Not trying to be mysterious, the text didn’t copy, so here it is down below:
Something you may not realise if you’ve lived your whole pop life in the U.K. or some other civilised country is that over here in Paddyland until 1979 there was no legal pop music station. And this only came about as a response to hissy medium wave pirate stations that had begun to spring up in the mid seventies. I was born in 1966. Luckily, I had older siblings who bought records, so from a very young age (before football on tv, before superhero comics), whenever I got the opportunity, I would play the hits on our dansette style record player.
In that room The Leader would urge me to “Come On Come On” and be in his gang, Mud would stomp their Tiger Feet and Marc Bolan told me that to “Bump and Grind” was good for my mind. Never mind the Jesuits, this was a proper education.
But stepping into the kitchen was like a reverse Wizard Of Oz transition from technicolour to monochrome. Here dwelt the radio, always set to RTE1. Throughout the day grown ups talked at length about dull grown up things, some deadly serious and some less so. During the lighter programmes they would break up the tedium with the occasional record. But it was never the Bolan Boogie or some Wig Wam Bam glam racket. Fresh, vibrant and uptempo was definitely not the order of the day. More than this though, several of these records, through extensive repeated exposure, scarred me for life. Here’s a selection of these evil works.
Janis Ian – At Seventeen
Now, I look back at being 8 and it’s jumpers for goalposts and Monster Fun comic, but when I was 8 it seemed like it was all homework and being told what to do. I wanted to grow up. Not to be an adult – oh no, I could see in the long faces of adults that was no place to be. I consulted with my similarly burdened chums and we agreed: late teenagedom, that was where it was at. We settled on 19, but, from where we were standing, 17 looked almost as good.
And here came Janis to tell me that’s when her life went to sh*t. And mine would too, as I wasn’t going to be a beauty queen either.
Even if much of the rest of the song passed me by (“debentures?”), the queasy feeling (hardly Sartre’s nausea, more like a clogged inner ear) had begun, even if, at this point, only at “uh oh” levels.
Peter Starstedt – Where Do You Go To My Lovely?
Still at the level of unsettling, this record was puzzling as it seemed to carry some kind of menace or threat which I was too young to identify. The verses are all about a lady who is doing pretty well for herself and has all the trappings of a successful life, albeit the one (as represented by our narrator of dubious motive) of a vacuous socialite. Then in the chorus there is the suggestion that the lady’s nights might be disturbed – by conscience, perhaps?
We discover she is from an extremely humble background and knew this gentleman before the upturn in her circumstances. Just as I’m beginning to think “I’d like to look inside your head” is a deranged stalker’s euphemism for “bash in your head” (that line about a carefully designed topless swimsuit, which escaped me at the time, has alarms ringing), he tells her to forget about him forever. A close one.
Helen Reddy – Angie Baby
They used to love to play this one early, as I was getting ready for school, so it would linger in my thoughts until I was through the school gate.
I’m recalling the lyrics of these songs as familiar now, but, back then, it took multiple listens for them to disturb me as they did. Initially, I liked the idea of a solitary girl whose friends were the songs she heard on the radio. But I always lost track of what the hell happened next, I just knew it seemed sinister. For a long time I thought she disappeared into her radio (back then I was a fan of a tv show called Lidsville, about a cheeky chap who entered a fantastic realm after falling into a giant magician’s hat – in retrospect, it was entirely the wrong lesson for young 1970s viewers that entering a popular entertainer’s dressing room was the best route to adventure).
I wouldn’t have understood the Black-Mirror-episode sophistication of her trapping an on-tap lover (his just desserts for having evil on his mind).
Bobby Goldsboro – Honey
The songs up to now have been disturbing in different ways, but now death starts to be a major character. Straight away, there’s a tremble in Bobby’s voice undercutting those first few innocuous lines. Between that and the way the lines of this song run into the next, there’s a whiny quality to the verse, so it’s no surprise the chorus is “Honey, I miss you”. I’ve heard these blubby “I miss you” songs before, I’d rather The Bump, but okay.
Then, out of the blue, “the angels came”. When I was 8, I’d only recently come to doubt the existence of angels, so this chilled me. Now, I’d be more troubled – having established that Honey’s dead – by the “I’d love to be with you” line. Gulp.
“Pushing suicide on 8 year olds on daytime radio – that’s a bit strong”, I hear you say. Well next up is starry, starry, night itself..
Don McLean – Vincent
Obviously, I had no idea who Van Gogh was or how his life ended. Fortunately, once again those sad chords and another song that remained resolutely in first gear throughout communicated sadness well before “you took your life” arrived to put the icepick in the cake.
Terry Jacks – Seasons In The Sun
Something I haven’t mentioned is how, to my 1974 ears, most of these songs sounded so OLD. Even the ones that had just come out had a whiff of the sixties about them, and this one more than most. Bang! “Goodbye”, first word, and that tone in his voice that says “this won’t be a party”.
A quick list of stuff that sounds fun and then “Goodye my friend it’s hard to die”. That escalated quickly, as the kids say nowadays.
