"Handbags and Gladrags" has fascinated me since the first time I heard it, on Rod Stewart’s first solo album, a million years ago. Rod rasped with palpable compassion about a spoiled young woman who’s trying to land a husband, though not yet out of school. Her “poor old grandad”, whom I saw in my mind’s eye as a labourer (office workers don’t sweat), struggles to keep her in trendy attire. Her having come to define herself in terms of her fashionable self-presentation is awful news for him, given the fickleness of fashion. “Once you think you’re in,” the song’s unidentified narrator laments at one point, “you’re out.” Or is he scolding more than lamenting? At song’s end, the narrator notes that our heroine hasn’t held up her end of the implicit bargain with Granddad — she’s missed school while Granddad’s sweating to buy her things — and is fatally disgusted with her.
You might imagine, as I did, that fatal disgust wouldn’t result from anything less than habitual truancy, and not just a single day’s. But that was hardly the lyrics’ sole misstep. The blind road-crosser who opens the song quickly disappears without a trace, and appears to have been present in the first place just to set up the rhyme about our heroine’s matrimonial ambitions (I’m reminded of The Move’s "Curly", in which we’re told in the opening lines that the protagonist’s father is a practical man, which turns out to have nothing whatever to do with anything that follows.) Lazy songwriting! Further lassitude is evident in the brazen place-holding of the nursery rhyme-evoking bridge (“Sing a song of sixpence…”). But one forgives all in the end because the Floyd Cramer-ish piano motif is irresistible.
Floyd was sort of the Chet Atkins of the piano, the country session player. His distinctive “slip-note” style bears a kinship to jazz giant Thelonious Monk’s. You read it here first.
Mike d’Abo, who was about to join Manfred Mann, wrote the song, in 1967, for submission to Chris Farlowe, who’d had a hit the year before with the Jagger-Richards concoction “Out of Time” in spite of producer Jagger’s having thought what the record really needed was him singing out-of-tune backing vocals. Much as I love Farlowe (the greatest of the British blue-eyed soul singers — better than Steve Marriott and even Steve Winwood), I don’t think you can argue very convincingly that he doesn’t rather overpower “Handbags.” Twent-four years later, a Welsh group called The Stereophonics, whose singer sounds very much like Rod Stewart, had a No. 4 hit with the song. But I am much more intrigued by its having been adapted, against all odds, as the theme of Ricky Gervais’s The Office.
While I’m in rhapsodising mode, I’ll ask you that you let me rhapsodize for a moment about The Office, the best English-language television comedy series ever — greater than M*A*S*H and All in the Family, much greater than the hilarious but farcical Fawlty Towers. A lot of people took one look, found Gervais’s character desperately needy, self-deluded, and obnoxious, and said, “No, thanks.” A few even said, “When I work in an office all day, why do I want to come home and watch one on television?”
Because, if you gave it a few minutes, it tugged so hard at your heartstrings. David Brent was indeed desperately needy, self-deluded, and obnoxious, but if you gave it a few minutes, you saw that what he was mostly was pathetic, a lonely, emotionally tone-deaf misfit whose implacable attempts to get people to love him served only to repel them. I saw a lot of my dad in David Brent, and a lot of myself. And if Gervais’s writing was brilliant, it was nothing compared to his acting. The scene in the second series in which he suddenly loses his brave face and begs not to be fired tore my heart out as only the death of Jimmy Smits’ NYPD Blue character’s had before. (As good as he was — and he was terrific, Steve Carell in the surprisingly wonderful American version didn’t come close.)
The Office is a work of sublime genius, and “Handbags and Gladrags”, along with The Kinks’ “Dedicated Follower of Fashion” and The Coasters’ “Shoppin’ for Clothes”, one of the three best rock-era songs about matters of the cuff.
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