Cliff RICHARD and The SHADOWS: Summer Holiday

(#33: 2 February 1963, 14 weeks)

Track listing: Seven Days To A Holiday/Summer Holiday/Let Us Take You For A Ride/Les Girls/Round And Round/Foot Tapper/Stranger In Town/Orlando’s Mime/Bachelor Boy/A Swingin’ Affair/Really Waltzing/All At Once/Dancing Shoes/Yugoslav Wedding/The Next Time/Big News

“I stumbled out with my bundles. I smiled. Everybody smiled. The snow was a huge joke, and our predicament that of Alpine climbers marooned in a cartoon.”
(Plath, “Snow Blitz,” January 1963)

Setting both biography and hindsight aside – for now – “Snow Blitz” is a lively, exasperated portrait of a Britain starving for change, a Britain still marooned in the post-war cartoon of making do and mending, a Britain whose citizens muck on by as amiably and incompetently as they have ever done, their boots frozen to a lackadaisical lake of “can’t do.” A monochromatic Britain guiltily hungry for colour and life.

Set this next to the eager, Technicolor, world-embracing “Can Do!” of Cliff and his fellow jolly bus engineers and it’s easy to see how Summer Holiday, both the film and its music, enraptured and captured its willing audience; indeed, one can already see how Cliff’s idea of free enterprise made most of his audience keen for Thatcherism a generation down the line. The British winter of 1963 was an especially wretched one, and the new phenomenon of inexpensive foreign holiday travel – escape from winter, shiny, yellow refuge from all that we know - was hugely inviting. So it’s instructive to remember just how popular and even empathetic Summer Holiday was through these grimmest of times.

As in The Young Ones, Cliff is avid, up for it but always with a cocky eye set towards future balance sheets. His Indian background does, I feel, come into major play in this movie; the album cover, both in terms of typography and photography, suggests a strayed Bollywood picture, and I sense none-too-distant links with Slumdog Millionaire, although Cliff & Co.’s adventures are strictly for laughs, any underlying dirt as scrupulously scrubbed out as ever. He decides to customise an about-to-become-disused Number 9 London bus (remember that number as this tale approaches the other end of the sixties) and take it across Europe, not simply for the pleasure of it but to test whether the idea would work on a larger, profitable scale. Before he reaches the Acropolis he has to deal with gender bending, reluctant American child stars, scheming mothers and agents, petty crime framing, Ron Moody, and sundry mishaps in various stages of national dress – is this Lynch’s Wild At Heart I see far beyond me? – but all, inevitably and invariably, ends well; his future is mapped out and is clearly going to be a happy one.

“Summer Holiday” the song remains as daftly optimistic as anything to come out of early sixties Britain, a shimmering stroll through a future that everyone seemed to deserve, though its writers Bruce Welch and Brian Bennett are careful to retain some sense of ambiguity within its cheery hopefulness; the double bluff, for instance, of “We’ve seen it in the movies/Now let’s see if it’s true” (although we are in fact watching a movie) and the suggestion of long-term rain in the pizzicato string lines drizzling over Hank’s solo. Also, note the vaguely ominous vibes/piano figure which briefly jousts with Cliff’s carefree humming at fadeout before withering in amicable defeat.

The soundtrack as a whole sums up much of what this tale has told thus far, which is fitting as it does mark the literal end of an era; many of the songs remain tailored to the still viable notion of All Round Entertainment set up with The Duke Wore Jeans and follow the classic pattern of film musicals which has formed the dominant voice in this tale to date, whether Rodgers and Hammerstein or Presley and Richard. There is even a song entitled “A Swingin’ Affair,” a leisurely vibes/flute-pedalled affair in which Cliff – assisted by Grazina Frame, back to dub juvenile lead Lauri Peters’ singing voice - does his best to be Sinatra, though his “a ring-a-ding-ding” is unlikely to awaken or arouse any grandmothers and, as with the album in general, he does his best to avoid matters inconvenient or explicit: “We’ll enjoy the music,” he and Frame sing, “but we won’t fall in love.”

Otherwise, it’s Mickey Rooney time again; “Seven Days To A Holiday” sees Cliff excitedly urging his co-workers to turn the bus into a fountain of red magic (“We will check everywhere/Though it’s hard to get there”; “Cor blimey, what a shower!”). The unlikely “Let Us Take You For A Ride” alternates between a slow, bass clarinet-driven crawl of a swing in which Cliff explains in painstaking technical detail (deconstruction!) to Una Stubbs’ girl group exactly why their car won’t start and an explosion of brisk cantering as Cliff pleads with them to board their bus. “There’s no need to look terrified,” he rather startlingly chuckles at one point.

There are also travel-oriented setpieces and ballads; “Really Waltzing” is an extraordinary piece of meta-Strauss self-commentary in which a baffled Cliff, seventeen years ahead of David Byrne, wonders exactly how he got here (“How did I get so square?”). “I know this kind of music makes me sick and you sick,” he remarks. “Still, I’m aware.” It’s a telling comment and one which could frequently be used against some of the things he went on to do (not least “Really Waltzing” itself, which ends up being hijacked by two Mike Sammes Singers bearing terrible German accents and rhyming “houses” with “cowses”). The waltz then speeds up and the original (unfilmed) ending of the “Dance Of The Dead” episode of The Prisoner comes instantly to mind.

The ballads tread a faintly treacherous path between schmaltz and truth. “Stranger In Town” wanders inoffensively (“Every girl is a beautiful girl when you’re a stranger in town” etc.) before veering off, via a segment of whistling backed by Deadwood Stage woodblocks, into a series of orchestral pastiches staggering from the Danube to Dixieland. Cliff’s good vocal on “All At Once” is offset, not to say drowned, by gruellingly dolorous 101 Strings lines and a melancholy muted trombone solo (probably Don Lusher). Set against this, “The Next Time” is a finely regretful, beautifully timed country-tinged performance fuelled by Hank’s chunky piano block chords – as always, Cliff seems far more himself when the Shadows are with him – and we’ll come back to the question of Cliff losing sleep in due course as this tale lengthens out. “Bachelor Boy” has since gained some notoriety, not least in part to its predicating, in tune, tempo and arrangement, “You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away,” but seems less of a closeted closet admission and more of the most reluctant pro-laddism song ever written (Cliff co-wrote it with Welch) since he’s happy to be a free and untethered youth until he finally settles down and has A Wife and A Child.

It is the Shadows-led rockers which point the brightest way over the bridge that this album forms, especially the trio of Shads instrumentals on side one. “Les Girls” bears a hardness to its swing and guitar cut-and-thrust which most readily anticipates Liverpool, complete with an exhilarating mid-section where Bennett’s drums explode, and a concluding series of trapdoors of successive key changes. “Round And Round” (which ends very abruptly) and “Foot Tapper” (a different version to the chart-topping 45, in a lower key and with a fadeout rather than an ending) maintain the momentum, and again Bennett’s drumming seems markedly predominant.

