CHAPTER 59

 

 

#42: SPARKS

"This Town Ain't Big Enough For Both Of Us"

from the album Kimono My House

Released: May 1974

 

 

The object of everything in the early seventies, if you were a child trying to grow up in them, was to frighten you, render life's expectations as maximally unpleasant for you as only jaded grown-ups could. There were brief Government films outlining in detail graphic what would happen to you if you had the nerve to deviate even minimally from your expected pathway, namely that of an unquestioning, obedient serf who robotically respected punctuality and authority. Some teachers were the same and fellow pupils, or rival pupils from another school of different religious denomination, could be worse. The latter would sometimes pretend they were going to kill you, that is if they were pretending. Television was goose-green and grey. Radio told you that everything wrong was your fault. As for parents...as if?

 

Pop music of the period may similarly have been fatally fatalistic. In the spring of 1974 there were number one songs about people going off to war and getting killed, and prematurely-dying rogues looking back on the alleged wastage of their too-colourful lives (yet Terry Jacks sounded so frail and apologetic, whereas Brel was all damn-the-Martinis).  There was "It's You" by Freddie Starr, where the singer mopes around his three rooms of doom with the implication that the person he mourns can never come back. The death sting of talent shows; I once wrote an unpublishable 60,000-word encomium about a stilled Scottish child entertainer of the time. Then there was the one about the ageing disc jockey flushing his career and indeed his life down the toilet - and he isn't even fifty (yet?).

How to scare children out of their wits, or any residual confidence and self-belief they might still have harboured? I'm speaking generally and not exclusively, or even at all, about myself. This song comes out. The magazines and radio love it. It rushes up the chart. The group responsible are invited to perform it on peak-time television.

They stare at you from the other side of the screen, or one of them does. Another one of them pirouettes absurdly and reaches ridiculously high notes. But the guy at the piano just keeps staring. No matter where the camera ventures, he looks at it, at us, at me.

The guy at the piano in that image. The one of which you've already been trained to be more scared of than anyone or anything else. The representative of all that is worst about the human species. You saw the genocide episode of The World At War one Sunday lunchtime the previous year. It is as though he has risen, returned and is now waiting to finish you off.

The music is DIFFERENT. It sounds like the 1969 Top 20 chart played backwards and all at once. He sings about zoos, tigers, Hiroshima, cannibalism and Vietnam. As Lennon did in "Imagine," he ups the stakes in every new line. How horrific can this portrait get? What fate awaits us when it has been completed?

If they intended to scare you and me, then maybe they succeeded. Shelley Winters turned up on Parkinson outraged that she'd seen that man on a pop music show last night. In 1981. Over seven years later, or too late, or not late enough.

But that wasn't actually their intention - if anything, it was the reverse; they were trying to inspire us, get us to rise up and do something, even if it were only (only?) to live life as honestly (to themselves) as possible. You wanted genuine scary? The grimacing creep who was number one a month after this, sneering at us in plain post-glam sight: "YOU know...I know..I'm never gonna let you GO!" The oldies chart show on Sunday lunchtime radio, with a host correctly described by Anthony Burgess as "the most evil man in Britain," where artistic expression was traduced to the level of awarding ten points if we knew the second bracket hadn't been printed on the label, because that's what freedom and art were all about. The beard in the centre of a circle of kids in the swimming pool. The deliberately stupid costuming of that game show compere.

THAT was "scary." But "This Town" was meant to represent a new beginning, an erasure (deliberate word choice there) of fear, a rise in boldness and courage. Consider - with each verse, the singer is faced with a new, and worse, challenge. But he is unafraid and undeterred. Just as the music charges through all limply corrugated pop manners, so does his laser beam of determination melt down all barriers to what he wants. To get the girl? To find and retain unshakeable life? His "I-ain't-gon-na-LEAVE" is as bruised and unarguable a triumph as the "walked-a-way-with-ME" that concludes Orbison's "Running Scared" as we all wanted it to do. They broke through that object and we needed to be scared no longer.