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Music history comes alive. Forgotten favourites & undiscovered gems from the rock, soul & reggae archive and a few of the stories behind them. Your host is Simon Tesler, former publisher and editor of 1980s music, media and pop culture magazine BLITZ.
I'm Simon Tesler. Welcome back to another hour of great songs on the theme of SCHOOL, kicking off with The Hoosiers and Goodbye Mr A.
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So just before the break we had Madness with Baggy Trousers and just now Goodbye Mr A from The Hoosiers. Funny isn't it, how everybody's memories of school differ so widely. Suggs from Madness clearly had a whale of a time, and captures it very well in his lyrics. "Lots of girls and lots of boys / Lots of smells and lots of noise..." Contrast that with the misery experienced by poor old Roger Waters of Pink Floyd who opened the first part of tonight's show with his bitterness about public school on Another Brick In The Wall. In fact that was a deliberate contrast on Suggs' part. He told the BBC, "I was writing about *my* time at school. Pink Floyd had that big hit with 'teacher, leave those kids alone'. It didn't really relate to me, because I hadn't been to a public school where I was bossed about and told to sing "Rule Britannia!" and all that."
The Hoosiers' experience falls somewhere inbetween I guess. Singer and songwriter Irwin Sparkes clearly feels conflicted. He's acknowledged that the song is about his secondary school English teacher Mr Anderton, who preferred students to call him Mr A. The song sounds like an attack on Mr A but actually Sparkes has said in interviews that he was a "really cool guy". What ever happened to The Hoosiers? They were such a great band, and released two really superb albums in 2007 and 2010, but then it all seemed to go to pot. They fell out with their record label and they've been ploughing the independent furrow ever since. To their credit though they're still going, with a series of festival dates across the UK this coming summer.
Two more British songs with very mixed feelings about school. In a few minutes, The Godfathers with Birth School Work Death; but first this. I'm sure you know it. It's The Jam.
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Two great bands. So I imagine not everyone out there is aware that the Eton Rifles is a real thing, a volunteer rifle corps founded by the elite British public school Eton in the 19th century to provide military training for young men, many of whom were inevitably destined to become officers in the British Army or Royal Air Force. It's still going today, though since 1948 it's been called the Combined Cadet Force rather than the Eton Rifles.
We think now of Paul Weller as one of the most politically engaged musicians of the late 70s and early 80s but actually it wasn't until this -- which was the lead single from The Jam's fourth album Setting Sons -- that he really began to wrestle with political ideas.
He told Uncut magazine in 2016, "Coming from such an uneducated background I suppose I'd had quite a blinkered Working Class upbringing and reading books like George Orwell's Homage To Catalonia and Robert Tressell's The Ragged Trousered Philanthropist had opened up my mind -- seeing how the system works and how people are kept down. They gave me a broadly socialist viewpoint and made me reappraise everything. I started to look at things differently I suppose and most of those ideas went into the Setting Sons album."
The inspiration for Eton Rifles came from news footage of a Right To Work march protesting against what was then exceptionally high unemployment in Britain. One of these marches went past Eton College in Windsor. "All the kids from the school came outside," Weller recalled, "and they started jeering at the marchers."
Famously, some 30 years later, the Conservative Party leader David Cameron, an Old Etonian himself, named The Eton Rifles as one of his favourite songs. "I was one," he said, "I was in the corps. It meant a lot, some of those early Jam albums we used to listen to. I don't see why the left should be the only ones allowed to listen to protest songs." Weller responded: "Which part of it didn't he get? It wasn't intended as a jolly drinking song for the cadet corps."
And then the Godfathers. A superb band, originally founded in 1985 by the Coyne brothers Chis and Peter. Birth School Work Death is the title track from their first proper album, released in 1987 -- the previous mini-LP Hit By Hit was a compilation of the three singles they had released up to that point -- and it's a savage critique of the relentless grind of ordinary life. Lots of other great songs on the album too, so definitely a band you should check out.
Let's stick with guitars and drums for our next three tracks, but we're going to get heavy. A little later in the show we'll have some classic soul from James Brown and others, but first some blistering rock and roll. First up, Van Halen, followed by AC/DC, and then Nirvana. Turn up that volume dial.
