Member Since: 10/5/2006
Band Members:
Two Soldiers by Continental Film Night
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Influences: So many...I remember my nan used to play Des O' Connor records to me on one of those nice cabinet record players. But she'd also keep me in stitches by farting loudly.
At home we listened to Radio One, Two, and Luxemburg. My mum had a small collection of some 30 or so records which we played incessantly. At three, I'm told, I used to croon like a dog to Acker Bilk's Stranger on the Shore. All tucked up in my navy blue wool merchant sailor's jacket, with my flaming red cheeks and curly blonde locks, I loved that melody, and so happily sad, I used to howl it out to the cold early sixties winter nights in council suburbia.
It took me until I was about 16 until I was able to boast a record collection bigger than my mother's. The first album I had was a gift from an older cousing, The Beach Boys Live.The first two I bought were The Beatles Red Album and Kimono My House by Sparks. The first time the incredible Mael brothers appeared on Top of the Pops, I was spellbound. The next day at school everyone was saying "Did you see that guy with the moustache who looked like Hitler?" Ron Mael never knew it, but for a generation of teenagers he's suddenly ended the Second World War and shown a few of us that surreal humour had its place in pop music.
All the records at home were played a lot.
Some of my mother's were 78s with lovely labels, like the Brunswick one for Francis Luther's The Bum Song/Hallelujah I'm a Bum. I loved that and the old Hi-Life tunes she brought back from West Africa. Another particular favourite was The Inkspots: Don't Get Around Much Anymore. I can still here those beauties crackling away for half a minute before the needle finally slipped into the intro...and continued to crackle away for the next three minutes.
Of course, there were more singles than albums. The singles were cheaper. I liked the Andy Wiliams ones, and the Elvis (Teddy Bear, All Shook Up, Lawdy Miss Clawdy), and my sister's trad jazz and skiffle singles (Lonnie Donnegan, Kenny Ball, Chris Barber...and their striking black-and-white Pye labels).
On our rented black and white TV set, there was always some interest in the musical guests on shows hosted by Bernard Braden or Peter Cook. Georgie Fame and Alan Price had everyone paying attention, and then one day Jake Thackray appeared. He was doing what for me, an 8-yr-old, was 'adult' stuff. I didn't know then that his unappreciated chansonnier brilliance was being disguised as semi-lewd, almost end-of-the-pier sauce because appealing to the puerile sense of humour of the repressed British middle-classes was the only way to get intelligent chanson onto British TV. But Jake had a personal style that transcended the product disguise. There was dignity there, the dignity of Brel and Brassens and a host of other French singers unknown in the UK. Just as the Pythons would be the nearest thing in Britain to Buñuel (only 40 odd years late!), Thackray was our secret underground passageway to France and Belgium, ane en route to Gainsbourg.
But radio was happening bigtime. My big brother had a transistor radio and used to listen to it while he was fixing his Royal Enfield motorcycle. This wasn't the last time he'd bring me music. Later, rocker turned hippy, he turned up one day with a couple of albums he borrowed from another hippy. I stole them into my puny collection and they sat grand in there, and still do. They were the first Roxy Music album and the first Strawbs album, and though they were worlds apart, they both excited me tremendously.
As a nipper, I sat and watched my brother clean pistons and cover himself in grease.I could pretty much ignore The Stones, but Cat Stevens' Matthew and Son came on one day and that made me take the stabilisers off my bike and become a two-wheeler.
There were other early radio gems that seemed quite magical. Keith West's Grocer Jack mesmerised me. Later it would be Nilsson's sentimental (and repetitive) Without You that made the mind glow on cold winter evening walks. I like the sentimental stuff (which reminds me, those singles of my mum's had some of the best Jim Reeves tunes amongst them...and a touch of bizarre hyperventilating happiness in the form of a yodelling cowboy called Frank Ifield (I remember You).
We're now just about at the 1970s. Time for sitting at the back of school assembly singing The Sweet's songs while everyone else was singing hymns...and getting caned for it. I got my free Marc Bolan t-shirt on after school, and a copy of Disco 45 to buy so I could learn the lyrics to songs like Mungo Jerry's Summertime, or Desmond Dekker's Israelites. The Hit Parade. The Top 30. ...to be continued
Sounds Like: ...a giant all-seeing movie tracking shot, pausing only for comic effect and melody...Serge Gainsbourg chanson, Scott Walker-esque Grand Guignol balladry, oblique, Brecht-Weil melodrama and velveteen, 50’s-tinged rock’n’roll as imagined by David Lynch...
Record Label: TINHORN HOME COMPANION LIBRARY
Type of Label: Indie