In writer/director Anthony Simmons' words, Peter Sellers gives "a great gut performance" in the 1973 film The Optimists of Nine Elms as the variety performer, reduced to busking, who is befriended - and ultimately redeemed - by two children.
It's a role which fits him like a glove, and it's surprising that it's taken so long for this film to be issued on DVD (and still not in its natural homeplace of Region 2), and that it's not one of the pieces automatically cited as an example of Sellers at his best.
That could be because of the associated negative connotations of a "children's film", which it could be argued this is. It certainly has lots of music (Lionel Bart and George Martin), and it mostly favours the children's point of view; indeed, the original, rather less complex, novel is told by one of the kids. But it's to Simmons' and Sellers' credit that there is very little in the film which is sentimental (meaning unearnt emotion), so the music could be seen as a way of sugaring the pill.
Just found this clip, below, on youtube of Dave Gilmour's beautiful performance of Don't, the song associated with Elvis Presley, from the 2001 Leiber and Stoller concert at Hammersmith Apollo. Read my review of the show here.
Very sad to read that Jerry Leiber (above, left) is dead.
Click here for a link to a 2001 interview with Leiber and Stoller at the NFT to promote a documentary about their work. I remember it well because I was present and even got to ask a question. It covers most bases and is well worth reading in full. Below are some brief extracts.
But if you're in a hurry, what with your busy schedule and lack of any sense of musical history, the gist is: they put in the hours and we all benefited.
Q: How unfinished was the song Stand By Me when Ben E King brought it to you, did you make the arrangement on the spot?
There hasn't been much to add to this series of posts about Bowie's early influences lately, but idly looking through post 16, about the original version of My Old Man's a Dustman (you can read it here), I suddenly remembered where I'd heard the term "nana" used on a record before, namely a composition by one ... David Bowie.
Stands back in amazement, as Eddie Large (ne McGinnis) used to say. Actually, the version I heard, on BBC Radio 2's Sounds of the Sixties a while back, was actually by Oscar (aka Paul Nicholas), embedded below, alongside what sounds like a pretty rough demo version by Bowie.
The arrangement on the Paul Nicholas recording is brassy and bouncy, calling to mind Quincy Jones's This is the Self Preservation Society, though I'm not sure, and can't be bothered to check, which came first..
While it would be a cheap gag to describe the "Oscar" version as winning, there is one detail which I can't resist pointing out as further evidence of what can only be termed intertwangularity in these posts. There is a direct quotation from Spike Milligan's Wormwood Scrubs Tango produced by George Martin: we hear a prisoner who is desperately attempting to file the bars exhort the musicians, who've suddenly stopped: "Keep it up lads - another chorus and we're out."
Trouble is, that explicit invitation to compare this song with the material Martin produced for Peter Sellers or Spike Milligan in the fifites does show up the limitations of Master Jones's composition.
If you have explored further than the most recent posts in this blog, you will know that it was set up to archive posts from a doo wop messageboard, and that a favourite subject of those messages was the Flamingos' recording of Golden Teardrops. This was recorded for the small Chicago label Chance, before the group went to Parrot Records then found success at Chess Records.
As Julien Temple's documentary Ray Davies: Imaginary has just been repeated on the BBC, it's once again briefly available on BBC iplayer here, this time until 1:09AM Mon, 25th July. Below, a repost of my response to its original broadcast.
Have just finished watching the above BBC TV documentary about Ray Davies and a review in the Independent, readable here, gets it roughly right, so I probably won't say too much more. The review ends:
if there was a lingering sense that Davies was being indulged, that his nostalgia was slipping into downright despondence, we could forgive him on the grounds that he has done so much for us.
This is to alert UK readers that the PBS documentary about John Lennon's final years, LENNONYC, has just been broadcast on the BBC - as part of Alan Yentob's Imagine documentary strand, appropriately enough - and should be available on iplayer shortly, I presume for the usual time of one week, so hurry, hurry, hurry if you didn't catch it last night. (BBC website page with iplayer link here.)
[Update looks like it's not going to be on iplayer after all - which may suggest to the cynically minded that a UK DVD release is planned.]
I don't know how much Mr Yentob interposes himself between the viewer and the material on this particular occasion, as I missed the start, but on the BBC website the film is clearly credited to the director, Michael Epstein.
