These I Have Loved (and Learnt off of)

 

A few years ago I wrote a series of pieces about the radio broadcasters who had contributed the most to my musical education over the years. Not all of these figures were attached to the BBC, but most were; and to celebrate that institution's 100th anniversary I've condensed those memories into one handy single post - no strenuous clicking required. 

"Broadcaster" seems more a appropriate term than DJ in this context, as I'm not including representatives of Radio 1 in this happy band, even though the station was regular listening for me in the early seventies. This is because John Peel and others were, in effect, building on enthusiasms already learnt from my brothers or through music papers or watching Top of the Pops or The Old Grey Whistle Test. My siblings were immune, however, to the delights of doo wop and rock'n'roll, which were largely my own discoveries, made by a process of trial and error whenever a likely-looking LP in a record shop or newsagent's seemed cheap enough to take a chance on. 

In the late seventies and early eighties, however, I became keenly aware that alternatives were available, that another style of music was available and had, in fact, been around for quite a while.

My first two guides were Hubert Gregg and Benny Green. I may have come across Gregg's Thanks for the Memory and Benny Green's Sunday afternoon show, both on Radio 2, sometime in the late seventies, but I remember them most fondly for providing the soundtrack to my reincarnation as a university student in the early 1980s. What they had to offer felt like the logical next stage in the sort-of serious, sort-of systematic musical study I'd fallen into around ten years earlier in my local library.

Hubert Gregg's presentation was mannered, the programmes audibly scripted, but in an age of prattle, that careful preparation felt like a courtesy, not a barrier: you learnt to accept phrases which would have sounded horrendously artificial coming out of any other presenter's mouth, like "No more for a se'enight," when the half hour had sped by yet again, and even grew to relish the inevitability of the pause you could have driven a stretch limo through during the middle of his sign-off: "And au revoir ... to you."

Just as it's said that Hutch (a Gregg favourite) had the power to make the audience in a vast variety hall feel as though they were enjoying a recitation in an elegant drawing room, so these and other Greggorian turns of phrase had the effect of drawing listeners together, a happy band of fellow conspirators who refused to acknowledge the end of a golden age of English and American music which stretched from the twenties to, I suppose, the late forties.

In Greggland Elvis Presley had yet to be invented, and it's even possible - although I'm less sure about this - that 1948's Hurricane Oklahoma had not yet swept through London town, whirling the musicals of Vivian Ellis, with their surreally silly books by A.P. Herbert, into dizzy oblivion; you were given the impression, at any rate, that Gregg prized the wordplay of Lorenz Hart far above the work of Rodgers' later collaborator, always pronouncing "Hammerstein" with what seemed like a mocking Teutonic "sch" - although, in fairness, this may have been an old-fashioned desire for strict accuracy, as with the distinction he made between nightingale-loud Square and choreographer.

In Gregg's domain Vivian Ellis stayed forever in fashion and the tempo for Have You Met Miss Jones?, with Hart's uncynically romantic lyric, was the subject of a preservation order, keeping it from degeneration into Sinatra's swingathon. When CDs, those dangerous portents of the digital age, became the norm for nostalgiac reissues, even they were assimilated into this gentler world, rendered harmless and homely once rechristened as "shaving mirrors".

And you were happy to feel part of this gang, this enchanted place, because Hubert Gregg - songwriter, singer, actor and general man of the theatre - knew whereof he spake; if you ever doubted that, a regularly aired excerpt from a broadcast in which Jack Buchanan contrived to meet Gregg by chance then proceeded to sing his song London in the Rain was proof that the pensionable Radio 2 presenter had indeed moved among giants of a bygone era.

Benny Green was a writer as well as a broadcaster, which showed in his scripts, though they were more direct in style than Gregg's. In both cases, however, you felt in intimate contact with someone keen to share what he loved. Green had also been in the music business - he can be glimpsed in photographs of the members of Lord Rockingham's XI, hiding his shame at the mercenary gig behind dark glasses - and his Sunday lunchtime programme on Radio 2 was another important influence in my life. My strongest memory is of the regular blasts of brass which punctuated Sinatra's singing on so many numbers chosen, although one of Green's favourite performances was the more restrained One For My Baby ("The singing is so good, it's silly," he told one interviewer).

