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allthemusic · 7 months ago

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Week ending: 6th July

My sister's birthday, and with it, a surprisingly cool bunch of songs.

Good Timin' - Jimmy Jones (peaked at Number 1)

We start with some cheery doo-doos and a bold, soulful voice singing some peppy but ultimately lightweight fluff. In that respect, this feels like a worthy sequel to Handy Man, Jimmy's last big hit. Like that one, this one is decidedly silly, but not so silly that you could class it as a novelty. And unlike that one, this one benefits from not accidentally suggesting that Jimmy's sleeping around with lots and lots of other girls. Which is always a plus.

It also benefits from an immediately distinctive line near the start, as Jimmy sings about how you need timin' / A-ticka-ticka-ticka-good timin', / Tacka-tacka-tacka-timin'. It's nonsense, but it's catchy nonsense, and it surely helped the song stick in people's brains - especially coming so near to the start of the song. I can absolutely imaging people who didn't remember the song title or artist being able to tell their friends about that song, you know, the ticka-ticka-ticka-timin' one? It's funny, because it's the sort of gimmick I more associate with disposable 1990s and 2000s trash like Crazy Frog, which was literally built on a specific nonsense noise, or the sort of single-line hook you're seeing more and more often now that's clearly designed to be clipped out of context and go viral on Tiktok. But no, catchy nonsense hooks have existed since forever, this song reminds you, and they've always been sellers.

After this point, the song's much more standard. It's got a cute concept, though, I guess - all about how Jimmy and his love were lucky to meet each other, and how good timin' brought me to you. Timing is everything, you see, and Jimmy illustrates this, rather randomly, with two examples, first David chancing on the perfect stone to brain Goliath with, and then Columbus happening yo come along right as Isabella of Spain needed money - and was willing to finance a rather speculative voyage to the other side of the world, to get there. They're both relevant examples, but slightly random picks, from completely different contexts, neither of them famously romantic. A part of me thinks having three examples would maybe help this to feel more balanced? But then again, I suspect that nobody's really thinking that hard about this one, and that the examples are just there to fill out the song. Which they do, so it's fine. Bit random, but fine - heck, thinking about it, the randomness even makes me think of Peggy Lee's (similarly miscellaneous) Fever, which is only an association that's going to help Jimmy. So yeah, overall pretty positive on this one.

When Johnny Comes Marching Home - Adam Faith (double A-side, 5)

I suspect I've maybe been a bit too down on Adam, where he's come up in this blog. True, a lot of his songs have a bit of a whininess to them, and are a little clearly trying to be a knock-off bad-boy Cliff. But this song shows that he has a genuinely cool song in him, on a good day - because, to my great surprise, I actually found myself bopping along to this one, in the train as I was listening to it!

It's a weird song for Adam to be covering - an American Civil War-era folk song, albeit quite a well known one, about the celebrations there will be when Johnny comes marching home from war. There will be a swingin' welcome, and the girls will scream, the boys will shout / The old folks too will all come out, and everybody will line the streets, church bells ringing, to welcome their hero home, with purple hearts in readiness / to pin upon his battledress. It's an image of a beloved son, coming back home, and while it was written in the Civil War, I can absolutely see the appeal of it, as a song, in various eras where people are off fighting. It got recordings in World War II from Glenn Miller and the Andrews Sisters, for example, and I can imagine it getting a boost going into the 1950s from the Korean War, or the various other mid-century skirmishes and tensions that had young men shipping out round the world on national service. Add in the influence of the ongoing American folk revival, and the fact that it's a familiar tune - I immediately clocked it as the tune of The Animals Went in Two By Two - and you've got a song with real hit potential, even before you rock and roll-ify it and add pizzazz.

And Adam really does give it quite a lot of pizzazz. You start with this urgent piano ostinato that keeps rumbling on underneath, soon to be joined by some urgent pizzicato strings, playing on the offbeat. Add a proper rock and roll delivery, complete with oh yeahs, where there would traditionally be a hurrah, and some rather epic-sounding hunting horns with this chromatic lkttle leitmotif, and you've got a really serviceable number. Or at least one that I rather like.

So yeah, it's got plenty of charms of its own, but the song also seems to have gotten a charts boost from being used as the credits music for a film, Never Let Go, starring Richard Todd and Peter Sellars, all about a struggling cosmetics salesman whose car is stolen, and who goes about taking down the chief who stole it and the sketchy garage owner who runs the whole operation. It honestly sounds pretty good - my description makes it sound pretty low-rent, but by the look of the summary I found, there's plenty of fighting, detectiving and drama, and a solid through-line of social commentary, with one character struggling having just been demobbed from the army, only to find himself replaced at work by a younger man, upon his return - which I presume is why they picked the song they did for the credits, as a sort of ironic take on it all. The version used in the credits was arranged by John Barry - of Bond theme fame, and also, more recently, Hit or Miss - which makes quite a lot of sense, and was presumably then covered by Adam by dint of Adam having a supporting role in the film. Again, makes sense.

