Whatever happened to melody?

Bevis Hillier

THE FABER COMPANION TO 20TH-CENTURY POPULAR MUSIC by Phil Hardy Faber, £20, pp. 1,236, ISBN 057119608X By the time I went up to Oxford, in 1959, meritocracy had almost triumphed in the university. The late Auberon Waugh. who came up in the same year, soon left, dismayed that the place was now 'overrun by grammar-school boys'. Most undergraduates had passed a gruelling series of examinations; but there were still some who got in simply because daddy had been at the college and knew the provost/president/warden. Of those few, some were bright; but others resembled Harry Enfield's character, Tim Nice-but-Dim.

I knew one of the latter group — let us call him Jakie Smythe. He was genial and likeable, but startlingly thick. In the United States presidential election of 1988, Michael Dukakis said of Dan Quayle, George Bush's running-mate, 'He's so stoopid, he thinks the Mount Rushmore heads are a natural outcropping.' Jakie's dimness was of that order. When a friend went to a performance of Sartre's Huis Clos and reported, 'It includes a deserter, a lesbian and a nymphomaniac', Jakie enquired, 'Are there any women in it?' As our three years at university neared their end, he wrote off for the brochures of many different firms to work out which offered the best trainee scheme in terms of pay, holidays, pensions, sports facilities and so on. He concluded that, overall, the best scheme on offer was that of Clark's Shoes. He secured an interview. When asked, 'And why do you want to join Clark's Shoes, Mr Smythe?' he replied, 'Well, you're a big firm; I'm a big chap.' He didn't get the job.

I have to admit that Hillier on pop music is rather like Liberace on birth control: not necessarily the first person you'd turn to for an expert opinion. But, adopting the Smythian Defence, I'd argue: 'You're popular music; I'm one of the people' — something we can all claim. even Brian Sewell. For over 60 years I have been exposed to pop music, in much the same way that passive smokers have absorbed what the smokers exhaled. That statement may suggest that I'm going to be snooty (snotty', as they say nowadays) about pop music, but I'm not. I concede that my main musical interests are classical — sort of, 'Take me to your lieder,' as the Martian said to Schubert. I would be more at home reviewing Eric Sams's masterly book on the songs of Hugo Wolf, or contrasting Arthur Somervell's and George Butterworth's settings of A. E Housman's verse, including 'Loveliest of trees the cherry now', the poem that haunted Diana Dors in the condemned cell in the 1956 film Yield to the Night. (I prefer Someivell's setting of that; but Butterworth gives a perfect rendering of 'Is my team ploughing?' By the way, I am thinking of writing a song about international terrorism, entitled 'Is my Bin Laden?') I would claim 'an ear for music', even if I don't have perfect pitch like Prince Charles or the Oval. My demotic credentials may be less obvious, but (if I may brave Pseuds' Corner) some pop songs have seeped into my soul.

When I was on Desert Island Discs with Roy Plomley in the 1970s, my selection included three pop songs. One of them was 'Poetry in Motion', sung by Johnny Tillotson. I chose it partly because I thought it might be mildly diverting to mention that when I first heard it I thought the opening words were 'Oh, a tree in motion', and thought of Macbeth and Birnam Wood. (I have this gift for creative mishearing. When I was four, and my mother sang me `Pistol-packin' Mama', I thought she was singing `Bisto-packin' Mama'. When Bill Haley, with his greasy kiss-curl, belted out 'Shake, Rattle and Roll' in the Fifties, I had an idee five that the words were 'Shake, Raglan Road' — a street in my native Reigate, Surrey. And once, in the Times newsroom, I took a message for Philip Howard: 'Please ring the Pomegranate Society.' It turned out to be the Performing Right Society.) Phil Hardy has a shortish entry for Johnny Tillotson (b. 20 April 1939, Jacksonville, Florida, USA), which begins:

Best remembered for the quintessential teen ballad 'Poetry in Motion' (1960), the clearvoiced Tillotson was one of the first country performers to turn successfully to pop.

This book already has formidable competition in the bookshops in, for examples, The Penguin Encyclopaedia of Popular Music (second edition, 1998), edited by Donald Clarke; The Virgin Encyclopaedia of Popular Music (concise third edition, 1999), by Cohn Larkin; and The Great Rock Discography (fifth edition, 2000) by Martin C. Strong, who also wrote The Great Alternative Rock Discography (1999). All these books are larger and more detailed than Phil Hardy's; but his more manageable work is just right for somebody like myself — as it were, a layman in pop music. It is a straightforward dictionary of singers, songwriters and instrumentalists, written in an easy, companionable style. There are two ways — each quite valid — in which such a

book can be put together. One is for a strongly opinionated expert to dole out stars and swipes, with lots of jokes thrown in — the sort of thing Victor Lewis-Smith does so enjoyably in his Evening Standard television reviews. The other approach is more objective — the facts without too many value-judgments or decorative trimmings — and that is the one Phil Hardy goes for. He allows himself some gentle tail-tweaking, as in his description of Cilia Black's 'compellingly naive mezzosoprano'. (That 'compellingly' defangs the verdict. I looked up Black because an anthem of my youth was her version of 'Anyone who had a heart', a No. 1 hit of 1964, in which she changed so ecstatically into fourth gear.) Hardy even refrains from any snideness in mentioning Sir Cliff Richard's 'Millennium Prayer' — 'a setting of the Lord's Prayer to the tune of "Auld Lang Syne" '. I'm afraid I could not be so forbearing. I've nothing against the Lord's Prayer or 'Auld Lang Syne', but they don't go together like, say, the words 'Dome' and 'fiasco' — more like marmalade spread on crispy bacon.

