大象传媒

by Bob Stanley

Underneath the Seaside Special comedy act, it seemed there was a real pop group trying to get out...

Bob Stanley

The first time I came across the Barron Knights was when they appeared on Top Of The Pops with Live In Trouble in 1977. I was 12 at the time, and thought their skits were pretty funny. By the time they released A Taste Of Aggro a year later (no.3 '78), their schtick - medleys of contemporary hits with comical lyric changes - was already beginning to pall for me. Into the eighties when the Knights released a single about any passing pop cultural event, from hip hop (Buffalo Bill's Last Scratch) to the rubiks cube (Mr Rubik) to Barbara Woodhouse (The Sit Song), I started to feel sorry for them. Underneath the Seaside Special comedy act, it seemed there was a real pop group trying to get out. They must have been trapped in a living hell. "Can we get away with a ballad I just wrote?" "No! Let's do a single about John Noakes..."

Their first three singles hadn't been comedy records at all. Let's Face It, on Fontana in '62, sounded like Joe Meek producing Eden Kane; Jo Anne was a fast-paced beat number with a touch of Johnny Cash chicka-boom; and they followed that with a more than respectable version of Mel Torme's Comin' Home Baby. It was their fourth single in 1964 - a comedy medley entitled Call Up The Groups - that gave them a no.3 hit and doomed them to a decades-long career of trying to raise a laugh.

The Barron Knights weren't alone in being a beat group who played skits on stage. Birmingham's were wont to do The Laughing Policeman and When I'm Cleaning Windows, but it was their good fortune that the melancholy He's In Town was their breakthrough single - coincidentally, it was also a no.3 hit in 1964. Their comedy numbers were restricted to album tracks and the occasional b-side.

No such luck for the Barron Knights who followed Call Up The Groups with an odd polka single called Come To The Dance that struggled to no.42. After that it became apparent that the public only wanted wall-to-wall comedy from the Knights: Pop Go The Workers (no.5, '65), Merrie Gentle Pops (no.9 '65) and Under New Management (no.15 '66).

None of their 'straight' records were hits in spite of some excellent efforts. A fine piece of ringing Merseybeat written by P'Nut Langford called She's The One - which has had SOTS plays in the past - was on the b-side of 1964's The House Of Johan Strauss. They even released a song that the Who never released - Lazy Fat People was another spoof, but it didn't grate on the second listen. It's hard to tell if it's meant to be satire, like Short People - quite possibly not as the "beautiful young people" are blue, having been suffocated by the lazy fat people. On the flip was a moody original called In The Night, written by the group - or 'Us-Lot' as the writing credit says - with a doomy piano break.

Before their late seventies renaissance, the Barron Knights finally got to cut a whole album of non-comedy material. One Man's Meat (1973) veers from glam to singer-songwriter to protest song, all band originals, and is well worth picking up. Their harmonies are never less than strong. And there isn't a 'dad joke' in sight.