So, this is 1977, the time when everything was called disco even when (like this album) it had a song by Smokie included towards the end (and if you don’t know who Smokie are, I envy you). Here is the back with the track listing:
I was 10 in 1977, nearly at the end of primary school and pretty much addicted to pop music. This is an album (a K-tel album) but mainly my brother and I bought 7” singles around this time (one a week usually). Sometimes we even fought over who should be the one to have particularly popular songs – leading to arguments about hits like 1976’s Don’t Go Breaking My Heart by Elton John and Kiki Dee. For that one, and that one alone, we just couldn’t agree and got a copy each – very extravagant.
This was years before UK compliation series like Now That’s What I Call Music! (Virgin Records only started releasing them in 1983) and there were a lot of these K-tel compilation albums around in the 1970s. At the time I knew nothing about the company but looking it up I see they are Canadian, started up in 1962 (selling kitchen equipment via TV ads) and sold their first musical album 25 Country Hits in 1966 (their second was 25 Polka Hits and it sold 1.5 million copies in the US, go polka!). The company is still going.
We didn’t have a lot of these compilation albums (even as kids I think we knew they weren’t proper records somehow) but I do remember wanting this one (having seen TV ads no doubt) and this was definitely mine, not my brother’s. I suspect a big draw was the David Soul track Silver Lady on side 2 (and RIP David Soul, his death was announced just a couple of days after I put up this post). We were big Starsky and Hutch fans in our house and even though I was more a Starsky girl, David Soul as Hutch was a huge star. Like half the country, I bought his hit Don’t Give Up On Us (written by English songwriter Tony Macaulay) and listened to it so much that I know (without looking it up) that the B side was called Black Bean Soup (a duet with Lynne Marta, lyrics by actor Gardner McKay). Oh, alright then, here it is:
Other tracks I loved on this album were Meri Wilson’s Telephone Man (I listened to it again recently with the daughter – she is regularly horrified by what passed for entertainment in the 1970s and this was no exception), Baccara’s Yes Sir I can Boogie (now a Scottish football anthem) and Red Light Spells Danger by Billy Ocean (because who doesn’t love Billy O? Though my favourite track of his is the less well known LOD (Love on Delivery) from 1976). I also really, really loved Float On by the Floaters and to this day cannot hear the word Aquarius without saying “and my name is Ralph”, which can be confusing out of context (and I am an Aquarius, and my name is not Ralph). The lyrics are terrible it’s true but the suits and the whole vibe is a delight. There have been parodies but Float On is already doing all the comedy work on its own (and with lurve). The band were formed by a singer from the Detroit Emeralds and I still love this song and I don’t care who knows it.
And there are many other great tracks on this disc (The Crunch, Magic Fly, a contribution from Gladys Knight and her lovely Pips) as well as some really odd ones (Naughty Naughty Naughty, best left alone). Some were bands I had already grown out of by 1977 (Showaddywaddy? How 1975. Brotherhood of Man? Already past their Eurovision winning best only one year after victory). I also feel K-tel were running out of content by the end of side 2 (hence Smokie and a rather out of place Boomtown Rats). Anyway, for whatever reason this album is still in my admittedly patchy collection all these years later. Funny, the things you hang onto isn’t it?
See you tomorrow for a comedy LP from the 1980s.
For the first intro post to this series go here.
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