Your budget stationer's has left its Croydon once for all

In a major blow to local shoppers and the high street, the doors to a popular branch of a bargain stationery chain have closed for the last time. Danish chain Flying Tiger Copenhagen has been based in Croydon's largest shopping centre, Whitgift Centre, for at least seven years, but its store is now labelled as "permanently closed" on Google Maps and signage reading "Goodbye Croydon" is now visible on the shopfront. 

[Daily Express, 28 April 2026]

As far as I'm aware there are still a fair number of Tiger shops operating in the UK though a North London branch which I used to frequent suffered the same fate as its Croydon counterpart some time earlier. A press report a few months ago stated that the Flying Tiger company was on the brink of being taken over by the same private equity firm which acquired and rebranded WH Smith as TG Jones; as 150 of the Smith/Jones shops are currently at risk of closure that does not seem to bode well for the company's other acquisitions. 

According to the Extra London News website, the sudden vacancy in the Whitgift Centre is not entirely unexpected, with 73 empty units reported last October:

This trend aligns with national patterns in UK high-street retail, where economic pressures, high business rates, and the post-pandemic e-commerce boom have forced closures.

Why, you may ask, does it matter in the case of Tiger in particular? Aren't there other sources of cheap stationery and the sort of impulse purchases which you have cause to regret later (albeit not too much, given the modest outlay)? The answer is no, or rather there is one item of stationery which cannot be found these days without some difficulty.

For some reason it has become harder and harder to get hold of the kind of A5 notebook I favour: unlined with thin sewn-in pages. WH Smith (as was) used to stock a good 'un, also available in A4, but these days unlined notebooks in discount stores tend to be aimed at budding artists, with the sort of heavy paper which may well stop pages curling in reaction to a wet watercolour brush but which also cuts down on the number capable of fitting between its hard covers ... Oh yes, you need hard covers too, so you're not dependent on a task or table when the muse strikes.)

You don't really want thick, acid-free pages to scribble your ideas onto; what you want is something more substantial than tissue paper, though not too much, and lots of it, so that the firstlings of your mind can roam free over the snowy fields, with ample space to allow for the possibility of transforming into something else along the way. I love the freedom of those cheap and plentiful virgin pages: no need to worry that some half-formed observation is already using up most of the precious space and the revised version must remain, for the moment, trapped within your brainbox.

Is there, perhaps, some reason for the scarcity of such desirable objects which I've overlooked? Could it be that more recent generations become so accustomed to drafting direct to screen that they have drastically reduced the market for the humble product which has suited me, and perhaps others, so well? 

Yes, there are Moleskine notebooks, but they are expensive without being expansive. And with space only to provide the barest outline of an idea in such a dainty product it's next door to keeping it all stored up in your head, risking the agonies described in Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire: an ever-tightening metal contraption around the cranium, if I recall aright. 

Not that I am exactly in crisis mode. Over the years, I have been - no, not panic buying, but when I have found suitable items on the shelves of stationery shops I haven't trusted to their forever being in plentiful supply. I can't remember whether the shop was called Scribbler or Paperchase but I did buy up a lot of A5 notebooks from the Covent Garden branch of one or the other when it seemed that they were being discontinued; I still have a few as yet unmarked which I can produce upon application, though they are starting to become a little discoloured with age. As for the others, I could weep for the time and effort I lavished on them, the projects never quite followed through, but each time I buy another notebook it seems like a fresh start and I can put thoughts of past failures aside - for a while, anyway. 

This isn't the first time I have written of a Tiger shop in this blog, though during my first encounter with this chain - the North London branch alluded to above - enticing as the products were it was the background music which piqued my curiosity. So come back with me, if you will, to the 28th of January, 2013: 

Brighten the Corner ...

 

Had a small but pleasing moment today which I want to share.

After I had lunch at the local shopping centre (ooh, classy) in the area of North London where I work I had a few minutes before I had to return to business. "What's it to be?" I thought to myself. "A mooch in HMV?"  But as I a) couldn't remember whether it was still open, and b) couldn't imagine finding much of interest there anyway, I went instead into the shop known as Tiger, really just to waste some time.

If you don't know about this chain, Tiger is full of lots of little things which contain the promise of creativity, though in my case it's rarely followed through, as though on some level I've tricked myself into believing the act of acquisition is enough in itself: sad to report my flat is full of such empty promises.

