Wizzard - Angel Fingers

Here is a film from Top of the Pops, showing Wizzard performing their number one hit, Angel Fingers. This went to number one, shortly after we got back from Switzerland, in September 1973. I have spent years trying to watch this film (and also the footage they made for TotPs for the week they were at number one), so I am very very happy to have found this on YouTube.

Angel Fingers was about the first single I bought, from Gerrards Cross, having (probably) missed the train back from school to Beaconsfield. I read today that Angel Fingers was a very expensive song to record as the band was very big and the Phil Spector 'Wall of Sound' sound took a long time to create, a bit like the middle operatic segment of Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody.

Although I had been a fan of the Beatles and Sandie Shaw and others in the 1960's, I think Wizzard were the first pop band I got into as a young teenager. They had their first hit, Ball Park Incident, just after we arrived back in England from Australia, followed up by See My Baby Jive at number one for four weeks in May 1973 and then this. They are mostly now known for their classic Christmas song 'I Wish It Could Be Xmas Everyday', which is played every year in England at least. It was Wizzard's bad luck to be competing that year, that classic year of 1973, with Slade's Merry Xmas Everbody, which hogged the number one spot for five weeks.

Looking at this video, and also the other Wizzard videos one realises how life was much more fun in those days for the youth., when you compare this to what they have nowadays, such as sexy Shakira, scarey Darkness, boyband Westlife and miserable-as-hell Snow Patrol or whatever. Still, I suppose Gnarls Barkley were a bit fun last year (says old man Roffey, sounding like his father).