Record #9: "In The Year 2525 (Exordium and Terminus)" by Zager and Evans

I thought I'd have a stab at topicality with today's blog post, what with what's happening in Copenhagen, although a song covering the years 2525 to 9595 at roughly 1010 year intervals is probably a bit optimistic for the times we live in.
2525 isn't really about climate change of course, but a sister cause, that of over-reliance on technology and overexploitation of the world's resources. It's an extraordinary song, for several reasons. First of all, there's the bizarre Mariachi intro, which bears very little resemblance to the rest of the song, which has a driving rhythm and ascending chords (I think it's ascending chords with a dramatic key-change in the middle, but I'm not sure. I'm not terribly musical in that way) before ending in a terribly pessimistic way.
It's a terribly pessimistic ending for a song recorded at any time, but this song is more remarkable in that it was number one in America from the 12th of July until the 16th of August, 1969. You may be thinking, "well, that's a good long run for such a gloomy song," so let me rephrase it. It was number one in America on the 20th of July, meaning this was number one when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon.
The Apollo programme is still seen by many as the apotheosis of American science and technology, with Apollo 11 its crowning achievement. It was, in a lot of senses, a golden age. There's a bewildering amount of precognition going on, because looking at it now, we recognise that Apollo 11 was the beginning of the end for all that - manned spaceflight, NASA and all the related industry and science have not, so far scaled such heights again. (Such metaphorical heights - the moon programme continued but the goal had been reached - America got a man on the moon first.) It was the end of the decade (the single charted in the Uk a little later, at the end of August) and just a couple of months before the Altamont Festival, with Hell's Angels security, brought what are traditionally known as "the sixties" in pop culture (which began in 1963. Confusing isn't it?) to an end. 11 years later the first test-tube baby was born and now genetic selection is a hot scientific issue. From our historical perspective, it at first glance it seems to fit the narrative perfectly. We have a lot more information now about the 70s than the record-buying public of 1969 though and know how it all turned out, Could they forsee what was coming?

Of course not, the question is absurd, but it is a salutary lesson in the dangers of painting history with broad brush strokes. Listen to the song again. It's an unpleasant future they're describing, so imagine how much closer it must have seemed in 1969. Men were walking on the moon and they hadn't even invented pocket calculators. You can forget 2525, what about when your children are 25?
The song was written much earlier in the decade, around 1963 or 4 (accounts vary). It was issued as a single in 1967 and wasn't a hit, but was picked up by a radio station in 1969 and re-ished off the back of its popularity there. It struck a chord (no pun intended), I guess because the dawn of a new technological age might be magnificent but it must also be a bit frightening, considering we're not that far from cave-dwellers yet. References to future tech are fairly basic scifi fare, a genre of course that flourished with the coming of the space race. That they got some stuff right means they picked their innovations with some care but isn't supernaturally improbable. They never had another hit, but I'm not sure how you'd be expected to follow this one up.
My copy is the German issue of the single, with an amusingly awkward definitive article on the sleeve. I bought it from the excellent Second Hand Records in Stuttgart when I was on my year abroad with university, despite my record players being at home and me not having one there, so I owned it for months without being able to play it. This was in 2006 or 7, I think it was January 2007, from memory, although the price in Deutschmarks above the Euros suggests it had been in the shop a while. I don't know why though - a bit corny it may be, but I've played it regularly since then.

Postscript
Generally when I'm writing this I favour my memory over Wikipedia, because although they're both fallible I trust the former more than the latter, and supplement my memory with a couple of books and other websites. However, I notice that the wikipedia article on this song asserts
""Their followup single on RCA-Victor, "Mr. Turnkey" (a song about a rapist who nails his own wrist to the wall as punishment for his crime), failed to chart.[citation needed]"

Now I'm only human, I admit I was intrigued. The big fat citation needed on there gave me pause for thought though - if I just wrote it as gospel and it turned out not to be true I'd just be propagating a big lie, albeit a tempting one.
I don't own the single in question, but I found someone on youtube who does, and in this instance, Wiki was right. Not being one I own it's ineligible for this blog, but I present it here for curiosity's sake:


Can't think why it didn't chart.

