Novelty Hits

17. ‘I See the Moon’, by The Stargazers

/ UK #1s blog / 16 Comments

the-stargazers-i-see-the-moon-1953-4-78

I See the Moon, by The Stargazers (their 2nd of three #1s)

5 weeks, from 12th March to 16th April / 1 week from 23rd April to 30th April 1954 (6 weeks total)

And now for something completely different…

Imagine an East-End pub, filled with smoke and ruddy cheeks, a jovial barman rings the bell and calls for last orders over the hubbub… Last orders, and one last song. Old Mrs. Fozzywinkle sits at the piano, shouting down someone who’s just said something saucy, and then… The opening bars of ‘I See the Moon’.

Over the mountain, over the sea, back where my heart is longin’ to be… Please let the light that shines down on me, shine on the one I love… Thematically, we are treading familiar ground: it’s a tale of two separated lovers, one hoping that the other still thinks of them. We’ve heard it a few times in this countdown so far. But, beyond the lyrics, this is something else entirely.

The first thing that comes to mind is the scene in ‘Oliver!’, where Nancy leads the pub in a rousing chorus of ‘Oom Pah Pah’. This song isn’t quite as rowdy, or raucous, but it has an unhinged quality that none of the previous chart toppers have had. Even the novelty tracks that have gone before it – the likes of ‘How Much is that Doggie?’ and ‘She Wears Red Feathers’ – still felt as if they had been professionally recorded, perhaps over several takes. This song doesn’t…

The first verse is sung – horribly – in a fake German (Polish? Transylvanian??) accent, the voice cracking as it fails to reach the high notes, with voices roaring in approval in the background. The second verse takes the form of a skit – a plummy voiced announcer introduces a little lady with a tambourine, who proceeds to come in at the wrong cue not once, not twice, but three times. Once she gets going, the announcer asks her to sing quieter, then louder, presumably until everyone listening at home is guffawing helplessly at the ridiculousness of it all. It’s funny(-ish), in a pantomime kind of way. We’re back in the music halls, here. Actually, it reminds me of a ‘Comic Relief’ track – you know the kind recorded by Cliff Richard and the cast of ‘The Young Ones’, or by French and Saunders as the Spice Girls. It has that same sort of anarchic energy, and in that regard it’s quite ahead of its time. It’s a truly bizarre song.

And when you look back to The Stargazers previous #1 – the morose ‘Broken Wings’ – it sounds even more crazy. What happened? What went wrong? (Or right, depending on your tastes?) What in God’s name did they take before hitting the recording studio? At least it’s an interesting song, though I’m not sure I’ll be revisiting it once I’ve finished writing this post.

5aa73dbf26f7295aa31761462f020c03

Information on The Stargazers is hard to come by. There are at least two other bands with the same name: an Irish folk trio, and a rock ‘n’ roll revival group from the ’80s. An image search requires some discerning before you can work out which band is which. But the original Stargazers were pretty popular in their day – the NME voted them ‘Best Vocal Group’ for five years in a row. But – and this is something that’s just occurred to me – ‘pre-rock’, the competition for that title wasn’t fierce. There simply weren’t very many groups going. This was an era of solo stars.

One other little titbit of interesting info. I’ve unearthed regarding this song: the lyric I see the moon and the moon sees me was first used in a nursery rhyme from the 1780s. We are then, listening to both the 17th UK Number One hit, and the very earliest UK Number One hit. Mind-bending…

8. ‘(How Much Is) That Doggie in the Window’, by Lita Roza

/ UK #1s blog / 13 Comments

R-1981783-1400074086-8543.jpeg

(How Much Is) That Doggy in the Window, by Lita Roza (her 1st and only #1)

1 week, from 17th to 24th April 1953

Before I’ve even played it, I know how this song goes!

This was one of the first pop songs I was ever aware of, actually. I have a vague memory of being two, or three, and hearing this song. Or at least the opening lines: How much is that doggie in the window? The one with the waggly tail… Looking back, I have no idea where I heard it: the TV, a toy, a grandparent… Maybe it was this version that reached number one that I heard; maybe it wasn’t. But still, this is the first song on this countdown that I was able to sing a line from before listening to it. So well done, Lita! You are officialy engrained in British popular culture.

The record sounds pretty much as expected – the same jaunty guitar and flutes that accompanied Guy Mitchell pop up at the end of every line so we know that this is a NOVELTY RECORD! There is also a barking dog, which sounds surprisingly real. Even on my third or fourth listen I can’t tell if it’s a dog with a great sense of timing, or a backing singer, or even Roza herself. In the song, the singer has to take a trip to California, and so wants to buy a dog to keep her sweetheart safe. If he has a dog he won’t be lonesome, and the doggy will have a good home… She’s heard about robbers, you see, and she’s understandably concerned. Other pets won’t do – no bunnies or kitties. Neither does she want a bowl of fish as he can’t take a goldfish for walks…

It’s quite cute, I suppose, and at a lick over two minutes long it doesn’t outstay its welcome. And it provides us with lots of UK chart firsts: first #1 by a British female, first #1 to feature brackets in the title, first #1 to feature a question in the title, first of many #1s to come out of Liverpool, first #1 about a dog…

Lita-Roza_1362708c

The strangest thing about the whole song, though, is Roza’s voice. It’s very husky, very sexy – it has a sort of giggle and a wink to it that is completely wasted on this asexual, childish nonsense. And a quick image search throws up lots of pictures of her looking very sultry, very exotic (she had Filipino heritage), and wearing dresses that would turn heads today never mind the early 1950s. So I went one step further and listened to her next biggest UK hit (‘Jimmy Unknown’, #15, three years after this). It’s a world away from ‘How Much is That Doggy?’ – a slow, seductive number to which her voice, all melted caramel, is much more suited.

