Look: Unless you’re a resident in, or owner of, an English retirement home, I cannot in good conscience recommend that you purchase a copy of early Seventies English novelty act Lieutenant Pigeon’s 2023 compilation album The Decca Years. It’s the kind of album you should listen to with antimacassars, not headphones. The smell of overcooked roast beef should be in the air. And your best friend should be a desiccated specimen of vintage English truculence named Gertie, who is forever accusing you filching her “kinky knickers.”
Of The Decca Years’ forty-eight tracks, compiled from three LPs the band recorded in 1973 and 1974 along with some songs, many are relatively staid music hall fare. I find maybe ten listenable, and I’m being charitable. And unless you’re a rather perverse person, or living in the aforementioned retirement community, you’ll probably never feel the need to listen to said maybe ten listenable tracks more than twice, once to be struck agog, and then again to be sure you actually heard what you think you just heard.
But: you should give The Decca Years a listen, if only because Lieutenant Pigeon of Coventry England (birthplace of The Specials!) are probably the strangest band to ever find their way onto BBC’s popular television “programme” Top of the Pops AND the top of the pop charts (back in 1972), which given we’re talking about England where eccentricity is more tolerated (and even celebrated) than here in the boring States, is really saying something. The English are a strange people. They sit down to eel pie and spotted dick, say completely incomprehensible things like “Bob’s your uncle” and celebrate Boxing Day, which has absolutely nothing to do with fisticuffs, bare-knuckled or gloved. And they don’t even celebrate the Fourth of July!
Lieutenant Pigeon was formed by two veterans of the experimental band Stavely Makepiece, Rob Woodward (piano, guitar, tin whistle, vocals) and Steve Johnson (bass, tin whistle, vocals, and glam garb), joined by drummer and vocalist Nigel Fletcher. Their music was closer in style to old-fashioned music hall than rock and roll, but they were eccentrics, not traditionalists, and produced the occasional neo-glam or straight-up pop track. None of warrants them more than the most passing footnote in rock history. What MADE Lieutenant Pigeon was their fourth member and secret weapon, honky-tonk and ragtime piano player Mrs. Hilda Woodward, the 58-year-old (at the time of her first of several Top of the Pops appearances) mother of Rob Woodward.
Hilda was a matronly looking woman, and an employee of the local Jaguar plant who spent her evenings banging out sentimental favorites on the piano for the regulars at the Stoke Ex-Servicemen’s Club, She also played on occasion with the Guildhall Operatic Society, and was a music teacher. Hilda was more or less pressed into duty by the band because 1) it was her living room they were practicing and recording in, 2) they knew a natural born rock and roller when they heard one.
In 1972 the band recorded the very odd “Mouldy Old Dough” in the Woodward living room. The rest is history. It became a surprise hit in Belgium, then crossed the channel (as Hitler never could) and took the UK by storm, going all the way to number one. It’s a very strange song, all martial drumming, tin whistle interludes, and Hilda’s piano playing, with Fletcher occasionally growling, like a toothless old drunk, the title. How it went to the top of the charts is beyond the understanding of anyone not English.
They followed it up with the slightly more fast-paced “Desperate Dan,” which featured the exact same elements and had Fletcher croaking “Dan, I’m a desperate man,” although it’s hard to make out. Mom’s playing is more raucous. And that was it, their moment of fame, although the band’s drum-heavy instrumental cover of obscure American songwriter Thomas Payne Westendorf’s 1875 standard “I’ll Take You Home Again Kathleen” made it to number 3 on the Australian charts. (You can hear the song—although not their version—on a 1966 episode of Star Trek!)
Most of the music on The Decca Years is staid and tinny old-timey stuff, but there are exceptions. “Dirty Old Man” has a quaint Beatles melody and has Fletcher (I think) croaking, choking, cackling, and coughing out the lyrics in an old sot’s voice while either Johnson or Woodward provides more traditional pop lyrical accompaniment. “And the Fun Goes On” is a fuzz-guitar, tin whistle, and piano stomper that has a primitive glam Chinnichap vibe to it. In the same vein is the coulda-been-great instrumental “The Villain,” with its drum pummel and fuzzed-out bass. Throw in a second drummer and a vocal chant and I’m pure dead convinced it could have been a hit for Gary Glitter.
“Big Butch Baby” opens with some jazzy piano and guitar before morphing into a rockabilly honky-tonker, complete with some tough vocals and some high-pitched backing vocals. Certainly SOMEONE could have taken this one and run with it. “Rockabilly Hot Pot” is a propulsive number with some cool piano gratis Hilda, but what makes it are the vocals that go “Oh ah, rockabilly hot pot” over and over and again, followed by some pseudo-yodeling. I recommend this one to Wizzard, or would if they were still around. And it’s got a jet taking off in the middle of it for no reason that I can figure out.
Lieutenant Pigeon’s covers of “Great Balls of Fire” and “Yellow Submarine” are unmitigated disasters—they obviously weren’t cut out to pigeonize contemporary rock favorites. But “Hilda’s Tonic”—which opens with some radio white noise and a brief psychedelic interlude, is a wonderful Beatles pastiche complete with McCartney-school vocals and a lively tempo. And lots of great piano by Hilda Woodward, of course. “Aggravation” is a piano and guitar-heavy honky-tonker that is undone by the “ah ah ah” vocals that get tossed in. But it’s proof positive that Hilda could hold her own when it came to pounding on the 88s. Which leaves the wonderful “After the Discotheque Is Over,” a bona fide Beatlesesque pop gem that has the lads singing in harmony and demonstrates that they could have transcended the “novelty” label with ease.
The only American equivalents who come to mind are Tiny Tim and Mrs. Miller, the latter a true novelty act popular in the 1960s for her shrill and vibrato-mad takes of such contemporary faves as “Monday Monday” and “Downtown.” She was also in her fifties and her vocals were once colorfully compared to sound of “roaches scurrying across a trash can lid.” So America isn’t eccentric-proof. But Mrs. Miller never found herself on American Bandstand, and that’s the critical difference. Hilda Woodward was a real rock and roll granny, and was beamed via TV to millions of kids in the same year and on the same show as the likes of David Bowie, T-Rex, Rod Stewart, and Slade.
If punk proved that you didn’t have to be Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, or ELP to become a rock star, that any acne-spotted kid could pick up a guitar and find him or herself on the cover of NME, Hilda Woodward proved that ABSOLUTELY ANYBODY could become a rock star, even a late-middle-aged lady with double chin. The R&R dream is within everybody’s reach. And for that, we all owe Hilda a debt of gratitude. And what else can I say besides Bob’s your uncle?
GRADED ON A CURVE:
B
