Starting all over again is going to be rough, so rough, But we're going to make it (oh yeah) Starting all over as friends is going to be tough, on us, But we gotta face it.

(Mel and Tim)

Congratulations, Neil Young, from Precision Tapes. It’s poll time and Melody Maker readers have been appreciating Emerson, Lake and Palmer. Best group in Britain and the world, best drummer, best keyboards, best pro* inducers, best composer's* best arrangers, I second best bassist and second best H miscellaneous instrument (yeah, quite right Keith Emerson’s moog). It’s the best composers bit that I like (Pictures Jat an Exhibition??)hut the whole poll is a jpy^ nearly as good reading as the league tables. Take the British ladies’ chart. Maggie Bell is the best and she is; Sonja Kristina of Curved Air and Sandy Denny come next, predictable enough in the MM. But fourth is Olivia NewtonJohn, Olivia Newton*John?l?!? Bet you never heard of her. She*s wholesome | and Aussie and pays her way by making I insipid versions of the more insipid Bob Dylan and George Harrison songs and I i can’t think how she attracts the BLP mob: But, more clues, Shirley Bassey is in the top ten. Very strange, J wonder I how many votes she needed.

If anyone wants proof that we’ve got two entirely different rock audiences, >4he MM poll provides it. In a week when Slade, David Cassidy, Alice Cooper and I T. Hex were battling it out at the top of I the singles and albums charts, only Marc had any sort of MM following (10th g British group, 9th World singer, 9th British single, 10th World single). On the other hand (other peaches) Captain i Beefhearfjs the 6th best singer in the Rprld - not up there with Greg Lake and 1 Don McLean but certainly better than Mick Jagger,Bob Dylan and Joe Cocker. John Lennon and Van Morrison, of epurse, don’t even get, a mention. It makes Rod Stewart’s success all the more awe-inspiring. He alone can top simultaneously the sales charts, the MM poll, the Playboy poll (did he?) and the critics’ appreciation list. No wonder he’s got all those bathrooms.®

But he’s not the singers’ singer because, meanwhile, the New Musical Express has been asking them: the world’s leading singers pick the world’s leading singers. Put them all together and it’s John Lennon ^followed by Paul Rodgers, Dylan, Jagger and Maggie Bell. But the composite (though it’s good to see Paul Rodgers up there) is less interesting than the individual choices. Alice Cooper’s top three singers are Burt Bacharach, John Barry (?) and Paul Simon. So. Brian Wilson rates Danny Hutton, which figures, but if Lulu spends her waking hours with Sly Stone, David Bowie and Maggie Bell, how come she goes on cutting crap? Jimmy Cliffs favorite singer is Jimmy Cliff, Paul Rodgers are Albert King, B.B. King and, Freddie King (when is some sharpie going to get mat supersession together?) and Rod Stewart likes Labi Siffre, Ah, I could go on for ever but I’d better slip it [ & quick. My favorite singers are John Lennon, Smokey Robinson and Robert my favorite single is Mel and Tim’s ^fstarthig All, Oyer Again,” my j favorite color is brown and I’m not one of Esquire’s hot hundred.

For the last month I’ve had no tv (no Match of the Day, no Monty Python) and no records except those I get to review (mostly Chicago V). I’ve been down to humming and listening to the radio. My mind is now programmed, radio I by day, radio Luxemberg by evening and back to radio I. After waiting, week after week, patiently and in vain, for someone to play the new Budgie album, I was going to write a scholarly piece on why the British like rock despite radio and not because* of it but 1 got carried away by all those bloody polls and now I’m surrounded by lists. Still, John Peel was voted top d.j. for the fifth year in succession and I can take this chance to pay" my own homage.

Until 1963 we had to make do with maybe four hours of rock a week on the BBC (“Saturday Club,” “Pick of the Pops”). Otherwise it was Luxemberg, a quavery commerical station which operated in English in the evenings, its time being bought by record companies as their only possible outlet. The quaint achievement of the pirate stations (which broadcasted between 1*963 and 1967, when they were outlawed) was simply to introduce us to the possibilities of American style pop radio and even the BBC now presents, in its own peculiar way, top 40 day-time listening

using all the old pirate d.j.’s.

While Caroline and the rest of them were counting their money, fiddling their" charts, John Peel was singlehandedly pushing FM-type radio. The Perfumed Garden was on Radio London, I think (I couldn’t get it where I lived) and catered for all the south eastern heads (Pink Floyd and the Grateful Dead). When Peel followed the other dj’s to the BBC the heads stayed with him — from Wednesday nights to \ Saturday, afternoons to Wednesday evenings to Tuesday nights. For years he’s provided the only radio chance to hear something besides a hit single (hence his MM poll wins) and even now that progressive rock has made it (11 hours a week on the BBC, 2 hours a night on Luxemberg) he’s still the only dj capable of surprise.

Peel’s progressive credentials are impeccable. He Introduced us to the West Coast (and Captain Beefheart got into the polls because of John Peel, no doubt about it) and the Soft Machine. He was behind TRex right up to the breakthrough 6f ‘Ride a White Swan,” he’s been Rod Stewart and Faces cheerleader'foC|s long as I can remember, he got Roxy Music off the ground and he’s even got Dandelion, a non-obsessive record label for the likes of Medicine Head, Bridget St. John and Stackwaddy (Bugger Off).

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But I like John Peel because he’s survived his image. He doesn’t actually lead to the place where his followers follow. For example, he’s contemptuous of ELP and has never used them in his programme. He’s got the best ear for a single that I’ve ever come across (he put me on to Mel and Tim, present choice Frankie Valli’s “Night”) and only Viv Stanshall is more aware of the True Tragedies of country music. If there is such a thing as English rock then its history would be best traced through the live tapes made for Peel’s Top Gear — starting with Led Zeppelin, Cream, Jimi Hendrix, the Bonzos, and moving on through Fairport Convention, Soft Machine and the Faces to Brinsley Schwarz and Plainsong and Stackridge. John even has me persuaded that there are good folkies (Barry Dransfield, Ralph McTell).

Those Cruisin ’ LP’s are a proud document of America’s rock history and I think someone should record some Top Gears for our archives. As it is, one of my special possessions is a tape of John Peel’s Christmas party of two years ago — with Robert Wyatt singing “Good King Wenceslas” and a ridiculously coy Rod Stewart taking “Once in Royal David’s City.”

Good on you, John, and another happy Christmas.