Big Voices and Little Voices
I was listening to some tunes with some friends on Saturday night and it got me thinking that if you have listened to music for a long time you are going to have some songs that you love and yet are really not to your normal taste. Guilty pleasures I used to think of them back when I thought I was supposedly way too cool to admit to liking them. Examples?
I swoon when I hear the The Thompson Twins hit Hold Me Now from the 80s and the 70s Kung Fu Fighting is a strangely compelling piece of disco.
From the 60s one of those songs is from a band that was unusual for the time and it is Spinning Wheel by Blood Sweat and Tears. BST didn’t sound like many other bands at that time but back then everyone was a lot less judgmental and a lot more experimental. So some of the bands that had major, major hits were a little out there.
In 1969 the BST self titled second album went multi gold thanks to the triple whammy of three top five hit songs - And When I Die, You’ve Made Me So Very Happy and Spinning Wheel. Unlike the others, which were relatively obscure covers, BST’s lead singer, a Canadian with the fancy big name of David Clayton-Thomas, wrote Spinning Wheel. His name wasn’t the only thing that was big; he had a big frame and a big voice perfect for arrangements that combined blues shouting with a pop melody and a lot of jazz underpinnings. The combination of Clayton Thomas’s exuberant vocals, jazz arrangements and pop sensibility meant they played both Woodstock in 69 and Vegas’s Caesars Palace in 1970 thereby annoying both the hard core conservative and hippy side of America. BST along with the early version of Chicago brought jazz influences into rock and roll. It was a sound that was extended and perfected later in the 70s by Steely Dan and in a more extreme sense by jazz-fusion bands. But they were really all about the music while BST and Steely Dan the lyrics and therefore the vocals were just as important.
If you’ve heard Spinning Wheel you won’t forget it, the song has a bit of everything just like all their hits did. Jazz brass introduces a standard 60s powerful vocal a la Tom Jones’s early hits with brass fills and highlights before we go a little psychedelic like Sgt Peppers before the second verse takes us to a piano solo [a different version has a guitar solo] which does nothing much before a be bop trumpet solo which is pretty hot takes us back to the verse and a weird kind of fairground melody then goes over the brass arrangement that is full of chords that only jazz musos play before a slow fade and then the finish with an except from some classical piece from 1815 dumped over the top.
It shouldn’t work but the playing and the arrangement are fantastic but when you add Mr Clayton Thomas’s voice it is solid gold. The other BST hits are just as left field and just as mighty. No band was better at blatantly bunging all the roots of rock and roll music into one song and making it work. In 71 they had more hits from their third album with Carole King’s Hi De Ho and Clayton’s Lucretia McEvil and then by February 1972 they were on the slide. What holds all those hits together is that voice of David Clayton Thomas, which by the evidence of some 2018 videos from the Monteux Jazz Festival is still a mighty instrument. Seriously I would give my left one to be able to sing like that. Mr Clayton-Thomas still lives, performs with his own band in Canada and no doubt banks some nice royalties. Good for him.
It’s not all about big voices though. Small voices can sell a song too. In the early 90s Frente very quickly became an Australian band that seemingly annoyed a lot of people. I can understand that not everyone was ever going to like them. Rock music was still very sexist back then and female vocals singing reflective lyrics that were both romantic and melancholic over some strummer acoustic guitars was a big ask for your fan of pub rock. It worked for me though on Ordinary Angels, a song that perfectly captured their unique sound. The song written by Simon Austin and Angie Hart and sung by Angie in that pure, sweet but never too sticky voice of hers was a brief breath of fresh air in all the heaviness. Accidently Kelly Street came next and it went huge and before too long the time had passed, as it does but not before a totally brilliant cover of New Order’s Bizarre Love Triangle that once again highlighted Angie’s vocal chops in two minutes and one second.
I have one more. Sophie Ellis – Bextor’s 2001 song Murder on the Dance Floor is so far way from my normal tastes that it might as well be on a separate planet but I love it. In most ways it is a standard disco thing, made for dancing, but her vocal drags you in and does not let go. Co written by songwriter gun Greg Alexander and Sophie the lyrics are marginally more interesting than the standard dance music offering and the film clip is a cracker which no doubt helps but it is Sophie’s vocal pitched just right that makes it all killer no filler.
Photo by Kajetan Sumila on Unsplash
