pans people site?
Dave
legs & co from my youth....are there any web sites for them does
anybody know,or indeed any other fans out there reading this???
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Dave
the time even(!)yeah Cherry was sooooo pretty,Babs was a bit too
obvious and busty for me,Ruth was really sexy,didnt she go on to
manage Legs&Co etc? Louise left just as I was "getting in to
them" and Dee Dee was ok.....ok,Legs....were not as good dancers
as I recall,but I really fancied Sue,Lulu and Rosy!!!!!!!!
Still,its nice to see them again after all this time,I have a
tape of them from UK gold somewhere as well....do you have
anything or know of any website?????
Hinchada
>
> Watching TOTP 2 in recent weeks reminded me of Pans People and
> legs & co from my youth....are there any web sites for them does
> anybody know,or indeed any other fans out there reading this???
good-looking' type fan, or a John Peel-like 'I love Pan's People,
they're always good for a laugh' type of fan?
Cherry Gillespie was the best-looking at the time, but I saw Louise
Clarke on a retrospective, and time's been kinder to her than Cherry or
any of the others. Perhaps because she left the troupe early.
As regards Legs and Co, they were vastly inferior, but not as bad as
Zoo.
Hinchada
>
> Oh I was always a big fan,remember keeping all the cuttings at
> the time even(!)
exists... In the days of David Cassidy, the Osmonds, the Bay City
Rollers etc., there were no all girl groups for teenage schoolboys to
follow, and even if Pan's People couldn't sing (they *did* release a
single in the mid-70s, but I only heard it once, and it flopped), they
looked nice, and that's all you want at that age. It made me laugh when
Britney Spears said "I hear William and Harry really like my music, so
that's cool"... no, Britney, I don't believe they're listening to a word
you're singing, they probably watch your videos with the sound turned
down; and take that stupid microphone off, you look like you work in a
call centre.
> yeah Cherry was sooooo pretty,
Cherry Gillespie was the talented one; she went on to perform with Wayne
Sleep in the 'Hot Shoe Show' on BBCTV, and despite the humiliation of
the Pan's People single, released a couple of passable solo singles
herself (yes, she could sing, so it was everyone else's fault then).
She's also got a sexy speaking voice, and is in demand for voiceovers.
Cherry was also gorgeous, with the expressive eyes, and all that hair,
but what was attractive when she was 20 isn't so appealing at 44... her
hair makes her look to much like Charles the First these days.
Louise Clarke was the classy one. She talks like she's got a plumb in
her mouth, and always had the slightly toothy look of a 'deb'. Now she
looks like she could be a lady of the manor, she knows how to grow old
gracefully, and though she must be 50-something by now, is the one PP to
retain certain sex appeal. Bet Prince William won't fancy Britney Spears
when she's fifty (most of her bodily parts will have had to be replaced
by then, I guess).
> Babs was a bit too
> obvious and busty for me,
But she did inspire the wonderful Ronnie Barker line in Porridge...
altogether now?
> Ruth was really sexy,didnt she go on to
> manage Legs&Co etc?
Ruth Pearson had a kind of Mediterranean, Israeli look (was she
Jewish?), and added a touch of exotica... ruined when she turned up on
the TV retrospective talking with a north London accent.
After Pan's People finished, Ruth and choreographer Flick Colby managed
'Ruby Flipper' (quite clever this, an amalgam of their two names), which
included, shock horror, male dancers. Cherry was the only Pan's Person
to join Ruby Flipper, as she was about five years younger than the
others.
But having guys in the troupe didn't work at all, as the dance routines
took a bizarre and slightly sinister turn. I remember one for Diana Ross
'Love Hangover', which featured this guy in Richard Gere-style American
naval officer uniform, with Cherry and others gyrating around him, and
the general impression created was that this guy was a high-ranking
pimp, and the other dancers were his 'employees'. An all-girl troupe
could get away with things that the mixed group never could. They were
axed after six months...
> ok,Legs....were not as good dancers
> as I recall,but I really fancied Sue,Lulu and Rosy!!!!!!!!
... and so Flick and Ruth managed Legs and Co. I always felt that the
problem with Legs was that the music was overtaking them. Lots of early
seventies music was so easy for a troupe like Pans People to dance to -
things like 'Everything's Tuesday' by Chairman of the Board, so
optimistic and light, and begging for Ruth to flounce and flick across
the stage in a floral print, flowing skirt and floppy hat. But in the
Legs era, there was much more hard-edged music around, and much more
difficult to interpret. TOTP2's recent showing of the laughable attempts
to dance to the Sex Pistols prove my point. And when they weren't trying
to be taken seriously dancing to New Wave, there was too much reliance
on gimmicky costume, like the ridiculous 'Granny' routine for Boney M's
Ma Baker.
Zoo, Flick Colby's 1980s dance troupe that no-one really remembers much,
were even worse, a sub-Toto Coelo, and in the age of video, the entire
raison d'etre of Top of the Pops dancers - to fill in for artists who
were unable to appear - had by now gone. The most embarrassing part of
that era was when Flick C attempted to put the dancers on the same stage
as the artists. It had worked once or twice with Pan's People and
unpretentious artists like Mike Batt, but seeing 'Zoo' performers on
stage with the super-cool Lotus Eaters on TOTP2 recently, they looked at
best, intrusive, at worst, like slutty pole dancers. (The 1920s-style
video for the Lotus Eaters song had captured it perfectly anyway, so
what was the point in Flick Colby trying to interpret it differently,
especially with the embarrassed band on stage?)
