Songs Found on my Local's Jukebox # 79 The Hollies

 

'The Hollies and the rest presented themselves as traditional show business entertainers, more anxious to meet audience expectations than to challenge them.' Charlie Gillett, The Sound of the City

The Hollies quite often get written out of the history of these things. Although they had twenty Top Twenty singles hits between 1963 and 1970 in the UK and five in the US during the same period they were always among the least hip of the big English groups of the sixties. I've got a Rough Guide encyclopedia of rock music published in the mid-nineties where they don't even get an entry. Nik Cohn doesn't find them interesting enough to write about in Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom. 

This is probably because they were shamelessly ordinary. They sang about meeting someone you fancied at a bus stop, chatting them up while sheltering from the rain under an umbrella and ending up marrying them. The kind of small town romance that most people's lives were probably based upon while The Beatles, Stones and The Who and the other hipper kids in the playground wrote the story of the decade that most people now remember never once thinking about writing a song which concluded by getting married. Bus Stop was written by Graham Gouldman who is also responsible for For Your Love, Heart Full of Soul, Look Through Any Window and No Milk Today among many others. He ended up forming 10cc. This song seemed to fit The Hollies. They, like Gouldman came from Manchester, where famously, it rains a lot.