Those who have read an earlier post about Donovan's 1972 concert to raise funds for Upper Clyde Shipbuilders may be interested in a radio documentary which fills in more of the background to that event.
Entitled When the Eyes of the World Were on the Clyde, the programme was originally broadcast in 2011, not long after the death of Jimmy Reid, one of the prime movers in the story. He was the shop steward who, before the "work-in", famously said:
There will be no hooliganism. There will be no vandalism. There will be no bevvying ... because the world is watching us.
It was repeated today on BBC Radio 4 Extra, and as far as I can tell will remain available, for UK and US listeners alike, for at least a month - very possibly longer.
I provided some basic details in that earlier piece, drawing on a memoir by Jimmy Reid kindly provided by Doug Holton, but the opportunity to hear the voices of those directly involved in the struggle for survival, the rawness of their emotion and anger, undoubtedly gives the tale a far greater immediacy.
Some all-too-human details emerge during the programme. The story about John and Yoko donating a bouquet of roses along with financial support is corroborated - the sum is £1000 in this telling - although there is no word either way on whether the Lennons really attended the show in body. I've been listening to some old Lennon interviews which suggest he and Yoko gave financial support to any number of causes in those times, though the personal connection with Donovan means that his presence at Green's Playhouse that day can't be ruled out - unless a chronicler of Lennon's solo years with a Lewisohn-like tenacity can account for his movements on the afternoon of the 30th of April. (If you are out there, please get in touch.)
But that's just setting the scene. The detail which leapt out for me is that the ex-Beatle's flowers were not kept by UCS but given away to a local hospital. A lovely touch, you might think, but no: the female staff just couldn't agree among themselves about who was going to keep them.
*
Donovan has been on my mind over the past few weeks for reasons unconnected to the above. He was due to play a concert at London's Cadogan Hall in April, and despite the my reservations when seeing him perform in recent years, chronicled elsewhere in this blog, I went ahead and bought tickets, wanting to see him at least one last time - especially as it is approaching half a century since the Sunday afternoon of that UCS gig, my first ever rock performance - just as Donovan's early album Fairytale was the first LP I ever bought.
I kept revisiting the Cadogan website: concert after concert at the hall was officially cancelled but Donovan's show seemed to be hanging on, almost as though he still believed that asking the audience to clap their hands would be enough to make it stop raining. But it was eventually postponed for six months - and we can only hope that it will indeed happen then.
But in time-honoured news announcer fashion let's end on a happier note (UK readers of a certain age, please to picture the rictus grin of Alastair Burnet as he prepares to dangle the latest Royal titbit).
Those who have read some of the other Donovan posts (there are quite a few of them) may remember that after the disappointment of buying a lo-fi tape of the UCS concert - not to mention the experience of being berated by the bootlegger when I dared to complain - I cut out the middleman and made my own illicit cassette recording of a later Dono-gig at the same venue, by then renamed the Apollo.
In all probability the quality wasn't that much better than the shoddy souvenir of 1972 - but it was mine, and listening to the concert in my darkened bedroom through the warmth of a valve amplifier my memory was just about able to fill in the gaps.
And then, at some unspecified point, that precious cassette ... just ... disappeared.
(Actually, my father probably threw it out along with other items unwisely left behind in the family home, but that's not such a good story.)
What? No, I didn't suddenly unearth the tape yesterday, sounding an unlikely note of hope amidst the uncertainty which now faces us all, but - well, the next best thing, I suppose.
I found, on the Sugarmegs website, a fairly well recorded gig from around the same time, and recognised roughly the same order of songs, beginning with Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, and going through quite a lot of the Essence to Essence album, only far more appealing in barebones form. He steadily plays quite a lot of new or newish material before making with the hits and it's a strong, assured performance.
My only regret is that no performance of There Is A Mountain has ever matched the one committed to my little cassette recorder that evening at the Apollo. In addition to the different stresses I have heard on various live renditions - "lock upon my garden gate's a snail" - he bursts into scatting. I have a feeling that this was earlier in the show than the one available online - possibly he felt he had to seize his home audience more firmly - and I've never heard it the same way since. "Nought happens twice thus", as Ramblin' Tom Hardy so rightly said.
*
Since writing the above yesterday, I have been idly searching for more Dono-stuff on youtube and discovered tracks from a tribute album to Harry Belafonte in, I think, 2019, therefore representing Donovan's voice pretty much as it is now.
Listening is an odd experience: strain is often apparent, but there is still something moving in the experience. Donovan has been part of my life for so long, and whatever the joshing in some of the pieces listed below he always will be.
Here's his take on Scarlet Ribbons. I've chosen it partly because it's less demanding vocally than some of the other selections but also because it describes a moment of simple magic. Or idiotic, irrational hope, if you will. You remember idiotic, irrational hope, dontcha?
When the Eyes of the World Were on the Clyde can be found here.
Other posts about Donovan - best read in chronological order:
I have just heard Adam Thorpe's 2003 radio play Nought Happens Thus Twice, about Thomas Hardy's second marriage, to Florence Dugdale.
There is no more plot than Long Day's Journey Into Night, say, or Sebastian Barry's The Steward of Christendom - in this case it's simply whether or not Florence will agree to accompany her husband on a jaunt - but it remains compelling throughout.
My friend late of North Berwick did not like this kind of play, an attitude I could never really understand. Okay, it's really no more than a camera slowly zooming in on its subjects, but what's wrong with that? It's certainly a difficult trick to pull off because as a writer you don't have the safety net of a plot for the audience to focus on to redeem the play if the dialogue happens to be less than stellar.
As is well known, Thomas Hardy's second marriage had its difficulties. In R.C. Sherriff's autobiography No Leading Lady the writer of Journey's End describes meetings with various literary lions after the success of his play, among them J.M. Barrie and Hardy. (The meeting with Barrie is at once hilarious and sad, but you will have to seek this highly entertaining memoir out for yourself.)
Florence was already Hardy's wife by the time Sherriff was being feted, and when she had a moment alone with the playwright she confided that she had been recently dragged along by Hardy to some muddy field in which he stood for an aeon in rapt contemplation because it evoked in him yet another memory of Wife Number One. Which is great for Hardy (and, indeed, for the world, because the best of his poems about Emma, written after her death, are very good indeed) but not so much so for the woman who is meant to have supplanted Emma in his affections.
Thorpe's play reminded me a little of the Maysles brothers' documentary Grey Gardens (which later became a musical) because we're likewise in the presence of two people who have been locked together for far too long, with no means of escape, and so there are cyclical recriminations, with nothing pushed to its resolution, because this is just one more day in purgatory and neither party is going to walk away. The outside world (the presence of the documentary makers in Grey Gardens, the invitation to see a film crew in Nought Happens Twice) maybe provides more of a focus than usual, but that's about it.
Still, you can't live at that kind of pitch 24 hours a day, and there are moments in the Hardy play when the couple seize on a distraction - the sighting of a grey squirrel as opposed to a red one - to provide respite, or maybe just to show that they do have things in common. There is even a kind of sitcom element - not that this is exactly a laff-o-rama - because it's the classic situation of two people being trapped together in a marriage or quasi-marriage, as with Steptoe and Son. And it may be remembered that Harold is capable of considerable verbal cruelty through the frustration of being trapped forever with his dad. His sarcastic or mocking words are a way of deluding himself that he has free will, but in that context they are no more powerful than that of a prisoner mocking his jailer - another sitcom premise. I am reminded, in fact, of a phrase used by Hardy in a poem about a prisoner and escort at a railway station: "grimful glee". So Florence talks of making a bonfire of Emma's things once Hardy is dead, but she, like Harold Steptoe, has a kind of special license. At the end of the play (spoiler alert) she does agree to visit the film crew - though the twist is that by that point, Hardy is reluctant, for fear that her obvious emotional state after all the conflicts they have been reheating will signal to onlookers that all is not well with the marriage.
It does help if you have some knowledge of Hardy, I suppose, to enjoy the play but it's not absolutely necessary. The piece's great strength is the teasing out of detail to provide an ever clearer impression of the enormous, unscaleable hole into which the two have toppled. It's just one more weary rehearsing of grievances (shades of yet another sitcom), upon which we happen to be eavesdropping.
