Naughty Naughty Naughty / Letters Of Love

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What I didn’t know was that SM were very much an experimental, avant garde band who released some interesting stuff in the 70s. Stavely Makepeace‘s manager was not impressed with this waxing and SM, therefore, became Lieutenant Pigeon for the purposes of performing MOD. Tony Blackburn even manages to take the piss out of his Scottish accent, which was standard for the time. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.

Now the first thing to say is that this isn’t a particularly bad record, the song is actually quite good. Co-written with Jim Dale (of Carry-On fame) it lost out to the legendary John Barrie and Don Black‘s easy listening classic ‘ Born Free‘, a song that became Matt Monro‘s theme tune (more on Matt later).I know I’m being very critical about the cynicism of this record but I’ve not even mentioned the worst aspect of it yet. An obvious choice you might say and, yes, of course it’s obvious but that doesn’t make it less or more rubbish and in some ways its success was inexplicable but not in others. Their follow-up Desperate Dan still made the top 20 but it was just too similar, however, Stavely Makepeace endured and released some very interesting music over the next few years.

Next, they were performing it on TOTP and everyone was talking about the old wifie on the piano, which is what really gave it its ‘novelty’ status. It’s always been a showbiz rule of thumb that if you become well-known, even for a short time, you have to make a record.This lugubrious equine annual bunfight even bumped Monty Python’s Flying Circus from the schedules and became a running gag for years on the programme. Ask anyone over a certain age (OK 55-ish), which single sums up the tackiness of the 70s for them and a fair number might choose this song. Features of the act include dropping or hitting the baby, Judy and Punch battering each other with the ‘slapstick’ (some saw this as domestic violence) and included malevolent characters such Jack Ketch, the Hangman, a ghost, a skeleton and the devil. Mind you, they still are) came up with the gossamer-thin idea of creating a comedy record through the use of clips from other records. In desperation he was asked to deliver the lines in a suitably faux Shakespearian style, which he, of course, was only too happy to do and the rest is camp history.