To Put Away Childish Things #20

A "to put away childish things" special.

I've been cleaning out the loft.

Among the other junk was that old box of 78rpm records that I mentioned. So that you get an idea of the soundtrack to my childhood, here, with a few links to the ones I particularly remember, is the full list of the records in the box. It should be noted that sometimes the song that I remember was the B-side.

Yellow Rose of Texas (Michael Holliday)
Shifting Whispering Sands (Billy Vaughan and his Orchestra)
My Fair Lady Piano Pops (Russ Conway)
Kisses Sweeter Than Wine (Jimmie Rogers)
Charlie Kunz Piano Medley D80
Charlie Kunz Piano Medley D84
Charlie Kunz Piano Medley D96
All Star Hit Parade (Max Bygraves, Tommy Steel and others)
Open Up The Doghouse (Dean Martin/Nat King Cole)
With A Song In My Heart (Andre Kostelanetz and his Orchestra)
Piano Pops #6 (Russ Conway)
Cinderella Medley (Gracie Fields)
The Poor People of Paris (Winifred Atwell)
No Matter How You Pray (Billy Cotton and his Orchestra)
Love Letters In The Sand (Pat Boone)
If I Had A Talking Picture Of You (Rodman Lewis)
Whatever Will Be Will Be (Doris Day)
Love Is A Song (RAOC Blue Rockets Dance Club)
A Strawberry Moon (Bob And Alf Pearson)
Suddenly There's A Valley (Jo Stafford)
Beautiful Dreamer (Al Jolson)
That's Amore (Dean Martin)
Come Back To Sorento (Gracie Miller)
Love Letters (Nat King Cole)
Would You (Gracie Fields)
Flirtations Walz (Winifred Atwell)
Don't Cry Joe (Charlie Spivak and his Orchestra)
Alone (Petula Clark)
Girl Of My Dreams (Bing Crosby)
Three Little Sisters (Geraldo and His Orchestra)
The World Outside (Russ Conway)
There's A Lovely Lake In London (Primo Scala and His Banjo & Accordion Band)
Shiralee (Tommy Steele)
Honey Babe (Cyril Stapleton and His Orchestra)
If (Allan Jones)
Memories Are Made Of This (Dave King)
Rogue River Valley (Chuck Miller) (Not the same version as on record. This link is Hoagy Carmichael)
Stupid Cupid (Connie Francis)
Last Train To San Francisco (Johnny Duncan)
Wandering Eyes (Charlie Gracie)
Baubles Bangles And Beads (The Dick Hyman Trio)
The Deadwood Stage (Doris Day)
Mary's Boy Child (Bob Dale)
It's The Irish In Me (Ruby Murray)
Stick It On The Wall Mrs Riley (Billy Cotton)
Careless Love (Slim Whitman)
Alexander's Ragtime Band/The Spaniard That Blighted My Life (Bing Crosby and AL Jolson)
Three Galleons (Robert Earl)
Lords Prayer/Bless This House (Gracie Fields)
Bless Your Beautiful Hide (Howard Keel)
My Son My Son (Vera Lynn and Frank Weir)
Real Love (Rubt Murray)
Beloved Be Faithful (Teddy Johnson)


And people wonder how I turned out as normal as I did!

28 Years Later... (A "To Put Away Childish Things" Special Edition)

Somewhere in a parallel Universe, it's 2010 and Jameson Raid have just played their farewell tour after thirty-five years as the most successful Heavy Metal band in the world. They have finished on a triumphant seven-night, sell-out run at the O2 in London. Rock magazines have produced detailed tribute issues. The twenty CD boxed set retrospective of their work has gone straight to the top of the charts.The Mojo cover disc has a lot of bands no one ever heard of doing their versions of Jameson Raid songs in inappropriate styles. The Classic Rock cover disc is "Bands influenced by Jameson Raid". Terry Dark has denied reports that he is the new judge on Britain's Got Talent.

But that's in the Universe next door.

