100 Greatest Songs of the 70’s #26 The Only Ones – Another Girl, Another Planet

Released: 1978

The quiz category related to one hit wonders is a whole sub-genre of it’s own, but how about the songs you swore made the charts, but actually never did? Well, the list is almost as long and probably more interesting: Bowie’s Changes anyone? The Verve’s Sonnet? Or maybe Hall and Oates soul smoker Out of Touch?

You can add Another Girl, Another Planet to it, a song which has been ubiquitous on punk and post-punk compilations for decades now, but didn’t so much as flop commercially as disappear without a trace. This black-holing was especially odd as it’s creators The Only Ones had signed to CBS after a frenzied ruckus which had included Island and Seymour Stein’s omnipresent Sire amongst the combatants.

The band’s story was essentially that of Peter Perrett, their lead singer and a man with a fascinating history which included lengthy spells as both drug user and dealer and who had once supposedly declined a chance to front a nascent Sex Pistols. After a police raid and the possible imposition of a jail sentence he’d opted for rock n’ roll instead, recruiting former Spooky Tooth stalwart Mike Kellie and bassist Alan Mair. An early dalliance with Keith Richards came to nothing, however continual buzz around their live work would eventually cause that major label scum.

Their debut single, Another Girl, Another Planet was a near perfect amalgam of Television and the Buzzcocks, the sort of three minute radicalism that is only pop because that’s the most adjacent place for it. Both the celestial body and the squeeze in question were metaphors for the escape hatch which Perrett’s drug habit offered, though at the time not many understood the reference and fewer seemed to care. Even with its corroded beauty The Only Ones never got their fifteen minutes, splitting in 1980 and performing only sporadically since. It wasn’t a hit. But by now you know that.