Today I saw cheapo acrylic paints and brushes, little canvases and drawing pads, and idly thought of buying some, maybe actually painting the image which appears at the top of this blog, which might reduce the need to be tinkering with it all the time.

In the end I didn't buy any painting materials, although I did pick up a small notebook, more as a kind of distant nod to the possibility of doing some "real" writing, as opposed to wasting my time more or less agreeably online,  than out of any firm conviction that I would do so, that this - at last - was Day One of the rest of my life.

But that's not what I want to write about. As I was shopping, or browsing, Dion's Runaround Sue was playing and, not having heard it for a time, I was vaguely nodding along, happy to be hearing something other than the music which I couldn't recognise, and which wasn't for me, irritating my ears in the cafe where I had lately dined.

But then - get this - Dion having whooped his way to the fade, on came Paul Foster introducing the Soul Stirrers' Jesus Done Just What He Said, one of the songs recorded on Sam Cooke's very first Specialty session with the group in 1951 in glorious acapella. So whatever collection was playing wasn't just another identikit 50s collection. When I went to pay for the notebook, I eagerly asked the assistant who had compiled the playlist. She said it was random.

Oh.

I felt disappointed, having hoped to be told it was a company compilation or, ideally, to have someone pointed out to whom I could speak about the respective merits of Sam Cooke and Dion, on and on, as the sky, unnoticed outside, grew darker and it wouldn't matter.

But that wasn't going to happen.

Anyway, I felt impelled to tell her, as I was moving away, it brightened my day. Though I suppose if I had taken the time to be more of a smart*rse I could have said that it brightened the corner where I was, thinking about an Anthony Heilbut gospel compilation I own - which, as it happened, had an even earlier Soul Stirrers recording, from the days of RH Harris, the veteran of the circuit whom the young Cooke replaced.

I don't suppose it counts for all that much in the general scheme of things, but the unexpectedness of that conjunction: DiMucci and Cooke (or doo wop and gospel or Italian American and African American or any other other contrasts I may have missed) was a small but happy moment.

In Three Sisters, Chebutykin, the dopey doctor whose pockets are full of newspaper clippings (apparently there was an element of self-parody there) notes that Balzac was married in Berdichev. It may be that it's just a totally pointless bit of trivia seized on by the good doc but at least one critic has suggested that the doctor notes it because it suggests happiness is possible anywhere.

 And for a moment in a North London shopping centre I felt more alive. I suppose because it never occured to me that anyone near where I live would be interested in those recordings - and maybe they weren't. But some process of selection must have been involved even to get the Soul Stirrers on random. 

Three days later I returned to the shop:

Tiger, Tiger or Let the newt see the steam train

Ah, I know what I did now. Tried for too much in the same day. Like Icarus. Or Bruce's Big Night Out.

Going out for lunch today, before breaking away from the confines of Shopping City (ooh, adventurous), I went into that gift-shop-cum-art-materials store Tiger again, to see what musical pairing might surprise and delight me today.

And I wasn't disappointed: Mystery Train, and what sounded like a Ray Davies demo or early Kinks song called So Long. And what with the train taking Elvis's baby, and Ray bidding farewell - they sort of went together. Ish. I won't bother embedding Mystery Train as you can find it on a recent post about Junior Parker here, but this is So Long - as I now know, from the album Kinda Kinks:



 And the point is you wouldn't expect to hear either in the shopping mall. Reminded me of another sort-of pairing on a Friday or Saturday night Radio 1 programme called, I think, The Friday or Saturday Sequence: Them's version of Baby Please Don't Go, followed by Bobby Charles' See You Later Alligator.

Anyway, I goes off for my unnecessary lunch (really an excuse to be away from work for a bit; I have adequate provisions there), am forced to explain the concept of lemon tea, etc, in the cafe I chose (and I have to endure horrible music, audible through the earplugs I habitually wear in such situations) and on the way back I think: I know, I'll go into Tiger again. Anything can happen, musically speaking, in the next six minutes.

There doesn't seem to be any sound for about half a minute, unless it was an exceptionally long fade to a track whose burden I have just missed, but then It's Only Love by the Beatles begins, with what sounds like real (ie imprecise and all the better for it) doubletracking. Maybe that was the album Lennon said they doubletracked the *rse off, or some such phrase. (No, you look it up.) And a woman near me is half-singing along, or just registering her pleasure in hearing this again, so it's a kind of tripletracking.