Finally Cliff and the Shads prepare to rock, though there are already signs of rebellion; the nursery rhyme-engineered “Dancing Shoes” is scarred by Hank’s repeated jagged dissonant snarls (and his raspberry of a tongue-sticking-out introduction). However, as the film ends and Cliff gets both marriage and business proposals, “Big News” slides like a happier variant on “His Latest Flame” (thanks, Lena). “I want to make a statement!” proclaims Cliff (his third co-composer credit on the album). “I’ve found a plan for living!” The tickertape parade fades out and closes this section of our tale, though both Stanley Black orchestral interludes deserve brief mention; in particular “Yugoslav Wedding”’s string and brass figures directly predict the Overture to The Lexicon Of Love, and the piece’s varispeed in-and-out-of-dissonance trundle must surely have been an influence on the younger AR Rahman. Just as Slumdog Millionaire concludes with an exultantly triumphant dance in a train station, so does Summer Holiday end with a modestly victorious bop around a bus. Life, meanwhile, will trundle on, providing its subjects with a lesser or different future than they might have expected. In January 1963 General de Gaulle vetoed Britain ’s entry into the Common Market; and as for idyllic travel, March 1963 saw Beeching’s marathon closing of less than profitable railway branch lines. And then there was Profumo. Britain ’s bus services would eventually become denationalised and opened out to competition to the detriment of all concerned except shareholders; this was Cliff’s idea made cold rationalist reality. And then there was the collapse, and a 2009 London as incapable of dealing with snowfalls as the 1963 London, and constrained Britons forsaking expensive holiday travel for more local comforts. The film's director Peter Yates would in time consider fast moving cars as a substitute for friendly-faced buses. In the context of this tale, a new chapter is about to begin, and Plath would not survive the winter to see it or live through it. But the cheer was as unquenchable as ever, and we were very careful not to burn any bridges, particularly those down which we might have to backtrack in any future.

“Oddly enough, no one really beefed…The cheer seemed universal. We were all mucking in together, as in the Blitz."
(Plath, ibid.)

The George MITCHELL MINSTRELS: On Stage With The George Mitchell Minstrels

(#32: 1 December 1962, 2 weeks)

Track listing: States Medley (North And South/You’re In Kentucky Sure As You’re Born/The Yellow Rose Of Texas/Georgia On My Mind/Stars Fell On Alabama/I’m Going Back To Old Nebraska/Dixieland/Carry Me Back To Old Virginny/North And South)/Happy Tramps Medley (The Lady Is A Tramp/In A Shanty In Old Shanty Town/Ain’t We Got Fun/I’m Sittin’ High On A Hill Top/Big Rock Candy Mountain/Side By Side)/Widdicombe Fair/Your Requests (Home On The Range/Back In Those Old Kentucky Days/I Went Down To Virginia/Sonny Boy/Mockin’ Bird Hill/Goin’ To The County Fair)/Cheep Cheep (Birdies) Medley (Dicky Bird Hop/Cuckoo Waltz/She Was One Of The Early Birds/When The Red Red Robin/Too-Whit! Too-Whoo!/Chee Chee Oo Chee/Let’s All Sing Like The Birdies Sing)/”Down Memory Lane” (A Load Of Hay/One, Two, Button Your Shoe/You Are My Sunshine/Bei Mir Bist Du Schön/Memories Are Made Of This/Sing A Song Of Sunbeams/South Of The Border/Where Or When)/The Frog And The Mouse/Long Long Ago Medley (Long Long Ago/Roamin’ In The Gloamin’/Let Me Call You Sweetheart/Meet Me Tonight In Dreamland/Pack Up Your Troubles/Till We Meet Again/Roses Of Picardy/Long Long Ago)
“Beans” is a song, or perhaps a scrunched up partial photocopy of a song, composed by vaudevillians Chris Smith and Elmer Bowman in 1912 and recorded by singer/shouter James Albert (a.k.a. Beans Hambone) and DIY guitar thrasher El Morrow in May 1931. Through its dimpled hiccups can be heard the song’s medicine show origins, but the beneficent nutritional and spiritual qualities of regular bean intake do not seem to be paramount in either performer’s mind; after rumbling through a very cursory reading of the song’s overall tenor, Albert is already agonising at the prospect of a lifetime filled with nothing but beans, and before the first verse is even done both he and Morrow are off on their own tangent, freestyling morosely about the bean-laden road to the grave and even contemplating St Peter’s views on the inescapable nutrient. That it paves a direct path to Beefheart needs hardly be stated (“I run on BEANS! I run on LASER beans!!” he will make Rockette Morton say thirty-eight years later) but in all terms, and not merely 1931 or minstrel show ones, this remains one of the most extraordinary – and smallest-selling (385 copies) – of all singles. Is El Morrow even plucking a guitar or, as some commentators have suggested, a customised cigar box with strings stuck to it? Either way, he has a sense of tuning which is beyond individualistic, beyond even Harry Partch’s measured quarter tones; after a rambling intro which seems to join the dots between Charley Patton and Derek Bailey (well, someone had to), he doggedly continues to pluck something which isn’t quite the right key but is entirely in keeping with Albert’s hopeful misery; he keeps coming back to that tone-and-three-quarters-out middle note of his “riff” and it is possible to hear a new music fumbling its way into existence. It’s a cold shower keeping Albert’s dreams of red death in safe harness.

I speak of “Beans” here since it arose directly out of a tradition of minstrelsy which by the thirties was already a century old, and whose crosscurrents were considerably more complex than the simple dividing lines of facile history tend to make out; from black entertainers donning blackface to the young Lenny Henry touring with the Black and White Minstrels as their time drew, or was drawn, to a close, we cannot simply shrug the phenomenon off as a sternly stolid plantation whip of musical anti-development.

But I also speak of “Beans” here since it shows immensely more musical and other aesthetic imagination than anything to be found on the third George Mitchell Minstrels album; as with Astaire blacking up as Bojangles in Swing Time, “Beans” bears a startling beauty which transcends any imposed notions of thoughtlessness. I am also far from unaware that in only a few weeks’ time this tale will be dealing with other white Englishmen doing their best to emulate the sound and feel of black Americans from a differing era.

Still, when listening to On Stage – which was not a live recording but a representation of the kind of material you’d expect to hear in their stage show – one’s primary astonishment, as ever, is how the Minstrels managed to survive and indeed thrive in the mainstream of entertainment beyond 1962, let alone until virtually the eve of “Rappers’ Delight.” In the last album chart of 1962, despite all the varying revolutions discussed in this tale over recent weeks, three of the top five slots were occupied by Minstrels music. They were the first act to top the UK album chart with their first three albums. And yet twelve months later On Tour With The George Mitchell Minstrels struggled to reach number six.

There is certainly already an aura of foreboding about On Stage, and Derek Johnson’s effusion of a sleevenote takes on a decidedly more prickly and defensive character. “The keyword is entertainment,” he proclaims. “Pure, honest-to-goodness, straightforward entertainment…This, of course, is what the public wants in these frenzied, hectic days – sheer entertainment (note the rhetorical triplicate), without any pretentions. Would that this approach were adopted more often in show business circles!”

In other words: readers, the world you and I have known and loved is under threat, is about to be usurped. But don’t panic – “We invite you,” Johnson concludes, “now to settle back in your favourite chair, forget your worries and cares, clear your throat…Let’s go, shall we?” The spectre of the withering jackboot is not far from mind, as evinced by Johnson’s curiously creepy aside about this music’s capability to “act as a tonic to the most morose listener.”