Florence Dugdale had been a teacher in Enfield, and the poem from which the play's title is taken describes Hardy seeing her on a platform in Liverpool Street Station. Hardy watches her diminishing form as she goes down the platform towards the train - he's at the barrier - and, this presumably being the first youthful flush of their love, he laments that whatever future plans are made this moment, this feeling, will never return. Actually, why don't you read it for yourself here?
And while you're at it, why not read what Cecil Day-Lewis called "Hardy's great farewell to love", At Castel Boterel, here? The latter is a poem I love very much, along with After a Journey and I Found Her Out There - all of them about Emma, not Florence. And that grimfully gleeful sitcom pilot of a poem, more of a minor work, a snapshot, can be found here.
Update 16/8/21: Adam Thorpe's play, starring Patrick Malahide and Sylvestra Le Touzel and directed by Patrick Rayner, can be currently found on youtube here.
A couple of weeks ago, during an interview with Joe Brown, Spencer Leigh let slip that he would be 75 on the first of February, the date of Brown's gig at the Liverpool Phil - which Spencer will, of course, be attending.
Like Joe Brown, Spencer's longrunning On the Beat show on BBC Radio Merseyside is still on the go, and long may it continue. I've really grown to enjoy his wide-ranging musical knowledge and his unshowy delivery. Performers seem to open up to him because they know that he knows his stuff and he cares about it. He has written books about various aspects of pop music: he has a particular interest in Merseybeat and the Beatles but his knowledge of rock'n'roll and 60s/70s pop seems pretty far-reaching.
His, for example, was the only UK obituary of Pookie Hudson (in the Independent) which gave any indication of familiarity with the Spaniels' biography. And during a Steve Cropper interview he was able to make the leap between the Beatles' 12 Bar Original and Green (not Glass) Onions. Not to mention a discussion with (I think) one of the Searchers about just what sort of kiss it was in Sweets For My Sweet which "thrilled me so." Or pointing out the pinch from the Diamonds' version of Little Darling at the end of the Beatles' Misery. All in one episode.
The programme isn't parochial, even though he will announce local gigs and his knowledge of Merseybeat and the Beatles will come to the fore. The scope of the programme is much wider than that. If you could weep when you think of the amount of time you have spent in the past listening to interviews by DJs or TV figures who haven't done their homework or simply don't have that much invested in the interaction then in a quiet sort of way Spencer will be a revelation because he does care - and he can make the musical connections which can illuminate things for the listener. During that recent Joe Brown interview there was an anecdote about George Harrison subjecting Scotty Moore to an evening of George Formby songs, to Moore's obvious discomfiture. Who else but Spencer would have pointed out that Pete Seeger was a Formby fan?
There is, in short, a foundation of wideranging knowledge which means that his interviews are more rewarding than in many other cases, and you can hear it in the performers' response to his questions: you can hear them relaxing and opening up, because it sounds like they're being talked to by a human being who has actually enjoyed their music, not a Radio Personality. Tommy Hunt mentioned during an interview that when he heard Spencer's voice on the phone "I knew he was gonna be nice."
When I began writing this blog I thought I would only write about doo wop. But other music I'd grown up listening to crept in, and of course it was all connected. Why not just celebrate it all? Which is what I've tried to do. And what I get most strongly from Spencer's show is that he too thinks all this, the broad sweep of popular music, is important. On his personal website he says of On the Beat:
My radio programmes contain many interviews with a wide variety of people from the world of pop, rock, country, soul ... everything in fact. I hope to provide an insight to their music, and give the listener an opportunity to hear the unusual as well as the familiar.
Well, for my money he does - frequently. And if you haven't heard this little gem of a show, you can listen to recent episodes here. The Joe Brown episode is here. Spencer's own website, where you can read articles, buy his books, and see a list of past On the Beat guests, is here.
On the Beat is broadcast on BBC Radio Merseyside every Sunday 7.00-8.00pm.
The Flamingos are one of the greatest, and most enduring, doo wop groups of them all, so it's a pleasure to report that Todd Baptista's biography, the first full-length study of the group, doesn't disappoint: this is a meticulously researched and very well organised account of their fortunes and changing personnel. The Flamingos' many permutations may not quite be in the Drifters' league but I can't have been the only one who found them confusing before Mr Baptista laid them out in these pages with such admirable clarity.
I confess to having been a little apprehensive when first picking up the book. With all the original members now dead, might the story turn out to be weighted in favour of Terry Johnson, the musical force behind what one might call the Mark II group? Encouraged by George Goldner, he helped steer them in more of a pop direction during their time on Goldner's End Records, leading to the huge crossover success of I Only Have Eyes For You ... but that was six years after Golden Teardrops, regarded by many as the greatest doo wop record of all, had been recorded for Chance Records in Chicago some time before Johnson joined.
As it turned out, however, I needn't have worried. Although Johnson's comments feature throughout the text due prominence is accorded to the group's R&B years in Chicago when Johnny Carter, later to join the Dells, was their presiding musical guide, cowriting and soaring over Golden Teardrops.
This is to draw readers' attention to Andrew Hickey's podcast A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs and the accompanying book which covers his first fifty choices.
New podcasts are coming out at the rate of one a week, and although he has not chosen all the songs yet Mr Hickey plans to take the story up to 1999. That's a decade or three outside my area of keenest interest but on the basis of the podcasts released so far - 64 to date in roughly chronological order, with Reet Petite the most recent - this ambitious endeavour can be recommended as a painless way of learning a great deal in the shortest possible space of time about the history and development of R&B and rock'n'roll. Mr Hickey has read the right books - and I'm pleased to note he gives Marv Goldberg's R&B Notebooks website the credit it so richly deserves - but, crucially, he does not assume any pre-existing knowledge on his listeners' part: you can start here if you know nothing about the history of this music.
It does help to listen to the podcasts, or read the chapters, in sequence, although he will usefully reiterate or sum up a point from some earlier programme, or direct you to it, and will indicate which pieces are better absorbed together, as with three related podcasts about Sun Records artists.
A few months ago I made my way to the village of Lemsford, in Hertfordshire, to meet Henri Harrison, former drummer of the New Vaudeville Band, and see his current group, Henri's Hotshots, in action at Lemsford Jazz Club.
I particularly wanted to find out more about Alan Klein's time with the
New Vaudeville Band, especially as Mark Blake's recent biography of their manager
Peter Grant doesn't have much to say on the subject. But the ways in which performers adapt and survive when fame has ebbed away is an abiding fascination, so I was also
looking forward to the opportunity of hearing the band's story from the one man who had
been there from soup to nuts. Henri played on the recording of Winchester Cathedral alongside other
session men when "The New Vaudeville Band" was just a thing in
songwriter Geoff Stephens' dream, and was still behind the drumkit of
the flesh-and-blood group, by then long mutated into a cabaret act,
when they finally called it a day some twenty years later.
Henri's Hotshots play unashamed goodtime jazz of a high order, and I spent a happy afternoon in the airy surroundings of the village hall, where the club regularly meets, listening to a mix of well-known and more adventurous numbers. A highlight was Fats Waller and Andy Razaf's Black and Blue - technically just Waller, I suppose, as there was no vocal, though the playing felt true to the spirit of Razaf's lyric, with particularly notable clarinet and trombone solos. There was also a good version of Lazy River which, like Black and Blue, put me in mind of Louis Armstrong's early big band recording of the tune; I was half-expecting to hear an affirmative "Yeah!" punctuating proceedings.
Black and Blue and other performances from the day have been captured for posterity by Peter Mark Butler and can be found on his jazzandjazz website here. Mr Butler has made it his mission to promote British jazz with videoclips and news of forthcoming events; his website is well worth exploring.
There was also what might be termed a "washboard-off" between Henri Harrison and Brian Smith, aka "Smiffy", who runs the club, though there was too much good humour involved to regard it as a cutting contest: at one point Smiffy threw his hat onto Henri's washboard by way of sabotage or rueful acknowledgement of his opponent's skills, but that was as far as hostilities went. (You can relive the tension here.) A good time was had by all present, and if you are a fan of vintage jazz then Henri's Hotshots can be recommended.
