the schedules and became a running gag for years on the programme. My first memory of this song was being told about it in the school playground the day after MOTR appeared on TOTP having got to No. It was released by the legendary Stevie Wonder on his classic 1976 album Songs in the Key of Life and was probably the most played track from the album on the radio at the time. They may be rubbish and inexplicably successful but still hold their place in the pantheon of strange but memorable hits. Now this character reportedly ‘discovered’ Helen Shapiro and wrote two of her first hits, Don’t Treat Me Like A Child, (which nowadays sounds a bit dodgy given she was only 14), and the formulaic Walking Back To Happiness, which got to No 1 and for which he received an Ivor Novello award in 1961.hit at that, but the song had been played to death on the radio and Stevie Wonder wasn’t releasing it as a single, so for many people it was not the next best thing, but the only way of possessing the song in single form. It’s a strange thing about the 60s and 70s charts that often there could be two, sometimes more than two, versions of the same song in the charts simultaneously and it was all about who was getting the most plays on radio or maybe who was the most well known as to who had the bigge hit.