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As a young metal fan back in the day I spent many a happy hour playing air guitar to the likes of AC/DC and Iron Maiden up in my bedroom. No mean feat either - some of those solos are tricky to pull off and you've got to drum your fingers on your thigh really quickly to keep up. No guitars here, but that didn't stop Winifred Atwell from attacking her own instrument like Steve Vai on crack and any fan of hers would need crazy flipper fingers to play air piano to one of her tunes too.*
'Let's Have Another Party' is a good enough example of the exuberant brand of ivory bashing ware she peddled, and in this case it's a megamix of old standards put through a honky tonk/ragtime blender so that what came out sounds far harder to date than virtually anything in the charts around it. 'Let's Have Another Party' is essentially Jive Bunny with added swing some thirty five years early, though this fusion of tunes is executed with a fine scalpel rather than a lazy axe. It might not necessarily be the soundtrack to the type of party I'd personally enjoy going to, but Atwell sounds like she's playing for herself anyway and having one hell of a time in the process so what the hell; the most enjoyable number one in quite some time and the first black artist to top the UK charts.
* Which I confess I used to do everytime I put down my air guitar long enough to watch Pot Black on the television - Atwell's version of 'Black and White Rag' provided the theme tune.
Pitched somewhere between relic and treasure, the very name Vera Lyn encapsulates for me everything about British popular music before these charts began and in its own way it sets a clear marker between 'them and us' as the latest Grime recording blasting out from a pirate radio station. Co-written be Eddie Calvert* 'My Son, My Son' is a piledriver of sentimentality aimed squarely at the gut with all the grace and finesse of a demob suit as Lynn extols the virtues of her offspring for the world to marvel at: "My son, my son you're everything to me. My son, my son you're all I hoped you'd be".
You simply cannot imagine anybody under the age of about forty deriving any kind of pleasure or enjoyment out of this at all; the grim, middle aged forcefulness of the tune and Lynn's no nonsense schoolmarm aura remind me of 'The Seven Steptoerai' episode of Steptoe and Son where Albert's pensioner friends see off Frankie Barrow's thugs with a display of geriatric kung fu. Except 'My Son, My Son' is devoid of any humour whatsoever - popular music was a serious business back in the fifties, but then so was polio and listening to this is about as enjoyable as catching that after a dip in the local pool.
* Calvert, of course, had already had a hit with the ghastly 'Oh Mein Papa'. Taking both these songs in tandem then maybe it's fair to say he had some parental 'issues' he needed to work through.
Another song from the movies, though this time I'm tempted to believe that 'Hold My Hand' got to number one under its own steam rather than on the back of 'Susan Slept Here' (no, me neither) which I don't think did a lot of business here in the UK. Saying that though, I YouTube'd it and found it a lot more palatable when accompanied by visuals of the ever lovely Debbie Reynolds flouncing around her apartment. Taken in isolation, it's your standard syrup and strings balladry cooked up in Tin Pan Alley and served up with a side order of oily smarm ("So this is the kingdom of heaven, so this is the sweet promised land") from Mr Cornell. * I could go into more detail but I'd just be repeating myself so suffice it to say it's as sturdily and functionally constructed as a prefab garage though unfortunately it generates the same levels of interest.
* Actually, it sounds remarkably similar to Garry Miles' recording of 'Look For A Star'. Or rather, 'Look For A Star' sounds remarkably similar to 'Hold My Hand', seeing as it came out four years later. That featured on a film soundtrack too, 'Circus Of Horrors' no less, though I digress.
There's a scene in John Hughes' 'Planes, Trains and Automobiles' where John Candy and Steve Martin are stranded on a packed bus To try and lift spirits, Candy gets a sing song going and gets all the passengers join in. When it's Martin's turn, he starts up crooning 'Three Coins In The Fountain' and promptly kills the jovial mood stone dead until Candy jump starts it again with a verse of 'Meet The Flintstones'. For my money, it's a presentation that nails this song to a tee.
