Planet VinylPretty much everyone who celebrates Christmas will put an angel on the tree. Ever wondered why? I was chatting on the phone to my stepmother yesterday, as I won’t be able to see her for Christmas. At her church she has been part of a group studying angels and how they have been depicted and […]
Muggsy Spanier. The name suggests a gangster from the Al Capone era, but Francis Joseph “Muggsy” Spanier was a musician. Given that the mob controlled all the best nightclubs in those days, and that, like Capone, Spanier was a native of Chicago, they might have crossed paths. Muggsy played the cornet. The what? It’s a […]
Five things I did not know about Ella Fitzgerald She was born in 1917 in Virginia, but moved with her mother to New York State as a child, part of the Great Migration of African Americans seeking a better life in the northern states. Her mother died in a car crash in 1932, when Ella […]
“The rollyng stone neuer gatherth mosse,” wrote John Heywood in his collection of “all the prouerbes in the englishe tongue”, published in London in 1546. A modern dictionary explains the meaning of this durable saying: “a person who does not settle in one place will not accumulate wealth, status, friends, etc … with allusion to […]
I have just read an article in which the author “hopes to catch that fugitive thing—Englishness”. He could do worse, I reckon, than contemplate the fictional secret agent John Steed. Here he is, in company of Emma Peel, with whom he shared many a rip-roaring adventure, saving the world from various villains in the 1960s […]
If George Michael, born Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou, is spanakopita transformed into white bread, what are we to make of the career of Arnold George Dorsey? Performing as Gerry Dorsey, he was small-big in the UK in the 1950s. He was featured on television shows, and toured with Marty Wilde (best known now as father of […]
A tin whistle. A parade-ground drum. A slightly out-of-tune pub piano playing sort-of boogie-woogie. Someone who sounds like a dero growling out “mo-oo-ouldy old dough!”. What part of this combination suggests “four weeks at the top of the British pop charts”? Just in case you were unaware that truth is stranger than fiction, I offer […]
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 […]
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