Mr Epstein's is a name is etched in my mind because of the excellent series of free-to-download podcasts of raw interview material for the documentary in which he can be heard gently prompting - and occasionally prodding - interviewees to talk about matters which, in some cases, they haven't discussed publicly before.
A DVD has recently been issued of Leonard Rossiter's last sitcom, Triipper's Day, written by Brian Cooke. It will, I imagine, sell on the strength of Rossiter's name - and it is indeed worth acquiring for his performance if you are already a fan.
The casual purchaser needs to be warned, however, that this is not another Rising Damp or Reggie Perrin: but a broad and knockabout sitcom of the sort which might have been more common when it aired in 1984.
This is to draw readers' attention to a DVD which features a selection of clips from films and TV shows in which Freddie "Parrotface" Davies has appeared over the years, including the very first TV appearance of his Samuel Tweet character on Opportunity Knocks from 1964.
He tells a single joke, really a shaggy dog story (appropriately, the setting is a pet shop), but what comes over is the performer's enjoyment in the relaying of what is a fairly simple gag and the sense of his knowing how to work the audience.
That was the moment which "started everything" for the former Redcoat - even though, acccording to an interview with Martin Kelner, it was entirely fortuitous:
[Last update: October 8th 2011. I have read that an official DVD of the gig is to be released at some point, and some of the clips embedded below have been removed from youtube so they won't play. I have read that there are plans to release an official DVD of the gig, which would explain it. Nevertheless, at the time of this note, a fair number of the clips below are still operational.]
No, I didn't go. I will add to this post over the next few days with reviews by others - y'know, people who actually went there, who took the chance and sat and sweltered on the tube in the hope of happiness to come by being present at Donovan's recreation, at the Royal Albert Hall last night, of the Sunshine Superman album.
The only review I have come across to date is by Kieron Tyler on the Arts Desk website, readable in full here. He notes that "the voice is not what it was" but concludes:
Have been thinking more about the Donovan Albert Hall gig tonight (above, same location in 1973). Not entirely unexpectedly, no mysterious benefactor has offered to pay for a ticket so far (so that cruel contributor Mr F, was right), and I've rather lost hope in that direction.
But in a way the money is not really the issue. Funds have been severely diminished but I could go if I really wanted to - and had a good look at the Royal Albert Hall website today, where good seats are still available, though sales seem to have been pretty good.
No, it's more about the level of disappointment. That there will be disappointment I am reasonably certain; that there will be flashes of enjoyment in between I am less certain, but that, too, seems, on balance, probable. But will those flashes be enough?
The post "Cheapo Cheapo Records - the Complete Story" seems to have attracted a lot of attention. It was assembled from a series of earlier posts, condensed and considerably rewritten in the process. If you wish to read the original pieces, which are longer and more discursive, click on titles below rather than images.
Saw American Hot Wax today for the first time in about thirty years. Enjoyable enough, although more bitty than I remembered. There are good moments when Tim McIntyre as Alan Freed shows that the music matters to him, but as the film is given over to a concert after around the one hour point there isn't a lot of time to develop character.
I mentioned the sitcom Nightingales in a recent post about BBC 4's new series The Night Shift. Originally broadcast on Channel 4 in the early 90s, it is now available on DVD and deserves the very highest praise.
Still in new (or newish) sitcom mode - I can't pontificate about doo wop all the time - I'd like to put in a word for PhoneShop, already broadcast on E4, but which has just started a run on Channel 4 last night.
In the Friday night slot, too - which would suggest a certain amount of faith in its potential, even if it's been securely sandwiched between very old Peter Kay material and Ricky Gervais.
As a further contribution to this blog's intermittent series of non-musical posts, allow me to draw youir attention to The Night Shift, a sitcom set in an all-night garage in Reykjavik which promises to be, on the basis of the first two episodes broadcast last night on BBC 4, pretty good.
If you are reading this around the time of its being posted you may be able to catch Matt the Cat's Juke in the Back radio show dedicated to Parrot Records, available for a while as a free-to-download MP3 on the Rock-it radio Archives page here - but hurry, as newer shows will gradually push it off the list. You can find further details about this and other Juke in the Box programmes in the episode guide on Matt's own website here (scroll down to # 44).
