Who swapped instruments on live TV?
Let us bring clarity to your rock doubts and answer your musical questions.
I saw a 1995 Top Of The Pops performance of Oasis playing their hit Roll With It, when Liam Gallagher pretended to play the guitar and Noel sang. What are the other good examples of groups changing their line-ups to freak out TV viewers?
MOJO says: The does-not-compute factor has always been a rewarding phenomenon watching bands on TV. There are lots of good examples from Top Of The Pops: how can we forget John Peel miming Ray Jackson of Lindisfarne’s mandolin part when Rod Stewart played Maggie May in 1971? Other instances include a roadie standing in for Can guitarist Michael Karoli when they played 1976 hit I Want More; The Specials and The Beat switching bassists when they both appeared on a 1980 episode, and all of Squeeze swapping instruments when they did Up The Junction in 1979, with Glenn Tilbrook as singing drummer (The Stranglers did the same when they did No More Heroes on Dutch TV show TopPop in 1977, with Dave Greenfield starring as vocalist/bassist and Jet Black on guitar). And it may be a video, but a particular MOJO favourite is the clip for Status Quo’s Rockin’ All Over The World, when absent-inAustralia bassist Alan Lancaster was replaced by a strange life-sized puppet resembling Peter ‘Where Did You Go To My Lovely’ Sarstedt. Of course, we need to know your choices, please!
LOOKALIKE SLEEVES REVISITED
MOJO says: Album cover homages (Ask MOJO 364) provoked a flurry of interest. Hanns Peter Bushoff of Munich sent us a load of Bringing It All Back Home lookalikes (see above) by Ray D’Ariano, Jack &
Amanda Palmer, King Blank, Greg ‘Stackhouse’ Prevost and others. Max Clemen threw in how the Fun Lovin’ Criminals’ King Of New York copied The Jimi Hendrix Experience’s Electric Ladyland, and Kruder & Dorfmeister’s G-Stoned mimicked Simon & Garfunkel’s Bookends; other doppelgängers include Nick Drake’s Bryter Layter and Boris’s Akuma No Uta, the remix 12-inch of Depeche Mode’s New Life and Black Sabbath’s Born Again, and Marvin Gaye’s I Want You and Camp Lo’s Uptown Saturday Night. Do Lou Reed’s Transformer and The Blue Mask (the same portrait of Lou is used) and Bowie’s “Heroes” and the re-designed The Next Day count? Let the debate commence.
MARILLION COMEDY CONNECTION PT.2
Re: Ask MOJO 354 and 358’s discussions of who wrote the music for ’80s BBC ‘alternative comedy’ show Not The Nine O’Clock News, and how Neil from The Young Ones supported Marillion. I should add that on October 30, 1983 Marillion played a secret gig at the Marquee as Lufthansa
Air Terminal – a reference to NOT spoof Nice Video Shame About The Song by Visage-like New Romantic group Lufthansa Terminal.
MOJO says: Thanks Graham! Back then there were lots of secret gigs at the Marquee, with The Jam re-named John’s Boys in 1979, Genesis appearing as Garden Wall in ’82, and Mötley Crüe playing as The Four Skins in 1991, which may have perplexed anyone hoping to see the Oi! band of nearly the same name.
OLD BEARD ALBION
After Peter Hammill’s appearance in MOJO 364, I am moved to ask: after he was photographed
MOJO says: Hammill says he shaved half his beard after a Van der Graaf Generator show at Eric’s in Liverpool on May 16, 1978. “[Violinist Graham Smith] thought I’d genuinely and finally cracked,” wrote Hammill. He was photographed for The Future Now the following day by the late Brian Griffin, who said in 2017 book POP, “Peter came to my flat in Chiswick with his half-shaven beard. He had travelled there on the District Line. I photographed him in my bedroom above the radiator… afterwards he left for the Tube the same way, half-bearded.” Hammill played a show thusly at Bangor University later that same day, but later confirmed, “the rest of the beard went a
couple of days later.”
HELP MOJO
I’ve been reading some old newspaper articles about Scott Walker. In a couple from 1967/68, there is mention of a Ralph Garnett, AKA “Big Louey”, variously described as Walker’s assistant or minder and “generally spoken of as one of the best road managers in the business”. Who was “Big Louey”? And do we know if he was the influence for the song Big Louise from Scott 3 (1969), which Walker claimed was “about an aging transvestite”?