Records of a particular variety often feel like they’ve arrived to a party dressed in the wrong clothes.
Not badly dressed, exactly. Worse than that. Inappropriately dressed. A record that arrives at a mod night with cartoon eyes, a novelty grin, a cheap theatrical cape and a rhythm section tucked under one arm. It does not look like it belongs. It does not have the approved menace of a Chess R&B side, the clipped elegance of blue note jazz, the sharp neopolitan suit discipline of a soul dancer, or the respectable museum tag of a major blues name. It looks silly.
Then the feet start moving. People who take themselves too seriously started looking at each other. My favourite reaction follows – “is this too uncool to dance to?”
Then they themselves stepped up to the dancefloor.
That is the trick.
Three records sat together in my box like three suspects in a strange little mid-century crime scene: Bonnie Lake & Her Beaus, “Thirteen Black Cats”; Perry Como, “Glendora”; Ray Stevens, “Laughing Over My Grave.” On paper, they should not work in a room full of people who take themselves seriously. Especially not a mod crowd, where taste can sometimes become an immaculate prison. The right shoes, the right labels, the right sleeve notes, the right amount of seriousness worn as lightly as possible while still being heavy enough for everyone to notice.
Then you play Bonnie Lake and the room has to deal with itself.
“Thirteen Black Cats” is not cool in the ordinary sense. It does not lean against a wall smoking. It does not stare through sunglasses in a Soho doorway. It does not swagger. It scampers. It tiptoes. It flashes its teeth. It sounds like a 50s cartoon theme that escaped from the studio before the executives could smooth it into proper television. The beginning has that mad, bright, domestic-futurist bounce, like the Jetsons theme tune after the jingle has been removed and something slightly feral has been left behind. Then it opens up into a strange jazz-band interlude, all theatrical bounce and moonlit absurdity, before that baritone hook drops in, “baby’s love is my lucky charm,” and suddenly the silly thing has a spine.
That is the moment the record stops being a joke.
Or rather, that is the moment you realise the joke was serious all along.
Novelty records are often treated as disposable objects. Little jokes pressed into shellac or vinyl, designed for a quick laugh, a seasonal gimmick, a disc jockey’s trick, a cheap chart angle, a momentary wink from a culture that wants to sell you anything it can fit into two minutes and thirty seconds. They are supposed to be used, smiled at, then forgotten. That is why they are dangerous. Some of them smuggle in more strangeness than the official serious records ever dared.
“Thirteen Black Cats” understands superstition as choreography. It does not merely mention bad luck. It moves like bad luck. It creeps, springs, grins, doubles back. The whole thing has the feel of a haunted animated short playing on a television in an empty motel lobby. Not horror in the heavy sense. Something lighter and therefore more unsettling. A toothy little curse with a swing beat.
A mod floor does not always know what to do with that at first.
The first reaction is suspicion. You can feel it before you see it. The heads turn. A few dancers pause. Someone near the back wonders if the DJ has finally confused eccentricity with competence. (To be fair they were half right about that any ever given time about me). There is always that twenty-second courtroom drama when an odd record lands. The prosecution says: this is ridiculous. The defence says: wait for the rhythm. The jury is the dancefloor.
And then the shoulders begin to move.
This is one of the small miracles of DJing. Not the obvious floorfiller, not the consensus monster, not the tune everyone already worships before the needle drops. The better miracle is when a record has to persuade the room in real time. “Thirteen Black Cats” does that. It enters as a novelty and leaves as a dance record. By the end, the crowd has not merely accepted it. They have been slightly changed by it. They have been made less stiff. Less correct. Less imprisoned by their own good taste.
That is why it belonged next to Perry Como’s “Glendora.”
Perry Como is not supposed to be dangerous. His public image is almost the opposite of danger. He belongs to warm television light, cardigans, American domestic calm, the soft authority of a man who could make a living sounding like he never once raised his voice at a kettle. The voice is smooth enough to iron a shirt by itself. The surface is safety.
Then “Glendora” happens.
A song about a man romantically fixated on a department-store mannequin should not be as strangely persuasive as it is. It should collapse under its own premise. It should be nothing more than a novelty curiosity, something to be filed away with other commercial oddities from an age when record companies would apparently release anything if the chorus had enough polish. But “Glendora” has that terrible gift of making its absurdity feel completely straight-faced.
That is where the uncanny enters.
A mannequin is already a haunted object. It is human enough to disturb us, vacant enough to invite projection. A shop window at night is one of the great overlooked ghost spaces of the twentieth century. Glass, reflection, artificial bodies, artificial desire, electric light on empty streets. “Glendora” turns the department store into a chapel of misplaced affection. The comedy is obvious, but the image underneath is not comic at all. It is lonely. A man sees a perfect woman who is not a woman. He falls for display, surface, styling, arrangement. The song is ridiculous because the desire is misdirected. It is unsettling because much of modern life is built on exactly that misdirection.
