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.

80@80 (Spencer Leigh autobiography)

 

 

I have just finished reading Spencer Leigh's autobiography 80@80: A Liverpool Life in 80 Chapters, which was published in February last year, and can warmly recommend it. As the title suggests it has eighty chapters to tie in with its venerable author reaching the milestone of his eightieth year, despite the still-boyish features displayed on the cover. (How does he do it?)

A thoroughly enjoyable read from start to finish for the musically inclined, it covers a wide range of genres, as you'd expect from his show On the Beat, a former fixture on Radio Merseyside, but there is much else besides. I didn't realise, for instance, that broadcasting and writing about music had been, in effect, merely a hobby for him until the mid-1990s and that for over thirty years he had a day job as an actuary - and appears to have been efficient and well-respected in that entirely different field too.

 Personal chapters entitled "A Day in the Life" alternate in the book with those more focussed on music, though the distinction isn't a hard and fast one, as music is bound up with so much of his life anyway. The memoir draws on material in his many existing books, taking to heart the advice of his friend, Beatles press officer Tony Barrow, "Rework your catalogue", but the chapters about his day job and his schooldays also have considerable interest because of his knack for selecting the telling detail.

No Off Switch: of Andy Kershaw and others

 I was sorry to hear of Andy Kershaw's death.  As he presented programmes on BBC Radios 1, 3 and 4 there will almost certainly be a tribute to him on one station or another in the coming days but in the meantime I can recommend his very entertaining, full-throttle autobiography, aptly entitled No Off Switch. 

 It's mentioned in the piece below, reposted from 2012, about Music in the Air, a radio documentary series about the history of music radio, presented by Paul Gambaccini: 

 

 Turn on, tune in, tape dropout ...  

 

There have been various programmes on the radio to commemorate the fact that it's now ninety years since the BBC started broadcasting. This post isn't going to be a digest of them all but one series, Music in the Air, might be of particular interest to readers of this blog. It's a comprehensive history of radio in the US and UK, presented by the Beeb's American import Paul Gambaccini (above); you can find available episodes here and listen to them via BBC iPlayer. [see note at end]

Episode Two, The Moondog Years, presumably concentrates on Alan Freed. It won't be available on iPlayer until after its transmission next Tuesday night, but I have heard Episode One, which takes us from the medium's very beginnings, with lots of archive audio, though the very first radio broadcast didn't survive and it seems we have to take the broadcaster's word that it actually happened. (Only a friend was listening, apparently.)

There's a bit of personal Gambaccini reminiscence thrown in at the beginning of the first programme - the shock of hearing his father swear and rush to turn the set off as rock'n'roll began blasting out, which had the unintended effect of causing the young Gambo to cleave unto the music ever after - but after that it's a more general account which could have been presented equally well by any number of people, so Episode Two, whose title promises a greater emphasis on rock'n'roll and the beginnings of modern disc jockeying, will probably be more interesting. And perhaps in a later episode there will be some insights into the Radio 1 environment which Gambaccini entered.

Rock & Roll Man (musical about Alan Freed)

On Saturday I went to see Rock & Roll Man, an agreeable musical about Alan Freed, at the Cambridge Arts Theatre; this week it's playing at the Lighthouse arts centre in Poole, and if you are within reach it's worth a visit.

As far as I know that will be the end of the production's short UK tour though it deserves a longer life. The show had a three-month Off-Broadway run in 2023; this British production has retained Constantine Maroulis as Freed, and the passion and conviction which he brings to the role are a big part of its success.

Alan Freed was a hugely influential DJ in the 1950s; he not only popularised the term "rock'n'roll" but even copyrighted it (a stricture which proved impossible to enforce). He was eventually undone by a payola scandal (the then-common practice of accepting bribes for playing records), though it seems he was a scapegoat; others such as the fresh-faced Dick Clark, more acceptable to the authorities, got away with it. That's putting it very broadly - there is much more detail in the Freed biography Big Beat Heat by John A. Jackson.

Neil Brand's radio play Stan repeated today on Radio 4 Extra

 

Not to be confused with a later television adaptation, Stan, Neil Brand's 2004 radio play about Stan Laurel, has just been broadcast again on Radio 4 Extra and will be available on BBC iPlayer for the next thirty days.

 

Stan, the radio drama, is very good indeed and a natural for the medium; the TV version doesn't simply add visuals but has been considerably reworked: we see scenes from the pair's past rather than their simply being recounted by the elderly Stan. Nothing wrong with that, but the intimacy of the radio play, and in particular that feeling of luck and privilege in being magically present, unseen, at the last meeting of these two great clowns is diluted.

Crying My Heart Out For You: the flop which made Sedaka a hitmaker

 

Crying My Heart Out For You is one of my favourite Neil Sedaka songs.

It's not wildly original, and was not a hit in the US or UK when it first came out - Italy is the only country which seems to have warmed to it - but for me the anguished wails which bookend this simple tale of love lost make the recording.

His later songs might have become more artful but Sedaka retained his love of doo wop. In 1993 he took part in a live radio broadcast hosted by the DJ Cousin Brucie and was so taken with the superb acapella group 14 Karat Soul, also appearing, that he sang a few impromptu numbers with them, including Earth Angel. These are understandably less than perfect - "I goofed it, I goofed it!" as he shouts when he messes up a couple of lines on the Penguins' classic - but there is obvious love and enthusiasm in the performance.

Leaves off Snodgrass (after posting the following supplementary observations)

 

If you've read the earlier post about alternative Beatles histories, here are more thoughts about Snodgrass, the short story by Ian R. McLeod which imagines the group achieving success without John Lennon.

In that earlier piece I had been relying on my memories of the original story and the film adaptation (above, with Ian Hart as Lennon); since then I have reacquainted myself with both, and it's interesting to note the differences between the two.

The Fabulous Beatles - literally

Listening the other day to Ray Connolly being interviewed by Tim Haigh on BooksPodcast about his novella "Sorry, Boys, You Failed The Audition", I remembered that it is well worth reading.

 

There have been earlier attempts to evoke the Beatles in imaginative ways, some of which I'll discuss below, but Connolly has the distinct advantage of having known the group well, especially John Lennon - he's also written a biography of Lennon and, according to the critic Philip French, the protagonist played by David Essex in Connolly's film That'll Be the Day was based in part on John. (I haven't seen this claim made by anyone else but Jim McLaine's relationship with his mother does seems to resemble that between Lennon and his stern-but-loving Aunt Mimi.)

 

 With the additional advantage of coming from the same area, Connolly has the trick of the group members' individual voices in his novella in a way that some others, including the American writer Mark Shipper, in an otherwise creditable comic account of the group's rise and fall, cannot manage quite so convincingly; small wonder that in the podcast Connolly couldn't help admitting, in response to the interviewer's praise, that he was quite pleased with the book himself.

Sans Everything

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.

Farewell, My Lady Nickerteen

 

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".

Uncalled-for review

 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.

"Plus a Twistin' New Year as standard ... non-negotiable!"

 Christmas just wouldn't be Christmas without this blog's annual cursory nod to the season, so here are some Christmassy doo wop sides, some of which have been posted here before, some not.

 

You can find some of them on Christmas Past, a compilation of Christmas-related songs from "the Roulette family of labels" released by the now-defunct UK company Westside, which reissued quite a lot of doo wop and is worth investigating on disogs or wherever you buy your music. This collection isn't limited to doo wop but does include some choice items.

Here's Harry ...

 

 

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.)

Terry Johnson

 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. 

Notes on the Finborough production of The Truth About Blayds by A.A. Milne

 

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.