Eddie and the Hot Rods : Do Anything You Wanna Do
On July 29, 1977 Essex pub rockers Eddie and the Hot Rods released their biggest hit single, the UK#9 "Do Anything You Wanna Do". At the beginning of the years, NME had named the Rods the most promising emergent act ( ahead of Racing Cars, Graham Parker and Sex Pistols). Now with the addition of Kursaal Flyers guitarist and songwriter Graeme Douglas, the band fattened their sound to great effect.
'Do Anything You Wanna Do", written by Dougas and band manager Ed Hollis, is one of the most exuberant songs of the year, its lyrics delivered with gusto by Barrie Masters who seems to be living every high school boy's dream on stage.
In retrospect, issuing a single with a photograph of occultist Alister Crowley in Mickey Mouse ears might not have been such a good idea.
Bassist Paul Gray said:
It wasn't long afterwards that what was to be known as the Curse of the Hotrods struck. In retrospect it wasn't the best of ideas to mess about with Alistair Crowley. The single cover featured the image above featuring Crowley's face with a pair of Mickey Mouse ears, a play on Crowley's mantra - "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law" . It wasn't long before the letters started coming from his followers, saying we were playing with fire and threatening dire retributions on us all. At the time it was unnerving and we tried to laugh it off, but uncannily enough we suffered more than our fair share of tragedies soon after. In no particular order one of the guys responsible for the cover committed suicide, our manager died of a drugs overdose and all sorts of other troubles befell band members that I won't go into here.
By any definition (even from the most curmudgeonly of us) this is a classic foot tappin' song of the highest order and yet you'd never know this by watching the audience reaction. Kudos to the band (lead singer mainly) who gave it their/his all. Youtube is awash with videos of TV pop shows (mainly German TV it seems) with mute audiences. They must've been under the strictest of instructions to not move a muscle! Ultra classic song though as I said. classic single
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