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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.
I'm Simon Tesler, back with you for another hour of great music on the theme of ANIMALS. In a few minutes, Elton John, but first the early 2000s favourite Toploader with High Flying Bird.
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Elton John with Honky Cat and before that High Flying Bird from Toploader. They burst onto the scene in 2000 with the album Onka's Big Moka -- definitely a contender for strangest album title of the decade -- and its lead single Dancing In The Moonlight. Both were major critical and commercial hits, but unfortunately the band were unable to maintain that momentum. The follow up album in 2002 got mixed reviews and Toploader imploded a year later. But never say never again, and the core trio within the band reformed in 2009 and are still performing regularly to this day. They're playing across the UK over the whole of October.
So what is an Onka's Big Moka? Well, actually the album title was borrowed from an anthropological TV documentary about the indigenous people of Papua New Guinea, which traces the struggles of tribal leader Ongka to accumulate enough pigs and other goods to exchange with a rival tribe in their important ceremonial process called a Moka. The bigger the Moka gift you give the higher your status within the region. How about that for cultural bonus points? But why?
"It’s the complete opposite to the way that we live our lives in the West," explained guitarist and co-founder Dan Hipgrave. "For us it’s all about what we own and keep for ourselves rather than giving away. We just thought that was a great spin on life in general!"
And High Flying Bird? According to vocalist and songwriter Joe Washbourn "That's a spun-out, hippie-ish track which I wrote about the book Jonathan Livingston Seagull, where he’s aspiring to be a better seagull. I was brought up by the coast, so… Yeah, I think I must’ve been smoking a lot of weed back then! I don’t know..."
And then we had the opening track from Elton John's 5th album Honky Chateau album, very much the beginning of his imperial phase -- the five of five consecutive chart-topping albums -- and the first to feature his entire regular live band on each track. Also his first studio album to be recorded outside Britain. Instead of using London's Trident Studios, where all the previous LPs had been recorded, the whole band decamped to the Chateau d'Herouville, an 18th century chateau in Northern France, that also lent its name to the title of the album. Honky Cat was another of lyricist Bernie Taupin's attempts to combine his fascination with cowboys and the spirit of the American West with a deep and abiding desire to give up the bright lights of the entertainment business and return to the seclusion of a rural farm like the one in Lincolnshire where he grew up.
More cats now, and then another bird. In a few minutes, Matt Johnson, better and more enigmatically known as The The, with Sweet Bird Of Truth. But first, a song you definitely know, with probably one of the finest sets of lyrics ever written by that poet of ordinary everyday life Chris Difford. Yes it's Squeeze.
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No one writes lyrics about the ordinary blokes you'd encounter in an East End pub quite like Chris Difford, who mostly writes the lyrics for Squeeze's songs while music partner Glenn Tilbrook mostly writes the music. Cool For Cats was perhaps the first that drew for the most part on Difford's own personal observations. It's also a rare song in the Squeeze discography that is also sung by Difford rather than by Tilbrook.
Glenn Tilbrook told Classic Pop, "We’d already written a song called Cool For Cats that I sang, with the same backing track. It was OK, but then Chris said: ‘Look, I’ve got an idea, let me take the backing track home.’” That night Difford was watching TV and saw a performance by the singer songwriter and poet Jake Thackray who tended to specialise in satirical songs about everyday life, and Thackray's style inspired Difford to write more specifically about the stuff he and his mates watched on TV or talked about in the pub.
"It was written about the social circle we were moving in at the time," said Tilbrook. "Being young, we were almost entirely centered in our own little world. I remember hearing Chris sing those lyrics for the first time and thinking he's just nailed what our lives are about now. It's lovely to be able to look back on that and see how we were as youngsters."
And then we had Matt Johnson's Sweet Bird Of Truth, a blistering and controversial critique of ongoing American military intervention in the Middle East during the 1980s, leading eventually to the Gulf War. Johnson imagined the thoughts of the American pilot of a US bomber involved in an attack on an Arabic nation in which his plane has been critically damaged by gunfire from the ground and in in the process of crashing. Written in 1985, it was included on The The's 1986 album Infected, and was earmarked for release as the third single from that album. Days before the planned release, though, America launched a series of bombing raids against Libya, which had been implicated in a bomb attack again a disco in West Berlin where American servicemen had been killed or injured. Johnson's song was staggeringly prescient because during those raids on Libya, one US plane was shot down with the loss of both pilots. Johnson's lyrics had become reality.
Let's lighten up a little for our next two tracks. First up are punk pioneers The Vibrators with a slightly out of character track from their second album V2. Unlike every song on their first two albums, this is not just written but also sung not by frontman Knox but by second guitarist John Ellis. And a bit like Cool For Cats, it's an observation on every day life.
If you're puzzled by the title it's a reference to the kitsch wall art popular in many ordinary British working class homes in the 1940s and 1950s of three ceramic flying ducks. These had more or less disappeared by the early 1970s until they enjoyed a huge resurgence in popularity when they were used by the set decorators for the home of one of the characters in the massively successful TV soap opera Coronation Street. After than New Town Animal by XTC, but this is The Vibrators and Flying Duck Theory.
