Proper singers.......
Am I turning into my parents? Brought up in a household where Harry Secombe and Gentleman Jim Reeves were the kings of my parental listening pleasures, I somehow always failed to please with my croaky voiced heroes of yore, you know, Rod Stewart,Paul Rogers (each when they were good, so that takes us all back a decade or 3), let alone all the other assorted screechers and howlers. I remember a secret frisson of contentment when my mother commented favourably about Jim Morrisons voice, "Hyacinth House", I think it was, from "L.A. Woman", so obviously she was then disappointed enormously by "Crawling King Snake"s ragged burr. As years went by, as much as to avoid the awful question of "how do you describe the music you listen to", I kept my music much to myself, only letting the odd snippet out. I remember my parents and an uncle and aunt listening to my newly purchased copy of the Fairport Convention hit single, "Si tu dois partir" b/w "Genesis Hall", after I had gone to bed. My eavesdropping established their approval of the b side, probably in part resonsible for my subsequent immersion in the folk-rock canon.
The years went by. All I ever played my mother would be Runrig or the Rankin Family, mainly as she had been raised a gaelic speaker in the Outer Hebrides. The former, she conceded, were very good, but she was referring more to the accent and pronunciation than the timbre of the singing, despite my thinking Donnie Munro would be right up her street. The Rankins fared less well, making her think of Bryan Ferry's laughable french in "Song for Europe", had she ever heard of him or it.
Anyhow, to cut a long story short, I was minded of this yesterday, as I listened to "Ladies Bridge" by Richard Hawley. Blimey, what a singer, I thought. My mum would have liked this... I should add I am long since an orphan. Now I had not been so similarly impressed by "Coles Corner", thinking it a bit overly affected by mannerism, with style knocking substance back into second place. But this was sublime, with echoes, sorry, of Bing Crosby, for goodness sake, resonating richly through the velvety smooth production. It was as if, having tested the water with his earlier release, and had favourable critical responses, he had had the confidence to entirely indulge himself and listener in pre-beat boom values, and I'm thinking Bobbys Vee and Darin.
Sublime.
Is anyone else finding themselves praising the musical styles they originally listened to music to get away from?
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Don't laugh
but I recently bought "Swing While You're Winning by Robbie Williams. I confess, I had only heard 2 tracks before and I did get it in a charity shop to make up my other purchases to a nice round figure. There...forgive me.
Quite frankly, I wish Robbie would just shut the feck up. It's not big and it's not funny. However, the big band behind him are simply wonderful and make me realise what I miss about my parents tiny record collection, especially Mack The Knife by Bobby Darin.
As the dark winter nights loom I find myself with an urge to pull out my Leonard Nimoy CDs once more, turn down the lights and settle down with a single malt beside a roaring, er, central heating radiator.
It's a hard choice
between deliberately provoking your parents into completely launching into a rant about how awful your musical tastes are and playing something slightly more tuneful that you hope they may like.
The first of these options involved me playing Edgar Broughtons 'evening over rooftops' which I still love to this day and Ian Dury and the Blockheads first album with Plaistow Patricia etc - naturally the reaction from my old man was 'get this effing rubbish off and lets hear something with a tune'.
Later in a spirit of entente cordial I played the album by Sky to my mum - you know the one, slightly classical rock with John Williams as the band leader (the classical guitarist not the film score writer).My mum thought it was 'very nice' and was pleased how my taste had developed. The big downside was that for my next Christmas I got unsolicited a 4lp box set of JohnWilliams solo guitar pieces. No doubt he is an accomplished musicians but 4 lps of Spanish guitar music with no other instrumentation at all is a bridge too far for me. On another occasion I happened to mention that I quite liked some of the songs out of 'Cats' and all of a sudden I get a Andrew Lloyd Webber collection (long since moved on). Its a bit like telling your mum you like corned beef and getting it on sandwiches for the next year (this also happened).
Isn't any form of musical interraction with parents. . .
crossing a fundamental line that should never be crossed? Openly discussing music with them is like sitting down to Sunday lunch and, as your Dad proudly uncorks this month's bottle of Blue Nun and you struggle to pry another piece of Yorkshire pud from the roasting tin, casually saying "Hey, Mum, what's the weirdest place you and Dad have ever had sex?" You just don't do it, do you?
Yes but no but....
