18 January 1973
Leave the kid out of this. Little Jimmy Osmond simply stands in a line of cutesy and precocious child performers, from Shirley Temple to whatever senior infant is currently wowing ’em on social media, and that strand of light entertainment has thrived since the days of vaudeville and music hall. Here in Ireland, the traditional response, as learned in our own childhood, is the eye-roll we throw to the Billie Barry Kids on the Toy Show, making us look useless in front of our parents. But it passes; apart from the grisly shiver of schadenfreude when some Channel 5 clip show invariably reveals how today they’re trailer-park crackheads or secondary school teachers, no one need get het up about them.
So, yes, obviously ‘Long Haired Lover From Liverpool’ isn’t a good record; it’s a stage-school child performing vaudeville-style whimsy to the jazz-hands accompaniment of a ukulele. (I note how young Osmond here also threatens us with becoming a leprechaun – a lyric which became the template for every Saturday Night Live skit about being Irish.) I say: let him at it; it’ll toughen him up and build character.
As for why ‘Long Haired Liver From Loverpool’ overheated to top the pop charts in the UK and Ireland, well, we can recognise several familiar factors. The rest of Jimmy’s family were already the fan-frenzying teen idols of the day, so this record met a market demand for more Osmond output. Novelty hits like this, usually enabled by larky radio DJs high on their own bantz, will only become even more prevalent in the ’80s and ’90s. Back in the early ’70s, bubblegum whimsy and cabaret schmaltz provided basic-core popular music to the parents of future Boyzone and Westlife fans, as well as raw materials to the future Boyzone and Westlife manager. At a granular level, we’ve already seen cutesy kids as a trope of our early-’70s pop ecosystem; I’m referring to Gilbert O’Sullivan’s ‘Clair’ here rather than the files of Operation Yewtree. Escapism from near-to-home 1973 events like the oil crisis and the Troubles; pop-cultural pastiche nostalgia swelled by material comfort; a new generation of parents themselves raised on modern pop music and therefore more likely to gift current-day pop music records to their children; mainstream unease at the social upheaval caused by actual longhairs; even the advent of colour TV to showcase the new gaudy, family-friendly bubblegum pop as Saturday-evening shiny-floor spectacles: these all surely contributed too to the success of ‘Hairy Livered Langer From Hartlepool’ and its peers.
Still, notwithstanding their Osmond thirst and that it’s clearly a more competent track than those of Dustin here or Mr Blobby in Britain, none of that explains or justifies a quorum of people going to a record shop in public and handing over hard-earned cash for a physical copy of actual ‘Long Haired Lover From Liverpool’ by Little Jimmy Osmond, as one had to do at the time, rather than just leave it on television where they found it. My parents didn’t buy records or listen to pop, and I’m sure if they did it would have been the T. Rex and Roxy Music this child of theirs has since discovered and now loves, so I’m off the hook. Sorry to have to break this to you, but I suspect your parents or grandparents may have been eejits.