Everything about On Stage suggests…indeed, seeps…the end of something. It’s hard to configure a setting where the fictive People Of All Ages would get together and roar out dismal pseudo-romps partially mis-echoing a culture which was clearly moribund, or at least in need of a radical spring clean. Tony Mercer croons “ Georgia ” as though Ray Charles had never happened. Readings of “Stars Fell On Alabama” and “Where Or When” when compared with Sinatra’s illustrate a difference between death and life. And everywhere there lurk these perfect Home Counties vowels, unchanging whether they be in “ Kentucky sure as you’re born” or on the “bonnie banks of Clyde ” (“Not forgetting “Eye-Oh-Way!”). Furthermore, whatever Louisiana plantation slaves would be doing in Scotland or going to Widdicombe Fair is not clearly explained. “Old Kentucky Days” is marred by a terrible, chirpy horn and woodwind arrangement which turns it into a Terry Scott sitcom pilot theme tune, even if the odd blasts of slide whistle and neighing trumpet on “Widdicombe Fair” itself invite the enticing prospect of Lester Bowie hijacking the entire proceedings (and the same song includes a moderately unsettling, sepulchral choral lament midway through). The romance of “Bei Mir Bist Du Schön” is surgically excised in favour of an unlovely mass bellow which is arguably worse than the Jordanaires at their worst (indeed, the whole enterprise makes me think of what a Jordanaires album without Elvis might have sounded like). Xylophones slide irritatingly up and down like Gestapo corrective tools.

Some songs – for instance, “The Lady Is A Tramp” and “You Are My Sunshine” - are more or less entirely obscured by unnecessary contrapuntal devices, but then show tunes appeared to be the only “recent” music with which the Minstrels seemed to be comfortable. It is virtually superfluous to say that their “Sunshine” perishes instantly when set next to the definitive George Russell/Sheila Jordan recasting of the same song recorded in the same year. But when the Minstrels strive to Go Modern the results are merely embarrassing; “Early Birds” reappears from their first album, but in a different arrangement, with the Television Toppers ashenfacedly going through some sub-Vernons Girls tropes (“Gimme gimme gimme… GOODBYE!”). Mercer struggles to maintain dignity and countenance as his reading of “Ain’t We Got Fun” is lent a Cliff Does The Twist setting. Yet another “South Of The Border” goes down the then fashionable cha-cha route but is almost inspired when set next to the embarrassed and embarrassing-sounding “Red Red Robin” who now apparently goes “cha-cha-cha-ing a-long.”

Added to this mantelpiece of what Lena rightly describes as “aural doilies” we get an unpleasant military bent to the proceedings. Thankfully Dai Francis’ Jolsonisms are kept to a relative minimum throughout the record, save for an interminable and overacted “Sonny Boy” (see instead Ken Dodd’s duff ventriloquist rendition of the same song, which remains definitive). But the ceaseless whistling and barking call the Hitler Youth rather too readily to mind. “The Lady Is A Tramp” is done as a, if you will, whistling waltz. The abominable “Birdie” medley begins with a stern whistling session and a command of “Get out of bed!” But “Where Or When” is interpreted as a Victory At Sea martial anthem, and the final lap of (mostly) World War I ditties suggest the Minstrels’ real core audience, and the thing of The War which Britain cannot ever bring itself to forget (and this tale will certainly be coming back to that very late on) – here we have full throated choral climaxes, orchestral thuds, timpanic tempests, everything short of a cannon being wheeled onstage.

Finally, however, it was all of little avail. Despite Johnson’s insistence on confidences being the core of the Minstrell’s businesses – “…a colourful and effective treatment of every song, simultaneously encouraging the amateur listener to join in the chorus, firmly convinced that his (sic) efforts are of equal merit!” – the record-buying demographic democracy elected to change their allegiances in 1963. The show continued both on TV and stage for a further fifteen or so years; even though the TV show’s final cancellation was ascribed to political pressure, the truth was that it had been losing ratings for some while and was proving prohibitively expensive to produce. But then it disappeared, wiped from the collective slate; it subsequently survived in sorely reduced form in whatever out-of-season coastal resorts and ageing audiences would have it. Of the main Minstrel stars, only John Boulter now survives, and I am not insensitive to Stan Stennett’s comment that the cancellation of the TV show was for Dai Francis the equivalent of having his oxygen supply cut off (“he lost his livelihood, his living and his will to live”) – particularly in view of the irony of a Jolson impersonator finding the going tough at a time when at least two of the leading protagonists in the seventies portion of this tale have repeatedly cited Jolson as their primary inspiration. I also note that Tony Mercer died young, of heart failure in 1973, barely into his fifties, and that after his passing a certain élan was lost from the Minstrels’ bonhomie. Both Francis and George Mitchell himself lived on until the early part of this decade but both were essentially broken and bewildered men, confused at a world which had changed and suggested subtexts of which they themselves would never have dreamt.

Indeed, this sense of displacement is one of the central secrets to the Minstrels’ wave of success; far from intentionally being racist, their mode was intended to be (even if aurally it didn’t resemble) one of a reassuring tonic to people who had lived lives in recognisable shapes and places and needed to be reminded of these constantly in a world which seemed to be doing its best to displace them from its surface forever. The Italian and Slavic émigrés who wept along to Jolson were weeping for their own, barely reachable pasts, not a forlorn foreclosure of a nineteenth-century plantation memory. Jolson’s message was “This is where we are” – whereas the most potent and dynamic of 20th century black music centres around the partly rhetorical question of “Where the hell are we?" (set, for example, On Stage alongside Mingus' Black Saint And The Sinner Lady, recorded at the same time as the Minstrels were dominating the lists). The landscape of this tale in 1963 is going to change rather violently; there is one more reassuring but vital bridge we have to cross, but not everyone was able to make that crossing, and it’s easier to damn the failed leapers than attempt to understand them. I make no claims whatsoever for artistic merit in terms of the George Mitchell Minstrels; I do not envisage playing any of these three albums again and certainly not with pleasure in mind. But this tale is in great part an attempt to educate myself about a certain strand of history as it has presented and re-presented itself over the last half century or so, an endeavour to avoid easy conclusions, uncover deeper truths and draw fuller and more satisfying pictures. We can’t get to the Beatles without understanding why the Beatles had to get to us. Otherwise the story of popular music really would be little other than an unending hill of beans.

The SHADOWS: Out Of The Shadows

(#31: 27 October 1962, 3 weeks; 24 November 1962, 1 week; 22 December 1962, 1 week; 19 January 1963, 2 weeks)

Track listing: The Rumble/The Bandit/Cosy/1861/Perfidia/Little “B”/Bo Diddley/South Of The Border/Spring Is Nearly Here/Are They All Like You?/Tales Of A Raggy Tramline/Some Are Lonely/Kinda Cool

Here is where some Shadows purists got off the bus; by now, Jet Harris and Tony Meehan had both jumped or been pushed out of the Shadows, depending on whose accounts you read and trust, and been replaced by the allegedly more malleable Brian Bennett and Brian “Licorice” Locking on drums and bass respectively. Both Harris and Meehan reckoned that the Shadows lost it immediately thereafter, and setting the brooding thrust of their subsequent run of 1963 duo hits (“Diamonds,” “Applejack”) against the amiable politesse of parallel Shadows hits (“Dance On,” “Foot Tapper”) could theoretically go some way towards demonstrating this.