Oh boy, I think, and fall to wondering just what they (whoever "they" may be, given that I know the selection is random) will find to follow this. It'll have to be good.

To my surprise, and not really in a good way, it's the terminally unhip Sing, Sing, Sing by Benny Goodman - I'm sorry, but it just doesn't fit. It's before rock'n'roll and all the associated genres began. I leave the shop dejected, replacing, as I go, the notebook I had been planning to buy. Didn't fancy standing in a queue for two minutes to hear the track play itself out. Besides I bought a notebook last time. Still haven't used it.

Then, as I work back to work, I think about it. I'm desperate to create a narrative, some kind of order and meaning in the shunting together of those two songs. And in the five minute walk between Shopping Hell and my place of work, I get it. Or something, anyway.

In The Hours and the Times, or The Hours and the Days, or whatever - it's got Ian "Nowhere Boy" Hart in it, anyway - John Lennon finds a moment of communion with a air hostess when they dance to a lesser known Little Richard track, a cover of Fats Domino's I'm in Love Again. There had been some quite aggressive banter between them earlier - You're not playing your part, Dolly Bird." / "Nor you yours" - but when the Georgia Peach mumbles some nonsense at the start - not sure whether it's a genuinely live track or some bit of gimmickry - and Lennon/Hart begins a comical but unselfconscious rooster strut, in thrall to the man who, along with Elvis, showed him The Way, the air hostess succumbs. Not sure whether it's the prelude to a seduction, and it's a while since I saw the film, but if it is it's not calculated. They find themselves to be worshippers at the same shrine, that's all. And listening to Little Richard, Lennon is a fan, like her, not a star.

Now - and this is a bit of a stretch - might Sing, Sing, Sing have been Eppy's recording of choice had a similar opportunity ever presented itself?

Beat. 

No? Oh, alright then.

Oh, actually it wasn't It's Only Love, was it, that was associated with Epstein but You've Got to Hide Your Love Away. 

Just had a quick look at Revolution in the Head, which says "the lyric is the hollowest which Lennon ever perpetrated" and that the working title was That's a Nice Hat.

The only other thing I want to say in this post has nothing to do with my two forays to Tiger. I mention it simply because it appealed to me. It's a detail about Benjamin Britten I read in yesterday's Guardian. Apparently Britten used to compose in his head while walking in the countryside, and Chris Watson suggests that birdsong, and possibly other sounds, found their way into his work.

I felt certain Britten would reflect on the sounds around him while considering his compositions. It goes back to the idea that we hear everything – but don't really listen much. When we do take the trouble to listen, it's an engaging and creative process. I'm sure that's something Britten felt.

But it's a non-musical moment which seems more important - at least it's saved for the end of the article, and although it's difficult to explain precisely why it matters, I have no doubt that it does.

Britten was a very private man. Had he taken his daily walk along the beach, or at Orford Ness nature reserve, he would have met lots of people. But there's one lovely encounter I was told of, when he walked down to the railway path and encountered two lads by the track. They had a jam-jar with a newt in it. He asked what they were up to and they said: "We're waiting for the two o'clock train to come out of Aldeburgh, so we can show this newt what a steam train looks like." They liked it – and thought the newt might, too.

Number One? Ah, that'll be THIS day ...

 

The soundtrack double album for the fifties-set British film That'll Be the Day was number one  on the UK charts today in 1973, or so I have recently been informed on social media. Its featured oldies helped foster a love in me for doo wop and rock'n'roll more generally even though I have never owned a copy. Tracks were played on the radio at the time - Luxembourg as well as Radio 1 - and I still recall the moment I first heard Frankie Lymon hitting a certain note on Why Do Fools Fall in Love.

The modest film, written by Ray Connolly, has endured, probably because it wasn't primarily conceived as a means of shifting records. Quite the reverse, in fact: the soundtrack LP came into being in order to raise the rest of the finance to make the film, as Connolly has said.

[Producer David] Puttnam went to see a small Canadian television marketing company and proposed building our movie around a plethora of old hits they could promote as a tele-marketed compilation album.

They would pump more than £200,000 into an advertising campaign, showing clips from the film, so all we had to do was put together a 40-track soundtrack album of oldies but goldies.

We’d always planned to have some songs in the film, but 40!

Shuttling between Count Arthur Strong's radio and video shows

Although I found Count Arthur Strong's Radio Show on Radio 4 entertaining I had reservations about whether it really worked as a sitcom, as opposed to an extended sketch or "turn". I could see that he belonged to a noble tradition of bumblers but a big part of the pleasure of, say, The Shuttleworths (the original Radio 4 series featuring John Shuttleworth), is the sense it conveys of the constricted world which Graham Fellows' creation inhabits: hospices, garden centres (with their newfangled "campuccinos"), fun runs etc. 

I didn't get a similar sense of a precisely realised setting during the Count's radio outings: such details of his showbiz career as occasionally escaped his lips in those shows seemed vague and fragmentary. Had his showbiz career all been in his mind? If not, just how far had he ascended on the showbiz ladder and what had gone wrong?

Safka's Metamorphosis

 

Today, or hereabouts, marks fifty years since West Country group the Wurzels had a UK Number One with Combine Harvester, their parody of Melanie's Brand New Key, a British hit in 1972. Memory insists, however, that the group originally sang a rather different version in live performance in which their lead singer, rather than boasting of having acquired a large and expensive item of farming machinery, merely declared his possession of a Brand New Pair of Underpants.

Let me say at once that I haven't heard those alternative lyrics for myself but I'm pretty sure that the existence of this ur-Harvester was reported in the music press at the time - or in one paper, at least. But as I used to read most of them and can't be certain of the date of this article, nor how many of those publications might await in digitised form in the British Library or elsewhere, it's not a search I feel particularly eager to begin - and if anyone tells me those yellowing pages haven't yet been scanned and I'll have to turn over page after inky page even to the edge of closing time then fuggedaboutit. 

I speak from experience. Researching a book, I once spent a fruitless day at the former newspaper library in Colindale, leafing through copies of the variety artists' paper The Performer. It was an enjoyable enough activity in one sense, as all sorts of interesting titbits presented themselves along the way, including a joke about the near-miraculous way in which a comedian well-known at the time had saved himself from drowning - "He clawed the d*** pier" - but no trace could be found of the vital piece of information which had been the sole purpose of my quest.

morecambeandwise

 Today, as is readily apparent on social media sites, marks 100 years since Eric Morecambe was born. I don't recall Ernie Wise's centenary making a similar hoo-ha last year, which is a pity: as with the pair's onetime TV guests, the Beatles, there have been many books, articles and documentaries about Morecambe and Wise, and, just as Ringo is given short shrift in some assessments, the role which Ernie played in securing the laughs for the pair often seems to be undervalued, as though Eric was really a solo act. 

Nohow and contrariwise. I don't suppose sculptor Graham Ibbeson had much of a say in it himself but there seems to me to be something fundamentally wrong about a joint tribute to Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy in Laurel's birthplace, Ulverston, when Eric Morecambe is depicted on his own in the former Eric Bartholomew's home town; even with a pair of binoculars bunged on the statue to indicate interests beyond comedy no one is going to look at it and think: "Wow, that's one ace birdwatcher!"

How's that for serendipity?

 

Just realised that an edition of Serendipity with Sykora can be found online which takes its theme as the month of June, positively demanding comparison with the Maytime episode of the Russell Davies Song Show discussed in the previous post. It's harder to compile an equivalent playlist, however, as Sykora often plays only a brief snatch of music, not the whole record, with artists and even song titles frequently left uncredited. 

With thematically linked quotations from poems, newspapers and other sources added to the mix, the overall effect is more stream-of-consciousness than Russell Davies's May-minded show. Yet it works: Sykora's choices don't seem random because his links do serve to make us feel that the jumble of information is the musing of one man. I'd forgotten just how soft-spoken and intimate his presenting style is, ideally suited to night-time broadcasting, when the mind may be permitted to wander more freely than within the constraints of daytime programming. (My memory is that Serendipity was on late at night though other shows he presented about big bands and the like were early evening.)

The Serendipity show does not consist, as I'd thought, of the Great American Songbook plus a few token novelties but is genuinely wide-ranging, with music from many other countries included. His distinctive voice and avuncular manner make it feel all of a piece but it's less formally educational than Russell Davies's programme - not that Mr Davies is formal in manner, merely that the narrower scope of his musical choices inevitably teaches you a lot about that golden period of American songwriting between the twenties and fifties in particular, whereas the experience for the listener to a Serendipity programme is more like falling into a kind of dreamy pinball game, rapidly (but not violently) shot from one musical or literary idea to another.

May-minded

 

Today is the first of May, which reminds me of the much-missed Russell Davies Song Show. I once tried to analyse a episode broadcast around this time of year, hoping to find pointers for making a podcast equivalent of this blog. I didn't get much farther than buying a microphone before the madness wore off (there really ought to be a proverbial phrase advising caution about purchases made during this month) but the exercise did give me a keener appreciation of the craft involved in preparing an hour of radio which doesn't sound slung together.

Like his predecessor on Radio 2, Benny Green, who had created the blueprint, Russell Davies's focus in his show was on the Great American Songbook, drawing the listener's attention to forgotten or neglected numbers awaiting within that capacious tome, making surprising connections between songs and celebrating felicitous lyrics. 

80@80 (Spencer Leigh autobiography)

 

 

I have just finished reading Spencer Leigh's autobiography 80@80: A Liverpool Life in 80 Chapters, which was published in February last year, and can warmly recommend it. As the title suggests it has eighty chapters to tie in with its venerable author reaching the milestone of his eightieth year, despite the still-boyish features displayed on the cover. (How does he do it?)

A thoroughly enjoyable read from start to finish for the musically inclined, it covers a wide range of genres, as you'd expect from his show On the Beat, a former fixture on Radio Merseyside, but there is much else besides. I didn't realise, for instance, that broadcasting and writing about music had been, in effect, merely a hobby for him until the mid-1990s and that for over thirty years he had a day job as an actuary - and appears to have been efficient and well-respected in that entirely different field too. 

No Off Switch: of Andy Kershaw and others

  I was sorry to hear of Andy Kershaw's death.  As he presented programmes on BBC Radios 1, 3 and 4 there will almost certainly be a tribute to him on one station or another in the coming days but in the meantime I can recommend his very entertaining, full-throttle autobiography, aptly entitled No Off Switch. It's mentioned in the reposted piece below, written in 2012:

Rock & Roll Man (musical about Alan Freed)

On Saturday I went to see Rock & Roll Man, an agreeable musical about Alan Freed, at the Cambridge Arts Theatre; this week it's playing at the Lighthouse arts centre in Poole, and if you are within reach it's worth a visit. As far as I know that will be the end of the production's short UK tour though it deserves a longer life. The show had a three-month Off-Broadway run in 2023; this British production has retained Constantine Maroulis as Freed, and the passion and conviction which he brings to the role are a big part of its success.

Neil Brand's radio play Stan repeated today on Radio 4 Extra

 

Not to be confused with a later television adaptation, Stan, Neil Brand's 2004 radio play about Stan Laurel, has just been broadcast again on Radio 4 Extra and will be available on BBC iPlayer for the next thirty days. Stan, the radio drama, is very good indeed and a natural for the medium; the TV version doesn't simply add visuals but has been considerably reworked: we see scenes from the pair's past rather than their simply being recounted by the elderly Stan. Nothing wrong with that, but the intimacy of the radio play, and in particular that feeling of luck and privilege in being magically present, unseen, at the last meeting of these two great clowns is diluted.

Crying My Heart Out For You: the flop which made Sedaka a hitmaker

 

Crying My Heart Out For You is one of my favourite Neil Sedaka songs. It's not wildly original, and was not a hit in the US or UK when it first came out - Italy is the only country which seems to have warmed to it - but for me the anguished wails which bookend this simple tale of love lost make the recording.

His later songs might have become more artful but Sedaka retained his love of doo wop. In 1993 he took part in a live radio broadcast hosted by the DJ Cousin Brucie and was so taken with the superb acapella group 14 Karat Soul, also appearing, that he sang a few impromptu numbers with them, including Earth Angel. These are understandably less than perfect - "I goofed it, I goofed it!" as he shouts when he messes up a couple of lines on the Penguins' classic - but there is obvious love and enthusiasm in the performance. 

Leaves off Snodgrass (after posting the following supplementary observations)

 

If you've read the earlier post about alternative Beatles histories, here are more thoughts about Snodgrass, the short story by Ian R. McLeod which imagines the group achieving success without John Lennon.

 In that earlier piece I had been relying on my memories of the original story and the film adaptation (above, with Ian Hart as Lennon); since then I have reacquainted myself with both, and it's interesting to note the differences between the two.

The Fabulous Beatles - literally

Listening the other day to Ray Connolly being interviewed by Tim Haigh on BooksPodcast about his novella "Sorry, Boys, You Failed The Audition", I remembered that it is well worth reading. There have been earlier attempts to evoke the Beatles in imaginative ways, some of which I'll discuss below, but Connolly has the distinct advantage of having known the group well, especially John Lennon - he's also written a biography of Lennon and, according to the critic Philip French, the protagonist played by David Essex in Connolly's film That'll Be the Day was based in part on John. (I haven't seen this claim made by anyone else but Jim McLaine's relationship with his mother does seems to resemble that between Lennon and his stern-but-loving Aunt Mimi.) 

Sans Everything

In 2019 I wrote a piece about a 78 rpm record which I'd picked up at a jumble sale or record fair in Glasgow in 1975 or 1976. The disc was credited to the Harry Donaldson Orchestra, the vocalist one Sanky Franks. The side I preferred began with a voice - Donaldson? The producer? - advising: "Hey Sanky, try to get a kick out of it!" - and as far as I'm concerned he did. 

When I left the family home I foolishly left the record behind, along with a lot of other stuff;  some years later a massive clearout which I only learnt about after the deed had been done meant that letters, books, music and even the odd piece of art vanished forever.

Yes, yes, I'd been foolish to assume that a little corner of the family home would remain forever mine but it was a painful lesson and that erasure of memories, or at least the precious objects triggering so many memories, remains a hard blow. 

This may help to explain why it felt important to find out whatever I could about that record, which isn't listed on discogs or other online sites. I didn't dream it into being, and I wanted to hear it again if I could, or at least find out as much as I could about it, to make it substantial, solid again, one thing retrieved from oblivion.

Farewell, My Lady Nickerteen

 

D.J. Taylor, who celebrated the songs of Allan Smethurst, AKA the Singing Postman, in a 2010 radio documentary, announced today on social media that the troubadour's muse Molly Bayfield (the Molly Windley who "smokes like a chimbley" in his most famous song) had  died. 

Smethurst's songs have considerable charm although the simpler world he describes seems so remote now that for a moment it seemed astonishing to think that the woman who inspired his most famous number had still been around for the first quarter of the 21st century.

A BBC News article by Laura Devlin describes the day, momentous only in retrospect, when Smethurst visited his old schoolfriends, Albert Bayfield, and his wife, Molly, in the seaside village of Mundesley, on the North Norfolk coast:

Uncalled-for review

 When the late Eric Midwinter submitted a review of the Jake Thackray biography Beware of the Bull on spec to The Call Boy, the magazine of the British Music Hall Society, it wasn't accepted for publication, so far as I know - because Thackray's songs are more aligned with music hall as the French understand the term, perhaps? A friend of the singer, Ian Watson, once wrote that "the UK does not have the sort of music-halls that you find in Paris, dedicated to a long tradition of popular, serious song."

Whatever the reason, it deserves an audience.

"Plus a Twistin' New Year as standard ... non-negotiable!"

 Christmas just wouldn't be Christmas without this blog's annual cursory nod to the season, so here are some Christmassy doo wop sides, some of which have been posted here before, some not.  You can find some of them on Christmas Past, a compilation of Christmas-related songs from "the Roulette family of labels" released by the now-defunct UK company Westside, which reissued quite a lot of doo wop and is worth investigating on disogs or wherever you buy your music. This collection isn't limited to doo wop but does include some choice items.

 

Here's Harry ...

 

 

It may be a name which springs less readily to mind these days, but in the 1960s Harry Worth was a major TV comic with a genial, bumbling persona, forever confounding petty officialdom. 

If that suggests a touch of Tony Hancock, however, nohow and contrariwise: Worth had none of Hancock's pomposity or aggression. Like Jacques Tati's Monsieur Hulot he was entirely guileless, an innocent who never seemed out to cause the trouble which invariably happened when he was around. The cause was his circumlocutory way of putting things which would inevitably tie the listener in knots, governed as it was by a logic comprehensible to no one except the mild and agreeable speaker himself. (Arthur Haynes was perhaps more closely linked to Hancock, and has been described as ITV's answer to Hancock, though Haynes's tramp character was several notches down from Hancock's TV persona socially.)

Terry Johnson

 For those not already aware of the sad news, Terry Johnson, the last surviving member of the Flamingos, died yesterday in Las Vegas at the age of 86 - "performing to the end", Marv Goldberg says. He can be seen above (with guitar) on the cover of Flamingos Serenade, the 1959 album of standards which includes his arrangement of I Only Have Eyes For You, the Al Dubin-Harry Warren film song which finally gave the group the crossover success they'd been seeking. 

Terry Johnson was not an original member of the Flamingos but had a vision, when he first saw them perform in October 1956:  "I saw a glow of light around them and I saw myself with them." He auditioned the day after this mystical experience and was invited to join on Christmas Eve. 

Notes on the Finborough production of The Truth About Blayds by A.A. Milne

 

When I wrote about this play's imminent revival at the Finborough Theatre a few weeks ago I hoped for the best but wasn't sure what to expect. Would there be the appropriate balance of seriousness and comedy in the playing? Would contemporary theatregoers take this example of Milne's adult work to their hearts as readily as audiences of a hundred years ago, weaned on his pieces in Punch magazine?

Lloyd Price musical coming to London

 

If you are able to get to London's Royal Festival Hall there will be two performances of a new musical about R&B/rock'n'roll pioneer Lloyd Price on Saturday 11th October.

 Audio of an extensive 2005 interview with Price can be found on Matt the Cat's site here, but for all the undoubted importance of Lawdy Miss Clawdy to the development of rock'n'roll (none of which seems lost on Price himself in that interview) Daniel Wolff's biography of Sam Cooke suggests that the recording was actually part of an ongoing process for Specialty Records owner Art Rupe, and that he'd already been experimenting with accentuating the beat on gospel recordings:

A.A. Milne Part 4 (Sarah Simple)

 

As with A.A. Milne's first novel (of sorts), Lovers in London, the mere fact of this play, Sarah Simple, being available again is welcome news. It's not included in the various collections which still crop up in secondhand bookshops, and I'd been searching for a copy for quite some time. Before the publication of Anne Thwaite's biography of Milne I had only come across a single mention of it, in a history of theatre published in the 1930s. 

In praise of Rock & Roll Graffiti (1999) again

  

If, like me, you've been tantalised by the many clips on youtube of a TV show entitled Rock & Roll Graffiti, the good news is that most of that show, hitherto available only as an expensive DVD box set, can now be obtained on two reasonably priced 3 disc sets; I'm based in the UK and ordered them from America for around £14 each around ten years ago though you will need to round that up to £20 or thereabouts now. These are the covers to look for:

Unvarnished Soul: Sonny Til

 

 Today marks the centenary of the pioneering doo wop/R&B singer Sonny Til, lead singer of the Orioles. They are perhaps best known for Crying in the Chapel (1953) but here's the story of how the group came to record It's Too Soon to Know, now widely regarded as the first doo wop record, in 1948.

The sharpest blades: C.S. Calverley and A.A. Milne

 

The poet who features in A.A. Milne's play The Truth About Blayds, soon to be revived at the Finborough Theatre in London, may have been Milne's own creation - but he did pinch the name. If J.M. Barrie was Milne's main inspiration for playwriting the Victorian author C.S. Calverley was the man whose light verse he had sought, from his earliest days, to emulate. That's "light verse" as distinct from poetry proper: for Milne that meant the serious application of his craft to the lightest of trifles, and he had little time for the less punctilious efforts of others in the field.

Also admired by Lewis Carroll - they had even considered collaborating - Calverley wrote poems which were comical, often parodic, mocking the cliches employed by other poets or - as in this example - songwriters: 

A.A. Milne's The Truth About Blayds to be revived

 

A.A. Milne's 1921 play The Truth About Blayds is about to be revived at the Finborough Theatre in London. This is good news as Milne's plays for adults are rarely produced these days. William Gaunt is playing the Blayds of the title, an elderly, much-revered, poet; having played King Lear as well as sitcom patriarchs he ought to have the necessary gravitas.  

"Like an HM Bateman cartoon. Only with budgies."

 

Today marks 61 years since comedian Freddie Davies's debut on TV talent show Opportunity Knocks - and eleven since the publication of his autobiography Funny Bones, which tells the story of that life-changing experience.

New Jake Thackray book to be published in August

 

 

I have just learnt from Paul Thompson, cowriter of the excellent Jake Thackray biography Beware of the Bull, that a collection of Thackray's prose will be published by Scratching Shed on 1st August. As the title, The Unsung Writer, suggests, this will offer readers a chance to explore the full scope of his writing and perhaps get a deeper sense of his character than is possible through those artfully constructed songs - or another side of his character, at least.

Skylark

When I think of the Hoagy Carmichael-Johnny Mercer song Skylark it's an unlikely recording which first springs to mind. Memory had insisted that it was acapella, which turned out to be wrong when I heard it again recently after a gap of about fifty years.

New edition of Rebel Rebel about to be published

 

For those who don't own a copy of the original edition - and even for those who do - the first volume of Chris O'Leary's excellent song-by-song Bowie study is about to be published in a considerably revised and expanded version, as depicted above.  

Lost Tapes: One

I freely admit that I haven't researched this meticulously but it seems to me that, more and more, any new TV documentaries which revisit the familiar tale of some much-loved comedian or double act seek to entice viewers by incorporating the words "The Lost Tapes" or "The Unseen Tapes" into the programme's title. 

More often than not this turns out to be misleading, to put it politely. Even if the tapes for some old show have not been seen for a while on telly they are often easy enough to find online. And in the rare cases where something unxpected has been unearthed we may be presented with no more than a few slivers of fresh material, the rest of the programme padded out with the usual well-worn anecdotes so the makers can get an hour out of it, frustrating though such superfatted displays may be for aficiandos.

Having got the above off my chest, rest assured I will not be talking in this post about batons left in Chicago or other reheated dishes. This is the first of a series about genuinely lost tapes which have some personal significance for me.

The first is a cassette of poor quality; the brand name was Crescendo. At some point, maybe in 1972, I put together a sketch and music show of sorts on tape, with almost no effort on my part, in order to entertain a friend (but mainly, I suppose, myself). I had the Bonzos' Doughnut in Granny's Greenhouse, which I owned, and a Davy Graham LP I happened to have borrowed from the library, among other materials; I read random bits of literature, accompanied by some Eastern Graham piece, and I improvised a sketch making use of Neil Innes' song Beautiful Zelda.

Walking With Wilson

 

Hearing of Brian Wilson's death yesterday my immediate thought was of the duophonic cassette of Pet Sounds which had been my regular companion on late-night walks in the early eighties, slotted into one of the bulky Walkmans of the day. Water was an integral part of the scene - not a surf-tormented shore but a loch, centrepiece of the local country park, which I would circle.  

Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman documentary and books

 

I have just watched AKA Doc Pomus, a documentary about the songwriter best known for his partnership with Mort Shuman in the late 50s and early 60s. The mix of images, interviews and the obvious taking of pains has resulted in a compelling and satisfying account which feels like the last word: we see, for example, not only footage of Pomus's wedding but also the song ideas he scrawled on the backs of unused wedding invites - including the one which was to result in Save The Last Dance For Me, one of Ben E King's finest moments as well as its writers'.

Tweet in store as Blackpool Show goes legit

I have just learnt that the 1966 episode of The Blackpool Show featuring Freddie "Parrotface" Davies at the height of his fame can be found on a newly released Blu-ray edition of The Punch and Judy Man; Tony Hancock is hosting the show, hence its inclusion.

As far as I am aware this is the first legitimate release of this programme, the only one which survives of the series; Bob Monkhouse also appears, so possibly the recording originated from his famously extensive collection. 

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).

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.

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.

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. 

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. 

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:

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?

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. 

B̶e̶a̶c̶h̶ B̶o̶y̶s̶ Cheapo Cheapo: Very Complete

In 2018 I wrote a piece for this blog entitled "Cheapo Cheapo Records - The Complete Story". It was a reworking of several earlier posts about coming to terms with the closure of the Soho record shop which I'd been frequenting for 24 years.

Those original posts were more discursive, and a fair amount of pruning and reworking went into the rewrite, which can be read here. 

That'd be the sensible choice. But if you're an idler who fancies the scenic route consider me your enabler, as I've assembled the unedited posts together below.

Novel by Angela Milne republished

Every so often over the years, more in hope than expectation, I've trawled the internet in search of a copy of One Year's Time, a rare novel by Angela Milne, niece of A.A. Milne. I first came across it in the National Library of Scotland in the mid-eighties when researching the plays of her uncle; like him, she had worked for Punch and had a light and appealing prose style.