FIFTY YEARS AGO we were humming along to the hits of 1976. Some have magnificently stood the test of time; others have not. Join us on Memory Lane as we review them on their golden anniversaries.
Fifty years ago the song at the top of the charts was the quirky Combine Harvester (Brand New Key) by the Wurzels. Only in Britain…
There’s a story to this one. In 1971 the US folk Singer Melanie had her best success with Brand New Key, a catchy, sassy song which was to prove to be her greatest success. It tells the story of a young woman who has brand new roller skates and tries to lure in the young man she has her eye on by pointing out that he has a brand new key (the tool you need to adjust the size of your roller skates) and they should link them up for better performance – as well as trying out a romance.
The song is a little suggestive (“(I) don’t go too fast but I go pretty far”), but it also has something of the feminist perspective of the times (“I’ve been all round the world/Some people say I done alright for a girl.”)
Before Melanie’s success, in 1966, singer/songwriter Adge Cutler put together a backing band to work on his records. Cutler was from Somerset and had a strong Somerset accent. He was part of the folk scene, still very much alive in Britain at that time, but his own songs were rooted in West Country tradition of farming and drinking cider. The band adopted the name “The Wurzels” after the animal food crop mangelwurzel, grown in the area. Their first EP (Extended Player – a record somewhere between a single and an album) was named Scrumpy and Western, which was soon adopted as a new genre.
The Wurzels achieved some national notoriety in 1966 for their single Drink Up Thy Zider, which reached number 45 in the charts– but they remained a local, perhaps a regional, band. Things carried on in this way, and in May 1974 they did a show in Hereford. Sadly, Adge Cutler drove himself home from the show. He fell asleep at the wheel, flipped the car and died. The band of backing singers was left without a songwriter. They began to re-write current pop songs, introducing their favourite themes of cider, farming and village life. Somehow they came across Melanie’s Brand New Key, and the rest is… history.
As a song, it is an annoying, catchy novelty song. It doesn’t have biting satire. Once you’ve smiled narrowly at the comparison, there’s little more to go on. Gone is the sassy girl fancies boy stuff. The boy fancies girl stuff of the Wurzels’ release is very transactional, and that’s not really amusing.
They topped the charts for two weeks, the musical equivalent of a seaside postcard. We can only apologise to Melanie.
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