Top of the Poppers Sing & Play The Hits Of David Bowie (ESLP 02) - 2018
Tracks:
Side 1
Side 2
Side 1
- Starman
- Life On Mars?
- Sorrow
- The Man Who Sold The World
- TVC15
Side 2
- Space Oddity
- Heroes
- Boys Keep Swinging
- Fashion
Sleeve notes:
The nine tracks on this wax biscuit represent a celebration of not only David Bowie himself, but the strangeness of the era during which he crafted his most essential work. The UK pop music marketplace of the 1970s could support Pickwick Records’ ‘Top Of The Pops’ business model, which saw the label churn out album after album of cover versions of the big hits of the day. It didn’t seem to matter that the originals had already sold hundreds of thousands of copies. The ‘Top Of The Pops’ compilations were cheap to buy, and were so popular that they were excluded from the official charts because they’d just clog the place up week after week, like bin bags during the Winter of Discontent. Listening to them as an over-eager pop consumer of the 1970s was to enter a disconcerting parallel world of the ersatz.
With admirable impartiality, Pickwick’s ‘TOTP’ “house band”, charmingly named The Top Of The Poppers, would crank out cover versions of whatever hits the British public favoured. So in July 1972, Bowie’s ‘Starman’ was covered alongside Donny Osmond’s ‘Puppy Love’ on ‘Top Of The Pops’ Volume 25. ‘Life On Mars?’, recorded for Volume 32 and released in August 1973, was sandwiched between stabs at The Carpenters’ ‘Yesterday Once More’ and Dawn’s ‘Say, Has Anybody Seen My Sweet Gypsy Rose?’.
Under the leadership of producer Bruce Baxter, and with one-time EMI recording artist Tony Rivers heading up singing duties, The Top Of The Poppers (in reality an ever-shifting line-up of available session players) would record enough material in a handful of hours of studio time for an album every six weeks. It’s probably fair to say that the ‘TOTP’ albums were aimed squarely at an audience of the skint and the gullible. Or the kind of pop music fan who, like the USAF’s Lieutenant Bob Hookstatten welcoming Spinal Tap to the Lindbergh Air Base for a particularly pitiful gig, was a fan “of the whole genre of the rock and roll and of the exciting things that are happening in music today”.
But what the ‘Top Of The Pops’ collections represent is fascinating. This is how David Bowie’s recordings were understood at the time, during his 1970s pomp. Encoded into these cover versions, which veer between artless, gauche knock-offs and heartfelt, earnest attempts to capture and pay homage to Bowie, is the essence of a troubled and agitated British decade. This was when pop music was considered to be little more that disposable flotsam of the cultural flow, even pop as evidently superior as Bowie’s. ‘TOTP’ albums and their crass sleeve artwork are as evocative of the 1970s as archive news footage of marauding football hooligans with scarves tied around their wrists, three-day weeks and power cuts. Somewhere in the chasm between Bowie’s life and music and the existence of these covers is the story of Britain’s post-empire, post-war hangover; a sonic diary of a nation on its knees when only a few short years before it had been the proud exporter of The Beatles and Union Jack clothing.
What of the music itself? The results are understandably hit and miss. Listen to the version of ‘Fashion’, from ‘Top Of The Pops’ Volume 83 in November 1980, when the concept was running out of steam and Bruce Baxter and Tony Rivers had quit. The guitarist has the most trouble, the perfunctory crack at Robert Fripp’s extraordinary howl reveals just how beyond the norm it was. You can almost hear the session player give up after hitting the first note and realising that he doesn’t even understand what he heard on the original, never mind how to emulate it.
But then there’s the version of ‘Heroes’ (Volume 62, October 1977), a sterling effort from all involved to do justice to what they must have realised was a truly great song. There’s also the epic take on ‘Life On Mars?’, a hit for Bowie in 1973, a few months after he told Melody Maker he was gay, but taken from the 1971 album ‘Hunky Dory’. It’s a wonder. The singer’s slightly strangled tones are soon swamped by a surprisingly lavish orchestral arrangement, upfront in the mix. The slapback echo on the drums is intense and the guitar reaches for Mick Ronson’s intensity. They don’t skimp on the reverb-heavy coda either, with the phone ringing and the studio talkback (replacing the “I think that’s the one” of the original with “I feel like a glass of water”). It certainly lacks subtlety and finesse, but it’s quite the beast.