Delighted to see that at long last Alan Klein's Three Coins in the Sewer can be found on youtube. Recorded in 1962 when there was a craze for Cockney songs. (perhaps prompted by the longrunning success of Fings Ain't Wot They Used T'Be), it is a kind of masterpiece, given what Stan Laurel would have called "a half-assed digntiy" by Ivor Raymonde's string arrangement. But it's Klein's deadpan vocal which is the heart of the song, a parody of Three Coins in the Fountain which sounds like it borrows musically from the traditional On Top of Old Smokey.. And the sound effects (it's a Joe Meek production) are pitched just right: not so many that they swamp - if that's the word I'm looking for - the song.
This is to bring readers' attention to a radio play about the singer and activist Paul Robeson by Annie Caulfield whch will be available on BBC iplayer till the 8th of May here(the above image is a screengrab.) Most BBC iplayer radio content (as opposed to TV) is accessible outside the UK so it's worth a try wherever you are.
I heard it at the time of its original broadcast and listened to it again this morning. The vague memory I had retained was that it was okay but a bit jumbled. Listening again, my brain oxygenated by a swim, I was rather more impressed than expected, and recommend it despite a few reservations.
It may not have been Ken Campbell. Well, no, it was Ken Campbell, obviously, but it may not have been Ken Campbell, is what I'm saying. Originally.
So my hailing him, in his soft black felt hat, as he was about to get into, or was possibly getting out of, a car in Parliament Hill Fields was, or may have been, on balance, a mistake.
But I wasn't to know that at the time - indeed, had no possible means of knowing that, what with my friend and his wife - the ones who don't read the blog, so it won't much matter what I say, even though I do strive for accuracy, what with the the hand of history a-tickling of my shoulder - with them, as I say, the only ones who had ever laid claim to witnessing the event - which was, or had been, a non-starter, chartwise, on two separate occasions (nothing to do with me, I hope), hence the - well, the obscurity of this promo video, and so the doubt on an early evening in the 1990s, as I crossed the road in search of answers from the soft felt-hatted one.
I can see that I've started too quickly. So let's leave my late nineties self frozen in the act of making some kind of hailing gesture, and let's have - well, let's have some kind of doubt or fear creeping over the features of Ken Campbell as, turning to another TV screen, we rapidly rewind ....
Having referred to The Yellow Balloon in the previous, entirely frivolous, post, perhaps now would be a good time to restore a modicum of sanity with the following review of a recentish DVD box set of London-based films. Anthony Newley stars in one, and although Sparrows Can't Sing is not a musical (despite a title song by Lionel Bart) it is, like What a Crazy World, a film adaptation of a Theatre Workshop production.
If you are thinking of buying this box set because, like me, you know one of the films, then I'd say it's worth taking a punt. I bought this primarily for Pool of London, an Ealing Classic which doesn't seem to be on any of the Ealing box sets, but all of the films here are worth seeing (though I haven't yet seen Les Bicyclettes de Belsize). And several appear to be released on DVD for the first time.
Remember that Alan Yentyob documentary about Bowie? That's right, in the long-ago when Yentob didn't feel the need to interpose his physical self quite so much between the viewer and the subject, yeah?
Well, remember all that cut-up writing he was doing, like Mr Burroughs in The Newcomers. What? No, you remember Mr Burroughs, surely?
He looked a lot like Norman Bi -ird,
Drove a Morris Minor van
Campbell Singer - that was it. Anyway, you know that cutting-up thing, and Bowie saying proudly, "Yes, that's how I came up with the Laughing Gnome, whereas Marc actually thinks he's a poet," and then subsiding into sniggering and complaining there was a fly in his soup, yeah? All coming back to you now?
Suppose I ought to let readers know that Donovan will be performing the whole of the Sunshine Superman album at the Royal Albert Hall on Friday June 3rd. I had known about this already, but reading the new edition of Mojo magazine I see that John Cameron, responsible for the arrangments on Donovan's classic 60s recordings, will be part of this and there is an orchestra to back him - in other words, this is not just yet another night with guitar. I had a look at the Royal Albert Hall website, and saw that the cheapest tickets are £20 but couldn't actually see any available: £30 looks more likely.
And I suppose the question is do I now care enough, or am I willing to take the risk of disappointment, to schlep out there and back? The answer is probably not - and if you have read my earlier post about Donovan performing at the Festival Hall you will understand why.