We’ve already had second person death with Bobby singing to Honey and third person death with Don trying to understand Vincent, so first person death isn’t that great a stretch. But Seasons In The Sun takes it further, being about the futility of life. Terry’s not going down without taking your carefree sense of well-being with him. The hills we climbed? F**k ‘em! The stars? We couldn’t even save Patrick the starfish.
Outta here. 🎤 drop..
Mary Hopkin – Those Were The Days
Fair enough, this one is old. And exotic. It’s also pretty lively, both for singing along and jumping about to and, initially, I could accommodate it in my broad pop tastes. But those East Europeans know how to weave melancholy into melody (granted, an emotion I wouldn’t have understood at that age, but, as with puberty, you start to sense its imminence some time before you can actually feel it) and it rises with repetition to overtake the jauntiness. Also, here we are looking back again. As someone with about four years of unclouded recollection I might press my wrist to my brow and protest that “this says nothing to me about my life”. At this point, I genuinely didn’t believe pop music was for anyone but the young (nothing my parents or their peers had to say about it suggested otherwise) so who was this for?
Jim Croce – Time In A Bottle
And here we are at last. The song about the irresistible march of time that, for three minutes, stopped The Muppet Show, as our scientist glugged down flasks of potions in a futile attempt to thwart ageing. When I was small this song disturbed me more than any of the others, eliciting a sort of existential panic in just a few of its lines. It’s funny revisiting it now, as it seems intended to be a sweet, if wistful, love song. It’s not oversentimental or wallowing in misery, trying to wring tears out of you, like some of the above, but it did give me the heebee-jeebies every time it came on, such that even the title makes me shiver today.
Talk of songs from the prehistory that was the 1960s, yearning for the past, progressing at a funereal pace, brings us to the dirge that is The Beatles – Yesterday
The national broadcaster wasn’t going to get away with ignoring the fab ones, but they damn well weren’t going to let us have any fun either, so for me as a child The Beatles were Yesterday, Let It Be and Eleanor Rigby over and over with an occasional outing for Hey Jude. We did have a Beatles single in the house (Hello Goodbye/I Am The Walrus), which I didn’t like at all and, of course, I was vaguely aware of some of their poppier stuff. But, even though Yesterday wasn’t too bad – I could get on board with the more general idea of wishing something hadn’t changed as opposed to the more specific my wife’s dead – I still hold the national broadcaster responsible for engendering in me an aversion to Beatles band for decades. And that counts as a scar, I think.
And then, at the end of 1974, Mud – Mud! – had a Christmas number one with a song about being lonely “since you left me” – as if growing up in a country where it’s always raining and years of Catholic indoctrination wouldn’t have made me a miserable bastard without all this pricking of my pop balloon..
Are there songs that scarred you in a similar way? Do you have anything to add about the songs that scarred me?
I think maybe Boby Goldsboro has form in this regard – Summer (The first time) makes the beach sound quite a menacing place to go to an impressionable young man!
When you mention Seasons in the Sun sounding OLD possibly because it is an English-language adaptation of the 1961 Belgian song “Le Moribond” (“The Dying Man”) by Jacques Brel the lyrics were rewritten in 1963 by singer-poet Rod McKuen, a dying man’s farewell to his loved ones.
Maybe not that old but old enough.
I was thirteen. I was off school, sick in bed. My mum had to go to work. She left a big bottle of lucozade by the bed and put the radio on, on the other side of the room, beyond reach. This song seemed to be played twice an hour for the whole day. It begins with the jilted singer wanting to throw himself off a tower and fasts forward to his mother succumbing to a broken heart after his dad’s death.
I was desperate to go back to school the next day. And, let’s draw a veil over Clare. Please.
I really enjoyed reading the OP – you are absolutely right in your description of childhood in the 70s. We weren’t just uncomplicated scamps with grazed knees, The Beano and an addiction to Wotsits – children are people with curious and active minds, keenly-felt emotions and can also pick up on vibes(man).
I remain more attracted to upbeat songs generally and it’s very much as a result of the kind of songs listed up there.
Without You – Nilsson
The manipulation at play here begins with the cover of the single where he is unshaven and ambling about in a dressing gown. Nothing good or positive happens in those circumstances.
The chorus was the line that spooked me as a child. I took it far more literally than the song intends. I thought his girlfriend fed him, or had medicine to keep him alive. I now know that the lyric is the kind of emotional play made by damaged people. They up the ante to ridiculous levels when things don’t go their way – in this case, his girlfriend leaving him. His reaction is very much like Rik from the Young Ones. “Right then …I’m going to kill myself! Is that what you want?”.
Tony Blackburn may well have considered this as the platter he would repeatedly play on his show when dumped by Tessa Wyatt but even he would have thought that this was a bit much.
My main adult thought about is why the hell was John Lennon a big mate of his when he blorted out mawkish slurry like this? Another very bleak thought is the fact that both songwriters killed themselves.
As a child I didn’t understand or particularly want to know about adult misery like this. At least one family member would have probably shouted “cheer up, mate!” when it was on TOTP. It was the kind of thing that led people like me towards Ottowan and the Wombles.
“he is unshaven and ambling about in a dressing gown. Nothing good or positive happens in those circumstances” – cobblers. This is me in about an hour’s time about to have a nice cup of coffee and some toast, as preparation for a day of very heavy pottering. This is, as Ian Dury would have it, Very Good Indeed.