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After Flying Duck Theory from The Vibrators that was New Town Animal In A Furnished Cage, one of the many elegantly spiky songs about suburban frustration penned by guitarist Andy Partridge for XTC's first album White Music. It's funny actually how fans of XTC tend to be divided into different camps determined by time period. Personally, my loyalties lie with the first three albums, and especially White Music and Drums & Wires, dominated mostly by Partridge's angular and slightly tormented songs. Bassplayer Colin Moulding ended up as a fine songwriter but I was never quite as keen on his much poppier and less angsty tracks like Making Plans For Nigel and Life Begins At The Hop from the first half of the 1980s. A whole other group of XTC followers are devoted to their even more melodic, almost Bestles-esque tracks from the second half of the 1980s and early 1990s.
Partridge has been very candid in interviews over the years about all the various demons which overshadowed his performing life, not least the crippling stage fright which eventually ended XTC's live career. However his fondness for his home town of Swindon has never been in doubt, even if it did make him into a New Town Animal In A Furnished Cage. Early in their career, record label Virgin advised Partridge to lose his distinctive West Country accent. “We said: ‘No, we’re from the West Country, we talk like this, we think like this.’”
A very different set of accents now for three classic reggae tracks. We'll start our journey in Kingston, Jamaica with two pioneers of the local music scene. First up is the toaster DJ Big Youth with Wolf In Sheep's Clothing. Then, another less wellknown toaster Prince Jazzbo, with star reggae producer Lee Scratch Perry, for Croakin' Lizard. And then we're flying home on the red eye, and your eyes will be very red indeed I can promise you, for a heavy dub from British-born reggae pioneers The Cimarrons. That's National Bird. But first Big Youth.
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Big Youth followed by Prince Jazzbo with Lee Scratch Perry, and finally The Cimarons, who do indeed lay a claim to being Britain's first homegrown reggae band, formed in 1967 in London's Harlesden by Locksley Gichie and Franklyn Dunn, two teenagers who had arrived a few years earlier from Jamaica. Both loved the rocksteady tunes they'd heard when they were growing up in Jamaica, and would go to illegal blues parties around London to soak up all the music coming from their home island. Already an accomplished musician, Gichie's added advantage was a sort of audio equivalent to a photographic memory that gave him the ability to remember and imitate music that he heard.
“You could hear all the latest records from Jamaica at those parties,” Gichie told The Guardian newspaper in 2024. “Every time there was a new unreleased rocksteady song we would hear it, practise it, and play it almost exactly like the original.” By the time they got booked for their first gig at a cricket club, around 1968, they had a catalogue. “People went crazy because they hadn’t ever heard live reggae before and we started doing all the latest releases. They were like, ‘I just bought this record this morning!’ They were blown away.”
Later they would support visiting singers like Ken Boothe, Toots & The Maytals, Dennis Brown and even Bob Marley. On his first visit to play shows in London, the Wailers had stayed home in Jamaica, so it was The Cimarons who served as his backing band for several live dates. In the later 1970s, The Cimarons were swept up in the emerging wave of new British reggae bands such as Aswad and Steel Pulse, and released several albums of their own music, but they never quite achieved the celebrity that some of their younger rivals achieved. National Bird comes from their third and best album Maka.
We're almost coming up to the end of the show now. Next up, the only insect on this week's show: and it's a Hot Butterfly. Gregg Diamond was an accomplished session musician and producer in the jazz and disco scenes of the late 1970s, and his brother Godfrey was a sound engineer at the Sigma Sound studios in Philadelphia where David Bowie had recently recorded his Young Americans album. That's where Gregg Diamond met an up and coming soul singer by the name of Luther Vandross, who had arranged the backing vocals for Bowie's album. Diamond invited Vandross to sing the lead on a track he was recording for his side project Bionic Boogie. This is Gregg Diamond's Bionic Boogie featuring Luther Vandross and Hot Butterfly.
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To close the show this week, a wonderful track by the celebrated vocal group Manhattan Transfer, founded by the singer and music historian Tim Hauser in 1969. Chanson d'Amour was a huge hit for them in Europe in 1977 but following a change of line-up in 1979 they tackled a few different musical styles on the next album Extensions, an enormously adventurous project which offered complete reinventions of well-known existing musical pieces, like an outrageous vocal version of the famous theme from the TV scifi show Twilight Zone, and a new vocal version of the jazz instrumental Shaker Song by Spyro Gyro.
Perhaps the most ambitious track was a vocal reinterpretation of the jazz instrumental Birdland, recorded a few years earlier by the fusion group Weather Report as a tribute to the famous New York nightclub of the 1950s, which was itself named after the legendary bebop saxophonist Charlie "Bird" Parker. Manhattan Transfer's Tim Hauser originally commissioned the jazz singer Eddie Jefferson to create the lyrics for the song. In the 1950s Jefferson had been the pioneer of what became know as vocalese, the composition of witty new lyrics retro-fitted to an existing piece of instrumental jazz by another artist. Perhaps his most famous work was Moody's Mood For Love, written in 1946 and later covered by many different artists including Georgie Fame, George Benson and Amy Winehouse.
But tragically, Jefferson was killed in a drive-by shooting in New York before he could complete the assignment, so instead the task fell to his successor as the King of vocalese, Jon Hendricks. The resulting piece is an absolute triumph, witty, erudite and gloriously enjoyable. Manhattan Transfer's version won the Grammy award that year for Best Jazz Fusion Performance. Here it is: Manhattan Transfer and Birdland.