Back here in this Universe it's 1982. Jameson Raid have just split up after a couple of years of struggling on with line up changes. They leave behind two EPs and a single track on a compilation album. Other tracks were recorded but never released. Their small but loyal following are disappointed that they will never make the big time.

Fast forward to our 2010 and after 28 years Jameson Raid are back. The missing recordings have been released on a CD, the classic line up are together on stage for the first time since they split up. They are playing three gigs, two in England and one in Germany. The Robin, venue for the first gig, is packed. Who would have thought that a band almost no one has ever heard of could fill the place? The band look old. We all look old. It's been a long time.

Then the music starts and they are as good as they ever were. They thunder through the tracks on the CD and more. Surprisingly I remember all of these songs from the first time round, so long ago. The audience love them. They are note perfect and harder and heavier than I remember them. They have even dug out the old costumes, Ian Smith in his waistcoat, John Ace in his military gear, Terry Dark more conventional in jeans and T-shirt. For two hours we have slipped over into that parallel Universe where they are the stars they should have been. 

And then it's all over. I can't get to the other gigs but I surely would if I could.

I'd thought the gig might have to fly powered solely by nostalgia. I was wrong. In their day these guys produced some of my favourite songs and performed some of my favourite gigs , gigs I recall vividly to this day, and older or not they can still do it. 

A glimpse of the greatness that might have been.

To Put Away Childish Things #8

I don't think I should be admitting this really.
My friends will laugh.
I will though.
I'll stand up and admit it.
Back in the 1970s I bought quite a few of the "Top of the Pops" series of albums.

There it's done.
Now it's possible, probable even, that some of you, especially those overseas, don't know what these albums were. There were, apparently, ninety-two altogether in the series - though I had only about a dozen. They sold over three million copies. They were mostly not eligible for the album charts because they were budget priced but in the very brief period when they were eligible two of them made number one.
So what were they? They were albums by anonymous artists covering an astonishingly wide range of currently popular chart hits, about a dozen per album. The front of the sleeve always featured a list of the tracks and, crucial to pubescent boys, a scantily clad model.
The songs were covered as closely as possible to the original sound and often they made a pretty fair job of it, though I recall that the attempts at imitating singers with distinctive voices weren't always successful. David Bowie covers always seemed to come out particularly weakly.
Now I know that they were looked down on by nearly everybody. After all if you were a fan you'd buy the real thing wouldn't you? But I always quite enjoyed them. They were cheap and cheerful and very much a product of the era.
Anyway, I am quite nostalgic about them.
Even if this is the first time I've ever told anybody that I bought them.

Harder and Heavier (with added PVC)

(One of those reviews that I don't do.)

When I last saw Toyah at the Robin she was wearing very little. She did the whole set dressed in a rather revealing basque. Very nice it was too. Last night she was wearing more - a skin tight black PVC outfit with a four inch wide red rubber belt. Somehow it was even more revealing than the basque. Forgive me for a moment while I just try to recall the detail.

Ah, that’s better.

OK. What about the music? She did a set that was half and half songs drawn from her extensive back catalogue and covers of her own personal favourites. The back catalogue ran all the way from 1979’s Sheep Farming in Barnet to 2008’s Court of the Crimson Queen and the covers included everything from Alice Cooper to Cameo, Billy Idol to Guns’n’Roses, the Cult to the Osmonds. When she sang Nancy Sinatra’s “These Boots Are Made For Walking” and reached the lyric “One of these days, these boots are gonna walk all over you” there probably wasn’t a bloke in the house not thinking “I wish”.
Let me just consider that outfit again.

The arrangements and the band performances were harder and heavier than usual, solidly moulding all these disparate songs into a unified whole. They rattled through it without any wasted time in as fine a rock performance as I’ve seen for some time. The band were all excellent though the focus was obviously on Toyah’s own dynamic performance at the front. She is every bit as energetic and enthralling now as when I first saw her thirty years ago, and in even better voice. Not to mention even better shape.

It’s hard to believe just how long I’ve been going to Toyah gigs and she’s never disappointed and though her style has become more mainstream rock over the years it’s just moved right along with her audience’s personal tastes. Let’s hope that she’s back at the Robin again before too long.

