Gnome Thoughts ... 39 (Liltin' Hilton or Wherefore to Bradfooord?)

I thought this blog's series of posts about the early David Bowie, entitled Gnome Thoughts, had come to a natural end but today I heard Ronnie Hilton's version of The Laughing Gnome, recorded in 1967, for the first time, and could not stay silent.


The youtube uploader describes it as "pretty dreadful", which seems monstrously unfair. True, it may lack the propulsive beat of Bowie's original but on its own terms, considered as a novelty song along the lines of his earlier A Windmill in Old Amsterdam, it's perfectly serviceable. Be'ave, as Paul McCartney might say.




The backing group on Hilton's Gnome seem to be made up of the same components as might be heard behind typical Bernard Cribbins or Paddy Roberts novelty sides of the early sixties - it sounds particularly close, instrumentally, to Hole in the Ground - or in cast recordings of revues from that period. Hilton's musical accomplices do not, in short, rock, but the phrase Chris Welch once used to describe one of Cribbins's records - "toe-tapping whimsy" - seems equally appropriate here.

His vocal style also reflects a different approach from Bowie: this may be a studio recording but to my ears he gives the impression of singing as though alert to a theatre or club audience who may be absorbing the song for the first time: Ronnie isn't languid, exactly, but he doesn't rush, exuding an infectious air of relaxation and ease akin to a magician's misdirection. His primary intention is to make sure we get it all - none of Bowie's self-indulgent giggling with Gus Dudgeon for him, thank you very much - that every aspect of this musical trifle is fully understood by the kids way up in the gods - not through volume but via the clarity achieved through pacing and emphasis. Plus repetition of the odd word which Bowie says only once, much as an old theatre comic would do.

Gnome was a B side - the A side was If I Were a Rich Man, so the song wasn't his first choice for a hit, but the additional prospect of having a new song honed enough to use in his act - perhaps to provide an occasional respite from that mouse-ridden windmill? - would have been an additional incentive to take the preparation seriously.

The only wrong note, to my ears, is his decision to place the emphasis on the possessive pronoun in the line:

... he was sitting on the edge of my bed.

Other than that, I reckon it works. Hilton is drawing on long years of performing in pantos as well as personal appearances in clubs and theatres. The It's Behind You website states:

His early pantomime career was cemented by the 1957-8 Sleeping Beauty at the Lyceum Sheffield, and he followed this with a huge number of pantomime appearances, a great many of them in Hull and Leeds.

He doesn't copy Bowie's delivery or his (alright: Newley's) accent so this is not a carbon copy; aspects of the arrangement are different too. For example, it's only the "gnome" (Hilton's speeded-up voice?) who does the "ha ha ha" bit; the singer doesn't join in. Some of the better puns are retained, but a new one is added:

Here, who are you then?
A member of the National Elf Service.

And the little fellow is put on a train to Bradford (said with lingering emphasis) rather than Eastbourne, reflecting the singer's well-known loyalty to his Yorkshire roots. He also pronounces "tummy" in a pointedly Yorkshire manner, thus getting two jokes (however weak) out of one word.

Some details have been cut out of Hilton's version, whether personally or by the producer - though I'm guessing Hilton would have had a say, at the very least - presumably so that what is left will land more effectively. Was this a song which had already been tested in live performance before he committed it to tape? Or was it simply that by the mid-sixties Hilton, with more than ten years of performing experience, was able to gaze at sheet music and immediately know what would and wouldn't work?

Either way, it woud be interesting to know whether the Hilton version ever did double duty as a "house number" for panto (the community singing at the end of that very British entertainment for kids at Christmas). The programme for his panto that year - he was Buttons in Cinderella, at the New Theatre, Hull - only mentions the A side of his new release, which may mean that A Windmill ... was already too popular to allow any substitute at the end of a show, but the notes do support the idea that Gnome would have been aimed at children:

Of all the facets of show business he prefers pantomime most of all, being a family man himself and extremely fond of children which becomes quite obvious once having seen him working to a family audience.

Not altogether seriously, I once added a comment to a post about Bowie's record on Chris O'Leary's Pushing Ahead of the Dame website:

Yes, it does rock. It also sounds a bit like a souped-up Tennessee Waltz, as a review of the 1973 rerelease, probably in NME, said. Also pleasing is that Bowie doesn’t lose it until late in the performance: it’s deadpan at the beginning – even ominous, as though this strange creature will bring disaster, for all the high-pitched cackling. Wonder if there’s an alternate take where the story takes a different turn?  

I meant it seriously enough, however, because all trace of menace or hysteria has been expunged from Ronnie Hilton's version. It's for children - and, I suppose, Hilton's original fans, parents of those children - not the Sergeant Pepper generation. True, there is a surreal, or Goonish note, at the end when Hilton presumes that his new friend will "jump off the record", something I'm pretty sure  featured in one or more of the George Martin-produced Milligan or Goon discs, but this notion would have been commonplace on children's records by 1967 - in the final moments of Terry Scott's My Brother, for example, he advises his sibling to "get out of here before we fall down the hole in the middle". Besides, the mental image is only a lead-in to a truly groanworthy climactic pun:

I suppose you're going to jump off the record now, are you?
Oh no, me and Fred, we're going gnommmme ...

But whatever you think of it at least you know beyond doubt that the song is over: there has been a full stop and a heavy underlining of that fact. And now the theatre audience knows to applaud.

On the Bowie recording, however, he loses control at the end and it's faded out: a product of the studio. Is that laughter an attempt to take the sting away from recording a novelty song, an indication he is less than wholehearted about the enterprise, even at the point of committing it to tape? Perhaps not; maybe he just wanted to retain some of the fun he and Gus Dudgeon were having in concocting the record, but it does suggest something more inward than Ronnie Hilton's version. I don't know whether Bowie heard or liked that Northern Gnome but I'd imagine his manager Ken Pitt, steeped in traditional showbiz, would have got what Hilton was about.

Ronnie Hilton is a name probably unknown to American readers so I should point out that he was a representative example of the British singers in the UK charts of the fifties, having success mostly with American covers. From the Guardian obituary by Michael Freedland:

Ronnie Hilton [...] was one of those 1950s vocalists whose career coincided with rock 'n' roll's 1956 onslaught on the ballad-dominated hit parade. But for a time Hilton was a star - strictly for home consumption - with nine top 20 hits between 1954 and 1957, that transitional era between 78 and 45rpm records. [...]

Hilton's approach owed much to the "nice 'n'easy" style of Americans such as Bing Crosby, Eddie Fisher and Perry Como. Together with the likes of Dickie Valentine and Michael Holliday, his was the kind of voice and style to which youngsters smooched as they edged across those dance floors not yet vibrating to Bill Haley's Rock Around the Clock and Elvis Presley's Blue Suede Shoes.

His wikipedia page notes:

Hilton's light operatic style, similar to fellow Hullensian, David Whitfield, was already by the mid 1950s being overtaken by events. By the time "No Other Love" dropped off the UK Singles Chart, Elvis Presley had clocked up his first three UK hit singles.

And while his cover of Around the World, "a bigger hit than the Bing Crosby original," Michael Freedland says, may have seemed a triumph "in summer 1957, as skiffle and Elvis gripped the charts," there was only one more top twenty hit to follow, according to the 45rpm website.

Windmill in Old Amsterdam, which Hilton recorded in 1965, two years before his cover of The Laughing Gnome, has proven remarkably durable, even though at the time it only made number 23. And his fame continued, even if the hit records didn't, through pantos and his broadcasts on the BBC. I knew No Other Love as the theme of his Radio 2 programme Sounds of the Fifties. The arrangement's opening bars always sounded very odd to me: was it meant to be an OTT joke - or was I born too late, too much a child of rock'n'roll, to get it?

Anyway, if you have the courage, or perhaps simply the open-mindedness, listen to The Laughing Gnome as reimagined by Ronnie Hilton: given back, you might say, to its rightful audience.

Incidentally, although the record puts me in mind of the likes of Bernard Cribbins I don't know whether George Martin had any involvement in it. (He was, as some readers and Paul McCartney will appreciate, pretty busy that year.) It's not impossible, though the arrangement is perhaps a tad more fussy than Martin might have approved, even if the approach is roughly the same. In an earlier post about Myles Rudge and Ted Dicks, writers of Hole in the Ground and other comedy songs for Cribbins, I quoted from a radio documentary about the pair in which Martin said that learning how to employ sound effects on the records of Sellers, Milligan and Cribbins was "great training" for Submarine, singling out the ease of working with Dicks' and Rudge's

very clever lyrics and quirky melodies, which hung together so neatly, leaving plenty of space for us to create a sound picture. All we had to do was add the right sound effects and musical arrangements.

 In my opinion, The Laughing Gnome as filleted by Hilton and/or his producer, drawing on their sense of what will and won't work, does the same: there is space for Hilton to do present his comic persona to best effect.

Oh, and if cooler members of your family express disdain or contempt for this simpler, more innocent Gnome, suggesting, moreover, that your championing of the recording is indicative of severe and irreparable deficiency in your own coolness levels, shrug it off: they're just older children, that's all.

Related posts:

"Gnome Thoughts ..." is a series of posts speculating about possible inspirations for Bowie's Deram era novelty songs. There is a guide to earlier posts here. 

Among  songwriters and performers considered are Anthony Newley, Alan Klein, Ray Davies, Myles Rudge and Ted Dicks.

Rudge and Dicks wrote A Windmill in Old Amsterdam for Hilton; the posts about them, mentioning the song, are here and here.

A guide to posts specifically about Alan Klein, writer of the musical What a Crazy World, and whose 1964 album Well At Least Its British has been called the "secret parent" of Bowie's debut, can be found here.

Shameless plug:

Readers interested in panto are directed towards this book.