Colin H on ‘Melody Maker’ 1/1/55 – what fun was Britain having 70 years ago?
70 Years Ago Today
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Musings on the byways of popular culture
Musings on the byways of popular culture
Colin H on ‘Melody Maker’ 1/1/55 – what fun was Britain having 70 years ago?
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Yet again, the text didn’t appear. Baffling.
I shared on social media yesterday pics of all 16 pages from ‘Melody Maker’ 1/1/55 – 70 years ago yesterday. A snapshot of what was entertaining the nation. I can’t post more than page 1 here, but hopefully the commentary alone will suffice. (If anyone wants to wrestle with the picture uploading thing, PM me for pages 2-16.)
Page 1 (cover) – a photo of Eddie Calvert, ‘The Man with the Golden Trumpet’, who had two instrumental UK No.1 hits in 1954 and ’55 (‘Oh, Meine Papa’ and ‘Cherry Blossom Pink’), the latter of which was also a US Top 10 – very rare for a British artist pre-Beatles. Eddie was also a pioneering anti-apartheid activist, moving to South Africa in the late 60s.
Also on page 1, we see a photo of future MOR harmony singing impresario and Light Entertainment god Mike Sammes – he would found his prolific Mike Sammes Singers later that year, 1955, and aside from the torrents of soporific cheese they recorded, they would also be heard on the Beatles ‘I Am the Walrus’ and on their ‘Let It Be’ album. (Producer Phil Spector simply wouldn’t let it be – he thought ‘Let’s hire an orchestra and the Mike Sammes Singers’.)
Page 2 – A fabulous hostage to fortune: a music publisher, on the back of Larry Adler’s rise to fame, predicts that chromatic harmonicas will replace the recorder as the prime instrument of school music tuition. I wonder how that worked out? š
Pages 2 & 3 – Leonard Feather subjects Duke Ellington to a combative interview, complaining that Duke’s latest record sounds nothing like Duke Ellington (Neil Young would face similar complaints in the 80s). Feather accuses Ellington and his lieutenant Billy Strayhorn of being lazy and not writing enough new material. Take that, Duke! š Ellington was in the doldrums in the mid 50s – his career rebirth came at the Newport Festival 1956, when he was actually out of contract as a recording artist. Perhaps following Feather’s hectoring, he and Strayhorn had written a new piece for it, ‘Festival Junction’ – but it flopped on the day. The following item in the set, though, single-handedly revitalised his career (yes, out of contract or not, the show was recorded and later released) – ‘Diminuendo in Blue’, in which saxophonist Paul Gonsalves blew a solo for 27 choruses – single-handedly, one might suggest, inventing progressive rock. Take THAT, Leonard Feather! š
Page 4 – the singular George Melly, halfway through his 1949-61 career as colourful, camp blues-singing frontman with the band of trumpeter Mick Mulligan (‘king of the ravers’), reviews a US blues LP and shows signs of the brilliant writer and cultural commentator he would become, spending most of the review critiquing the spurious ‘Mississippi baroque’ style of writing found on the sleevenotes of such releases. A photo of Melly in typically outrageous pose, jamming with the Alex Welsh Band (stalwarts of British ‘mainstream’ jazz for many years) is found on page 6.
Page 5 – po-faced pontificator Steve Race, who was a doyen of those really stuffy highbrow music panel shows on BBC in the 70s, profiles, with a raised eyebrow, emerging US piano sensation Liberace and decides he isn’t good enough to appear at the London Palladium.
Page 6 – a typically grinning publicity photo of accordionist/bandleader Tito Burns. Burns was remarkably good at getting publicity for himself in the 50s – though I still can’t get my head around anyone being interested in ‘jazz accordion’. He later turned this genius with PR into his role as an agent in the 60s – notoriously appearing in a sequence of mendacious telephone calls to promoters in the Bob Dylan film ‘Don’t Look Back’. (Burns appears in another photo in this issue – like I said, he found publicity easy.)
Page 7 – Current affairs colossus Richard Dimbleby (who began the Dimbleby family business of commentating in deferential tones on various state funerals and coronations) is pictured playing a vibraphone on TV – beating xylophone-bothering astronomer Patrick Moore to this sort of thing by several years.
Also on page 7, we learn that the conservative Radio Eireann is becoming rattled by the success/influence in Ireland of popular-music broadcaster Radio Luxembourg, and plans to introduce three ‘sponsored’ programmes as a result (commercial entities buying airtime to sell soap powder etc. in between popular music discs).
