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Every track has a story. Classic songs from the rock music, pop, reggae & soul archive and the stories behind them with Simon Tesler, founder and former editor of 1980s music, media and pop culture magazine BLITZ.
Hello, this is Simon Tesler with more great Sounds from the Rock, Soul and Reggae Archive and a few of the stories behind the songs. Each week I select tracks with a specific theme, and this week the theme is ANIMALS. I have more than 20 fabulous tracks for you from Suede, The Beatles, The Stooges, Big Youth, Lemon Jelly and many more. But first up, this is King and Fish.
**
So that was King, named after frontman Paul King, and the opening track Fish from their debut album Steps In Time. Do you remember King? You probably remember their biggest hit Love & Price, also from that album, which actually got to #2 in the UK charts in 1984. And if you watched MTV in the Britain back in the late 80s and early 90s you will certainly remember Paul King himself, who was one of the onscreen presenters for MTV when it launched in Europe, along with another former rock star Richard Jobson, previously the front man for Scottish punk band The Skids.
King the band were in part the brainchild of Perry Haines, a face around town in those halcyon days of the early 1980s, as a early contributor to iD magazine, a club promoter and subsequently as the image consultant and stylist for Duran Duran. King was his first step into band management: they'd previously been known as The Reluctant Stereotypes, but Haines overhauled their image and also engineered a successful promotional partnership with bootmaker Dr Martens. The band became famed for their paint-splattered DMs.
But King the band didn't last very long -- there were two albums and then they broke up in 1986. King himself joined MTV in 1989, eventually going behind the camera as a producer for its sister channel VH1 in the mid 90s. He now works primarily as a property developer in Spain.
In the band's heyday, Paul King was instantly recognisable for his chiselled features and elaborate quiff. Next up, two more sets of chiselled features and elaborate hairstyles. The first originated at around the same time as Paul King in Oslo in Norway. The second burst onto the music scene in the early 1990s. In a few minutes, Suede make their debut on Sounds. But this is A-ha.
**
Cry Wolf from A-Ha's second album and then Animal Nitrate from the first Suede album. Both bands enjoyed spectacular success with their debut albums released in 1985 and 1992 respectively, but as is so often case they found it hard to maintain that trajectory. That hasn't stopped both bands from carrying on to this day, albeit with several breaks along the way.
A-Ha arrived in London from their native Norway in the early 1980s and the massive success of their first single Take On Me, combined with singer Morten Haarket's striking good looks catapulted them into pop super stardom, not just in Europe but also in the US. However this was not a world they particularly wanted to inhabit -- though they were happy enough to play the popstar game for a while they were rather more serious minded than pop peers like Duran Duran, for example.
Another problem was the friction developing within the band over the vast amount of media attention devoted solely to pinup frontman Morten Haarket, considering that all the band's songs were actually written by his two bandmates Magne Furuholmen and Pol Waaktaar. Cry Wolf comes from their second album Scoundrel Days, which is a much darker and moodier affair than its predecessor. All the better for that quite frankly.
Almost a decade later, Suede were a media sensation even before they'd released their first single, greeted by the music press with a deluge of hyperbole, not least a front cover feature in Melody Maker that lauded them as The Best New Band in Britain.
Though not their biggest hit, Animal Nitrate is probably the defining anthem of their career. "I wanted to evoke a violent sexual world," said singer Brett Anderson, and more than any other of the Britpop sensations of the early 1990s, Suede were the ones who seemed to inhabit that midnight world of drugs and danger. The title of course is a play on words, a reference to the drug amyl nitrate, also known as poppers. It was guitarist Bernard Butler who came up with the original chord sequence for the song, which had a working title of Dixon because it sounded to the band a bit like the theme to BBC TV police show Dixon Of Dock Green. But Brett Anderson was struggling to come with lyrics for it.
"I just couldn’t write anything that I thought was any good," he said. "Then one night I was at a gig I overheard what I thought was 'animal nitrate' in a drunken conversation. I wrote it down, forgot about it, opened my notebook the next day and there it was. It unlocked the song for me. All of a sudden I had the lyrics."
"I was taking a huge amount of drugs then. It wasn’t actually anything to do with amyl nitrate, it was other sorts of drugs – coke, ecstasy. My mind was in a stormy period, I was going quite insane."
"I’d always liked the idea of writing a pop song with darker themes, so with Animal Nitrate I wanted to evoke this violent, sexual, underprivileged world. I’d grown up in a council house and I was trying to talk about the failures and frustrations and the darkness of that background."
"I love the idea that people would be humming along to a nice little tune, but underneath the lyrics are barbed and uncomfortable, as if we had smuggled a dangerous animal into their house."
