Forever Doo-wop: review of book by Cadillacs' backing musician

 

For those who might be interested in a book about doo wop which is more than just a history of the changing personnel of a group or groups, let me draw your attention to John Michael Runowicz's Forever Doo-wop, published in 2010. It examines how the music is perceived by different sides: the largely white audience who pay to see live acts; the increasingly elderly singers, still making a living from serving up their past - significantly fewer in number now in 2024, of course - and those in the middle who promote and make money from the enterprise. 

I don't really know why it took me so long to get round to reading this; I'd seen it crop up over the years in remainder bookshops in the UK but I hadn't really taken a proper look at it, nor taken in the subtitle which is enough on its own to indicate this would be a more reflective read than some. I suppose it was that the cover seemed to suggest something picture-heavy, aimed squarely at the nostalgia market - and there are quite a few of that sort around, repeating the same basic points about how great it all was for those growing up in fifties America.

So it was a pleasant surprise to discover that it was in fact an academic work but clear and readable for the most part, written by someone who is both part of the culture and at a distance from it: a white musician who has played longterm with the Cadillacs, one of the most famous of all black doo wop groups, and has also been their musical director and an occasional singer. He examines that myth of "oh, wasn't everything great back then" and discusses the complex feelings of black oldies groups performing today for white audiences.

In outline the book is not unlike another memoir, reviewed earlier in this blog, by Michael G. Devlin, a white musician who played with the G-Clefs. But the crucial difference between the two (Devlin's book is entitled Doo-Wop! and the G-Clefs) is that the limitations of Devlin's ability as a writer mean that there can be a bit of a struggle to understand precisely what he means, despite the inherent fascination of the tale and a few good anecdotes about his own musical career before meeting up with the group.

It's not entirely his fault: there are limits to the extent to which Devlin has been truly accepted by the group, despite many years' service, and neither he nor, it seems, anyone else, can fathom how they conduct their business affairs, rejecting opportunities which could improve their fortunes for reasons which don't seem logical. That said, Doo-Wop! and the G-Clefs is essentially a tantalising work rather than one which has been fully realised. 

Runowicz, by way of contrast, is able to articulate his misgivings about interviewing the Cadillacs' leader (by then his friend) Earl "Speedo" Carroll for the academic piece he's writing, and the need to convince Carroll that he's not trying to write an unofficial biography on the sly and thus cheat this icon out of potential earnings. 

This is a big issue for many doo wop originals - and Runowicz mentions that the doo wop documentary Life Could Be a Dream is yet another example of artists not receiving their due, made harder to bear by the high quality of the programme and the irony that the documentary discusses that very problem. I'll quote the relevant passage, abridged, below, as it will give an idea of Runowicz's style:

A show the Cadillacs had played ... on Long Island .... was the show at which much of the video Life Could Be a Dream (2002) was made, an experience still invested with much bitter feeling ... The filmmakers offered no payment or royalty arrangements, claiming that it was a low-budget production for the Bravo cable television network which would not be for sale. Within a year of the taping, however, VHS and DVD versions were on sale ... Some of the exploited parties ... tried to put together a lawsuit, but it ultimately proved not to be worth the time, effort, and money. According to Jay, who was featured prominently in Life Could Be a Dream, not getting paid for the use of his image and words would not have been such an injury if the video had not been so well made and had not so sympathetically featured the artists in their current lives as oldies circuit performers. The documentary is an effective portrayal of the doo-wop community highlighted by a wonderful offstage interlude in which Jay along with Carroll and many of the other performers in the show spontaneously gathered around a piano in one of the classrooms and began to sing. The excitement increased as, one after another, singers entered the room and joined the music making. The video crew was notified and soon after the cameras were rolling. In the background were five recent graduates of the New York High School for the Performing Arts, all in their early twenties, whom Carroll had hired for the evening to be the Cadillacs' horn section. Even before the cameras arrived, they were dancing and singing along, absolutely surprised and overwhelmed by how much fun they were having at a gig where many of the artists were old enough to be their grandparents. I was seated behind the singers gathered around the piano and in front of the young horn section, singing along but smiling a little uncomfortably, acutely aware of being in the middle of a very special, deeply resonant fieldwork and life experience. All this was captured on video, as good as any informal, spontaneous backstage moment represented in the media. The surprise marketing of Life Could Be a Dream was deeply painful for its stars. Just as in the 1950s, when so many of them were exploited by the entertainment business — ironically, a subject addressed in depth in the video — their rich, music-infused lives had been commodified and distributed with no financial compensation for them.

