Paul Oldfield - Nice Strong Arm / Live Skull - Melody Maker - September 12 1987

 

Chris Petit - Wreckless Eric - Melody Maker - 1979

 

I did not know that Chris Petit, maker of the great Radio On, also did a bit of rock writing, for Melody Maker.  (He was also the Film Editor of Time Out at this time)

Here he reviews Wreckless Eric, whose "Whole Wide World" is memorably used in the film

Here Melody Maker's then editor Richard Williams blogs about a later Petit work The Museum of Loneliness and recalls sending Petit to Germany to write a piece about German music including Kraftwerk but also Boney M!

And here's Petit himself, talking about how his brief foray into rock journalism was instrumental in the making of Radio On: 

"I became a rather bad music journalist for Melody Maker with the express intention of meeting Kraftwerk. This achieved, I gave them a folder with the script for Radio On. Ralph Hütter mistook the name of the folder for the title of the film and thereafter it was referred to between us as The Digby Wallet. We completed the package by going to Dave Robinson at Stiff Records and offered the film as a way of promoting Stiff’s material. The specific track wanted was Wreckless Eric’s Whole Wide World, but we were given the run of its catalogue." 

Wreckless Eric is someone I would have probably never bothered to check out, if not for the film, which introduced me to "Whole Wide World"

Elton John rather perceptively described it as Troggs-y.

At his enjoyable blog Eric Goulden remembers the  moment when Elton John was infatuated with Wreckless Eric and - very briefly - a guest member:

 One night we were at the Hemel Hempstead Pavilion. I was sitting in a corner of a large dressing room full of bands, trying not to let everything get on my nerves, when a woman I knew walked in. I knew her because she’d done some PR work for Stiff Records at some point and we’d got on well. She came straight over to me, said hello and addressed me in hushed voice:

‘I’m here with Elton John, he’s out in the corridor - he’d really like to meet you.’

... He was in a corner of the corridor looking as though he was trying to melt into the wall. There must have been other people around but I didn’t see them, just him, alone and exuding vulnerability. His face lit up when he saw me. He seemed at once other worldly and completely normal. He was wearing a black 1920s flapper suit and a floppy herringbone tweed cap. 

We said hello, and our awkwardness hung in the air between us. His eyes were soft and grey, and very kind. He had an Edwardian shirt buttoned to the neck with some sort of Art Deco, bakelite bow tie.

‘Um, er... does that light up?’

He laughed: ‘No, I’m off duty.’

Elton joins the band onstage to play piano on "Whole Wide World" and then the whole thing escalates:

Then he was at the piano, playing and singing some weird slow blues that turned out to be a half speed version of Chuck Berry’s Sweet Little Sixteen. We were playing along and it was getting intense, and then there was one of those massive piano fills that goes from one end of the keyboard to the other, and we were up to full speed and rocking. The guitars were shrieking and I turned round in time to see Elton kick back the piano stool, take a backward run, then head forward like a raging bull and leap off the stool and on to the top of the piano where he stood for an instant like the rock god he most undoubtedly was. Then he jumped off the piano into the centre of the stage and cut the entire band with one gesture.

He stood in the spotlight and just for an instant the world stopped turning. He raised his arms above his head and started to clap his hands. The energy that was coming off him was almost physical. I’ve never again experienced such a thing. At that moment I fully understood why he was such a huge star.

The whole story is well worth a read.