Record #8: "The Family EP" by Whysp

It's become clear to me as I've been doing these that I've barely scratched the surface of what I have: I daren't count them for the same reason I daren't calculate how much money I've spent on records - I'm scared of the outcome. It seemed likely though that over the course of the 45 pieces the dominant trends of my record-buying would make themselves known. In an early post I talked about how in the seventies, seven inch singles weren't "special" the way that they are now, at least to a faction of the record-buying public. They sold in their thousands to a public to whom the words 'limited edition' aroused nary a flicker of interest. This record then, is the obverse of that. It's modern (2008), limited edition (number 194 of 300)and put together with extreme care. I've added a clip of side one's track, "Sun Without End," side 2's track is similarly ramshackle, but not quite so paranoid. It's a touch quiet, but the distortion you can here is on the record too - it's not a fault in reproduction or in my recording. That's a leaf on the edge of the picture, I sat the laptop in a plantpot to get a view of the deck with the webcam
I mean ramshackle in a positive way, but for all that, there's not much here really, to love or hate. I like it, but without passion. The record-buying subset of mine that this falls into is what I call "airy nothing-folk-records." To me it's all about the packaging (in this instance.) I listen to the record, but what lingers is the experience of taking the record from the box, unwrapping it and putting it on the deck, which is a pleasure I get to experience again, but in reverse, once it's finished.
Now, a quick break for credit, where credit's due. The label, The Great Pop Supplement spend their time putting out beautiful limited edition pieces, and this, at 300, is one of their larger editions. They're a tiny label run from somebody's back room and a good 90% of their releases are 7 inchers, each one handle and presented lovingly. Judging by how quickly their stuff goes, they must be doing something right, so hats off to them.
Maybe you could argue that this fetishisation of vinyl is a bad thing for music, like those people who will frame your record sleeves - the ownership of the physical artefact becomes the important thing, rather than the music itself. If that were the case, then yes it would be, but, in the words of The Long Blondes, you could have both.
I have a lot of singles. Some of them I really like, some of them I once really liked and some of them are and always were mistakes but I've never bought a record just to own it - everything gets played* There are numerous limited edition things for sale that I'm ignoring RIGHT NOW - this one, this one and this one for starters and that's jusrt from the labels that email me. (Although, actually I would like a couple of them...)
Thing is though, the aim is for a fantastic-sounding record presented in a beautiful package that can easily be fawned over. I have a few examples of that and they may well make appearances at some point before we reach 45 #45. This one's here though, in part to illustrate that sometimes the zenith I described is missed. I'm very much into this sort of thing though, and Whysp's myspace cites obscure late-60s folk band Forest as a big influence, which is a winner in my book - I had to take a punt at it.
This leads me on to my final point, something I've not touched upon - exclusivity. I had to have a punt on it right then and there because if I'd hung around it'd be gone. In this case, I'm lucky (in case it goes, there's one for sale here at £8 on Netsounds, 12/12/09) On one level, it's a marketing con/decision (delete as applicable) but on another level it makes sense - small labels don't have the space or the resources to make and stock thousands of the things, and I don't imagine that the market for them is that big. The secret I suppose is making your pressing number just a bit smaller than your market. I admit that I like numbered editions, they feel more personal somehow, unique (after all, I have the only number 194 of these in the world!) and indie. I feel I've rabbitted on rather overmuch though, so I'll leave that one hanging.



*well yes, the exception is my mispressed mono Revolver, but I was given that and I've got another copy of Revolver which I play, and that's 60s vintage, so nyerr

totally wired

I've got record #8 written up and ready to go, but it's taking an awfully long time to process the video of the single going round, it being too obscure for the youtubes. Hopefully it'll be finished tomorrow, but I'm off to bed the now.