The fact that Runowicz is in such a privileged and unusual position - viewing the situation both from outside and as one of the musicians - makes for a compelling read overall. My only gripe, and it's a minor one, is there is an occasional sense of a scholarly tone intruding on sections which don't really need such thorough explanations. But as some books about doo wop can get rather bogged down in tales of changing personnel Mr Runowicz's book has to be applauded overall. (I recall the excitement of first reading Philip Groia's They All Sang on the Corner - the first book I ever read devoted to doo wop - and then, for all its virtues, beginning to think that there was rather a lot of focus on the personnel of the Cadillacs' many spin-off groups and not quite so much discussion about the music - or at least that's the impression I retain from reading it several years ago.)

For more about doo wop groups I recommend Richard G. Carter's biography of the Spaniels, written with the cooperation of all members of the group. That too doesn't really discuss the music, taking its importance as a given, but there is more than enough of interest in the changing fortunes of the group members. I was lucky enough to interview Billy Shelton at length; he taught Pookie Hudson how to sing at glee club in high school and joined the Spaniels around the time of  Mr Carter's biography; he said that with all members in the room any self-serving account of events was instantly contradicted. 

For a monograph about life as a member of a young doo wop group Johnny Keyes' book Du-Wop [sic] can't be beat for conveying the excitement and anxiety of making a first recording (Keyes was in the Magnificents of Up on the Mountain fame). It's not very long, and half the book consists of pictures, but I haven't read anything else like it.

 

Related posts:

Review of Doo-Wop! and the G-Clefs

Review of Life Could Be a Dream

Review of Spaniels biography

Billy Shelton: Spaniel Forever

Review of Du-Wop by Johnny Keyes

A Distant Signal: Scott Walker

 

Scott Walker died five years ago today, the 22nd of March. I first heard about it on Radio 4's Today Programme on the morning of the 25th and immediately sat down to write the following.

 The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine Anymore, as recorded by the Walker Brothers, is one of those rare non-Beatles songs remembered from childhood before I became any kind of conscious music fan (the Beatles, part of a fraternal bond, were obligatory). But even when I started buying records, for a long time I didn't have - didn't want - a copy of it in any form, fearful of holding the experience up to the light. This went beyond stereo/mono snobbery or any notion of good taste or coolness: for me the magic was in the memory of the warmth and fuzziness of first hearing it on a medium wave radio in another room in another house. 

When young I was friends with a boy who lived in a nearby street and while we were playing together indoors his elder brother would be strumming a guitar - I can't remember whether he had any ability - or listening to the radio in the next room: a friendly enough presence but not of us. Possibly he had been assigned to babysit or was just idly relaxing at home after school; I can't remember. But The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine ..., heard at a distance via an AM signal, has become part of that generalised memory of a brief but much-valued friendship. 

 Some years later - and I'm aware this is going to sound as though strings, not necessarily arranged by Wally Stott, are called for - I recall envying boys such as my friend, who had been given a genuine Action Man for Christmas or a birthday, as I gazed longingly at its cheapo Hong Kong equivalent in the window display of a shop in Burnside on my way home from school. I couldn't afford it, even though the price was around a third of the real thing, and secretly went without school dinners for a week or two, saving up the money. (Not quite as secret as all that, as I was blackmailed about this matter by my elder brother, though that's but a trifle here.) 

