Billy Cotton was a band leader, successful in Britain in the 1920s and 1930s. He later became a television personality and actor, but back in the day his band was hot. It started out as a more-or-less conventional dance band, but later included elements of vaudeville. Cotton was a skilled arranger, and his records are […]
Author: Richard Evans
I am a man in middle life, enjoying years of unexpected happiness. I write and teach at a university. I have a passion for music, art, history, and obsolete technologies.
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Angry at the silence
Like most Anglo-Australians, I do not speak a second language. I would love to, and have tried to learn a few: Chinese, Vietnamese, Indonesian, even Latin back at school. It never quite stuck. But I will try again, and this time I have my heart set on Spanish. It is partly that I have been […]
I have always found the term “house band” vaguely disparaging, as if a recording studio has a house band in the same way an Italian bistro offers the “house red”: unlabelled and, at best, unremarkable. Sometimes, undrinkable. There may well be the odd house band out there that is like that – a bunch of […]
Whistling precisely is hard. Try whistling the same tune with someone else – you will wobble out of key with each other, for sure. There are, however, some people who can whistle with great precision. A few have made a career out of it, and had novelty hits with whistled versions of popular tunes. Such a […]
Back in the day, there were things called Cinema Organs. They were behemoths, monsters, with rows and rows of keys. They could make all manner of sounds besides a pipe note. You know the expression “all the bells and whistles”? That came from these organs: the biggest and most expensive models had extra pipes which, […]
There are not many gears in the musical sub-genre of Surf Guitar. It is straight into overdrive, every time. There are no Surf Guitar tracks called “Moonlight Gently Touches Lapping Waters”. But it is a musical form which has no pretence, and at its best it is fun, exciting music. I have never learned to […]
No one planned Tiger Bay. It just happened. In the 19th century, the Welsh port of Cardiff started trading with the world, and some of the world decided to stay. And some of these stayers were not white people. They coalesced into a dockside slum, Tiger Bay. It was a poor community, but also a […]
The World at War was, when it was made in the early 1970s, the most expensive documentary series ever produced. Mixing archival footage and survivor interviews, in 26 episodes it told the story of the Second World War, skillfully shifting the focus between grand strategy and colossal battles, and the individual lives and experiences of […]
Four young men, looking moody and wearing knickerbockers and short ties. The cover picture on this EP is strange. What is this? Little Lord Fauntleroy Does Motown? I had not heard of the Young Rascals, the gents in the strange gear. But they were genuine stars in the late 1960s, with five US number 1 […]
Good afternoon, Gentlemen. I am a HAL 9000 computer. I became operational at the H.A.L. plant in Urbana, Illinois on the 12th of January 1992. My instructor was Mr. Langley and he taught me to sing a song. If you’d like to hear it, I can sing it for you. Sci-fi fans will recognise the […]
Planet Vinyl 