There was a band called The Spotnicks. Record Collector readers will doubtless know more about them than I do - Record Collector readers know more about anything than I do - but they were Swedish and played instrumentals, and weren't bad, but are best known for their unique gimmick of dressing up as spacemen, presumably because dressing up as actual Sputniks would have made it quite difficult to play their instruments. But in doing so, The Spotnicks were one of the, if not actually the, first acts to Dress Up.
Dressing Up is one of the great cornerstones of popular music. For years it was very simple: if you were serious, you wore Posh Clothes onstage tuxedos for men, gowns for women and if you were funny, you wore Normal Clothes or, if you were really funny, Daft Clothes. There was nothing in between (except Ethnic Clothes if you were Harry Lauder or Roy Rogers). And this was how it went, from Enrico Caruso to Frank Sinatra, from Dame Nellie Melba to Vera Lynn.
But then something awful happened: authenticity. Authenticity was the clearly made-up notion that the best things in art are "real" and anything "not real" is bad. So, blues singers were required to take off their smart clothes and put on overalls to show that they were real, so country singers were compelled to wear cowboy hats and boots, and folk singers oh God. The average 50s folk singer looked like Wurzel Gummidge fronting the Wurzels.
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Paperback Blighters - The books every record collector should read.
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"Beware the Savage Lure/of 1984..." - David Bowie is one of the most venerated musicians ever. But even he had his bad periods.
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Someone needs to come and empty the bins behind the Lloyds Bank branch in Kingston-upon-Thames. It’s been raining and flattened cardboard slumps next to a flytipped air conditioning unit and a rusting clothes rack. There are two signs at head height on the red brick wall. One warns that you’ll be clamped if you park here; the other, a stainless-steel plaque, marks Nipper’s 100th birthday. Nipper, the dog at the heart of the HMV and RCA Victor logos, was a white terrier with chocolate brown ears, maybe a Jack Russell, Smooth Fox, or Bull Terrier, more likely a mix. This is his final resting place. He was buried under a mulberry tree but, you know, urban sprawl, progress, etc. The plaque was unveiled by the Chairman of HMV Stores on 15 August 1984, while Captain Sensible, Janice Long, and a Nipper doppelganger looked on. Round the corner, at HMV and Our Price, George Michael’s Careless Whisper was flying off the shelves, and every copy turned at 45 RPM.
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