His tastes were perhaps wider than those of Hubert Gregg, so the two programmes complemented each other. Some numbers regularly featured in the programme could be called brash - like Johnny Mercer's own rendition of his novelty number Pineapple Pete, which I never found a ribtickler. But Peggy Lee's wistful performance of The Folks Who Live On the Hill was also a favourite - as, indeed, was another Mercer number sung by the composer: The Days of Wine and Roses, taken from a live performance. And as a man who'd written a book about PG Wodehouse, Green was keen on Wodehouse's gently humorous musical collaborations, and particularly alive to the lyrical content of what he played.

The critc Robert Cushman had several series on Radio 3 in the eighties entitled, Book, Music and Lyrics, a history of musicals, which he presented with intelligence and charm; these also made a big impact on me. I suspect that I first heard In the Morning, No from Cole Porter's Du Barry Was a Lady there, as this was certainly the musical he seemed to rhapsodise about above all others, but it might well have been courtesy of Gregg or Green. All three gradually and painlessly filled me with knowledge which was ultimately to prove professionally useful as well as a source of pleasure and metaphorical enrichment. 

I never met Robert Cushman to say thank you in person, although I did have a close encounter, of sorts, with him - two, in fact. He had a show at the Edinburgh Fringe, probably around 1983 or thereabouts. It was remarkable, because he wasn't any kind of a singer, I think it would be fair to say, but he understood how singing worked: he knew about phrasing even though his personal equipment was cruelly lacking. What he did was, in effect, to hypnotise us: he gave us an impression of how a truly gifted singer - as it might be, Mabel Mercer - might tackle De-Lovely - and it worked. When we applauded, I think it was for what he had conjured up, as though he hadn't sung at all but somehow described, with extraordinary vividness and intelligence, someone else, some gifted other, singing. 

A few years later I was very briefly - as in a couple of days - an agency kitchen porter at Broadcasting House when I first arrived in London. I worked pretty hard on the first day but on the second an old hand showed me the dodges, which involved spending a lot of time in the canteen, giving the impression of being busy. I noticed Mr Cushman in conversation at one of the tables but something - my awareness of my current status? simple politeness? - kept me from going over and heaping praise upon him for Book, Music and Lyrics.

Had it been Benny Green or Hubert Gregg, would I have held back? Was it about a perceived coolness in Cushman's presenting style or simply the far greater and more regular exposure to the other two broadcasters? I don't know. Possibly there was a more of an educational air in Cushman's programme - there was certainly a specific agenda, where the other two were freer to range more widely, even though their tastes must have dictated what was played. Yet that's unfair, because his programmes did exactly what he describes in this Independent  appreciation of Jonathan James-Moore, who produced the series:

We proved, I think, that it was possible to treat popular music on radio and to be entertaining without compromising anyone's intelligence: our subjects', our listeners' or our own.

Maybe it was the memory of his "singing." And yet ... that Edinburgh performance has stuck in my mind for almost forty years, especially the pause he relished at the line about the new stork-bought arrival - "He's apalling" - before getting all animated like a loose-limbed marionette for the home stretch. And Hubert Gregg would surely have understood: conviction is all. (So what am I saying, then - that it was a  good performance? I don't know; maybe the hypnosis still hasn't worn off.)

More short-lived, and indeed shorter in its running time, was Dilly Barlow's Friday Treat. This was a fifteen minute programme devoted primarily to jazz classics of the era favoured by the purchaser of vinyl for Motherwell Library - roughly late twenties to mid forties - so I was particularly receptive to the show, broadcast in the early eighties, which offered guidance about jazz greats I didn't get in the library itself - not, to be fair, that I was ever bold enough to ask for any. It became yet another strand in my remote musical education, an opportunity to hear some of the very best of that era as selected by Ms Barlow, things I might have unwittingly passed over in my awkward and selfconscious flipping through the racks in the library, and which hadn't been played by Gregg or Green.

