Birthday Blues No. 1 #3 - Mud - Tiger Feet

 

I am three years old and Mud are number one with Tiger Feet.

My memories of this time are hazy. I am living in Maidstone. So it’s probably for the best. Sixth tier football. Too far from London to be convenient, not near enough France to swim. We had a black Labrador called Lassie. I can picture seeing my Dad walk to work. A candle on the landing at bedtime. A red pedal car I had with a personalised reg.

This was as close to success as I ever got. There were neighbours on the square where we lived. One was called Shirley. Another one was called Eddie. I remember watching an animated episode of Star Trek round a kid’s house called Danny. I think he was called Danny. But they had colour TV and we didn’t so that was how I discovered money. I went to a playgroup where I threw an orange at Santa. Weekends were often spent at my dad’s parents – Poppa and Nanny Cuckoo. Poppa wasn’t Italian, though he was from the Rhondda originally and had ended up in London after the war. Nanny Cuckoo was a gentle woman who used to shout Cuckoo down the stairs to her maisonette door when I banged the knocker. I had pyjamas with the words Pop Star on.  I was obsessed with the TV show Rainbow. I had spotted an album featuring songs from the show in the window of a shop. My mum saved up and bought me the record, bringing it home and putting the vinyl on the record player. The crackle of the theme tune echoed across the lounge. The music didn’t interest me, I just gazed at Zippy and George on the album sleeve, my heroes.  I once woke up early to eat all the Jaffa Cakes and left obvious clues as to the culprit. Outside, unbeknownst to me, my dad was fighting with Tories and getting into all kinds of bother. A little sister was born in 1973, though in my memories she just appears as an irritating three-year-old.

There are two anecdotes about the 3 year old me that regularly get trotted out. The first one is what I like to call the Jenkins Pollock incident. My Dad was a keen painter. He had a little area of one room set aside for his easel and oils and what have you. One day he realised I’d been quiet for too long and found that I had discovered, pleasingly, that if you jump on a tube of paint, colour will be shot across the room in a joyful manner. Sadly, for him, he discovered me on about tube 12.

The other one is the time I decided to ride my tricycle downstairs.

Luckily for me, our stairs at the time had two sections at a right angle to each other. I’d crashed instantly, of course, on the smaller section after just three stair steps or so. My Mum found me upside down, tricycle wheel spinning, relatively unscathed.

If you can remember the seventies, you were there.

There was a layer of dirt over everything in those days. Most surfaces were sticky. On the television, sex offenders openly frolicked with children. The streets were dark and filled with uncollected rubbish. The Yorkshire Ripper released his first EP. Punks waited for Thatcher. The socialist government dressed every child in flares and flammable nightwear.

There are several schools of thought about seventies Britain. One, largely perpetuated by the kind of halfwit who’ll be voting Reform next time round, says that it was a country where you could leave your front door open, nobody got murdered and if they did your neighbourhood bobby would have caught them anyway once he’d given your kids a friendly clip round the ear for doing the kind of crazy shit that got kids maimed, blown up and drowned in Public Information Films. Another says it was fucking grim, nothing worked, the country was in the grip of hard left lunatic trade unions and if it wasn’t for Thatcher riding to the rescue, we’d all be living in some kind of Soviet style misery right now.

And then there’s those who claim that it was brilliant. The NHS worked. Top of the Pops was brilliant. Bowie taught us how to be glam, the punks taught us how to be rebellious. It was sexy and colourful, vibrant and daring. We had Play for Today and Play Away. Instead of qualifying for World Cups, England decided to have a stream of maverick (trans. often shitfaced), journeymen (more trans. undisciplined) footballers who we still celebrate today for not being as good as George Best.

I’m not sure which school I side with but I do know how I feel about Tiger Feet.

One of the great Twitter activities in recent years has been joining the masses passing comments and pouring scorn whilst watching BBC4’s regular Friday night repeats of old episodes of Top of the Pops. Lots of editions haven’t been shown, usually because the show is presented by somebody who was later convicted for child sex offences, or because one of the performers has. Or because Mike “Crash Landing” Smith has put the kybosh on it for some reason.

Most surviving episodes from 1974 feature an act who look like at least one member of the group probably has a laptop of interest to the cops. And, in the case of Mud, they’ve got two.

Tiger Feet is the kind of record that the British record buying public used to buy in their millions. It’s catchy, it’ s shit and it comes with some kind of attendant dance. In case you aren’t familiar with it, it’s terrible.

Mud. Christ, it’s so unambitious. Mud. FFS. The singer was called Les. He looked vaguely like Mike “Frank Butcher” Reid. One of the guitarists used to dress as a woman, I think. Or at least wear dangly earrings. Because that’s what it took back in Power Cut Britain to give your band a personality. Not for Mud the gender bending androgyny already taken on and abandoned by Bowie etc. It’s all a bit nudge nudge, wink wink. A little bit of a laugh for Queerbashing Britain.

And yeah it’s supposed to be fun, its just a lighthearted bit of nonsense. A harmless novelty hit – the kind of thing your dad would dance to at a wedding, accidentally headbutting a bridesmaid when he tries to do the dance. But that’s why I hate it, it’s that kind of song. It’s a shit seaside fairground of a song, all the warmth of a hot car in a seventies traffic jam. It’s the kind of music that people who don’t like music buy. Or at least used to. These days, it’s all endless identikit shitpop. Maybe things were better.

That bloke in the dress ended up writing Cant Get You Out of My Head for gay icon Kyle.

That’s right, that’ s right, that’s right….

Current Ranking of Birthday no. 1 - 2

Final Ranking of Birthday no.1 - N/A

What Should Have Been Number 1 instead that week - Love On a Mountain Top - Robert Knight.