Top of the Pops, Vol. 22

Top of the Pops, Vol. 22 Review by Dave Thompson

Glam rock came to town in the year 1972, the emphatic dawn of the most exhilarating period in British chart history -- ever. And the Top of the Pops series was there to chronicle it. Beginning with Vol. 22, eight consecutive volumes would tell the story of this most crucial of years, and what better way to kick off the survey than with the song that ushered in the span in the first place, a furious rendering of T. Rex's "Telegram Sam," all scything guitars, honking horns, and, rising above the furor, the furious poetry of Marc Bolan in excelsis. Add the Faces' disreputably swaggering "Stay With Me" and the Sweet's post-bubblegum pounder "Poppa Joe" and, truly, it's like you've died and gone back to pop heaven. Of course, memory is a selective beast, particularly where musical eras are concerned. Glam rock came, saw, and conquered, but there was a lot more eddying around the U.K. charts that year than a snowstorm of spangles and glitter. America, for example, meandered out of the world of album-oriented easy listening to score a massive hit with "A Horse With No Name" -- and truly, the Top of the Pops singer is having the same problems with the lyric as everyone else did: "There were plants and birds and rocks and things...." Things? What sort of things? Tell us now! Elsewhere, Don McLean's "American Pie" is a tricky song for anyone to cover, and the version here is no better than it ought to be, while the New Seekers' "I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing," the chart-topping reinvention of a popular Coke commercial, simply reminds listeners to make an appointment with the dentist. All is not, however, grim -- indeed, Vol. 22 wraps up with a performance that, behind the scenes, was to prove as integral to the Top of the Pops series' growth and development as glam rock would become. Covering Chicory Tip's spangled version of Giorgio Moroder's American hit "Son of My Father," former Harmony Grass vocalist Tony Rivers makes his Top of the Pops debut. And he would stay around even longer than glam rock.