Friday Treat's irresistibly upbeat theme music came from a late twenties/early thirties Ellington recording which I can no longer identify (though it can be found among the selection on the Living Era CD Jazz Cocktail), suggesting that when it came to choosing music Ms Barlow, like Philip Larkin, posed herself the query coined by Zelig-like musician Eddie Condon: "As it enters the ear, does it come in like broken glass or does it come in like honey?"

That said, I can't actually recall much of the music played on the programme, which ran itermittently between August 1980 and August 1983. Looking at the Radio Times listings the music is initially described simply as "up tempo" then later as "jazz, blues and gospel" - which has reminded me that she did play Aretha Franklin's version of I Say a Little Prayer for You, pointing out the borrowing of gospel-style call-and-response in the vocal arrangement. There may have been gospel and blues songs I heard there for the first time and sought out on vinyl or tape; alas, I can't recall. 

But there is at least one other recording retained from the many playlists. In my memory, I always seem to be in the bath when listening to Friday Treat. It's possible I may have taken especial care to arrange my ablutions to coincide with the programme, though that would suggest a degree of - well, I don't really know what. But that doesn't matter because it's more likely that the experience of hearing the show has become irremovably fixed in that damp locale because that was certainly where I first heard Dilly Barlow play Billie Holiday's 1948 recording of I Loves You, Porgy, accompanied only by piano and bass and drums.

I still recall the sense of being stunned and an awareness of the bathwater cooling; years later, in dominie mode, I played it to a class and almost immediately felt the temperature in the room drop in  a similar way. Not just me, then - nor, indeed, Ms Barlow. The directness of that emotional plea is breathtaking and has never, to my knowledge, been bettered; Nina Simone's attempt seems rococco by comparison.

I can't say, at this distance, whether that was the first time I ever heard Billie Holiday, but no recording I'd heard had felt as naked and open. Hubert Gregg, like Billie's biographer John Chilton, would have certainly favoured her thirties recordings; I seem to remember Chilton using the word "springtime" in connection with them and his ambivalence about her later, croak-voiced performances.

I suppose part of the power of Porgy is that her voice is still strong - not that that seems the right word to use of her style. Around the same time, perhaps as a result of the programme, I borrowed a tape of Songs for Distingue Lovers, recorded nine years later; some of the more upbeat numbers made for uneasy listening as she strained for a note but the resignation of Lorenz Hart's lyric for I Didn't Know What Time It Was seemed to suit that battered instrument; I can still place where I was on a late night walk when that song sank into me, particularly the enunciation of the words: "I was naive."

It reminds me of another radio guide a little later, around 1987, on Radio 3: Mel Hill, who had various radio series about jazz singing and playing. Comparing an Armstrong solo with one by Bix Beiderbecke he surmised that the latter's seemed consciously worked out - the suggestion was that of the trumpeter Max Kaminsky - whereas Armstrong seemed to be more instinctive in his approach, "like some Bisto Kid of genius."

With this wonderful phrase rattling around in my head, I wrote to Mr Hill, thinking about a 1960 Louis and Ella duet, Autumn in New York: Ella Fitzgerald sings the first part of the song, and it is beautifully done, but for my money when Louis Armstrong starts singing it is something else entirely, linked to that Holiday performance of Porgy: it seems wholly unguarded, open, unafraid to reveal evidence of the passing of time. Armstrong, no longer the tiger of his youth (I think the recording dates from 1960) was still indivisibly Armstrong, which reminded me of a line in King Lear which seemed linked to that "Bisto Kid" image: "There I found em, there I smelt 'em out."

I'm not quite sure now what I meant precisely, but I suppose I was saying that Armstrong had, as it were, smelt himself out, knew his own essence, so the lessening of power and range in his voice was a mere detail: he was still, after all, Louis Armstrong.

Which reminds me, in turn, of Humphrey Lyttelton or George Melly quoting the gnomic utterance of a girl who apparently met Armstrong during a visit to the UK: "You cannot get away from what you have got." Indeed not. Years later, just after I had shuffled off my dominie shackles (does one shuffle shackles?) I was being painted by an artist friend and tried to keep that performance of Armstrong's in mind, as though that openness could somehow transmit itself through my being - not sure whether it did, but it's a good painting all the same.