But the truth, as always, is necessarily more complicated. True, the Shadows offer on their second album perhaps the politest version of “Bo Diddley” one is ever likely to hear, all Home Counties vowels, a harmonica which owes more to Genevieve than Little Walter, and a shave and a haircut for tuppence out of the High Street barber’s (half day closing on Wednesday). But that has to be set against their strutting reading of “South Of The Border” with Hank stretching out in a bluesy middle section and a bass-led rhythm pattern which owed as much to Ricky Nelson’s version of “Summertime” as Deep Purple’s “Black Night” was later to do. Similarly, Ike Isaacs’ “The Rumble” initially resembles a sturdy petition from Tunbridge Wells churchgoers rather than a Thames Estuary Link Wray but is still tough enough by 1962 Britbeat standards.

Much of the credit for this toughness has to go to Brian Bennett, the album’s unexpected star, fresh from Marty Wilde and the Wildcats, who certainly does anything but lay back. “Tales Of A Raggy Tramline” was recorded when Harris was still in the band – indeed, was co-written by Harris - and together Harris and Bennett work up a startling pattern, drum n’ bass whichever way one looks at it, to heighten the otherwise standard Ventures-style workout. Speaking of the Ventures, the Shadows’ take on “Perfidia” is markedly more reflective, and set to a tango tempo (their big hit single of this period was, fittingly, “Guitar Tango”) which somehow turns into a tearoom cha-cha (complete with a curious “OOOOOOOHHHHHHHHH!!!” collective vocal eyebrow as though locked overnight in the gents’ toilets at Victoria Coach Station) but still displays some remarkably inventive exchanges between guitars and Bennett’s carefully patient tom-toms. Best of all, perhaps, is “Little ‘B’,” Bennett’s big feature, a cursory fast-paced rocker which slowly rises to a tumultuous boil over five minutes as Bennett’s solo, again accenting on the tom-toms and accompanied by occasional ooh-yah whoops, demonstrates dynamics that are extremely similar to some we shall hear at the opposing end of this decade (and for some while into the next); I expect that some young ears in Birmingham in particular were already perking up and taking aural notes. And then, completely unexpectedly, halfway through Bennett’s solo, extra bubbling percussion is added and we are suddenly encountered with the father of “Pump Up The Volume.”

Elsewhere, “1861” has a decidedly martial feel to it (a Civil War marching pattern in particular) but then cruises and plucks along like a cheerier variant on the “High Noon” theme; “Kinda Cool” features Hank on rebounding Cramer piano once again; and “Some Are Lonely” is an extremely rare example of a composition by the group's employer, Cliff Richard – as with much of the rest of the album (and other number one albums of this period) there is a decided Latin feel to its tempo and pace (complete with decorative castanets) but it’s not bad at all. There are two vocal harmony numbers; “Are They All Like You?” with its rather unsettling leitmotif of “Ring-a-ding-a-ding” is an Everlys variant, while “The Bandit” – adapted by “South Of The Border” composers Jimmy Kennedy and Michael Carr from a melody by, of all people, Milton Nascimento – is a solemn Kingston Trio-style lament, the solemnity of which belies its relatively trite lyrics (“Olé, I am a bandit,” “Blue Brazilian sky” – although the latter points forward, both lyrically and aurally, to Chris Isaak’s “Blue Spanish Sky”). The stentorian delivery of expressions such as “Shoot to kill” looks forward, not just to the Byrds, but even unto “Cortez The Killer.”

That last comparison is not farfetched; Neil Young was by this time in his last year at high school and it is impossible in particular to listen to this album’s dreamy (and, yes, rather shadowy) ballads without imagining the young Neil practising along; “Spring Is Nearly Here,” despite Norrie Paramor’s intrusive Ovaltine strings, floats as benignly as the pumpkin papa of all harvest moons; while “Cosy” is my own favourite of these tracks – I note the similarity of Hank’s slowly descending guitar motif to “Bend It” by Dave Dee & Co. but the limpid lanterns of dreaming tremolo arms as warm as those of Morpheus and the evening terrains of subtle rhythm progress in different dimensions thereafter; I see the forebears of “Albatross” and even, in places, the Durutti Column – a patient proceed towards eventual end horizons, a blue skyway of airy purchase, a land more wonderful than even 1962 might have thought possible.

Kenny BALL, Chris BARBER and Acker BILK: The Best Of Ball, Barber And Bilk

(#30: 22 September 1962, 1 week; 20 October 1962, 1 week)

Track listing: Jump In The Line/Higher Ground/Willie The Weeper/Gladiolus Rag (Mr Acker Bilk and his Paramount Jazz Band)/Teddy Bears’ Picnic/Hawaiian War Chant/I Love You, Samantha/Chimes Blues (Kenny Ball and his Jazzmen)/Majorca/High Society/Tuxedo Rag/When The Saints Go Marching In (Chris Barber and his Jazz Band)

Twenty-five years before the Rave Generation will enter this tale, there were other ravers and other notions of undying “hardcore.” All night raves in doubtful clubs, attended by wayward youths dressed in seemingly incomprehensible tribal uniforms, sneered at by their assumed “superiors” for apparent “superficiality” and bearing the faint aroma of performance-enhancing drugs (mainly marijuana); here, unquestionably, is Rave but here too is Northern Soul (not to mention everything else from psychedelia via punk to dubstep). Over the differing generations the denominator has remained common; a deliberate retreat from a perceived bland music/societal mainstream into a corner which no one else can access or touch or hurt. All such retreats are by definition limited but these tribes tend to influence future ones as a means of escaping from their painted-in corners, if only by virtue of (in)action.

The trad jazz boom was an escape from the end of skiffle as well as a fleeing from what its adherents viewed as a smiling, neutered pop environment; here was something old, perhaps – historically, as old as its century – but something into which it was felt some vitality could still be breathed. A return to basics, an end to gloss, and, most importantly, a sense of community for a pregnant generation of youth not yet allowed proper freedom; they had narrowly escaped National Service but were still expected to behave themselves, become minor replicas of their parents and employers. Only in the jazz clubs, smoking away to the bluff and bluster of the leading trad bands, could they feel anything approaching free.

Not surprisingly, the leading exponents of Brit trad were amused but bemused by this devotion; there was of course also the political subtext – CND marches especially, and the consequent partial harnessing of trad as a temporary style of revolt – but Kenny Ball and Acker Bilk were far more cognisant of their responsibilities to showbiz than any palpable political commitment. This does not render their music ignorable. But Chris Barber, always the most perceptive and far-sighted of the “B” triad, remarked in a 1978 NME interview that all music lovers – whether they were into the Beatles or Ornette Coleman – were “essentially Max Bygraves fans”; in other words, the great majority of music consumers are inclined to stick with what and whom they know, a carrot of comfort deriving from a childhood or teenage time when…well, when other considerations still didn’t need to be taken into consideration. When life was still “pure” even if only for three minutes.

Ball’s Jazzmen were for many years the resident musical group on the BBC’s Morecambe And Wise Show; Bilk’s greatest commercial success came with “Stranger On The Shore,” a transitional pop record which had little to do with jazz but which hovered over the charts throughout the whole of 1962 like an uncertain beacon, not quite sure of what it should be lighting up. When the Beatles came in trad went straight out (and the Mods sprang up in its place). And yet, listening to this Pye Golden Guinea retrospective – an assemblage of archive tracks, four per band, ranging from 1954 to 1961 – I feel not only the inescapable scent of Sunday lunchtime roast but also a pace, a determination, which demands not to be taken for granted.