Eventually I was able to secure my prize but knew I couldn't play openly with it, and so this knock-off Action Man, this Chinese imposter in a bright orange jumpsuit, was hidden in the pocket of a heavy, dark unused coat in the wardrobe in my bedroom. And at some point - most likely in my imagination, as I wouldn't have had, or thought to ask for, a radio by then - one summer evening with the curtains closed but orange light filling the room I recall opening the wardrobe, seeing the arms of the boy-doll hanging out of the pocket and suddenly hearing the song, which became associated forever after with a sense of the sadness of that need for subterfuge. I had my Action Man - of sorts - but realised I could only ever enjoy it furtively. 

 Which I suppose was about recognising, in my childish way, the sadness and joy intertwined in that Walker Brothers record - and particularly in the voice of Scott Walker. I didn't hear My Ship Is Coming In until about ten years later but instantly grasped the same quality, even though the lyrics of that song were all about good times on the horizon. 

Eventually, more than three decades later, I bought a Walker Brothers compilation CD which included both songs but the stereo separation made The Sun ... seem far removed from those good and bad memories and I regretted having made it dwindle into one more track to be summoned up at will instead of an experience better left at a distance, unexplored but instinctively understood. 

Now I have heard the Four Seasons' original as well as the Walker Brothers' version numerous times on any number of nostalgia stations, AM, FM and digital, and can call up mono and stereo versions of the Walker Brothers' recording on youtube or spotify. The mono comes closer to that early memory but even if the sound of an original 45 could be processed to simulate a 1960s medium wave radio heard from an adjoining room I don't suppose it would really conjure back that sense of hearing something strange and magical: a sadness and a pain in that distinctive, echoing baritone which was also somehow joyful and celebratory. 

The song's opening line may have been what sparked the association with my illicit plaything and made that radio start playing in my head. But I think it was also an early example, perhaps the first I experienced, of the way in which music can answer, or name, a confusion of emotions, even if they are not directly addressed in the song, and bring a kind of comfort: I didn't know or understand about the pain which attends relationships, but that simple pleasure which could not be enjoyed openly, and that mix of sadness and happiness in my childish mind, found a response in the voice of Scott Walker. I didn't have the experience or imagination to understand what he was singing about; I only knew it was important.

New Peter Skellern CD on kickstarter - pledge by March 8th

 

For those who might be interested, Richard Moore, who has already put together two comprehensive collections of Peter Skellern's recordings, thus rescuing Skellernites or Skellernatics like me from the frustration of earlier random collections, is doing it once more for Happy Endings,  the album of the TV series for which Skellern wrote the songs and in which he appeared. 

The songs were issued on LP at the time - that's the image which adorns the top of this post - but the forthcoming CD expands that compilation - and judging by Mr Moore's earlier CD releases it is likely to be in top-notch sound, and comes, moreover, with the approval of the Skellern family. There are only a few days left so hurry, if you're interested. It's great that someone has taken the time to put together the kind of release which major companies obviously don't think will be cost-effective. 

I must admit I'm not that familiar with Happy Endings, having only sampled it briefly on youtube but it's surely worth taking a punt if you like Peter Skellern's work, as the chance to get such a CD might not come round again. Prices begin at £13 for a CD with UK postage, though it's more if you want a credit on the disc (why?) or if you want a copy of one of Mr Moore's earlier Skellern collections thrown in (makes more sense to me). You can find fuller details about the different pledging options and see a short video of extracts from the TV series on the kickstarter website here:

Other posts about Peter Skellern:

If - and the thing is, I suppose, remotely possible - you are new to this blog I've written two posts about Peter Skellern, one forever unfinished piece devoted to his music in general entitled Not Without a Fan:

 And the other specifically about the wall-to-wall frolicking of the Decca album Holding My Own, entitled  Music for Pleasure:

 

Outrageous: new book by Kliph Nesteroff

 

Kliph Nesteroff is the author of the book The Comedians,  a gossipy, scandalous, irresistibly written history of the underside of the development of American stand-up comedy. But although you get all sorts of juicy details along the way (the Mafia figure prominently) it does also provide an excellent overview of how the form evolved in America and is hugely enjoyable.. 