......think where we'd be had, as I'm sure they did, there not been music talk (probaply not the sex talk) chez Thompson, Wainwright, Dylan etc etc. (Altho', come to think, maybe not, as I recall most of the musical old block chips were raised by mothers after Dad had buggered off......., a whole psychological treatise in itself))
Fair Point
Where parents are concerned, music joins the list of politics and religion as subjects not up for discussion, as it's clear that no-one's mind will get changed and tempers may become frayed in the process.
I recall the shock
of my Mum approving of Canned Heat performing On The Road Again on ToTP. After registering disbelief she said, "It's the blues" as if I was an idiot at not recognising her love of the genre.
Quite the contrary
I can only speak for myself, the parents being long gone, but one of the greatest gifts mine gave me was a love of Bing Crosby, Ella Fitzgerald, Phil Harris, Jimmy Shand, Count Basie, Nellie Lutcher, Spike Jones and many many more. I know in return I gave them John Martyn, the Stones, the Fairports, Bob Marley and the Ramones. Orthodoxies such as "The Generation Gap" are surely something we Wordsters would resist.
Nellie Lutcher?
Gap in my, Stan. Who she? (What a name.)
Nellie Lutcher
According to Wikipedia, at the age of 12 she played with Ma Rainey but not, as far as I can tell, Beethoven. I had imagined she'd died decades back and was pleasantly surprised to see she'd made it to a ripe old.
It's the thought that counts
A good friend of mine was watching fly-on-the-wall documentary "The Cruise" with his nan one evening.
A careless remark he made, that salt-of-the-earth singer Jane McDonald had "quite a good voice", landed him with tickets to see her live for his next birthday.
Eeeeuw.
Parents have, like, sex and stuff? That's disgusting. As my 17 year old neice might say.
As for musical diplomacy across the generations, I've always had a soft spot for the Glenn Miller sound of my parent's youth, while said neice is happy to trawl my brother's or my CD racks in search of cool stuff from our decades. So in my experience there's nothing essentially wrong with liking material from an earlier generation's growing years, but neither is there any substitute for the adrenaline fuelled excitement that comes from hearing things to which no previous lugs have been subjected.
Can't take my ears off them...
You can't knock a bit of Matt Monroe, hats off to Andy Williams, a bronx cheer for the Ink Spots followed by a click of the heels for Acker Bilk's Stranger on the Shore.
Lovely.
Ol' blue eyes has the last laugh
Similar situation. I was raised surrounded by Radio 2, Perry Como, the aforementioned Jim Reeves, the loathsome "Sing Something Simple", a bit of opera and mum's favourite, Frank Sinatra.
So the response I received to the loops and sound effects of Dark Side of the Moon and Steve Hackett's srangled cat impersonations from The Lamb Lies Down never really made for much in the way of common ground. That's until I was looking for something apt to play at Mum's funeral. The crematorium only had a CD player which meant walking into a record shop and buying one of Frank's compilations without a disguise or asking for it in a plain brown wrapper.
The upshot was that it later found its way onto my iPod and having thrown up several random tracks encouraged me to invest quite voluntarily in "Songs for swinging lovers" & "In the wee small hours". These ironically were not by way of some misplaced nostalgia kick, but possibly that some switch had flicked in my head that made me realise that he did have a stunning voice and the Ageds perhaps knew a good tune after all.
Thinking about "Sing Something Simple" still brings me out in a cold sweat though.
Now you're talking
The Mike Sammes Singers!
The excellent Music For Biscuits on Trunk Records http://www.trunkrecords.com/turntable/biscuits.shtml
P.S. Is that Hepworth Snr. on the left?
Not only that. . .
but Ricky Gervais, zany as ever, appears to be touching up the Duchess of Cornwall. And is that really Hepworth Sr. or Hughie Green's evil twin? (No doubts about the woman in the middle though - it's good to see Mavis Riley getting out more after so long stuck in the Kabin.)
Strange thing is...
...there's probably not one of them over the age of 25 when they all look as if they are in their early 60's...
Sammes Seri
I am astonished by the strength of memory etched into the souls of fellow Irregulars by these sunday night staples: whenever they get mentioned, the volume of response is more substantial than many other heroes and/or villains. Given that the consensus seems to be that music is how the young escape the old (even if there is a grudging reversal with time), these are the guys we should be congratulating for the birth of punk. And prog. And merseybeat. Everything really.
Respect!
Tell me if Mike Sammes died either in penniless ruination or rich as croesus? Or is he still alive?
Follow Beany's link
(The answer, in a nutshell, is a gas leak in a Reigate semi.)
Stranger still
They were on I Am The Walrus. Fact!