I’ve been belatedly reading and enjoying Tom Marshall’s Catch A Falling Star, a brief memoir describing his time as a working pop musician and session player from the 1960s onwards. I love this kind of first-hand history from folks who weren’t the most famous person in the room, since their perspective is often less clouded. But that said, it always pays to fact check.
Following many club and pub band gigs and an extended stint performing in the Middle East in the 1970s, Marshall worked as a touring musician for Cliff Richard and (the reason I learned about his book) Bucks Fizz. Indeed, he was a victim of the infamous Fizz horror coach crash in 1984, taking years to fully recover from his injuries. (Maintaining the connection, he continued performing in line-ups with Cheryl Baker’s husband Steve Stroud for many years.)
Arguably Marshall’s commercial peak came as a latter-day keyboardist for Liquid Gold, best remembered for their camptastic 1980 disco banger ‘Dance Yourself Dizzy’, which reached #2 on the UK charts in 1980.
Marshall wasn’t in the very first lineup, which had been kicking around since 1978, but was signed up to the band on keys just as ‘Dance Yourself Dizzy’ was taking off. And that’s how he ended up on what was Liquid Gold’s third of eight total live appearances on Top Of The Pops, very much the pinnacle of music TV in the UK at that point.
Here’s that performance, preceded by Steve Wright proclaiming “this lot have been so much trouble at rehearsals”:
Reading about the preparation for that appearance, this anecdote from Marshall gave me pause:
Once my keyboard was positioned where it should be, I climbed on stage just to check. I heard a voice from another lower stage, set just behind me. I turned round to find a young guy holding a couple of drums. He said that he had never done this kind of thing before, and did I have any idea where he should put his Drum-Kit. I wasn’t sure either but suggested he just set them all up, and that I was sure one of the studio staff would be along to position them on stage. “Oh cheers,” he said. I asked him what the name of his band and he said ‘Genesis.’ They were a brand-new band and I had never heard of them. The drummer I spoke to was Phil Collins.
Punctuation aside, let’s deal with the obvious clanger: that Genesis was a “brand-new band”. Genesis formed in 1967 and had been charting albums in the UK since 1972. At this point, even Peter Gabriel’s departure from the group was old news: Phil Collins had been the lead singer since 1976. So Marshall has just slipped up on that detail.
That aside, this story does broadly check out. The unofficial but comprehensive Top Of The Pops Archive shows that the 13 March 1980 edition featured both Liquid Gold performing ‘Dance Yourself Dizzy’ and Genesis doing ‘Turn It On Again’, which eventually reached #8.
Collins’ relative lack of knowledge of the TOTP process at this point also makes sense. Despite Genesis’ solid album chart performance, it ran pretty thin on hit singles in the UK.
Prior to 1980, it had scored just one top 10 entry, 1978’s ‘Follow You Follow Me’. The TOTP archive confirms that the band never mimed or performed that track on the show, simply showing the music video instead.
Genesis’ only other TOTP appearance at this point had been for minor hit ‘I Know What I Like (In Your Wardrobe)’ in 1974. This was accompanied by a dance performance by the legendary Pan’s People. (Couldn’t find that one online, alas).
That said, it’s worth noting that on that first TOTP performance, Collins isn’t actually playing the drums. That’s being done by long-time touring drummer Chester Thompson. So it may well have been Thompson that Marshall chatted to. But I’ll give Marshall the benefit of the doubt here.
Liquid Gold’s other claim to fame was coming second to Buck’s Fizz in the race to pick the UK’s 1981 entry for Eurovision. As Marshall tells it, from the second ver Fizz went on stage for its Song For Europe performance and the skirts (of course) came off, it was clear that ‘Don’t Panic’, the Liquid Gold number, wasn’t going to take the crown.
The Liquid Gold experience ended badly for Marshall, with him abruptly quitting the group after receiving no royalty or performance payments for over a year. The pop biz sucks sometimes. But he can fairly lay claim to telling Genesis where to put their drums.
For more nit-picking on pop biographies, check out when Doctor Who and The Tourists collided and the time Eric Idle met Chrissie Hynde.
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