Bilk’s band opens the proceedings; “Jump In The Line” is a virile calypso-ish piece with immediate, and surprising, free vocalisations from Bilk’s clarinet and Ken Simms’ trumpet which would rematerialise at the other end of the decade in the Art Ensemble of Chicago ’s “Tutankhamun.” “Rock your body on time,” growls Bilk in another interesting precedent to 1988, and Ron McKay’s drums help batter the tune into a suburb of outer space by track’s end. “Higher Ground,” a Bilk original, gradually builds up from hushed horn voicings into a celebratory gospel workout, McKay having great fun tap dancing on his supplementary traps. “Willie The Weeper” features a splendidly guttural vocal from Bilk reminiscent of no one less than Beefheart (“Willie The Pimp” anyone?) climaxing in a startling shriek of “FI-IIIIIIIII-VE!!” while Joplin’s “Gladiolus Rag” is traced with great delicacy.

The unpromising titles of the four Kenny Ball selections might initially point to other Golden Guinea releases advertised on the rear sleeve (including, inter alia, Let’s Twist To The Oldies by Fats and the Chessmen, Hit Movie Themes Go Latin by the Orchestra Del Oro, Strictly For Dancing by the Statler Dance Orchestra, Continental Jazz by Les Cinq Modernes, Honey Hit Parade and the unlikeliest of them all, Charleston by Slim Pickins and his ‘Twenty Niners’) but all work surprisingly well. His “Teddy Bears’ Picnic” is done á la “Chant Of The Weed” and I note the more “produced” nature of this music; there is that same, partially submerged echo chamber air which pervades hits like 1961’s cheerily apocalyptic “Midnight In Moscow.” “Hawaiian War Chant” begins with a nod to “Big Noise From Winnetka” before Dave Jones’ doleful clarinet is drowned out by John Bennett’s outrageous trombone snarling and the entire track steps up at least two gears. “I Love You, Samantha” disposes with Bing’s easy grace entirely in favour of Ball’s Carry On Satchmo vocal; “Remember,” he winks, “I’m a one-two-three-four-five-six-seven-gal guy!” (and causing in this listener unlikely echoes of James Brown’s contemporaneously recorded Live At The Apollo) before drummer Ron Bowden drives the band into a train station cluster of an ending. “Chimes Blues” is played straight and displays great subtlety in its arrangement, slo-mo brass counterpoints met by adroitly tricky tempo shifts.

Finally we come to a quartet of tracks recorded by various editions of Chris Barber’s band. The first is a live reading of New Orleans revivalist trombonist Wilbur de Paris’ “Majorca,” an inventive Creole (out of Jelly Roll Morton) arrangement featuring banjo/bass unisons alternating with fortissimo front line declamations; Bowden is again on drums here, his dynamics allowing both band and tune to blossom out fully.

The remaining three tracks date from the mid-fifties and feature a man of partially spent destiny plucking away unobtrusively but inventively on banjo; one recalls that “Rock Island Line,” a realer beginning of time for British pop music (because more immediately accessible) than either “Clock” or “Hotel,” began life on a Barber album (New Orleans Joys) and that Donegan’s skiffle routine was the original interlude between full band sets onstage. But it was now getting late in 1962 and Donegan had largely seceded from the charts, been reabsorbed into mainstream entertainment and was about to view the fruits of his unlikely offspring. Skiffle had been and gone and in the (perceived) absence of anything better its roots had returned to take transient residence. “High Society” and “Tuxedo Rag” are both elegantly classicist constructions, Monty Sunshine’s clarinet beaming to the fore like a belatedly reluctant ray emerging from late winter.

But the album vibrates into extraneous life with the closing epic “Saints” reading, featuring an uncredited Ottilie Patterson on vocals, strong and truthful. After a false ending the band return, up an octave and up several gears and suddenly this dim corner of the world raves up into extralucid colour, Jim Bray providing the second bass solo to feature in this tale, Donegan now rampant on banjo, Graham Burbidge tearing down the curtains of the world with his drumming (“It almost sounds like a drum machine!” exclaimed Lena), and we are reminded very forcefully that this album’s second spell at number one coincided with the run of “Telstar” at the top of the singles chart and that both coincided with the apex of the Cuban missile crisis; with Barber’s “Saints” we feel as though we are all together, on the 3 AM eternal floor of Alexandra Palace, buttons and coats askew yet tightly wrapped, singing and dancing until the end of the world.

Elvis PRESLEY: Pot Luck

 

(#29: 28 July 1962, 5 weeks; 8 September 1962, 1 week) 

 

Track listing: Kiss Me Quick/Just For Old Time Sake/Gonna Get Back Home Somehow/(Such An) Easy Question/Steppin’ Out Of Line/I’m Yours/Something Blue/Suspicion/I Feel That I’ve Known You Forever/Night Rider/Fountain Of Love/That’s Someone You Never Forget 

 

I must confess slight initial bafflement in relation to this record; so used am I to Elvis albums throughout the bulk of the sixties comprising of film soundtracks that I searched myself trying to recall a movie entitled Pot Luck – 1962? That would have been Follow That Dream, an amiable if hopeless sub-Beverly Hillbillies yarn, the not-bad-at-all boxing picture Kid Galahad and the dire shape of dregs to come entitled Girls! Girls! Girls!, but no Pot Luck as such - before realising that this was that rarest of sixties phenomena, a proper new Elvis studio album (even though some of its tracks eventually threaded their way towards the soundtrack of 1965’s entirely useless Tickle Me). That isn’t to say that Pot Luck is a very good album, although it’s never less than interesting and committed; simply that Presley demonstrates a sense of dramatic and emotional focus which, 1966’s How Great Thou Art excepted, would be largely absent from his conveyor belt of productivity until 1969.

 

Interestingly, and peculiarly contemporaneously with Coltrane (and well ahead of Adam Ant), Presley experimented with a double rhythm section on the Nashville sessions which produced the material for the album; Buddy Harman and DJ Fontana twin up on drums while Bob Moore’s acoustic bass is balanced out by Harold Bradley’s electric. The focus is broadly on post-“It’s Now Or Never” numbers with a vague Latin/bossa nova feel, coupled with some sombre country ballads, but there is a suggestion of incipient trouble and doubt coursing even through things like “Kiss Me Quick,” a superior Pomus and Shuman “Now Or Never” rewrite; despite Elvis still donning Dino’s mantle – complete with a “That’s Amore” backing choir standing in for the Jordanaires who will become increasingly irritating as the album wears on, and the inevitable mandolin – the sense of impermanence and transience is never far away from Presley’s leers and licks.

 

“Just For Old Time Sake” is yet another Tepper/Bennett number and clearly designed as a “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” clone (though unsurprisingly there are also hints of “When The Girl In Your Arms”) but Presley escorts it out of its marimba/piano-decorated supper club by his fiercely soft concentration. “I made my greatest mistake,” he muses. “Ih-if-a-a-ii-you loved me (doing a Dean pastiche) then, you could love me once again,” he pleads, before leaving a huge, gaping question mark of a pause. “Gonna Get Back Home Somehow,” another Pomus/Shuman tune, rocks out of the paddock but is curiously weighed down by Boots Randolph’s baritone sax, against which Presley palpably struggles to escape: “Leavin’ now” (answered by a wriggling worm of a Scotty Moore guitar figure), “I’m leavin’ nowwww-uuuuuuhhhhh” and finally “I’m leavin’ NOWWWWWWWWWWWWW!!!!” Stooges of octave piano (Floyd Cramer) and tambourine spice up the middle eight, while Presley’s determination is underlined by his title pronunciation accompanied only by double bass and finger snaps.