I must go have a lie down now and think some more about that outfit.

Something I DO like about Alice

At last, something I can be unequivocally positive about with regard to the new Alice in Wonderland. I today received my CD of Danny Elfman's score for the movie and it's a remarkably well rounded piece of work. It doesn't play like a film soundtrack, it plays like a suite of music written entirely independently and works very well as such. Here and there it may be a touch episodic but overall it flows almost symphonically. Danny Elfman, as testified by such previous scores as Beteljuice and Batman writes with tremendous dramatic flair and while, in parts, this may be reminiscent of those - and other - Elfman film scores, it remains nonetheless a splendid piece of work on its own terms. The recurring Alice main theme solidly underpins all of it with the choral passages threading through it as a constant counterpoint to the frequently menacing foreground.
As Alice says in Looking Glass when she reads the poem Jabberwocky, "Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas -- only I don't exactly know what they are!"
Fortunately the ideas and images that it fills my head with are shaped by my own previous knowledge of the books, by my own imagination of how Wonderland should be and not by Tim Burton's movie.
If only everything about the film had been as good as the soundtrack it would have been a mighty piece of work indeed.

28 Years Later

There used to be a band called Jameson Raid. Unless you live within about five miles of where I was born or own the Metal For Muthas albums that compiled tracks from what went by the clumsy name of NWBHM (New Wave of British Heavy Metal) you have almost certainly never heard of them. For the people whose musical taste was formed in that geographical area and within a year or so either side of mine they were the must see local band. They released two eps and a track on one of those albums. Eight tracks altogether. And that was it and that was twenty eight years ago. I saw them half a dozen times in the brief period that they were around, bought the few available tracks and then, when they split up, filed them and, over time, forgot them.
Forgot them until a couple of weeks ago when Pete turned up in the pub with a concert ticket for Jameson Raid who have, after all this time, got together for a few gigs. Naturally I've bought a ticket and equally naturally I've dug out those tracks for a listen. What amazed me was that after twenty eight years I can still sing along with most of the words. I knew all of Seven Days of Splendour and Catcher in the Rye and most to The Raid and Getting Hotter. I struggled a bit with Straight From The Butcher and It's a Crime and only knew a handful in The Hypnotist but hey, it's been twenty-eight years. Given that I cant remember where I put my keys ten minutes ago and regularly forget to watch or tape my favourite programs I'd say that's pretty damned good.
Of course whether the band will be pretty damned good after all this time remains to be seen. I shall of course keep you informed but the gig isn't until the middle of July.
Meanwhile I have a set of photographs I took of the band when I saw them for the last time at Himley Park. I shall scan them at the weekend and put them onto my other blog.

Listen to the fingers

Most of the time I have my radio in the car tuned to Classic FM. This, for those who don't live in the UK, is a station that plays classical music. The problem with it is that, for the most part, it plays classical music from a fairly restricted playlist of popular and undemanding classical music. There are certain pieces that you seem to hear every time that you tune in. A few weeks ago I got fed up of hearing William Walton's Crown Imperial* every day and retuned to BBC Radio three. Once again, for those who don't get BBC radio stations, this specialises in Classical music, though taking a rather more highbrow tone about it.
I was listening this morning as I drove into town. It was the CD review program and two people were playing pieces of piano music from CD and discussing them. I was struck by the difference between Radio 3 and Classic FM. When I listen to Classical FM the links are often fairly trivial and the discussion of the music superficial but when I listen to Radio 3 the links are mostly gibberish.
Let me be fair. They are mostly gibberish to me, how they sound to people who actually know something about classical music I couldn't say. I just like to listen to it; I don't actually have any expertise in the area.
But listening to the links was a bizarre experience where all the words made sense but the actual sentences seemed meaningless.
What, for example, was meant when one recording was described by "I felt I was listening to her fingers rather than to Schubert"?
Did they perhaps expect her to play the piece with her nose?
Another piece was described as sounding "hesitant and disjointed" though I had detected nothing other than a pleasant, if unfamiliar, piece of piano music. In a longer interval it was "explained" that musicians should not feel bound by the dots on the page, that they should be more modernistically interpretive. Aren't the dots on the page the things that tell them what to play? What is "modernistically interpretive" anyway? Is it like the old Morcambe and Wise joke about "playing all the right notes but not necessarily in the right order"?

