Hokey Pokey (Part 1)

Richard and Linda Thompson: Hokey Pokey [April 1975]

While not an about face, the pair’s follow-up to Bright Lights is a quite different album, both in sound and tone. While keeping to the basics of British folk-rock, for the most part, the Thompsons bring in a larger palette of textures and attitudes. Hokey Pokey is not so grim and awe-imposing as I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight, and it is obvious from the start that this is quite intentional. Though not lacking in depth, the album largely takes a lighter approach, and the sound is generally more pop oriented - in a good way - than anything Thompson has done before.

This is not to suggest in the slightest that Hokey Pokey is in any way a commercial retreat or a sell-out - all the ironies remain intact. But this is a more welcoming, come-hither approach that invites the listener in to explore the multi-faceted perspectives and textures of Richard Thompson’s twisted world.

Released in the mid-seventies atmosphere of such zillion-selling artists as the new Fleetwood Mac, one cannot help noticing certain similarities of sound and approach, and wonder why the hell Warner Brothers (their American distributor, as well as Mac’s) did not push the Thompsons harder. Many of these songs would not be out of place at all on car radios of the mid-1970s, their oddities notwithstanding. But oddities were still tolerated (as Joni Mitchell and Randy Newman attest), and sometimes even prized. Sometimes I wish that the Thompsons had made it truly big on the charts during these years - if for no other reason than that I would not have to attempt to explain to everyone I meet just who Richard Thompson is before going on to describe or discuss aspects of his work.

Of course, if the duo had enjoyed massive commercial success, any subsequent history (and therefore output) would inevitably have been quite different. Not that it would have been necessarily inferior, but the experience of discovery - for both artist and audience - would have been one of a radically different dynamic. For cultic artists, their message always seems to their initiates to be of more valuable and honest coin than the big stars of the airwaves, with whom they serve as an ongoing contrast and dialectic. One feels more personally bound to one’s private heroes in many ways.

Nevertheless, part of the fascination, for me at least, of listening to Hokey Pokey is in imagining what it might have been like if such singular, beautiful art had merged with the commercial machine at such a propitious moment in history. How would the world be different? Or would it?

"Hokey Pokey (The Ice Cream Song)" - The song begins teasingly with a repeating little fiddle figure that tricks us into thinking we’re about to get some Fairport-esqe excursion, which is blown away quickly by the churning back and forth of the electric guitars, bass and drums. "Hokey Pokey" is a child-like rocker that Linda sings with a true visceral glee. After each couple of verses, Richard enters with his hard electric guitar solo, adding increasingly ironic commentary (and wizardry). Now this should have been a hit.

It’s nice to hear some humor reappearing in Thompson’s songs, and the inclusion of this song at the beginning of the album (not to mention as the title of the record itself) sets a strong, upbeat mood that will be held, more or less, throughout the disc. That is not to say that the song is bereft of the trademark Thompson "doom and gloom," as the sarcastic nature of the lyrics walk a neat knife’s edge between celebration and condemnation.

For hokey-pokey, the "ice cream" of childhood metamorphoses as its verses unfold into the joys of sex. The contrasting parallelism between the childhood love of a treat and the adult’s equivalent pleasure can be taken in manifold ways. Does the treatment of sex as purely a pleasure device devalue it or the individual? The song is ruthlessly non committal on this question. As the images unfold, however, the oddity of the sexual context increases: a prisoner’s sexual fantasies help to keep him alive, a gangster is threatened with death, which is equated with the end of sex. And finally, we are presented with the image of what must be the contemporaneous "glam rockers" of Britain, all tarted up in an alleyway, completely engulfed by their obsessions.

The fun feeling never leaves the song, however, which is brilliant in its simple construction and genuine sense of enthusiasm. Is "Hokey Pokey" a song of "guilty pleasure" only? Does it justify man (and woman’s) sexual nature? Or is it taking a "poke" at such activity as banal, childish and trivializing?

But as the song admits:

Everybody runs for hokey pokey,
It’s the natural thing to do.

Sex, however you wish to look at it, is a part of human nature and an inescapable fact of life. The true feeling of the song seems to me to be a humorous acknowledgement of that fact, as well as the inevitability that it will take many forms. I don’t really see the song as disapproving of sexuality - except insofar as taken by itself that it manifests itself into fetishes and patterns of life that may be seen as inauthentic. But ultimately, this is not a harsh song. "Hokey Pokey" seems more generous than many of Thompson’s songs in this regard - it’s partly celebration, partly satire. And it’s object is you, me, him, and her - all of us. We can’t resist the allure of sex any more than a kid can resist ice cream.

And once again, Linda’s delivery is absolutely delicious.

"I’ll Regret It All in the Morning" - If there’s any question at all about Thompson’s misanthropic, fatalistic point of view, however, it’s quickly dissolved by this weary acoustic ballad, in which he sings of the need for quite a bit of whisky to get him through the night with his lover. Bitterness and self loathing flow everywhere in what is genuinely a lovely, though doom-laden song.

If this is a sub-species of "hokey pokey," it is a particularly pathetic one. The narrator does not explain why he remains entangled with this woman, but there is a tangible sense of entrapment. Perhaps he has married her, perhaps they even have children - and he’s stuck in his unhappy situation. But there are no outside references to the narrator’s prison, and they seem to be voluntarily imposed. In a way, the song seems more a sequel to "Cavalry Cross" than the opening number. Something within her keeps something within him self crucified - and that condition is somehow part of human nature as well as desire.

I’ll regret it in the morning
When I see your smiling face -
I’d rather be any place but here.

Thompson cleverly, devilishly, inverts cliches and plays joyously with language, but once again his protagonist is in a self-constructed hell.

Usually thought of, the phrase "I’ll regret it in the morning" implies that one might do something under the influence of drink - sexual or otherwise - that one would ordinarily not have done, usually with a stranger or an acquaintance that one wishes to keep at a certain distance. Here, drinking is just the medicine required to keep an already established - and unwanted - relationship intact. That the situation seems beyond the singer’s control is much more pathetic than any single, impudent act of self indulgence could ever be.

"Smiffy’s Glass Eye" - This oddball tale is reminiscent of one of the more vaudevillian songs of the Kinks or perhaps even the Who - in fact it’s more reminiscent of a John Entwistle song than any I’ve perhaps ever heard. The story is of a boy whose eye is knocked out by a schoolmate’s slingshot, and his subsequent replacement eye causes him to be the constant object of derision.

The song is sung blankly by Linda in a lower register, with double tracking. There is a conspicuous lack of emotion, which of course she does well, and the folksy setting of what is basically an English music hall type of construction, makes the whole affair totally lacking in sentiment. The playful nature of the melody and accompaniment implies a joke, but it’s hard to be unmoved at Smiffy’s plight - his life is actually ruined, and he will never know a normal life or experience love.

The song ends in absolute disaster:
Nobody cried when his world fell apart
And poor Smiffy died of a broken heart.
You have to turn a blind eye to that sort of thing,
Smiffy with his glass eye glittering.

The pun cruelly distances the singer from the subject, and this jaunty little ditty has become a true nightmare. Of course the tragic aspect of the song is its shoddy treatment of a poor little boy, whose deformity caused a like reaction from his peers. On the other hand, in his most slyly, skilfully ironic way, Thompson confirms the point that we really have to keep emotional distance from all kinds of suffering just to maintain emotional balance. That we are equipped to do this - from childhood - with playful mockery, is not something we should feel particularly good about.
Once again, we see that the act of being human requires skills at inhumanity, which is yet another variation on the great large theme of the great universe of compromises required to keep us alive and functioning.