Planet Vinyl
A little while ago I wrote about the Pizza Principle: do not judge the music of a country by the pizza named after it. The principle applies most obviously to Hawaii, where tourist clichés obscure a rich musical tradition. Discovering the wonderful steel guitar playing of Sol Ho’opi’i inspired me to be more open minded […]
Six degrees of separation between Dr Barnardo and John Travolta. Thomas John Barnardo was an Irish philanthropist. While training as a doctor in London in the 1860s, he became aware of the miserable plight of the many homeless children in the city’s slums. He established the first of “Dr Barnardo’s Homes” for children in that […]
In the 1950s there was a person with the initials G.S. who lived in my area. He or she liked music and collected records. I know this, because a box of 10-inch shellac records turned up in an op-shop near me, and most of them had “G.S.” neatly written on them. Sometimes, G.S. used a […]
Another star of another time, now pretty much forgotten. Carmen Cavallaro. “The Poet of the Piano”, they called him. American born, of Italian heritage, Cavallaro was classically trained but in the 1930s he shifted to playing jazz and swing in ballrooms and nightclubs. He used his classical expertise to adorn popular tunes with what the […]
It is easily 25 years since I read J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, but I still remember the pivotal scene vividly. Holden Caulfield is speaking to his sister Phoebe, who is pretty much the only person he trusts. “You know that song ‘If a body catch a body comin’ through the rye’? … […]
When I was a teenager, I sort-of-learned to play the flute. I never got very good at it, because I rarely practiced. My feeling after each lesson, as I packed the flute into its brown plastic case, and the case into my school bag, and began the long journey home (two buses and over an […]
Trevor Stanford was born on in 1925 in Bristol, the seaport in the west of England. A man born in that time and place was pretty much certain to go to war – Germany invaded Poland the day before he turned thirteen – and he did, serving in the Royal Navy. His military service saw […]
The vinyl microgroove LP was launched in 1949. So when this record was released, late in 1952, the technology was still new, exciting and expensive. One of the many superior features of the vinyl record is hard to appreciate, unless you have handled a shellac gramophone disc. Or, more to the point dropped one. Think […]
I spent many years being prejudiced against opera. It wasn’t really opera’s fault. What happened was that when I was a teenager, my parents divorced. I lived with my Mum and every couple of weeks traveled to stay with Dad. Dad was a loving and kind man but, like many Australian men of his generation, […]
Eddie Carl was a doo wop singer. He seems to have had a few hits in the late 1950s, but they can’t have been that big because I can find out nothing about him. On the other hand, he must have made a bit of an impact, because he recorded in America on the Decca […]
Planet Vinyl