Two that were staples of morning radio when I was a small lad:
Devil Woman by Cliff Richard: Maybe the lyrics coupled with Cliff’s ‘danger dance’ in the video are what pushed me over the edge. I still picture a horned she-demon with yellowed fangs whenever I hear it.
Bermuda Triangle by Barry Manilow: I was into ghosts and mysteries and the 70s were peak paranormal. The Bermuda Triangle was as real to my 5yo self as the Loch Ness Monster, so a lyric that warned “The Bermuda Triangle makes people disappear “ seemed like a public service announcememt.
To all the above, I’d add Lindisfarne’s Lady Eleanor, which scared and scarred me at 8, knowing nothing of the Fall Of The House of Usher upon which it’s based.
I’d extend the theme to those songs that conveyed a sense of the inherent finiteness of things to listeners who had minimal experience of life and love. This thing you haven’t yet enjoyed will inevitably end and be over. Even a song like First Class’s Beach Baby Beach did this, with it’s opening ‘Do you remember back in old LA…’
Exile – I Want To Kiss You All Over. This weird looking, rodent- like feminine individual wants to cover his woman’s body with his sloppy mouth before the night closes in. The sun’s going down and he’s up against it, trying to complete the task in hand. I always found the whole notion rather off-putting and unseemly. All this exertion and writhing about was troubling at the time, this business of love and love making.
Early 1970`s, off school ill, lying on the settee, mum ironing to the sound of onederful Radio One. Two songs come on that are imprinted in my brain and so i now associate with being ill. Petula Clarkes Downtown and Baubles, Bangles and Beads, not sure of the artist but kinda Swingle/Kings Singers type thing.
I genuinely cant listen to either since then. Must be early onset aversion therapy.
See also Dont Sleep in the Subway. The subways round here at that time were piss smelling rat holes.
Downtown. Lyrics, black and white images of Piccadilly Circus, etc, that always used to go with it on the telly in the mid-60s – I can remember thinking, as a nipper, that it must be scary and terrible to be downtown: how would you get home if you were on your own?
Age 11 and long family trips in the car are soundtracked by ABBA, The Carpenters, or Barry Manilow (unless it was Saturday which would ba an hour of The Grumbleweeds on radio)
ABBA now sit in the retro cool camp, The Carpeneters an inoffensive Easy Listening staple.
But Barry … just the introduction to Copacobana brings me out in hives.
Went on a school trip around that time, and the Hotel restaurant seemed to have only 1 tape – the large-nosed one.
I knew the words, but my street cred (such as it is for an 11 year old) is gone.
Sing Something Simple by Cliff Adams & The Cliff Adams Singers.
The sound that ushered in the dawning realisation that the weekend was almost over and the horror of double maths Monday was only a heartbeat away.
For some reason the song “Gilly Gillly Ossenfeffer Katzenellen Bogen By the Sea” sprang into my head last week, luckily I managed to remove it from my my memory. Thank you for rekindling my remembrance of it you swine.
Sorry. The songs were No Woman’s Flesh But Hers from Johnny Dowd and Slapp Happy’s Scarred For Life from Ca Va (it really is time for another release from this superb outfit).
No apology necessary. It’s weird – I can see the Johnny Dowd video, but the Slapp Happy one is showing the “video unavailable” message.
Yes: Slapp Happy is a much underrated band – or maybe unheard – and Ca Va is particularly under the radar. All the songs deserve a wider audience – but Scarred for Life is just superb.
I’d be overjoyed if they released another collection – but what chance? I’d like to see a further Art Bears release as well – so I’m probably outed as a Dagmar Krause fan…
Bit of a cheat, this as it was the film that did the lion’s share of the damage, but whenever they played this on Swap Shop they always used footage from the movie and the PTSD would kick in..
To the excellent choices so far, I would add Golden Brown by The Stranglers, first heard on the car radio when I was 10. Didn’t know the heroin subtext, obviously, but such a strange, melancholy song.
Around this time, my much older punk cousin played me Subhuman by Throbbing Gristle when I was upstairs in his bedroom on a family Sunday afternoon family visit and made me meltdown ( it’s all forgiven now, and I have some TG albums).
One of my first memories is from lying in my cot as a very tiny child, rigid with fear as I looked at the built-in bookshelves above it. I knew that the LPs were being stored there and among them were Peter and the Wolf, so I was convinced that at any moment the wolf would jump out from its sleeve, into my cot, and have me for a snack. This was my daily fear for as long as I slept in that cot.
My brother (seven years older) and I would always pull our feet up from the floor when that record was played, when the wolf’s music appeared…just in case it was lurking underneath the sofa.
But the creepiest music from that piece was the grandfather! *shudders* He genuinely terrified us more than the wolf…probably helped by the fact that we had a somewhat scary grandfather ourselves.
When I was a little older (1971, so I was four) my brother had the Redbone single of The Witch Queen of New Orleans, which wasn’t scary, but the B-side was a track called Chant: 13th Hour. Loved the music, but the recording started with ominous chanting and screaming that really frightened me – not helped by the fact that my brother knew it scared me and would make sure to creep up and attack me from behind, screaming wildly.
