For this Popular comments repost, I’m rewinding briefly to a 1987 hit before looping back in time to 1988. Two science-fiction-TV-inspired novelty hits that couldn’t be further apart.
The Firm, “Star Trekkin”, 20 June 1987
Part of me was worried that this ghastly record might garner an affectionate few points from the Popular crew out of UK nostalgia. Not from me, though, and fortunately not from many others. “Star Trekkin’” was 1987’s nadir by a long shot.
Points to the creators for getting their self-pressed 500 copies to snowball into a million-seller, I suppose. But that’s it. The plasticine video doesn’t even respect its own logic: one of Uhura’s lines is voiced by the McCoy figure.
I always wondered how The Firm got away with using their name when Jimmy Page’s band predated this by a few years. But it turns out these guys had an earlier 1982 hit, “Arthur Daley ’E’s Alright”, which peaked at number 14 and was performed on Top of the Pops. I can imagine how it goes—some kind of geezer knees-up, I’m guessing. Which is what this one is, isn’t it? Knees up Mister Spock, knees up Captain Kirk...
I expect that when Page & co. chose the name in 1984 their lawyers were able to buy off any protests (if there were any) from this lot; then when this Firm reemerged they could claim priority on the name and keep using it, especially as Page’s Firm was defunct by then. Or they just used it regardless for their 500 copies, and the lawyers sorted it out after the event once this hit number 1.
Its almost accidental climb to the top (and to number 3 in Australia) was hardly a Cowell-like contrivance, and silliness in a song I don’t mind, but the unshakeably irritating qualities of “Star Trekkin’” make it a 1 for me. Especially as—having lived through 1987—I’ve heard it so many times.
The Timelords, “Doctorin’ the Tardis”, 18 June 1988
I’d always assumed that this was one of those songs that everyone loved, so was surprised to learn from Wikipedia that the critics reviled it at the time, as if it were a novelty track as execrable as “Star Trekkin’”. They got it wrong, wrong, wrong, but it’s not that hard to guess why. Critics of 1988 would have been of an age to remember Gary Glitter from first time round, and must have considered him yesterday’s news; and they must have been too old to be going through the throes of intense Doctor Who disappointment.
On the first point, I had no prior exposure to Gary in 1988, and loved the supremely chantable and danceable glam of this. And on the second...
Doctor Who was one of the cornerstones of my TV-watching childhood; some of my earliest telly memories are of Jon Pertwee whizzing around on his yellow hovercraft, and Tom Baker was like Olivier playing Lear to me. Even when Peter Davison took over, I stayed keen, enjoying his run as much as any from the recent revival. And then came the 18-month hiatus in Colin Baker’s tenure, which broke the spell. The ABC, which had repeated the Pertwee and Tom Baker Whos endlessly, never repeated Colin Baker’s, most of which I’ve still never seen; and by the time they reached McCoy’s, those only got a single outing as well. I caught a few of the early McCoys and felt they had gone seriously downhill; apparently they improved, but by then I’d moved on.
So by 1988, I (like many others, no doubt) was ripe for nostalgia for the good old days of Who. And not just the actors, but the music. By Doctors six and seven, the tinkering with the theme that started with Davison’s Doctor had got out of control, with the results now sounding badly dated in a way that the earlier themes never will, because they were so orthogonal to their times. My canonical Who themes were the modified Delia Derbyshire ones of Pertwee and Tom Baker; that’s what I wanted to hear.
And thanks to “Doctorin’ the Tardis”, which I helped send to number two in Australia, I could: the best Doctor Who themes merged with superior glam, with the very best Who monsters over the top. And not only were the juxtaposed results fun, they were funny. Electronic chants of “do what” and “dosh, dosh, dosh, loadsamoney” may not have been the height of Dalek-inspired humour, but until Mark Gatiss contrived to have a Dalek asking “would—you—like—a—cup—of—tea” earlier this year they were the best we had, at least on an actual recorded product rather than in a playground game. Not an official product, true, but then the unofficialness of “Doctorin’ the Tardis” was part of its charm: a song ostensibly recorded by a car, Ford Timelord (shades of Hitchhiker’s Ford Prefect), shown in the video mowing down Daleks cobbled together out of cardboard.
We didn’t know it then, but this was the first mash-up to reach number one, a direct ancestor of the DIY marvels of “A Stroke of Genie-us” and “Marshall’s Been Snookered”, and for that alone it’s a landmark. It’s also, of course, effectively the first number one by the KLF, and was the inspiration for Drummond and Cauty’s notorious Manual about blagging your way to number one. The song’s creators apparently don’t rate it either, but all that tells you is that artists aren’t always the best judges of their own work: “Doctorin’ the Tardis” was brilliant then and remains brilliant now, a perfect melding of its excellent parts, and I’m always happy to hear it. The only reason I’m not giving it 10 is that I know that some people aren’t fans of the show and might not...
Oh, sod it: 10. Here, have a jellybaby.
Later...
After re-listening to “Doctorin’ the Tardis” and Who themes numbers 3, 4, and 5, it sounds as if Drummond and Cauty didn’t actually use any of the actual recordings—they must have recorded their own. It has elements of five, but has the clearer synth line of the earlier ones, but isn’t exactly like any of them. So much for the “mash-up” theory.
Listening to the 12” mix just now, which I’d never heard before, I’m also noticing a subliminal similarity in some of the guitar sounds to certain Martian noises on Jeff Wayne’s War of the Worlds.
One of my favourite songs of last year was Muse’s “Uprising”, which bears more than a passing resemblance to this. I just love the danceable guitar/SF-synth combo, it’s as simple as that. Maybe that dates me. Actually, no: inevitably that dates me.
Bonus Tracks
I’ve been writing new limericks again lately, and these two are timely.
The Doctor replaces his faces
On a semi-occasional basis.
As a Timelord, he tries
To prevent the demise
Of the Universe (where Time and Space is).
What’s that metal thing, knobbly and squat?
“EX–TER–MIN–ATE!” Aaaargh, I’ve been shot!
Now my body’s dissolved.
There’s the mystery solved:
It’s a Dalek. Who could have forgot?
22 June 2010