Well, enough people seemed to enjoy the last piece of nonsense I did on terrible Scottish songs:
https://whorattledyourcage.blogspot.com/2025/08/the-scottish-cultural-cringe-presents.html
So I thought I'd just do a second part, as there's always more sacred hairy Scottish Highland cows to slaughter and make into tasty irreverent burgers. I'm going to exhume a few more zombie songs from the Celtic archive and have more fun with them than you would have listening to them. Two of them are from the 70s, and five of them the 80s - those were bad days for kitsch Scottish tuneage. Thatcher has a lot to answer for. So, in disgraceful chronological order, rising up from the midst of the keech-clogged mists of time, we have...
MOTHER OF MINE: NEIL REID (1971)
Back in an unentertaining entertainment world in a land that time forgot, there used to be a radio and telly talent show called Opportunity Knocks. Anybody who thought that the 21st century invented the televisual talent show, a way to humiliate delusional untalented proles before casting them back into bleak unforgiving infamous soul-destroying darkness, is wrong. Opportunity Knocks was dragged kicking and dancing and singing and screaming into the unready public consciousness back when men were men, women were women, midgets were short, nights were long, there were only six telly sets in the UK, and reality was in black-and-white.
The Opportunity Knocks host was a child star and fanny merchant teenage father called Hughie Green, and it had been a radio concern on BBC Radio in 1949 for one season. It hit telly in 1956, when the world was less hazy and more innocent, and Shug unleashed many a cracked-voice, nervous, knock-kneed warbler upon a teeth-grinding, ear-holding island. Opportunity Knocks drifted in and out of British consciousness on static-crackling airwaves for decades. One of these precious, precocious finds was young Scottish laddie Wee Neil Reid, discovered singing at a pensioner's party in 1968, at the ripe old age of eight. Many a future number one record holder has no doubt been found in these bizarre, dumbfounding, granny-heartwarming circumstances.
He released a self-titled album in 1972. It went to pole position in the UK album charts, making the wee man the youngest ever person to reach that position at the ancient age of twelve years nine months. A couple of years later his voice broke - Aled Jones syndrome - and he gave up singing, finding god and disappearing off into the average struggling life wilderness. But not before leaving us this timeless anti-classic that Jesus will never forgive him for, especially as he ironically sports exactly the same haircut here that the evil wee Antichrist bastirt Damien does in Omen 2:
SHANG-A-LANG: THE BAY CITY ROLLERS (1974)
I was too young to ever be into this band, thank fuck. I really don't know much about them, to be honest - thank Heaven for youthful innocent ignorance. What little I know about them seems to involve a predilection for wearing tartan, silly hats, too-short flares, big fuck off glam boots, and waffling singalongy pish like this earbleed atrocity.
There is nothing on this planet worse than braindead mainstream feelgood music, and this song certainly qualifies. It's a fucking disgrace, quite simply. I mean, look at the 'lyrics': "We sang shang-a-lang/and we ran with the gang doin' doo-op-dooby-do-a." Who wrote this pish? It sounds like they were trying to write after a major head trauma, perhaps being inadvertently cranium-kicked with a loosely-laced boot flying off a high-kicking foot during rehearsals.
A few years ago, there was also the post-#MeToo misogyny scandal that the band managed to keep mostly hushed up. On the lazy prowl for meaningless retrograde anti-male conquests that meant nothing, various screeching weasel middle class feminists decided that the lyrics "We were groovin', we were movin'/pussy-footin' and a bootin' it round/we were boppin' it, we were hoppin' it" were a naked, blatant call to kick women in the crotches, and indulge in violence against women in general. Radical lesbian feminist cell The Gay Clitty Trollers demanded the song be cancelled, the band's music removed from social media, that the feelgood bigboot strutters should be retrospectively branded as woman-haters, and banned in general.
An unknown sum paid to the organisation made the embryonic scandal disappear. But would we really have cared if teen-girl-beloved vile shite like this had disappeared off world music radar forever? I think not! Begone, foul misogynist tartan-pimping pigs forever! The modern intersectionalist world doesn't need your kind!