It turns out that Roza hated this song. And not simply after it turned out to be her biggest hit, a millstone around her neck for the rest of her career. She had to be persuaded to record it in the first place, and only did so on the proviso that she would never have to sing it live. And she never did: “I sang it once, just one take, and vowed I would never sing it again. When it reached number one, there was enormous pressure to perform it but I always refused. It just wasn’t my style.” She lived for a long time too, dying in 2008, aged eighty-two. I have a fabulous image of her sitting in a dusty ball gown, in a dusty parlour, throwing a plate at a lackey who has just brought yet another request for her to perform her biggest hit. ‘Don’t ever mention that awful song again!’ she yells as he runs for cover. The Miss Havisham of UK pop. She even adopts a little girl, and trains her from an early to be a huge singing sensation, but with a secret plan to ensure that this starlet’s first and only hit will be a piece of throwaway tripe… Too far?

Anyway, not wanting to slander the dead too much, but it’s great to get a #1 hit with a tale behind it. And perhaps Ms Roza didn’t really hate the song all that much (or perhaps she just had a very knowing sense of humour) because she left a large chunk of her fortune to stray dogs’ homes.

And it turns out that ‘Doggy’ actually has a much more sinister legacy than that of a throwaway novelty that overshadowed its singer for the rest of her career. It was also…(gasp!)… Margaret Thatcher’s favourite record.

6. ‘She Wears Red Feathers’, by Guy Mitchell

/ UK #1s blog / 18 Comments

s-l300 (1)

She Wears Red Feathers, by Guy Mitchell (his 1st of four #1s)

4 weeks, from 12th March to 10th April 1953

Oh my… I’m not sure where to begin with this one. The 6th UK number one kicks off with a cod-Arabian nights, we’re entering the harem kind of intro, and then… well, perhaps the lyrics will best describe just what territory we’re in here:

            She wears red feathers and a hooly-hooly skirt, She lives on just cokey-nuts and fish from the sea, A rose in her hair, a gleam in her eyes, And love in her heart for me.

Why is ‘she’ wearing red feathers and a hula skirt? Well… See, the singer is the respectable employee of a bank who, disenchanted with his humdrum life, goes to musical reviews of an evening. At one such performance he spies a pearl of a native girl and the very next day sets sail to find her. Again, the lyrics are best quoted verbatim:

            Goodbye to the London bank, I started in a-sailin’, The fourteenth day from Mandalay I spied her from the railin’, She knew I was on my way, waited, and was true, She said “You son of an Englishman, I’ve dreamed each night of you.”

Through what feat of clairvoyance the exotic girl knows he is coming isn’t explained. But they fall in love, and wed, and I quote: An elephant brought her in, placed her by my side, While six baboons got out bassoons and played “Here Comes the Bride.” It’s all a bit… Well, I suppose it was 1953. In the words of everybody’s slightly racist uncle: ‘You couldn’t get away with it these days, that’s for sure.’

Inaccurate racial stereotyping played for laughs aside, this is a cloying song that does what all horribly catchy songs do i.e. lodges itself in your brain from the first listen. It’s jaunty to the point of being wildly irritating, with someone going crazy on a flute and a xylophone at the end of every line. Compared with the handful of number ones that have preceded it, this sounds really old fashioned – something from a 1920s music hall, along with ‘Roll Out the Barrel’. Looking it up, I did wonder if it was a cover of an old standard, but nope: it was written for and recorded by Guy Mitchell. It’s clearly a novelty, so I suppose it does provide us with another chart debut: the first in a long line of songs to reach the top by being funny, or annoying, rather than any good. You can enjoy it in all its music-hall glory here, though. (Note that this is not the version that topped the charts – the video for that lies at the foot of this post.)

guy mitchell

By the end of the song, the singer has returned to London with his bride, and all his former co-workers stare in wonder and amusement as this foreign beauty sips her tea just like them! I don’t want to sound all woke and millennial and right on but… Jesus.

Anyway, at the very end of the song – and this is something that Perry Como did in ‘Don’t Let the Stars Get in Your Eyes’ too – Mitchell completely changes tack from the laid-back, knowing manner in which he’s delivered the previous two minutes and fifty seconds and ends with a huge, faux-operatic repeat of the final line. It jars, and seems to serve no other purpose than announcing THIS IS THE END OF THE SONG! It was the style of the time, I suppose.

Like Perry Como, Guy Mitchell was a big star, and continued to be a big star throughout the 1950s. We’ll meet him again before long; his biggest hits yet to come. And we’re yet to meet our first one hit wonder, with all the artists featured thus far enjoying some form of extended success. As I wrote with Como, it wasn’t as if people woke up one morning in November 1952 and decided to start buying 45s. Therefore, it’s slightly harder to judge the success and popularity of these early artists whose ‘debut’ hits are chart debuts rather than career debuts. Things will become clearer as we delve deeper into chart history…