Although the potted biography at the front of the book does not give Hardy's date of birth, we are told that in 1971-2 he edited the Rockbooks series, so he can't be a spring chicken. But the impression I get is that, while he is strong on anything from the Fifties onwards, he is less au fait with the earlier years of the century. My parents were both younger children of large families; so the singsongs at family parties tended to be of yearning or comic Edwardian hits and flapperish numbers from the Twenties and Thirties, such as 'Please Handle with Care' (not to be confused with the 1988 'Handle with Care' on which George Harrison, Bob Dylan, Roy Orbison and others collaborated), 'What Do You Do Sunday, Mary?' and 'The Chum Song', with its immortally kitsch words –

Why did the crocodile cry (Wha, wha), Sitting on a pile

Of stones beside the Nile?

Had he a pain in his poor little turn? No! He just wanted to be a new Chum.

(Chorus) Being a Chum is fun; That is why I'm one — Always cheerful, always gay, Happy all night and happy all day...

Perhaps understandably, some of these hits are misses for Hardy. My own first musical memories are of the war years; and, while Hardy includes 'Run, Rabbit, Run' and 'Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition', one does not find in his index the punning and then ubiquitous `Mairzy Doats and Dozy Doats'. Another Forties song which doesn't get a look-in is the tongue-twister `Chickery Chick, Cha-la, Cha-la', which I think was sung by Carmen Miranda, from underneath a fruit salad, in a movie.

By the 1950s I was buying gramophone records — first 78s, then EPs and LPs. I remember the cataclysmic change from sentimental songs like 'Three Coins in the Fountain' and 'Stranger in Paradise' to the animistic beat of rock 'n' roll. Alma Cogan might stand as the archetype of the early Fifties' style. (Hardy is typically on the ball in mentioning Gordon Burn's later novel with her name as the ironic title.) She sang things like The Naughty Lady of Shady Lane', 'You, Me and Us — We Are My Favourite People' and 'I Can't Tell a Waltz from a Tango'. A radio comedian told a laborious joke about an East End barrowboy called Shultz who sold fruit and veg and was run over, with his wares, by a steamroller — the punchline being 'I can't tell a Shultz from a mango'. When 'Rock Around the Clock' burst upon us, along with Teddy Boys, 'expresso' coffee and ripped cinema seats, the revolution paralleled that in America, where Elvis blasted Crosby, Sinatra and Perry Como out of the water, the croon out of the lagoon.

In the early Sixties, the Beatles supervened. This was a group that even 'snotty' classicists could admire: in 1963, William Mann, the music critic of the Times, wrote an article praising their use of `melismas' (e.g. 'Yesterday-ee-ay'. Original and rare then, melismas have become a pestilential nervous tic in modern pop.) It was not just the Beatles' music that exhilarated, but the whole change in society they brought with them. The American rockers of the Fifties, led by Elvis, had been muscular he-men, the sort that didn't get sand kicked in their faces on the beach. The Beatles were skinny: at last we skeletons could come out of the cupboard. They had long hair, provincial accents and increasingly fancy clothes. And with them pop became British-driven, not American-driven.

I was, and am, a Beatles fan. I think Schubert himself would be proud to have composed 'Yesterday' or 'Hey Jude'. But what is very clear from Phil Hardy's entry for them is that, as a lover of rip-roaring 'raw power' rock, he regards their music as somehow a wimpish, sissy decline, a betrayal.

If greatness is measured in terms of commercial success and popularity [he writes], The Beatles are the greatest popular musicians of the century. Moreover, the changes in the music industry wrought by their success make it unlikely that their impact will be surpassed. Their artistic significance, however, is less certain. The musical genius of The Beatles lay less in innovation than in the ability to produce the synthesis of many pre-existing styles...

Like God in the hymn, Hardy is slow to chide and swift to bless: but, as with God, there are limits to his indulgence, and he (Hardy) is not really a Beatles fan.

The tune of a song has always meant more to me than the lyric. Maybe this is because words are a busman's holiday for me. Or possibly my prejudice against lyrics derives from two I was made to learn in infants' school. One began:

Long ago, as everyone knows. June was born in a pale pink rose.

The other: I am a little daffodil, A-sitting on a windowsill.