VIENNA: ULTRAVOX (1981)
The early 80s were a dark time, music-wise. Though you had rays of sonic light like 2-Tone, you had some of the most appalling musical swill ever to assail the ears of listeners in human history. Synthesisers and dandy outfits and clothes and limpwristed fops were crawling everywhere, with hollow caustic atrocities like Yazoo, Haysi Fantayzee, Howard Jones, The Human League, and endless other such fartslappers prowling the charts during the early part of the decade. Anti-Tory protests fought for airtime alongside Duran Duran poncing about on yachts with topless birds. The yawning-chasm juxtaposition with race riots and ever-building poverty, perfectly exemplified in the classic Ghost Town by The Specials, could not have been more stark and horrifying in tone, at least on the New Romantics side.
And then you had...Ultravox.
Now. Vienna is the song included here by this long-gone band. It's the one everyone knows them for. They were actually formed in London, but Midge Ure was (and still is!) Scottish, from Cambuslang, so the band gets tarred and feathered and dragged down along with him. I was swithering about whether or not to include Vienna, and then thought aw, fuck it. No point in the cheated-feeling getting agitated, I am making up the rules as I go along. Midge's real name is James. His stage name, Midge, is a phonetic spelling of Jim backwards. Spelled like the evil flying Highland bloodsucking beastie. Who the fuck calls themselves after a hated gore-gorging insect? This shows you just what the Hell we are dealing with here.
A mere four years before Bloodsucker was saving Africa with Bob Geldof, he was swanning about in the moody, brooding, extremely pretentious video for the extremely pretentious number two hit Vienna. Apparently it was voted the UK's fave song only to reach number two, and was given an honourary number one as a (dis)consolation prize. Sure that made the band feel better! As with the other songs, I have enclosed the video below. You may well have seen and remember it. if you're of a certain age. If not, well, youngster, you will shortly be able to gaze with horror and fear and loathing upon a wispy upper lip gash tash so feeble John Waters would have pulled it off Horsefly's face if he had seen it on him.
But before we even get to the video, contemplate the existential wannabe-poetic horror of the lyrics: "The music is weaving/haunting notes, pizzicato strings/the rhythm is calling/alone in the night as the daylight brings/a cool empty silence/the warmth of your hand and a cool grey sky/it fades to the distance." Now that's terrible, sixth-year purple versifying, trying far too hard to be arty and oblique and poetic, so toe-curlingly bad that Nicola 'Philistine' Sturgeon would probably love it. Cowsucker Ure wrote this wordslop, so we can hold that against him, along with the tash. That would be enough to convict him of crimes against melody, before we even got to the tune; not a jury in the land that wouldn't convict.
One quick thing. In 1982 the English comedy programme Not The Nine O'Clock News had a satiric song in it called Nice Video, Shame About The Song, by 'Lufthansa Terminal'. It expertly skewered early 80s New Romantic/New Wave pretension, with hilarious meaningless lyrics like "Let's spend our time in East Berlin/and though like lemmings, we will never swim/the Devil's lunar craft makes waves in time/my Asian brother says "Spare me a dime." Including the video here because it just nails that early 80s lyrical and videoriffic pretension so well:
Now, this is a shocking one. With the kind of mind I have, I can remember utter shite like this from forty-five years ago, which is a highly marketable life skill. If only I could use it for the stock market or something useful. Anyway, without any further ado, I present to you Brian Alexander Robertson, a Glaswegian, the man, the myth, the legend, the forgotten simpering early 80s 'artist'.
I only just learned his full name. I thought it was Bad Attitude, like B.A. Baracus ("I ain't getting onto no Top of the Pops, fool!") from The A-Team, though I do not recall ever having seen the guy singing here in blackface, covered in cheap gaudy jewellery. It's just as well, really. The black and white minstrel show (invented in my old home town of Falkirk! Proud boast!)(laughing) look is out these days.
