It's the FRIDAY'S BEST POP SONG EVER Podcast, Episode 3!

Hi, I'm Todd and I like turtles, Chinese noodles and pop music. Mostly pop music, though. In fact, I like pop music so much that I have a new favorite song every Friday. I post videos of those songs every week, under the banner Friday's Best Pop Song Ever, but I also have a monthly podcast of the same name in which I examine one of them in excruciating detail. The latest episode of that podcast, which I've just posted, deals with "A Glass of Champagne" a robust bit of bubbleglam from the nautically-themed British band Sailor. You can stream it using the link below.

Never Too Young to Rock (England, 1976)

Never Too Young to Rock begins in a dystopian present: England in the mid 1970s, when the powers that be are conspiring to ban rock n’ roll music from television. As an opening title card tells us, a young man named Hero (Peter Denyer) has endeavored to stage a gala TV concert in defiance of this ban, despite opposition from the “enemies of rock n’ roll”. This immediately gets me excited, because I love movies in which rock music is portrayed as being under attack by graying suits who fear its subversive power, ignoring the very many graying suits for whom rock was a pocket lining cash cow.

Anyway, because there are no telephones in this world, Hero must take to the road in order to find the specific bands he needs for the concert. Fortunately he is not unaided in this task, as he has at his service the Group Detector Van, a sophisticated piece of mobile equipment that can hone in on the unique sonic signature of any designated pop group. Which is a great idea, as long as those groups are playing at all times. Happily, the million selling group Mud (Mud) have nothing better to do than run through their chart topping hits at a small roadside café. Meanwhile, a food fight breaks out among the patrons and we are introduced to one of Never Too Young to Rock’s primary flaws: its tendency to interrupt its musical numbers with dialogue scenes, by which songs are reduced to intermittent blaring snippets bisected by patches of people mumbling disconsolately at one another.

Now, in case you don’t know who Mud is -- because you probably don’t -- a primer: Along with The Sweet and Suzi Quatro, Mud was part of the stable of bands for which songwriters Michael Chapman and Nicky Chin wrote hit after hit during the glam era. That duo, known professionally as Chinnichap, had a gift for nonsensical but naggingly catchy tunes (The Sweet’s “Little Willy”, for instance, and, later, Toni Basil’s “Hey Mickey”) that went straight for the pocket books of British teeny boppers of the time. Unlike Sweet – and, to a lesser extent, Suzi Quatro -- the band never made so much as a dent in the U.S. charts, which may be due to their odd combination of bubble gummy, 50s influenced tunes with a roaring, wall of guitar sound. For Americans, probably the most noteworthy thing about the band is that guitarist Rob Gray later wrote “Can’t Get You Out of My Head” for Kylie Minogue.

But one band does not a gala concert make, and so we are next introduced to The Glitter Band (The Glitter Band), who doubled as the backing band for now noted kiddie fiddler Gary Glitter. And then it’s on to the Rubettes, a group with a distinctly nostalgic 1950s vibe who somehow got co-opted into the glitter scene by dint of sheer proximity. Other acts on tap include the beardy Whoopee Band and Slick, featuring a pre-Ultravox Midge Ure looking like a teenage stoner. Throughout this musical cavalcade, a variety of wan attempts on the part of the “enemies of rock n’ roll” are made to derail the Group Detector Van’s mission, leading to a pokey fan boat chase with helicopters buzzing overhead, an attempted bombing, and a bit where the van is vaguely pursued by a bunch of black clad cyclists. Meanwhile, Mud act as the van’s defenders by firing toy dart guns at everyone.