His new book, Outrageous, overlaps to some extent, as comedians feature prominently, but its focus is on the culture wars in the US - far from a recent phenomenon, as Mr Nesteroff reveals. He starts in the 1800s with a discussion about blackface, and the many protests by successive immigrant groups - Irish, Jewish, Italian, among others - to stereotypical depictions by comics. The long-running Amos 'n' Andy radio show had two white performers playing black characters whose personae had been stolen from two black performers, who were never remibursed; when, much later, it moved to TV there were black actors surrounding the two stars, and despite protests from the NAACP those actors defended the show on the grounds that without such programmes, demeaning as they were, there'd be no work for them at all. 

It's not all about racism, however, as quite often the target is a perceived decline in standards of moral behaviour, though frequently the two issues are interlinked. What becomes clear as the tale progresses is that companies sponsoring of TV and radio programmes are all too ready to capitulate to protests, never wanting to rock the boat or run the slightest risk of their products being boycotted: money, not morality.

There is an amusing tale which illustrates this sense of priorities. Desi Arnaz, Lucille Ball's husband who also played her spouse in the long-running TV sitcom I Love Lucy, which the couple also produced, found that the show's sponsor, tobacco giant Philip Morris, had given in to protests that Ball's real-life pregnancy should not be depicted in the show, and it was strictly no go. Rather than wasting more words on the company's intransigent American representatives Arnaz got directly in touch with the head of Philip Morris, based in Britain, reminding him that I Love Lucy had made a great deal of money for the tobacco giant and it would be a pity to put such a fruitful relationship in danger. Whereupon the head honcho blasted off a curt memo to his Stateside underlings: "Don't f--- with the Cuban".

There is - though it's no reflection on Mr Nesteroff's writing - a certain grim sameiness about proceedings, in that members of the ultra-right-wing, anti-communist John Birch Society, once that group becomes subject to general ridicule, have a habit of cropping up again in a series of differently named organisations who are essentially doing the same sort of thing, or searching for new targets to justify their bile. It's also depressing to see that over the years there is almost a consistent house style for the language employed by a wide range of protest groups or journalists, mainly involving exaggeration and repetition, possibly echoing the oratory of the pulpit. 

There are, however, optimistic moments dotted throughout the narrative when the majority of Americans quietly decide, by their refusal to desert a favourite sitcom, that some former source of moral controversy is really no longer a big deal and protests quietly die away; as mentioned earlier, the sponsors' main concern is to maintain the successful promotion of their products. And the cumulative effect of all the events over the centuries and decades is to make it very clear that the present day is far more liberal than one might have supposed; it's simply that today's social media gives a skewed sense of popular opinion.

The story has been assembled from a wide range of sources, all indicated in the notes. It's such a vast topic that it cannot quite have the coherence of the earlier book with its narrower focus, but it's a compelling and lively read nevertheless. Music, from rock'n'roll to rap, and beyond, is also covered, with the suggestion that attacking the supposed corrupting influence of various musical genres is a front for the racism which dare not speak its name anymore. Anyway, this is well worth reading.

Waterloo Sunset excerpt

 

I must have been eight years old when I first heard Waterloo Sunset, in the year of its release, and - like just about everyone else in the world - realised it was something special.

Perhaps for a child the fact that it wasn't, strictly speaking, a love song had something to do with it, even though lovers figure in it. But for someone growing up in Scotland the song's setting was enough in itself to suggest something magical, even if the Engerland in my head may not have swung like a pendulum do. My childish notions of the country and its capital came largely from Ealing films on the telly, all decency and community spirit, tempered by odd glimpses in police series of a modern day city seemingly awash with criminals, spies and pyromaniacs like George Cole  (below) in Gideon's Way.

