Birthday Blues No. 1 #2 - Little Jimmy Osmond - Long Haired Lover from Liverpool

NOTE - I had made the mistake of presuming Wikipedia was correct and so this is about the song that was number 1 the day before my second birthday. I can't be arsed to write anything about the song that was the actual number 1 24 hours later because it's Blockbuster by The Sweet, a song that somehow pipped Bowie's Jean Genie to number 1 because instead of a sleazy transgressive pop song inspired by The Stooges, Burroughs and Genet, Joe Bastard Public preferred the same tune but with a fucking police siren and some bloke called Brian dressed like a twat.

I am two years old and learning to hate America.

Little Jimmy Osmond is number 1 with a song so twee, so fucking schmaltzy, that Nixon was immediately forced to suspend hostilities in North Vietnam to boost his country’s standing in the world. The Osmonds were Mormons, I think they’re the ones with the guy finding a magic golden book about a hundred years earlier, just as he had run out of money.

The Osmonds were everywhere. They had a cartoon show. Donny and Marie had a tv show that used to be on midweek when I was a kid and there were only three channels and most of what you had to watch was absolute shite, they used to duet on love songs which, considering they were brother and sister, tells you all you need to know about the Seventies and the post-free love attitudes to noncery and light entertainment. There were some older Osmond brothers too, ambassadors for some Salt Lake City car dealership, and then there was Little Jimmy, the CIA approved antidote to Little Michael Jackson of the Jackson 5.

Child stars are vile. It’s not the kids themselves of course. It’s the dollar eyed parents who push their offspring away from a normal childhood the moment they smell a buck or two in it for them. They all end up fucked in some way. Literally in some cases. From Judy to Justin, through endless Zavaronis and Britneys, you can see the sadness in the eyes, ten thousand hours of rehearsals and auditions and pressure and threats and all because Daddy hated his job and Mummy couldn’t sing. Charlotte Church never had a childhood and now she lives near me. Don’t put your daughter on the stage, Mrs Worthington.

Long Haired Lover from Liverpool was, until the creation of Ed Sheeran’s Galway Girl, widely considered by scholars to be the most cynically written song of all time. And, by “widely considered by scholars” I mean “thought by a bitter, hateful fifty something failure from South Wales.” The Beatles had only just split up, an overreaction by the Fab Four to my parents pre-decimal fucking (see Birthday Blues No. 1 #1 - The New Seekers - I'd Like to Teach The World to Sing). Liverpool, like much of the world, was still in mourning. Those long haired lads had fucked off to the States or Scotland or some other place you didn't give your kids cigarettes for breakfast.

Little Jimmy was adorable, in that chubby faced wholesome way that Nixon’s America presumed we liked our kids to be, toothy and well-fed, confident in a showbiz way. There was absolutely nothing scandalous about him, no black and white pictures of him naked and shrieking in a just stepped out of a Napalm shower kind of way existed. No, our Little Jimmy was a Stars and Stripes turkey, a picket fenced slice of apple pie. He was America’s revenge for us corrupting their youth with the Rolling Stones and all that. Little Jimmy offering to be some sort of Scouse moptop fuckboy in return for Californian fingering experiences (THE SUBTEXT OF THIS BILGE) was somehow thought by this desperately grim archipelago of ours to be worthy of being Top of the Pops. It’s awful. How awful? It’s enough for you to imagine a remake of Adolescence where someone knifes Little Jimmy Osmond and no one gives a fuck, that’s how bad. And there was no need for this. Because the Osmonds as a family band had made Crazy Horses, one of the three best songs of the Seventies, a mental environmentally themed rocker with electronic neighing and a brass section giving it the big one. Tellingly, little Jimmy isn’t on that one. He’s being stuffed into a cute Christmas jumper somewhere waiting to pretend to some West Coast girl he’s actually from Liverpool, or a leprechaun, or anything just to get his fat Mormon mitts on her. As big a lie as telling your pals that you knew the whereabouts of some super new Bible type deal made from gold and buried somewhere in the hills.

Current Ranking of Birthday no. 1 - N/A

Final Ranking of Birthday no.1 - N/A

What Should Have Been Number 1 instead that week - The Jean Genie - David Bowie.


 


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