 

In contrast, “(Such An) Easy Question” is a lope through some airs of blue which sees Presley pacifically fuming, “Why can’t I get an answer? Tell me!” He gets prickly: “Can it be that you’re too sh-hyyy?” Then he begins to demand: “Can you – TELL ME YES?” and is immediately underwritten by grave mass harmonies. By track’s end all he can do is slur and lick the phantom of an escaped ice cream cone. “Steppin’ Out Of Line” was an outtake from the Blue Hawaii sessions and rocks and howls exactly like that soundtrack didn’t; ravenous, thirsty, his ski slope of “in your sleep,” an explosively pregnant tenor solo from Randolph to which Presley responds with a deranged “UUUUUUUUAAAAAAARRRRRRGGGGGGHHHHHHH!!!!!,” the shop finally being shut down by Harman and Fontana shattering the complacent glass. Side one, however, chooses to conclude with cheese: “I’m Yours” is a courtly wedding waltz with Patti Page-ish double tracked lead vocals (and narration) which might just have been tolerable had it not been wrecked by some terrible Ken Griffin/Junior Showtime ice rink organ.

 

And yet side two commences with the same scenario seen from a far more fearful perspective; “Something Blue” is an intensely internalised country performance, and while Elvis works through the song’s old/new/borrowed bits of lyrical business he suddenly finds himself facing a desert. In the aisle, walking behind her (remember Eddie Fisher?), he abruptly sobers up. “I feel I’m walking to my doom,” he intones, “I’m really not the best man in this ro-oo-oo-ooom” pronounced as though he’s about to roll right out of the room and into the pits of hell. There is some call and response work with the choir (as with the Jordanaires, far more effective on the ballads) and the scenario is tied up by a never more doleful, elongated baritone sax burp. “Suspicion” – Pomus and Shuman again, and top ten as a very belated single release in 1976 – echoes and presages its 1969 counterpart with scratching harpsichord, its references to “torment” and his wildly vanishing refraction of a shout of “Why torture me?” in each chorus as though Wile E Coyote has yet again failed to find ground beneath his feet as he hurtles off the edge of the cliff.

 

“I Feel That I’ve Known You Forever,” composed by Pomus with a lyric by Alan Jeffreys, might be the album’s most fragile track, another slow, uncertain (but comparatively brief – 99 seconds) Tennessee waltz with a lovely chord change on the “contraire” of “Your face so fair, me au contraire” before he suddenly erupts with an escalating triple breath cadenza of “Forever, forever, FOREVER!,” almost threatening to detach the roof from its studio. “Night Rider,” the last Pomus/Shuman track on the record, returns to fast Latin-tinged rock, led by Randolph’s stuttering tenor, though Presley’s half-tempo vocal presents us with the improbable picture of a Gerry Anderson theme tune. Despite terse commentaries from Cramer’s piano and Scotty’s guitar, and despite Presley’s evident angst (though tinged with more than a hint of the reasons why she ran away in the first place – “keep her at home”?) doesn’t really transcend its ultra-lite “Mystery Train” wannabe status.

 

With “Fountain Of Love” we are back in Dean Martinland, complete with light, extended double entendres – Presley makes “just come and drink” sound like “just come and breathe” – and Grady Martin offers some suitably sardonic commentary on his acoustic lead guitar but it struggles not to turn into “It’s Now Or Never Part 98.”

 

But then we arrive at the astonishing closer (and with more than a hint of Closer about it, if you’re asking) “That’s Someone You Never Forget,” the only song on the album to be co-composed (with Red West) by Presley himself (another one, “You’ll Be Gone,” co-written by Presley with West and Charlie Hodge, appears on the CD of Pot Luck and skilfully skirts as close as possible to “Begin The Beguine” as copyright royalties will allow; the CD version of the album, incidentally, plays wild and free with the original track order, interspersing five bonus tracks seemingly at random, but I have chosen to concentrate on that order as structurally and emotionally it makes the most sense). Here the backing singers begin to be used creatively, their sonorous “ooooohhhh-OOOOOOHHHHHH” ebbing waves exactly counterpointing Presley’s tortured vowels with a sense of tonality more akin to Debussy than the Opry. Presley himself, for the most part, barely ascends from a thinly detectable whisper and it is clear that we are intruding on a very private mourning – this is a lost love which has no hope of coming back in this world. “The LIT-tle things you planned,” he trembles. The “of” of “You’ll think of her each day” is obscured by a tremulous sob. The lullaby of celeste fails to resolve his stinging, lethal, internal pain. “But you know,” he concludes, “they’ll never replace the one who waits for you,” before working up to a terrible, if brief, crescendo and then settling down into the waves, the waves which won’t stop rolling, where have they been. The song was written with his mother in mind and provides the umbilical cord which would never break, and indeed leads in emotional part to the long black limousines we will subsequently encounter. The real Elvis, revealing himself before diving back under the Hollywood covers for the rest of the decade. We will rejoin him when the covers get brutally thrown off him, and he discovers, much to his surprise, that he’s the one who did the throwing.

ORIGINAL MOTION PICTURE SOUNDTRACK: West Side Story

(#28: 23 June 1962, 5 weeks; 1 September 1962, 1 week; 15 September 1962, 1 week; 29 September 1962, 3 weeks; 17 November 1962, 1 week; 15 December 1962, 1 week; 12 January 1963, 1 week)

Track listing: Prologue/Jet Song/Something’s Coming/Dance At The Gym/Maria/ America /Tonight/Gee, Officer Krupke!/I Feel Pretty/One Hand, One Heart/Quintet/The Rumble/Cool/A Boy Like That and I Have A Love/Somewhere (Finale)

In my fourth year at school, our English class read out and studied the text of West Side Story. I think that this was a Shakespeare educational tie-in, even though the principal Shakespeare text we were given to study at the time was Julius Caesar, but given that this is now over thirty years ago I am necessarily a bit rusty about the detail. I’m pretty sure I’d seen the film on TV, and not recalled that much about it except that it was markedly more violent than any Hollywood musical I’d seen before (but then I hadn’t really seen Oklahoma!). What I do recall was a special screening of the film organised by our English teacher which took up the best part of the school morning.

My overall impression at the time was one of flatness; the text did not seem to sing, but then we had to recite it out piecemeal, including all the song lyrics, as though they were soliloquies (which, of course, they were). It seemed faintly trite, and detailed viewing of the film did little to change my opinion; like On The Town, it was filmed on location in New York (specifically in the Manhattan grounds which would one day house the Lincoln Center) but both flow and drive seemed fatally impaired. It looked like an artist’s impression of Hell’s Kitchen rather than the thing itself; none of the stars quite seemed to match with any of the singing; the story’s emotion seemed weighed down by compromise and strenuous efforts to impress the viewer with cinematic tricks – the opening descending panorama centring on Russ Tamblyn might as well be the Alps converging on Julie Andrews.