As an irrelevant but interesting side note, though, one of the actresses in the film apparently went on record to say that she had affairs with Richard Todd, Peter Sellars and Adam Faith while making the film. Nothing more to say about that, just thought it was funny.

Made You - Adam Faith (double A-side, 5)

In contrast to the previous one, this is not a song I knew before listening to it. It's a proper rock and roll number, but perhaps a little less distinctive than it's other A-side - I could imagine Cliff or Marty doing a pretty decent version of this one. It's not bad though, a proper pacy rocker with a nasty streak at its core that you can't quite imagine clean-cut Cliff ever pulling off.

We start with vibrato strings and a chugging guitar that sounds like it was nicked wholesale from C'mon Everybody. And that's not the only "borrowed" element here - we've got a riff punctuating the lyrics that also sounds like a sped-up dead ringer for one that we're going to bump into next week in Shakin' All Over. Plus we've got the Buddy Holly pizzicato strings, because of course we do. None of it's so blatant as to constitute plagiarism, of course - more than anything, it just serves to build excitement for this song, situating it in a canon of other popular rock and roll numbers.

Adam, when he comes in, is doing quite a good Cliff impression, singing about how I saw you sittin' there so cool / Like you just come out from school / Lookin' such a pretty sight / Like a stick of dynamite / Sittin' on a coffee bar stool. It's a strong start, lyrically, establishing his love interest as a cool customer, hip to all the current trends, hence the coffee bar (remember them being listed as a modern fad back in Fings Ain't Wot They Used to Be?) They're the biggest thing in our town, the trendiest and hottest prospect around - and Adam, it seems, doesn't have a chance with them.

Or so it would seem! Because for all thay he complains - rather petulantly, I'll add - about how honey it ain't fair / Never getting anywhere, and about how he never made first base, he mostly spends the song vowing not to give up his pursuit, telling his love all about how I never can relax till I've maaaaaaade you. Made you what, I hear you ask? Not a clue. The ambiguity let's you read all sorts of stuff in there, giving a sort of disreputable edge to the song, at least to my ears, with Adam coming off just that little bit too predatory for comfort. I'm not sure it's gonna help his case - it's not generally a good sign when every time I make a play, baby you just run away - but it certainly makes the song memorable, and it stops just short of being overtly, objectively creepy.

Angela Jones - Michael Cox (7)

And, fresh from one song with echoes of various others songs, we've got yet another that reminds me of various other hits we've heard already. There's a definite whiff of Green Door, for example, at least in the tune, and the doo-n-doo-doo a capella bits and general softness of the intro also remind me of nothing more than Come Softly To Me. Plus there's a glockenspiel involved, which we've absolutely heard a few times as of late - most recently, there was one featured on Neil Sedaka's Stairway to Heaven. So yeah, lots of good antecedents, here - I'm not shocked this was a hit.

The song itself, despite this, is fairly slim, a rather innocent-sounding song, produced by Joe Meek, all about a high school crush, the titular Angela Jones, and how wonderful she is. I'll meet you at your locker, when the school's dismissed, Michael promises, before carrying on to tell Angela about how I'll carry your books home if you'll give me one little... only for the rhyme to be omitted, leaving the listener to fill in the word "kiss". It's cute, and the subverted rhyme gives it a bit of interest. It's a trick be actually repeats later on, too, first in a verse about how he wants to make her his... ("wife") and about how he hopes she'll stay true and never give another person her... ("love"). But I think it's cutest and works best the first time, when you're not expecting it. Fun stuff.

I'll gloss over the fact, for now, that both Michael in this song and Adam in tne previous song are a little too old - in their early twenties - to be mooning over schoolgirls. Not least because if I made a big deal of thay every time it happened, this would just fully be a blog about men being creepy, with the music itself as a sideshow. But also, most of these songs are covers that Michael and Adam are just being given to record. It doesn't mean I don't wish different choices might have been made at some point in the process. But it feels a bit churlish to blame the singers for decisions their songwriters and producers presumably made for them.

Yeah, I liked all four of this week's songs. None are songs I'd have listened to - and certainly wouldn't have devoted much brainpower to - if I weren't writing this project. And that would have been a shame, because they're fun! Trendy fluff, to be sure, but fun trendy fluff. And I'm glad to finally come across some Adam Faith songs I can say good things about - he was overdue for it!

Favourite song of the bunch: When Johnny Comes Marching Home

#uk charts #1960 #jimmy jones #adam faith #michael cox

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