8
Aug 08
10cc – “Dreadlock Holiday”
On one level the ‘plot’ of “Dreadlock Holiday” is hugely important to any judgement of it. On another, not at all, but let’s recap anyway. The narrator is a tourist in Jamaica – he gets mugged for his silver chain and returns to the comfort of his hotel where a woman tries to sell him weed.
Nobody comes out of the story well: the song’s parent album was called Bloody Tourists, and the narrator is a simp, trying and failing to fit in (“concentrating on truckin’ right”) and then fleeing to the hotel at the first sign of trouble. But the island isn’t exactly a welcoming place either, and the message seems to be that if you’re a white tourist, any approach is misguided and nowhere is entirely safe from the scary dark other looking to hustle you at every turn.
This, to my mind, makes for a rather mean-spirited song, a lose-lose game whose main purpose is to make 10cc seem clever and cynically realistic. I haven’t ever been a great fan of 10cc, precisely because I feel there’s this callous smirk behind a lot of their music, and “Dreadlock Holiday” crystallises the feeling for me. That makes me dislike it more than whatever racial or cultural politics might or might not lurk underneath the song: I am sure an extensive comments thread will tease them out!
On the other hand, “Dreadlock Holiday” is often superlative popcraft: that shimmering, unmistakable percussion intro that makes the song a sampler’s or mash-up act’s dream, and the massive chorus – seized on out of context by Sky Sports for an effect darkly comic enough that I’m sure the band enjoy it greatly. Even here, though, the cynicism runs deep. The song, light reggae which slides skilfully from awkward bounce to clammy paranoia, is an inversion of the lyrics’ theme: if you want to be a tourist, it says, stick to the studio and you can happily steal stuff from them. “Dreadlock Holiday” is in some ways the unpleasant opposite of 1978’s other reggae-related #1, “Uptown Top Ranking” – a wiser, crueller denial of its open celebration. Impressive work in its way, but it leaves a nasty taste.
4
As someone who’s only recently discovered Popular, and getting to this a long time after the discussion ended…
but my take on this song has always been fixed in my mind by a moment in a pub in Oxford late that year, when this was followed on the jukebox by probably the best of the pre-No.1 singles by a band that will be commented on Popular a couple of years down the timeline, when the public gets what the public wants.
While the ‘boring old farts’ were wimping off about a stolen necklace and running home to the safety of a hotel swimming pool and a prostitute — in real life it smelt of pubs and Wormwood Scrubs, with his life swimming around him and drowning.
A cheap holiday — do it today…
It’s a moment that stands out really clearly in my mind: how utterly distant the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ had become. And the difference in their reactions — the one running away and seeking pleasure, the other consumed by anger and an urgent, infectious refusal to accept.
It’s a moment that stands in my memory close to the first time I heard “Anarchy” a few months after it came out, something I can only describe as a Taoist moment of understanding. It wasn’t about different types of music; it was about a different way of living.
I always thought it was something hotter not something harder
It only occurred to me recently, the girl in the last verse is not a prostitute but a ganja dealer. “My harvest is the best” and all that, c’mon!
I always imagined that this song was racist (though it’s one of the number 1s from the time when I was listening to pop music that I don’t actually remember hearing at the time), but I had never seen it ‘outed’ as such by anyone until now. Whether it is or not I never much cared for it anyway and, indeed, I never really ‘got’ 10cc at all (mostly before my time and I had no urge to retroactively discover them) though I did like a couple of Godley and Creme’s hits from a few years later. I can see all the clever-clever things they did with their music but it doesn’t really have much to say to me, and obviously if the majority here are correct, it isn’t something I would want to hear from this record anyway. Still, it’s about average to me so I’ll give it 5.
@90 That Jimmy Savile and his notoriously high moral standards.
Judge Dread was apparently at it as well. Talk about projection!
Yes, I mentioned the other day elsewhere on here about Judge Dread’s quote in a Record Mirror interview circa ’75 that there were “a few 14-year-olds I wouldn’t mind giving one to”. The kind of thing you could say back then, presumably. I wondered in a chat with the Swede whether Paul Gambaccini maybe thought at the time that his own sexual preferences were more of a career threat than Savile’s, being the Radio 1 new boy and all that, otherwise he might have taken it further. So many ifs…
I heard “Up with the Cock” the other day, at the end of some US whorehouse ‘fly-on-the-wall’ documentary. Unlikely, I thought. It sounded like Jasper Carrott, which Bigs Six and Seven didn’t…
Just revisited this upon the YouTube. “I heard a dark voice beside me” is an awful lyric, one repeated, and I’m quite surprised it isn’t referenced in the above discussion.
Either way, this stinks.
Erithian @ #107 – I was going to make a joke here, but it would probably be unwise. I’ll give it another few years.
This song and ‘Safe European Home’ can both be seen as correctives to white reggae fans’ romanticizing Jamaica as a Disneyland with reggae and pot. Together they must have cost Jamaica a lot of tourism.
Struggling to find somewhere suitable to pay my respects to the late Richie Benaud, caught at deep midwicket for 84. This will have to do but I was hoping for more of a little conundrum involving some prime Stax soul. Alas, it seems that Stax Records has not graced the top of the British charts. This seems a great shame and an incomplete picture of popular music of the 1960s. Others may mourn but Booker T Jones must be grinning all the way to the bank today.
‘Mambo Number 5’ would have sufficed as well as the great man also appeared on Channel 4 until 2005.
You guys had better ideas than I did – the nearest I could think of was surely at least a reference in Rory Bremner’s parody of Paul Hardcastle’s 19 (N-N-Nineteen Not Out).
See, if this were an Australian Number One Albums blog, you’d have a much easier time of it.
Although for mine, the classic Benaud parody on vinyl was on Doug Mulray’s Rude Album, where he’s reading from an autocue, “This is Richie Be-nude… Be-nude? Benaud, it’s Benaud. I think I ought to know how to say my own name.”
RIP, RB.
Yes, a great loss. Cricket is in my blood. My brother played for London Schools and was without doubt County level but decided against following that path. He was good but not outstanding and would probably have only lasted a couple of seasons with Essex, his preferred choice or with anyone else for that matter. I think he knew this. As for me, I’ve been a member of Surrey CCC pretty much continuously from 1974. I am thus no stranger to Oval Tests over the ages and have seen some of the great Aussie sides as well as the Windies. I was present when Tony Greig had to call in his grovel, as the packed ranks of Windies supporters on the East terrace sung their hosannas, whilst clattering their beer cans.
Richie was at the centrepoint of all of this and was the perfect foil in his early days in the BBC commentary box for the very dour Jim Laker, who despite being a Surrey hero, had the personality of a parsnip. Benaud loved a punt – horses mainly and was often spotted in the Ladbrokes tent when anchor man Peter West allowed him the chance to get away. He was delighted to chat with everyone, even kids who shouldn’t have really been in the tent in the first place.
I exchanged letters with him on a couple of occasions – he always replied, and he also made sure that he personally signed every copy of his autobiography when he was finally persuaded to do one.
Richie’s passing is a great loss to the larger sporting world, although in non-cricketing quarters, his name would mean nothing. They are talking about a State funeral in Australia. Whether this happens is not important. What surely counts is what he achieved as well as how he was perceived. A man with no enemies, respected and indeed beloved by everyone.
RIP.