Weer Not Crazee Now - March 27th, 2004 The Times By Mick Hume When Mick Hume heard his daughters singing along to lyrics about domestic abuse, he was horrified. Then he remembered the Crystals... Driving home from school the other day, our daughters (five and nearly seven) started singing along with the car radio. That's nice, thought Virginia, my wife. Then she cottoned on to the lyrics of Thank You, by the British R&B singer Jamelia: "You hit, you spit, you split every bit of me/ You stole, you broke, you're cold/ You're such a joke to me./ For every last bruise you gave me/ For every time I sat in tears/ For the million ways you hurt me/ I just wanna tell you this/ You broke my world, made me strong/ Thank you/ Messed up my dreams, made me strong/ Thank you." No, thank you, that's enough of that. When did hit pop songs start sounding as if they were written by Home Office propagandists - revelling in spit and bruises, and preaching about women as victims (or, at best, "survivors") and men as violent losers and abusers? To hear our girls happily singing along with such degraded stuff seems far worse than the familiar sexually loaded lyrics. It wasn't, Virginia and I agreed, like this in our day. Some might say the willingness to make mainstream pop records that tackle "ishoos" such as domestic violence shows that we live in a more open, tolerant society in which dark secrets can be brought into the light. Well, maybe. Except that in many ways ours seems a more insecure, uptight and illiberal age. At the risk of sounding like Smashie and Nicey, whatever happened to "It's only rock'n'roll but I like it"? The Jamelia business started Virginia and I talking about records that we grew up listening to which might not have been made, and certainly not played, these days. I asked Ed Barrett, a writer with a rare eye for such cultural contrasts, to trawl through the old singles on his Wurlitzer jukebox. "Thirty years ago," he says, "teenybopper hits were full of lyrics that would cause outrage in these days of socially responsible entertainment. The mildest references to sex and drugs were out. 'Attitude', on the other hand, was more or less uncensored. Much of what might now be considered 'antisocial behaviour' was regarded as a normal pastime or even harmless fun, and sung about in a matter-of-fact way." The antithesis of Jamelia's Thank You was He hit Me (and it felt like a kiss), sung by the girl-group the Crystals, produced by Phil Spector, and co-written by Carole King: "He hit me/ And it felt like a kiss/ He hit me/ And I knew he loved me/ If he didn't care for me/ I could have never made him mad/ But he hit me/ And I was glad." Spector's defenders say that the song was meant to show that love is not always a simple "walkin' in the sand" affair. Perhaps, but I can't imagine hearing it on our car radio somehow. Tom Jones had a big Sixties hit with Delilah, which sympathised with the plight of a man made "a slave" by a scarlet woman whom he had to stab to death because he "just couldn't take any more" of her betraying him and, worse, laughing at him. Rather than Eminem-style accusations of misogyny, Jones had women's underwear thrown at him. Race is another no-go area for any ambitious pop singer today, unless they want to celebrate multiculturalism. Not so back in 1978, when a band as innocuous as 10cc (whose most daring act was "secretly" naming themselves after the average volume of male ejaculate) could safely have a hit with Dreadlock Holiday, about being mugged by black men ("I saw four faces, one mad/ a brother from the gutter"), sung in a dreadful cod Jamaican accent. The Rolling Stones' Brown Sugar is a Seventies classic. But would a group of white men these days get away with singing about wild sex with young black girls? "Drums beating, cold English blood runs hot/ Lady of the house wonderin' when it's gonna stop". Then the chorus gets to the point - "Brown sugar, how come you taste so good?/ Brown sugar, just like a black girl should" (and let's not mention the line about a slaver having fun whipping African women). You might spot a coded reference to the semi-respectable habit of smoking dope in today's pop lyrics. Surely nobody, however, would do what Slade did in 1972, and have 12-year-olds like me singing along with a hit single about getting out of your head on Scotch: "I don't want to, drink my whisky but still do/ I had enough to, fill up Dave Hill's left shoe (a reference to the guitarist's knee-high platform boots) Don't stop now a c'mon/ Another drop now c'mon/ I wanna lot now so c'mon" (Mama Weer All Crazee Now). Slade had other hits with lyrics that would make a DJ blush today - "And I thought you might like to know/ When a girl's meaning yes, she says no" (Skweeze Me, Pleeze Me). The only serious stick they got at the time was from educationalists worried that their misspelt song titles might lead the nation's youth astray, 30 years before txt msgs. In an age when "yob culture" is never far from the authorities' thoughts, it is hard to imagine the Queen Mum of pop, Elton John, releasing his 1973 ode to beer and violence, Saturday Night's Alright (For Fighting). Binge drinking and bovver boots don't lead to a knighthood, Elt. What about our hyper-sensitive attitudes to children? Alice Cooper's 1972 No 1 School's Out (with pupils cheering the news that "School's been blown to pee ces") might not go down too well in our age of education, education, education and the Columbine massacre. As for his 1971 effort, Dead Babies ... No doubt everybody Over a Certain Age can think of their own examples, from the gratuitous sexism of Rod Stewart and the Faces' Stay With Me ("You won't need too much persuadin'/ I don't meant to sound degradin'/ But with a face like that you got nothin' to laugh about"), to Ray Stevens's "comedy classic" Bridget the Midget. But there seems little question in my mind as to what would top a chart of taboo pop songs today. In 1972, a strange young Irishman called Gilbert O'Sullivan, dressed in baggy shorts and cap, scored his first UK No 1 with Clair, an innocent song about the singer babysitting the three-year-old daughter of his manager. But look at the lyrics through 21st-century eyes, and imagine what the dirty minds brigade would read into them now: "Clair, the moment I met you I swear/ I felt as if something somewhere/ Had happened to me/ Which I couldn't see.... Words mean so little/ when you look up and smile/ I don't care what people say/ To me you're more than a child, oh Clair ... "But why, in spite of our age difference do I cry/ Each time I leave you I feel I could die/ Nothing means more to me than hearing you say/ I'm going to marry you/ Will you marry me, Uncle Ray (his real name) oh Clair, Clair ..." If Gilbert offered that in today's febrile climate, it seems unlikely that he would be released, never mind the record. When he appeared on the retro show Top of The Pops II last year, he chose to perform his other hit, Alone Again (Naturally), about a suicidal depressive. Much more appropriate for a generation that made the miserabilist Mad World its jolly Christmas No 1. Thanks David for the article!