But I am tempted - if only to have my disappointment confirmed in a masochistic sort of way. Or maybe I should accept that my experience of Donovan live has already been bookended by the Green's Playhouse and Festival Hall gigs.
One of the better sketches in the variable BBC comedy series Big Train - in fact, the only one which has stayed with me - imagines a heavily bearded George Martin as a Terry Waite-style hostage, speaking at a press conference after his release. Whatever question Martin is asked, he immediately responds with one or other of the well-worn anecdotes about the Beatles: not realising John was high when he sent him to the roof for a breath of air, etc.
I don't know what the average viewer made of it, but for someone who thinks about the Beatles maybe a little too much (and hey, there's a dullblog for that), it was screamingly funny - on a first viewing, anyway. If you do fall into the latter category, try it if you haven't seen it:
Normally around this time of year I attend a work-related lunchtime event in the West End then beetle off to root around in Cheapo Cheapo Records.
Today, the event over, I thought now would be the time to brave MADD, the mango-based dessert cafe which has sprung up in the spot where once Cheapo stood.
More details about the translated Cheapo, taken from the blog of "specialist branding agency" Underscore.
The owners appointed underscore to devise the name and create a fresh and funky brand to take their exciting concept to the market. The name itself is a mix of the words Mango and Addict, as most choices on their truly unique menu contain the superfruit Mango in some shape of form ...Our communications needed to be playful, versatile and bold to establish a new brand in such a busy location as Soho – which is why MADD is the perfect name for this destination restaurant.
So now you know the Rest of the Story. An "exciting concept" indeed.
Oh, and if you have any allergies, please let them know before ordering. Thank you.
Saw this for myself tonight, already knowing it was inevitable, as I had seen, a few days after the last entry, signs of some kind of counter being put up in the Cheapo Cheapo Records space, but above is final proof. It has happened. The shop I loved, the place which sustained me through amateur and professional associations (oh, read the relevant entries, if you can be bothered to find them) is now ... "London's first mango-based dessert and coffee lounge."
Don't get me wrong: I endorse the consumption of fruit - at least in theory. And it's a bold move to have an eaterie in the heart of London's West End. Who could have seen that coming? But will the customers be nourished as I was?
I'm delighted to report that Alastair Dougall (above), the Brighton-based singer songwriter who composed the lament for Cheapo Cheapo Records which you can find in the post here, has now recorded a new version which you can check out on his myspace playlist here, along with an album's worth of other tracks.
Stately is, I think, the word to describe this 1955 recording by the Orchids on Parrot Records: the tempo feels unrushed, processional.
I was wrong to describe their more famous Newly Wed as "lumbering" earlier, as that implies clumsiness; what can, perhaps, be said is that the change in Newly Wed's tempo between the wordless opening and the entry of the lead vocal (Gilbert Warren?) is unusual - to these ears, anyway. (I did say I wasn't an expert. Unlike Billy Vera, who describes it properly here.)
You Have Two (I Have None) seems marginally faster, but the disjointed feel of Newly Wed, which fits perfectly with what little we can glean of the couple's story ("Hearts broken - broken in two, / Don't leave me here ..."), is replaced by what sounds like calm assurance or resignation, though at the point of highest emotion ("Tell me you love me, Show me that you care") it becomes clear that the song is a plea for union rather than a celebration of a union already achieved; we aren't given any indication of her feelings either way.
Do you remember the BBC children's show Crackerjack and its tradition (at least before Chas and Dave gave them a theme tune composed with the same care that Lennon and McCartney expended over I Wanna Be Your Man) of a panto-type finale utilising the pop songs of the day?
Have you ever read, seen or been obliged to study King Lear?
Have you ever stopped to ponder what King Lear might have been like if put through the Crackerjack process?
Ah, but did you then transform that idle thought into some semblance of action?
Well, I - or rather a persona I constructed - did.
Unlike he whose mortal remains swirl in infinitesimal pieces around the east coast of Scotland, I'm not any kind of a Northern Soul expert so can't really comment on accuracy of detail in this film - an issue with several punter reviews of the DVD on a well-known shopping website. (Now, had it been doowop ...)
But what I can say, as I'm reasonably sure my late friend would have done, is that this is essentially a coming of age tale which is fairly simple in outline: no huge surprises after the various plot strands have been set up, and the resolution probably won't make you whoop with astonishment either.
