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. 

In the early 1970s another, older, broadcaster, Ken Sykora (the young Paul McCartney had listened to his programme Guitar Club on the BBC's Light Programme in the 1950s) had presented a not dissimilar show on the newly formed independent station Radio Clyde. He, however, had the advantage of an inspired title: Serendipity with Sykora, meaning he could include material outwith the aforesaid songbook as the fancy took him. Hawaiian music and the Lovin' Spoonful's Nashville Cats crept in from time to time, as I recall, though his penchant for the voice of Peggy Lee and others meant that standards were always threaded through each week's choices

That catch-all title having already been nabbed, and synonyms for serendipity such as Happenstance not providing similar alliterative possibilities in my case, I fell to examining Mr Davies's method of linking his musical choices in my short-lived quest to discover The Secret of Broadcasting Man's Red Fire.

Ken Sykora had provided my introduction to Spike Jones, among many others, and one of Jones's masterpieces of musical mayhem happened to feature in the edition of the Russell Davies Song Show put under the microscope. It was broadcast on Sunday, the second of May, 2010.

I made notes about the rationale behind each selection:  

 

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 the 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."

 

Laying bare the rationale for inclusion like this, shorn of most of the presenter's comments, is, it must be admitted, grossly unfair: as with some others I've praised in this blog, Russell Davies's links display a breadth of reference and an ability to make associative leaps which extend far beyond the chronological coincidences cited above, which are merely a mildly amusing extra, a ribbon around the musical goodies.

Interesting, too, that like Ken Sykora, Benny Green, Hubert Gregg and Ian Whitcomb, Russell Davies is also a musician, which may have helped foster the catholicity of taste on display; the programme's subtitle is "The art, craft and inspiration of the popular song" - which may not quite be Sykora's  Anything Goes, but there are several decades to draw from, with a cut-off point for compositions of, say, around the mid-fifties, though there are exceptions.

The show appears to be scripted, but he has a real gift for succinct, accessible phrasemaking. It's different from Hubert Gregg's conscious stylisation, more like ordinary speech - but in a more compact, vivid form than the unscripted alternative, just as an advert on British television for some kind of wonder yoghurt (or some such) boasted  of its invigorating effects with the slogan: "You - but on a really good day."

Lorenz Hart, for example, is summed up as "Pint-sized genius of the lyric and tragical boozer" and we're 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, do justice to his links, where four or five interconnected ideas may whizz by in the transition from one record to another. 

So let's take the preamble to You Always Hurt the One You Love. After That Old Devil Called Love finishes playing, we are told, among other things, that Alison Moyet's pop revival is now twenty five years old; that he has been reading The Tin Pan Alley Song Encyclopedia, "one of those books that are there to be disagreed with," which omits that Doris Fisher song but includes 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," we are told, "suggests a certain breadth of interest in this song." That 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 goes on to point out that there is no built-in protection for compositions against "uprincipled rogues" - such as Jones.

It is a performance - odd interview clips I've heard reveal someone more tentative - but as with Hubert Gregg, to whom I have paid tribute elsewhere, it's the right performance for that context, and in Russell Davies' case he fairly rattles along, a raised eyebrow here, the ghost of a wink there, as there is always so much to impart with what I can only describe as a kind of trademark measured zest.

And although the programme has now been shunted from the 2pm slot which it had occupied since the days of Benny Green in favour of something rather less interesting (to me, anyway), and although I'd rather it were back in that slot, maybe there is a sort of justification in having something so pleasing just at the hour when some of us may need diversion from thoughts of the working week.

After that May 2010 episode Russell Davies's show was only to last another three and a half years. Here's what I wrote on learning of its demise: 

So ends a line which stretched, for me, from the seventies and Benny Green in the same slot (before it was shunted from afternoon to evening, during the Davies era, to make room for the chumminess of Elaine Paige).

It's also a source of sadness because although I believe he will still be presenting the odd programme for Radio 2 this marks the end of regular broadcasting for the last of those presenters who educated me about pre-rock'n'roll music, most notably Benny Green, Hubert Gregg, Ken Sykora and Robert Cushman. (Of that quartet only Robert Cushman is still alive, although as far as I know he is no longer broadcasting.)

