CHAPTER 92

 

 

#9: HUMBUG

“Groovin’ With Mr Bloe”

Single released: February 1970

 

 

This was number one in my Your Top Songs 2021 Spotify playlist, which will not be included in this book since I wish to avoid boredom on the part of both author and reader. I had only begun using Spotify in September of that year so that list is probably as unrepresentative of my listening habits as the 2022 one is in general. After years of doubting and dithering – in great part due to an initial long-term incompatibility between two programs – I ventured happily into the world of streaming since, for reasons of storage space, finance and personal health problems, the physical option wasn’t really one to follow any more other than in exceptional circumstances. Hence I now have access to considerably more music than I had done before, and it remains an absolutist pleasure to be able to read about a piece of music or hear it on the radio, or see it on YouTube, and immediately conjure it up on my laptop. I am thoroughly aware of the multiple political, aesthetic and financial issues surrounding Spotify but have my own ways of dealing with them which are outside the scope of this present study. There’s a feeble cop-out for you which will get this book scolded, if it isn’t pre-emptively ignored.

 

Anyway this is a vocal cover of an American song which came out a month before the most famous instrumental version (by “Mr Bloe,” i.e. Zack Lawrence and various session players) and it sounds far rougher and more elemental, from the harmonica and drums on up (or indeed down). The lead vocalist sounds so much like Nick Lowe that for a while I thought this is another one of his doings but actually it was one Freddie Batt, who went on to manage the long-demolished but (in)famous-in-its-time Caesars nightclub in…Streatham. Everything makes a circle of sense if you survive long enough.

 

That’s really all I have to say about my most streamed song of 2021. Readers seeking a thrilling climax to this book should prepare themselves for disappointment. The countdown formula is used because that’s the tidiest way in which this deeply untidy story can be told. There is no gigantically cathartic number one ending. Rather, think of the hundred songs in this book as a horizontal list, not a vertical one, where every song is adjacent to another and neither above nor below it. Indeed, the book’s “climax” came some pages ago. This Humbug song is here because listening to it makes me feel daft, punky and good. Everywhere I go reeks of descending compromise. But “Groovin’ With Mr Bloe,” as represented here, doesn’t. Harry Pitch’s harmonica on the Mr Bloe version makes me imagine Saturday morning paper rounds on the bicycle, Super Mousse chocolate bars and everything nicely encased in pre-emptive petals of aspic. Humbug make me find the song again. Finding music again and anew; it’s a lifetime’s occupation.