Smash Hits '71: Various Artists - Music For Pleasure 1971

British music buyers in the 1970's would have been well familiar with the shady practice of budget labels releasing compilation albums of recent chart hits, usually with a young, attractive female wearing not much in the way of clothing on the cover. 'The 'Top Of The Pops' series is probably the most familiar/notorious example of this carry on and would probably deserve a blog all of their own, but plenty of other labels were in on it too.  

If the knock down prices of these releases seemed too good to be true, that's because they were; on getting their 'bargain' home, the uninitiated would have been surprised to find that, instead of an album of the latest number ones from Mud or Slade, they had in fact bought a load of cover versions by anonymous session musicians who often didn't take too much trouble to sound anything like the artists they were aping. Charity shop crates are stuffed full of this stuff and I was going to try and stay away from them as far as I could with this blog, unless there was something about a particular release that caught my eye, something that 'Smash Hits 71' managed to do as surely as if it had reached out and shoved a fish hook into it.

Firstly, that cover; what do we have here? A cheesecake shot of a topless woman wearing what looks like a nappy (complete with oversized safety pin) holding a baby whose 'Where's my mummy and who is this strange woman' expression suggests a child freshly stolen from a pram not ten minutes hence. If that wasn't odd enough, the back cover features the same duo, only this time both are wearing different coloured nappies. If there was a 'concept' at work here or a 'message' to be read then I'm afraid it's sailed right over my head. Second up, that track list. On first glance it looks a fair round up of the usual suspect glam and bubblegum hits of 1971, but then what's that nestling amongst them? Mozart Symphony Number 40? Well that's got to be worth a pound of anyone's money.  

Well I can clear up 'the Mozart mystery' early doors; a closer inspection of the cover notes reveals 'Smash Hits 71' to be of Dutch origin, and a quick Google shows that an Argentinean conductor called Waldo de los Ríos (with the Manuel de Falla orchestra) scored a number one hit in Holland  that year with a pops version of the first movement of Mozart's 40th (it was popular all over Europe apparently but it didn't chart in the UK). Strange, but what's stranger is that the arrangement that's played on this album doesn't sound much like Waldo's own treatment of the score, making this version a curious hybrid of both a cover version and an original piece of work.  

As for the rest, well the backing tracks throughout are pretty faithful, chicken in the basket circuit, covers band stuff. The vocals, however, range from the "rough approximation-alikes" ('Did You Ever?', 'Hot Love' (which doesn't stint on the 'la la la la la la la's' either)) to the "makes no attempt at all to sound like the original artist-alikes" ('Indiana Wants Me', 'I Did What I Did For Maria', 'My Sweet Lord').* But though it's fair to say that nobody here would win 'Stars In Their Eyes', to criticise any further would be churlish; these are meant to be cheap and cheerful knock-offs, not faithful reproductions. On that level - and as long as you know what you're in for before you part with your money - they work just fine. If you don't, then the disappointment will be a palpable as paying to see 'The Drifters' and having four white guys turn up on stage.

* I should give a mention in dispatches to the unknown female who (to these ears anyway) provides a fair go at Nancy Sinatra on 'Did You Ever' and a not quite so fair go at Diana Ross on 'I'm Still Waiting' - this girl is game if nothing else.