‘Mouldy Old Dough’: The best-worst number one of the 1970s
The 1970s were, well and truly, a different time. Political correctness was an abstract concept, health and safety were nonexistent, and the music was… interesting, to say the least.
Once the 1960s had died and before glam rock and punk took over the zeitgeist, there was an odd period of no man’s land in which the music business, and seemingly society at large, just didn’t know what to do with itself. It’s when the true definition of one-hit wonders – as well as tracks that could never be played again today – really ran riot.
One of the worst offenders that emerges from the fray is ‘Mouldy Old Dough’ by Lieutenant Pigeon, a song so belligerent that it almost warrants no explanation, besides the fact that it’s pretty much impossible to find one anyway. The only lyrics to this tuneful masterpiece are “Mouldy old dough” and “Dirty Old Man”.
But if you’re looking for an explanation as to what that means, unfortunately, you’re not going to get to the bottom of it. When band member Rob Woodward was asked what the significance of the words was, he simply said he didn’t know. Nigel Fletcher, the singer – and I use that term loosely – just had to go along with it.
If the strangeness of the track wasn’t enough, Lieutenant Pigeon then decided to take things up a notch by having Woodward’s mother play the piano on it. As such, when the song inexplicably went to number one, it made them the only mother and son duo to ever achieve a chart-topper.
Even though that was a seismic achievement in itself, the more unbelievable thing was that ‘Mouldy Old Dough’ even got to the top of the charts in the first place. After all, when it was first released, it was a complete and utter flop. Then Belgium came along, used it in a TV programme, and the spirits were buoyed, sending it to number one there as well as the UK and New Zealand.
As it turned out, the Kiwis particularly liked a bit of jangly romps and mouldy dough, because for some unknown reason the song stayed at the top there for a whopping five weeks. There’s no other way you can explain this apart from the unfit justification that it was the ‘70s – times were different, society was strained, and people were downright weird.
You could say that ‘Mouldy Old Dough’ was the absolute manifestation of that, but it almost wouldn’t be giving it the correct credit. The whole point was that it was music for music’s sake – not exactly high class or world-beating, of course, but a real reminder that a bit of joy and silliness can go a long way in times of need.
Naturally, by the time that David Bowie and the Sex Pistols came to the fore, you could breathe a sigh of relief knowing that the course of music history wasn’t about to descend into utter bedlam. It was a whole new gregarious era, but you’d like to think that even a tiny part of it was infused with the true bizarreness of ‘Mouldy Old Dough’.
