Welcome back my friends, to the flamboyance that never ends, as Fabulously Flamboyant Friday glides effortlessly over the crease to deliver yet another groin-polished googly from the gasworks end of musical magnificence.
This week we consider the poptastic careers of Mike Chapman and Nicky Chinn, the songwriting and studio maestros behind the all-conquering production house whose 1970’s conveyor belt of top twenty hits utterly dominated, for a time at least, the singles charts and the UK’s nascent glam rock scene. We are of course referring to Chinnichap, the powerhouse production duo who left an indelible mark on the poptastic 1970s and a fair few bits of the early 1980s as well.
Our dynamic duo’s trademark was an in-your-face, primary colour combination of infectious melodies, catchy hook lines and bold production; and this chart-busting formula delivered a seriously impressive run of beautifully crafted hit singles that, at the time at least, felt instantly disposable, but have in many cases gone on to withstand the test of time and are now regarded as stone cold pop classics and perfect examples of the craft of creating top twenty hits.
Nicky Chinn hailed from a well-to-do London family, but escaped the family car business via a break as a lyricist for Mike D’Abo (the vocalist and songwriter with Manfred Mann). D’Abo was impressed by some of Chinn’s early lyrics and included some of them in his score for the 1970 Peter Sellers / Goldie Hawn film, There’s a Girl in My Soup. Just a few months later, Chinn met the Australian musician and songwriter Mike Chapman, who, at the time, was knocking around London, struggling along in a not particularly successful band called Tangerine Peel (now that’s a great name for a Krautrock band) whilst making ends meet as a waiter (there simply has to be a “Waiter! There’s a girl in my soup!” joke in there, somewhere).
Anyway, to their surprise and delight they very quickly hit it off as a songwriting partnership and even managed to write four songs in a single day. Chinn would later recall that they weren’t particularly good songs, but they demonstrated there was at least some artistic chemistry between the two writers. So they decided to stick at it, practised their craft, polished their material, and started hawking their wares around what was left of London’s Tin Pan Alley scene. They didn’t have a lot of luck, but eventually ended up in front of RAK Records’ pop supremo, Mickie Most. Most dismissed the majority of their material out of hand, but did accept a track called Tom Tom Turnaround and promptly declared it to be a hit.
The track was buffed-up and given to the group New World to record and promote. Most was clearly a good judge, because his faith in the track was thoroughly vindicated when the single duly made its way into the top twenty and eventually peaked at No 6 in the UK charts. Chinnichap were up and running and our hit-maestros’ production line began to rumble into action. They would go on to deliver several more hits for New World including Sister Jane and Living Next Door to Alice (later re-recorded by Smokie and eventually by l’humoriste grossier et risqué – the splendid Roy Chubby Brown).
Next up for our dynamic duo were a pretty decent hard rock band called Sweet. People are often surprised to discover that Sweet could kick some serious arse on stage and rock-out with the best of them, but it really is true. Sweet (originally called Sweetshop) were a damn fine rock band and regularly proved so on stage – much to the bemusement of their concert-attending teeny bopper fans, most of whom were doubtless expecting something akin to a Bay City Rollers show.
However, although they could rock out, they also had a very good-looking, pretty-boy frontman (the ill-fated Brian Connolly). Because of this, they were eventually persuaded to put away their smelly denim and guitar solos to have a crack at the scream-teen / teeny-pop / bubblegum market (and eventually of course the glam rock genre). They duly signed up for the Chinnichap stable and subsequently recorded and released an impressive string of increasingly successful singles.
Under the wise and watchful guidance of Chinnichap, Sweet enjoyed a cracking run of hit singles including Funny Funny, Co-Co, Alexander Graham Bell, Poppa Joe, Little Willy, Wig Wam Bam, Block Buster, Hellraiser, The Ballroom Blitz, Teenage Rampage and The Six Teens. Now that really is an impressive run of poptastic poptastitude. Sweet also delivered Chinnichap’s first No.1 hit single when Blockbuster held off David Bowie’s Jean Genie to top the UK chart in early 1973. We shall make no comment here with regard to the remarkably similar guitar riffs driving both songs
By ’73, Chinnichap were on a roll and added both Mud and Suzi Quatro to their hit-making stable. Mud were a London-based rock ‘n’ roll band that had been knocking around since the mid-1960s, hadn’t had much success and looked destined for the cabaret and chicken-in-a-basket circuit.
Mud had a cheeky, Elvis-meets-panto kinda vibe and did not seem to take themselves very seriously at all. They performed a cheesy version of the classic 1950s rock’n’roll that was usually to be found in working mens’ clubs during the ’60s and early ’70s. Chinnichap built on this vibe and amongst the hits they crafted for Mud were Crazy, Hypnosis, Dyna-mite, Tiger Feet, The Cat Crept In, Rocket and Lonely This Christmas. Tiger Feet was a million seller and Lonely This Christmas was a hugely successful Christmas No.1.
