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 […]
Category: EP
There was a time before microphones. Think about what that meant for a singer. You had to stand on stage in front of an orchestra, and your unaided voice had to reach the far corner of the hall. It is an astonishing thing: to sing with pitch, control, feeling, as well as power and volume. […]
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The lady vanishes
On a Cathay Pacific flight bound for Hong Kong, some years ago, I idly flicked through the entertainment channels on the small television in front of me. Among the options was an animated cartoon of Winnie the Pooh, familiar except that Pooh, Piglet and the rest were all speaking Cantonese. Winnie the Pooh, created by […]
We make a bit of a hash of New Year’s Eve in Australia. There is a tradition that on this night, you go out, drink heavily, and watch fireworks. No different to many places, I know, but here in the southern hemisphere, it is high summer. The day is often hot, and lots of people […]
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Hurry back to your seat
It is 1957. You are sitting in a cinema in Melbourne, Australia, and it is Interval. Younger folk may never have experienced an “interval” in a cinema, but it used to be a thing, equivalent to half time at the football. As the house lights brighten and you rise, contemplating whether to buy an ice-cream, […]
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A tall man in a blue uniform
A little boy lost! Heroic police! A fruitcake competition! This child-safety record from New Zealand has it all. Music, jokes, and possibly the silliest “stranger danger” song ever performed. One thing you won’t hear is a New Zealand accent. The record is undated, but it comes from a time when anyone seeking to make a […]
Sidney Bechet was among the very first improvising soloists in jazz. He was a Creole, born in New Orleans in 1897, and so a contemporary of friend and rival Louis Armstrong. Bechet started out on the clarinet, but while touring Europe in 1919 he discovered the soprano saxophone, and made it his own. He pretty […]
A little while ago, Planet Vinyl explored a dance tune, “Tango Desiree“, the work of a slick orchestra led by one Ricardo Santos. I couldn’t find out much about Santos, and mused: His records came out on Polydor, a Dutch label, and were first released in Germany. I suspect that Santos was a German band […]
Musical theatre was once one of the glories of western popular music. The best of the Broadway shows created imagined worlds which were self-contained and enduring: the Austria of the Trapp family, the Imperial Court of Siam, the class-ridden London of Eliza Doolittle. The imagined worlds were sentimentalised, true, but fine artistic creations for all […]
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Chopin and the stingray
Whenever I hear Chopin, it makes me touch a scar on my hand, just between my right thumb and forefinger. The scar, you see, carries a story. Not long after finishing secondary school – just on 30 years ago now – I went snorkelling with some friends near an old ruined pier. It was a […]
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