Page 9 – a glimpse of perpetual pop person Petula Clark at a recording session – for what would be her second UK chart hit, ‘Majorca’. Her career, incredibly, began as a radio and TV performer in 1942. She is, I think, the only person featured in this MM edition still performing. She appeared at Fairport Convention’s Cropredy Festival in 2017 (her first ever festival appearance) and a couple of years earlier I interviewed her for ‘Bathed in Lightning’ – yes, she’s a John McLaughlin fan. š
Page 10 – take note of that advert for Humphrey Lyttelton’s Club at ‘Mack’s’ on 100 Oxford Street. Mack’s was the original restaurant on the site; it then became the (Victor) Feldman Club (1942-54) – Feldman being a British jazz prodigy on piano, vibes and drums. Feldman emigrated to the US in late ’54 and Lyttelton’s manager/agent Lyn Dutton took over the premises. On page 12 we read a news items confirming the advertised show (Humph, Chris Barber, Manchester’s Zenith Six etc.) as the first event at the new club, which will now have a trad jazz policy. While Humph himself was by 1955 a kind of halfway house between trad and modern jazz – his own category, really – the ‘trad boom’ was fast approaching, when people like Acker Bilk and others in fancy dress would dominate British Light Entertainment in the couple of years before the Beatles. It was still ‘street level’ in 1955, though Chris Barber especially was thriving on the city hall concert circuit – popular enough to afford to bring over a succession of US blues artists (Big Bill Broonzy, Rosetta Tharpe, Muddy Waters etc.), which fuelled the UK folk and blues movements that surged in the 1960s. The 100 Club’s mostly trad policy remained into the 70s, though ‘Year Zero’ types will recall it for hosting an early ‘punk festival’ in September 1976.
In the supplement (4 pages), we see clarinettist and Van The Man hero Sidney Bechet (‘Sidney Bechet… Sidney Bechet!!! SIDNEY BECHET!!!!!!!!!’ etc.) in a photo from a French film – France being the place that takes jazz seriously as an art form.
Elsewhere in this edition, we find a profile of variety artistes Doctor Crock (of Doctor Crock and the Crackpots) and a photo of Sid Millward (of Sid Millward and the Nitwits) – the popularity of whom shows how unlikely it was that Britain would ever take anything very seriously.
On Jazz Records Requests the other week they played a record from 1949 by the Steve Race Bop group ā which was described as one of the earliest British bop recordings. It seemed quite creditable, and a bit of a contrast with Steve Raceās later image on TV. Some time ago, BBC4 showed archive footage of the Modern Jazz Quartet playing with a bossa nova guitarist, whose name Iāve forgotten, and Steve Race, introducing it, pointed out that he used his fingers not a plectrum, which he described as the āproperā way to play. He seems to have taken a similar path to Benny Green, of disapproving of innovations in jazz which had occurred after he stopped playing.
I recall seeing that very clip. He really was the wrong side of history there – a prescriptive fuddy-duddy.
I wonder how he felt presenting ‘My Music’, with ‘Graham Dalley at the Mellotron’. At the time, that would have been as if a musical instrument from the future, at odds with his apparent persona.
I think the guitarist would have been Laurindo Almeida.
Itās a mysterious world to me but there are names peppered around like Steve Race, George Melly, Larry Adler, who were TV regulars in the 70s but even then seemed to be throwbacks to this long-gone, sepia-tinted age. I went to a My Music recording as a child and witnessed Race alongside Frank Muir, Dennis Norden and the Desmond Morris doppelgƤnger, Ian Wallace.
Their dusty reminiscences of gramophone records from 40 years ago was a soothing way to spend time, I had very little idea of who they were talking about – it was the stories that lit up shows like that. I would be interested in seeing a similar format about the 70s and 80s but without all the shouting, wackiness and scripted comedy from the same 6 people that are always on these things.
I though Ian Wallace was a sort of washed out Ronnie Corbett.
Here’s George Melly in 1956 with tracks from his ‘Melly Sings Doom’ EP:
Ian Wallace was the cobbler in George Pal’s Tom Thumb.
He was later in King Crimson, too.
And here’s Humph at the Feldman Club, which became the Humphrey Lyttelton Club in January 1955:
And here’s Steve Race rocking the house:
Lovely stuff, Colin! In 1955 I was far from the hipster I was shortly to become – my first 78 purchase, Tommy Steeleās The Duke Wore Jeans, was still 3 years away – but all those names are very familiar to me, presumably from the steam wireless.
Thanks Colin, for several laugh-out-loud moments in that piece! š
Hurrah! I’ve become a Light Entertainer! š
The very film scene with Sidney Bechet (‘…Sidney Bechet! SIDNEY BECHET!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! etc etc’) glimpsed in a photo in the MM issue above.
A fan-created visualo representation of the legendary Duke Ellington Newport ’56 ‘Diminuendo & Crescendo in Blue’. The invention of prog-rock!
I think I am of a similar vintage to @mikethep – my first records were from 1956, bought for by my very hip auntie (not being sarcy – she was into Elvis etc at a very early age) and they were Dick Jamesā Ballad of Davy Crockett/Robin Hood (produced by George Martin, no less) on a red Parlophone 78, and Frankie Laineās deathless Champion the Wonder Horse. Apparently this was 1956. I played them to death, and that was the start of the long slippery slope of listening to records, and the radio of course. Music was always playing in our house, and whatever was on I absorbed whilst on the floor my toy soldiers, train set, Scalextric, Meccano and so on!
Ah yes, Davy Crockett! I was allowed to take my younger sister to see the Davy Crockett movie, with strict instructions to bring her home if she was frightened by it. I was 8 and she was 5, so I donāt know what my parents were thinking. The supporting feature was a Mr Pastry movie – she took one look at Mr Pastry and completely freaked out. What sheād have made of Davy Crockett killing a bāar when he was only 3 weāll never know.