Unfortunately I’ve also turned some perfectly innocent albums into creepy ones by listening to them on repeat while reading horror novels! Hearing them now I feel a need to sit in a corner where I have full view of all entry points.
I hadn’t realised video was available on the AW. Is this option only for premium members?
And does this explain all the “that looks excellent, Milky” posts and, if so, do I want to know what “that” is?
I’ve just remembered we sang this when we were in small school (i.e. I was definitely younger than 8).
There was an old woman and she lived in the woods
Weela Weela Walya
There was an old woman and she lived in the woods
Down by the river Saile.[n 1][11]
She had a baby three months old
Weela Weela Walya
She had a baby three months old
Down by the river Saile.
She had a penknife long and sharp
Weela Weela Walya
She had a penknife long and sharp
Down by the river Saile.
She stuck the penknife in the baby’s heart
Weela Weela Walya
She stuck the penknife in the baby’s heart
Down by the river Saile.
Three loud knocks came a’knocking on the door
Weela Weela Walya
Three loud knocks came a’knocking on the door
Down by the river Saile.
Two policemen and a man
Weela Weela Walya
Two policemen and a man
Down by the river Saile.
“Are you the woman that killed the child?”
Weela Weela Walya
“Are you the woman that killed the child?”
Down by the river Saile.
“I am the woman that killed the child”
Weela Weela Walya
“I am the woman that killed the child”
Down by the river Saile.
They took her away and they put her in jail
Weela Weela Walya
They took her away and they put her in jail
Down by the river Saile.
Alternate Ending:
They took her up and strung her by the neck
Weela Weela Walya
They took her up and strung her by the neck
Down by the river Saile.
And that was the end of the woman in the woods
Weela Weela Walya
And that was the end of the woman in the woods
Down by the river Saile.
Bit barbaric – but it didn’t leave a lasting impression on me the way above did..
Space Oddity really troubled me when I first heard it – I would have been seven or eight. I was very upset about Major Tom drifting out into space for a cold, lonely end. Ten years later I was overjoyed to hear him return, a little worse for wear but still intact. A2A still makes me well up…
When I was a kid I was in awe of astronauts and that line “sitting in my tin can” always struck me as disrespectful to cutting edge technology. Then, as an adult I saw what vehicles like the moon lander were made from and that they were so flimsy that being in a “tin can” prompted a Four Yorkshiremen style sketch in my mind, to wit
“a tin can? luxury!…”
I had an LP which had an abridged version of the first episode of Thunderbirds on one side and a Captain Scarlet episode on the flip. I was crazy about Thunderbirds, so I came to know that side by heart
“7.5000 miles an hour! Have you gone crazy?”
“Do not require runway – coming in vertically”
“Fireflash, lift port wing!” etc.
I had never seen Captain Scarlet and only really got as far as the creepy voice saying “This is the voice of the Mysterons”, which had some nightmare potential.
Never having seen the show might have helped – a young imagination could have amplified the scary.
BUT, this being an LP, I only had to play it at 45rpm (78 was also available) to neutralise the nasty in the voice of the Mysterons..
At one point, I remember that we had a radiogram with a turntable option of 16rpm – much fun ensued: but I shudder at the thought of a slowed-down Voice of The Mysterons…
Once, when I was on some substance or other, I played Wish You Were Here by accident at 78rpm. Whichever Dave Gilmour guitar solo I heard was pretty good – never bettered, in fact.
by 66 Comments 
Not trying to be mysterious, the text didn’t copy, so here it is down below:
Something you may not realise if you’ve lived your whole pop life in the U.K. or some other civilised country is that over here in Paddyland until 1979 there was no legal pop music station. And this only came about as a response to hissy medium wave pirate stations that had begun to spring up in the mid seventies. I was born in 1966. Luckily, I had older siblings who bought records, so from a very young age (before football on tv, before superhero comics), whenever I got the opportunity, I would play the hits on our dansette style record player.
In that room The Leader would urge me to “Come On Come On” and be in his gang, Mud would stomp their Tiger Feet and Marc Bolan told me that to “Bump and Grind” was good for my mind. Never mind the Jesuits, this was a proper education.
But stepping into the kitchen was like a reverse Wizard Of Oz transition from technicolour to monochrome. Here dwelt the radio, always set to RTE1. Throughout the day grown ups talked at length about dull grown up things, some deadly serious and some less so. During the lighter programmes they would break up the tedium with the occasional record. But it was never the Bolan Boogie or some Wig Wam Bam glam racket. Fresh, vibrant and uptempo was definitely not the order of the day. More than this though, several of these records, through extensive repeated exposure, scarred me for life. Here’s a selection of these evil works.
Janis Ian – At Seventeen
Now, I look back at being 8 and it’s jumpers for goalposts and Monster Fun comic, but when I was 8 it seemed like it was all homework and being told what to do. I wanted to grow up. Not to be an adult – oh no, I could see in the long faces of adults that was no place to be. I consulted with my similarly burdened chums and we agreed: late teenagedom, that was where it was at. We settled on 19, but, from where we were standing, 17 looked almost as good.