Introductions having been kindly effected by Mr Butler during the interval, I spoke to Henri afterwards in a nearby pub. But to set the scene here's part of Alan Klein's own account of how he came to join the New Vaudeville Band, as told to Spencer Leigh (a fuller version can be found here). After a dry spell following the release of his album Well At Least Its British he happened to bump into Geoff Stephens, who was looking for material to fill out an album capitalising on the success of Winchester Cathedral.
So I said, "I've got a silly song that I wrote the other day that might be on it, called Whatever Happened to Phyllis Puke?" And he said, "Oh I love that! I love that title, I'll have that song!" ... we went down to a studio and I recorded it, just with a guitar.
Afterwards he said, "What are you doing generally?" I said, "Well, not a lot really," so he said "Would you be interested, or do you know anybody who'd like to sing with the band?" And I didn't realise he was offering me the job. I think I said "No, I can't think of anyone, Geoff, actually, offhand," so he said,"Well what about yourself?" I said, "Well, I can't sing myself, never really saw meself as a singer," so he said,"Well, it sounds fine - would you be interested in the job, then?" So I said, "Well, I'll give it a shot, yeah" - a week later I was on the Ed Sullivan Show in New York!
Here is the finished version of that song:
Fame happened overnight for the New Vaudeville Band, as Henri describes:
Before
you could say Jack Robinson Geoff had made an album [using session
musicians]. And we did a couple of tracks on that album, in Regent
Sound, before Alan joined. I was dancing with a girl in New York at a
party and I said "This is good, who is it?" And she said: "You!" I
didn't even know; it was something we'd made with session guys and it
happened amazingly quickly. I had been in a band and gone to Europe but
to suddenly go to the States was unreal.
Initially we went in 1967 and then we did the Ed Sullivan Show, that was the big thing: the record had dropped down to Number Two but after that it shot up to Number One again. We did the Merv Griffin Show and other TV shows and a little promo tour, then we went back before Christmas of that year and did the first spot in Vegas, which was really successful. Then in 1968 we did a second tour when we did Vegas again and went all over the States - all the State Fairs and things like that.
"Places like Las Vegas and Reno, Nevada - the cabaret circuit ... They weren't exactly a rock band", as Peter Grant is quoted as saying in Mark Blake's biography, Bring It On Home, which also includes a description by Grant's lieutenant, Richard Cole, of a gig in Atlantic City when Henri and his bandmates had to share the bill with a diving horse:
The old stagehand told us not to go over our twenty minutes because everybody would leave to watch the horse. We thought, 'F*** that.' But they did - everybody left. This horse was hoisted in a harness with a girl on its back before plunging thirty feet into a tank of water.
Henri continues:
That whole year we were back and forth to America all the time rather than go[ing] to other territories because there was more money there, really. We did a few gigs in the UK with Alan, he did the two years when we were up in the charts and then he just totally wanted to move on.
Peter Grant's increasing preoccupation with his new (and decidedly non-cabaret) act, Led Zeppelin, may have contributed to Alan's decision:
I've got a feeling Peter Grant missed out on something because we
were doing so well there at the Tropicana [in Las Vegas] that I think Richard Cole
[reckons] some guys were gonna come over from Caesar's and offer us
something - which is a shame we lost out. Could have done us a hell of a
lot of good but there you go.
Was that the point when Alan said "I'm off"?
Probably if we'd had an offer like that he might have said I'll stay on for the Vegas thing.
I asked whether, despite being lead singer, Alan really had much of a
say, or whether it was Geoff Stephens' vehicle. "I think Geoff Stephens
would have been happy to go on releasing records by session musicians
and not ever having a band, but the BBC obviously didn't like that idea
at all."
Finchley Central and Whatever happened to Phyllis Puke were the only two songs Alan wrote which were recorded by the band. Henri fills in a little more detail about the circumstances of Alan's cowriting Finchley Central:
Geoff Stephens had the music and it was actually
called Aluminium, about a female washboard player: "Aluminium, on her
fingers ..." Alan said, "Oh, they're useless lyrics, they are," and
Geoff said "Well, if you can do better you do something." So he got on the
train on the Northern Line and looked up: "Finchley Central, that's
better than aluminium." So he wrote all the words then, in the process
of going to his home in Finchley, and gave it to Geoff the next day.
Now that I didn't know ...
Were the band influenced, I wondered, by the New Temperance Seven, the group who'd had a few hits in the twenties style a few years earlier?
Yeah, there was an element of that: New Temperance Seven meets rock'n'roll, basically - there's a rock beat to Winchester Cathedral with the Temperance Seven feel to it. I went to Geoff's home and he had gone into it quite a bit, listening to old records from the era; he was going through a craze of being interested. Of course, he's written hits for all sorts of people, either on his own or with others; it's endless. Tom Jones, David Soul ...
Geoff conceived the whole idea of the New Vaudeville Band and thought up the name. He thought it was a good time to do vo-de-oh-doh meets rock'n'roll, and obviously it worked; he was a very clever man and made lots of dough out of it, but he didn't have the pleasure of travelling around the world that we [the band] were getting - you can't really value that. He stayed at home - he lives in Berkhamstead at the moment.
Even if the invitation to join the New Vaudeville Band came at a lean time in Alan's solo career, I suggest that he must have been in his element fronting such a band, given his penchant for comedy songs. Part of the reason for my wishing to interview Henri in the first place was a remark he had made to Mark Frumento about Alan:
Alan really played it up. At one point some people really thought he was an earl.
So I askwhether Alan remained in character during his time with the group.
Oh yeah, he went thoroughly into that character: a laconic, upper class thing. He did a pretty good job of it.
I mention his admiration for Noel Coward:
Yeah, that was how he
managed to get his voice to fit in with the Vauds; it was just funny now
and then when he would slip into his Cockney accent.
And even if Alan told Geoff Stephens that he never regarded himself as a singer Henri says he fitted very well into the group. "Jonathan King came up to him after one Top of the Pops appearance and said: 'I love your deep brown voice.'"
The group's nationality was still a big selling point in America even though this was a couple of years after the British Invasion :
We still used to get people stopping us on Broadway: "Are you really from England? Say something to me! Do you know the Beatles?" All this sort of thing. It was amazing to suddenly be there, doing all this. It was a super era - pity it's not all recorded like it would be now.
For a short time, after Ed Sullivan, we were very big, but we were never
going to be appealing to girls because our hits weren't love songs.
So what of the group's fortunes after Alan?
We did
69-71 in Canada, then the last year was living in Vegas. Then we came
back to the UK in 1972 and reestablished ourselves with more or less a
completely different lineup.
Remembering an appearance around that time on The Wheeltappers and Shunters Social Club (above) I ask whether they were more of a cabaret act by then.
Yeah, that was the whole idea - before that we'd tried to cover everything. The Bonzos got a lot of street cred with political jokes or whatever; we were just purely out-and-out cabaret - it went down well and people used to like us. We got guys in who could play modern pop so
on the cabaret circuit we'd do things by the Stylistics, Stevie Wonder,
the Commodores or whoever, in amongst a bit of jazz and comedy songs like
Windsor Davies and Don Estelle.
At some point after the band's return to the UK there was a meeting in Peter Grant's office with Mickie
Most, who suggested they change their name, which took Henri aback:
I
thought the whole point is we've got a name. I didn't really see our
value in the studio without being the New Vaudeville Band - we weren't
brilliant musicians or vocalists or anything. But Mickie Most was
obviously very successful in what he did; perhaps I should have said
yes.
He doesn't appear particularly regretful, however, hinting that that in any case Most would have got the lion's share of the spoils. The group did go on to make recordings after their pop heyday, and Henri had the happy surprise of meeting Alan's daughter Karen
when this later version of the band was recording for SRT in the early seventies; Henri can be seen below, bottom row, second from the right, on the back cover of Live Vaudeville.
And armed that strong conviction about the power of their name, Henri and his bandmates did an eminently sensible thing. Geoff Stephens' interest in the New Vaudeville Band had faded when
the hits stopped happening and the band bought the name from him:
When we split from Geoff Stephens and took over the band name we went to
Companies House and re-registered in the name of the members that were
in the band at the time, then as each member left we'd pay them off; we
probably didn't need to it officially but it felt like the best thing to
do.