Yes, echoing the title of a film by his idol, let George be the one to taunt you with visions of what might have been, specifically the prize which could have been yours had you chosen to enter our John Lennon songwriting competition.
The prize has now been awarded to the only person who submitted an entry and it is, as I forecast, a copy of the 1968 Yellow Submarine Gift Book (spooky).
I had intended to produce a few scans here but it seemed more fitting to reproduce such images as I could find on the net: why should those who chose not to enter be rewarded with uniformly high quality reproductions which might act as a substitute for the experience of owning such an item instead of a tantalising glimpse of riches now unattainable?
So below are a variety of images, from a well known auction site and elsewhere. Note that one seller is quite open about the scribblings which have lowered the value of the item.
That it may have been inevitable doesn't make the death of Gerry Rafferty any less sad. I got to know his work through his second Humblebums album, Open Up the Door - and a few days ago, listening to stuff fairly randomly on spotify, clicked on My Singing Bird and marvelled once again at the perfection and simplicity of it
.
You could draw comparisons with McCartney, and wonder why (at that time) he hadn't had similar success, though my immediate elder brother (whose album it was, and who had already seen them live) said that maybe the trouble was he didn't have a George Martin producing him.
I don't know. But today, reading an obituary in the Guardian written by Michael Gray, his personal manager ("employee not Svengali") during the time of his greatest solo success, one passage leapt out:
He did not want to have to out-platinum himself: he had money enough, and disliked being recognised. But behind an aggressive front, and a strong awareness of his own musical excellence, was fear. He turned down working with Eric Clapton, McCartney and others, telling [his wife] Carla "nobody was good enough". In truth, he dared not sit down with superstars without a drink or five. So he sat at home – now 300 acres of Kent farmland and a Queen Anne house in Hampstead, north London – and convinced himself he could work alone with [Hugh] Murphy. Carla said later: "He was just stalling for time. Maybe some new project would suddenly happen, but I knew he'd crossed the line as far as the record business went."
Spotify link to My Singing Bird here. Full Guardian obituary here. STV interview from 2001 here. The TRUE story of how I fell out of love with Donovan here. Strangers on a train: meeting Jake Thackray here.
This isn't really to do with music - or only with music as an incidental ingredient - but I feel compelled to write something about Peter (not David) Bowker's dramatisation of the early years of Morecambe and Wise which was shown on BBC 2 last night and will presumably be available to readers in the UK for a further week on the BBC's iplayer here.
As with Beatle-related biopics I am both helped and hampered by my knowledge of the subject, so that it's hard to judge it - or, indeed, to submit to simple enjoyment.
Time has now been called on our John Lennon songwriting competition (see post here, but it's academic now).
I have to report that as no entries by other hands have been received then technically the prize has to go to me, as the only person to have contributed a snatch of song in the appropriate mode. True, it was intended merely as an example of how to go about things but if it's the winner by default then my hands are tied. So I can only say - as I would have done to any worthy winner - very well done.
Ooh, I'm all excited now - never win things, me. What could the prize be? Perhaps a vintage copy of the Yellow Submarine Gift Book from 1968, telling the story with lots of colour drawings and possibly written by Hunter Davies?
Have just finished watching the above BBC TV documentary about Ray Davies and a review in the Independent, readable here, gets it roughly right, so I probably won't say too much more. The review ends:
if there was a lingering sense that Davies was being indulged, that his nostalgia was slipping into downright despondence, we could forgive him on the grounds that he has done so much for us.
As a reluctant nod to the season, herewith Christmas Prayer, a lesser-known Valentines track from 1955 - at least it isn't on the Collectables Best of collection that I have. I first came across it on a UK compilation of Christmas-related songs from "the Roulette family of labels" on the now-defunct Westside label, which issued quite a lot of doo wop.
As the Collectables CD of the group's Rama recordings includes an amusing but hardly essential snippet of song in praise of Boston DJ Joe Smith, I'm surprised by Christmas Prayer's absence. It was released at the time and an A side, and it isn't just a novelty: the rough edge to the singing and harmonising is highly pleasing to these ears, despite the corny saxophone quote ("jingle all the way") just in case anyone should be in any doubt about the seasonal nature of the song.
