Spanish Stroll on video

Mink Deville singing Spanish Stroll, perhaps even as long ago as 1977.

Courtesy of Mr Dante Fontana's Visual Guidance Ltd. Nice miming. Boy, but those butch backing singers can sing high.

Can you feel it out in Needham now?

Roadrunner by Jonathan Richman is one of my all-time faves. On 2 Feb 2007 I put a two-line entry into Wikipedia about it, and it quickly grew to this. It's a song that has plenty of admirers. Now the Guardian's Laura Barton, who I knew to be a woman of taste and discretion from her remarks on Tupelo Honey, has visited Boston, MA, and driven up and down Route 128 in the dark "with the radio on". She even walked past the Stop 'n' Shop, then she drove past the Stop 'n' Shop - she doesn't say which she preferred, but I suspect the latter. Full story.

I now need to go home to my meagre singles collection and check which side of the 1977 single is Roadrunner (Once) and which is Roadrunner (Twice). In my mind, Once was the one that got all the radio play, and is the later version credited to Richman only, while Twice is the older one with the Modern Lovers.

Forgotten Stories of Punk

The Guardian film & music section is full of 1977 stuff today.

Cake with Johnny Rotten - Jez Scott saw the Sex Pistols on Christmas Day 1977, and Sid Vicious gave him some cake. Let's hope Johnny hadn't given it the same garnish as Glen Matlock's sandwich.

A right royal knees-up - Stuart Jeffries tells the story of Derek Jarman's punk film Jubilee

Roots manoeuvre - Dave Simpson on the strange symbiosis of reggae and punk

A typical day on Radio 1, May 1977

• 6.00am Ray Moore (as Radio 2)
• 7.01 Noel Edmonds
• 9.00 Simon Bates featuring the Golden Hour
• 11.31 Paul Burnett incl 12.30pm Newsbeat
• 2.00pm Tony Blackburn
• 4.31 Dave Lee Travis incl 5.30 Newsbeat
• 7.02 Country Club (as Radio 2)
• 9.02 Folkweave (as Radio 2)

Radio, radio - it's a sound salvation

Up in Cumbria, where I lived as a lad, radio reception was fairly diabolical. Being sandwiched between the Pennines and the Lake District fells probably had something to do with it. Radio 1 used to broadcast on 247m medium wave (or AM) and was endlessly frustrating to listen to, all fuzz and crackle. It's no wonder we never really knew the words to songs, not that that prevented us from singing along - we just used the right vowel sounds. I'm still finding today that I can listen to Seventies music in modern digital quality and nonsense lyrics magically start to make sense. Well, more sense at least. Into The Valley is still completely impenetrable. Anyway Radio 1 was dreadful in Cumbria until it switched to 275m and 285m (Mike Read! Mike Read! 275 and 285!) and they boosted the power at the same time.

Master Bates fiddles with his knob

This man seems to know it all: http://www.radiorewind.co.uk/transmitter.htm

Luckily the Top 20 was broadcast simultaneously on Radio 2, which was a lot more reliable. Sunday afternoons would be spent with Tom Brown running down the charts, radio parked next to the built-in mic of my mono tape machine as I recorded favourite songs onto some knackered old cassette, at the same time writing down title, artist, chart position, change since last week, and weeks on the chart. For years I did that, building up an archive more valuable even than the Guinness Book of Hit Singles. Unfortunately, in a moment of madness somewhen in the Eighties, I threw the whole file out. Regretting it now.

Summer holiday - spanish stroll

Can you turn it up, Dad? Bit more. Little bit more. Just a tiddly bit more. We can nearly hear it in the back. This was the course of in-car conversation whenever Mink DeVille's Spanish Stroll came over the AM airwaves in the long hot summer of 77. It would start one femtosecond after the opening upstroked guitar chord, and continue over the one-note solo intro, and generally into the backing vocals' Ooo-ooo oo-oo-oo. Then we could sit back in the plush velour of the family bottle green Hillman Hunter 1600 and enjoy the rest of the record as it whispered from the single speaker somewhere under the dashboard. Spanish Stroll was a thing of strangeness and beauty. We could hardly decipher any of the lyrics of course: is Brother Johnny a raisin in the wind? What was all that stuff with the paper boat? Now he's speaking foreign - it must be Spanish. What is a Spanish Stroll anyway? It's got to be more than just a slow Iberian amble. Does this count as punk? Half of it does, with its distorted guitar, basic chord progression, and one-note solos, but Spanish guitars and backing singers aren't very punky. And does Mink DeVille have any connection with Cruella de Vil and her love for furs? There are always more questions than answers...

Someone looked after their Hillman Hunter better than we did

Groundhog Day

As it's my birthday, I treated myself to a top-11-from-1977 on the bus this morning. Very refreshing.

1. Graham Parker & The Rumour: Hold Back The Night
2. Mink DeVille: Spanish Stroll
3. Harold Melvin & The Bluenotes: Don’t Leave Me This Way
4. Santana: She’s Not There
5. The Jam: In The City
6. Eddie & The Hot Rods: Do Anything You Wanna Do
7. Thin Lizzy: Dancing In The Moonlight
8. Tom Robinson Band: 2-4-6-8-Motorway
9. Ram Jam: Black Betty
10. Jonathan Richman: Roadrunner (Once; the 1977 single version)
11. Roxy Music: Virginia Plain (re-released in 1977)

The Night Elvis Died: 16th August 1977

I was on holiday with my family at Wiseman's Bridge in South Wales. We had borrowed a caravan and awning, and while the rest of the family were tucked up in their cosy bunks in the caravan, I was on a creaky camp bed in the awning, encased in a durable nylon sleeping bag. Not that I minded, as it allowed me to clamp my portable radio to my ear and listen to John Peel at micro-volume. In the middle of a programme of subverting and genre-defining punk, the news came through that Elvis had died, the circumstances somewhat mysterious. Elvis meant something to me, having spent my formative years struggling to play along with GI Blues on my sister's Woolworth's guitar, but I didn't think Peel would have rated him highly. Peel meant rebellious punk and generally weird shit, not Elvis in his (rhine)stoned Vegas splendour. Au contraire. Peely put aside all the bands he used to introduce with "These are the..." and played some of The King's top tunes. I think I listened to In The Ghetto for the first time, and like a lot of people that night, felt a certain dampness in the facial area. Sniff.

• Elvis at Wikipedia
• John Peel at Wikipedia

Containing...

The Jam, The Clash, The Sex Pistols, Bob Marley & Elvis, ABBA, The BeeGees, Mud & Suzi Quatro, Mink DeVille, Rumours!... ...and David Soul