Cheapo Cheapo resurrected for Black Friday?

This almost defies belief, and I'm still not sure whether it's just an elaborate wind-up, but according to the information I have been given the much-missed Cheapo Cheapo Records of Rupert Street, Soho, will be resurrected, or regenerated, or what you will, for "a month and a day", starting on Black Friday (November 29th).

It's an appealing idea in theory, but from the little which I've been told about the project it sounds like a rather Disneyfied way of bringing the beloved record shop back to life - and not cheap, either: instead of free admission and handing over a few pennies for bargain finds would-be customers will be obliged to hand over a tidy sum simply for the privilege of revisiting its racks once more. 

Despite that it'll be a case of "look but don't touch" - or at least "look and touch but don't take to the counter or slip surreptitiously under your roomy coat": none of the stock is available to purchase until the installation is dismantled on or around New Year's Eve. 

Which sounds a bit stupid to me, though I suppose the shelves would become rather bare by the third or fourth week. Visitors will be sent a code which allows them to apply online to "bag" any of the items which took their fancy once the pseudo-store is taken down. Too late for Christmas, then, but a hopeful start to the New Year (always assuming someone didn't want the record you wanted).

Will the items finally released for sale be as cheap as those once peddled by Phil? There has been no indication about possible prices - let's hope that at least it won't be a case of dynamic pricing with demand pushing up the cost of certain items. And it's possible, I suppose, that whoever is behind this project will want to offload all the tat quickly once Cheapo expires a second time - here's hoping, anyway. Unless it's going to be a regular occurrence for Record Store Day. Personally, I favour the Brigadoon model: let it reappear once per century. 

I've been told - appropriately, at second hand - that this whole project began when a certain someone - I know not who, but apparently a very well-known name, no stranger to working in a record shop himself - realised that a site in Rupert Street (either Cheapo's old premises or a neighbouring space) was available for rent for a few weeks between the closure of one business on the site and the official start date of a new one.

This mystery man is clearly someone savvy enough to know the mystical hold that certain long-gone record shops can have in the hearts of their former customers; learning of this opportunity, he formed a plan to recreate Cheapo's cramped interior and the general ambience of the place. I don't know whether  a professional actor will be employed but apparently there will even be someone present to represent Phil, and with whom visitors can interact - which already sounds out wildly of character for a cod-Cording, if you ask me, but it does provide an encouraging indication of the lengths to which whoever has set this up seems to be going in order to convey the atmosphere of that long-lost emporium. Some of those who haunted Cheapo, myself included, have been interviewed about the stock and I understand there has been frantic buying on auction sites and elsewhere since summer in order to replicate, or at least give a sense of, the range of CDs, LPs and even cassettes you could find there once on a time.

But here comes the nasty bit - and please don't bombard me with enquiries because I really don't know any more than I have set down here. I've heard this all from a friend of the person who is behind it, and as I've said I don't know the latter's name. Possibly it's all some ill-considered gag, trampling on the feelings of those who really felt the loss of Cheapo, and with it part of their life. I do hope not. I was approached and asked to publicise this because of my blog post Cheapo Cheapo: The Full Story, which provided a potted version of my many blog posts about the closing of the shop. I wish the enterprise well, though my chum, the intermediary, could not be drawn on the price of this admission to the past, other than strongly hinting you wouldn't be left with much change out of fifty quid (as in "... bloke"). And that's only for the privilege of walking in the door, remember: any items you wish to claim later will cost you more.

It has the potential to be a rip-off, no doubt, but I think it all comes down to how convincingly Cheapo is realised - and I suppose that renting the space during that four-week window can't be, er, cheap either. 

Wonder how much effort will be taken in recreating the look of the shop? Will it be akin to the National Trust scrupulously seekingout period wallpaper and other items in an attempt to restore Paul McCartney's childhood home, Forthlin Road, after post-Macca occupants had transformed the place? But Cheapo didn't have a Mike McCartney to document its interiors, as far as I know, and there aren't many photographs of reasonable quality of Cheapo's inside to give more than a vague overall impression. (The image up top, by Jonathan Sloman, dates from 2021, presumably in between earlier post-Cheapo incarnations.)

Maybe, however, a slight sketchiness about finer points is as it should be: the Cheapo Cheapo Records I have in my heart might well differ from yours. There has been no mention (to me, anyway) of any attempt to fill up this revived Cheapo with DVDs, for example, even though they sure took up a lot of space in the shop in its final years. Anyway, here's hoping that what appears before our eyes will be more than a tawdry con-job.

More news as (if?) it happens, music lovers ... 

The Complete Story of Cheapo here.

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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. 

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.

Permit me to explain. 

I listen to music via an mp3 player, a model which is no longer manufactured. Its inbuilt battery has a finite life and cannot be removed or replaced unless you know about things like soldering and the match last night. So I regularly find myself on a well-known auction website in search of backup devices.

Most of the replacements I've bought - only ever this favoured model - are secondhand, and I can't tell how long they will continue to operate. I've had reasonable luck with purchases so far, even though the average playing time between charges for a pre-loved one is a little less than that of a pristine device. But a day inevitably comes when its power reading starts falling from 100% and I know that I must steel myself once again for the sadness ahead.

Pennies From Heaven Revisited

 

 Someone mentioned on social media recently that Dennis Potter's Pennies From Heaven has not been broadcast or made available via streaming services for quite a few years. To be clear, that's the original 1978 TV series about a naive and optimistic songsheet salesman (Bob Hoskins), using 30s and 40s recordings to which actors mime, not the US film adaptation. In the book Potter on Potter the writer told Graham Fuller his thoughts about the latter:

... they failed to understand that it was supposed to be a home-made musical ... I was shown the schoolroom set ... a simulation of a genuine rural Illinois schoolroom of the thirties - and I thought it was great. Then they said, "Now we'll show you the fantasy schoolroom," which was this much bigger, all-white duplication of it. That was the moment I realised they were never going to make it work, but there was no way that could be conveyed. The whole thing was running, the cake was baked, and it was eating itself.

The G-Clefs as seen by a backing musician

Before I review another book about the experience of being a backing musician for a doo wop group I thought I'd repost this assessment of Michael G. Devlin's account of working with the G-Clefs of I Understand and Ka-Ding-Dong fame. I've corrected a few of my own typos - so much for my criticism of his style - but otherwise left the piece much as it was.

 
It has to be said at the outset that this is not, in the technical sense, a well written book: there are  grammatical errors or infelicities which mean you occasionally have to rewrite a sentence in your head to make sense of it - and don't get me started on the apostrophes. Was there really no one to cast an incisive eye over musician Mike Devlin's MS before it was shared with the world?

That said, this is still a compelling tale: stick with it and you will learn to filter out the blemishes, like tuning out the bacon sizzle on a 78 once the music grabs hold. And it is liberally illustrated with photographs of the group in action and posters and flyers for gigs.

The Iceman Writeth

 

If you're reading this blog then you will probably know that Jerry Butler was a member of the Impressions, a doo wop/soul group which also featured his childhood friend Curtis Mayfield. For Your Precious Love, which Butler cowrote and sang lead on, was a meld of doo wop and gospel which sounded as though it had been recorded in a cathedral; it was a big hit on Vee-Jay Records in 1958 and is now regarded as a doo wop classic. 

Butler was unexpectedly given top billing on that release, which created some bad feeling within the group and eventually led to his decision to go solo. Apparently the distinction had been made on the record because the company reasoned that having two acts on their books would be better than one, having already made what they considered a mistake by not giving Pookie Hudson top billing with the Spaniels.