My favourite track-or one of them-from Totally Shuffled. I was so pleased when this came up at random as it was one track I really wanted to write about. It's like nothing else...
May 23rd
The Silver-Do You Wanna Dance-white label
7” single
The maddest
record ever. I’m sure of it. The funniest one for certain. It always makes me
smile, if not actually laugh out loud. There
are some records that words can’t do justice to, that words can’t fully describe and I know that this is one of
them. You’d really have to hear it to get any comprehension of what I’m about
to say, but I’ll give it a go.
(I played this
for Amy and Thomas, after trying to get a copy for many years, with a high
level of excitement and anticipation. I really built it up, “You just have to
listen to this...”etc. After a few brief bars of the track, they both looked at
me with utter disbelief and incredulity. There were a few seconds of stunned
silence followed by shaking of heads and a genuine, heartfelt question, “You
actually like this? You think this is good? Really?”)
I first heard
this, like many other records, on John Peel’s radio show. He played it each
night for a week in 1980, so I knew it was something special. An old tape of the
programme that I’d copied and spliced over and over again, just for this one
track, had Peel chuckling to himself as the song ended, “It’s a good job no-one
is listening to this right now”-which just about sums it all up.
Anyway, here
goes, with a brief factual description. The single is a cover of the famous
1958 Bobby Freeman single, covered by The Ramones and The Beach Boys, as well
as many others. The Silver were a Finnish band (I did mention previously that I
didn’t have much Finnish music on the iPod-how on earth did I forget this gem?).
I don’t know anything about them at all; they never released anything else.
Purely from the sound of this record, it seems to be the work of a couple of
teenage girls let loose in a studio with only a rudimentary grasp of the song
or their instruments. Their grasp on reality was a bit slack as well. Whether
it was down to natural exuberance, over consumption of alcohol, drugs or the
effects of a long and dark Nordic winter it’s hard to tell, but barely a third
of the way into the song they lose it big time. Their version only lasts 2
minutes 11 seconds and the only words that they seem to know, apart from the
title, are “under the moonlight” ,“baby” and “1,2,3,4” which, as time
progresses, they scream and shout louder and louder. The microphones buckle
under the overload, and at 1 minute into the song, Silver collapse into a fit
of giggles and screaming. The phrase “under the moonlight” particularly seems
to amuse them. Normally, there would be some sort of resolution within a track
like this, and it would be brought back to earth by the producer before the
song ended, but I have a feeling that there was no-one around to keep an eye on
things. It all grows increasingly manic until it concludes with a random
banging of cymbals and drums and yet more shouting. What a classic.
Totally Shuffled:
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