Whatever the reason, the song stayed in my imagination. A few years later, when a family holiday finally necessitated an overnight stay in London, I eagerly craned out of my room's tiny window to take in the stretch of water in the reddening dusk: it was Waterloo Sunset.

We were in Camberwell at the time.

You can find a great deal about the song on the net, and I'm not going to try to provide a digest of others' comments here. Instead, I'm going to pick up on a few points which have stuck with me over many years of thinking and reading about the song.

To start with the identity of the lovers: my only contribution to the Terence Stamp/Julie Christie question is that I'm prepared to swear that on one early occasion when the Kinks were performing the song on TV (possibly Top of the Pops, possibly not), I distinctly heard Ray sing the words: "Terence meets Julia."

A playful reference to one half, at least, of cinema's golden couple (they starred in Far From The Madding Crowd that year) or an equally playful booting of the song's original pair a rung or two up the social ladder?

I think I prefer the latter explanation. And even if the revision was a momentary whim to amuse his bandmates it still suggests the inclusivity of the song: no matter how much of an allowance your daddy gives you, the healing balm of that view is yours for the gazing. (And I didn't even need to be there.)

In the act of listening, of course, the song makes perfect sense. Scanning the lyrics cold on the page, however - without the benefit of additional information about family members who may have inspired it - you can't help wondering about the character of the speaker and his relation to this couple. For a kickoff, he seems to have been watching them regularly enough to note that

Terry meets Julie, Waterloo Station
Every Friday night

But there's no clear indication he actually knows them. He appears to be a recluse, claiming in his defence:

I don't need no friends

[...]

I am so lazy, don't want to wander
I stay at home at night

But two details suggest that he has somehow absorbed the couple, is them as well as himself: an artist, in other words, identifying with his subject.

He is an omniscient narrator, swooping down on them as though via a crane shot, picking out the young lovers from the "Millions of people swarming like flies." And he even knows that they, like him, "don't need no friends" - that the city itself, the beauty of the scene, is enough to sustain the watcher and the watched.

Waterloo Sunset has already been compared by others to Wordsworth's famous sonnet about Westminister Bridge. But a small detail from his book-length poem The Prelude may illuminate the song further. Subtitled "Growth of a Poet's Mind", the poem might be crudely summarised as "boy meets Lakes - boy loses Lakes - boy gets spirit of Lakes back again." (Other synopses are available.)

One section deals with his sense of alienation in London until he too is able to zoom into the swarm to pick out tiny details of humanity:

.... In the tender scenes
Chiefly was my delight, and one of these
Never will be forgotten. 'Twas a Man,
Whom I saw sitting in an open Square
Close to an iron paling that fenced in
The spacious Grass-plot; on the corner stone
Of the low wall in which the pales were fix'd
Sate this One Man, and with a sickly babe
Upon his knee, whom he had thither brought
For sunshine, and to breathe the fresher air.
Of those who pass'd, and me who look'd at him,
He took no note; but in his brawny Arms
(The Artificer was to the elbow bare,
And from his work this moment had been stolen)
He held the Child, and, bending over it,
As if he were afraid both of the sun
And of the air which he had come to seek,
He eyed it with unutterable love.

Suggs (how's that for a cultural leap?) was talking in a TV series about the impact of first hearing Lola . He said something to the effect that although he didn't get the details, he knew enough to understood it was describing an adult world, and set in a place - Soho - associated with adult pursuits.

He went on to say, however, that he had found the song reassuring: the message he took was that whatever the obscure challenges to come later in life, they could somehow be coped with, that ultimately he'd be alright, just as the speaker seemed to be.

The subject matter isn't quite the same, but Waterloo Sunset had, I think, a similar effect on my younger self. The speaker may be a reclusive adult - is it merely being "lazy" which keeps him indoors? - or he may be an artist. But it could equally easily be a child's eyes which are timidly peeping out at life from that window, at the big city with its "millions of people", and those as yet unknowable adult challenges.