I presume Richard Barrett, the man who discovered Frankie Lymon, and later achieved fame as a producer, is the lead vocalist, and we're definitely talking gospel-inflected, soul-anticipating mode. And it sounds like there was a bit of leeway in the harmonising too - it's not that the singing is ragged, just that it doesn't sound rehearsed to death, and that another take might have been different again. Anyway, have a listen and see what you think.
I see from the magic of statcounter that someone who googled the above question today was directed to the Gnome Thoughts ... 25 post on this blog rather than, say, post 3, which is all about the film. Presumably google picks up words from the labels on the right as well as the posts, which is unfortunate, but if that person should chance to revisit this blog then I think I'm fairly safe in saying: no. There wasn't. I've certainly found nothing online and have searched thoroughly.
I can't pretend I listened to every single edition of Mark Lamarr's BBC Radio 2 show Shake Rattle and Roll - too much non-Carl Perkins rockabilly for me - but I am very sorry indeed to see it go.
Last night I listened to the final edition, which will be accessible for a week on the Radio 2 website here. He has circulated an email about his resignation, readable in full at the end of this post, but towards the end of last night's show he acknowledged that Shake Rattle and Roll had a "tiny but dedicated" audience, with the clear implication that the BBC were no longer able to tolerate the "tiny" part of that. Er, isn't that rather the point of the BBC?
It is a great pity, not only because of his presenting style (the true voice of an enthusiast) but because there sure won't be much chance of hearing almost any of the tracks he played anywhere else on the Beeb - the odd Bo Diddley number, perhaps, on Paul Jones' blues show, but that's about it.
Last night was all listener requests, and the final track was an inspired choice as a sign-off, one which I knew well but never, ever imagined I would hear on national radio ... well, never anywhere but there, and a final, fine example of his tradition of playing a doo wop number as a closer.
This is to alert readers that Ian Whitcomb's peerless radio show has moved from Luxuria to XM 24. My post about his Luxuria programme, readable here, still holds good, although the blurb on the XM 24 website here says it rather more succinctly:
The Ian Whitcomb Show is an hour-long fun fest featuring an eclectic and exciting panorama of American and British popular songs, ranging from Tin Pan Alley ragtime through 1920s crooners and dance bands to raunchy pioneer 1950s rock ‘n’ roll. Join host Ian Whitcomb, 1960's Brit Invader, music historian and ukulele maven, on The Music Summit.
Details of the currently free to download podcast version here.
Shows run for one hour rather than two but the shorter format, or perhaps a different hand on the production tiller, or something, makes the shows sound a bit tighter.
And either his voice has suddenly become richer and deeper or the quality of broadcast microphone employed has drastically improved with his transfer - or both? I shall forbear from using the word "slick" as it's still the essential Ian, although I suspect this version of the Ian Whitcomb Show will gain more converts among people who don't already know much about some of these genres. Which can only be a good thing: as I said in my earlier review:
Whitcomb's awareness of the deep, tangled roots of popular music means that he is able to make the most illuminating comments in his show en passant, seeing the sort of connections others wouldn't
so why not download a few shows and get yourself illuminated? The most recent programme is entitled Whistlers, Yodellers, Zithers and Such, featuring, among others, The Waikiki Swingsters, the Pan American Marimba Band, Reginald Dixon, Guy Mitchell ... and Rolf Harris. Now that's what I call eclectic.
At the time of posting you can also download shows about accordion music, what he calls "Transcendental Tunes" (more Mills Brothers and Flanagan and Allen than the Lemon Pipers) and others. His British Invasion Revisited show studiously avoids the Beatles in favour of the names less often played and towards the end of he let slip a detail which will be of interest to regular readers.
Apparently, when the New Vaudeville Band's Winchester Cathedral first became known in the States, so many people assumed it was Ian that eventually he got tired of denying it and went along with it, even singing it in his act, thus adding to the already impressive list of his musical and literary achievements over the years "self-confessed surrogate Alan Klein." How many others can make that claim, even today?
Actually, I've just listened to the programme again and it seems his impersonation actually took place in the happy no-time between Geoff Stephens' intention to make the New Vaudeville Band flesh and the actual hiring of members. So who can blame him for spying a gap in the market?
