Funny the Things, eh?

I used to like Sounds. Not as good as the NME admittedly, and a tad heavy on the DEATH TO FALSE METAL! Coverage, but streets ahead of the dour, priggish Melody Maker, for sure. Anyway, one of the wacky stunts the paper pulled towards the end of its life was to fill two whole pages with made-up charts. Not just the notoriously unreliable ‘indie charts’ (ie what some surly get in Notting Hill thinks his customers ought to be buying), but charts of everything from pie fillings to the most popular catchphrases on Bullseye. (This last achieved fame by being read out, a few weeks later, on the programme, to the mock-bemusement of Jim Bowen, and the as ever genuine bemusement of the crowd.)

One of these charts, published some time in early 1988, has stuck in my mind ever since. God knows why - it’s not especially funny or interesting in itself. A lot of it doesn’t even make sense. But, well, ‘funny the things, eh?’ And in an attempt to purge this pointless bit of whimsy from my mind for good, here it is, as the inkies used to say all the time, ‘in full’:

“WHERE ARE THEY NOW?” PETES

1. Pete Stride & John Plain
2. Peter Perrett
3. Pete Wylie
4. Peter Glaze
5. Peter Oosterhuis
6. Peter, Paul and Mary
7. Peter Lorimer (Leeds)
8. Peters and Lee
9. Pete Gunn
10. Pete Best
    

(The little flower things didn't appear in the original paper, of course, it's just Blogger being an arse and not letting me do a numbered list, for some reason. Anyway, let's have a rummage...)

PETE STRIDE AND JOHN PLAIN
A very Sounds choice, these two being members of pub-punk act The Lurkers and punk-pub band The Boys respectively. Dunno about The Boys, but The Lurkers sounded like 101 variations on The Clash’s White Riot to my punk-ignorant ears and, shall we say, respected the privacy of the UK Top 40. Still, loads of other people, including Peel, loved them, and they ‘made The Ramones sound like Queen’, which has to be worth something. Here’s some phlegmatically flailing skinny tie action from the lads on Revolver (sadly the clip cuts off before we get to hear Peter Cook’s soused verdict on the band.)



PETER PERRETT
Lead signer of The Only Ones, of course, who may have been nowhere to be seen in 1988, but now are all over Jools Holland, adverts and compilations – doing Another Girl Another Planet in all cases, admittedly, but Perrett’s still about, albeit tainted with association with The Libertines, of all folk. And he could still do with a bun or two by the looks of things.



PETE WYLIE
Bit cheeky of them to bung the Wah!meister into this list, as he’d been in the charts with Sinful just over a year previously. Sadly it’s more appropriate these days, as an accident in the early ‘90s put the kybosh on his solo career, though a comeback is apparently ‘imminent’, which could be rather good. Of course, the best band he was ever in was The Crucial Three, one of those late-’70s Liverpool bands who never actually wrote songs or performed, but just hung about in tea shops all day talking about how great it was being in a band. That’s the music career for me. Other members were Julian Cope, who is ace in a bizarre new way every day, and Ian McCulloch who I’ve never been able to stick. Put that jumper on properly lad, you’ll ruin the neck hole! And stop pouting!



PETER GLAZE
Not a very well-researched list this, is it? The former Crazy Gang understudy turned shortarse recipient of a giant tuning fork to the head on Crackerjack* had been dead a good five years by the time this chart was compiled. He carked it halfway through a series of the late-period, Stu Francis-’n’-gunge-era incarnation of the show too, raising the question of how, if at all, the programme commemorated that sad event. A memorial round of ‘get the whistle out of the tray of Sugar Puffs with your teeth’? Or just a mournful Jimmy Krankie with two downturned thumbs, declaring the tragic loss decidedly un-fandabidozi? Best of all, while Glaze was still operational, he could conceivably have covered the work of any of the abovementioned Pete’s in that section of Crackerjack where they do a daft mini-play and shoehorn a Hit parade number into the action. Not sure Glaze’s bluff tones would suit a Perrett song, but I bet he ould do a belting Seven Minutes to Midnight.


PETER OOSTERHUIS
Bit of a zany choice here, with the oddly-named lanky golfer who was all over the telly in the canary yellow plus fours era of the sport, but had buggered off to America by the time this list came out. That’s it.


PETER, PAUL AND MARY
Were still going in ‘88! And are still going these days to the best of my knowledge. Just because you stopped listening to Junior Choice when they started going overboard with the Ralph MacTell songs doesn’t mean that world just vanished, Mr List Compiling Man!



PETER LORIMER (LEEDS)
Footballer famous for his ability to kick the ball very hard. Unlike his team-mates, who preferred to do the same to the opposing side. No joke like an old joke, eh?


PETERS AND LEE
This list does admittedly run out of steam towards the end. Though this pair are a legitimate Where Are They Now? Target, being as they were bloody everywhere in the 1970s on the back of pretty much one song, with their own TV Christmas specials and everything. They’d long packed it in by 1988, though I do remember seeing them on Summertime Special once, which must have just about been in the ‘80s.



PETE GUNN
Not sure who this even is. Do they mean Peter Gunn, the 1950s detective series? Or the Duane Eddy theme tune from same? If it’s the latter, that was being covered by The Art of Noise about the time this was published, so zero points on the research front there. But knowing this paper, it’s more likely referring to the bassist from Peter and the Test Tube Babies or something.



PETE BEST
Oh, of all the cheap shots… It’s hard not to feel sympathy for the Biggest Loser in Rock (copyright lots of little losers). Twenty years of sterling work for the civil service and a rock solid marriage to the girl off the biscuit counter at Woolie’s mean nothing, do they? Oddly enough, this list was published in the very year Best knocked his day job on the head and went back to music, forming The Pete Best Band. I like to think this list was directly responsible.


* - Crackerjack!