That, at any rate, was how I think I took it - and the London I knew then only from TV seemed more remote and dangerous, closer to my notion of "The City", than nearby, familiar Glasgow.

Taken like this, Terry and Julie could be seen as imaginary figures, brought into being by the child-artist in an effort to make sense of that frightening mass of people and bring them down to a manageable scale: two people who at least know each other.

Their names are friendly, reassuring, perhaps absorbed from film or TV (which might bring Terence Stamp and Julie Christie back into the equation); they presumably have found proper grown-up jobs in the big city as they meet at the end of a working week; maybe, too, the fact they have discovered each other in all this crowd offers hope for that peeper-out at the window that he might someday be redeemed from his isolation.

As would be consistent with a child's-eye view, however, the speaker doesn't enter into details of their lives beyond the suggestion that they have in some unspecified way completed each other ("they don't need no friends") and feel "safe and sound" - a phrase perhaps more associated with children than adults - once they have crossed the river.

And instantly I see in my head the image used to sell Start-Rite shoes in the sixties and well beyond: two small children hand in hand, a boy and a girl, walking along a road which stretches to infinity with the dark unknown safely fenced off:

 

Read the full post here.

New play about Thomas Hardy on in London until Saturday 2nd December

My recommendation comes rather late, but if you are based in London and interested in the relationship between Thomas Hardy and his wives I can recommend the play What I Think of My Husband by David Pinner, running at the Grey Goose Theatre in Camberwell until Saturday, 2nd December. 

You can find fuller details at the theatre's website (link at end), but for those who are unfamiliar with the story the essential facts are that the writer Thomas Hardy's marriage to his first wife Emma soured over time, with the couple eventually living largely separate lives under the same roof, but an outpouring of grief and guilt after Emma's death led to a sequence entitled Poems of 1912-13, generally agreed to be his best work in that form. 

 The play contrasts the interactions of the elderly couple with fleeting glimpses of the young lovers they once were and also details the progress of Hardy's attraction to the younger Florence Dugdale, who is installed in Max Gate, the Hardys' home, as his secretary then becomes his second wife after Emma's death ... only to find that the bargain she has struck isn't all that she imagined. 

During the first act the play unfolds in fragmentary scenes which show us, among other things, how wilfully awkward Emma could be in social situations (though Edmund [Gosse?] seems to take matters in his stride) and how ill-matched she and Hardy have become over the years, for all that early passion. 

But considerable sympathy is shown for her plight too, trapped as she is in a situation so far removed from her early expectations. As played by Laura Fitzpatrick Emma is alternately exasperating and beguiling, which is, I think, as it should be. As I wrote in an earlier review of a radio play about Hardy and his second wife, there is an element of sitcom about this relationship, and just as Harold Steptoe's sense of being trapped with his father gives him license to be verbally abusive to his captor so the equally impotent Emma's jibes make perfect sense: she can mock and attack the character of the women he flirts with as viciously as she likes precisely because she is fully aware that she is incapable of effecting any change his behaviour. 

But sitcoms depend on the cycle never being broken, and equilibrium safely restored at the end of the episode. Florence is no mere flirtation and is soon installed in Max Gate as Hardy's secretary - even seen by the unwitting Emma as an ally in the scene shown at the top of this piece in which she uses Florence's position to gain access to the writer's sanctum sanctorum while he is out and gleefully chucks all his papers in the air while the new employee frantically struggles to put them back in order.

The above happens in the second act, which takes things up a notch: having set out the situation through the snapshots of the first half the painful reality of Emma's lot and the sheer sadness that this form of prison represents for both sides of the partnership gradually become more poignant as we move towards the inevitable end. We see Emma becoming increasingly frail and then dying, followed by Florence's agreement to become Hardy's second wife, only to be followed in turn by an ironic coda. 