If there’s any reason to love Never Too Young to Rock, it’s because, goddamn it, someone has to, and clearly no one involved in making it did. The film came early in the career of director Dennis Abey, who later worked almost exclusively in British television. In keeping with that, Abey’s vision for the picture seems resolutely small scale, with a penchant for low angle shots that give us a toddler’s eye view of the action, as well as a lot of pore exploring close-ups of the actors where none seem warranted. To be fair, though, Abey was obviously saddled with a tight schedule and a very low budget; flubbed lines are given a pass, edits are sloppy, and poor sound recording renders some of the dialog incomprehensible. Abey makes some half hearted stabs at druggy surrealism, but these mainly seem like a sweding of Magical Mystery Tour. A chase through a military training ground reminds us that someone still thought the sight of anyone in uniform in a British countercultural comedy was innately hilarious. And then for some reason there are robed Klansmen running around, and then there aren’t.

At a seemingly random point in Never Too Young to Rock, Hero suddenly turns to his curmudgeonly driver Mr. Rockbottom (Freddie Jones – and, yes, it’s that kind of movie) and shouts “We did it!” As mysterious as this proclamation may be, there’s no point in pondering it, as now comes the moment we’ve all been waiting for: the Big Concert. With prerecorded adolescent screaming filling in for an unseen audience, The Glitter Band and The Rubettes each run through a couple of their hits, and then it’s time for Mud. This was probably the high point of the movie for me, because, even though lip synched, Mud’s “Dynamite” is a pretty rocking song.

The concert seems to be a rousing success, but whether it succeeded in staving off the ban is never addressed. For, as soon as it ends, the credits roll… and it’s time for some more graying suits to collect their take.

Slade in Flame (England, 1975)

Slade inhabits an estimable place in rock history alongside other British acts -- The Move and The Jam, to name a couple -- who failed to “break America” despite achieving massive commercial success at home. Part of that is because the populist end of the glam rock spectrum that Slade occupied never really caught on here in the States. While artier glam acts like Bowie and Roxy Music attained a foothold on American album-oriented radio, stompers like Slade never really made inroads to the U.S. teenage audience for whom their music was most suited (at least not until they did so secondhand via cover versions like Quiet Riot’s “Cum On Feel the Noize”). Yet, while Slade’s self-penned tunes were indeed as mindless and football chant-ready as those of any other soldiers in the glitter army, the band itself had an authenticity born of its organic, yobbo roughness that put it in good stead when compared to more manufactured seeming acts like The Sweet or Mud.

When their success poised Slade to make their screen debut in 1974, the choice they faced was that seemingly faced by every pop act determined to make a cinematic cash grab since the days of the Beatles. And that was whether to play fictional versions of themselves in a mock, “day in the life” style documentary a la A Hard Day’s Night, or to play fictional versions of themselves dropped into the middle of a freewheeling satirical romp a la Help! A script for a film based on the latter model -- titled The Quite a Mess Experiment, in a spoofing reference to The Quatermass Experiment (a sign that Slade had at this point resigned themselves to their irreducible Englishness) -- was even proposed, but ultimately rejected. Instead, with Slade in Flame, Slade chose to take a very different route: that of portraying a sort of fictional every-band whose experiences serve as a dark expose of the British music industry. Suffice it to say that no one could have expected something as bleak, sober and heartbreaking as this movie from the band who sang “Mama Weer All Crazee Now”.

It’s easy to see Slade in Flame as autobiographical, although Slade has made clear that a lot of what it depicts is anecdotal rather than directly experienced. Nonetheless, the members of the band share the same working class roots as their fictional counterparts -- Slade hailing from the West Midlands, while Flame haunts an industrial North recognizable from the Red Riding films. Additionally, for a good portion of Slade’s career -- a long stretch that lasted from the group’s inception in 1966 until they had their first hit in 1971 -- they were a rough-knuckled “working” band in much the same mold as Flame. It’s just such bands, unsophisticated and hungry from years of thanklessly treading the boards one night into the next, that are the grist for the corporate machinations that Slade in Flame depicts -- and if its events don’t match up point for point with its stars’ actual experiences, it’s hard to imagine that there aren’t at least a few scores being settled.

