( * Doctor and the Medics featuring.... )
Chart entered : 22 November 1986
Chart peak : 45
As undignified exits go this takes some beating - a guest spot by invitation from a cartoon band on an "ironic" cover of a song that you largely influenced in the first place.
I have to say that I dissent from the consensus, which seems universal among music fans a bit older than me , that regards Roy as the great lost genius of pop. He's an excellent musician and led a good band in The Move but his three chart-toppers are all well-executed pastiche . Moreover , he's largely rested on his laurels for the last forty years. A clever and nice bloke, yes. Genius ? no way.
Roy's post-ELO outfit Wizzard disintegrated in 1975 after two number ones and a Christmas perennial. Roy spent too much time in the studio and not enough on the road to maintain such a large line up and the members drifted away. That same year he had his last solo hit; even before punk made his prog-leanings politically suspect , public interest was waning. He released a string of singles , sometimes under the name "Helicopters" but they were all ignored.
Doctor and the Medics had been going since 1982 finding a small audience for their tongue in cheek mixture of Goth, psychedelia and glam. They had long been doing camp versions of early seventies hits but in the early summer of 1986 their not very adventurous cover of Norman Greenbaum's "Spirit In The Sky" took off like a bomb and reached number one. Cominhg to the end of my time at university I couldn't get why sensible friends with good taste were enjoying it. I never did get to grips with student irony, probably as a result of my half-in half- out approach to university, now a matter of some regret. After following it up with one of their own compositions , the instantly forgettable "Burn" and seeing it just squeeze inside the Top 30, the band tried to replicate the winning formula and brought in a venerated glam icon to augment the sound with his sax.
Actually Roy's playing is the best thing on the record. Usual singer Clive "The Doctor" Jackson handed the lead vocal to the two girl backing singers The Anadin Brothers who drone through the song so robotically they make The Human League girls sound like, well, Abba. Benny's arrangement is replaced with rockier guitar and cheap synth sounds. It's dreadful and pointless. Katie Boyle, Lemmy and Captain Sensible popped up to make the video seem like an event and it got on The Chart Show but the joke was wearing thin and the record failed to breach the Top 40.
The following year Roy put out "Starting Up", his first album for eight years and his last to date. It's short at just under 36 minutes and includes two previously released singles. The opening pair of tracks are quite good old fashioned pop songs and "On Top of the World" is a cheeky attempt to ape ELO but the rest is quite ugly , Roy showing the world that he can use synths and modern production techniques like the rest but not bothering to write a decent song to go with them. When you've lost your audience you need better than this to get it back.
And that was it basically. Roy's just lived off his royalties , popped up on TV occasionally and sporadically gone out on the road. In 1995 Channel 4's Glam Top 10 proclaimed that he was on tour with all new material but none of it made it on to record. In December that year he got to 59 with a re-recording of "I Wish It Could Be Christmas Everyday" and five years later mashed it with The Wombles A Wombling Merry Christmas reaching 22. In recent years he's toured with Status Quo. He turns 70 later this year.
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