The latter comparison is not farfetched, since Robert Wise was responsible for directing both, and the suggestion that he needed a Welles to provoke him remains intact. Initially the show’s original Broadway director and choreographer Jerome Robbins was hired to direct, but he went painfully over budget and possibly wished to dot too many “t”s and cross too many “i”s; after ten weeks he was replaced by Wise who turned any residual sparkle into lumpy pudding. Likewise, screenwriter Ernest Lehmann had just come off North By Northwest, but his stilted scenarios for West Side Story would have been laughed off Mount Rushmore by Hitchcock. In addition, Natalie Wood and Richard Beymer both recorded full vocal tracks for all their songs but the producers heard them, shuddered and dubbed them over; Marni Nixon was back again to voice Maria, while one Jimmy Bryant covered for Tony. Rita Moreno did most of her own singing, though even she (as in The King And I) suffered one dubbed track; the voice of Anita on “A Boy Like That” belongs to Betty Wand. The result, unsurprisingly, was a sprawling porridge of a movie.

Perhaps the truth is that West Side Story was always unfilmable. Any enterprise involving a combination of Bernstein, Sondheim, Robbins and Hal Prince was necessarily going to result in an explosion of egocracy but – as with The White Album and Tusk – the consequent sense of conflict was enormously beneficial to the show’s impact on stage. And really West Side Story has always had to be seen on stage, and maybe it had to be witnessed in its age; its Romeo And Juliet-made-hip-for-The-Kids approach needed its fifties/sixties transitional compass and its explosions had to be seen close up, in person; the dances, the fights, spilling out into the auditorium, the embryonic electricity of danger and the scent of blood felt at that moment and none other, and an ending deliberately constructed to contradict every known law of the Broadway musical.

As Sondheim would doubtless still attest, however, one needs to learn the rules thoroughly before one may break them and his youthful tutelage under Hammerstein cannot be avoided; after all, West Side Story turns on the same plot premise as Oklahoma! – who’s taking the girl to the dance? – but then throws urban mud back in its complacent face; multiple descendents of Jud throwing the knife into Curly, and without the promise of future, prosperous union; as the Moebius comic strip of “Gee, Officer Krupke!” demonstrates, the Jets and Sharks can turn any way they like, but at every turn will fail to find the future. The song “Somewhere” – based on that increasingly sinister two-chord leitmotif which hovers like a neutron bomb over the show’s landscape, and which finally finds respective resolutions in Bacharach and David’s “Twenty-Four Hours From Tulsa,” a song about the impossibility of there ever being a thing called “home” again, let alone getting there, and Scott Walker’s “Big Louise” with the man-woman lamenting in her/his haunted house, on a “fire escape in the sky” which may or may not be the same one on which Tony and Maria pledge their troth (as Manilow would late ask in “Copacabana,” what happens when these victims live on?) – seems the precise reverse of “The Young Ones”; Cliff and his chums have nothing to worry about, fear is an unknown concept to them, the future is all laid out, they can even get on with their parents. But – as again demonstrated in “Krupke” – these societal self-rejects may not even know who their parents are, and “Somewhere”’s delivery is based in a trepidation as scarlet as the album’s bloody cover.

Listening to the music alone, however, one is struck by exactly how radical West Side Story was in so many unexpected ways, and it seems clear to me that its appearance here marks a boundary, an end of something and a beginning of something else, and perhaps a more significant dividing line than Please Please Me. The “Prologue” for instance offers remarkable fare for a 1962 number one album; beginning with a long, Morricone-predicating whistle, we move into finger snaps, rattles of percussion and dissonant (Bartok via Bob Graettinger) brass which wouldn’t have been out of place in Mingus’ Town Hall Concert of 1962. I had in my extreme youth thought the movie of West Side Story to have been shot in the mid-fifties, i.e. at the birth of rock ‘n’ roll, but when I discovered that it had been filmed and released in 1961 it made a parallel musical sense; Bernstein’s projection of what might have happened with pop had it taken the Mingus/Pithecanthropus Erectus path rather than the Elvis/”Heartbreak Hotel” avenue in 1956. Extreme volume alterations (quiet followed by sudden loud) foresee the Pixies and Nirvana. There are sequences of overlapping xylophones which essentially say hello to Steve Reich. Lena pointed out some harmonic/structural similarities to Rollins’ The Bridge (also released in 1962). Franticity is terminated by a police whistle before breaking into passages of brass/woodwind counterpoint which could have come off Gil Evans’ 1961 Into The Hot disc (either the John Carisi or Cecil Taylor sections). And yet, periodically peaking its nose through all of this newness, are hoedown passages straight out of Oklahoma!

Ironically, given the film’s huge reliance on dubbed singing voices, a substantial emphasis is placed on “non-singing” voices in the ensemble pieces, a trope which certainly would not have been lost on Carla Bley as she began to piece together Escalator Over The Hill half a decade later. Thus Russ Tamblyn’s untutored voice on “Jet Song” is a genuine but fresh shock. The song crisscrosses its own roadblocked rhythms as though knowing its subjects are going nowhere, never quite settles (a drunken, diagonal march marred by mud). This is Dobie Gray’s “In Crowd” stripped of the mythical belt of knowing manhood, revealed as a bunch of kneejerk racist misfits (rather than “the greatest”), who pronounce “bugging” in a way to make it sound as much like “fucking” as possible. And what’s that “bat out of hell” I see flying into the dim upper left corner?

“Something’s Coming” I am interpreting as an influence on Bacharach rather than vice versa, with many characteristic rhythmic and harmonic jumps and pauses which Bacharach would soon make his own; although Bryant imbues the song’s already defeated expectations with slight Presley-isms (e.g. his “the air is humming” and the surprisingly virile “Come on, deeeeeeeee-liver to me!” like a fuck-you-eagle Prometheus) his air is necessarily lighter than anything Elvis would have lent to it (Presley was the producers’ first choice for Tony but Col Parker said that his boy didn’t do no Broadway; Bobby Darin, Richard Chamberlain, Tab Hunter and, perhaps most intriguingly, Anthony Perkins were also considered for the role; Perkins would go on to resolve his own difficulties with society in Welles’ 1962 film of The Trial – that Freudian slip of “pornograph” for “phonograph” – a film as deliberately closed in as West Side Story which recognises that the only way out is the end of the world)..

It is also significant that Tamblyn and Beymer would eventually go on to portray vaguely lost souls in Lynch’s Twin Peaks, since much of West Side Story’s music plays as though fading in and out of a peculiarly foreboding dream; the vertiginous strings which slash into the start of the “Dance At The Gym” sequence, the echoes which haunt “Maria.” Twin Peaks serves as Riff’s and Tony’s afterlife, or hell; here they wash up, middle aged, not quite intact, Sherilyn Fenn as an undamaged Maria (unless she grew up and turned into Piper Laurie; see also de Palma’s Carrie as an improbable bridging point). “Dance At The Gym” itself is a virulent war of old versus new, the barn dance being obscured by odd moments of quiet, hoedowns facing off against swing (though the central Tony sees Maria/rest of dancehall dissolves trope was borrowed from the “Broadway Melody” ballet sequence in Singin’ In The Rain). The song “Maria” could even mark out West Side Story as the first New Pop musical – since it could properly be retitled, or subtitled, “The Word ‘Girl,’”; Tony seems lost, entranced in caverns of his own fatal making, in love with a name rather than a flesh and blood person, obsessed with the notion of love rather than the act itself.

“America” plays like the revenge of South Pacific; islanders knowing full well that the promise of a New Nation is a sham and yet, despite all their cynicism, mocking and suppressed terror, being utterly enchanted and hypnotised by its spectacle. Despite Sondheim’s extremely barbed lyrics this is clearly a celebration of the whooping new, anything, even slavery in different robes and disguises, being preferable to the deathly glare of the old. The Puerto Ricans see America as a challenge, but also as a potential suitor.