'Three Coins In The Fountain' is taken from the soundtrack of the eponymous film about three American girls (the 'coins') looking for romance in Rome. It's harmless enough fluff and Sammy Cahn's lyrics are faithful to the plot to the point of inanity - "Three hearts in a fountain, each heart longing for its home. There they lie in the fountain, somewhere in the heart of Rome"; it's hardly Cahn's finest hour, yet Sinatra phrases them almost conversationally with the sincerity of one confessing to a priest. And it's precisely the fact that Sinatra is able to elevate this nonsense to a higher plane is the secret behind the song's enduring appeal - an appeal which, truth be told, has always baffled me.
It's true that for much of his career, Sinatra could find an internal melody amongst the bland text on a cereal packet. He does as much here too, but his efforts are akin to a boot sale painting of a blubbing child being passed off as a Raphael. Sinatra could get away with it simply because he's Sinatra, but in lesser hands (such as Steve Martin's back on that bus), the flat spinelessness of 'Three Coins In The Fountain' soon has the listener realising that this particular Emperor really has no clothes long before it dribbles to a close. Flintstones, meet the Flintstones, they're the modern stone age family.........
I've often thought that within every musical genre, there's a sub-genre known as 'the last dance song'. It doesn't matter if you're at a metal or reggae or rap or whatever bash, there's always a song to slow dance to at the end of the night while gazing into your loved one's eyes just before the lights come on. There's no doubt I'd class 'Little Things Mean A Lot' as a 'last dance' kind of song, albeit one from an unlikely source - Kallen was a forties big band singer on her second go round with a song that dampens the tempo on her usual pace both in tone and in lyrics with only an intermittent muted cornet acting as a signpost to her past.
Kallen is no material girl, the little things in life mean the most ("Give me your arm as we cross the street, call me at six on the dot. A line a day when you're far away, little things mean a lot") and the clear as a bell yearning in her voice makes this a more touching affair than some lungbusting declaration of eternal love. More than pleasant yet less than great, 'Little Things Mean A Lot' has a timeless universality that still appeals but lacks the iconic spark to mark it out as a classic. A far bigger star in her native USA, Kallen never followed this up with anything in the UK and so gives us another first - the first one hit wonder.
Though variously known as "Mr. Emotion", "The Nabob of Sob" and "The Prince of Wails" 'Such A Night' finds Johnnie Ray upbeat of mood as he reminisces about what seems less than a one night stand and more like a one night kiss. Well Johnnie's excited enough for the record to have been banned by the BBC for 'excesive panting' anyway, but the music playing behind him is excessive pants - 'Such A Night' is an apt follow up to 'Secret Love' in that it neatly highlights what I see as the split between the old and the new.
On this, Ray is restless to break free, an aural Steve McQueen in 'The Great Escape'; in the telling of his tale, Ray's vocal is up and down, quick and slow, squashed and stretched in it's attempt to find a freedom to express though it's kept in captivity by the hail of bullets and barbed wire fence of the restricting stonewall of lazy backing vocals and one trick drum click rhythm that ultimately bring him down. What he really needed were The Jordanaires (who backed Presley on his 1963 version) behind him - Ray is certainly far enough ahead of his time to have employed their services in 1954 so it's a shame his reliance on mutton instead of lamb should derail all the good envelope stretching work he puts in.
I've always been a fan of the horror/sci-fi genre. My love stretches right back to the days in the 1970's when the BBC used to have a season of horror double bills on Saturday night. Generally, they'd show the Universal Dracula's and Frankenstein's in sequence first before something more up to date afterwards. But despite my ongoing interest, then as now I've never been keen on anything with 'meets' or 'versus' in the title; 'Frankenstein Meets The Wolfman', 'Freddy vs Jason', 'Alien vs Predator' - none have added up to anything more than the sum of their parts and are, to a film, quite dreadful.
When faced with David Whitfield 'meeting' Mantovani, then a horror scenario of it's own is conjured up, but unlike the above films, this one does not disappoint. Whitefield's faux operatics meet Mantovani's faux classicism in a very real sludge of over emotional overflow that aims high but hits low. 'Cara Mia' likes to think it was specially scripted for Caruso to belt out at La Scala, yet the only thing it calls to my mind are those mock, redbrick mansions built with new money but given an old world air by the application of huge, plastic columns and buttresses that serve no purpose other than to kid eyes bleached clean of all taste and cultural appreciation that they are gazing at something genteel. Hurry up Elvis, fer gawd's sake.