Record #7 : "Young Adult Friction" by The Pains of Being Pure at Heart

(editor's note: This one was done when I was quite poorly so may not be up to scratch but I didn't want to leave any longer between posts)

Ah, i do like a good library-based pun in a title. This is a bit of mid-1980s Scottish indie janglepop that seems mysteriously to have been recorded in New York in 2009.

Strangely and sadly it's become a journalist cliche to say that in every piece written about this band, so I'm getting it out of the way early. It's not without some merit of course, it does sound quite jangly and the cover art (also used on their album. And badges. And tote bag) does, it's been pointed out to me, resemble early Belle and Sebastien covers.
It's not like this has come completely out of nowhere though - Kevin Shields has recently scuttled back out from wherever he's been hiding and is as obsessed with waves of noise as ever, talking last year about hitting buildings' "resonance points" and thus making the masonry shake so that bits of dust fall on the crowds, or something, with his revitalised My Bloody Valentine and The Wedding Present (!) have been stotting around the country with TPOBPAH in tow. There are also bands like A Sunny Day in Glasgow who, with a name like that have obviously not been near Glasgow, let's be honest.
TPOBPAH (catchy, that) obviously have been though, because I saw them live a couple of nights ago. There were a lot of black polonecks in the room but it was enjoyable. I got a real sense that TPOBPAH's music should definitely be played at the sort of volume a venue's sound system can afford, blissful tuneful twee waves of sound with a melancholy edge and lyrics about being in love with Christ and heroin. The band opened their set by saying "Thanks for letting us play your songs" and were repeatedly effusive about Glasgow and its musical heritage - they know as well as I do where their sound comes from.
Musically this single, which preceded its parent album by a couple of months, is for my money, their best song. I'm not grumbling, but this sets out their stall well. I particularly like the double meaning of the "don't check me out!" coda, even though it's just pinched from "Take me Out" by Franz Ferdinand.
Derivative, then, is what seems to be coming across mainly and I suppose it is. No bad thing though.
In the picture above I've also put one of the badges that came with the album as an illustration of the, ahem, uniformity of sleeve design. (except that I forgot, didn't I? Anyway, no prises for guessing what it looks like. You'll just have to take it on trust that it exists. Come to think of it though, it looks very like the centre label of the record itself. Funny that.) While some uniformity can be good (I'm thinking Take Me Out-period Franz Ferdinand again, with their Russian Constructionist artwork, or Penguin or Persephone Books) or bad (Hard-Fi's lamentably weedy "No Cover Art" nonsense), they did tend to vary it a little bit, and in their defence I see that their newest ep (or, y'know, support your local record dealer) has new cover art in the same style, so maybe they're playing the long game. Problem is though, to my jaded, tired eyes it all looks a bit cool and trendy, and the problem with things that look cool and trendy is they look a bit naff and old very quickly. (I do know about this, incidentally. I own a Trimphone, after all) and I suspect it will be abandoned before it really begins to work as a brand. Still, it made it easy for me to spot it in the singles box here at Anticant Towers.

Normally, that would be my conclusion, but I don't really want to stop it there. I'm aware that I've not really sold this record to you, the reader, and I don't want to end on that sort of note. I really like it, despite its, shall we say, obvious heritage and limited aesthetic appeal. This is why I put a link to a video of the song itself at the top of the post, so's yous can hear it yourselves. I can write at length about any piece of music but it's no substitute for hearing it.

Record #6: "Heart Full of Soul" by The Yardbirds

This record is from 1965 and, unusually it would seem for this blog, was a proper hit, both here in Blighty and in America. The Yardbirds though are not really thought of as being a "hits" sort of band. They're remembered primarily as being the Ur-Led Zeppelin and secondarily as being the launchpad of the careers of Eric Clapton and Jimmy Page. Like most things people are remembered for, these are partial truths.
Clapton was (and remains) a great guitarist but the popular perception of him is of a former innovator who now (1999 to time of writing, basically) has ossified into some kind of "Blues Purist." I think this idea is based upon his work with Cream but I genuinely don't get it - he's always been a blues purist. I've been incredibly fortunate with the youtube today and dug up this:



That's Clapton, aged about 19, on guitar on the left. Very different to the single I'm getting further away from by the minute, although there's only about a year separating them. The real star of that clip though is singer/harmonica blower Keith Relf, more on him later.
Anyway, Clapton was disheartened by the pop direction the band started to head in and left just in 1965 to join John Mayall's Bluesbreakers, where he met Jack Bruce with whom he formed Cream. stop tittering at the back there. It as in The Bluesbreakers that he really started his career in earnest and made the connections with other musicians that soon led to graffiti proclaiming his deistic nature. When he joined the Yardbirds he WAS a promising young blues guitarist, but there were plenty of them around. Hell, two of the others were in the group after him.
They became Led Zeppelin only in the sense that Jimmy Page needed a band to fulfil a tour after the band broke up. The ROCK guitar sound that characterised his work owed very little to The Yardbirds and in fact can be heard on "Je n'attends plus Personne" by Francoise Hardy for which Page, then a session musician, provided the growly fuzzy guitar. This was in 1964, before he joined the Yardbirds, when he must have been about six years old.
This leaves us with our 3rd guitarist and that's the one who actually plays on the single I'm supposed to be writing about - Jeff Beck. He also has been highly regarded throughout his long career but not quite to the extent of the other two. Given who the other two are, I think this is understandable and not something we should hold against him. This is a great little single and Beck's riff is quite savage and sharp. I picked it up for 70p at a market stall. Listening to it shorn of all the cultural baggage it still makes me want to dance. Mid-60s pop 45s seem pretty bomb-proof and cut and pressed to be loud and to be played on a crummy portable record player. Teenager-friendly, in other words. I'm going to go and play it again. Sometimes owning it as one single in a large box can make it easier to strip away the mythos surrounding a song and do a wee-bit dance.
To finish, I wrote near the start that I'd have a bit more to write about Keith Relf. He died in 1976 and the oft-repeated story is that he electrocuted himself playing electric guitar in the bath.
It's not true. Of course it's not true, I mean, that would be monumentally stupid. His electric guitar was badly wired and that electrocuted him while he was playing, nowhere near a bath, him being a professional and all.

Record #5: My Baby's Into Witchcraft by The Yell

I knew that this was going to happen eventually, but thought I might get further than number 5 before it did. The single I've chosen to pontificate upon doesn't have a video that I can conveniently link to on the youtubes, so I've sat the laptop in front of the record player and recorded it that way, as blogger seems to have a video upload option, but not an audio upload. Here it is then. I bought this a couple of years ago after hearing it on Marc Riley's show on 6music back in the days before George Lamb. I thought it sounded a bit like The mighty Fall so I bought it, probably over the internet. Relistening to it again now, it still sounds a bit like The Fall, and it's on a record label named after a Fall song but where Mark E. Smith's lyrics are hard to fathom sometimes, they do tend towards the enigmatically gnomic. "She's got a huge personality/ She keeps it on her mantelpiece" doesn't quite satisfy in the same way. Still I actually secretly really like this - my laptop's inbuilt microphone makes it sound quite flat, but actually it's got a pleasingly ragged bass kick and seems to be only just hanging together from verse to chorus. In this context, these are Good Things. Edition of 500, from memory, maybe less. Marquis Cha Cha are no longer with us, but Puregroove, the shop which birthed them, abides. The aim of the venture though was to "act as a step up for bands, giving new artists the chance to release their first single. According to labelmeister Tarik: "If we believe in it and the band think it's a good idea then we are off." (source). I don't know the reasons behind the cessation of the label, but putting out singles (and MCC was explicitly geared at 7 inchers) isn't a fantastic way to make money. The little quote above illustrates of course that that wasn't the primary motivation for the label and quite right too, I feel. As they already have a record shop both online and In Real Life one of the major problems - distribution- is made less of a battle before they even start. Finally, it's not that expensive to have a few hundred singles pressed up, if you're working closely with your bands and they have a strong local following with a prevailing wind you should shift most of them.
Thing is though, why bother?
I know, if they hadn't I'd have no blog entry today and I've made no secret of my approval of... well, bothering. If you think about it though, cdrs are cheap as proverbial chips. Get a box of a few hundred, burn them on your computer, sell them at shows, send a few out to reviewers or the radio or whoever you want really, and bung the tracks on iTunes and Spotify and the whatever the next big thing is. Total expenditure: about fifty quid.
Despite this though there are dozens of labels putting out black plastic disks (they also use the itunes and whatnot of course). So why?
If I may take the liberty of answering my own question, I think the answer lies in the little quote snippet a couple of paragraphs back. "The chance to release their first single" is what pretty much all bands (who haven't had it yet) want. I could record myself and flog cdrs bit it wouldn't be the same.
The Yell are, as far as I can reasonably ascertain, still going, with being played on 6Music about the highpoint of their career so far. Chances are they won't have a "hit" but who has hits nowadays anyway? the little record labels in back rooms all over the world aren't trying for hits, but for a little stab at immortality. A single like this cements your position of being a band in a way that a cdr just can't.