Next up, a couple more dangerous sexed-up animals in the house. In a few minutes, American rocker Ted Nugent with Cat Scratch Fever. But first, David Bowie and Cat People. More about both tracks in a few minutes.
**
That was David Bowie's second version of Cat People, re-recorded for the Let's Dance album 1983, but first composed two years earlier by Bowie and disco maestro Giorgio Moroder for the movie of the same name. The two versions are strikingly different and perhaps surprisingly the later version is the better one.
Cat People was originally a stylish but low budget black and white horror movie made in the 1940s about a mysterious femme fatale in New York femme fatale who transforms into a panther when romantically aroused, like a feline version of a werewolf. Four decades later, the huge success of the sexy thriller American Gigolo in which Richard Gere played a high-class sex worker left film studios desperate for similarly edgy fare, and a remake of Cat People looked like the perfect project. Giorgio Moroder had done the soundtrack for American Gigolo, with Debbie Harry of Blondie singing the title song Call Me. Moroder got the call to create the soundtrack for Cat People too but who to sing it?
Moroder told Dylan Jones for his biography of David Bowie "I was talking to the director Paul Schrader, and I said, ‘Who shall we take for the single? Who represents that weirdness of the movie?’ And we immediately said David Bowie. So I wrote the song and I sent it to him. He loved it, he wrote the lyrics, we went to Montreux in Switzerland, where he lived at that time; and we recorded it in less than an hour. He sang it twice, and it was done. It was one of my easiest, fastest and greatest recordings ever."
However, Bowie obviously felt he could improve on the synth-heavy original and when it came to recording Let's Dance two years later with Nile Rogers they set out to do something different. "The way 'Cat People' came out on the soundtrack really bothered him," Rogers recalled. "He didn't like it at all." It was, Rogers said in his autobiography, "a dirge-like ballad". Out went the synths and in came the superb blues guitar of Stevie Ray Vaughan. Music critics have been fighting over the comparisons ever since, with many praising Moroder's original over the remake, but for my money, the Let's Dance version is the winner.
And then Ted Nugent with Cat Scratch Fever. Now Ted Nugent may not be everyone's favourite rock n roller because of his outspoken extreme right wing -- well, extreme everything views really -- but he can pen a catchy tune. Cat Scratch Fever is his anthem. It's a real thing of course, an infectious disease caused by a cat scratch. He told Ultimate Classic Rock "I had seen a medical journal back in 1975, I opened it up and at the top, it said, 'cat scratch fever.' I'd never heard of that before. What's that? So later on, that lick was cataloged in my memory bank. I went, 'Cat Scratch Fever!' and I had fun with the lyrics." Needless to say, the cats in question aren't literal. As Nugent once told an interviewer, the song isn't about pussy cats, but just about.... well, you get the idea...
From cats to dogs now for four canine classics. First up, two of the very greatest in the rock business. I'm sure I don't need to tell you who they are.
**
Elvis Presley of course with Hound Dog, followed by The Beatles and Hey Bulldog. Hound Dog was the song that made Elvis Presley a huge national star across America, but in the eyes of many, for all the wrong reasons. He was already a rock n roll phenomenon after two consecutive No 1 singles in the US charts, but most ordinary Americans were unaware of him. All that changed on the 5th of June 1956. He was the musical guest on the network TV programme The Milton Berle Show, beamed into 40m American homes. That appearance electrified the nation, as controversial in its day as the Sex Pistols' notorious The Filth & The Fury interview on the Today programme in 1977.
The reviews in the next day's newspapers were savage. Said the New York Journal American, "The sight of the young Mr Presley caterwauling his unintelligible lyrics in an inadequate voice, during a display of primitive physical movement difficult to describe in terms suitable to a family newspaper, has caused the most heated reaction since the stone-age days of TV." It was his physical moves that offended most: "unspeakably vulgar" said the Herald Turbine. Like "striptease with clothes on" said the Catholic weekly America. "Movement that hitherto has been primarily identified with the repertoire of the blond bombshells of the burlesque runway" said The New York Times.
Needless to say, teenagers all over America were absolutely entranced. Making the most of the huge publicity generated by his performance, Presley went straight into the studio to record the song he'd performed on the Milton Berle Show, and on its release a month later it was his third consecutive No 1, and topped the charts for 11 weeks, a feat matched by no other artist for the next 36 years. It was also the biggest selling single of his entire career, certified 4x Platinum. The song was of course Hound Dog.
Presley wasn't the first artist to record it. The song had been written four years earlier by two white Jewish 19-year-olds called Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, later to become legends in the industry. They fancied themselves as rhythm & blues songwriters and had been submitted their compositions to various agents for a couple of years. In 1952 the bandleader Johnny Otis invited them to come and meet Big Mama Thornton, a hard-living blues singer of imposing appearance and fearsome reputation.
