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    Hucklebucked

    RIP Brendan Bowyer.

    #2
    I hope you weren't hoping for a nil. Quality tune (British listeners will remember the Coast to Coast cover)

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      #3
      I was watching a documentary about the Showband craze recently and was surprised that he was still alive. TBH, nobody outside of Ireland and 1960s Las Vegas would have heard of him, but he was absolutely massive in both places at the time ( ok, maybe not absolutely massive in Las Vegas but he was still topping the bill on the Strip)

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        #4
        Yeah, thanks for the earworm. What was with that teddy boy revival in the early 80s?

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          #5
          It began a few years before that, of course, with Showaddywaddy, Darts and then the whole Grease thing. (In the US, Sha Na Na, of course, had played Woodstock in 1969...) True that at the start of the eighties there was Shaky and a whole shedload of smaller bands jumping on the bandwagon - most of whom seemed to have 'cats' in the name.

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            #6
            And Darts. Don’t forget Darts.

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              #7
              Originally posted by Duncan Gardner View Post
              I hope you weren't hoping for a nil. Quality tune (British listeners will remember the Coast to Coast cover)
              Until just now I genuinely didn't know that the Coast to Coast version was a cover. Another part of my childhood turns out to be based on a lie...

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                #8
                The Hucklebuck was written in the 40s and apparently derived from a Charlie Parker melody line

                https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hucklebuck

                Here's the Parker piece

                https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ryNtmkfeJk4

                I'd say the Parker melody is pretty much the core of The Hucklebuck, enough to give Parker a credit by today's legal standards.

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                  #9
                  Originally posted by Sits View Post
                  And Darts. Don’t forget Darts.
                  The very first sentence - containing the words '...Showaddywaddy, Darts...' - might suggest that I didn't forget Darts.

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                    #10
                    Ah but you hid it cunningly.

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                      #11
                      And don’t forget Darts.

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                        #12
                        The King’s Arms would never pick me again if I did.

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                          #13
                          Originally posted by Jah Womble View Post
                          It began a few years before that, of course, with Showaddywaddy, Darts and then the whole Grease thing. (In the US, Sha Na Na, of course, had played Woodstock in 1969...) True that at the start of the eighties there was Shaky and a whole shedload of smaller bands jumping on the bandwagon - most of whom seemed to have 'cats' in the name.
                          That kind of thing happens in every generation. So the '50s revival started in the late 1960s and reached into the early 1980s, by which time the 1960s had begun. And by 1986, the '70s revival had begun (remember Tavares and the Real Thing returning to the charts?), and that carried on for a long time. Currently we're deep into the '90s revival, with even the horrors of ugly football jerseys being revived. Next it'll be the George W Bush revival.

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                            #14
                            Tavares/Real Thing were just reissues/remixes rather than a specific revival, though?

                            Over here, in terms of ‘homage’-style revivals in which new generations have been aping the look and the music of a particular movement, there have been several half-assed punk efforts, and there was that rather weedy mod revival in 1979 (Secret Affair, Merton Parkas, etc). There were also a few bands that attempted to bring back the new romantic thing during the mid-nineties.

                            One could argue that Britpop as a whole represented some kind of ‘revival’ but its reference points were too diverse to qualify, IMO.

                            What we tend to see nowadays are ‘individual band’ revivals, but - given that these things are usually driven by people with little knowledge of pop history - this doesn’t usually travel much further than Abba or Queen.

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                              #15
                              Showbands, man. Awesome. I started re-watching 'Tutti Frutti' this week (I'm on an Emma Thompson reappraisal). Yeah - that's them showbands, like.

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                                #16
                                Originally posted by Jah Womble View Post
                                Tavares/Real Thing were just reissues/remixes rather than a specific revival, though?
                                Yes, remixes. But that was a signal that it was OK to like the 70s again. Not long before that, Barry White was thought of by many as naff; suddenly he was becoming cool again.

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                                  #17
                                  Originally posted by Vicarious Thrillseeker View Post
                                  Showbands, man. Awesome. I started re-watching 'Tutti Frutti' this week (I'm on an Emma Thompson reappraisal). Yeah - that's them showbands, like.
                                  Tutti Frutti was excellent, saw it on IP a year or two back

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                                    #18
                                    Britpop was very 60s in its trappings, Cool Britannia and in the pop-rock styles of many of the main bands

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                                      #19
                                      A good few of them were influenced by punk/new wave in their stylings, however. (And one or two also referenced pub rock and glam.)

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                                        #20
                                        Originally posted by Jah Womble View Post
                                        It began a few years before that, of course, with Showaddywaddy, Darts and then the whole Grease thing. (In the US, Sha Na Na, of course, had played Woodstock in 1969...) True that at the start of the eighties there was Shaky and a whole shedload of smaller bands jumping on the bandwagon - most of whom seemed to have 'cats' in the name.
                                        And bridging the gap in the timeline between Sha Na Na at Woodstock and the rise of Showaddywaddy) was the London Rock and Roll Show at Wembley Stadium in 1972, photos here. Jeremy Beadle was involved in promoting it I think.

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                                          #21
                                          I guess that That'll Be the Day (the 1973 film) fits in there somewhere, as well.

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                                            #22
                                            American Graffiti in the same year too, though get the impression it was more of a cult hit than mainstream hit in the UK, but still would have been important to that community.

                                            Interesting (to me anyway) thing about American Graffiti is that even though it is a nostalgic, love letter to the past sort of film it was set only eleven years in the past.

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                                              #23
                                              Yes, AG also occurred to me, but in my (wrong) head it was released later than 1973. (I suspect that's because I remember seeing it at the cinema with some school pals a few years after.)

                                              Perhaps it's the apple-stretching of time as one grows older, but that brevity of timescale always seems odd to me, too. Sha Na Na at Woodstock was barely even a decade after the original scene to which they were paying homage.

                                              I was going to make some kind of comparison with what went in music ten years ago being aped in 2020, but it would merely be much the same as what's happening now. There simply aren't revolutions/movements in pop music anymore - well, none that make a cultural impact, anyway.

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                                                #24
                                                Indeed, when there were revolutions in music, the older stuff seemed like ages ago. And in 1969, exposure to things from 10-15 years earlier was so limited. If you were 20 in 1969, you probably really got into music by the time the fire of rock & roll was diminished. Elvis was back in the army, and Chubby Checker and Connie Francis were the biggest stars. Your parents likely had no truck with that rock & roll and still played their Bing Crosby shellacs. And the nostalgia hadn't hit yet. Even the early Beatles covers of Chuck Berry songs were old hat. So, unless you had a big brother who loved rock & roll, your exposure was limited. In that context, the ten years gap between rock & roll and Sha Na Na was very long.

                                                But if you're 20, a time gap of ten years is incredibly long. More than half a conscious lifetime ago...
                                                Last edited by G-Man; 04-06-2020, 10:03.

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                                                  #25
                                                  Sure, ten years was a long time if you were young (twenty or under), but less-so for the protagonists driving (or tapping into) the commercial potential of a revival scene.

                                                  Absolutely agree, though, that major shifts in music were occurring every few years - which definitely facilitated these revival scenes emerging within a short time. All kinds of reasons as to why that's now died out, but I think that's for another day.
                                                  Last edited by Jah Womble; 04-06-2020, 09:46.

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