The anomaly here is ‘The Man Who Sold The World’ (Volume 36, February 1974), which is a cover of a cover, seeking to emulate Lulu’s unlikely hit version of the title track of the 1970 Bowie album. Bowie and Ronson worked with Lulu on her interpretation, Bowie taking the production credits and helping push the record to Number Three in the UK charts, the song’s cabaret styling slap bang in The Top Of the Poppers’ comfort zone.
Continuing the cover version hall of mirrors theme, it all gets quite convoluted with The Top Of The Poppers’ rendering of ‘Sorrow’ (Volume 34, October 1973), copied here after Bowie had a hit with this track from his ‘Pin Ups’ album. His cover was inspired by The Merseys version of the song, released in 1966, itself a cover of the 1965 original (a B-side) by the American rock outfit The McCoys, who were fronted by Rick Derringer. To throw in a Beatles footnote, ‘Sorrow’ had been quoted by the Fab Four in ‘It’s All Too Much’ (George Harrison sings “With your long blonde hair and eyes of blue” towards the end of the psychedelic freak out), which was recorded shortly after the release of ‘Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’ and included on the soundtrack of the film ‘Yellow Submarine’ in 1968.
What did David Bowie himself think of The Top Of The Poppers’ renditions? Well, we know that a private CD of these cover versions was put together for a Christmas party in 2001 by Bowie insiders. It was called ‘Top Of The Fops’ and featured a photo lifted from the cover of the 1970s teen mag Mirabelle of a fake Bowie called Henry, where he was quoted as saying, “I can’t sing, I can’t write songs, and I’m not married to Angie…”. Bowie, we’re reliably informed, loved it. After all, here was a man who had built a career on pretending to be someone else, manoeuvring his various invented personas through a succession of albums and telling anyone who bothered to listen that it wasn’t actually him the audience was responding to, it was Ziggy, or Aladdin Sane, or The Thin White Duke.
The Woolworths artifice of these recordings, the very tattiness of the concept, the eccentric weirdness, the apparently contradictory mix of cynicism and guilelessness on display, is an essential ingredient of the British pop experience – whether we like it or not. The Top Of The Poppers nurtured our 1970s pop sensibility every bit as much as Jackie magazine and Fab Lollies, and fully deserve this 21st century coloured vinyl reissue.
Mark Roland, Electronic Sound
The nine tracks on this wax biscuit represent a celebration of not only David Bowie himself, but the strangeness of the era during which he crafted his most essential work. The UK pop music marketplace of the 1970s could support Pickwick Records’ ‘Top Of The Pops’ business model, which saw the label churn out album after album of cover versions of the big hits of the day. It didn’t seem to matter that the originals had already sold hundreds of thousands of copies. The ‘Top Of The Pops’ compilations were cheap to buy, and were so popular that they were excluded from the official charts because they’d just clog the place up week after week, like bin bags during the Winter of Discontent. Listening to them as an over-eager pop consumer of the 1970s was to enter a disconcerting parallel world of the ersatz.
With admirable impartiality, Pickwick’s ‘TOTP’ “house band”, charmingly named The Top Of The Poppers, would crank out cover versions of whatever hits the British public favoured. So in July 1972, Bowie’s ‘Starman’ was covered alongside Donny Osmond’s ‘Puppy Love’ on ‘Top Of The Pops’ Volume 25. ‘Life On Mars?’, recorded for Volume 32 and released in August 1973, was sandwiched between stabs at The Carpenters’ ‘Yesterday Once More’ and Dawn’s ‘Say, Has Anybody Seen My Sweet Gypsy Rose?’.
Under the leadership of producer Bruce Baxter, and with one-time EMI recording artist Tony Rivers heading up singing duties, The Top Of The Poppers (in reality an ever-shifting line-up of available session players) would record enough material in a handful of hours of studio time for an album every six weeks. It’s probably fair to say that the ‘TOTP’ albums were aimed squarely at an audience of the skint and the gullible. Or the kind of pop music fan who, like the USAF’s Lieutenant Bob Hookstatten welcoming Spinal Tap to the Lindbergh Air Base for a particularly pitiful gig, was a fan “of the whole genre of the rock and roll and of the exciting things that are happening in music today”.