For a while I though it was so obscure there might not be an image of the above album cover online, but of course there was. I bought it, I suppose, because of the Marble Arch brand. Marble Arch was Pye's quality (ie the records were sonically good) budget label, a reassuring sign because the very first album I bought was Donovan's Fairytale in that form. Marble Arch covers always had white bars at the top and bottom and you were informed of key song titles.
So the series was easily identifiable, the records themselves were substantial - ie fairly heavy pieces of vinyl, even though the running time was never overgenerous. Donovan's album had a few tracks knocked off, for example, presumably so that, a la the Fabs' American issues, there might be eventually be enough material to enable a new album to be fashioned out of those offcuts.
But other than the reassurance of the tried and trusted label, whatever made my ten or eleven year old self decide that my next purchase had to be an album devoted to the Lemon Pipers?
I must have heard and liked Green Tambourine, and at some point, during some family holiday, my immediate elder brother told me he had just heard a broadcaster announce, just before playing Rice Is Nice, also by the Pipers, that he didn't really look this newfangled pop but that "One must be 'with it' to a certain extent."
But that was about it. I knew nothing else by them and I hadn't particularly hungered and yearned to hear more. Nor can I remember the act of buying the record or seeing its cover - as had been the case with Fairytale - tantalising me from the window of a now-vanished shop. And if you look above, you'll see that Marble Arch's graphics team hadn't exactly pushed the boat out for this American act.
And pretty soon I had sold the album on, to a sister of a schoolfriend, if I remember correctly. I don't know what she made of it, as I never met her, though I can probably date the transaction to 1970 at the latest - or maybe even 1969, the year of the album's issue. And I haven't thought much about the album, or the group, in the intervening forty years: when Green Tamourine crops up in a compilation or on the radio it's a pretty period piece, but I only half-listen.
So why am I writing about this album now? Blame the magic of the internet, and spotify in particular. I was compiling a vaguely psychedelic playlist and remembered one of the songs from the album whose title, at least, spoke about the times: Love Beads and Meditation, and I listened to a few other songs I dimly remembered from the LP I'd quickly recycled.
And my verdict: no, not a neglected masterpiece, but what with the overfamiliarity of more well known artists of the time, it felt refreshing to hear those who had attempted to cadge a lift on the bigger names' coat-tails. That song title sort of gives it away that the Lemon Pipers were not unaware of the Beatles' existence but there are other songs which owe clear debts to individual tracks by the Fabs. And it's good to hear them after all this time: to hear, for example, Shoeshine Boy which, like the Bonzos' Equestrian Statue, is a "response", shall we say, to Penny Lane. And actually Love Beads and Meditation may owe more to the group who also stayed with the Maharishi in India, the Beach Boys. And then we have Jelly Jungle (Of Orange Marmalade), though this is less druggy than it might appear, more about the fantasy world two lovers can inhabit.
The one incongruous track on the album was Turn Around and Take a Look, which seemed corny, though I can sort of hear they may have been going for a Lovin' Spoonful-type feel (their labelmates back in the States, in fact). And I think Paul McCartney admitted Good Day Sunshine on Revolver "borrowed" from Daydream, so no one is innocent.
The others I don't remember, though I can see they included a cover of Wasn't Born to Follow.
Having written the above, I realised I ought to find out something about the group, so headed for wikipedia, as you do, where I see that Turn Around and Take a Look was an initial and unsuccessful attempt by a band member to come up with a hit song, and that many of the group's songs were by Brill Building writers Paul Leka and Shelley Pinz. When their Green Tambourine was a hit, their record company, Buddah, put pressure on the group to stay in the bubblegum genre. An article by Larry Nager, here, quotes band member Larry Nave on "the duality of the Lemon Pipers":
We were a stand-up rock 'n' roll band, and then all of a sudden, we're in a studio, being told how to play and what to play.
They left Buddah in 1969 and later "dissolved", which seems an appropriate term. But there is a small footnote: three band members,
Bartlett, Walmsley and Nave formed Starstruck, whose recording of a Lead Belly song, "Black Betty" was reworked by Super K Productions producers Jerry Kasenetz and Jeff Katz, and released in 1977 under the name of Ram Jam, featuring Bartlett.