From most of my tart comments to date it must seem to the casual observer that I've got a total downer on music from the fifties. Not so. There are any number of singles from the era that I love and cherish with their only fault being that they stalled short of the number one spot (considerably short in some cases, it has to be said). Those songs that did make it to the peak thus far have for the most part fallen down through trying too hard; too sentimental, too earnest, too fussy, too overwrought and too emotionally overloaded - all they've managed to do is create an overmade, overdone and overdressed approximation of what I'd call a 'pop' song, much like Danny La Rue going overboard with the slap and frocks to the extent that he could only ever be seen as a man in a dress. In other words, the exact opposite of what he set out to achieve, (albeit intentional in Danny's case).
In logically following my own interpretation, 'pop' should be more subtle, more Thai ladyboy than drag queen if you like. But see, I can't blame the songs for not falling in line with my own definition of what a number one should be all about can I? These early hits were 'pop' as in 'popular', and when you've spent eighteen weeks at number one then your popularity simply can't be denied. By that definition at least, they are all pop songs par excellence
But in writing all this, I'm not trying to be some xenophobic tourist in a foreign land complaining loudly about everything from the food to the weather to the fact the roadsigns are in a different language - there's an element of archaeology involved here too, a cultural timeline to excavate that reveals this thing called 'pop' was slowly morphing into something more than just an abbreviation. Listening to 'Secret Love', I get the same feeling that Robinson Crusoe must have got the first time he spotted Man Friday's footprint in the sand; at last, there's something familiar here in the wilderness, something comforting that makes me feel less of an illegal alien amongst Guy Mitchell and the gang. Not perfect, by no means perfect, but 'Secret Love' has, via its arrangement and performance, a lightness of touch and a genuineness born of confidence that you won't get from a facefull of mascara and lipstick pasted on with a trowel.
In modern parlance, 'Secret Love' is probably best know through the upbeat version that Kathy Kirby cut in 1963 and hearing Day's more languid take can wrong foot the unwary. Kirby's shout slants the 'secret' until it implies all manner of adulterous wrongdoing (there's also a gay angle that's frequently exploited with the 'secret' being equated to the 'love that dare not speak its name'). True, this can be read into the current version too, but taken solely in context in which Day is performing it (the musical 'Calamity Jane' at a point where Jane/Day is out of town and musing over Wild Bill Hickcock), then that little bit of knowledge comes loaded with the potential to kill all this stone dead.* But thankfully, 'Secret Love' is a strong song. Strong enough to shrug off such ridiculous baggage anyway.
Day's voice helps enormously in all this; hardwired with a smile, it's all natural and effortless when compared to the company it's keeping in these charts. Never stiff or formal, when Day soars (as she does on "Now I shout it from the highest hills") then it's because she means it and not simply because the arrangement calls for a bit of oomph. Yes the song is still heavy on the soup of soppy balladry, but the orchestration is light enough to give Day the room to breath that she needs to do her thing, and in so doing she gives 'Secret Love' a modern veneer that wouldn't sound too out of place in today's charts.
Any number of X Factor wannabes could pitch up with this at audition, and in 1954 it was like placing a modern racing bike in a line-up of Penny Farthings. Whilst undoubtedly ahead of it's time, 'pop' music was quick to catch up and overtake it, but not to pull so far ahead as to leave it out of sight in the rear view mirror and languishing in the dirt. Which is the fate that's befallen much of what's gone before us so far.
* And if you've seen the scene from the movie where a pristine white toothed and freshly scrubbed up Day sings it on horseback in a Technicolor Wild West that looks more like the Wonderful World Of Oz than the land that Calamity Jane/Robin Weigert rode in the hyperealistic 'Deadwood,' then that death will come all the quicker.
Not one but two firsts this time - not only were The Stargazers the first act to score consecutive number ones with consecutive chart hits, 'I See The Moon' can also go down as the UK's first comedy/novelty chart topper. And after the strait laced, Salvation Army drone of 'Broken Wings', it's a comedic approach that comes as a surprise akin to watching a nun defecate in the gutter.
