(This page uses CSS style sheets)
bladd
jez ford
"…Technology can be,
so technological,
But nature's
So natural, you know…"
From the bearded hippy that wanders the world's beaches today, it is hard to picture the studious child prodigy that was the musical soul of Flem. He had composed his first number one hit at ten months, before he could even talk (Manfred Mann's Do Wah Diddy Diddy) and went on to write all the Eurovision hits from 1967 to 1978. Bladd couldn't open his mouth without releasing a hit song. He tried singing deliberate nonsense, only for it to become the chorus of Lennon's Across The Universe. He tried singing the worst crap he could possibly concoct, only to have a string of hits produced by Stock, Aitken and Waterman. Only when he heard Chuck's revolutionary singing voice did he see a route to the obscurity he had always craved. No tune, however catchy, could emerge intact - and if it did, it would be lost behind the nuclear attack of Quentin's guitar. At the time, it seemed to work. Many critics dismissed it as "shite"; others were able only to rush outside and vomit. It's only now, 20 years on, that musicologists are beginning to grasp the unfathomable complexities underlying even the earliest Flem recordings. "It will be the classical music of the 22nd century," predicts Wilma von Krapp, an obviously fabricated musicologist from a trumped-up German university. "There are disharmonies and atonal structures here that defy analysis, let alone enjoyment." But then what would a Kraut woman know about rock'n'roll, eh?