But on a more serious, headshaking note: To Be Or Not To Be. (Quick side note: Aztec Camera's 1987 hit Somewhere in My Heart reminds me of this song a wee bit. Maybe Brian Attitude should talk to a lawyer.) The song got to number nine in the charts in May 1980, ironically keeping Vienna off the number one spot. Two Scots fighting for top dog singer premiere position, that must have been a fun canine fight! There's no accounting for listener taste, or sanity, sometimes. Because, it has to be said, this song has some of the most bizarre, surreal, oddly risque lyrics in a top ten song (perhaps rivalled only by 1981's grim Shaddap You Face by fake Italian Joe Dolce, originally from Ohio).
Obviously the song is referencing the famous should-I-tan-myself-or-not soliloquy from Hamlet. Several other plays by the long-dead English bard are referenced too, including Romeo and Juliet, Twelfth Night, and As You Like It. I did not really know this until I just looked it up, but the Hamlet ref was obvious, as well as the Romeo and Juliet one: when he sings...ah, the Hell with it, you know what? I am going to reproduce all the lyrics here, so you can see what I mean about how weird they are. If you ever encounter this song again, you will not hear it in the same way:
Now I'm a little shy
I like to stay homeo
Shakespeare's my guy
Julie and Romeo
Now I have found a girl so dear
She cares not if Will he was queer
Who cares if Hammy made it with his Ma?
To be or not to be my lover
To me, there could not be another
To be or not to be's my plea
It's as you like it, you know
To me, there could not be another
In hardback or in paper cover
To be or not to be's my plea
Some like the sun
They'd be a Barbadian
We think it's fun
Here in Stratford-on-Avion
Kids go out to a disco show
We stay and praise Malvolio
Who cares if Will
He dressed his guys as chicks?
To be or not to be my lover
To me, there could not be another
To be or not to be's my plea
It's as you like it, you know
To me, there could not be another
In hardback or in paper cover
To be or not to be's my plea
It's as you like it, you know
To be or not to be's my plea
It's as you like it, you know
Now. How utterly fucking bizarre is that? Full of references to homosexuality and incest and transvestism and...eh..folk from Barbados who like the sun. I confess, I do enjoy the lyrics, for the sheer funny, surreal, deranged nature of them, especially for a top ten hit. More songs should use name rewrites like 'Stratford-on-Avion'. I suppose this cosmopolitan bloviating gibberish is to be expected from somebody who attended the Royal Scottish Academy of Music & Drama. These desperate thesp types, they're all effete absurdist twisted-tongue pervs, of course.
The song's pap pop music is pretty bad, though, and it's still a smidge too weird for me, in general. Also: Robertson bears a more than passing resemblance to David Hess (who wrote songs for Elvis!) who played Krug in The Last House on the Left. Plus Robertson wrote that terrible We Have a Dream song for the 1982 World Cup Scotland Squad, so he deserves all the harsh ignoble pillorying he can get. The cunt.
WE HAVE A DREAM: SCOTLAND WORLD CUP SQUAD 1982
As I mentioned, the twisted gay sex promoter above is responsible for this one. The less said about it the better. Definitely deserves to be here. That's John Gordon Sinclair, of Gregory's Girl fame, rhapsodising on the main mike. This song was probably responsible for Scotland losing the World Cup that year. Well, that and the team being shite, as always. The song didn't help any, though. It ends up with a sleeping man inadvertently committing domestic violence on his wife. Notice Robertson sticks his ugly Krug mug front and centre right behind Sinclair:
The final two songs on this list of the lost both came out in the same sonically bereft year, so you can stick them in whatever order you want; I saved the be(a)st for l(e)ast. Needless to say, Deacon Blue were a band I could never stick when I was a teenager. They were twee and meaningless to me; by this point in my life I was listening to Dead Kennedys and The Jesus and Mary Chain and such, a total wee indiehead, and the weegie busker-level Deacon Blue (it's even a bad name; still don't know what it means, except maybe a depressed Christian)(or maybe a reference to Joey Deacon) were just utterly incomprehensible and risible to me. You know what teenage boys are like.