I suppose this is what happens when you eavesdrop on experts talking to each oter, regardless of the field. Or possibly it is genuine gibberish and they only think it makes sense.

Still, gibberish aside, at least the music is drawn from a much deeper well and in twoweeks of listening I haven't heard Crown Imperial once.

*Crown Imperial for some reason always sounds like the Thunderbirds theme tune to me anyway.

Will you, won't you join the dance

When you are a collector - be it of stamps, music, books, matchboxes or straw donkeys - stuff to add to your collection pops up at the oddest of unexpected moments. Yesterday, in an attempt to vary our Sunday drinking routine, we went to a free gig in the Robin 2 in Bilston. The band was a rock outfit called Ebony Tower. They turned out to be pretty decent, managing to overcome a very muddy sound balance in the venue, and the thirty or so people watching them all seemed to have a good time. More than that though the guitarist - Wilson McQueen - turned out to be a serious fan of Alice In Wonderland. The first song was from the EP and titled "White Rabbit" and a subsequent one, also from the EP, was called "The Looking Glass War". One not on the EP, but that will doubtless surface on the forthcoming album, was "Alice". They even, at one stage launched into a chorus of "Will you, won't you join the dance" - the Mock Turtle's song from the book.
Of course I had to buy the EP - no great hardship as it was only a fiver and I'd really enjoyed the show anyway.
It was an unexpected bonus and the EP will join my collection of Alice related stuff even if the two songs on it have no discernable lyrical connection to the books.

DPRK: Korean State Symphony Orchestra

The Symphony Hall was a magnificent building constructed once more of marble, at least the reception areas were. The hall itself was acoustically splendid with a rounded construction and a wooden surfacing that lent a deep resonance to the music of the orchestra. And what an orchestra it was. Several of us independently estimated that there were between 130 and 150 people on the stage. The quality of their musicianship and the power of such a grouping was in no doubt whatsoever. They were quite simply the best orchestra I have ever heard. The program was another matter. While it was all very rousing stuff it was also all more of that vaguely militaristic pomp and bombast that we had heard so much of already. It was music that while engaging enough on a visceral level had no cerebral impact at all. The only part of the 75 minute performance that I could recall afterwards was a brief, surreal interlude when the orchestra suddenly launched into a spirited rendition of “Those Were the Days”.

Actually that isn’t completely true. There were two other things about the performance that stick in the memory. One was the woman who gave a brief, spoken introduction to each piece. The introduction was in Korean but she had the most extraordinary voice that I have ever heard. It swooped and dived as if she were overcome with the weight of a great emotion. It filled the entire hall with the feeling that at any moment she would burst into such tears that we might all drown in them. It was truly astounding.

The other thing was both comical and telling.

The hall was full and we had good seats, near to the door by which we had entered, so I witnessed this whole pageant play out. As I have said we were accompanied on the tour by an official cameraman, a tall, gaunt man who glided silently around filming but who always seemed to be there whenever you turned around or glanced to one side. He reminded me of Lurch in the Adams Family. Now, as the performance was beginning he tried to enter the hall with his camera and one of the officials, a woman, turned him away. They both went out into the corridor. Voices were heard. Then the music started, drowning everything else out. I though no more of it, except that he had perhaps met his match.

Then I noticed the door opposite, nearest the stage, open and in walked our man. He walked up onto the stage and in among the musicians and started filming. Officials around the auditorium ignored him.

At first I thought this rather comical but as he continued I started to wonder. Just how important were our guides? What kind of leverage did they have if on their say so a cameraman could do as he was doing? I know that they were showing us the country’s best face but were we, a motley band of tourists really important enough to warrant this? I didn’t think so but it showed the levels of power that were actually vested in the people showing us around.