Superspiked

Have you ever wondered what would happen if you brought two titans of comedy together for a disco single? Well, wonder no more!

 

Credited on the label to Bill Oddie And The Superspike Squad (Featuring John Cleese) but on the picture sleeve to the Superspike Squad with Bill Oddie and John Cleese, Superspike (Parts 1 and 2) was issued by Bradleys – the same label that issued the vast majority of the Goodies pop output – in February 1976.

 

Although best known for their individual successes in seminal comedies The Goodies and Monty Python’s Flying Circus, Cleese and Oddie were old friends, first crossing paths at university in the Cambridge Footlights, before going on to appear in the long-running radio comedy show I’m Sorry, I’ll Read That Again. Both wrote for, and occasionally appeared in, the satirical hit show That Was The Week That Was, and both wrote for the ITV comedy Doctor in the House. More recently Cleese had appeared in The Goodies Christmas 1973 episode The Goodies and the Beanstalk.

 

The Superspike Squad was ‘A chorus of international athletes’, including sprinter Ainsley Bennet and Commonwealth Games gold medallist Sue Reeve, with support from professional backing singers the Chanter Sisters, who had worked on records for Elton John, Roxy Music, Pink Floyd and others. Doreen Chanter wrote Star, a 1982 chart hit for Kiki Dee.

 

Superspike, a spiked running shoe emblem complete with a patriotic, Union flag tongue, was the official logo of the International Athletes’ Club, and was used to raise funds to pay for equipment and training for British athletes. The International Athletes’ Club had originally been formed in 1958, ‘In order to provide a medium for discussing, representing and promoting the views of the body of contemporary international athletes in the U.K.’

 

With lofty ambitions to raise £500,000 over three years, the hope would have been that the single would bolster these funds, and help to send Britain’s elite runners, gymnasts and other sportspeople off to compete around the world, specifically the 1976 Olympics in Montreal and the 1980 games in Moscow.

 

Superspike was advertised as ‘The funniest and funkiest record of the year’, although as you'll soon tell it really wasn’t: funky hits from 1976 included both Car Wash and Daddy Cool, and when it comes to comedy, Richard Pryor, Rutland Weekend Television and Pam Ayers all did rather well that year too. As one contemporary reviewer put it, ‘Needless to say, this record is exactly what you'd expect from Messrs. Oddie and Cleese - complete nonsense. Bill does his Funky Gibbon bit with a little help from Basil Fawlty… all in aid of a fund to help Britain’s athletes.’ Record Mirror put it more succinctly: ‘The record could easily be called “Do The Funky Plimsoll”… Good cause, maybe, uninspired definitely.’ 

Sadly, neither the single nor the Superspike campaign were a success, and by the time the Montreal games came around, in the summer of 1976, the whole thing had been forgotten.

 

Anyway, here are both sides of this fascinating, if flawed, piece of pop and comedy history. 

Enjoy!

 

Download Part One HERE

 

Download Part Two HERE

In Praise of Older Women

Todd Andrews is one of my absolute favourite song-poem stylists: his thin, warbly voice is at odds with the country-western songs he regularly performed for Nashville outfit Nu-Sound Records and, as a bonus, his performances invariably include a spoken word section. For me, he is a purveyor of song-poem gold.

 

Although I have tried, I have really struggled to find out much about Todd Andrews. For a time I laboured under the misapprehension that he and writer-producer Alex Zanetis (of song-poem outfit Royal Master) were the same person, but that seems not to be the case. Zanetis had a deeper, more sonorous (and much more accomplished) voice than Andrews, and my assumption that the two men were one and the same was came from the fact that Andrews recorded for Royal Master under the name Allen Scott, and having heard Zanetis’s solo recording Are You Ready For the Lord, where he sounds similar to Andrews/Scott. However, I’m now convinced that Zanetis and Andrews/Scott are most certainly two different people.

 

A division of Nashville Music Productions, Nu-Sound was primarily a song-poem company, but like several others it occasionally dabbled in more mainstream releases. The company actually enjoyed a couple of US chart hits with Keith Bradford, another of Nu-Sound’s stable of singers (who scored a number 89 hit on the Billboard Country chart in 1978) and veteran country singer Rusty Draper, whose Harbor Lights was a minor hit (number 87, to be precise) on the same chart in 1980. 

Nashville Music Productions were operational from at least 1968 though to 1986, although associated labels seem to have been operating into the early 2000s. Their usual schtick was to charge people $45 for a lead sheet – a simple, handwritten piece of sheet music, one copy only – and follow that up with an offer to have the song professionally recorded for a further $110. Each letter would be accompanied by an official looking contract, and each contract would be accompanied by a further request for money: the $110 had brought the songwriter a cassette, but for a further $350 he/she/they could have 50 copies of the song on 7” single. The offers would continue, with extra fees for rhyming dictionaries, biographies, lists of companies to mail the record to and so on. Writer, DJ and singer Shad O’Shea writes about his own experiences with the company in his 1986 book, Just For the Record.

One of the nascent songwriters happy to pay a minimum of £495 to have their words etched into vinyl was J. Lambert, the author of the 1979 release My Baby’s in Texas and its wonderful flip side, Older Women. A J. Lambert wrote a better-known song, Lester’s Gone, in tribute to Lester Flatt the same year, but there’s little doubt in my mind that would have been Jake Lambert, who wrote for Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs in the 1960s: our ‘J. Lambert’ is/was nothing like as accomplished.

 

We may never know what became of our J. Lambert (nor of Todd Andrews/Allen Scott for that matter), but their words are still here for you all to enjoy.

 

Download Texas HERE

 

Download Women HERE