I mean, I'm not particularly serious about hating any of this stuff, obviously, just writing this for a laugh, but even to this day this song just irks me when I hear it occasionally. It's just so happy happy joy joy and milquetoast and soft it grips and rips and nips my nipples. Another single of theirs, Real Gone Kid (great, now it's going through my fucking head), has a title that belongs in the American 50s, a pure affectation. Dignity is a song popular at funerals, circumcisions, mass poisonings, and suicide bombings, it has such a negative effect on people.
As for lyrics from Dignity like "And I'm telling this story/in a faraway scene/sipping down Raki/and reading Maynard Keynes." How much more middle class and pretentious can you get than being Scottish and reading a book by an English economist and drinking distilled grape pomace flavoured with aniseed...on holiday? Utterly, unforgivably disgraceful. Shaking my head here. It should not be allowed, quite simply. People have had their artistic licences revoked for far less. As for the scene in the video where lyricist and singer Ricky Ross writes 'FAITH' on his hand with a fountain pen then closes his hand, staring moodily out across a beach? Get a fucking grip.
And the music never really goes anywhere, either. It just builds to a certain level then just chugs and parps and farts along, like bucketraker Bogie in his boring skip-bought ship. Which they call a 'dinghy', too, cos it sorta-rhymes with 'Dignity'. Ships and dinghies are two totally different types of aquatic transport. I certainly hope Ross never volunteers for the coastguard, with faulty rudimentary seafaring craft knowledge like that. Only tragedy would await such misguided folly.
We never even find out if the binman ever got his escape vehicle, or if he just wasted his life dreaming of something that never happened, retiring to comfortably live off an inflated council pension after doing as little work as possible for decades, sitting on his todd in the house until dropping dead of a booze-and-food-fuelled heart attack and being eaten by his three voracious flesh-squabbling chihuahuas.
You have to admit, it's a distinct possibility.
Anyway, fuck it, here we go, the quicker we get this bitter song pill swallowed the better, so set it up again:
Alright, I confess: I have never, ever liked this song. At all. Which means precisely nothing, of course, I am well aware of that. But in writing about some of these songs, it does occur to me that the pretension level displayed in some of them - and not in a charmingly eccentric way like Bad Attitude Robertson's - is what really annoys me about them.
Labour of Love is no different.
I specifically remember when this song came out. Back then Radio One was a huge cultural force - no idea what it's like now, not heard it in many years - and you'd hear pay-to-play stuff like this, and whatever slop was in the charts, mourning, noon, and nightmare. I could never get entirely what the song was about; the scoobydoowopwop way that singer Pat Kane dribbled the lyrics out rendered them coma-flecked, insensible, semi-sentient. If you even listen to the first couple of lines, it sounds like he sings "You said you geeza cah now seben yeesa go" when he actually sings (as I just learned) "You said, you recall about seven years ago now." Nope. No, he doesn't sing that. "Gonna strag for the rag to get into your heart." Guess, or look it up.
"Love lee putting me down in a total lee ooh aye" equals "Loved you for putting me down in a totally new way." Laughing here. The way he says "Git AWAY now!" has always cracked me up, as do his limp wrists in the video. "Gonna whip up my labour of love." ("Going to withdraw my labour of love.") And on and on...pure misheard lyrics comedy.
My favourite part is this hilariously overwrought segment from the song (again only part-understood in the 80s by me): "I don't need your ministration/your bad determination/I've had enough of you, and your super-bad crew/I don't need you, I don't need your/pseudo-satisfaction baby." To this day I still quote "I've had enough of you and your super-bad crew" to myself, when mocking something, and am laughing here typing it.
It's so 80s hip-hop American, that it coming out of a Scottish mouth at that time was the funniest thing in the world. It still is. To me, that is. Shrug. As for the video, having plaster of Paris on the band's faces...eh...aye? Can certainly see the connection with the garbled lyrics. Maybe the headspinning video director got as confused by the lyrics as the average listener and lensed his interpretation of what was going on.
As for Pat Kane's current self-righteous, left-vs-right-vs-wrong wannabe-Guardian musings in that children's comic The National, the less said the better. Doesn't fit the time capsule period I am finishing up with here anyway, so I will leave well enough alone. Hope you've enjoyed it and had a laugh, catch youse later.
Git away now!
THE END
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