Anyway, Dilly Barlow, Mel Hill and  others provided additional stepping stones on my journey, bringing me closer to an understanding and appreciation of this wonderful music. Each new discovery, each piece of the jigsaw, remains valued even if I can no longer identify the donor.

And it occurs to me that these memories call to mind a time, only a few short decades ago, which now seems aeons away, when the would-be musical explorer was entirely dependent on a small group of people on the radio or the purchasing whim of the local librarian (if you lived in an enlightened borough which lent out records): no vast snowdrifts of youtube or spotify to lose yourself in. 

Not that the change has necessarily all been for the better: rationed it may have been, but the music was, in the main, doled out by people who cared about it and knew something about it, and possessed the ability to communicate their enthusiasm to the listener. I am not a DJ nor was meant to be but I have, in my own way, followed their lead, their inspiration, in that my job allows me pretty much of a free hand in buying CDs and sheet music for the enlightenment of others, and I take great pleasure and pride in writing the accompanying catalogue notes - though whether or not others choose to read them is another matter.

There is one more broadcaster whom I'd like to salute - a relatively late addition to the fold. Russell Davies took over Benny Green's Sunday programme slot and proved a worthy successor, following Green's lead in building the choice of tracks for each programme around anniversaries - well, notionally, anyway. In 2010 I made brief notes of the rationale Mr Davies provided for each song in an edition broadcast on the second of May:

Mel Tormé — One Morning In May
Because it's May.

Billie Holiday — That Old Devil Called Love
Because 2nd May is birthdate of lyricist Doris Fisher.

Spike Jones and His City Slickers — You Always Hurt The One You Love
Because this is another Doris Fisher lyric and Spike Jones died on the 1st of May.

Matt Dennis — Mountain Greenery
Because 2nd May is the birthdate of Lorenz Hart and anyway 1st May is mentioned in the lyric.

Ella Fitzgerald & Chick Webb — A Tisket A Tasket
Because 2nd May is the birthday of Van Alexnder, a white bandleader now in his nineties who sold arrangements to Chick Webb including the above, which was recorded on Alexander's 23rd birthday.

Dean Martin — At Sundown
Because this is an example of a later Van Alexander arrangement as an antidote to "Ella's juvenilia" (No additional May connection proffered on this occasion).

Matt Monro — Try To Remember
Because 2nd May 1960 was the night before the opening of The Fantasticks.

Harry Belafonte & Odetta — The Hole In The Bucket
Because it's from a 2nd May 1960 Harry Belafonte concert at Carnegie Hall.

The Spirits of Rhythm — Nobody’s Sweetheart
Because scat singer Leo Watson died on May 2nd 1950. Thereafter we're told "So much for May 2nd, which if nothing else has been a good excuse for staving off thoughts of May the sixth and the ballot box" - ie a then imminent UK general election.

Li’l Abner Original Cast — The Country’s In The Very Best Of Hands
Because despite appropriation by various political parties "songs go better in fantasy elections in Broadway musicals." And because lyricist Johnny Mercer's biographer Gene Lees died recently (actually in April).

Perry Como — One More Vote
Because this film song is "a stylised form of a hustings speech of the mid-forties." Thereafter we're assured us we won't return to this topic.

Frank Sinatra — Let’s Get Away From It All
Because this provides an opportunity to hear a lyric by Matt Dennis who sang Mountain Greenery earlier. Oh, and, er, the orchestra leader is Billy ... May.

Tina May — When In Rome
Because - in Mr Davies' final, impudent flourish - "Let's stay May-minded to the very last."

To lay bare the rationale for inclusion like this, shorn of almost all of the presenter's comments, is, of course, grossly unfair: as with the other broadcasters, his linking comments displayed a breadth of reference and an ability to make associative leaps which extend far beyond the chronological coincidences cited above, which are merely an amusing extra.

