While Jim takes a well deserved break visiting relatives SLS is being looked after by Fandango. His post, modestly entitled Substitute Music Teacher, invites us to share a song that was a one hit wonder, and I’ve gone for one which will probably be unfamiliar to anyone outside the UK, and probably to many here too. These are its lyrics:
Call out the instigators
Because there’s something in the air
We got to get together sooner or later
Because the revolution’s here
And you know it’s right
And you know that it’s right
We have got to get it together
We have got to get it together now
Lock up the streets and houses
Because there’s something in the air
We got to get together sooner or later
Because the revolution’s here
And you know it’s right
And you know that it’s right
We have got to get it together
We have got to get it together now
Hand out the arms and ammo
We’re gonna blast our way through here
We got to get together sooner or later
Because the revolution’s here
And you know it’s right
And you know that it’s right
We have got to get it together
We have got to get it together now
Source: Musixmatch
Songwriters: John David Percy Keen
Something In The Air lyrics © Fabulous Music Ltd
And this is the song:
Thunderclap Newman were brought together by Pete Townshend of The Who. They made one album, Hollywood Dream, and released four singles from it. One of those, the rather morbid Accidents, did actually reach our chart in June 1970, but it only got to #46 – as far as I’m concerned, a ‘hit’ is a record that makes the Top Forty, so I’m sticking to my belief that this is a one-hit wonder! This is the only song they are remembered for here, and they didn’t have any chart success elsewhere either. It is unique, I think: do you know of any other hit record which has had a honky tonk piano solo in the middle? I sure don’t! This spent three weeks at #1 here in July 1969 – that was a good year for music for a 15/16 year old like me. It knocked The Beatles’ Ballad Of John And Yoko off the top and held Elvis Presley’s In The Ghetto off it, thus making its mark before The Rolling Stones’ Honky Tonk Women replaced it at the top – without any honky tonk piano solos! The band didn’t last long, though there were a couple of reformed versions featuring the pianist Andy ‘Thunderclap’ Newman. Sadly, he died in 2016. The most well known of the original members was probably Jimmy McCullough, who went on to be a member of Paul McCartney’s Wings – he died in 1979 at the age of 26, from a heroin-induced cardiac arrest. A terrible waste of a young talent, when you consider that he was only 16 when he played guitar on this track (he’s the one in the vest). Pete Townshend didn’t appear on stage with them, but he played bass on their recordings, under the pseudonym of Bijou Drains (no, I’ve no idea, either).
This song sounds like a call to revolution, but it was done in a gentle way. You need to hear it in context: the previous year had seen massive student protests in Paris (May 1968), and the Russian/Warsaw Pact countries’ invasion of the then Czechoslovakia to quell its progress towards democracy (August 1968). The Vietnam War was still in progress, and President Nixon was elected in November 1968: maybe it isn’t so shocking that musicians chose to write songs which invoked the need to make the world a better place, and some things don’t seem to change much, do they? For me, an impressionable 15 years old when it came out, it was simply a great record – very much one of a kind. It isn’t a surprise to me that they couldn’t really follow it up, and that it has gone down in UK pop history as one of the great one hit wonders.
