From 'The Pop Show'

The Osmonds, I’m Still Gonna Need You 

Donny Osmond, Puppy Love 

David Cassidy, Daydreamer 

The Partridge Family, One of Those Nights 

 

From 1971 to 1973, it wasn't my business to be interested in heart-throbs so successfully designed to be adored by girls. Notwithstanding much regard for the very cute Marc Bolan, who was also a creative genius, I was a serious 12 to 14 year old and those like me at a grammar school for boys had been told we were intelligent and were inclined to believe it. The orthodoxy was to regard the outbreak of mostly American good-looking boys as 'teeny bop' or 'commercial', despite the fact that such a portentous and dull album as The Dark Side of the Moon outsold them all.

At a relatively early age I had despaired of daytime Radio 1 with its cast of cheerful DJ's playing chart hits, new releases, 'records of the week' and golden oldies interspersed with their breezy good humour in favour of listening to Sounds of the 70's, from 10pm-midnight when there would be the sardonic Dancing Jack Peel, the soporofic Bob Harris or the minimalist Pete Drummond on Friday nights would just tell you what you'd been listening to and then play the next album track by Spooky Tooth, Vinegar Joe or Tonto's Expanding Head Band.

My chosen favourites were denim-clad post-hippies with lank long hair like Lindisfarne, for ultimate preference, but also anybody like them, including the influx of bands from Europe, like Focus, that I attributed to Mr. Heath's brilliant maneouvre of somehow persuading both Europe to accept the UK into the Common Market and the people of the UK to vote in favour of it.

While it might have been easy to dismiss Donny Osmond and his brothers and the transparently vacuous ciphers later to be featured in such magazines as Non-Threatening Boys that Lisa used to read in The Simpsons, it wasn't quite so easy to put away David Cassidy who quite simply had it all, not least by being better looking than most girls but also by having some good songwriters on his side.

In One of Those Nights,

  you say to yourself
"Hey, couldn't I live without it"
Well I think so, on the other hand
I doubt it
Suddenly she's crashin' through my mind
Like waves upon the shore.

 

Not many teenage boys devoutly expressing devotion to their Emerson, Lake & Palmer albums or labouring through the latest drab epic by Pink Floyd didn't furtively glance at their sister's copy of Jackie and know, somewhere inside them, that they were wrong and she was right.

The Osmomds had a go at being wild, Mormon boys with Crazy Horses, Down by the Lazy River and One Bad Apple on which they most obviously revealed themselves as an attempt at a white answer to the Jackson 5 but it was with the 'ballads', the mournful love songs, that they exceeded themselves, with Donny not forefront but taking his place in the line. In Love Me for a Reason, the songwriters, that include Johnny Bristol, find,

I'm just a little old-fashioned
It takes more than a physical attraction
My initial reaction is
Honey give me a love
Not a fascimile of

 

They were guilty of no more than vaudeville, of song and dance, and being good and successful at it. Those still nostalgically listening to the music of the mountebanks that sold them records with more outrageous claims to artistic significance in 1972 still haven't realized they bought a pig in a poke but as long as they never realize, they'll be happy enough and it won't matter.