So this was about having a secure and regular cabaret gig?
Yes,
absolutely: keep working the name. I was sure there was value in it and
there was - and there probably still would be to a degree today.
It's an arrangement which some other groups of the era would have done well to emulate. Henri fills me in on the current controversy regarding ex-Bonzo Dog Band members' use of their name, which naturally leads to that earlier controversy about the New Vaudeville Band being seen merely as imitators of the Bonzos.
They didn't like me because when Bob joined us [in the New Vaudeville
Band] he had just left the Bonzos - and we did nick loads of their
ideas.
Ah, so Vivian Stanshall wasn't just being paranoid?
He
was paranoid but justifiably so because he was doing this 1920s, 1930s
stuff, going along fairly well, then all of a sudden we come along. The Bonzos hated me
because I'd taken Bob on; Spencer's Washboard Kings were also doing that
sort of thing and we nicked a few people from them as well. Then all of a
sudden we're at the Palladium doing a lot of the things that the Bonzos
did, holding the cards up: "Isn't he wonderful?" etc. But then they got
Bob back in on the reunion and he did quite a few gigs with them, though
that's all fallen apart now.
After Bob Kerr left the New Vaudeville Band he formed his own group, Bob Kerr's Whoopee Band, very much in the spirit of the early Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band; if memory serves they were regular guests on the BBC TV show Alan Price's Monster Music Mash. At the time, did Henri regard them as rivals?
Not
really, because they've always been into the more way out sort of stuff.
I don't think they'd have worked on the cabaret scene really - you
know, working men's clubs, they'd have been too clever for that. They
did do some military gigs and I think it didn't really work, whereas we
could do all ranks - the Whoopee Band
would be too many in-jokes.
When the New Vaudeville Band finally came to an end Henri became an agent, but on his retirement he was suddenly aware of the phones not ringing. Then an offer came from Bob Kerr to join him in the Whoopee Band. Not having played for so long, Henri was apprehensive before the first gig, in Germany, but a comment he overheard afterwards - "See? I told you he could do it!" - boosted his confidence, although it did take a while before the act of drumming felt truly instinctive again. And having led the New Vaudeville Band for so long he enjoyed not having the responsibility of being the leader: "I could just get on a plane and do things."
I joined Bob Kerr's Whoopee Band about fifteen years ago and it's only just come to an end. I think Bob just had enough, really - not enough bread to get a full load of people behind him to make it work: not enough roadies or whatever. That is a shame. I had been an agent for twenty years and not played at all and then went around Europe with Bob - it was fabulous.
Henri now plays several gigs a week with Henri's Hotshots - no pop or soul, unlike the later incarnation of the New Vaudeville Band, just trad jazz, although there is a cabaret element, in that crowd-pleasing numbers like The Charleston are part of the set. But the standard of musicianship is high and the set is an effective compromise between satisfying a handful of cognoscenti and pleasing a more general audience - who might then be tempted to explore this music further.
So more power to Henri's elbow and sundry other moving parts, I say. I wasn't there but I see from the jazzandjazz website that he was back at Lemsford less than a month ago, playing drums at a Christmas gig for Dave Rance's Rockin' Chair Band.
"I don't think it was planned," Herni says of Alan's two year stint with the New Vaudeville Band, and that ties in with the chance nature of his meeting with Geoff Stephens. Alan himself has said:
I thought I'd go along for the ride, see what being a pop star was
like. I did that for a couple of years and then went into the theatre.
That implies a sense of distance from the experience which may be a little different from that of the average pop star. Henri recalls that Alan's background in theatre made him unusual within the band - not that relations weren't friendly, just that expectations were different.
Henri has summed up his own attitude to the New Vaudeville Band: "We made the most we could out of it - and
had a good few years." It's a practical approach to things which shows not only in that avowed determination to "keep working the name" but also in Henri's attitude to Alan's replacement. I don't think to ask about how their voices compared but Henri volunteers the information that as the new frontman also played an instrument onstage this kept costs down and helped maintain them as a going concern on the UK cabaret circuit.
And what of Alan after his departure from the group? He didn't immediately return to the theatre, despite the impression given above - or at least the first production he was involved with wasn't staged until late 1972.
In the interim you could say that he was "working the name" too - or at least his American record company was. A solo cover of the Beatles song Honey Pie, an obvious fit for his Noel Cowardish New Vaudeville Band persona, was credited to the Earl of Cricklewood, the pseudonym he had
used in the group.
The UK version of the single, however, is the work of "Alan Klein". The wording of the accompanying press release (by Ken Pitt?) makes for interesting reading. However jokey the tone, you could say it's a declaration of severance from the past:
The Earl of Cricklewood (NVB retd.) renounces his title and becomes just
plain Mr. for his first single 'Honey Pie' on the Page One label ... He wanted to be like the people he wrote about [in the musical What a Crazy World] - a "name" himself. A long spell touring with the New Vaudeville Band as lead singer in almost every country in the world gave him that opportunity and cured him of that frustrated pop star syndrome!
And tellingly, the B side of the single is one of Alan's own compositions.
Related posts and links:
A guide to posts on this blog about Alan Klein can be found here.
The homepage of Mark P Butler's jazzandjazz website can be found here.
Find out more about Bring It On Home, Mark Blake's biography of Peter Grant, on the author's website here. It may be limited about the New Vaudeville Band but is well worth a read in its own right.
Mark Frumento wrote the sleevenotes for the New Vaudeville Band CD Winchester Cathedral (RPM), the only compilation you will ever need for the band in their earlier incarnation: all their issued sides plus unissued sides, demos and all in great sound - more details can be found on the Cherry Red Records website here.
Just before Christmas I visited a friend in Scotland who is also a doo wop and rock'n'roll fan. I brought a magazine with me which had an article about some new Carl Perkins finds - four roughly recorded sides predating his time on Sun - so was delighted to learn he already had the 10 inch Bear Family album (above) which contained these, along with some Sun alternate takes already issued on CD.
The magazine had described one of the newly unearthed sides, a version of Good Rockin' Tonight, as a "country blues boogie" or something of that sort. I'm not quite sure to what extent such a categorisation differs from plain ol' "rockabilly", but listening to the performances the question becomes academic: even if he hadn't quite arrived at the full-blown assurance of his later recordings with Sam Phillips, he was already well on the way by the early fifties.
For those who love Carl Perkins the three previously unheard sides on which he is leader, including a cover of Drinking Wine Spo-Dee O-Dee, are fascinating: you get a strong sense of how he must have played for audiences in the honky-tonks, as his intonation and pacing, especially on the Eddy Arnold song There's Been a Change in Me (written by Cy Coben), suggests he is imagining a crowd in his head.
A fourth tune on which he is a sideman, a traditional number called Devil's Dream, is also included on the album: pleasing enough of its kind though unremarkable, I suspect, unless you know of the association. But I'm very glad I had the chance to hear all these sides, and having loved Perkins from an early age it was especially pleasurable to be listening with someone who also understood his importance. Short samples of all four sides can be found on the Juno Records website here.
The release has also had the effect of correcting an error which may have been peculiar to my mind. It's some time since I read Perkins' autobiography Go Cat Go, which I remember as being pretty good, putting Carl's thoughts into self-contained sections so that author David McGee was freer to write about him in the third person. But what I thought I'd retained from the book, or possibly from some reference in another book or magazine, was that when Perkins first heard Elvis he thought: "I could do that!" and boldly made his way to Sun Records instanter.
Which is, I suppose, more or less what happened ... except that my fuzzy recollection was that Perkins hadn't put himself to the test already, just had some kind of mystical certainty, uncorroborated by experience, that his talents and inclinations must perforce lie in the same direction. What these newly unearthed recordings make clear - or perhaps just confirm for more careful or retentive readers - is that Perkins was already doing that: he just needed someone like Sam Phillips to encourage and draw out his talent more fully.
Actually, maybe I'm not alone in that supposition. A press release on the Bear Family website declares:
Those records make it clear that he was far from the clueless hillbilly who had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the rockabilly revolution. In fact, one of the four songs he recorded was Good Rocking Tonight, perhaps two years earlier than Elvis Presley cut it at Sun!