And here came Janis to tell me that’s when her life went to sh*t. And mine would too, as I wasn’t going to be a beauty queen either.
Even if much of the rest of the song passed me by (“debentures?”), the queasy feeling (hardly Sartre’s nausea, more like a clogged inner ear) had begun, even if, at this point, only at “uh oh” levels.
Peter Starstedt – Where Do You Go To My Lovely?
Still at the level of unsettling, this record was puzzling as it seemed to carry some kind of menace or threat which I was too young to identify. The verses are all about a lady who is doing pretty well for herself and has all the trappings of a successful life, albeit the one (as represented by our narrator of dubious motive) of a vacuous socialite. Then in the chorus there is the suggestion that the lady’s nights might be disturbed – by conscience, perhaps?
We discover she is from an extremely humble background and knew this gentleman before the upturn in her circumstances. Just as I’m beginning to think “I’d like to look inside your head” is a deranged stalker’s euphemism for “bash in your head” (that line about a carefully designed topless swimsuit, which escaped me at the time, has alarms ringing), he tells her to forget about him forever. A close one.
Helen Reddy – Angie Baby
They used to love to play this one early, as I was getting ready for school, so it would linger in my thoughts until I was through the school gate.
I’m recalling the lyrics of these songs as familiar now, but, back then, it took multiple listens for them to disturb me as they did. Initially, I liked the idea of a solitary girl whose friends were the songs she heard on the radio. But I always lost track of what the hell happened next, I just knew it seemed sinister. For a long time I thought she disappeared into her radio (back then I was a fan of a tv show called Lidsville, about a cheeky chap who entered a fantastic realm after falling into a giant magician’s hat – in retrospect, it was entirely the wrong lesson for young 1970s viewers that entering a popular entertainer’s dressing room was the best route to adventure).
I wouldn’t have understood the Black-Mirror-episode sophistication of her trapping an on-tap lover (his just desserts for having evil on his mind).
Bobby Goldsboro – Honey
The songs up to now have been disturbing in different ways, but now death starts to be a major character. Straight away, there’s a tremble in Bobby’s voice undercutting those first few innocuous lines. Between that and the way the lines of this song run into the next, there’s a whiny quality to the verse, so it’s no surprise the chorus is “Honey, I miss you”. I’ve heard these blubby “I miss you” songs before, I’d rather The Bump, but okay.
Then, out of the blue, “the angels came”. When I was 8, I’d only recently come to doubt the existence of angels, so this chilled me. Now, I’d be more troubled – having established that Honey’s dead – by the “I’d love to be with you” line. Gulp.
“Pushing suicide on 8 year olds on daytime radio – that’s a bit strong”, I hear you say. Well next up is starry, starry, night itself..
Don McLean – Vincent
Obviously, I had no idea who Van Gogh was or how his life ended. Fortunately, once again those sad chords and another song that remained resolutely in first gear throughout communicated sadness well before “you took your life” arrived to put the icepick in the cake.
Terry Jacks – Seasons In The Sun
Something I haven’t mentioned is how, to my 1974 ears, most of these songs sounded so OLD. Even the ones that had just come out had a whiff of the sixties about them, and this one more than most. Bang! “Goodbye”, first word, and that tone in his voice that says “this won’t be a party”.
A quick list of stuff that sounds fun and then “Goodye my friend it’s hard to die”. That escalated quickly, as the kids say nowadays.
We’ve already had second person death with Bobby singing to Honey and third person death with Don trying to understand Vincent, so first person death isn’t that great a stretch. But Seasons In The Sun takes it further, being about the futility of life. Terry’s not going down without taking your carefree sense of well-being with him. The hills we climbed? F**k ‘em! The stars? We couldn’t even save Patrick the starfish.
Outta here. 🎤 drop..
Mary Hopkin – Those Were The Days
Fair enough, this one is old. And exotic. It’s also pretty lively, both for singing along and jumping about to and, initially, I could accommodate it in my broad pop tastes. But those East Europeans know how to weave melancholy into melody (granted, an emotion I wouldn’t have understood at that age, but, as with puberty, you start to sense its imminence some time before you can actually feel it) and it rises with repetition to overtake the jauntiness. Also, here we are looking back again. As someone with about four years of unclouded recollection I might press my wrist to my brow and protest that “this says nothing to me about my life”. At this point, I genuinely didn’t believe pop music was for anyone but the young (nothing my parents or their peers had to say about it suggested otherwise) so who was this for?
Jim Croce – Time In A Bottle
And here we are at last. The song about the irresistible march of time that, for three minutes, stopped The Muppet Show, as our scientist glugged down flasks of potions in a futile attempt to thwart ageing. When I was small this song disturbed me more than any of the others, eliciting a sort of existential panic in just a few of its lines. It’s funny revisiting it now, as it seems intended to be a sweet, if wistful, love song. It’s not oversentimental or wallowing in misery, trying to wring tears out of you, like some of the above, but it did give me the heebee-jeebies every time it came on, such that even the title makes me shiver today.
