Godley. “We were on our way, baby!”
They were indeed, as Hotlegs returned to the chart, albeit anonymously, at the end of the year. Kennedy Street’s Harvey Lisburg had recently discovered a new talent named John Paul Jones; not the pop arranger turned Led Zeppelin bassist, explains Gouldman, “but a comedian who had the most wonderful rich voice.” Aware though he was, that Zeppelin’s Jones already had some claim on the name, Lisburg went ahead with launching his new client’s career, and Gouldman marvels, “I still don’t know why he used it. It was such a bizarre thing to do! But Harvey always liked the name John Paul Jones.”
was coming into the studio. “The first musical noises that had any cohesion… started life as an unorthodox drum test featuring full kit overdubbed onto all four tracks, with Lol singing this spooky, retarded nursery rhyme that got mixed in via the bass drum mike. Like all the early work, it was driven by applied ignorance and adrenalin but we knew it had ‘something’. Unfortunately the track got erased but we liked the vibe so much we started again adding recorders, tone generator, anvil, backwards echo etc. until it sounded like nothing else on earth.”
Stewart picked up the thread. “Dick Leahy, from Philips, came in and he said, ‘What the hell’s that you’re playing?’ I said, ‘It’s a studio experiment; a percussive experiment.’ He says, ‘It sounds like a hit record to me...’ and ‘Can we release it?’ And we said, ‘Yeah, OK. What should we call it?’
“‘Neanderthal Man’. “‘And what shall we call ourselves?’
‘Hotlegs’. We had a girl at the studio,” Stewart continued. “Kathy Gill, I think her name was, yeah... who had very, very nice legs and she used to wear these incredible hot pants. Green, leather hot pants. So we called the group, ah, Hotlegs.”
Released in the summer of ’70 by Philips, ‘Neanderthal Man’ reached #22 in the U.S., #2 in Britain, #1 in Italy, and ultimately sold over two million worldwide. The record was enormous: The Idle Race, heading towards the end of their brief but glorious career, wrested one final hit from the jaws of oblivion when they covered the song for German and Argentine consumption; Elton John, eking out a pre- fame career as a jobbing sessioneer, recorded his own distinctive version for a budget priced collection of soundalike hits. “We thought we had it made,” laughs
44
All four of the Strawberry team played on Jones’ ‘Man From Nazareth’ single, which was well on its way to being a Christmas ’70 hit when the other John Paul succeeded in getting a court injunction, forcing the artist to respell his surname Joans. The single had already reached #41 on the British chart; in the ensuing chaos, while RAK Records reprinted the label, ‘Man From Nazareth’ dropped from the charts, reappearing in the newyear, when it rose to #25. (In the U.S., the name was truncated to simply John). Itsmomentum, however, was lost and Joans never followed it up.
Meanwhile, the Hotlegs project continued to grow, although the trio were certainly not being rushed into anything. “We hit an unexpected nerve with ‘Neanderthal Man’,” says Godley. “It was one of those lucky
accidents that turn into something both interesting and successful, without knowing how or why. When you go back and try to recreate the same circumstances it just doesn’t work.”
But with Philips demanding more of the same, the band was happy to comply. They had already proved their ambition with the single’s B-side, ‘You Didn’t Like It Because You Didn’t Think Of It’, a beautiful mid-paced rocker that provided the blueprint, eventually, for 10cc’s debut LP closer ‘Fresh Air For My Mama’.
It was time to create more of the same, says Godley, “and we just kept going until we had an album, complete with our version of side two of Abbey Road, ‘Suite F.A.’ I think we also built the first Gizmo prototype during this period.”
Still, it would be September ’71 before Hotlegs delivered a newsingle, and it sounded nothing at all like its predecessor. “‘Lady Sadie’,” says Godley, was “a faux Rolling Stones song that explored Eric’s love of dirty blues guitar. It was so obviously other people’s territory. It had a nice feel but it didn’t chart. Probably didn’t deserve to.”
A similar fate awaited the album. Thinks: School Stinks arrived in a school desk sleeve which would prove very useful for Alice Cooper two years later, but he was probably the only person who paid it any attention. Which is a shame, because it’s a great little record, from the fuzzed-out of
percussives of ‘UmWah Um Who’ to the the of
Who’
cartoon cut-ups of ‘Desperate Dan’, the ‘All God’s Chi
sweetness of ‘All God’s Children’ to the sheer
eer beauty of ‘To Fly Away’, reworked from the Marmalade sampler.
‘To Fly Away’,
punch not
Godley admits, “It was great just to try to punch above our weight. It’s not bad, but it’s not us yet, is it? At the time we didn’t recognise ‘Neanderthal Man’ for the
weight. yet, is not the tim for
inspired piece of nonsense it was. No tune. Stupid lyrics. ‘We can do better than this, chaps.’ We were young and subconsciously aping our heroes, like you do until the real you shows up, so ‘Neanderthal Man’ was this bizarre anomaly that pointed one possible way forward but we failed to see it. I sampled most of the album tracks for the mid section of GG06 song ‘Son Of Man’ recently, and I could hear something of what we eventually became, under all the other influences. In truth, we didn’t fully discover our own musical identity until we stopped trying so hard and started feeling.”
On the road, Hotlegs toured the UK as support for The Moody Blues, but again to little effect. “Audiences were expecting ‘Neanderthal Man’ and we were playing Thinks School Stinks. Consequently any momentum evaporated, the phone stopped
didn’t
Dan the to
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