Melody is paramount. Any fool, given a saucepan lid and a spoon, can achieve a teat'; only a genius like Jerome Kern could compose the tune of 'Smoke Gets in Your Eyes'. (I prefer the Platters' version of 1958 to the original airing in the Astaire/Rogers film Roberta.) Kern's The Way You Look Tonight' would also be in my top ten, with Cole Porter's 'Night and Day', Bobby Vee's 'Run to Him', Elvis's 'The Girl of My Best Friend', Roy Orbison's `Cryin", Marty Wilde's 'Teenager in Love', Bobby Darin's 'Dream Lover', the Beatles' 'In My Time' and the Kinks' 'Sunny Afternoon', which I first heard played by a busker in the white-tiled subway at South Kensington underground station in the 1967 Summer of Love. (Hardy neatly characterises it as 'a genial satire on the nouveau riche popocracy.') What we have seen, or rather heard, since the early Seventies is the gradual extirpation of melody from pop music. First there was disco, which always sounded to me like the scratching of a persistent itch. (Remember the young lady of Natchez, who said, 'When ah itches, ah scratches'?) Then the nightmare of punk rock. (When Elvis died in 1977, a newspaper headline asked, 'Will they cry for Johnny Rotten?' No, we jolly well won't.) There followed a period when most singers shouted at the audience with ugly grimaces as if denouncing them in a Soviet showtrial. The vestiges of tune that survived were muzzed by weird electronic effects. And with rap, melody was virtually snuffed out. When Dante Gabriel Rossetti painted a picture and pasted a long explanatory poem underneath as a caption, Whistler maliciously asked, 'Why don't you just frame the sonnet?' Confronted by the insistent bang-bang-bang of much contemporary pop, one might ask, 'Why don't you just have sex?'

What we are too often served instead of a tune is a nondescript gibbering, with none of the development and destination that a good piece of music should have. It is musical dog-paddle. I have heard two young girls babbling such a song to each other in a railway carriage, and wondered, 'How on earth can they remember the notes? And who on earth would want to?' A few weeks ago. on Songs of Praise, the presenter said the next hymn was going to be 'Breathe on me, breath of God' — a song which, in the only version I know, has a beautiful, serene tune, leading on irresistibly, like a well-played game of Consequences, and reinforcing the words, not working against them. Instead of that familiar melody, the congregation sang a mopey, meandering sequence of notes — one could not call it a tune. It's that kind of

disappointment that I get from pop music today.

To check whether I was being unfair, I watched Top of the Pops on television soon after. I made these notes on the songs, in the order in which they were presented:

At No. 2: Shaggy & Ritrok, 'It Wasn't Me', Very assertive beat, good to dance to; but assorted bawling, the ghost of a tune struggling to get out.

NEW: Ronan Keating, tov-in' Each Day'. Repetitive. Virtuoso groin thrusts no compensation for the absence of any melodic line of interest.

At No. 3: Crazy Town, 'Butterfly'. Tattooed and pierced, the male singers were barechested except for one wearing a T-shirt; whatever the legend on the shirt, it had to be censored, with a bar, on television. Generalised rap, no melody. The unlovable in pursuit of the unhummable. Manic energy and nice pecs not enough.

At No. 6: M&S + Girl Next Door, 'Sailsoul Nugget'. A pretty girl band in gold bikinis and baggy white harem pants. Much of the time bleated 'Do It' (I think). A drivelling non-tune.

At No. 18: The Bee Gees, 'This is Where I Came In'. This is where I go out. The wrinklies wearing granny glasses delivered a substandard Beatle-like melody with a dying fall — but at least it was a melody.

At No. 11: hante Moore. 'Straight Up'. Tempted to comment `Chante less, please.' Repetitive high-pitched squawking. A certain catchiness, but I couldn't hum it to save my life.

At No. 19: Ocean Colour Scene, 'Up on the Down Side'. A real melody here, if an unsubtle one. Sixties-ish. Well sung. Oi give it foive, as they used to say on Juke Box Jul y.

NEW: Destiny's Child, 'Survivor'. Hysterical shrieking from sun-tanned dollybirds — a touch of the Hava Nagilas and more than a touch of the screaming habdabs.

At No. 1: Hear'Say, 'Pure and Simple'. Well, simple anyway. A banal unmemorable tune from this engaging group, whose rise to fame we have followed in the television series Popstars. The most manufactured band of all time; the fastest-selling launch single and album of all time. They really can sing, and what they need is a songwriter to give them a melody, now they have cut their teeth on this musical rusk.

Hear'Say are too recent a phenomenon to get any space in Hardy's book; but of course he has the Bee Gees, and Ocean Colour Scene win a mention as 'one of the most popular bands in Britain in the midNineties in the wake of the Oasis-led resurgence of traditional guitar-based rock'. The pop scene moves on so swiftly that much has happened, between the editing of this book and its publication, that has escaped Hardy's dragnet. Mark Knopfler, formerly of Dire Straits, has had a dinosaur named after him and Puff Daddy has changed his name to P-Diddy, (Evidently Ken Dodd and David Hamilton are not names to conjure with in the States.) To those urging me to change my name to BHolly, I can only say, 'That'll be the Day'.