That is the record’s secret.
Perry Como sings it as though nothing especially strange is happening. That makes it stranger. If a more obviously deranged singer performed it, the listener would know where to place the unease. With Como, the madness is upholstered. The song smiles politely while dragging you toward a waxwork romance in a closed department store. It is not a novelty song despite its absurd premise. It is a tiny hymn to artificial longing.
Now put that into a mod night.
That is where it becomes funny in a second way. Not funny because the song is merely comic, but funny because the room is forced to confront its own boundaries. A mod crowd often prides itself on taste, and rightly so when the taste is alive. The clothes matter. The records matter. The details matter. But all scenes risk becoming historical re-enactment societies with better haircuts. A scene becomes dead when it only recognises what it has already approved.
“Glendora” is a test of whether the room is listening or merely identifying labels.
If someone sees Perry Como and says no, they may be correct by category and wrong by ear. That is the whole problem with scenes. They begin as acts of discovery and harden into border control. A good DJ occasionally smuggles something through customs. “Glendora” is contraband wrapped in easy listening paper. It asks whether rhythm, atmosphere and strangeness matter more than the name on the label. In the right room, at the right time, they do.
And then there is Ray Stevens. Imagine a cartoon deranged version of Just Dropped In To See What Condition My Condition is In.
“Laughing Over My Grave” belongs to a different corner of the same haunted fairground. Ray Stevens would later become widely associated with comedy records, but this one has a sharper little blade in it. The title alone has a nasty elegance. It is not just death as a joke. It is resentment becoming posthumous theatre. The grave is not silent. It laughs. Or someone laughs over it. Either way, dignity is already in trouble.
Played beside “Thirteen Black Cats” and “Glendora,” it becomes the third panel of the comic strip. First superstition. Then artificial love. Then graveyard revenge. Three bright novelty surfaces, each with something darker underneath. They are not horror records, exactly. They are not Halloween records in the cheap seasonal sense. They are records from the cheerful commercial middle of the twentieth century where the grin has become too wide.
This is where novelty becomes hauntological.
Hauntology is often discussed through public information films, library music, lost television idents, brutalist schools, educational calm before nuclear annihilation, analogue ghosts. But it also lives in novelty records. Perhaps especially there. Novelty is the cultural unconscious wearing a paper hat. It tells us what an era could laugh at, what it could package, what it could sell as harmless, what it could transform into a chorus before anyone had time to ask what was really happening.
A black cat record is never only about black cats. A mannequin love song is never only about a mannequin. A comic graveyard song is never only a comic graveyard song. These records are small pressure leaks from the dream-life of mass entertainment.
They come from a period that sold brightness aggressively. Postwar American pop culture often presented itself as clean, modern, cheerful, efficient, neon-lit, freshly painted. Yet inside that brightness were strange compulsions: superstition, object worship, death jokes, loneliness, artificial romance, anxiety disguised as bounce. These records are not exceptions to that world. They are evidence of it.
The mistake is to think seriousness has to sound solemn.
A great deal of dull music sounds serious. A great deal of interesting music sounds ridiculous. The ear has to learn the difference between triviality and play. “Thirteen Black Cats” is playful, not trivial. “Glendora” is absurd, not empty. “Laughing Over My Grave” is comic, not weightless. Each of them contains a theatrical idea strong enough to disturb the smooth surface of a dancefloor.
That is why they work.
They make the room self-aware, then rescue it from self-awareness by making the rhythm undeniable. At first, people think about the record. Then they move to it. That passage from thought to movement is where the DJ has leverage. A serious mod crowd wants to maintain its image. It wants the right kind of cool. But dancing is already a surrender of image. A strange record simply makes the surrender more visible.
There is a beautiful little humiliation in dancing to something you initially judged.
You hear Bonnie Lake and think, this is too silly. Then your foot betrays you. You hear Perry Como and think, this cannot belong here. Then the arrangement finds a pocket. You hear Ray Stevens and think, surely not. Then the grin gets you. The body is less snobbish than the mind. The feet are democratic. They will vote for a good beat even if the brain spoils the ballot.
That was the pleasure of playing these records. Not as a comedy break. Not as a wink. Not as a novelty interlude where everyone is invited to laugh safely before returning to proper music. They had to be played straight. Even if the choices were encouraged by an extra G&T or two. That was the only way they could reveal themselves. If the DJ apologises for a strange record, the room will punish him. If he plays it as though it belongs, the room has to consider the possibility that it does.
