1959 Russ Conway: Side Saddle

I can remember once asking my mother what it was really like back in the sixties and her replying 'well they didn't bloody swing around here". I can relate to that now - I wasn't alive for most of the sixties, but after effectively growing up in the eighties I always find myself cocking a wry snook at those who think it was a day glo era of big hair and pastel suits. Because it wasn't. Not round here anyway. I wasn't alive in the fifties either, but to my idealistic mind it was all expresso bars, pony tails and Wurlitzer jukeboxes. And whilst the presence in the charts of Elvis and his buddies only serves to egg me on, it's the appearance of the likes of Russ Conway that lets in the most light to give probably clearer picture of the true state of Britain in 1959.

A pianist by trade, next to the finger shredding runs of Winifred Atwell Conway is a far more relaxed player with a lighter touch, a Hank Marvin to her Steve Vai.* Lightness can be a virtue, but the self penned 'Side Saddle' and its production is an inconsequential dribble of light entertainment that comes with a lack of guts and a surfeit of repetition that fails to hold the attention beyond the first couple of bars; something as short as it is really shouldn't get so boring so quickly.

'Side Saddle' has the quaint and dusty feel of a pianola endlessly tinkling out it's scrolled rhythm to no one in some long abandoned Western ghost town. To my mind it conjures up an image dreary black and white world of lardy cakes, weak tea, half day closing, de-mob suits and BBC radio's 'Light Programme', and in that respect it forever puts me in mind of Verne, the half brother of the narrator of Colin MacInnes' 1958 novel 'Absolute Beginners'. Verne was a bitter 25 year old in 1958, too old to enjoy the lifestyle of the new breed of teenagers yet young enough to feel bitter at missing out on what his teenage half brother was experiencing. The jollity of 'Side Saddle' tries hard to make friends with its perma grin cheer, but it missed the party to such an extent that it must have felt old and in the way mere seconds after it was recorded.

* Perhaps because one of his fingers had already been shredded courtesy of an accident with a bread slicer.