By sheer coincidence, a couple of days ago I happened upon Andrew Hickey's podcast A History of Rock in 500 Songs for the first time, and one of the episodes is dedicated to Blue Suede Shoes. I will probably write about this series when I've investigated it further, but it's worth noting here his comparison of Elvis's cover with the original. (The transcript is not mine but is taken directly from his website, here, where you can read it in full or listen to the podcast.)
Perkins'
version of "Blue Suede Shoes" and Elvis' had a few crucial differences
other than just their performer. Perkins' version is more interesting
rhythmically at the start -- it has a stop-time introduction which
essentially puts it into six-four time before settling into four-four.
Elvis, on the other hand, stayed with a four-four beat all the way
through. Elvis' performance is all about keeping up a sense of urgency,
while Perkins is about building up tension and release. [...] It
seems to stall after every line, as if it's hesitant, as if he doesn't
really want to get started. But at the same time that gives it a
rhythmic interest that isn't there in Presley's version. Perkins'
original is the more sophisticated, musicianly, record.
Mr Hickey, who studied the history of popular music at university, recently guested on an Elvis-related podcast and told its hosts that a lecturer once apologised to students before playing a Carl Perkins track, assuring them that they were only being subjected to this for educational purposes and that no one was expecting them to enjoy it for its own sake. If that isn't a cue for setting up your own podcast to ensure such a situation never happens again in our lifetime I don't know what is.
Which seems a fitting moment to resurrect a post from my dialogue with Clarke Davis on the Doo Wop Shop board. At the time this was written I only had a web TV and the tiniest of keyboards - a strong disincentive to embellishing one's thoughts. Yet I don't think there's anything I would add today.
I go way back with Carl Perkins, loving those economic guitar solos (possibly because I could hear George Harrison in them - Beatles were of course Numero Uno in my early years, listening to the records my elder brothers bought, our father's disapproval bonding us further). Can anything be simpler, neater than the solo in Movie Magg? And maybe - unlike doo wop - there is a sense of writing more directly from experience. There's a very strange Perkins track, Her Love Rubbed off on Me, done when he was drunk (according to Go Cat Go) that is confusing but conveys the sense of real, unedited experience - and a lot of his songs were originally improvised in the tonks, the book says. I think it was Ringo who said that when Carl sings you believe him.
With Carl Perkins I feel, as I also feel about Louis Armstrong, that it's a voice that's known to me: like Ringo, I trust it. Like a friend or family member. And Blue Suede Shoes is still infectious when other records have become dulled by overfamiliarity. There is a kind of purity of heart about some of Carl's stuff, as well as the raunchier, hellraising Dixie Fried.
Does anyone else actually know or remember this group? Sometimes it seems they were only a thing in my dream: an unattainable vision (and sound) of doo wop perfection, never seen by waking eyes or heard with unclogged ears (I'll explain later).
And yet there they are on youtube; CDs can be bought; they're mentioned in Jay Warner's Billboard book of vocal groups and there's still an official website online - even though to all intents and purposes they called it a day in 2003.
14 Karat Soul were undoubtedly an accomplished act, slaying live audiences time after time, as I can testify, yet they never made it big in America or the UK, only attaining the scale of recognition they deserved in Japan. And that's why I want to do my bit to commemorate a group who deserve to be revered all round the world.
I first came across them in 1981 at the Edinburgh Festival, an annual celebration of the arts in Scotland's capital. Anyone can perform at the so-called Festival Fringe, which over time has become much bigger than the festival itself.
Studying Greek tragedy at university in nearby Glasgow at the time, I was intrigued by the notion of a production of Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus with Gospel music. I can't remember if the word "doo wop" was mentioned in the Fringe brochure (each act is given two or three lines to sell itself to potential audiences) but what I got for my gamble in the staid setting of the Assembly Rooms that evening in Edinburgh was what seemed to me doo wop heaven.
As well as The Gospel at Colonus, as the Sophocles adaptation was called, the group performed a piece called Sister Suzie Cinema which was all about atmosphere rather than plot (five young men enter a cinema, are beguiled by visions of fifties starlets, then leave). The university student in me ought to have dismissed this as the slighter piece; the burgeoning doo wop fan was only aware of the most gorgeous, soaring harmonies, unimpeded by any instrumentation, and a growing sense of entering a kind of trancelike state. Doubtless this was partly the production's intended effect - the characters were in a place which peddled dreams - but the feeling was enhanced in my case because although I had been collecting doo wop albums for the last ten years I had never imagined that the essence of those fifties recordings which I listened to in my bedroom could be brought so vividly to life. And although I had been going to concerts for around the same length of time there weren't many doo wop groups, vintage or revivalist, who stopped off in Glasgow. (Please don't bring Showaddywaddy into it.)
Through a cruel twist of fate, at the precise moment of this wonderful discovery I was having ear trouble which meant that I had to pull down sharply on one lobe in order to hear anything which didn't sound as though multiple layers of cotton wool had been interposed between me and the sound source. So there I was, doing my best to soar high in doo wop heaven and drink in all this acapella perfection, taken to heights of aural ecstacy such as I had never known before ... all the while with a constant reminder of the baseness and imperfection of my human form, my head to one side, forever tugging on that lobe.
I'll spare you the details of the subsequent treatment, except to add that as wonderful bright, clear three-dimensional sounds finally rushed into my head once again, I could only mutter to the nurse: "Too late."
Living in the UK with no internet in those days, I had no easy means of finding out afterwards about the group's career in America, though I do remember thinking: "Hey, don't they realise they could use that singing ability to perform actual doo wop oldies? Now that I would pay to go and see." It never occured to me that Lee Breuer, creator of the two pieces, had chosen 14 Karat Soul precisely because, young as they were, they already had a reputation as ace doo wop revivalists, championed by the late Stan Krause and others. (Krause was a New Jersey record shop owner who founded Catamount Records.)
My chronology is now a little vague, but around a year later I was delighted to find that the group, who had toured The Gospel at Colonus and Sister Suzie Cinema around Europe, were having a week long residency in the unlikely location of the Mitchell Theatre in Glasgow.
I say unlikely because although Glasgow audiences are known for their warmth - Green's Playhouse, later the Apollo, was a renowned UK venue for rock acts - the more modestly proportioned Mitchell Theatre was part of a recent extension to Glasgow's main reference library, so it had no history or particular atmosphere to speak of. Possibly it had been cheap to hire and/or seemed was a handy place to try things out away from the glare of too much publicity. Maybe it had state of the art sound, as that was certainly very good. Or it could be that the decision was the a result of their earlier appearance at Mayfest, Glasgow's modest attempt to start a festival of its own to rival Edinburgh's.
Anyway, I booked to go to the Mitchell Theatre, normally home to local amateur theatre groups, just about every night of their stay. I saw them quite a few times afterwards but that week at the Mitchell Theatre is how I remember them. Aspects of the act changed from night to night, suggesting that it may have been a tryout base, although these were fairly minor. Essentially, they were good to go from the first night - and the first number - onwards.
Quite a few of the songs they sang that week are available on CD, although those antiseptic studio recordings are a long from hearing (and seeing) five figures with nowhere to hide blasting out at you.
I think this is what draws me to acapella doo wop, and acapella in general: the knowledge that you're watching a balancing act, and if there is one weak link in the troupe they will all topple. You're seeing something vulnerable and human.
At around the same time, a lecturer at Glasgow University was trying to explain the twentieth century to us - a good trick in precisely fifty five minutes. His main point was that in previous centuries people were in touch with the objects which surrounded them - eg a door handle would have been carved out of wood, and you could visualise how it was made: by a man, as you were a man. You could have made it. (Unless you were a woman, of course, but that was a whole 'nother lecture.)
Come the twentieth century, however, the advent of mass production and the development of new, artificial materials meant people were surrounded by objects which they didn't really understand and so they lost a secure sense of their place in the world which led to social alienation and lots of depressing - I mean, challenging - literature.