Record #4: Some things just Stick in Your Mind by Vashti Bunyan

This, the more observant among you will notice, appears in the stramash of singles I put as the header image on the blog. The picture is actually much bigger, but I can't get it to fit. Ho hum. I've been trying to trace the video clip that heads this entry but no luck I'm afraid. I was shocked when I found it - it's so unlikely. Vashti Bunyan's story is very well-known now and is covered in greater detail elsewhere, but I'll go over it here briefly, as some background knowledge is required for this. Bunyan is remembered today for her 1970 album Just Another Diamond Day which was ignored on release but feted this decade, leading to her eventual and welcome return to music about five years ago now. Before all this however, she attempted a career as a pop singer. A proper pop singer, managed by Andrew Loog Oldham with a single (as this one was) written by Jagger and Richards, of Stones infamy. They were essentially trying to recreate the success they'd had with Marianne Faithful (who, incidentally, also disappeared from the music business for a long time, but that is, as they say, another story for another time). Some Things Just Stick in Your Mind dates from this era of her career, 1965. Vashti, as she was abreviatedly known then was not a success at all, which is why I'm so surprised to find this clip, in which she looks petrified, poor lamb. It's not a surprise that she found (very) belated fame as a folk singer, her voice made the transition wholly and is in full evidence here on what is a very mid-sixties folk-pop arrangement (although, if you were being unkind, you could say that the thing that stuck in Jagger's and Richards' collective mind was the melody to Blowin' in The Wind, to which this owes some debt.
But to the record itself. It's a lovely thing, but only a couple of years old, put out by Fatcat Records to promote their double album of Vashti's 60's work, singles and demos, and very nice it is too. They pressed 500 of them, and they are beginning to be a bit sought after in their own right, although the £5-£10 you'd pay for one of them is nothing to what the original would fetch. It's been done to resemble an old acetate test pressing, with labels and sleeve lettered with typewritten text and pen and ink on the B-side. It highlights the "from the vaults" nature of the release well, but also says something about the nature of the 7 inch single. If you had the acetate and this reissue you could play them both on the same machine. The deck I'm currently using is older than both of them. If you have the acetate then please God don't play it, of course, but the point is that you could - flick the switch and drop the needle and watch it spinning . It's a direct link back to the mid-sixties and the methods of consumption of pop music then - and we don't have many of them.


Addendum: It is in fact, I noticed as I lifted the record from the platter to put in the scanner, a facsimile of the original demo, which luckily strengthens my conclusion about the durability of vinyl more than anything, and doesn't necessitate a rewrite. Phew.

