It was all so horribly inevitable that the we’d be losing some great musicians, industry folk, friends and loved ones during the awful global Covid-19 situation that we find ourselves in.
Alan Merrill from Arrows is the man who inspired Joan Jett to record his song
I Love Rock & Roll, which she then turned into an international smash in 1982. But the genesis of that idea came from Joan seeing
this clip from Granada TV on teatime in the mid-70s when she was touring the UK with her band The Runaways. Arrows had their own series (one in a long line for the ITV kids slot that would also include Marc Bolan’s short run of shows in 1977, shortly before his death, where he championed many of the New Wave acts around at the time including The Jam, Generation X with Billy Idol, and The Damned), and it still seems remarkable that just one performance witnessed by Joan in the middle of the afternoon would stick with her for rest of her career. But that’s the power of a great song. Likewise, the insanely catchy
Stacy’s Mom, beloved now by so many thirty-somethings who grew up loving Scuzz and Kerrang! TV a couple of decades ago. Its writer
Adam Schlesinger from Fountains Of Wayne has died as a result of virus complications at the age of just 52. And things really hit home to us on the Record of The Day team when we heard of the passing of
Larry Foster last night, a tremendous guy and top music brain whose knowledge of pop from the early days of the chart right up the present day was all encompassing, particularly when it came to soul music. Both Joe Taylor and Lee Thompson knew Larry, and often shared a beer and gossip with him when they all took part on the Wise Buddah pop quiz crew at the annual Nordoff Robbins music quiz every December. Over the past few years, he’d been a stalwart of David Stark’s Songlink team, and his loss to Covid-19 was particularly cruel and shocking after reading his Facebook post from just five days ago when he seemed upbeat, but mentioned that he felt “so very ILL bad chest infection combined with influenza!! Never mind, we will get through this shit. Hopefully life will return to normal.” We will miss Larry enormously. We didn’t know
Gary Salzman,
the American manager, but we know of him for the role he played in breaking dance music in America, not to mention some of the biggest remixes of all-time from the likes of Todd Terry and Jason Nevins.
On a more upbeat note, we enjoyed the great
BBC Radio singalong on Thursday morning at 9, with a song played across each of Auntie’s pop networks, who all united to keep the nation’s spirits up. Radio 1’s choice was Florence’s version of
You Got The Love, which was a tad too high for our limited vocal range, but the lyrics were spot on. Meanwhile, Radio 2 plumped for that karaoke and sports stadium anthem,
Sweet Caroline, and 6 Music selected Prince’s splendid
Raspberry Beret, undoubtedly one of his very best pop songs, but surprisingly never a very big hit in this country, despite it now been so well-known. 1Xtra’s song choice
Toast by Koffee was a bit baffling, and felt a bit too cool in the context of everything else. Dotty tried to justify it by describing it as “a modern classic, that I’m extremely proud to play”, but several tweets from listeners included one that read “I’ll confess I was utterly incapable of singing along to Toast even with the lyrics in front of me but bopped along regardless”. And we weren’t at all surprised to see Asian Network select the always-wonderful
Mundian To Bach Ke by Punjabi MC as their track, since it was a bonafide crossover hit back in the day. All in all, a lovely initiative. They should try it every week.
Radio 1’s ratings are up as you might expect during a national lockdown, so we have a little request on behalf of artists and industry – more than ever, we need you to champion new music during this period. Recent playlist additions have been dominated by TikTok hits, and deservedly so, but we’d love to see Radio 1 getting back to uncovering the likes of
Coffee For Your Head by Powfu themselves, rather than following where others lead.
If anyone had suggested a fortnight ago that a 60-second comedy song on a BBC panel show in the late-90s, sung by a bald man wearing red dungarees, would soon be one of the most-talked about tunes right now, you’d have dismissed the idea as lunacy. But we could be about to see
The Baked Potato Song by
Matt Lucas raise hundreds of thousands of pounds for NHS workers during this crisis. And he may be heading for a big hit on next weekend’s chart. The track is released this Friday as a download, and we confidently expect it will be the biggest seller since
I Love Sausage Rolls by LadBaby last Christmas (which of course was an interpolation of the late Alan Merrill’s hit). In another twist, there might be an even bigger load of cash heading its way, thanks to the YouTube ad sales generated around the cute animated video for the song that premieres on BBC1’s top-rated The One Show this evening. That’s been put together by a fan, working from home, in the past few days, which is a remarkable achievement. Kids adore the song. Don’t be surprised if this is the next breakout viral video short-form hit to rival
Baby Shark.
Dame Helena Morrissey was on
Desert Island Discs and picked one Benjamin Clementine track and also a track by The Clementines, AKA Benjamin and his wife Flo, who just happens to be Dame Helena’s daughter. Still, she was open about the connection, so not quite as bad as the time Louis Armstrong got the wrong end of the stick and picked all his own records.
Someone posted one day of
Wireless Festival’s 2007 line-up on Twitter and it’s a fascinating illustration of how much music has changed in 13 years. Yes, headliners Kaiser Chiefs and Editors are still around, but almost no-one else from the bill is. More to the point, the “landfill indie” that was once the UK mainstream is now rather niche again, and likely to become more niche still until live music makes its comeback.
One of the week’s wittier Twitter exchanges was
Mark Goodier’s response to Scott Myers, son of former radio exec John Myers. In reply to Scott’s question “Anyone got any idea how to listen to BBC Radio 2 on Alexa now?”, Mark tweeted “yes…just say play greatest hits radio”. In case the joke’s a bit lost on you, Goodier jumped ship from his regular deputy cover shifts at Radio 2 to host week-day mid-mornings on the Bauer-owned Greatest Hits Radio at the start of last year. Mongrel also chuckled at a tweet on Sunday afternoon from 6 Music’s
Shaun Keaveny who said “I actually think Johnnie Walker is keeping me alive through this crisis, both the broadcaster and the drink”. And kudos to Twitter user @adamlawless97 who, after the country came together to applaud NHS staff last Thursday evening, suggested the following day (when her excellent album
Future Nostalgia arrived to almost unanimous acclaim) that ‘at 8pm tonight we all go outside and clap for
dua lipa’.
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