Gimme Little Sign - Brenton Wood
- unclestylus
- 2 days ago
- 2 min read
Haydn (?Hofstetter) String Quartet Op. 3 No 5.
We may never know for sure
Who wrote that haunting minuet;
But as Haydn has so much more
Let Hofstetter be granted it -
So he may shine, a minor star,
In excellence a singleton,
Like Eichner, Litholff and such men
Whom genius touched, by chance,
Just once, just once.
So, catching up on the twilight parade, as I ruminated on Brenton Wood, a soul journeyman who died on January 3rd this year, I recalled this poem by Simon Curtis, a poem I first read in 1978 which has stuck with me ever since.
Brenton Wood was, in that hackneyed phrase, a "one hit wonder". But he was more, or should one say, less than that as, quite unusually for an artist who made records for over 15 years, no tracks by him that I have heard, have even nearly approached the quality of his one major hit, "Gimme Little Sign" with the possible sole exception of its predecessor "The Oogum Boogum Song" which scraped number 34 in the US. "Gimme Little Sign" which he co-wrote with two other relative unknowns, reached the UK Top Ten and the US Top Twenty in late 1967.
In the high-paced Uncle Stylus discos of the nineties and noughties, when I played "Gimme Little Sign" as a pre-dance track (ie for that period when people are eating their food, chatting and generally settling in) I would often be perturbed to see people suddenly flocking onto the dance floor, forcing me to get things going earlier than I had planned. Maybe it was the staccato, laid back yet funky bass and drum combination, maybe Wood's slick vocal, maybe even the mesmerising electric organ solo by Mighty Mo Rodgers.
I knew Simon Curtis from my Manchester days, a kind man, a lecturer in English whose essential decency always shone through in his teaching and his precise and delicate poetry. Today the memory of this poem prompted me to look him up on line. Our modern ability to check out almost everyone we have ever met if we try hard enough has its sad side: I discovered he died eleven years ago.
"Gimme Little Sign" is hardly up there with String Quartet Op. 3 No 5 (check it out on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hv0aviGm7fY ), exquisite though they both may be, but Brenton Wood is surely a contender for soul music's Roman Hoffstetter.
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