This is one of the unspoken arts of selection. Confidence can temporarily redraw taste. Not permanently, not dishonestly, but for the length of a record. A DJ can hold open a door that the crowd would not have opened themselves. Sometimes all that is needed is conviction. Not arrogance. Conviction. The sense that this ridiculous thing has been chosen deliberately, not accidentally. That it is part of the architecture.
A dancefloor is not just a place where music is played. It is a social nervous system. It notices hesitation. It notices fear. It notices when a record has been thrown on as a novelty shield rather than placed as a serious object. The crowd may not articulate this, but it feels it. A strange record played nervously sounds embarrassing. A strange record played with belief sounds like a challenge.
“Thirteen Black Cats” was a challenge.
So was “Glendora.”
So was “Laughing Over My Grave.”
Together they asked a question that every taste-based scene eventually has to answer: are you actually listening, or are you protecting your identity?
The mod scene, at its best, was never supposed to be a museum. It was about sharpness, curiosity, movement, detail, reinvention. It was about taking from jazz, soul, R&B, ska, French cinema, Italian tailoring, American imports, English weather, working-class aspiration, modernist design, whatever had charge. That spirit should be elastic. It should be able to handle Perry Como if Perry Como has the right wrongness.
But scenes often become defensive as they age. The uniform remains while the curiosity thins. People remember the approved artefacts and forget the original hunger. They know what belongs before they hear it. That is death by good taste.
These three records are antidotes to that.
They are not better than the great R&B records. That is not the claim. We all know Walter Spriggs’ I Pawned Everything holds that title but it was a fucker to find. They are not secret masterpieces that everyone else was too stupid to understand. That would be another kind of collector vanity, and there is enough of that already pressed into seven inches. Their value is different. They interrupt the hierarchy. They remind a room that pleasure can come from the side door. They prove that a novelty record can carry atmosphere, rhythm, social mischief and even a kind of accidental philosophy.
They also expose the theatrical roots of all dance music. Even the coolest record is a performance. Even the most serious scene is full of costume, gesture, timing, ritual. A mod crowd laughing at a novelty record is not outside theatre. It is inside theatre pretending not to be. The black cats simply make the theatre visible.
That is why these records were never throwaways to me.
They were little acts of sabotage against stiffness. Not destructive sabotage. Generous sabotage. The kind that loosens the floorboards so the room can breathe. You play enough hard, credible, properly approved records and people begin to admire themselves for knowing how to admire them. Then you drop “Thirteen Black Cats” and suddenly admiration has to dance with embarrassment. That is healthy. That is air coming back into the room.
There is something almost moral in it.
Not moral in the dull sermon sense. Moral in the sense that it humbles taste. It reminds us that the body knows things the collector does not. It reminds us that seriousness without play becomes taxidermy. It reminds us that absurdity can be precise. A novelty record, taken seriously, becomes a tool for cutting through performance. Everyone is performing cool. The record performs madness. Madness wins because it is having more fun.
The best dancefloors are not the ones where everyone looks correct. They are the ones where a temporary society forms around sound. For three minutes, “Glendora” can make a room accept a mannequin romance as a legitimate route to movement. For two and a half minutes, Bonnie Lake can turn superstition into swing. Ray Stevens can drag laughter into the cemetery and somehow keep the beat alive.
That is not trivial.
It is a reminder that forgotten records often survive because they contain unresolved energy. Not polish. Not importance. Energy. Something in them still wants an audience. Something in them still wants to happen. When a dancefloor finally accepts them, decades after they were pressed, the record completes a circuit that may never have worked properly the first time.
This is where the hauntological feeling deepens. These records were made for a present that vanished. They return in rooms full of people dressed partly in memory, moving to sounds from a commercial culture that no longer exists, laughing at jokes whose original context has dissolved. The novelty is no longer merely novelty. Time has changed its voltage. The silly record has become strange because the world that made it is gone.
A black cat crosses the floor in 1956 and arrives in a mod night half a century later.
A department-store mannequin stares through glass after the department store has closed forever.
Someone laughs over a grave, and the laugh outlives the person who first bought the single.
That is why they should be taken seriously.
Not solemnly. Never solemnly. Solemnity would kill them. They need their bounce, their cheap grin, their theatrical overacting, their strange little hooks. But seriousness does not mean removing the joke. It means understanding what the joke is doing. It means recognising that a dancefloor can be moved by absurdity because absurdity is part of life, perhaps one of the most honest parts.
In the end, these records did what the best records do. They changed the temperature of a room. And that is precisely what all good music achieves. A song that becomes background noise is redundent as art.
At first, the crowd looked doubtful. Then they moved. Then the doubt became part of the pleasure. That is the whole story, really. A serious crowd was made to dance by records it might have dismissed. Three pieces of mid-century nonsense walked into a mod night and found the weak spot in its armour.
The weak spot was rhythm.
It usually is.
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