Sunday [1]

(0632)(0817)

Torquaymada and “generations lost in space”

That heading quote is from Don McLean’s American Pie and his commentary on post-war until 1971/2 “rock history”.

With the greatest respect to our senior member here, nearing 90, a musical dedication to him coming up later (called Sunday) and accepting that each classical or baroque piece pinpoints in itself a sub-era so to speak, what was the rage at the time … so does popular music of more recent, post-war sub-eras … or in other words, throughout the duration of our own lives.

Part of that has been reestablished contact with my first genuine Valentine’s romance after so many decades now, plus other ladies of various eras … and that has sharply focussed my mind at least on how far a person is always of his/her era, with its thinking process, but also how far he/she has explored other eras and likes or skips past various eras. Clumsy construction but you get the idea.

And into eras and sub-eras comes the modern (though also biblical) notion of labelling a generation … it’s quite possible to do immediately post war but starts to lose its validity into the 80s and has almost diversified into quite different musical camps by the mid-90s, at which point, imho, the music did, finally, genuinely grind to a halt and die, coinciding with the rise of autotuning. It quite lost its way, went dark and satanic, inc. Minaj.

So we’d been through proto-punk, punk, post-punk, techno, disco, grunge, glam … plenty of other genres … and then we get to Britpop:

“Britpop was a British music and cultural movement that emerged in the 1990s. Musically, it produced bright, catchy alternative rock that drew heavily on the traditions of 1960s guitar-based British pop, with lyrics that emphasised national identity and offered commentary on British culture and society. The movement was seen as a reaction against the darker lyrical themes and soundscapes of the American-led grunge and the more introspective shoegaze scene in Britain. It helped bring British alternative rock into the mainstream and became a key part of the broader Cool Britannia phenomenon, which echoed the spirit of the Swinging Sixties.”

I largely missed entire sub-eras after the mid 70s … I was vaguely aware of something called a Nirvana and some teen spirit thing people went on about but I never knowingly heard any of it until exploring it relatively recently. I also vaguely knew of some guy called Kurt and something about him dying … big deal, Jim Morrison and Hendrix had died, Joplin, Sandy Denny. As for Pink Floyd … that largely passed me by, except for Meddle, which I liked. Not forgetting that I was a Radio DJ at that point for a year or so, playing mainly Krautrock and Hawkwind.

I did know of The Clash but had never been deeply into “down by the wivver” rock, completely missed Oasis, Queen (except I want to be free) … yet as the 80s became the 90s, I knew MC Hammer, Paula Abdul, Betty Boo, Twenty4Seven, boy bands such as Take That and Backstreet Boys, and of course Ska and Two-Tone … so how had I missed all the rest?

Around 1995, I was on a bus to Blackpool (don’t even ask) with a London girl deeply into Oasis … I’d heard there were two Gallaghers who didn’t like one another, we sat on the beach together, speaking of nothings … maybe she’d heard of Blondie and New Order, maybe even Slade but I’d never knowingly listened to some Guns and Roses thing … seemed to be big in the lives of various young ladies I knew.

And so we finally get to Torquaymada at 1294:5:

“The particular subject may not appeal to all (some might say ‘who cares?’) but this article should be of interest. Our host … often challenges us to ‘dig deeper’ into the multiple offerings and ‘starting points’ proffered here.

Whether you like it or not, this is a masterclass in ‘deep diving’ to my mind…”.

https://restoremag.com/chasing-the-restless-ghost-of-kurt-cobain

I found it fascinating and forgive my plug for NOWP (see navbar above) but there is so much reading and viewing there, going right back … there’s our era in real time. And yes, I’m also going to urge people to work through the anecdotes at UHC-WP. If I don’t oush HQ all that much, it’s coz I’m writing much of it.

Now, with your permission, I must revert, briefly, to Don McLean because last night I saw another reaction to him from young people … yes, I much prefer to see how the “old music” affects the young or does not, obviously the things they know nothing of but also the things they’re quite interested in. Dozens of youtube reactors (mainly Millennial or early Gen Zee) are avidly exploring the old and my vintage seems to be going to comments threads to supply primary source info.

To my mind, the whole thing is healthy and if we take that, plus what you chaps and chapesses are supplying here … well I for one am piecing together quite a postwar roadmap of what went on at our level. Sorry to confess to my first romantic love back then but part of it is placing “us” in the wild events, the eras, more accurately, more definitively, seeing just how one summer of love signed off on one era … began another. One day, I’ll write it all up. Maybe.

Oh … here’s that very emotional young people reaction to American Pie. Do give it a viewing please.

However, that’s not what this post is actually about. It’s about Torquaymada, plus Sloopy. You wot?! Yep, and the second part of it involves multiple youtubes.

In 1965, The McCoys came out with Sloopy, based on a so g from the previous year by a black band: My Girl Sloopy, which did not go into the charts due to the tyrannical music controllers of the time. But the McCoys’ version did … pre video, pre MTV.

The version most people know has a raunchy, though dressed girl, Lisa Leonard Dalton, with “more moving parts than a machine”, as someone put it. And yes … as good as the song was, the braless Lusa was the focus of all eyes.

But here’s the thing. The producers put the 1975 vision behind the 1965 band … they spliced the two, as Lisa LD wasn’t in that 1965 version … she was born in 1956 and is still around today. And thus it was the 1975 version she was in the video of, being brought in from where she’d won some go-go dancer awards.

And the first thing is that yes … viewers wanted her, wanted to know all about her … but the lead singer wanted it to be all about the band and the song … the girl was an incidental. Not in our eyes she wasn’t. And when she finally saw how people were ascribing her performance to some other woman, she was highly p***ed about it: