[read details about kickstarter campaign for new Peter Skellern CD here - 8th March 2024 is last day to pledge]
A memory which lingers, rather pointlessly, from schooldays is of the moment an elderly invigilator was presented with a cup of tea while we were toiling over an exam. "For me - not for you," he announced - which was a) distracting and b) not very funny, even though it had probably been c) conceived as a friendly sort of thing to say to a group of nervous scribblers rather than d) an attempt to gloat about the pettty privilege thus afforded him.
The remark has lodged in my brain as a small display of humanity from one who didn't need to display any - and indeed has lingered over the decades as a catchphrase, shared with a friend from those days.
It's a phrase which could also be applied to the album illustrated above - unless you too pledged to a Kickstarter project to fund the release of Peter Skellern's Decca recordings on CD.
All the albums (and related non-album singles from the compilation Hold On To Love) will be worth hearing, of course, but I am especially delighted at the thought of soon being able to listen to the songs on Holding My Own in the correct order.
All, or almost all, of these songs can found on CD already if you are prepared to buy enough compilations but their effectiveness, scattered anyhow, is lessened as a result: as the title and cover image (above) might suggest, Holding My Own is comprised exclusively of comic songs and is better enjoyed as a whole, and in sequence.
So as this is one of my favourite original Peter Skellern albums - and virtually a masterclass in comic singing to boot - to commemorate the fact that soon we happy few who signed the pledge shall be holding our own Holding My Own here is a song-by-song account of the album. (I actually became familiar with it on cassette, but I think the running order was the same).
Holding My Own is unlike any other LP Peter Skellern recorded. A mixture of his own songs and what were presumably old favourites of his, by Frank Crumit, Noel Coward and others, it was his last album proper for Decca, and I wonder whether the absence of anything resembling a hit within its covers might have hastened his departure from the company.
On the back sleeve he asks God to bless the influential Decca producer and A&R man Hugh Mendl "for making this album possible", which suggests that others within the hierarchy might perhaps have been less welcoming towards an album whose ready-when-you-are-Mr-McGill cover blabs to potential purchasers that he's not playing the pop balladeer game anymore. There is nothing much resembling a love song in the whole collection: the earlier LPs You're a Lady and Not Without a Friend may have their comic or bizarre moments, but this is wall-to-wall frolicking.
And, innuendo aside, that title suggests that this collection may be more representative of his musical roots ("my own") than some of his earlier ventures - although the implication may also be that he's getting by, even if the success of his big hit single hasn't transformed him into a rock superstar.
Here's the track list, with vinyl-type division, and I'm going to explore its delights in order, with the occasional comment about the sequencing.
Abdul Abulbul Amir
Up For The Shoot
The Streaker
The Tattooed Lady
She Had To Go And Lose It At The Astor
Skin 'N' Bone
Honey Chil'
Society Ladies
That Is The End Of The News
Vicarious Vestments
Uncle Sam
The End Of The Show
Abdul Abulbul Amir
The album opens with a slow-burner, intended to draw the listener in. You can find out more about Abdul Abulbul Amir, a song dating from the Russo-Turkish war of 1877-78, here, but the main point of its enduring worth as a comic song, long after its topicality has vanished, is that it describes at a luxuriously leisurely pace ("By this I imply you are going to die") a fight to the death, the musical equivalent of the decorous destruction in a Laurel and Hardy short carried to its logical extreme.
There are many variant sets of lyrics (as described in Michael Kilgarriff's highly recommended book Sing Us One of the Old Songs) but the most famous recording is by Frank Crumit, and that's the version which seems to have inspired Skellern, although he slows the pace a little and adds his own multitracked backing voices. It's his lead on this opening track which is especially noteworthy, however, as though announcing his intentions for the album: the song may not be a great vocal stretch, but his recounting of the unfolding havoc has what seems precisely the right balance of Northern gormlessness and wry, detached amusement. You can sense his enjoyment in the performance and the implied promise that - to quote the title of another album - there is some fun going forward ...
Up for the Shoot
... which is borne out by the next number, the self-penned Up for the Shoot. A smiling attack on Hooray Henrys - hence Skellern's accent now leaning the other way - this may have originated as a point number for the BBC Radio 4 programme Stop the Week - at least, its lightly satirical tone seems of a piece with contributions to that show from the group Instant Sunshine, Jeremy Nicholas and others.
Here we all are breakfasting in our pyjamasIncidentally, that is not the first time that such a rhyme has been employed. Sheridan Morley was much taken with this couplet by Tim Rice in Joseph:
Tiring of holidays in the Bahamas
Initialed slippers, kedgeree or kippers,
We're all such gentleman farmers.
The things you saw in your pyjamasGreat minds and all that, but could this have been a mischievous appropriation? Still, "Bahamas" puts him ahead on points.
Are a long-range weather forecast for the farmers.
Ike Isaacs, that stalwart supporter of Jake Thackray, adds his own, spikey but delicious, commentary on guitar, and halfway through the song there appear a flock of murmurous Skellerns, as though to suggest the happy complacency of those he is mocking. This song would work well enough just with voice and piano, but the care behind its arrangement is indicative of the album as a whole and - as we shall see - Peter Skellern creates a variety of effects with his multitracked voices.
The Streaker
There isn't much to say, really, about The Streaker, a bit of ragtimey fun, except that the most well-known albums of Scott Joplin pieces, popularised in the wake of the film The Sting, were by Joshua Rifkin, a man who seemed to take to heart the composer's instructions that his tunes should be played slowly. I can't recall the source but remember reading or hearing that such instructions were mainly about Joplin's desire for ragtime to be given the respectability conferred on classical music, and so they could safely be ignored.
Rifkin's albums became widely known in the seventies even though other pianists such as Dick Wellstood were arguably better guides for how these tunes might be played. If you wish to investigate further this is the album I'd go for, although it's not available on CD as far as I know:
What was going through Peter Skellern's mind I have no way of knowing, but The Streaker seems a giddy, breathless Anti-Rifkin, taken at a pace liable to induce nausea in the unwary, ultimately crowned with several bursts of on-mike panting as the tape is breasted. Note, too, that it alludes briefly to another song on the album, Skin and Bone, along its dizzying way - unless this composition merely contained the germ of the other.
There was an additional effect present on this recording in the form in which I first heard it, on a musicassette (remember them?). The secondhand tape I bought of Holding My Own must have been chewed up and then straightened out again at some point because there was a distinctly odd underwater effect during The Streaker which cannot be heard on CD versions: a happy, unique accident which I had assumed had been added by him.
The Tattooed Lady
Now exhausted, we turn to a merrily plodding rhythm as The Streaker is followed by The Tattooed Lady - well, that's bodily concealment of a sort, I suppose.
There are many songs similarly named, but this is not Groucho's celebration of Lydia, nor yet the Paddy Roberts ditty ("Oh I was a bit of a lad I admit..."). The song featured on Holding My Own was written and originally recorded by Walter O'Keefe, "The Broadway Hillbilly", in 1933. I don't know whether Peter Skellern heard this original version or a later cover, but as there is a later recording by Billy Cotton it would certainly have been familiar in the UK.
The singing on both these recordings is interesting. O'Keefe (below), who began his career in vaudeville, seems to press his points home as though the notion of electrical recording, and the greater subtlety thus permitted the performer, was still a distant dream.
That appears to have been his conscious intention according to a spoken interlude which gets in a dig at performers who rose to fame with the newer technology. Crooning only became fashionable once performers like Bing Crosby shook off the Jolson-inspired intensity in their singing and adjusted their style down to something more intimate which could now be picked up by the more sensitive equipment:
You know, ladies and gentlemen, it's really refreshing in these days of hotcha and crooning and booboo [?] to realise that people still have a deep taste for the good old-fashioned type of singing such as this. I don't know, somehow or other this has the feeling of the rosary to me. Alright Lemuel, give me the pitch pipe again ...That two sided recording isn't available on youtube but you can listen to it on dailymotion here.
The recording by Billy Cotton is quite different in its approach. It omits (as Skellern's does) a slightly ruder verse which includes the deathless line "No nudes is good nudes" and appears to feature a range of voices, each essaying a small portion of the song. If, however, these are all Alan Breeze, aka "Breezy", it's all the more remarkable because he had a pronounced stammer when speaking.
I'm not sure whether or not these are impressions of specific performers known to the original listeners, but either way I'd say the effect works against the song a little, as though the words have not been trusted to do the job on their own. But it's probable that this record, not O'Keefe's, was Skellern's model because the final voice, or final Breezy impression, is of a gormless Northerner, reminiscent of Stanley Holloway's monologues, though possibly based on a specific comedian.
Skellern adopts this last voice, or something very similar, for the whole of his rendition, allowing us to concentrate on the story without distraction. And because he sounds helpless and naive here it's as though he is both narrator and victim. I particularly like the line when the husband discovers his wife's infidelity:
He yelled: Never dampen my bathmat again.I'm not sure whether Peter Skellern would ever have wished to be compared to Benny Hill (about whose limitations I have written in the context of a post about another comic singer, here), but the sleevenotes for the Golden Hour of Benny Hill album praised his ability, as a singer, to know just how to point up, or signal his relish in, the innuendo in a seemingly corny song. I don't have the notes to hand, but I think it's exactly what Skellern does, in this song and others:
Mother Eve in the garden of EdenPerhaps it would be more appropriate to cite his nearer neighbour Gracie Fields as an influence: she has a similar ability to suggest innocence while simultaneously inviting the audience to laugh at that innocence. In a live performance at the Holborn Empire you can hear that outside the confines of the studio she is remarkably free with some numbers, sending them up, relishing them, seeming utterly careless and playful as she sings. Here is an example:
Knew the serpent the same as the lass
But this girl might have kept
From temptation except
For a terrible snake in the grass.
Writing about this recording Richard Anthony Baker says that Fields is deliberately guying the melodramatic aspect of the song, so she too is distancing herself from her material, becoming a commentator on it. Her vocal range and boldness may exceed Peter Skellern's - she can sing an affecting music hall or parlour song like Three Green Bonnets straight -but it doesn't seem too fanciful to suggest a connection: Bury, his birthplace, is only a few miles from Rochdale.
And maybe - though I admit this is straining things a bit - there could some slight connection between Skellern and another piano man of note. In The Sound of the City, one of the first overviews of the rise of rock'n'roll, Charlie Gillett has especial praise for the singing of Jerry Lee Lewis, citing out his ability to sing, as it were, in inverted commas, never wholly abandoned like Little Richard but "almost always" with "an edge of detachment or even cynical derision", never quite buying into this "love" business:
This detachment [says Gillett] enabled Lewis to pace his records, and control his audiences at live performances, with a finesse few rock'n'roll singers showed. He would have needed only Chuck Berry's flair for writing songs to be a comparably important figure.Love that "only."
Anyway, I'm not saying Peter Skellern is quite like that, but his singing, on Holding My Own and elsewhere, does seem to have a sense of detachment particularly suited to material designed to elicit both laughter and sympathy. It's also true, I think, of Our Jackie's Getting Married on the You're a Lady album. And it's different in kind from the gleeful sendups by Fats Waller of patently inferior material: as with Gracie Fields, there's a sense of Peter Skellern being bound up with the songs: there is affection involved, not breezy contempt (with a small "b").
She Had To Go And Lose It At The Astor
She Had To Go And Lose It At The Astor is essentially a one-joke song, but infernally catchy and with a pleasing arrangement, complete with massed Skellerns in vocal support, and the recording does not outstay its welcome. Which is all that can be said, really. She Had to Go and Lose It at the Astor is credited to Don Ray and Hugh Prince, although it was originally published under pseudonyms, and a was recorded in 1940 by Harry Roy was banned by the BBC. The Roy record was, I'm guessing, Skellern's model: the opening has the same sense of deliberateness as his, and the chorus is likewise a singsong, though Roy's mob sound as though it's a little later in the evening.
One occupational hazard for those who've been forced to assemble a collection of Skellern's work via CD compilations has been the carelessness evident in the packaging of some items. The CD The Singer and the Song lists the above number on its the back sleeve as She Had To Go And Lose It At The Altar, suggesting someone who hasn't quite grasped the concept of deferred gratification.
Skin and Bone
Perhaps the most pleasing self-penned numbers on the album are neither satirical (Up For The Shoot) nor (arguably) semi-confessional (Society Ladies) but ones which I'd label as purely silly, in which the lyrics seem largely a pretext for Skellern's gleeful messing around with the musical sounds of several decades ago.
Skin 'n' Bone is a case in point. There's a certain amount of innuendo and heavily ironic sexual boasting - Skellern is clearly inhabiting a Formby-type persona - but the whole is just so jolly and cheering (complete with speeded up backing vocals) that you (or I, anyway) succumb. It has some great, sly lines:
I'm afraid I've burnt me boatsNo uke solo - no uke, come to that - but inserted into the uke-shaped gap are those speeded-up Skellerns, providing the vocal equivalent of the instrumental break customary at that poin on a Formby side. Like hearing the bagpipes in Roy Wood's Bill Haley pastiche Are You Ready to Rock? this is surprising yet not at all incongruous - and I'm also reminded of those Wood-derived Andrews Sisters who sing on the title track of Roy's Mustard LP.
I've sunk everything that floats
From Land's End to John O'Groats ...
Could Skellern have been an admirer of Roy Wood's vocal trickery as exhibited on Mustard and his other solo album Boulders? It's possible, although I have read that he, Skellern, quickly realised that multitracked voices only seemed to work when they were all his: the voices of others stood out and ruined the effect. And without session singers presumably there was greater freedom to experiment and discover different sorts of textures. It would be interesting to know whether demos or rough sketches for vocal backgrounds were originally knocked up on cassette recorders at home.
After the mock-stately tempo of She Had To Go And Lose It At The Astor the sprightly Skin And Bone is a great side-closer: you can hear his relish in delivering the song and the obvious Formby homage, and yet it doesn't seem like an impersonation or a parody - more that he has fully absorbed the spirit of that much-loved singer and trusts that you will share in his delight.
Here's a poor sound quality youtube clip which nevertheless gets the Formby connection - and closes, fittingly, with images of other Northern comics such as Jimmy James and Norman Evans, which seems appropriate for an album steeped in Northern humour.
Honey Chil'
Honey Chil', the breakneck opening to Side Two is, I suppose, an early tribute - of sorts - to the group later celebrated on the album Stardust Memories, namely the Ink Spots: the phrase "Honey Chil'" is, of course, associated with their bass singer Hoppy Jones in his spoken interjections.
The joy of this track is that Skellern gives the lyrical side of things precisely the amount of attention it deserves - which is to say practically nil: the pleasure is in the back and forth between Skellern's bass voice and, once again, a multitracked self-backing group. And the good news is it's the Ink Spots' uptempo, lightly swinging mode he's affectionately nodding towards, not the group suffocating in sentimentality (as parodied by Spike Jones and His City Slickers), though maybe the early, jazzier Mills Brothers in Tiger Rag mode are also in the frame. Or a bit of both groups.
(Which reminds me, if I may be permitted to indulge in a spot of product placement on my own blog, that Freddie Davies, whose autobiography Funny Bones I cowrote, was taken at the age of ten to see the Ink Spots at the newly-opened Casino Theatre in London - now the Prince Edward. Having badgered his grandmother for ages to see them, imagine his crushing disappointment when an announcement was made that they wouldn't be appearing that night. Their replacement? No, not the Mills Brothers ... Jewel and Warriss.)
Actually, maybe I'm being a little unfair about the lyrics of Honey Chil', which are a catalogue of calamities:
Twenty years have passed since thenAnd there is an early George and Ira Gershwin song called My Cousin in Milwaukee so it's just about possible that, as in the affecting ballad My Lonely Room on his first album, Skellern is making another allusion to the greats - even though, from a cursory reading of Ira's lyrics, this may not have been the pair's finest three minutes:
And things got slowly worse
Mother got evicted from a slum in town
And came to join us first
Then my brother from Milwaukee went and lost his doggie
And didn't even ask if he could stay
He just walked in, cool as a cat, and asked to stay the night
Oh, Honey Chil', you know that just ain't right.
I got a cousin in Milwaukee
She's got a voice so squawky
And though she's tall and kind of gawky
Oh, how she gets the men.
Society Ladies
The next song, also self-penned, is Society Ladies. Like Up For The Shoot, I imagine that this might have been originally written for Stop the Week, but where some numbers on that programme could come over as well-crafted but bloodless (there were several musical contributors over the years) there seems more than a hint of anger or contempt in Skellern's song, for all its witty framing. And whether or not the song is to be considered directly autobiographical he was certainly well placed to judge those members of the upper classes into whose sphere his minor celebrity status ("a Name") had lately propelled him.
When society ladies show me to their friendsWhen the matrons warn him off their deb daughters, the song ends with what might be called a note of triumphal regret:
They kiss my cheek - but that's where it ends
For although I'm a Name, it's not quite the same
Cause I'm no one, no one but me.
They try very hard to be down to earth
And talk about things I should know
But after a time they succumb to their wine
And their breeding begins to show ...
I'll never be Mark Phillips, try as I might
Cause I'm no one, no one but me.
That Is the End of the News
That Is the End of the News was originally performed by a pigtailed Joyce Grenfell (below) in a 1945 Noel Coward revue, but although there is one direct reference to the end of the war, the song is a kind of evergreen point number:
Skellern doesn't emulate Grenfell's accent, but the same sense of innocence and lunatic optimism is there - although, again, he seems to be outside the song at the same time, inviting us to share his enjoyment of the situation's ridiculousness, aided by the introductory verse, sung rather more knowingly than the rest of the song:We've been done in
By the mortgage foreclosure
And Father went out on a blind,
He got run in
For indecent exposure
And ever so heavily fined
We are told very loudly and often
To lift up our hearts,
We are told that good humour will soften
Fate's cruelest darts
So however bad our domestic troubles may be
We just shake with amusement and sing with glee.
That recording, which I think may even have been released as a single, has considerable historical importance: Richard Stilgoe (one of Jake Thackray's successors for point numbers on the Beeb) heard it and was greatly taken with it, leading ultimately to a long-lasting musical partnership and several live albums.
Vicarious Vestments
Vicarious Vestments, which sounds like it could have come from Stop the Week or telly infotainments such as That's Life or Nationwide, is a bit heavy handed - by which I mean it's a "proper" comedy song, a point number such as might also have appealed to Richard Stilgoe, poking fun at clergy rather too concerned with outward appearances:
But at least in my own congregationThat said, the lyrical invention - not to mention the high campery of Skellern's delivery - is sustained throughout, and the mock-sacred setting serves the song well. I suppose it's that the delivery signals the comic intent too clearly for me.
I can dress in the fabrics I want
Velour in the vestry, shantung in the crypt ...
And my terylene trunks in the font.
Uncle Sam
And so to Uncle Sam, a tall tale of a dull bank clerk with a secret life:
But when he got home and the curtains were drawn,For reasons which need not detain us here he becomes stranded on a desert island but remains so in thrall to jazz-crazed rhythms that he muffs an opportunity to escape:
He'd kick off his shoes and pick up his horn.
