Smokie – Don’t Play Your Rock’n’Roll To Me

Smokey’s second Top 10 hit proved the first was no fluke, and the success that followed cost the band the spelling of its own name.

On Sunday, November 16, 1975, Smokey walked onto the stage at the Empire Pool in Wembley to collect an award and play Don’t Play Your Rock ‘n’ Roll to Me, a record that had just finished a seven-week run on the British chart. The band from Bradford had spent the better part of a decade getting into rooms like that one. That same month, the band announced it would stop using the name it had carried all year. The second hit was the one that made Smokey a serious proposition, and being a serious proposition was exactly what cost them the spelling.

Keep watching: Smokie – If You Think You Know How to Love Me · explore more →

A year earlier, nobody would have bothered to challenge them. Smokey’s debut album, Pass It Around, came out in February 1975, and neither it nor its title single reached the British chart, even with the band touring the country that spring as support for Pilot. What changed the band’s fortunes was an introduction to Nicky Chinn and Mike Chapman, the writing and production team behind hits for Sweet and Suzi Quatro. Their song If You Think You Know How to Love Me gave Smokey a No.3 single in Britain that summer, and it left the band with a harder problem than obscurity.

One hit can be luck, so the follow-up had to prove otherwise. RAK released Don’t Play Your Rock ‘n’ Roll to Me in early September 1975, another Chinn and Chapman song recorded at Audio International Studios in London, with Chapman producing alongside Chinn. The band’s own writing lived on the flip side. Bassist Terry Uttley wrote the B-side, Talking Her Round, just as Chris Norman and drummer Pete Spencer had written the B-side of the previous single. When the album Changing All the Time arrived on September 22, the new single opened it.

Seven weeks and a second Top 10

The answer came quickly. The Official Singles Chart logged the record’s entry on October 4, 1975, at No.44, and three weeks later it peaked at No.8 on the chart dated October 25. It spent two weeks in the Top 10 and dropped to No.31 on November 15, its last week in the listing. West German buyers took it to No.10 and Austrian buyers to No.13. Two Top 10 singles in a row turned a support act into a band with a following, and the album reached No.18 in Britain, where the BPI certified it silver.

Visibility brought the trouble. A struggling group could call itself Smokey without consequence, but a group with two hit singles was now sharing a name with Smokey Robinson. In November 1975, the band announced it would become Smokie to avoid confusion with the Motown singer. RAK’s original pressing of the single carries the old spelling, as did early copies of the album, and later pressings of Changing All the Time bore the new one.

A victory lap under the old name

The Wembley show caught the band exactly at that hinge. The Saturday Scene Pop Awards concert took place at the Empire Pool on November 16, and London Weekend Television broadcast an hour of highlights on Saturday Scene, its Saturday-morning pop show, between 11:30 a.m. and 12:30 p.m. on November 22, presented by Russell Harty and Sally James. Smokey received an award and performed the single, a closing salute for a record that had already done its work. The footage, licensed from the ITV Archive, now sits on Smokie’s official channel.

Within a year the new name was doing the work. As Smokie, the band reached No.5 in Britain in 1976 with Living Next Door to Alice, and the run that started with Chinn and Chapman kept going. The Wembley clip records the last stretch of the old version. Don’t Play Your Rock ‘n’ Roll to Me was the song that proved Smokey could last, and lasting is precisely what made the name impossible to keep.