The film opens upon three quarters of Flame playing a series of dreary wedding and supper club gigs as the backup for an aging Elvis wannabe (a potential figure of fun who‘s portrayed with great empathy by Alan Lake). In a mildly disorienting turn, Stoker, the character played by Slade frontman Noddy Holder, makes his first appearance as the singer of a rival group, a corny shock-rock outfit whose stage antics are clearly modeled on Screaming Lord Sutch. With his formidable mutton chops, wily demeanor, and rabid cat’s squall of a voice, Holder can’t help but be a larger-than-life -- and frequently laugh-out-loud funny -- presence. But what’s surprising here is how naturalistically he performs during the film’s more low key moments. Nonetheless, it falls upon Slade’s drummer, Don Powell -- another natural -- to play the real everyman of the group; Charlie, the band’s drummer, who toils in an iron works by day and gigs by night, all while living with his elderly parents in a tiny flat and dodging payments for his rented kit.

After a bonding session over the course of a night spent in jail, Stoker agrees to replace Flame’s singer, and soon thereafter alienates the group’s sleazy booking agent, Harding (Performance's Johnny Shannon), with his frank assessment of his character. This clears the stage for the newly vivified band to come to the attention of Seymour (Tom Conti, in an early star turn), a slick corporate marketing type who sees in them an opportunity for a quick payday. After a particularly cynical publicity stunt puts the group in the public eye, a hit record is not long to follow. The resulting smell of money then brings Harding back onto the scene, binding contract in hand, putting the group at the center of a tug of war between his and Seymour’s opposing camps. A product of the same hardscrabble milieu as the boys, Harding quickly proves willing to take the fight to the lowest level possible, employing a pair of sociopathic cockney goons straight out of a Ted Lewis novel for the purpose. Some dark and ugly business follows.

Despite their top billing, Slade becomes increasingly peripheral to Flame’s action during its final half, which is only as it should be. The film is admirably hard-nosed in its depiction of the band as an object of exploitation, and as such deprived of agency -- a product to be unceremoniously cut loose once everyone has made their profit, even if integrity, friendships, and illusions are to be shattered in the process. At the same time, director Richard Loncraine takes care to contrast against the gritty industrial “before” of the group’s day-to-day world the antiseptic boardrooms and prim society parties that make up Seymour’s upper class universe -- two worlds as far removed from one another as the monochrome Kansas of The Wizard of Oz’s prologue and what follows it. Conti’s Seymour is no caricatured fat cat, to be sure, but simply a man so sheltered by privilege and driven by class imperatives that he could never hope to connect with these young men whose lives his actions are so profoundly to affect. (Asked by the group’s bass player if he even likes their music, Seymour sniffs that he doesn’t smoke but has nonetheless sold a lot of cigarettes.) It is just this cloistered mindset that leaves Seymour woefully unprepared when the violent world of Harding, whom he has failed to take seriously, suddenly starts to encroach upon his own.

Slade’s songs for Slade in Flame were composed at a time when the group, in the face of dwindling sales, was retooling its rowdier early sound toward a slicker, pop rock style. The tunes are enjoyable for the most part, but fans are nonetheless unlikely to look to the film as a document of the band at its musical peak. Slade in Flame does, however, provide an opportunity for those fans to see Slade in a new light. While the film met with a mixed reception upon its release, it has since undergone a positive reappraisal, and has even been lauded by some as being among the best British pop films ever made. Some of this can be credited to the band members themselves (including, in addition to Holder and Powell, bassist Jim Lea and lead guitarist Dave Hill) who, while not counting an Olivier among them, bring to the screen the humanity necessary to drive home the story’s ultimately tragic dimensions. True, the picture may have sunk once and for all the group’s good time image, but in the interest of a movie as solid as Slade in Flame -- whose charms easily outlive those of misspelled song titles and weird facial hair -- that’s a tradeoff that now looks pretty reasonable.