His links showed a gift for succinct, accessible phrasemaking, different from Hubert Gregg's conscious stylisation, more like ordinary speech - but in a more compact, vivid form than the unscripted alternative, just as a TV advert for some kind of wonder yoghurt (or some such) used to boast of its invigorating effects with the slogan: "You - but on a really good day."

On that programme, for example, Lorenz Hart was summed up as "Pint-sized genius of the lyric and tragical boozer" and we were that told Spike Jones is "well known for taking the sweetest rose and crushing it till the petals fall - with a thunderous crash."

These brief quotes don't, however, quite do justice to his links, where four or five interconnected ideas often whizzed by in the transition from one record to another. In the preamble to You Always Hurt the One Love, on that broadcast, after That Old Devil Called Love finishes playing, we were told, among other things, that Alison Moyet's pop revival was now twenty five years old; that Mr Davies had been reading The Tin Pan Alley Song Encyclopedia, "one of those books that are there to be disagreed with," which apparently omitted that particular Doris Fisher number but included You Always Hurt ..., described in the book as a "fatalistic ballad" recorded by the Mills Brothers and others including Brenda Lee, Al Martino and Ringo Starr - "which, " he added, "suggests a certain breadth of interest in this song." That, I think, is the authentic Davies note: waspish understatement in a slightly raised voice, inviting you into the joke. Leading into the Spike Jones remark already quoted, he then went on to point out that there is no built-in protection for compositions against "uprincipled rogues" - such as Jones. And Davies's delivery of his own words could be regarded as musical in itself: he fairly rattled along, a raised eyebrow here, the ghost of a wink there, the whole radiating his trademark measured zest.

Sadly, although Russell Davies is still around the BBC in quizmaster mode, in 2013 they jettisoned his Radio 2 show after shunting it from afternoon to evening, and it's difficult not to feel that something precious has been lost as a result. It marks the end of regular broadcasting - of a music-based programme, anyway - of the last of those presenters who educated me in pre-rock'n'roll music. The suggestion was made at the time by Mr Davies himself, among others, that it had been dropped as part of the plan to make Radio 2 into "Radio one-and-a-half", catching those who have grown out of Radio 1.

I can only say that it's a great pity that there is less room now on BBC radio for the popular music which preceded the rock explosion. Did somebody make the pragmatic decsion that Radio 2 cannot go on infinitely expanding its capacity and so the earliest decades - the thirties and forties - must perforce be jettisoned? It sort of makes sense, I suppose ... provided, that is, you don't believe that any of the subsequent songwriters benefited from the example of those who came before. (Wonder what Macca would have to say about that? Or Lennon, come to that, who was taught Scatterbrain, a song I first heard on a Hubert Gregg show, by his mother.)  

It's significant, I think, that the majority of the broadcasters I have mentioned were working from a script - in other words what they were giving us was something polished, not just chatter to fill the moments in between recordings. In all of these cases you were getting something which hadn't been thrown together, and there was an implied respect for the audience. More than that: you had the sense that they were sharing something which was precious to them, but their knowledge was worn lightly. You never felt you were being lectured. No longer, alas, will I be introduced to songs, and odd pairings and coincidences, by someone who had taken the time to shape his thoughts and open his listeners' ears to the richness of the catalogue of music before Chuck Berry.

Hmm ... rather less of an upbeat conclusion than I intended, but I must thank the BBC for the decades in which they provided this service unstintingly via Green, Gregg et al. 

And in fairness, it should be noted that at the time of writing Barry Humphries has just finished presenting a series of nostalgic programmes on the station, so it may be that all is not completely lost. But even with Humphries' celebrity in other areas - a factor in his continuing employment by the station, much as celeb authors' work is filling bookshops? - the show haven't exactly been gifted with what might be described as a popular timeslot (midnight). 

Still, I've greatly enjoyed Humphries' earlier series, mixing memoir and music, so that's better than nothing, I suppose. Will there be more from Mr Humphries? Will it indeed be "Au revoir" to him  rather than Peter Cook's rejoinder in that famous Beyond the Fringe sketch?