1953 Guy Mitchell: She Wears Red Feathers

In which a London banker gives up the good life to travel to what sounds like Kong island to marry a native woman who lives on coconuts and fish in a ceremony attended by baboons and elephants. On paper it sounds pure Victorian music hall but in truth it's a product of 1952 America, an era that saw the craze for a genre that came to be called 'Exotica' - that is, a safe, middle class idea of the culture and music of Oceanic countries that rustled up a hint of the forbidden in the comfort of your own home.

Of course, at heart it was pure fantasy that bore as much relation to reality as a John Wayne western, but it enjoyed an armchair safe popularity and within the genre Les Baxter's 1952 album 'Ritual of the Savage' is a benchmark with Martin Denny, Esquivel and Yma Sumac always getting honourable mentions in dispatches. 'She Wears Red Feathers' is part and parcel of the same though this time it's played for laughs.

Or perhaps more accurately, it's played for a patronising smugness that drips from every bar of the tribal musical flourishes to the "GEE WILLIKERS, aren't I just the craziest!!!!" tone ('cocynuts' indeed) that reaches it's nadir when Mitchell brings his exotic prize home for the 'boys at the London bank' to goggle at in amazement as she drinks tea with the white folk. This all may have worked had there been at least a spark of humour in there somewhere, but time has given it a nasty edge that a postmodern critic could dismiss as popularising ethnic imperialism but which I'd rather dismiss as 'annoying drek'.