Bite-sized posts about 7″ singles I own – shameless nostalgia from the days of vinyl.
Tom Clay – What The World Needs Now Is Love/Abraham, Martin & John b/w The Victors (Mowest, 1971)
The fact that I have this single reminds me of the time when I was an avid late-night listener to the pirate radio station Radio Caroline in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
As well as playing album based rock, the station also promoted Loving Awareness (LA), a hippy-ish concept inspired by a philosophy of love, peace and understanding.
LA was the brainchild of Caroline’s founder Ronan O’Rahilly and disc jockey Tony Allan was an enthusiastic supporter of the concept. Allan explained that : “The whole point about Loving Awareness is that if you have a love for somebody but it doesn’t necessarily have to be sexual. It can be a loving thing which goes on and on and on; it can be a truthful thing; and those things work both ways”.
The direct opposite of LA was ‘DA’ which stood for ‘Defensive Awareness’.
Caroline produced a number of jingles to promote LA (‘Let the loving awareness sound gently kiss your ears’) including one, posted on You Tube (see below), which features extracts from The Moody Blues’ track ‘In The Beginning’ from their 1969 album ‘On The Threshold of a Dream’. The combination of mysticism and hipster speak dates the jingle incredibly as for example when a follower of DA is chided : “Thou art surely the all time sucker!”
Tom Clay’s single was played regularly to epitomise the well-meant , but cheesy, concept of Loving Awareness.
Clay was a popular Detroit radio personality in the ’50s and ’60s who put together the track without any intention of releasing it officially. It came out on the Mowest label, a subsidiary of Motown
It begins and ends with an adult asking a cutesy kid to define words associated with social unrest – segregation, bigotry, hatred and prejudice. The child doesn’t know the meaning of the first three words but when asked ‘What does prejudice mean?’ replies: ‘I think it’s when someone’s sick’, which, when you think about it, is as good a definition as you’re likely to get!
The song proper is a medley of Burt Bacharach’s ‘What the World Needs Now Is Love’ and an adapted version of Dick Holler’s ‘Abraham, Martin, and John’. The latter was originally recorded by Dion but made more famous by Marvin Gaye (and countless others).
Girly backing vocals by a group called The Blackberries ( (Oma Drake, Jessie Smith, and Clydie King) are interspersed with sound bites from speeches given by President John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr., along with clips of radio and TV broadcasts related to the assassination of each. The reference to Abraham (Lincoln) in the original song is excluded.
On the B-side is The Victors in which names and ages of people who died in World War I & II and Vietnam are read out in a neutral newsreader’s voice against a spare backing of ‘The Last Post’. Most names are Americans killed in action but the inclusion of names of Vietnamese and of children “killed, but not in action” makes the point that in any war there are no real victors, only victims.
It is a measure of our more cynical age that if released now this single would be dismissed as a corny and inauthentic plea for a more enlightened way of living. It may be melodramatic and lacking subtlety but it still addresses well the question posed by Nick Lowe in his 1974 song : ‘what’s so funny ’bout peace, love and understanding?’
