SONG OF THE DAY

“Some­thing In The Air” by Thun­der­clap New­man (sin­gle, Track Records, 1969). Writ­ten by John “Speedy” Keen.

WHERE I HEARD IT

HBO’s Six Feet Under

INTERESTING FACTS A LA WIKIPEDIA

- “Some­thing in the Air” is a song recorded by Thun­der­clap New­man, a band cre­ated by Pete Town­shend for The Who’s for­mer road­ie John ‘Speedy’ Keen who wrote and sang the song.

- It was a UK #1 sin­gle for three weeks in July 1969.

- In 1969, Pete Townshend, The Who’s gui­tarist, was the cat­a­lyst behind the for­ma­tion of the band. The con­cept was to cre­ate a band to per­form songs writ­ten by for­mer Who roadie and drummer/singerJohn ‘Speedy’ Keen, who had writ­ten “Arme­nia City in the Sky”, the first track on The Who Sell Out. Town­shend recruited eccen­tric GPO engi­neer and jazz pianist Andy ‘Thun­der­clap’ New­man (a friend from art college), and 15-year-old Glaswe­gian Jimmy McCulloch. Keen played the drums and sang the lead.

- Town­shend pro­duced the single, arranged the strings, and played bass under the pseu­do­nym Bijou Drains.

- Orig­i­nally titled “Rev­o­lu­tion” but later renamed to avoid con­fu­sion with the Bea­t­les’ 1968 song of that name, “Some­thing in the Air” cap­tured post-flower power rebel­lion, mar­ry­ing McCulloch’s sweep­ing acoustic and glow­ing elec­tric gui­tars, Keen’s pow­er­ful drum­ming and yearn­ing falsetto, and Newman’s felic­i­tous piano solo.

- The sin­gle reached No. 1 on the UK charts just three weeks after release, hold­ing off Elvis Pres­ley in the process. The scale of the song’s suc­cess sur­prised every­one and there were no plans to pro­mote Thun­der­clap New­man with live per­for­mances. Even­tu­ally a line-up — aug­mented by Jim Pitman-Avory on bass and McCulloch’s elder broth­er Jack on drums — played a hand­ful of gigs. Per­sonal records say the band played live only five times, although Keen referred to a two-month tour, play­ing “everywhere”.

- In the UK, a follow-up sin­gle, “Acci­dents”, came out only in May 1970 and charted at No. 44 for a week. An album, Hol­ly­wood Dream, peaked in Bill­board at No. 163. Thus, the song and the band were for­ever linked as a one hit wonder.

- Labelle recorded an emo­tional cover of it along­side “The Rev­o­lu­tion Will Not Be Tele­vised”, for their 1973 album, Pres­sure Cookin’.

- “Some­thing in the Air” appeared on the sound­tracks of the sev­eral films The Magic Chris­t­ian (1969) and The Straw­berry State­ment (1970) (which helped the sin­gle reach No. 25 in the United States) and lat­er King­pin (1996), Almost Famous (2000), The Dish (2000), and The Girl Next Door (2004). It also appeared on and was the title of the sec­ond disc in the Deluxe Edi­tion of the Easy Rider soundtrack.

- “Some­thing in the Air” has been used exten­sively in tele­vi­sion, most notably on an adver­tise­ment for British Air­ways which fea­tured PJ O’Rourke. More recently, a ver­sion of the song was used in the adver­tise­ments for the mobile phone ser­vice provider Talk­Talk. (A sim­i­lar advert for Talk­Talk shown at the begin­ning of advert breaks dur­ing Big Brother fea­tures the open­ing bars). It is also used as the ‘on hold’ music for The Car­phone Ware­house, of which Talk Talk is a part. The song was also fea­tured in the pilot episode of the Amer­i­can tele­vi­sion show Aliens in Amer­ica and in the third sea­son episode Bad Earl of My Name Is Earl. A ver­sion of the song recorded by Ocean Colour Scene was pre­vi­ously used by tele­phone provider Ion­ica. In 2008, this song appeared in a Coca-Cola com­mer­cial in Taiwan.

- The song has been cov­ered by a num­ber of artists includ­ing Phish in 1991, The Light­ning Seeds in 1992, Tom Petty in 1993, Eurythmics in 1999, The Super­je­sus in 2001, Elbow and Well­wa­ter Con­spir­acy in 2003, and Hay­ley Sander­son in 2006.

VIDEO OF THE DAY