Record #3: Brahms' Alto Rhapsody by Kathleen Ferrier

This disk comes from the early 60s, as far as I can tell, but the recording itself is from the 1940s. Kathleen Ferrier was a contralto opera singer who died of breast cancer aged 41 in 1953. She's remembered, if at all these days, for finishing a performance of Orpheo ed Euridice after a leg bone, affected by her cancer which was advanced, shattered and chipped on stage. She clung on to a pillar and finished the opera stationary. It's an incredible story, but it unfortunately overshadows her amazing voice. There still surrounds Ferrier an aura of the tragic heroine, one who died too young. It's true that she was incredibly brave, not only in the abovementioned performance but in the unrelentingly chipper way she faced dying. A few months before her death she wrote to an old schoolteacher of hers saying
"It broke the ligaments and a piece of bone of the hip in the middle of an Orpheus performance, so that is why I have stayed so long here, to give the leg a chance to get strong again. For the time being I must go round in a wheel chair, but I expect I shall soon become expert at steering a middle course and avoid scratching the paint on the doors!
"It was lovely to hear from you, and I do hope that if by any chance you are in St. John's Wood, you would call, and give me the great pleasure and privilege of welcoming you."
She's so winsome it's impossible not to like her. All this doesn't matter though. If she were still with us today at 97 she would still have produced some remarkable work. This is a setting of a few stanzas of Goethe composed in 1869 and although my copy of it is a little crackly (found in a charity shop, no doubt) her voice just cuts across that and is unearthly in its clarity. It's really beautiful.
Although I said earlier that it was a shame that the beauty of her voice has been overshadowed by the tragedy of her death, some great good has come indirectly out of it. Soon after her passing a number of people, including Ferrier's sister, Winifred, who wrote the biography I quote the letter above from, and Hamish Hamilton, who published it, established The Kathleen Ferrier Memorial Scholarship Fund which continues to assist young singers and The Kathleen Ferrier Fund for Breast Cancer Research, also ongoing. I feel it appropriate to plug both it and the Kathleen Ferrier Society here.
The fund required money and much of that came from the musical and theatrical world, she was, it seems, well-liked. Large amounts of money were also donated by members of the public, who were naturally endeared to Ferrier's story. My second-impression biography is signed by Winifred, suggesting promotion by appearances and signings even for the reprints. At the time she was pretty universally lauded as a singer, but as that renown has faded the fame that remains is in a large part due to those early memorialisers. Her memory has been helping people in mant different ways for over 50 years whih is a fantastic acheivement, but it would be a great shame if these bits of black plastic, which the charity shops are rife with, were forgotten.

Record #2: "Feel The Machine" by The Chalets

To start off with, maybe I was too harsh on yesterday's single. It's been going round my head since then. Above this block of text is the video, which they apparently made inside an old apple mac.* Above that, if I've got the formatting of this blogging stuff right, should be a scan of my single. I never noticed until I was digging in the singles box for a candidate but while the title and artist are printed on the card, the other writing is by hand. "Pony" and "Peepee" are the designated noms de guerre for the two ladies pictured and Chris is another band member. The other two had to make do with signing it on the back. Wowser, a rare find.
A break now for some history. Recent history. The Chalets were from Ireland, they're not together any more and I don't know what any of them are doing now, although I'll hazard a guess that Pony and Peepee don't sign their credit cards like that any more. If they ever did. I suppose if anyone questioned it they could just take the single out of their handbags and show the sceptical official. Not this one of course, this one my memory tells me I got in Avalanche Records on Cockburn Street for 99p, but I know I was only aware of their work, so to speak, because I saw them support Art Brut in about 2005, (I've still got a poster with the exact date on it, somewhere, but I don't have it to hand.) so I might have bought it directly from the band themselves, which would explain the signatures, but I don't think I did. It wasn't a hit and they didn't have any hits, none in Britain anyway and only managed one album. They were good live though, even if the single doesn't really stand up 4 years later.
What I really wanted to address though was value - it always flashes through your mind when you see a signature. There can't be many of these around - 2005 was still the era of the cd single, with vinyl typically given one pressing of say 500 copies and not kept in print, whereas the cd single in this case at least, is still available from the record label's website, and typically received as many repressings as demand warranted. Of those 7s pressed, we can assume that most of them are unautographed. My copy's in excellent condition, so maybe I've got a goldmine sitting in my scanner.
It's a tempting thought, but it doesn't translate to reality. Yes, it's rare, but noone cares about The Chalets, not even their webmaster, who had ensured that their website is a sort of shrine to 2007. Value is driven by demand, not supply. Ebay is a good, though unscientific, barometer and illustration of my point. At time of writing you can buy a mint, unplayed 7inch for £2.49 and you can get a signed one, just like mine, for £8.99-or-best-offer, which is clearly a figure the seller pulled out of his or her bottom. (Incidentally, the seller seems to have put the wrong blurb with the listing, unless Paul Weller has changed his name to Pony) The reality is that the signed one is worth the same as the unsigned one, because the "Chalets Collector" market doesn't exist, unless it's old mother Peepee filling up her daughter's old room. Noone cares that 5 people you've never heard of have written the names of their choice on it and unless one of them wins X-Factor noone will. It's the transitory nature of fame illustrated in black plastic.