Talk of songs from the prehistory that was the 1960s, yearning for the past, progressing at a funereal pace, brings us to the dirge that is
The Beatles – Yesterday
The national broadcaster wasn’t going to get away with ignoring the fab ones, but they damn well weren’t going to let us have any fun either, so for me as a child The Beatles were Yesterday, Let It Be and Eleanor Rigby over and over with an occasional outing for Hey Jude. We did have a Beatles single in the house (Hello Goodbye/I Am The Walrus), which I didn’t like at all and, of course, I was vaguely aware of some of their poppier stuff. But, even though Yesterday wasn’t too bad – I could get on board with the more general idea of wishing something hadn’t changed as opposed to the more specific my wife’s dead – I still hold the national broadcaster responsible for engendering in me an aversion to Beatles band for decades. And that counts as a scar, I think.
And then, at the end of 1974, Mud – Mud! – had a Christmas number one with a song about being lonely “since you left me” – as if growing up in a country where it’s always raining and years of Catholic indoctrination wouldn’t have made me a miserable bastard without all this pricking of my pop balloon..
Are there songs that scarred you in a similar way? Do you have anything to add about the songs that scarred me?
I think maybe Boby Goldsboro has form in this regard – Summer (The first time) makes the beach sound quite a menacing place to go to an impressionable young man!
When you mention Seasons in the Sun sounding OLD possibly because it is an English-language adaptation of the 1961 Belgian song “Le Moribond” (“The Dying Man”) by Jacques Brel the lyrics were rewritten in 1963 by singer-poet Rod McKuen, a dying man’s farewell to his loved ones.
Maybe not that old but old enough.
Rishi Sunak.
Gilbert O’Sullivan – Alone Again (Naturally)
I was thirteen. I was off school, sick in bed. My mum had to go to work. She left a big bottle of lucozade by the bed and put the radio on, on the other side of the room, beyond reach. This song seemed to be played twice an hour for the whole day. It begins with the jilted singer wanting to throw himself off a tower and fasts forward to his mother succumbing to a broken heart after his dad’s death.
I was desperate to go back to school the next day. And, let’s draw a veil over Clare. Please.
It’s a witty, nuanced and sensitive grown-up song for grown-ups, not a ditty for 13 year olds. Not the song’s fault. Brilliant lyric, superb delivery.
Gilbert O’Sullivan was 21 when he wrote it. An adult yes. The single was a big hit: number three in the UK and one in the US.
That doesn’t mean it hasn’t scarred me. 😀
I blame the parents.
So do I. 😉
G’s own father died when G was 11.
Fantastic Song
Pete Wylie used to do a great acoustic cover of this
I really enjoyed reading the OP – you are absolutely right in your description of childhood in the 70s. We weren’t just uncomplicated scamps with grazed knees, The Beano and an addiction to Wotsits – children are people with curious and active minds, keenly-felt emotions and can also pick up on vibes(man).
I remain more attracted to upbeat songs generally and it’s very much as a result of the kind of songs listed up there.
Without You – Nilsson
The manipulation at play here begins with the cover of the single where he is unshaven and ambling about in a dressing gown. Nothing good or positive happens in those circumstances.
The chorus was the line that spooked me as a child. I took it far more literally than the song intends. I thought his girlfriend fed him, or had medicine to keep him alive. I now know that the lyric is the kind of emotional play made by damaged people. They up the ante to ridiculous levels when things don’t go their way – in this case, his girlfriend leaving him. His reaction is very much like Rik from the Young Ones. “Right then …I’m going to kill myself! Is that what you want?”.
Tony Blackburn may well have considered this as the platter he would repeatedly play on his show when dumped by Tessa Wyatt but even he would have thought that this was a bit much.
My main adult thought about is why the hell was John Lennon a big mate of his when he blorted out mawkish slurry like this? Another very bleak thought is the fact that both songwriters killed themselves.
As a child I didn’t understand or particularly want to know about adult misery like this. At least one family member would have probably shouted “cheer up, mate!” when it was on TOTP. It was the kind of thing that led people like me towards Ottowan and the Wombles.
“he is unshaven and ambling about in a dressing gown. Nothing good or positive happens in those circumstances” – cobblers. This is me in about an hour’s time about to have a nice cup of coffee and some toast, as preparation for a day of very heavy pottering. This is, as Ian Dury would have it, Very Good Indeed.
Two that were staples of morning radio when I was a small lad:
Devil Woman by Cliff Richard: Maybe the lyrics coupled with Cliff’s ‘danger dance’ in the video are what pushed me over the edge. I still picture a horned she-demon with yellowed fangs whenever I hear it.
Bermuda Triangle by Barry Manilow: I was into ghosts and mysteries and the 70s were peak paranormal. The Bermuda Triangle was as real to my 5yo self as the Loch Ness Monster, so a lyric that warned “The Bermuda Triangle makes people disappear “ seemed like a public service announcememt.
To all the above, I’d add Lindisfarne’s Lady Eleanor, which scared and scarred me at 8, knowing nothing of the Fall Of The House of Usher upon which it’s based.
I’d extend the theme to those songs that conveyed a sense of the inherent finiteness of things to listeners who had minimal experience of life and love. This thing you haven’t yet enjoyed will inevitably end and be over. Even a song like First Class’s Beach Baby Beach did this, with it’s opening ‘Do you remember back in old LA…’
Exile – I Want To Kiss You All Over. This weird looking, rodent- like feminine individual wants to cover his woman’s body with his sloppy mouth before the night closes in. The sun’s going down and he’s up against it, trying to complete the task in hand. I always found the whole notion rather off-putting and unseemly. All this exertion and writhing about was troubling at the time, this business of love and love making.