I'm not going to go into detail here about why the decision to drop Russell Davies is so wrong. The "presentation reason", as we psychiatrists say, is that he isn't, apparently, cost-effective for a programme only lasting one hour - even though one hour is precisely the right amount of time for something which demands more direct attention than most of Radio 2's output.

The suggestion - made by Mr Davies himself, among others - is that his show being 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.

By and large I have approved of that scheme in the past, and enjoyed the music documentaries and slots for different genres on Radio 2. But there has to be room for the popular music which preceded the rock explosion.

Is it about time passing? I can't remember exactly when  "Radio one-and-a-half" was first mooted - I suppose around the time of Matthew Bannister's cull of dinosaur DJs at Radio 1, and he was appointed controller twenty years ago.

Has somebody therefore made the pragmatic decision that Radio 2 cannot go on infinitely expanding its capacity and so the earliest decades - the thirties and forties - must perforce be jettisoned, just as some nostalgic "gold" stations have now dropped the 1950s from their oldies options?

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. And - like Russell Davies - Benny Green and Ken Sykora were musicians, and Hubert Gregg was a singer, songwriter and all round man of the theatre.

Robert Cushman is a journalist and critic - he may play an instrument, for all I know, but the point is that 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.

In terms of world events I suppose the end of a radio programme means - well, not that much. But regular listeners will know that with the closing down of this show something important is going from Radio 2 and from our lives. We will no longer be introduced to songs, and odd pairings and coincidences, by someone who had taken the time to shape his thoughts for us, and who opened our ears to the richness of the catalogue of music before Chuck Berry.

Rereading the above notes from 2010 and 2013 I have to admit that The Secret of Broadcasting of Broadcasting Man's Red Fire remains elusive. You could copy the approach of a Russell Davies or find some show title which, like Ken Sykora's, permits a catholic choice of records, but the real binding agent in any record show is that compound of intelligence, enthusiasm and knowledge which a presenter brings to the affair: the sense that, as I said of Spencer Leigh in the previous post, he knows whereof he speaks. 

And that can only come from long years of experience. I recall that Andy Park, who was Head of Entertainment at Radio Clyde in its early years, said in a documentary about Ken Sykora that other DJs on Radio Clyde needed to have their programmes edited to a greater or lesser extent but Sykora always brought something which was perfectly formed and didn't need the heavy hand of a producer.

I wrote earlier that Mr Davies's song selections usually had a cut-off point of the mid-fifties - the compositions, that is, not the recordings, which were often more recent - but towards the end of the show's time on Radio 2 the occasional number was featured which stuck out from the rest, coming from a later era. They weren't bad songs but I did wonder whether their inclusion might have the forceful suggestion of a producer, anxious to provide a sop to those higher up. As far as I remember they included Bridge Over Troubled Water, either Johnny Preston's Cradle of Love or Running Bear, and Someday Soon as sung by Judy Collins. Someday Soon seemed to fit best but it was difficult not to feel that those songs were like a few spots of rain on a windowpane moments before a deluge.

To close, one small example of Russell Davies in action in the show's penultimate year: when Paul McCartney released an album of standards, Kisses on the Bottom, he included More I Cannot Wish You, from Guys and Dolls, the song which her Missionary grandfather sings to Sarah Brown, hoping someday she will find a beau gazing at her, as Macca puts it, 

With the sheepish eye 
And a look of the truth

- only what Frank Loesser actually wrote was:

With the sheep's eye
And the lickerish tooth

- the word "lickerish" can mean lecherous or having a craving for something; at any rate it means the line as written was about the suitor's desire rather than his integrity. 

Luckily the Russell Davies Song Show was still around at the time to capture this rare example of a Little Richard adherent in effect doing a Pat Boone.

If you haven't read them already, here are some posts from a series called They Turned Me On, praising some of the broadcasters who helped shape my musical tastes:

Ian Whitcomb
Ken Sykora
Hubert Gregg
Benny Green & Robert Cushman