The tutor probably put it better (it was over twenty five years ago) but when I see an acapella group onstage, vulnerable in way that no rock band can be, I feel in touch with something fundamental. There's the sense of intimacy involved: the directness of the human voice, as opposed to an instrument, to provide the music; the self-exposure and risk in the sharing of that voice, in offering it to others for judgement. Then the magical-seeming way in which a group of individual personalities subdue their egos to create a single entity. To go back to the image of the balancing act, when nobody falls - when, in fact, they all seem to soar - then that is a joyous moment which affirms your faith in humanity. And as the listener, you feel like an intimate part of that group. During a discussion of In the Still of the Night on a long-vanished doo wop forum someone pointed out that there were actually only four members of the group, but it seemed to me that those who listened to and cherished that record - were the fifth Satin.
As part of my job I've had to do some research into folk music in Britain. I'd always known about the fifties folk revival in America and Britain but didn't realise that all through the twentieth century and earlier collectors had been trying to preserve what they could of ballads handed down through the generations. I don't know enough to discuss it in detail, though I believe part of the impulse in Britain would have been as a response to the growing dominance of imported American culture. Interestingly, however, on a visit to Cecil Sharp House (the UK's Folk Music Central), when I mentioned my interest in doo wop to the assistant librarian Peta Webb, she likened it to folk music. Which I suppose all comes back to a phrase which struck me all many years ago in the entry about doo wop in the Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock'n'Roll: "music you or your lover could have made."
The group kicked off their Mitchell Theatre set every night with Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy, and both ears now fully operational and tuned in. The bass singer, Reginald "Briz" Brisbon, had been a drummer, and was miming a double bass; but the moment I really knew this was something special was at a particular blending of voices around about the line "And now the company jumps when he plays reveille ..."
I can't describe precisely what was being done; I can only say it sounded grainy but right, rough but undoubtedly polished, not accidental. And a million miles away from the smooth stylings of barbershop. Or, come to that, any white doo wop group I'd heard. The nearest match I've heard on record is towards the end of the Spaniels' Get Away Child (You Don't Move Me). Below is the group's Catamount recording of Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy. The sound is more basic, less processed, than their later studio albums but it still doesn't convey what I heard on those successive nights at the Mitchell Theatre. The sheer attack of that opening number (cannily chosen from outside the genre), and the promise of an evening of like joys to come, is something I'll never forget.
But one of the highlights for me was Farewell, My Love, which I'd never heard before. I subsequently found out it's an old Temptations number which was as much doo wop as soul; on the original recording the bass voice echoes (or is echoed by) an actual bass all the way through, so really one or the other is redundant, and the song was eminently suited to an acapella rendering. I'm presuming it was a favourite of Stan Krause's, as the Royal Counts also recorded it.
There was also a number called, I think, Take Me Back Baby which included the line "Try me one more time".
But the biggest thrill, perhaps, was seeing Gloria acted out rather than merely sung. Rather than repeat myself, I'll quote the relevant part of a Doo Wop Shop discussion:
The full meaning ... came to me: the bass, Briz, loomed as the lead sang, one last time, of his yearnings, intoning over him those doomy notes that spelled out just one thing: You're alone, Bub; get used to it. The bass was reality, just as he often takes over on "baser" group sides (Pookie for the dreams; Gerald for the down'n'dirty), and his notes here were a death knell for the lead's tattered vision of togetherness ("Maybe she'll want me... "), a bell to toll him back to his sole self, alone in the less than tender night. Briz was singing right into his face, with a sort of evil glee: maybe this message from the Reality Zone had to be given, but he was certainly enjoying the task, and the "teenage" lead was not much liking it, protesting his love and need to the end.
You can read the above in its original context here.
Whether it was before or after that residency, I was with some friends at the Mayfest festival and 14 Karat Soul were queueing in the communal cafe (no Edinburgh elitism in good old leftwing Glasgow). I wanted to go over and say It's great what you're doing - I love the Dells, etc - but I didn't. I dearly wish I had.
Fast forward a few years and I'm living in London, going to see 14 Karat Soul at the Fridge in Brixton. I'm near the front of the stage, immersed in the performance, when I find I'm one of the people called up to add a few extra dum dums to Come Go With Me.
This is a task into which I throw myself with relish - only at some point one of the singers, grinning, makes a gesture. He slashes his throat with his index finger, which I know now almost certainly means "Shut the *&%! up as you cannot carry a tune in a bucket," but I thought then, and even now would like to present it as a remote possibility, that it meant he envied my vocal command, joshingly indicating that he wished my prowess could be curtailed so as not to expose his own limitations quite so cruelly when he next stepped up to the mike. But I admit it's a bit of a long shot.
I'm still haunted by that singer's gesture. But maybe it's best - in order to pull some tattered shreds of self esteem around me - to look up from the gesture and fix instead on his grin, which seemed conspiratorial. So it could have meant - oh, I don't know what it could have meant, but whatever was going on, I was part of it, I loved what was going on, and the odds are I didn't actively ruin it.
Someone even complimented me at the bus stop afterwards: "That was great, man. Do it again!" But maybe he was tone deaf too.
This is a revised version of a piece originally posted ten years ago today. Other posts about 14 Karat Soul:
14 Karat Soul in 1980 here. 14 Karat Soul live on Channel 4 in 1983 here. As They Should Be Heard here. (From a 1983 BBC Radio 1 session.)
Try Them One More Time here. (The one-off reunion gig in 2011)
This is to draw the reader's attention to Richard Herring's recent podcast featuring Graham Fellows, otherwise hapless middle-aged musician and songwriter John Shuttleworth (above). It can be downloaded here.
The interview is leisurely, and fairly frank as well as funny, perhaps helped by the fact that Herring once gave Fellows a fiver in the nineties when the latter was having no joy at a cash machine. (Herring framed the cheque he received in return, making his act of kindness doubly kind.) But it's clear, as the conversation progresses, that they do have a certain amount in common, that act of charity aside: both have forged unusual paths in the business of comedy after an initial bout of fame.
I don't recall reading or hearing too many other interviews with Mr Fellows since his long-ago days as spurned teenager Jilted John (he had a hit single of the same name in the seventies before he developed the older character), although one detail which sticks in my mind from, I think, an NME interview is of his associating with elderly men who bred fancy mice; the Shuttleworth character derives in part from afternoons spent with such people in drafty church halls.
Fellows announced during the podcast that he will be reviving John Shuttleworth next year after having given him a bit of a layoff - and it's scary to reflect that he is now older than his creation, who is forever hovering somewhere in his late fifties. I will certainly try to catch his new live show, to be entitled John Shuttleworth's Back, although I have to admit I'm less keen on the character live, as John's command of the crowd seems at odds with his "loser" persona: the intimacy of radio seems a better fit.
There have been several series of The Shuttleworths on BBC Radio 4, in which John talks directly to the listeners and tries, with varying degrees of success, to involve his circle (his wife Mary, his "sole agent" and neighbour Ken Worthington, and others) in the programme.
And there was a bit of a revelation about the radio show - for me, anyway - on the Herring podcast. I knew, or assumed, that there must be a bit of speeding up of the tape for voices such as Mary (Fellows, a trained actor, plays all the roles) but I didn't realise that The Shuttleworths is not actually scripted: he told Herring that although he had some idea of where he was going he disliked the sense of lines being obviously read in radio drama. Given that voices are recorded one at a time I reckon that makes The Shuttleworths an especially notable achievement.
If you haven't yet discovered or been beguiled by his radio show you are
urged to do so. Perhaps the supreme example of his art in this medium
is the episode from the first or second series entitled Pillock of the Community. This consists largely of John's wait
outside a mysteriously closed hospice where he is due to play a gig -
and it's left to the listener's imagination whether the inhabitants are
simply ignoring him, perhaps having been entertained enough in the past.
John is confused but notices a Curly Wurly wrapper in the hedge and ...
well, it's better to listen to this non-tale unfold at its own pace
than to have it described. When one of John's songs swells up at the
end, it's similarly nondescript yet loaded with significance:
And pubs and clubs The bus to Crookes And scouts and cubs And doberman pups And woodland paths And parks and caffs A Shandy Bass In a lady's glass
It's a litany of small pleasures in a small life, but their importance to the
character who has hymned them is beyond doubt, and for as long as the
song lasts we feel something of it too.