In complete contrast, Suzi Quatro could really rock (tremendous bass player as well) and possessed a pretty decent rock ‘n’ roll voice. Mickie Most persuaded her to ditch her home town of Detroit to try her luck in the UK. Most asked Chinnichap to work their magic on Suzi and they duly obliged by crafting a pretty decent run of hits for our leather-clad lovely. Suzi’s hit singles included Can The Can, 48 Crash, Devil Gate Drive, Daytona Demon, The Wild One, She’s in Love with You, Tear Me Apart, If You Can’t Give Me Love and Stumblin’ In (a duet with Chris Norman of Smokie and a very big hit in the U.S.). Can The Can and Devil Gate Drive were both U.K. No1 hits.
Inevitably, this incredible run of success as both writers and producers had quite an impact on our dynamic duo. Nicky Chinn would later recall that it was sometimes tough to deal with their rapid and substantial success, adding that he would not know how to advise anyone on how to handle that level of fame and fortune. His own experience: expensive cars, clubbing, drinking too much and not treating people as nicely as you should, was apparently driven by a belief that he and Chapman were “God’s gift to the music business – because for a while all the evidence said that we were”.
Chinn and Chapman continued their successful run into the mid-70s with acts like Racey and Smokie, but (like so many in the music business who found fame and fortune in the early 70s) they also began to feel the cold and spittle-stained hand of punk rock on their shoulder. They still had hits, but it seemed the glory days were over. Reflecting on their success Chinn later noted, “of course our primary motivation was to sell as many records as possible, but we also worked very hard on making them good. I don’t think any of our hits were bad songs, and, as someone who grew up with pop music and never fell out of love with it, it is very pleasing to see that they were not only popular, but also durable.”
By 1975 Chapman had moved to the U.S. and his departure marked the start of the duo’s gradual separation. They still collaborated, occasionally, but their partnership was, to all intents and purposes, over. It was eventually ended, formally, in 1983. However, Chapman’s move to America certainly paid of as he thrived there both as a writer and as a producer. Perhaps his most iconic achievement of this period came as the producer of Blondie’s hugely successful 1978 album, Parallel Lines, which sold by the truckload and produced a global string of hit singles including Heart of Glass, One Way or Another, Sunday Girl, Hanging On The Telephone and Picture This.
His production success continued with The Knack’s 1979 debut album Get the Knack, which he produced on a shoestring budget in under two weeks. The album was another worldwide hit, selling millions of copies and producing the No1. single, My Sharona. Chapman went on to successfully produce several more successful albums for Blondie and for a diverse range of artists including Altered Images, Agnetha Faltskog, Rod Stewart, Lita Ford, Pat Benatar and Bow Wow Wow.
As a songwriter (often collaborating with the composer Holly Knight) Chapman continued to find considerable commercial success, including (Simply) The Best, recorded by both Bonnie Tyler and Tina Turner, Love Is a Battlefield for Pat Benatar and Toni Basil’s Hey Mickey (a re-worked version of Kitty, a Chinnichap composition first recorded by Racey). However, in complete contrast to the success of Mike Chapman, the ’80s and ’90’s were not kind to Nicky Chinn as a series of health challenges forced a prolonged and unwanted hiatus from the music industry. Happily, however, he recovered and returned to songwriting in the early 2000s and now works out of Nashville.
The pair eventually re-united around 2012 to help develop Blockbuster, a musical based on their extraordinary 70’s success. The production hit the boards in 2014 and had a pretty decent run. But it is for their extraordinary early-to-mid 70’s chart-rogering partnership that our dynamic duo will be best remembered. A partnership that generated sales of well over 40 million singles, produced over 50 Top 40 hits, landed more gold and platinum discs than you could possibly shake a stick at, and which earned them three prestigious Ivor Novello songwriting awards, including an Ivor Novello Lifetime Achievement Award in 1997. Them lads done good. Real good.
And I think that’s probably quite enough of my ramblings for this week’s Fabulously Flamboyant Friday. My pikelets have been consumed, my Lambrini quaffed and my lurex body suit needs a damn good airing. So I think we’ll wrap things up for this evening with a pretty decent live performance from Blondie.
TTFN, Puffins. May all your pillows be tasty, your gardens inclined and your puddles well jumped.
Goodnight, and may your frog go with you – Not ‘arf!
Featured Image: AVRO, CC BY-SA 3.0 NL, via Wikimedia Commons
References:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicky_Chinn
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Chapman
https://ultimateclassicrock.com/blondie-heart-of-glass/
https://popslutz.wordpress.com/2013/02/16/interview-with-nicky-chinn
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2014/sep/12/blockbuster-nicky-chinn-songs-mud-and-sweet-jukebox-musical
https://www.doremi.co.uk/glam/articles.html
https://www.rockwired.com/sweet.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sweet
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suzi_Quatro
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