Sparky And His Magic Piano scared the shit out of me (mind you, pretty much anything did – I was a sensitive little chap).
You should have got into writing horror stories like that talented chap Stephen King.
This was a mildly unsettling video for a nipper to see. The drummer is brilliant, though.
Space – Magic Fly.
When Daft Punk emerged (from the crashed ship….?) I wasn’t the only one who thought “Space…. slight return”
Space were also continental types, weren’t they? I think the DP boys must have seen this.
Yep, those DP boys saw that video and got their helmets out.
We’ll Meet Again. Again? We haven’t even met yet! Spooky stuff as a nipper.
Early 1970`s, off school ill, lying on the settee, mum ironing to the sound of onederful Radio One. Two songs come on that are imprinted in my brain and so i now associate with being ill. Petula Clarkes Downtown and Baubles, Bangles and Beads, not sure of the artist but kinda Swingle/Kings Singers type thing.
I genuinely cant listen to either since then. Must be early onset aversion therapy.
See also Dont Sleep in the Subway. The subways round here at that time were piss smelling rat holes.
Downtown. Lyrics, black and white images of Piccadilly Circus, etc, that always used to go with it on the telly in the mid-60s – I can remember thinking, as a nipper, that it must be scary and terrible to be downtown: how would you get home if you were on your own?
I did enjoy that catalogue in the OP. Scarring or not.
Can’t say many gave me the heebeegeebees. ( too many e’s ?)
Maybe Arthur Brown’s Fire.
Sarstedt. Yes a slightly menacing overtone. Next up he wants a frozen orange juice… or what eh Pete, or what?
You can neeeeeeveeeeeeeeer have too many ‘e’s…
So say The Shamen
Anything by or featuring Tiny Tim *shudders*
God bless us every one!
Age 11 and long family trips in the car are soundtracked by ABBA, The Carpenters, or Barry Manilow (unless it was Saturday which would ba an hour of The Grumbleweeds on radio)
ABBA now sit in the retro cool camp, The Carpeneters an inoffensive Easy Listening staple.
But Barry … just the introduction to Copacobana brings me out in hives.
Went on a school trip around that time, and the Hotel restaurant seemed to have only 1 tape – the large-nosed one.
I knew the words, but my street cred (such as it is for an 11 year old) is gone.
An hour of the Grumbleweeds? Jings…. where were social services?
Emma by Hot Chocolate. It doesn’t end well.
One of my favourites from the era – Brother Louie as well.
Tie A Yellow Ribbon Round The Ole Oak Tree. Even though I was only three, it terrified me.
A decade or so later, Camouflage by Stan Ridgway.
Wooly Bully: that was scary, as was They’re Coming To Take Me Away ( Haha, Heehee)
The latter is a quite good comment on the absurd OTT histrionics of love ballads. It’s also unlistenable
Sing Something Simple by Cliff Adams & The Cliff Adams Singers.
The sound that ushered in the dawning realisation that the weekend was almost over and the horror of double maths Monday was only a heartbeat away.
Ken Dodd singing Tears For Souvenirs.
Max Bygraves singing anything ..
For some reason the song “Gilly Gillly Ossenfeffer Katzenellen Bogen By the Sea” sprang into my head last week, luckily I managed to remove it from my my memory. Thank you for rekindling my remembrance of it you swine.
Football fans in the seventies sang it to the opposition, the last three words changed to “You simple twats”.
Not exactly scarred by this fine track from Johnny Dowd but I do find it deeply disturbing
And the lyrics to this track from Slapp Happy are excellent too
I’m a big Slapp Happy fan…but I can’t see the video. Which song did you post? Thanks
Sorry. The songs were No Woman’s Flesh But Hers from Johnny Dowd and Slapp Happy’s Scarred For Life from Ca Va (it really is time for another release from this superb outfit).
No apology necessary. It’s weird – I can see the Johnny Dowd video, but the Slapp Happy one is showing the “video unavailable” message.
Yes: Slapp Happy is a much underrated band – or maybe unheard – and Ca Va is particularly under the radar. All the songs deserve a wider audience – but Scarred for Life is just superb.
I’d be overjoyed if they released another collection – but what chance? I’d like to see a further Art Bears release as well – so I’m probably outed as a Dagmar Krause fan…
Bit of a cheat, this as it was the film that did the lion’s share of the damage, but whenever they played this on Swap Shop they always used footage from the movie and the PTSD would kick in..
(Art Garfunkel – Bright Eyes)
“Ernie’s ghostly gold tops, a-rattling’ in their crate.”
– just me then?
I thought that was a really clever song. So many words and all perfectly in synch with the rhythm of the song.
… 2 ton Ted from Teddington
This is pretty smart too.
Yes, because it’s now associated with David Cameron.
To the excellent choices so far, I would add Golden Brown by The Stranglers, first heard on the car radio when I was 10. Didn’t know the heroin subtext, obviously, but such a strange, melancholy song.
