In 2019 I wrote a piece about a 78 rpm record which I'd picked up at a jumble sale or record fair in Glasgow in 1975 or 1976.
The disc was credited to the Harry Donaldson Orchestra, the vocalist one Sanky Franks. The side I preferred began with a voice - Donaldson? The producer? - advising: "Hey Sanky, try to get a kick out of it!" - and as far as I'm concerned he did.
D.J. Taylor, who celebrated the songs of Allan Smethurst, AKA the Singing Postman, in a 2010 radio documentary, announced today on social media that the troubadour's muse Molly Bayfield (the Molly Windley who "smokes like a chimbley" in his most famous song) had died.
Smethurst's songs have considerable charm although the simpler world he describes seems so remote now that for a moment it seemed astonishing to think that the woman who inspired his most famous number had still been around for the first quarter of the 21st century.
A BBC News article by Laura Devlin describes the day, momentous only in retrospect, when Smethurst visited his old schoolfriends, Albert Bayfield, and his wife, Molly, in the seaside village of Mundesley, on the North Norfolk coast:They shared a few roll-up cigarettes over lunch and a walk on the beach, with Molly thinking "nothing more of it".
When the late Eric Midwinter submitted a review of the Jake Thackray biography Beware of the Bull on spec to The Call Boy, the magazine of the British Music Hall Society, it wasn't accepted for publication, so far as I know - because Thackray's songs are more aligned with music hall as the French understand the term, perhaps?
A friend of the singer, Ian Watson, once wrote that "the UK does not have the sort of music-halls that you find in Paris, dedicated to a long tradition of popular, serious song."
Whatever the reason, it deserves an audience.
It may be a name which springs less readily to mind these days, but in the 1960s Harry Worth was a major TV comic with a genial, bumbling persona, forever confounding petty officialdom.
If that suggests a touch of Tony Hancock, however, nohow and contrariwise: Worth had none of Hancock's pomposity or aggression. Like Jacques Tati's Monsieur Hulot he was entirely guileless, an innocent who never seemed out to cause the trouble which invariably happened when he was around. The cause was his circumlocutory way of putting things which would inevitably tie the listener in knots, governed as it was by a logic comprehensible to no one except the mild and agreeable speaker himself. (Arthur Haynes was perhaps more closely linked to Hancock, and has been described as ITV's answer to Hancock, though Haynes's tramp character was several notches down from Hancock's TV persona socially.)
For those not already aware of the sad news, Terry Johnson, the last surviving member of the Flamingos, died yesterday in Las Vegas at the age of 86 - "performing to the end", Marv Goldberg says.
He can be seen above (with guitar) on the cover of Flamingos Serenade, the 1959 album of standards which includes his arrangement of I Only Have Eyes For You, the Al Dubin-Harry Warren film song which finally gave the group the crossover success they'd been seeking.
When I wrote about this play's imminent revival at the Finborough Theatre a few weeks ago I hoped for the best but wasn't sure what to expect. Would there be the appropriate balance of seriousness and comedy in the playing? Would contemporary theatregoers take this example of Milne's adult work to their hearts as readily as audiences of a hundred years ago, weaned on his pieces in Punch magazine?
The answers, based on the performance I saw last night, would appear to be Yes and, moreover, Yes. It is well cast, with William Gaunt as the Great Man particularly memorable during his time onstage in the first act. The production serves Milne very well, and time seemed to whizz by, which is always a good sign.
Gaunt's performance made it easier to understand why, as discussed in that earlier post, some critics - and even Milne's idol and inspiration, J.M. Barrie - wished that he had kept Blayds alive for the duration. But, as he made clear over six pages of his autobiography, that's not the play he was interested in writing: his intention was to explore the question "What happens in a religious community when its god is discovered to be a false god?" so the discredited hero hanging around would have been an irrelevance.
If you are able to get to London's Royal Festival Hall there will be two performances of a new musical about R&B/rock'n'roll pioneer Lloyd Price on Saturday 11th October.
Audio of an extensive 2005 interview with Price can be found on Matt the Cat's site here, but for all the undoubted importance of Lawdy Miss Clawdy to the development of rock'n'roll (none of which seems lost on Price himself in that interview) Daniel Wolff's biography of Sam Cooke suggests that the recording was actually part of an ongoing process for Specialty Records owner Art Rupe, and that he'd already been experimenting with accentuating the beat on gospel recordings:
As with A.A. Milne's first novel (of sorts), Lovers in London, the mere fact of this play, Sarah Simple, being available again is welcome news.
It's not included in the various collections which still crop up in secondhand bookshops, and I'd been searching for a copy for quite some time. Before the publication of Anne Thwaite's biography of Milne I had only come across a single mention of it, in a history of theatre published in the 1930s.
It is not, however, a neglected masterpiece - something which it has in common with that novel. If you're already familiar with Milne's work for the theatre there will be little here to surprise you: a wife, presumed to have divorced her husband, suddenly reappears as he is on the verge of marrying a somewhat more stolid partner. Once, long ago, I embarked on a dissertation on Milne's plays but my tutor was not keen, joshing about his struggles to remember which missing spouse featured in which play. (In the end I switched to Tennessee Williams and still slightly regret it).
If, like me, you've been tantalised by the many clips on youtube of a TV show entitled Rock & Roll Graffiti, the good news is that most of that show, hitherto available only as an expensive DVD box set, can now be obtained on two reasonably priced 3 disc sets.
I'm based in the UK and ordered them from America for around £14 each around ten years ago though you will need to round that up to £20 or thereabouts now. These are the covers to look out for:
Today marks the centenary of the pioneering doo wop/R&B singer Sonny Til, lead singer of the Orioles.
They are perhaps best known for Crying in the Chapel (1953) but here's the story of how the group came to record It's Too Soon to Know, now widely regarded as the first doo wop record, in 1948.
Deborah Chessler, the young songwriter behind it, had been trying to make sense of her feelings after a disastrous early marriage. It's Too Soon to Know wasn't her first song, though earlier pieces also had a direct and conversational tone in their titles and lyrics (Jerry Leiber was an admirer), and It's Too Soon to Know coaxed out a correspondingly fresh and emotional style of singing from Til and the group.
The number which kickstarted the whole doo wop shebang - or shboom? - came about when a supportive male friend who was helping with Chessler's divorce suddenly declared his own love for her. Normally it's parents who counsel caution in these matters but her mother was all for it; it was Deborah who told her mother: "How can he love me? It's too soon to know."
The poet who features in A.A. Milne's play The Truth About Blayds, soon to be revived at the Finborough Theatre in London, may have been Milne's own creation - but he did pinch the name.
If J.M. Barrie was Milne's main inspiration for playwriting the Victorian author C.S. Calverley was the man whose light verse he had sought, from his earliest days, to emulate. That's "light verse" as distinct from poetry proper: for Milne that meant the serious application of his craft to the lightest of trifles, and he had little time for the less punctilious efforts of others in the field.
A.A. Milne's 1921 play The Truth About Blayds is about to be revived at the Finborough Theatre in London.
This is good news as Milne's plays for adults are rarely produced these days. William Gaunt is playing the Blayds of the title, an elderly, much-revered, poet; having played King Lear as well as sitcom patriarchs he ought to have the necessary gravitas.
Milne had a run of hit plays in Britain and America between the wars but Blayds, more serious in tone than most, did not receive the level of acclaim he thought it deserved, and it rankled: he dwelt upon its reception in his 1939 autobiography It's Too Late Now, his disappointment still keen almost twenty years after the event.
