5 June 1970
When did pop music, traditionally for the kids, start pitching to adults too? Perhaps in the mid-’60s with The Beatles taking Dylan’s influence on board, along with Paul going music-hall, and around the same time as the advent of Bacharach & David’s sophisticated masterpieces. Later on, bubblegum pop was always made by experienced studio musicians, but late-’60s US hits of the genre, such as ‘Sugar, Sugar’, still manage to sound young and carefree while the ’70s UK variant, like ‘Love Grows (Where My Rosemary Grows)’, feels older and more knowing.
Yes, ‘Yellow River’ is upbeat guitar pop-rock whose cheesy-sounding (and cheesy-coloured) chorus is pure ’70s British bubblegum, right down to its McCartney-worshipping reference to the title home-place being “in my mind and in my eyes” in ‘Penny Lane’ fashion. However, Christie look and sound like Monday-to-Friday factory workers who play weekends in a working man’s club. Lyrically, the song touches on a soldier longing for home—still a live issue in Vietnam-era 1970 and certainly resonant for college students and US teens—but its cabaret sentimentality and folksy Americana isn’t particularly anti-war; the protagonist is closer in spirit to a dusty cavalry officer of 19th-century balladry and fiction. I have trouble imagining actual young people going for ‘Yellow River’ – unless they heard its unfortunate title and started taking the piss.