Uncle Sam grew sad at heart... cue the Skellern piano, unable to resist swingin' them familiar notes. And a chorus of Skellern's own speeded-up voices provides hilarious accompaniment: ukelike in Skin And Bone, they have been transmuted into a whole host of trumpets here.
He knew he'd be there forever.
But he'd still alive cause he was smart
And the natives ... weren't very clever.
And when ships came into sight
The morse code he'd play
But he never got far
Cause he'd get carried away
The arrangement, or the production, builds in a satisfying way. Just as in the spectral conclusion to Benny Hill's Ernie ("Was that the trees a-rustlin ...") Sam lingers after his death, and these two lines have the appropriate echo:
And still to this day, when the moon's in the treesAnd then we go into a trumpet-vocal finale followed by a second wind, the whole concluded with a Rude Word - talk about value for money. The youtube clip accompanying this contains an image which is a little too on the nose, but presumably the name "Uncle Sam" was chosen because the song is a tribute to the rich legacy of American music - though perhaps a more local association with Stanley Holloway's reluctant snapper-up of discarded weaponry is also intended.
An eerie sound is heard on the breeze.
The End of the Show
The album's final song is, appropriately enough, the send-up to end all send-ups of all finale-type songs you've ever heard, the words as hackneyed as possible:
There is no end I knowNow this is not exactly clever wit, and I initially thought: maybe he's talking about, you know, doing it - so "before the curtain's down" maybe meant before clothing was put back in place (after, y'know, doing it) - but again, the arrangement (more multitracked Skellerns and a wonderfully portentous spoken interlude) is more than enough in itself.
Like the end of a show
When the orchestra's packed up and gone
There is no peace I find
Like the one left behind
When it's time to lock up and go
Before the curtain's down
One last look around
There's no end like the end of a show.
And the context of the song - coming, as it does, at the end of a series of ditties which have been less than unabashedly solemn - is part of the comic effect. Because what he's been doing throughout the Holding My Own album is surely the antithesis of such superfatted sentiments.
Could The End of the Show also have been intended a farewell to his then record company, a sort of half-concealed two fingers? I dunno. As a whole, the album is surely more sauce than spite. But if, for a moment, we read it as such, then as leavetakings go it's a good 'un: not a ha'porth of genuine sentiment yet filled with a kind of daffy conviction at the same time - conviction, that is, in the simple enjoyment of recreating an outmoded, overblown style. Fun. That's the word I'm looking for. You remember fun, dontcha?
And that may be the key to Skellern's work as a whole, informing his musical choices throughout his career, though the quality seems particularly marked in Holding My Own. In an autobiographical documentary series simply called Peter Skellern and transmitted on the BBC in the eighties, he had this to say about his musical upbringing:
The great thing about being brought up an unsophisticated mill town that nobody ever said this is good music or this is bad music because nobody knew that there was a difference. There was something dark and mysterious called Highbrow but that didn't concern us; that was for snooty people. All the rest was music - and its worth was not assessed by content but by effort involved in performing and enjoyment upon hearing. In other words, music was for pleasure. People played instruments or sang in choirs as a means of relief, of escape from a very drab world full of coal lorries, cotton, heavy machinery, linoleum, public baths and Sunday School, the mothers' union, public transport and opticians' waiting rooms.No, you won't be in any sense enlightened or transformed by listening to Holding My Own. It is unlikely that Skellern ever made any claims for it along the lines of Pete Townshend's habitual trumpetings for Tommy, but it is beguiling and entertaining throughout and that's aplenty for me. To borrow his own phrase, Peter Skellern was a creator of music for pleasure.
As time permits I may try to write an equivalent post piece for each of Peter Skellern's Decca albums. Or I may not. But I certainly look forward to hearing them all again, and I thank the determined Mr Moore for his efforts in making them available on CD in a manner which befits the love and craft behind them.
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