*I suppose it's not so bad. At least they don't look like Andrew Collins sat next to a sex doll.

Record #1: "It TakesTwo to Tango" by Richard Myhil

The first record I'm tackling comes with a sticker on the front of it proclaiming "Beware - It's square! Do not adjust your turntable" which is almost certainly why I bought it. Square vinyl is a gimmick that doesn't turn up all that often but one still being used - a quick ebay search turn up singles by Morning Runner and Panic! At The Disco from recent years. It's probably pretty easy to do as well -it already fits into your standard sleeve, and all you have to do is change the shape of the cutter at the pressing plant. It's fairly low-rent in that respect and has the air of a cock-up passed off as collectable. That's why the lurid green warning on the front of this single is so ridiculous. The injunction "Do not adjust your turntable" suggests that you would, normally change to the square setting if confronted with this disk unprepped. I've got settings on my decks I never use, but I don't think any of them cover that. I can only assume that the "Beware!" is aimed at possessors of stackable multichangers for their vinyl, because this release wouldn't work well with them at all. The more prosaic of you may suggest it's because it rhymes with "square," but there's less comedic potential in such dry logic.
For all my mocking, it did enduce me to buy a copy, but not many others did, it seems. I'm not responsible for the youtube video I linked to above but it seems it's correct in asserting that this made number 17 in 1978, and the pop world was untroubled by Mr Myhill's prescence again. 1978 is remembered as being a year into the exciting punk years when all the worst pop excesses of the mid seventies were swept away but musically this belongs very much to the earlier era. Vaguely funky synths and drums and the ambience of an Italian restaurant c. 1975 collide awkwardly with a tortured metaphor about romance built on dancing, the title the building block of the chorus because Myhill's "mad affair" is "going nowhere" and his ladyfriend won't "dance" with him. Ahem. Thanks to top of the Pops, we find the reason. Have a look at this clip, hosted by Kid Jensen and some twins of indeterminate sex:


That's right, his amour is... um... a sex doll. Well, this obviously didn't endear him to the viewing public because he wasn't asked back. Keep in mind as well, while you watch the clip that at the same time this was recorded, somewhere in the north, The Fall were playing [i]Bingo Masters Break Out![/i] to general indifference. I said above the video that this single belongs in an earlier era, but watching that totp - it doesn't, not really. Listening to it with the other songs featured that week it doesn't sound out of place, it doesn't sounded dated or silly. 7 inch singles are very much alive in 2009, but are the province of hipsters, fundamentally. 98.6% of singles sales this year were digital. In 1978, it was 7 inch or nothing. That's why there's huge amounts of this stuff in charity shops today, because it was bought by the truckload. The image of the 7 inch in 2009 casts a distorting shadow over the past 60 years. The idea that the format is cool would've been bewildering to whoever bought sufficient copies of "Two to Tango" to book Richard his seat next to the inflatable lady.

I don't know to what extent the shape of the record contributed to its success, but I'm prepared to bet it didn't harm it none. This is a salutary lesson we'll return to again and again in this blog - stupit gimmicks sell records, as me owning this damned thing testifies.