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First up we had Hot For Teacher from Van Halen, then AC/DC's cover of that old Chuck Berry classic School Days, and finally School from Nirvana. Hot For Teacher comes from the album 1984, the last from Van Halen's classic first incarnation before David Lee Roth's departure... or rather first departure. He left, he came back, he left again, he came back again... You might say it's the ultimate Van Halen track, with every musical signature Van Halen ever created all boiled down into a single four-minute song, from Alex Van Halen's amazing double bass drums through Eddie Van Halen's blistering guitar solos and David Lee Roth's jokey half-sung half-spoken vocals. "I brought my pen-cil!"
AC/DC's version of School Days comes from 1975, originally from their second studio album, TNT. That's Bon Scott on vocals of course. And then School, from Nirvana's debut album Bleach. "No Recess, You're In High School Again," sings Kurt Cobain, but of course it's not so much about high school as about what Cobain felt was the suffocating cliquey atmosphere of Seattle's music scene. Just like high school again.
Back to Britain now for the next two tracks, or sort of, anyway. First up, is the original incarnation of Fleetwood Mac, or rather what was then Peter Green's Fleetwood Mac, with a cover of a blues classic by Otis Rush. After that, Lulu, yes, Lulu, but first Homework.
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If you say Fleetwood Mac to many people, they'll only think of the band's later line-up, the golden period admittedly, from Rumours onwards, with Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks. But Fleetwood Mac had already released 11 albums before Rumours.
They were formed by British guitarist Peter Green, a devotee like so many British musicians in the mid 60s of American Blues. Drummer Mick Fleetwood and bassist John McVie were equally obsessed. In 1969, the band was on tour in the US and they heard that Chicago's legendary Chess Studios was about to close down. This was where so many classic blues songs had been recorded, so they assembled a line-up of greats like Willie Dixon and Buddy Guy to accompany them there in a jam through some of great songs that had inspired them. Homework, originally recorded by Otis Rush in 1962, is the track that closes the album.
And then we had Lulu, yes, Lulu, that diminutive Scottish ball of fire, with the title track from the 1967 British classroom movie To Sir With Love, in which Sidney Poitier -- already a big name movie star -- came over to the UK to play a teacher in a London East End comprehensive who has to instill a bit of order and education on a class of unruly teenagers. It's a fine movie, based on the real-life experiences of British Guyanese teacher Ricky Braithwaite. But the title song made Lulu an unlikely international superstar, especially in the US, where it was the top-selling single of that whole year.
The main theme of the movie of course is, make the most of school because you won't get anywhere in life without education. And that's the main sentiment of my next two tracks, both recorded at around the same time. Quite a few Black American soul artists in the late 60s made use of their status to deliver social messages to teenage audiences. None more so than James Brown who released songs warning against all sorts of evils, especially drugs, but his first such single was Don't Be A Dropout in 1967. But first, released a year earlier, here's Motown recording artist Brenda Holloway, with backing vocals from The Supremes, with their warning to wayward youth, Play It Cool Stay In School.
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OK, now we've already had three songs with the title School Days in this show, and there are quite a few more to choose from, but my final track today is -- in my humble opinion -- the greatest School Days of all. In fact you may already be expecting it.
Stanley Clarke is the bass player's bass player, he's the man who brought the four-string guitar out of the shadows, so to speak, out of the rhythmic background of modern music and made it the lead instrument. He's dabbled in many different musical styles including rock, in side-projects with Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood in the New Barbarians, and with Police drummer Stewart Copeland in Animal Logic, but his first love has always been jazz, and more specifically what's generally called jazz fusion.
He was actually classically trained, but as a teenager his hands became too big for the first instrument he learned to play, which was the violin. So he moved over to the stand-up double bass, but his musical skill soon put him at something of a disadvantage. The move to electric bass, he said, came from something really simple. "I used to play in bands," he said, "and I'd be the one guy that could arrange the music, the only that could write, and the only guy that could rehearse the band properly. So I thought, if I have all these abilities, why don't I just write some stuff for the bass. I have to admit, I had some people that used to look at me like I was crazy."
Not after this, though. This is the title track from Clarke's third solo album. This is of course School Days.
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I'm Simon Tesler. Thanks for joining me for another deep dive into the rock, soul and jazz archive. I hope you'll join me at the same time of 7pm next week for another great selection. See you then!