Despite the second Mrs Hardy redecorating the gloomy Max Gate - neatly suggested in the minimal set by the simple placing of a tablecloth - there is no escaping the spectral presence of the first Mrs Hardy as "T.H." becomes increasingly immersed in thoughts of Emma as she once was, processing his grief via a series of poems. (It's not quoted in the play, but in Hardy's biography, credited to Florence though largely written by Hardy himself, we are told that Hardy was "in flower" when he wrote those tributes to Emma's memory. His phrase or hers, I wonder?)

Playwright David Pinner weaves extracts, sometimes only a few lines, from Poems of 1912-13 and other works, such as "I look into my glass", into the play, both at the end and earlier in the action; this made me hungry to hear some of the originals again in full but it was probably the right decision: a complete poem is a story in itself, and what we're watching is what led to the poetry. 

It also seems a wise decision to have the young lovers figuring only intermittently: flashes of memory which only become substantial as Hardy revisits their relationship - literally, through journeys to the places they knew, as well as through his compulsive writing of poems - after her death. Aliya Silverstone and Andrew Crouch, the actors playing the younger version of the couple, double efficiently as servants at Max Gate, the Hardys' home, and anyone else required, which accords with the pleasing minimalism of the set and props: in addition to the single tablecloth mentioned earlier we see, for example, empty picture frames for our imagination to populate - and in this play, to paraphrase the familiar warning at this time of year, a wreath is not just for Christmas. 

Edmund Dehn, who plays Hardy, has something of the hangdog expression familiar from photographs and paintings of the writer in his later years, and conveys the convincingly the air of a long-suffering spouse - even if he is the one who has contributed to that suffering. And that patience is enough to suggest the love which once burnt more brightly. There is even a touching moment when the pair frankly admit to each other that the love, or the fiery excitement and happiness associated with it, has gone - and whether or not that derives directly from Hardy's or others' writings (I don't know) that mutual acknowledgement feels right.

But nothing gets in the way of his writing, as Florence (Isabella Inchbald) discovers at the play's end, her enthusiasm about becoming the woman behind a great man replaced by something more like resigned acceptance: she had once inspired his poetry but now her predecessor is his sole subject.

I can add an anecdote, not from the play, which encapsulates the fate of the second Mrs Hardy. It comes from R.C. Sherriff's highly entertaining autobiography No Leading Lady. When the play Journey's End brought Sherriff acclaim in the late 1920s he got to meet some of the great literary figures of his day, including J.M. Barrie (a hilarious, absurd encounter which you will have to read for yourself) and Hardy and Wife.

I don't have the book to hand but remember the gist of a remark Florence made to Sherriff when they were alone, or at least not within hearing distance of her husband. She complained to him that the day before she had been obliged to wait patiently in the cold and gloom as her husband stood for an hour (or however long) in a muddy field, all because it had some sort of distant association with Emma - a typical outing for the couple, one suspects.

 

 

What I Really Think of My Husband (the title is taken from a piece of writing by Emma Hardy) is running at the Golden Goose Theatre at 7.30pm until Saturday December 2nd. It's a short walk from Oval tube and around a ten minute bus ride from Vauxhall (in one direction) or Peckham (in the other) on the 36 or 436. 

The Golden Goose website, with full details of how to book, can be found here.

Grimful Glee Club, my review of a radio play about Hardy and  his second wife, is here.

The play has inspired me to look at the best of those poems again, which I'll do in a later post rather than delay the posting of this time-sensitive - take that how you will - piece.

Merely Players? Pah!

  

 

There is, or so I've been given to understand, One who has numbered all my days.

Despite the occasional pointer in the form of various aches and pains, however, no clear indication of the date of my last go-round has been vouchsafed to me as yet. 

Which is a bit annoying, though not because I'm desperate to husband such energies as remain in order to produce one final creative flourish before gasping my last or anything like that.