"She looked like the biggest, baddest, saltiest chick you would ever see," remembered Leiber years later. "And she was mean, a 'lady bear,' as they used to call 'em. She must have been 350 pounds, and she had all these scars all over her face." Those were reputedly razorblade cuts inflicted on her in some unspecified past brawl. "She was a wonderful blues singer, with a great moaning style," added Stoller. "But it was as much her appearance as her blues style that influenced the writing of 'Hound Dog' and the idea that we wanted her to growl it." The song was a Southern blues about a woman throwing her exploitative lowlife boyfriend out of the house.
It ended up being a huge hit for Thornton, the biggest of her career, and it was covered by several other artists over the next couple of years, with its bawdy lyrics gradually eased out of the song, especially once white guys started singing it. By the time Elvis first heard it, played by Freddie Bell & The Bellboys in Las Vegas, it had stopped being a song about a seedy gigolo and was now about a real dog. He played it for the first time, unrehearsed, at the end of a Vegas show in April or May of 56, complete with those swivelling Elvis the Pelvis hips, and it went down so well it was an easy choice for the Milton Berle show a few weeks later.
The animal at the heart of Hey Bulldog also changed during the course of the song's composition. In February 1968, The Beatles were about to leave for India to study meditation with the Maharishi but before they went they were booked to record a promotional film for their soon-to-be-released new single Lady Madonna. By the time they got to the studio though they had decided to try something new instead. John Lennon told biographer Hunter Davies "Paul said we should do a real song in the studio, to save wasting time. Could I whip one off? I had a few words at home so I brought them in." The original title was Hey Bullfrog, but during an early take, Paul McCartney adlibbed some barking at the end of the track to make John Lennon laugh, so they rewrote the song to be about a dog instead. With The Beatles now away in India, the track was repurposed later that year for the soundtrack of the animated movie Yellow Submarine.
Two more dogs now, and these are much wilder. In a few minutes, EMF -- the You're Unbelievable boys -- with a great track from their undeservedly ignored second album Stigma. That's Dog. But first a killer classic from the first album by The Stooges, released in 1969. To say it was ahead of its time would be an understatement. This is I Wanna Be Your Dog.
**
Woof, you might say! Recorded more than 20 years apart, both tracks share a similar concept: a guy addressing his lover and wanting to be for her (or for him, depending on your preferences) both a god and a dog, both angel and devil, or if you prefer top and bottom. Haha! In The Stooges case, Ron Asheton's savage descending guitar riff came first, and it was so good that Iggy had to come up with lyrics that would do it justice.
"I wanted to write something big," he said later. "The biggest thing I knew about was God. I wasn’t that into singing about God, but then one day I thought, ‘If you turn god backwards, what would you have?'”. But I'd have to say that a couple of those lines are in their own very simple way, pure poetry. "So messed up I want you here / In my room I want you here / Now we're gonna be face-to-face / And I'll lay right down in my favourite place" And I especially love "Now I'm ready to feel your hand / and lose my heart on the burning sands." EMF's song was almost certainly inspired by The Stooges earlier classic, with James Atkin singing And I could be your god / I could be your love / And I could be your dog"
Unfortunately the rave-happy kids who'd propelled EMF's previous tracks Unbelievable and I Believe to major chart success were not ready for this shift from techno-pop to a darker harder rock and Stigma failed to find an audience. But it's a really great album. Check it out.
We're just coming up to the break now. I will be back with you after the news for another hour of great songs on the theme of ANIMALS, but to take us there, a much more gentle slice of English whimsy. In the early 2000s, Fred Deakin and Nick Franglen compiled three wonderful albums of semi-ambient electronic soundscapes in which each track was inspired by some oddball audio sample. I'm going to play Nice Weather For Ducks, from their second album Lost Horizons.
The vocal hook came from an album of nursery rhymes sung by the American educator John Langstaff. One track was called All The Ducks. Nick Franglen told the website WhoSampled, "We weren't aware at the time that it's a famous Dutch nursery rhyme. We liked the original John Langstaff sample because it had a gentle madness to it, slightly unhinged - for me the song was always about what's going on inside a madman's head. Unfortunately we couldn't clear the copyright for some reason and we were too far down the line to drop it, so we had to re-record it. The guy who sang it was good, but you always lose something when you do that and for me that edge disappeared. Next time you listen to it, please imagine it's a crazed guy with a large mallet singing and you'll get more of an idea of what was going on inside my head."
This is Nice Weather For Ducks.