Any Major Dude With Half A Heart

As I have done over the past few years, I’ll review the hits from fifty years ago in two parts. One follows the hits from 1976 in the UK, the other in the US. This lot picks 23 tracks that were riding high in the UK charts in 1976; some of them were hits too in the US (and it will work vice versa when Volume 2, which will focus on the US charts, comes out).

In the UK, 1976 marked the launch of punk, with a hype that prompted even West Germany’s teen magazine Bravo to write a feature on the Sex Pistols, with a poster — before the band had even released a record (their first UK chart entry was in December).

Even as the year started with the pomp rock of Bohemian Rhapsody, the year really belonged to ABBA, who finally knocked the Queen opus off the top of the charts in late January with Mamma Mia. Two further #1s followed: Fernando in July and Dancing Queen in September. ABBA spent 12 weeks on the top of the UK charts, and added a #3 hit with Money Money Money as the year fizzled out. Three more consecutive #1s would follow in 1977.

That dancing queen felt the beat from the tambourine in a discotheque. And disco music was getting bigger in 1976 — not yet so big that Ethel Merman felt compelled to make a disco LP, but enjoying a certain ubiquity. And UK acts were helping to lead the charge. Tina Charles’ I Love to Love and The Real Thing’s You To Me Are Everything and Can’t Get By Without You brought club vibes to mainstream pop. From Germany, Donna Summer’s Love To Love You Baby and Silver Convention’s Fly Robin Fly were, well, flying high in the charts. From the US, Tavares’ Heaven Must Be Missing An Angel was a slice of disco joy.

While Ethel Merman and Sesame Street were still holding their disco fire, one novelty record already blazed a trail for the joy-destroying trivialisation of the genre: Rick Dees’ Disco Duck, perhaps the worst record of 1976.

Dees had plenty of competition. JJ Barrie’s dreadful No Charge, a spoken-word country moral tale about unpaid motherhood, spent weeks at #1. The Wurzels’ belated comedy cover of Melanie’s Brand New Key, reworked as Combiner Harvester, introduced agricultural humour to the charts. Robin Sarstedt’s My Resistance Is Low sounded like a Disney movie reject. And punk found an antidote in Our Kid, a Liverpool vocal quartet of boys, led by a 12-year-old with a pudding-bowl haircut, whose You Just Might See Me Cry probably made many people weep with anger.

The closer on this mix might or might it be a novelty tune. The Kursaal Flyers’ Little Does She Know is deliberately and gloriously overproduced — producer Mike Batt said he was going for a Phil Spector effect. Cheating songs are rarely set in laundromats, nor do they tend to refer to dropped bikinis that had been bought in Rome. But the Kursaal Flyers were not usually a novelty band trading in parody, so I assume that they played the song straight.

The year’s biggest-selling single in the UK was the Eurovision winner Save Your Kisses for Me by Brotherhood of Man. The passage of time has eased my objections to this lightweight number. It’s a harmless and catchy singalong tune. But it doesn’t feature in this mix.

The most unexpected record was the born-again Christian Cliff Richard singing about a Devil Woman, a song about a stray cat with evil eyes and a lady with bad intent corrupting our clean Clifford. It’s a decent rock number, and rock music was still very much around. Status Quo were chugging their boogie riff, and Thin Lizzy made a great comeback with The Boys Are Back In Town (featured here, like all tracks, in its single version. I’ve replaced that in my folder with the full album cut).

As the Sex Pistols made their chart debut with Anarchy In The UK in December, peaking at #38, the charts were topped by Showaddywaddy with their rock & roll revivalist Under The Moon Of Love and Johnny Mathis’ adult-oriented When A Child Is Born. Punk would make its mark in 1977, but even in that year, the top positions in the UK charts would defy all ideas of revolution.

Will I make Hits From 1977 mixes next year? I don’t know yet — the lack of comments for the predecessor mixes over the past couple of years suggests that this series is more a self- than crowd-pleasing exercise. I did a Life In Vinyl 1977 mix some years ago, which covers that year. But the well of hits goes deeper than my vinyl acquisitions of that year. You tell me in the Comments or on my Facebook whether you want Any Major Hits From 1977.

Meanwhile, the US hits of 1976 will follow soon.

Links for all past mixes in the series are up.  If you dig the feel of 1976, take a look at the collection of posters from West-Germany’s Bravo magazine in 1976 (other years are available, too)

As with other Any Major Hit mixes, the sequencing is roughly chronological. The mix is timed to fit on as standard CD-R and includes home-discoed covers and the above text in a PDF. PW in comments.

1. Slik – Forever And Ever
2. Tina Charles – I Love To Love
3. Billy Ocean – Love Really Hurts Without You
4. R&J Stone – We Do It
5. Barry White – You See The Trouble With Me
6. Harpo – Movie Star
7. Sailor – Girls Girls Girls
8. Cliff Richard – Devil Woman
9. Sutherlands Brothers & Quiver – Arms Of Mary
10. Jimmy James & The Vagabonds – I’ll Go Where Your Music Takes Me
11. Melba Moore – This Is It
12. Real Thing – You To Me Are Everything
13. Gallagher & Lyle – Heart On My Sleeve
14. Thin Lizzy – The Boys Are Back In Town
15. David Dundas – Jeans On
16. Jesse Green – Nice And Slow
17. Johnny Wakelin – In Zaire
18. Sherbet – Howzat
19. Leo Sayer – You Make Me Feel Like Dancing
20. Showaddywaddy – Under The Moon Of Love
21. Bonnie Tyler – Lost In France
22. Electric Light Orchestra – Livin’ Thing
23. Kursaal Flyers – Little Does She Know

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