Graham Fellows himself said (in William Cook's highly recommended book Ha Bloody Ha) that that episode was the best writing he'd ever done, even though nothing happened. (Presumably that means certain sections of The Shuttleworths were indeed written, or perhaps because this episode was essentially a monologue it required a different approach.)
One of the reasons it works so well, I think, is the way that pathos is held at bay. Even if John is a loser (especially if an audience of OAPs are desperate to avoid his act) he is a kind of poet too, not only via the details noted in the song but in his ability to seize on whatever he sees around him as he thinks aloud. Just as the aggressive optimism of Tony Hancock's character offsets his failures so John's ability to find meaning and interest in things means we needn't worry too much about him: he is well-insulated, even if a song in another episode speaks of John's feeling "alone with the day",
which implies that loneliness, or boredom, is an everpresent threat. And Fellows tells Herring that Shuttleworth is "foolish" but also "sweet".
Occasionally the radio programmes have branched out to include celebrity guests and prankish phone calls. These are also enjoyable but do not work quite so well for me. The calls betray some signs of the performer's enjoyment and lessen the illusion. And why should biggish names condescend to give this man any of their time? This is why I'm also less keen on seeing John live - what does he think he's doing in a crammed theatre when his normal gigs are in hospices etc (or not, as the case may be)?
Perhaps those live gigs and variations of the radio format are best appreciated as a kind of dream sequence, a chance to enjoy how John might behave in the unlikely event of success coming his way. And to invoke Hancock again, Galton and Simpson were never that consistent about how much fame had been enjoyed by the character they created. So maybe I should stop going down this route.
Far more interesting, in any case, to ponder over an episode of The Shuttleworths when Ken makes a reference to John's first wife only for John to shush him, fearful Mary will overhear. What's going on there? And to consider more deeply whether, in the Pillock of the Community episode, everyone in the hospice really was furtively watching behind lace curtains, praying he would go away and entertain somewhere else.
But that "Pillock" episode is a kind of victory (as well as a humiliation) for John, given the amount of interest and pleasure he can derive from a discarded sweet wrapper ... In fact, now I think of it, on an unconscious level my reservations about the Radio Shuttleworth series with celebs may have been not so much aesthetic as concern for his welfare: this is a man, after all, whose hobbies include measuring reservoir levels; surely exposure to C-list celebrities on a semi-regular basis might well result in some kind of sensory overload?
I've seen Fellows perform as Shuttleworth at least three times, and I must admit I did have to laugh when I saw him at Edinburgh a few years ago with a show around 5.15 - this was for our safety, John explained during the performance, as any later there could be "youths congregating outside."
It's just that for me the illusion is lost a bit when he's facing these large crowds who are laughing a lot at what he says and yet he carries on, by and large, as if they're not. I prefer the added melancholic dimension of listening on your own in the dark to John doing pointless things to fill in the day (and try to find enough material to constitute a show). In the same way that it can be a more melancholy experience to watch Laurel and Hardy by yourself rather than in a packed cinema (when you're more likely to register the pain and resignation in Hardy's expression in a closeup which, with the original audience present, would merely have been intended to mark time until the laughter died down) so for me the essential Shuttleworth is a solitary experience.
Of course an alternative explanation is it may be about my wanting to feel that only I get it - I don't want to see other people sharing my "secret" so maybe it's cultural snobbishness too.
Anyway, the details of the John Shuttleworth's Back tour can be found on his website here.
By way of commemorating ten (count 'em!) years of this blog I've uploaded the rare 1961 Vee-Jay release of the Flamingos' Golden Teardrops to youtube, as it doesn't seem to be available there or on spotify or anywhere else. You can find any number of transfers of the original 1953 Chance recording in variable sound quality - as well as a spurious "echo version" which would have turned Bill Putnam's stomach - but not the Vee-Jay pressing, which features an overdubbed guitar. Readers who have explored the earliest posts here will know how significant that recording was to me.
I had no idea that I'd still be finding new thoughts to add to this blog a few weeks after I'd set it up in December 2009, let alone in a decade's time. My modest intention had been to provide a permanent online archive for posts I'd exchanged with the American DJ Clarke Davis on a music forum, Steve's Kewl Doo Wop Shop, which had closed for business not long after our dialogue - or dialog, if you're American.
Over a few frenzied weeks in the autumn of 2000 Clarke and I had compared notes on how, despite coming from very different backgrounds, we had both managed to arrive at a love for this wonderful and ridiculous genre, and Golden Teardrops played a major role in the discussion, along with In the Still of the Night and Gloria.
The Doo Wop Shop vanished without warning but luckily I'd saved a few printouts - though I did manage, over the years, to lose an especially precious sheet of one particularly precious post: Clarke's description of the Cadillacs' recording of Gloria. At some point the page disengaged itself from my pile, and unless someone else has kept a copy you will have to fill in the blanks for yourself.
As a prompt for those inclined, here is the record:
The exchanges between myself and Clarke seemed to be enjoyed by a lot of readers on the original forum. Tokens of appreciation, in the form of videos, CDs and cassettes, were sent my way by especially generous individuals, to whom I send my heartfelt thanks once again. Some, like the late Bruce Woolf, were even kind enough to say that our dialogue might be of interest to doo wop fans in general, and those seeking to learn about the form, which is why I decided, with Clarke's approval, to make the posts available online again in December 2009.
But as I began transcribing the pieces for a new readership one thing led to another. It seemed only natural to add a commentary to the posts, filling out what I'd said or adding new thoughts, and to add the occasionally new piece about some treasured record I hadn't got round to mentioning in 2000.
And then, having got the taste for this sort of writing again - the pleasure of searching for words to convey to others how this music had given me so much pleasure - there didn't really seem any reason to stop. Those old messages were an incomplete picture of my early musical enthusiasms, so why not discuss the other genres which had also inspired me? And occasionally I'd add other, non-musical, elements to the mix: whatever else of the past had retained its importance for me, such as the comedians revered in childhood. (One of them even asked me to help write his autobiography after he had read my encomium, which can be found here.)
At some point the phrase "rummaging in the record shop of memory" advanced itself as a subheading for the blog; it seemed apposite, and it stuck. The image at the top of this blog is of another vanished Doo Wop (and other genres) Shop: the late lamented Cheapo Cheapo Records in Rupert Street, London. (I have written about that too, here.)
But whatever matters have crept in, doo wop remains the foundation of this blog - how could it not, with a title like "Pismotality"? That had been my username on the vanished forum, a nod towards one of the greatest (and possibly stupidest) doo wops of all, the Medallions' The Letter, so it seemed only natural to resurrect it for a blog which revived my contributions under that name. And what word better sums up that mixture of idealised romance and plain idiocy which characterises the best of this genre? (More about The Letter here.)
As I write this I am still eagerly awaiting the arrival of Todd Baptista's new book on the Flamingos, the first full-length study of perhaps the greatest of all the doo wop groups; they certainly recorded the supreme doo wop song, and I still thrill to hear it.
I first heard it - in that overdubbed form - just over forty years ago. Presumably the 1961 sweetening was an attempt to cash in on the group's recent crossover success with End Records: the hitmaking arrangement of I Only Have Eyes For You is ushered in with a guitar.
Not that I was aware that I was listening to a reworked recording when I first heard it. I only registered that this seemed a more challenging listen than some of the other tracks on the compilation album I had picked up cheaply in the basement of Glasgow's Listen Records in Renfield Street. It took me a while to adjust to the Flamingos' sound, as I told Clarke on that Doo Wop Shop forum. I reproduce the post below with a ghost of an apology for its slightly overheated style, reflecting the elation I was then experiencing at finding other doo wop enthusiasts, like Clarke and Bruce, via the new magic of the internet:
Odd as it may seem, it wasn't that accessible to me when I first heard it around 1978, on a poor quality oldies compilation with muddy sound and a dubbed-on guitar. Adjoining tracks, like Sonny Knight's Confidential or the Spaniels' Baby It's You, seemed far better: I got the point. But this - this was Ink Spots territory, wasn't it? That guitar. The Harptones' I Almost lost my mind, also on the LP, that was emotion; the Flamingos seemed out of reach, unfocused, somehow; I couldn't take the whole thing in in one listen.