But what the ‘Top Of The Pops’ collections represent is fascinating. This is how David Bowie’s recordings were understood at the time, during his 1970s pomp. Encoded into these cover versions, which veer between artless, gauche knock-offs and heartfelt, earnest attempts to capture and pay homage to Bowie, is the essence of a troubled and agitated British decade. This was when pop music was considered to be little more that disposable flotsam of the cultural flow, even pop as evidently superior as Bowie’s. ‘TOTP’ albums and their crass sleeve artwork are as evocative of the 1970s as archive news footage of marauding football hooligans with scarves tied around their wrists, three-day weeks and power cuts. Somewhere in the chasm between Bowie’s life and music and the existence of these covers is the story of Britain’s post-empire, post-war hangover; a sonic diary of a nation on its knees when only a few short years before it had been the proud exporter of The Beatles and Union Jack clothing.
What of the music itself? The results are understandably hit and miss. Listen to the version of ‘Fashion’, from ‘Top Of The Pops’ Volume 83 in November 1980, when the concept was running out of steam and Bruce Baxter and Tony Rivers had quit. The guitarist has the most trouble, the perfunctory crack at Robert Fripp’s extraordinary howl reveals just how beyond the norm it was. You can almost hear the session player give up after hitting the first note and realising that he doesn’t even understand what he heard on the original, never mind how to emulate it.
But then there’s the version of ‘Heroes’ (Volume 62, October 1977), a sterling effort from all involved to do justice to what they must have realised was a truly great song. There’s also the epic take on ‘Life On Mars?’, a hit for Bowie in 1973, a few months after he told Melody Maker he was gay, but taken from the 1971 album ‘Hunky Dory’. It’s a wonder. The singer’s slightly strangled tones are soon swamped by a surprisingly lavish orchestral arrangement, upfront in the mix. The slapback echo on the drums is intense and the guitar reaches for Mick Ronson’s intensity. They don’t skimp on the reverb-heavy coda either, with the phone ringing and the studio talkback (replacing the “I think that’s the one” of the original with “I feel like a glass of water”). It certainly lacks subtlety and finesse, but it’s quite the beast.
The anomaly here is ‘The Man Who Sold The World’ (Volume 36, February 1974), which is a cover of a cover, seeking to emulate Lulu’s unlikely hit version of the title track of the 1970 Bowie album. Bowie and Ronson worked with Lulu on her interpretation, Bowie taking the production credits and helping push the record to Number Three in the UK charts, the song’s cabaret styling slap bang in The Top Of the Poppers’ comfort zone.
Continuing the cover version hall of mirrors theme, it all gets quite convoluted with The Top Of The Poppers’ rendering of ‘Sorrow’ (Volume 34, October 1973), copied here after Bowie had a hit with this track from his ‘Pin Ups’ album. His cover was inspired by The Merseys version of the song, released in 1966, itself a cover of the 1965 original (a B-side) by the American rock outfit The McCoys, who were fronted by Rick Derringer. To throw in a Beatles footnote, ‘Sorrow’ had been quoted by the Fab Four in ‘It’s All Too Much’ (George Harrison sings “With your long blonde hair and eyes of blue” towards the end of the psychedelic freak out), which was recorded shortly after the release of ‘Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’ and included on the soundtrack of the film ‘Yellow Submarine’ in 1968.
What did David Bowie himself think of The Top Of The Poppers’ renditions? Well, we know that a private CD of these cover versions was put together for a Christmas party in 2001 by Bowie insiders. It was called ‘Top Of The Fops’ and featured a photo lifted from the cover of the 1970s teen mag Mirabelle of a fake Bowie called Henry, where he was quoted as saying, “I can’t sing, I can’t write songs, and I’m not married to Angie…”. Bowie, we’re reliably informed, loved it. After all, here was a man who had built a career on pretending to be someone else, manoeuvring his various invented personas through a succession of albums and telling anyone who bothered to listen that it wasn’t actually him the audience was responding to, it was Ziggy, or Aladdin Sane, or The Thin White Duke.
The Woolworths artifice of these recordings, the very tattiness of the concept, the eccentric weirdness, the apparently contradictory mix of cynicism and guilelessness on display, is an essential ingredient of the British pop experience – whether we like it or not. The Top Of The Poppers nurtured our 1970s pop sensibility every bit as much as Jackie magazine and Fab Lollies, and fully deserve this 21st century coloured vinyl reissue.
Mark Roland, Electronic Sound
Comments: This compilation of nine Top of the Pops cuts was issued in November 2018 by Electronic Sound magazine. The LP was pressed on purple vinyl, on Electronic Sound's own label, and tied in with issue 47 of the mag. The LP was the first Poppers vinyl release in 33 years!