Released today in 1984: My White Bicycle

WEA YZ30

‘Neil’ (full name Neil Wheedon Watkins Pye, credited on his singles with a lower-case N) was a character in the BBC sitcom ‘The Young Ones’. This was a show that generated a significant amount of merchandise in the mid-80s, with the character of Neil being the focus of a lot of it. A book, Neil’s Book Of The Dead, was published, but his appearance on the cover of Smash Hits (5 July 1984; Neil gave that his date of birth because “Today is the first day of the rest of your life and it could get WORSE!”) was prompted by his cover of Traffic’s Hole In My Shoebeing released as a single. There were two problems with this, as Mark Ellen discussed with Neil in the Smash Hits interview.

1. Neil had died before the single was released. Everyone had seen it happen in the final episode of ‘The Young Ones’ on 19 June 1984, and the single didn’t come out until July. “You will remember to tell them that I’m dead, right, and this was recorded before I died? Because otherwise I’ll get into real trouble…I just went along to this studio to, like, do some of my poetry and sing some of my songs and have a really mellow experience and then they got this really heavy producer in who said, you know, that we had to use tape-recorders and things and then, you know, the whole thing kind of escalated from there and just became , like, a real hassle.”

2. Neil didn’t like the blatant commercialism of making a record anyway. “I think it’s a sell-out. And all the films and books and everything and all the t-shirts and all the little mugs and everything that are going to come out to promote the single, the jungles on the radio and everything, all the ‘sell-out’ stuff, right, was all done, like, before we died and we’re all going off to a special island that’s a tax haven… oh, no, we’re not. Oh no. I’ve blown it already… a special tax exile island where we can rest up and watch the royalties come in.”

Despite these two pressing problems, the single very nearly reached the top of the chart; both it, and its follow-up My White Bicycle, were taken from Neil’s Heavy Concept Album; and Neil’s recordings ended up winning a special award at the 1985 BPI Awards, for comedy recording of the year. But thereafter, his career as a recording artist came to an end and he returned to being dead.

It wasn’t the end of actor Nigel Planer’s sideline as a singer. The following year, there was another release, this time under his own name. He sang the theme song to the ITV television series ‘King And Castle’, in which he also starred. The song was Rough With The Smooth, written by High Cornwell of The Stranglers.

NEW SINGLES on sale from Dec. 7
1984
NEIL (Nigel Planer) My White Bicycle (WEA YZ30)
1987
EURYTHMICS Shame (RCA DA14)
Samantha FOX True Devotion (Jive FOXY13)
The SMITHS Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody (Rough Trade RT200)

Released today in 1986: Living Doll

WEA YZ65

Living Doll was a charity single for Comic Relief, and the comedy team from The Young Ones (featuring Smash Hits cover stars Ade Edmondson and Nigel Planer) were united with the artist who had previously had a hit with the song, Cliff Richard. Cliff’s original, recorded for the film ‘Serious Charge’, topped the chart in the summer of 1959 – and this comedy version also made it to #1. (The BBC television show ‘The Young Ones’, from which his co-performers came from, of course used another of Cliff’s #1s as its theme tune: from the film of the same name, The Young Ones was Cliff’s first single of 1962.)

Cliff’s 1980s saw him return to previous chart form, having managed only fairly minor hits in the prior decade. He had had then perhaps only one genuinely memorable hit (1976’s Devil Woman) until the closing months of the 70s, when his ‘comeback’ really began with his first and only #1 of the decade We Don’t Talk Anymore. The 80s got off to a good start with a Top 10 placing for his first single of the new decade, Carrie. 1980 also saw him formally change his name to Cliff Richard from his birth name of Harry Webb by deed poll, and receive the OBE. He had several more Top 10 hits in the early years of 80s, including the classic Wired For Sound in 1981 and his cover of the mawkishly sentimental Daddy’s Home (the original was an answer song to The Heartbeats’ 1960s hit A Thousand Miles Away), which missed the top spot by one place at the end of the same year.

1983 marked Cliff’s silver anniversary in showbiz and his reward was three more Top 10 hits that year. However, the next two years saw fairly poor chart returns, with only She’s So Beautiful scraping inside the Top 20 – and that was effectively a Stevie Wonder single: with the exception of Cliff’s vocals, the entire recording was arranged, performed and produced by Wonder. Consequently, Living Doll was a timely release. Several more memorable hits followed including the duet with Sarah Brightman All I Ask Of You, Some People from his 1987 album Always Guaranteed, and his Christmas hit Mistletoe and Wine, the best-selling single of 1988.

The decade ended with the release in 1989 of Cliff’s 100th single for EMI, The Best Of Me. In the same year, he also received the ‘Outstanding Contribution to Music’ at the BRIT Awards.

NEW SINGLES on sale from Mar. 10
1986
Samantha FOX Touch Me (I Want Your Body) (Jive FOXY1)
Hazel O’CONNOR Today Could Be So Good (Red Bus RBUS2209)
Cliff RICHARD and The YOUNG ONES featuring Hank MARVIN (Ade Edmondson) Living Doll (WEA YZ65)
THEN JERICHO (Mark Shaw) Muscle Deep (London LON86)