Around this time, my much older punk cousin played me Subhuman by Throbbing Gristle when I was upstairs in his bedroom on a family Sunday afternoon family visit and made me meltdown ( it’s all forgiven now, and I have some TG albums).
One of my first memories is from lying in my cot as a very tiny child, rigid with fear as I looked at the built-in bookshelves above it. I knew that the LPs were being stored there and among them were Peter and the Wolf, so I was convinced that at any moment the wolf would jump out from its sleeve, into my cot, and have me for a snack. This was my daily fear for as long as I slept in that cot.
My brother (seven years older) and I would always pull our feet up from the floor when that record was played, when the wolf’s music appeared…just in case it was lurking underneath the sofa.
But the creepiest music from that piece was the grandfather! *shudders* He genuinely terrified us more than the wolf…probably helped by the fact that we had a somewhat scary grandfather ourselves.
When I was a little older (1971, so I was four) my brother had the Redbone single of The Witch Queen of New Orleans, which wasn’t scary, but the B-side was a track called Chant: 13th Hour. Loved the music, but the recording started with ominous chanting and screaming that really frightened me – not helped by the fact that my brother knew it scared me and would make sure to creep up and attack me from behind, screaming wildly.
Unfortunately I’ve also turned some perfectly innocent albums into creepy ones by listening to them on repeat while reading horror novels! Hearing them now I feel a need to sit in a corner where I have full view of all entry points.
@locust
Peter and the Wolf scared me too though I’d forgotten about it. Thanks!!
Excerpt from a Teenage Opera by Keith West. The fate of poor old Grocer Jack haunted my childhood.
Lovely to see you, sarah.
Thanks, Tiggerlion – you too 🙂
I hadn’t realised video was available on the AW. Is this option only for premium members?
And does this explain all the “that looks excellent, Milky” posts and, if so, do I want to know what “that” is?
I’ve just remembered we sang this when we were in small school (i.e. I was definitely younger than 8).
There was an old woman and she lived in the woods
Weela Weela Walya
There was an old woman and she lived in the woods
Down by the river Saile.[n 1][11]
She had a baby three months old
Weela Weela Walya
She had a baby three months old
Down by the river Saile.
She had a penknife long and sharp
Weela Weela Walya
She had a penknife long and sharp
Down by the river Saile.
She stuck the penknife in the baby’s heart
Weela Weela Walya
She stuck the penknife in the baby’s heart
Down by the river Saile.
Three loud knocks came a’knocking on the door
Weela Weela Walya
Three loud knocks came a’knocking on the door
Down by the river Saile.
Two policemen and a man
Weela Weela Walya
Two policemen and a man
Down by the river Saile.
“Are you the woman that killed the child?”
Weela Weela Walya
“Are you the woman that killed the child?”
Down by the river Saile.
“I am the woman that killed the child”
Weela Weela Walya
“I am the woman that killed the child”
Down by the river Saile.
They took her away and they put her in jail
Weela Weela Walya
They took her away and they put her in jail
Down by the river Saile.
Alternate Ending:
They took her up and strung her by the neck
Weela Weela Walya
They took her up and strung her by the neck
Down by the river Saile.
And that was the end of the woman in the woods
Weela Weela Walya
And that was the end of the woman in the woods
Down by the river Saile.
Bit barbaric – but it didn’t leave a lasting impression on me the way above did..
I didn’t know you were from Summerisle.
Fuck’s sake SR, I thought that memory was buried deep …
Space Oddity really troubled me when I first heard it – I would have been seven or eight. I was very upset about Major Tom drifting out into space for a cold, lonely end. Ten years later I was overjoyed to hear him return, a little worse for wear but still intact. A2A still makes me well up…
When I was a kid I was in awe of astronauts and that line “sitting in my tin can” always struck me as disrespectful to cutting edge technology. Then, as an adult I saw what vehicles like the moon lander were made from and that they were so flimsy that being in a “tin can” prompted a Four Yorkshiremen style sketch in my mind, to wit
“a tin can? luxury!…”
All together now…..
“Last night I heard my mama singing a song
Ooh wee, chirpy chirpy cheep cheep….”
*slashes wrists*
I had an LP which had an abridged version of the first episode of Thunderbirds on one side and a Captain Scarlet episode on the flip. I was crazy about Thunderbirds, so I came to know that side by heart
“7.5000 miles an hour! Have you gone crazy?”
“Do not require runway – coming in vertically”
“Fireflash, lift port wing!” etc.
I had never seen Captain Scarlet and only really got as far as the creepy voice saying “This is the voice of the Mysterons”, which had some nightmare potential.
Never having seen the show might have helped – a young imagination could have amplified the scary.
BUT, this being an LP, I only had to play it at 45rpm (78 was also available) to neutralise the nasty in the voice of the Mysterons..
At one point, I remember that we had a radiogram with a turntable option of 16rpm – much fun ensued: but I shudder at the thought of a slowed-down Voice of The Mysterons…
Once, when I was on some substance or other, I played Wish You Were Here by accident at 78rpm. Whichever Dave Gilmour guitar solo I heard was pretty good – never bettered, in fact.