That was a big hit in the UK, and I actually heard it sung live a few months ago, by Joe Brown. Whose success predated the Beatles. Ee, it's all cyclical. And members of Beatle-influenced 10cc worked with those producers. But rather than getting lost in my own jelly jungle of connections, a final quote, taken from the wikipedia page, taken from the book Bubblegum Is The Naked Truth.
It was the Pipers’ way with a tough-pop gem in the under-four-minute category which was most impressive by far: "Rainbow Tree", "Shoeshine Boy" and especially "Blueberry Blue" each sported a taut, musical sophistication worthy of The Move and, dare I say it, even the Magical Mystery Beatles.
A lightly clad truth, but very pleasing pop nonetheless. Here's Shoeshine Boy:
If the title of this post has already made you think of Dion and the Belmonts' Teen Angel ("Our love is young,/Now we are one") then congratulations: you've probably arrived at the right blog.
If, however, it doesn't, then it's statistically likely that you have been directed here by google images and are in search of non-existent David Bowie downloads and will leave after - eh? Wha - ? Ohhhh ...
Ee, they might have had the courtesy to allow me to finish my sentence, at least. Anyway, for those happy few who remain, in order to mark today's anniversary (One Glorious Year of Blogging), for one day only the title image for this blog will be the original photograph of the Cheapo Cheapo Records shop by Laura Appleyard (see her flickr photostream here) without my embellishments.
Though that wasn't the original title image: I used a detail from a Medallions publicity photograph - Vernon Green's eyes - as, I think, the first, or one of the first, pictures to indicate what that these posts would be about. After all, if anyone held the secret of pismotality, the mystery at the heart of doo wop, it had to be the man who coined the word.
As I've explained elsewhere, I took Pismotality as a username on the Steve's Kewl Doo Wop Shop website simply because my own name, Tony, had already been taken, but I've retained it as much of what I write is about doo wop - plus it makes my work easier to find via google.
I can't remember just when I made the change of title image, but it may have reflected the blog's expansion from doo wop, once all the available Kewl Steve material had been reposted, to all the music of my formative years - and at one time or another Cheapo Cheapo Records, late of Soho, held just about all the albums I had ever bought - or borrowed from my local library back home in Scotland - so it seemed ideal. And the fact the shop had closed down also made me want to commemorate it. I still miss it a great deal.
As there is now a year's worth of blog posts to ferret through, for the busy executive here is a - well, not a top ten, exactly, but a quick list of some entries which may be worth reading if you like anything you've already read here. Well, I enjoyed writing them, anyway, although I appreciate that that may not of itself be an infallible guarantee of quality.
Golden Teardrops - this is my original piece about the record from the ol' Doo Wop Shop board, but with a commentary added when it was reposted here in December 2009. I began to realise that blogs were about going wherever your inclination dictated, which in this case involved an artist who had used a cover from Springboard International's Original Oldies series as inspiration. The reason? I first heard the Flamingos' classic - guitar overdubs and all - on a compilation in that series. Also I accuse a (probably) innocent man over the theft of Lou Reed's doo wop collection. The post was just going that way.
You Have Two (I Have None) - an attempt to capture another great doo wop recording, but at least I have the humility to cite Robert Pruter. Warning: may contain unnecessary traces of Elizabethan poetry.
14 Karat Soul - a longish piece about the best young doo wop group I ever saw in live performance, including The Mysterious Case of the Gesture at the Neck. I still say I was singing in tune.
A Wreath for Cheapo - the most substantial piece about the importance to me of the vanished Cheapo Cheapo Records shop.
On Again! On Again! or Strangers on a Train - Jake Thackray in my life, despite my immediate elder brother's objections. (But can you trust someone who mistook a Bolan fan for his wife?) Plus my time alone with the great man: now it can be told.
Stand By Me Part One - first of two posts exploring the origins of Ben E King's song, looking at the singer's early doo wop years and the signficance of Clyde McPhatter during this period. Part Two focuses more on the song's gospel roots and the beginnings of soul with Sam Cooke and others.
They Turned Me On - Part Three: Hubert Gregg - from a series celebrating the broadcasters who opened my ears to a world beyond pop. I'm happy to say that Hubert Gregg's widow, Carmel Gregg, has read this and seemed to like it.
Gnome Thoughts ... 11 (Well At Least Its British) - a long piece about Alan Klein's neglected 1964 solo album in the context of other comic songwriters. Links at the end to other Klein-related posts.
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