I don't particularly recall a moment of piercing clarity. But at some point the elements made sense - tremulous falsetto, out-of-tune-sounding yet absolutely right lead, odd lyrics (why "a cottage by the sea"?) and above all that sense at the beginning that we're being ushered into a holy place, cavernous and echoing as a great cathedral, and then drawn together in a moment of collective stillness, as though calmly taking stock of the sadness in things (lacrimae rerum, appropriately enough: "the tears in things") before there's a collective sigh - at what life is?- and Sollie McElroy comes up to testify or confess: "Swear to God I'll stray no more ..."
But it's too late: although at one point he addresses the lost love directly - "Darling, put away your tears," – the burden (and howl) of the song is about regret: all he can do is try to take in fully the time he hurt her enough to make her cry: the time, now gone, when he mattered to someone, and the knowledge bearing down upon him that he's going to be carrying that memory to the grave and beyond: "Until the end of time, And throughout eternity - " Golden Teardrops. Cried, by her, for him.
And the rest of the group, or congregation, seem to grab him there - we're almost at the end of the song now - try to hold him in that moment when he feels the enormity of what he's done. Maybe the wisdom will last; who knows? But the sad, sweet pain - the knowledge that he was once loved - undoubtedly will, if the falsetto weaving in and out of the reiteration of that painful vision of her tears at the end is anything to go by.
Doo wop lyrics don't matter that much: a peg for emotions. They'd be trite enough here if read on their own. But on this occasion they seem to give the group a clarity of focus which inspires them to a height they never quite attained on any other song: Golden Teardrops is, quite simply, the loveliest and the saddest of all doo wop records. In his autobiography Chaplin talks of the day music entered his soul. Golden Teardrops seeped into me on some unknown date. But I never tire of it and always hear it afresh; for me it holds the whole mystery of doo wop: it's religious, it's secular, it's ... beyond words, actually.
At the time I knew the Flamingos' classic only through the Vee-Jay
version until Clarke kindly sent a CD of one of his shows featuring the
song "sans guitar" and I gradually learnt to wean myself off the
doctored reissue. Now when I listen to it I can hear that the guitar is essentially an unnecessary underlining of what is already present in the restrained musical backing by Red Holloway and the other
session musicians in 1953. (You can read more about Golden Teardrops in
my song-by-song account of the Flamingos' early recordings here.)
That said, it does seem odd that the doctored side is so difficult to find in the digital era. Charly's ten disc box set of Vee-Jay recordings features the Chance original. So here, in order to commemorate the past Ten Glorious Years (other adjectives are available), is the overdubbed version of Golden Teardrops. Please note that sound quality is not optimal - this is taken from an old cassette I recently found, not directly from the original vinyl album depicted in the video, and the audio seems to have taken on a slightly corrugated effect over the years. But it's still worth hearing, if only to cement your opinion of the original.
A complete guide to posts about the Flamingos' Chance and Parrot sides, described by Marv Goldberg as "a wonderful analysis", can be found here.
Or go straight to the piece on Golden Teardrops here.
A review of Todd Baptista's book about the Flamingos will follow in the New Year.
A new biography of Ken Dodd, the first to be published since his death, has just come out, and it's a good 'un: streets, if not whole counties, ahead of the book by Steven Griffin published in Dodd's lifetime, cheekily entitled Ken Dodd: the Biography.
That suggests a definitive study but Dodd offered no cooperation and in an edition of BBC's Arena programme he spoke darkly of "pirates" who'd written about him against his will; Michael Billington's monograph How Tickled I Am, now almost fifty old, was the only publication he mentioned with approval on the programme, and it's still a great read today if you want an insight into his craft. (Interestingly, although he doesn't use that particular term, Billington doesn't seem to see Dodd as a "funny bones" comedian, despite the obvious advantage of his physical attributes, but someone who has had to develop his skills.)
Griffin's book passes the time agreeably enough but the author doesn't have a compelling enough individual style to compensate for the lack of direct access to his subject. There isn't the sparkle of a John Fisher (Funny Way to Be a Hero, which includes a portrait of Dodd) or the meticulous research of a Graham McCann (especially in his book on Frankie Howerd). There are some insights from sympathetic interviewees like Roy Hudd but also pointless soundbites from celebrities (Anne Widdecombe?!) which didn't offer much or were quoted too briefly to be of use; Bob Monkhouse - not, in my view, a natural comic but one who undoubtedly understood and appreciated those who were - is the notable exception.
Griffin does offer chapter and verse on the tax trial, which earlier books obviously couldn't do, but overall there is little sense of, or even speculation about, the comedian's inner life; in his introduction to the book, as though in acknowledgement of its limitations, he regrets the fact that Dodd hasn't shared his own insights and can only hope he may do so one day.
Happiness and Tears, the new book by Louis Barfe, was commissioned after Ken Dodd's death so he has no additional advantages over the earlier biographer, no personal interviews with the great man to draw on, but he does a far better job than Griffin for several reasons. One is in the choice of interviewees: Anne Widdecombe doesn't get a look in but "Diddy" David Hamilton does, as do several others who worked closely with the comic. Barfe recognises that Dodd had a stock series of responses employed in interviews, but he talks to the people behind the Arena programme, whose constant presence around the comic during filming led to some less guarded moments.
Another key reason the book works so well is the sense of balance: in a nutshell, Dodd comes over as a man prone to meanness in professional matters but enormously generous with his time, and more than willing to pass on all he has learnt, provided the aspirant comedian appreciates what he is being given. We are given the testimony of a drummer who rejects the offer of a job with a show because he learns Ken will be offering him thirty pounds less than the Musicians' Union rate, but that comes only after his fulsome praise for Dodd has been noted. Similarly, it's common knowledge that Eddie Braben split with Dodd over a disagreement about money but more details are provided here (Dodd was given a substantial increase for a show which he chose not to pass on to his writer) and Barfe makes the point that the two understood each other so well that this was a real error of judgement on the comedian's part. It's tempting to wonder whether his TV career might have fared a little better with Braben still in tow.
Additionally, the research on display here is painstaking. Dodd often referred in interviews to seeing an advert for a ventriloquial device in a comic - but who else would have bothered to find what may have been the very issue which steered him towards a life in showbiz?
Most of all, however, you simply feel that Louis Barfe gets it: understands this world and why, despite his personal failings, Ken Dodd is and will remain such an important figure - and that his death is, in a sense, the final death knell of variety.
The book isn't that long, and a fair proportion of it is devoted to a "Doddology": a listing of live shows up until 1960, and TV and radio shows until the end of his life. But that is understandable: the occasions when Dodd diversified into acting or other activities were rare, and the bulk of his stage act remained substantially the same over the years, so in a sense there isn't that much to report. When I worked with Freddie Davies on Funny Bones (to which Ken Dodd generously contributed an introduction) there were three or four careers (at least) to draw on, not to mention a potted biography of his comedian grandfather as a final flourish. But in Happiness and Tears the interest never flags, and Barfe is to be congratulated on writing as good a biography as one might reasonably expect of a subject who shied away from revealing his private self in public. It's written with warmth and understanding, and unless some gamechanging cache of confessional recordings or journals comes to light I suspect it may be prove to be the final word.
I did have my own personal post-show audience with Ken Dodd once, during which he said that he didn't want anything written about him "which might harm comedy". I don't know how he'd feel about Louis Barfe's book - especially as a recurrent theme is that he always liked to be in control - but for the rest of us I reckon it will do admirably. I referred earlier to a comment of Bob Monkhouse's in Steven Griffin's book. It is also reproduced towards the end of Barfe's volume - unsurprisingly, because it could stand as a justification for any biographer's approach to this particular subject. Monkhouse declared that for Dodd "everything offstage is an interval", and that Dodd the person is of less interest than the "clever, spinning Dervish of a madman that he has invested with life" when performing.
Find out more about Funny Bones, the book what I wrote with Freddie Davies, in a dedicated website here.
Not mentioned above, Eric Midwinter's 1979 book Make 'Em Laugh includes a substantial original interview with Dodd. Like the lately retired Michael Billington's How Tickled I Am it's out of print but fairly easy to obtain.
