I must confess that this is not my idea; having recently come across Tom Breihan’s ‘The Number Ones’ column for Stereogum, and in turn, Tom Ewing’s ‘Popular’ column for Freaky Trigger, I felt inspired to approach the format from my own geographical perspective; that is, review every single to reach number 1 on the ARIA Charts/Kent Report, and assign a numerical grade from 1-10. In the interest of brevity (and some pertinence), the column shall begin from July 1974, the date in which the initial Kent Report was first published commercially, and work forwards from there. Dependent upon time constraints and general interest, publishing of these articles will, similar to Ewing and Breihan’s columns, be daily. And now…

---

 

Paper Lace – “Billy Don’t Be A Hero”

17 June – 5 August 1974 (8 Weeks).

In the heat of Vietnam, “Billy Don’t Be A Hero” became associated with a reflexive opposition to the condemned Indochinese conflict; pop culture had gone to such great heights to illustrate the crude, imperialistic, and toxically masculine overtones of the war, and, at least for Australia who had contributed more than 7000 military men and had approximately half of them return dead or injured in 1971, the opposition resonated. Not least of all because Vietnam vets were soon being spat on and excluded from RSL clubs and parades; hostility toward military presence in Vietnam lingered long after the conflict, as it did in the US and elsewhere.

It’s worth mentioning all of this because, though it’s impossible not to divorce “Billy Don’t Be A Hero” from a certain anti-war perspective, it’s more literally a song about the American Civil War. That much is implied by a marching drumbeat, lyrics concerning the cavalry and mounted infantry, and a Top of the Pops performance in which Paper Lace literally dressed in appropriate attire. However the theme—one of a soldier’s wife bemoaning her husband’s foolish and imprudent actions in war—resonates now as it did then, and as it has done for any number of songs that don’t directly critique war as much as interrogate the real, harsh truths of it. And the real, harsh truth is that somebody’s daughter, son, husband, or wife is going to be coming back in a body bag. In the aftermath of Iraq, those themes remain timeless.

Musically however, “Billy Don’t Be A Hero” does not meet the same standard. It can be excused as a matter of production techniques available at the time, but there’s no denying that, as a pop song, it has not worn well; for every drum sound that might have sounded innovative at the time, there’s a softened, clean strum that wears down the song’s ability to be forceful in meaning, whilst also robbing it of durability more than forty years later. Without question, the song’s status as a hit makes sense, but compare it even to Bo Donaldson and The Heywoods’ cover, which incorporates some prehistoric synth and guitar busyness, and the quality gap is marked. If you listen to any version, listen to that one. 5.