> Still,its nice to see them again after all this time,I have a
> tape of them from UK gold somewhere as well....do you have
> anything or know of any website?????
I put the words into a couple of search engines, so I can assume that
there is no site. I don't think there's enough video material around to
make such a site work anyway... Pan's People were by definition a visual
experience, which would need lots of Real Video, etc, and only the BBC
could set such a thing up with material from their archive... and I
don't really think they would be bothered.
I taped all the stuff from the '30 years of Top of the Pops' special
programmes (including the needless and corny links from Messrs
Whitehouse and Enfield as Smashy and Nicey), and this included a
thirty-minute Pan's People Retrospective, in which I believe the girls
were heard to talk about their experiences on TV for the first time. It
was refreshing that all the girls took part... usually, in things like
the C4 'Top Tens', there always some sulky and precious pop star who
refuses to appear on the same programme as their former colleagues.
Since that programme, the girls have popped up here and there, riding
the 70s nostalgia wave of the last decade on programmes such as 'Noel's
Telly Years' and UK Gold's brief attempt at a nostalgia quiz, but TOTP2
is jogging a lot more memories.
Perhaps a sixty-minute video 'Best of Pans People' would be in order?
:-)
Martin Underwood
Hinchada <hin...@clara.net> wrote in message news:391D9E...@clara.net...
> Dave wrote:
> >
> > Babs was a bit too
> > obvious and busty for me,
> But she did inspire the wonderful Ronnie Barker line in Porridge...
> altogether now?
Remind me which line that was.
Hinchada
>
> Hinchada <hin...@clara.net> wrote in message news:391D9E...@clara.net...
> > Dave wrote:
> > >
> > > obvious and busty for me,
> > But she did inspire the wonderful Ronnie Barker line in Porridge...
> > altogether now?
>
"There's one special one... Beautiful Babs... don't know what her name
is..."
Dave
if anybody out there felt the same way,have to confess to having
a lot of material on all the girls,many video compilations from
the re-showing (every night for several years) of TOTPs from 1970
up to 1981 on UK Gold,this amounts to well over a hundred full
routines Pans/Ruby/Legs...and many photos,mostly from the BBC
press office,dating back to early line-ups of Pans People..right
though to the demise of Legs&Co,and a scrap book of cuttings and
articles.....if I had a scanner I would have created a website by
now if enough people were interested??
Sue Menhenick of course along with Cherry left Pans People to
join the ill advised Ruby Flipper in 1976 along side Patti and
Lulu.......you sound like you know your stuff by the way! I also
have a tape with the Pans People songs on...arrrrrgggggghhhh!!!!!
Hinchada
>
> if I had a scanner I would have created a website by
> now if enough people were interested??
should do it anyway. I like to see any 70s telly resources on the Web, I
just wouldn't have the time or indeed patience to put anything up there
myself.
> Sue Menhenick of course along with Cherry left Pans People to
> join the ill advised Ruby Flipper in 1976 along side Patti and
> Lulu.......you sound like you know your stuff by the way!
I know what I meant - that Cherry G was he only dancer form the
*classic* PP line up to join Ruby Flipper. (Classic line-up = the five
you mentioned in the first posting).
Of course, the group went through that funny period in late 75-early 76
when, although it was still called Pan's People, the line-up had changed
so much that it wasn't *really* Pan's, just a pale imposter... a bit
like Oasis today, really. And then when Ruth gave up the ghost, and
blokes came in, the name was finally changed.
Bit of trivia, do you know which were the two songs Pan's People danced
to on their last ever appearance? I know one of them, as it was by one
of my favourite 60s and 70s bands - 'Silver Star' by Frankie Valli and
the Four Seasons IIRC, and in true, literal fashion, it involed wearing
whacking great silver stars on their heads - but I've no recollection of
what their final routine was.
>I also
> have a tape with the Pans People songs on...arrrrrgggggghhhh!!!!!
You mean they made more than one? The one I heard, which was the single,
had a lyric about alley cats wailing at night in a deserted street or
something, and pretty much described their own vocal talents (I'm not
even sure Cherry Gillespie was on this disc anyway, so it had no
redeeming features!)
Dave
was in April 1976,remember that in these shows they often did 2
routines,and as well as "Silver Star" they finished with "More,
More,More" bu Andrea True Connection(think she was some kinda
porn actress?)dressed in white cat-suits as I recall dancing in
and around a bird cage(?)....got this on tape somewhere......and
they had THREE singles out in the 70's (unbelievable eh)
"You can really Rn'R me"/The Singer not the Song"
"He's got Magic"/"Sooner or Later"
"Club Lido"/"Club Lido"(Instrumental)
As to which is your cat wailing song aint sure,and I aint gonna
listen to em to find out as they are bleedin' awful....!!!!!
g
Dave wrote:
> ... they finished with "More,
> More,More" bu Andrea True Connection(think she was some kinda
> porn actress?)...
True.
The DJ Dave Cash tells the story of when he interviewed
the lady on Capital Radio and she told him she was a porn
actress, which threw him a little.
Gus.
Dave
you.....do you remember "The Dave Cash TV Show" at all??????? he
had an assistant,a posh voiced girl,think she also used to be in
adverts at the time?? any idea who she was?? you mentioning Dave
Cash made me think of her again.....!!!!!