'I See The Moon' derives its humour from its presentation, an anarchic yard sale of drunken barrel house piano and an even drunker choir of raucous, in and out of tune voices and interjects that hang as a neat link on a very British chain that stretches from music hall through to The Goons right up to Monty Python* Ok, maybe I'm being over generous in my comparators there, but one of the most praiseworthy things I can say about this is that I genuinely can't tell if this is all a one take improvisation or if every squawk and clang has been carefully scripted.
I suspect the truth lies somewhere in-between, but in truth it doesn't matter all that much - the end product is the same and your reaction to it will depend solely on your tolerance of strained japery and how much humour you find in a silly voice. I've never been much of a fan of The Goons and their ilk and so for my own part I listened to the first minute or so with open mouthed horror and acute embarrassment on behalf of a group of people labouring under the illusion that they are in any way funny. But as it wears on I'm gradually won over by the flat out left of centre weirdness of it all. We'll have to wait until 'Mouldy Old Dough' before anything quite so odd tops the charts again, and although 'I See The Moon' hasn't aged a tenth as well as Lieutenant Pigeon's tune, it deserves a separate shelf of its own that stands apart from those usually reserved for the 'golden oldies'.
* There was also a contemporary American version of this by The Mariners, but try as I might I can't track a copy down to compare notes.
Another song from Germany 'Oh Mein Papa' hails from a 1939 musical but it's a tune that's enjoyed an enduring popularity throughout the years (Eddie Fisher had a version at number one in the American charts at the same time as this). Enduring perhaps, but not that endearing - typical sentimental schlock, 'Oh Mein Papa' is a song of a son/daughter addressing their now aged parent with a wistful eye - "Oh my papa, to me he was so wonderful. Oh, my papa, to me he was so good". And so on.
Well that's how it goes when the lyrics are sung anyway - Brit trumpeter Calvert's version is a more or less an instrumental take, his horn blaring out the main theme with a bricks on eggs lightness of touch while a female backing choir repeats the title on a loop that alternates with some ghostly wailing that's a dead ringer for the ghostly wailing on the Star Trek theme music. As abrasive as this all is (and it is. Very.), around halfway along an old time Wurlitzer organ chips in to the mix with a sound that evokes a dusty Brylcreem and Woodbines fifties feeling like no other song has done so far.
To be honest, 'Oh Mein Papa' leaves me scratching my head. Both then and now, I can't imagine what anybody would get out of hearing it, let alone wanting to buy and own it (nine weeks at the top for this one). As light entertainment it's about as attractive as a rusted dental brace with any sentimentality the original song may have possessed roughly sandpapered out by the car crash harshness of the mix. And while there's a beat there of sorts to shuffle dance to, I can't believe anybody in their right minds would ever want to. All quite horrible really.
'This Ole House' was written by Stuart Hamblen after he allegedly stumbled across a shotgun shack in the mountains that had the owner lying dead among the ruins. Hence: "This ole house is gettin' feeble, this old house is needin' paint. Just like me it's tuckered out, but I'm a-gettin' ready to meet the saints". Morbid stuff maybe, but I've never heard a downbeat version of this and Clooney's own take is a pop/rockabilly crossover with fuel injection. Clooney herself is pushed to the fore and roars along with gusto, but she never manages to sound like she's really enjoying herself; there's a hesitancy here that implies a desire to give the lyric a greater respect than reducing it to the sound of a barn dance. The interjection of a male bass vocal on the 'Ain't gonna need this house no longer' is good value, but Clooney's ultimate starchiness stops the party getting out of hand and there's not half as much fun as Shakin' Stevens would come to wring out of it.
As a young metal fan back in the day I spent many a happy hour playing air guitar to the likes of AC/DC and Iron Maiden up in my bedroom. No mean feat either - some of those solos are tricky to pull off and you've got to drum your fingers on your thigh really quickly to keep up. No guitars here, but that didn't stop Winifred Atwell from attacking her own instrument like Steve Vai on crack and any fan of hers would need crazy flipper fingers to play air piano to one of her tunes too.* 