Amidst all this fiery furore, there lie surprisingly familiar oases of calm. “Tonight” structurally and emotionally is pure Rodgers and Hammerstein love duet; mindful of the shadow of “We Kiss In A Shadow” but with a pregnant cosiness which makes it feel like a resolved “If I Loved You” from Carousel; the “if” has disappeared, the promise young and profound. Similarly, “One Hand, One Heart” is a fulfilled “I Have Dreamed” even though its post-Tosca torrents of slo-mo augmented minor fifths intimate an unpleasant awakening.

The light relief also seems to underline some basic truths. “Krupke” seems to me more and more the show’s key song, since it not only outlines that every answer offers no answer at all, but also radicalises the Broadway musical’s vocabulary; if there was another preceding mainstream show which utilised words like “junkies,” “punks,” “marijuana” and (perhaps most significantly) “analyst” in its song lyrics, I’ve yet to hear it, but answers in the usual place if there be any. It is also the most terrifying song in the show, possibly because it comes across as the most lighthearted; it indicates with gleeful firmness that this may indeed be a war to the bloody death, and in the end always with themselves as their own enemies.

Likewise, “I Feel Pretty” is not as straightforward or cheery a post-My Fair Lady ditty as it might appear (Eliza and Freddy – they also have nothing to fear in comparison). Derived structurally in part from South Pacific’s “I’m In Love With A Wonderful Guy,” it continues the show’s policy of continuously deconstructing itself as it proceeds; Maria’s exclamation of “I can hardly believe I’m real” is disconcerting amongst all this surface perkiness.

The complex “Quintet” sequence of antiphonal apocalypse outlines to me why we had to read those lyrics out in school; these are difficult songs, hard to master or even control. Here all the strands come together, or at least ragingly co-exist briefly; “Tonight” is turned into a war chant, and the swarm of voices diagonally converging, channel to channel – and converging on what? – again strongly predict the devastating final sequences of Escalator. The “Rumble” sequence proceeds steadily to demolish all the structures which were quietly built up, and then suppressed, throughout the musicals previously discussed; the subtexts of received racism, violence, enchainment now fuse and fissure in the hands of the descendants of Oklahoma, Maine, Siam and Bali, and particularly in the fists of the Oklahomans; musically this plays, as Lena commented, like Copland’s “Appalachian Spring” turned inside out and then fiercely folded into itself. There are no crops of comfort to be dug here.

As the “America” sequence was predominantly female-led, and bright despite itself, “Cool” is chiefly male and as coldly rationalist as anything in the Broadway musical, its chants of “Let’s…go…crazy” foresee Cuckoo’s Nest far more than they do Prince but the dynamics and delivery seem also to earmark West Side Story, not only as the first rock musical, but also as the aesthetic birthplace of Tom Waits; the harsh whispers, the sudden lunges into the foreground, the “POW!!!!” followed by a catarrhal cackling, the extending deployment of space as a foil or undertow to rhythm.

In contrast the Anita/Maria medley is a last, desperate struggle of a cling to the old versus reluctant acceptance of the new; Anita’s is conversely the more modernistic-sounding of the two voices, jagged, abrupt, discordant, but she is eventually overcome by Maria’s quiet defiance, sourced from Carousel’s “What’s The Use In Wond’r’n’?,” and we know that this story will end similarly (Lena and I couldn’t help but think of Rihanna while listening), and without the gratifying tool of afterlife blessings to compensate. Together the two shakily harmonise at the end (and provide another preview of Escalator; compare with Bley and Ronstadt’s harmonising at the end of “Over Her Head”).

And, then, finally, the Passover, the Bodhisattva, the transference of the candle from one world to another; “Somewhere,” a love duet born out of a fear of everything, ready to embrace anything if only they could find it. “There’s a place for us,” “Peace and quiet and open air…wait for us…somewhere.” It is impossible not to listen to this pledge and think of it as a far wider statement; not just in terms of what happened in the States a few months ago but, in more immediate terms, what was going to happen with the sixties. Tony and Maria’s world was, as of 1962, still five years away, but they know that something is coming, has to come. And the paths remain multiple; at the other end of this decade will come Hair, where the old is finally shaken off, or at least seen to be shaken off; but still amongst the surviving Jets and Sharks there is already a fatalism about their (temporary?) pallbearing union at show’s end, a knowledge that some of them, the ones who don’t get sent off to get killed in an East Side Story, will grow up and become Johnny Boy or Travis Bickle. Or Frank Booth.

Cliff RICHARD and The SHADOWS: The Young Ones

(#27: 13 January 1962, 6 weeks)

Track listing: Friday Night/Got A Funny Feeling/Peace Pipe/Nothing’s Impossible/The Young Ones/All For One/Lessons In Love/No One For Me But Nicky/What D’You Know We’ve Got A Show & Vaudeville Routine (Have A Smile For Everyone You Meet/Tinkle, Tinkle, Tinkle [Evergreen]/Algy The Piccadilly Johnny/Captain Ginjah/Joshuah/Where Did You Get That Hat?/What D’You Know, We’ve Got A Show/Living Doll)/When The Girl In Your Arms Is The Girl In Your Heart/Mambo: (a) Just Dance; (b) Mood Mambo/The Savage/We Say Yeah

The original sleevenote for The Young Ones speaks of young Nicky Black (Cliff) and his chums’ stance against “the narrow and disappointing adult world,” so it comes as a great if predictable pity that so much of the film’s soundtrack seems bent on pleasing and doffing its multiple caps to the adults. The plot of The Young Ones is a cannibalised twisting of Babes In Arms, and as songs such as “Nothing’s Impossible” and “All For One” demonstrate, that’s not all it borrows from the thirties. Despite the potentially intriguing conflicts between the bad face of free market economics (that Cliff’s dad, creepily played by Robert Morley, can buy up his youth club and as many buildings as he wishes and close them down/demolish them without fear of reprimand or censure) and the good face (the plot’s surprisingly early deployment of pirate radio and even pirate TV), the film kowtows to the status quo just as surely as Cliff will stand up for his dad at the end and in doing so ensures that his club – apparently set in Paddington, but it’s not an early sixties W2 that either Michael Bond or Peter Rachman would have known – survives.

The soundtrack album is in its own way as distended an assemblage of different voices as Tusk, but markedly less profound or entertaining. Apart from Cliff and the Shads the record has to shoehorn in the likes of the Mike Sammes Singers, the Associated British Studio Orchestra under the firm but fair direction of Stanley Black, and Grazina Frame, whose job was to dub the singing voice of Cliff’s Zimbabwean co-lead Carole Gray, whose acting performance mirrored her surname; her sole solo feature, “No One For Me But Nicky,” is so dreary a non-event of a song that she seems to have difficulty remaining awake. All to placate the rapidly receding platoons of that demographic Holy Grail, “people of all ages.”

Spirits immediately sink with the opening bustle of “Friday Night,” musically reminiscent of those old Scotland Yard potboiler shows which always opened with a stern voice announcing “ London! Hub of the Universe!” before cutting to stock shots of busy Piccadilly Circus traffic and then Harry H Corbett in the cop shop, dolefully attempting to solve that week’s case. Various Sammes singers proclaim in uncomfortably varying accents – Cockney, RADA and mid-Atlantic – their unconvincing passion about the evening to come: “We’ll learn more tonight than we do at home,” before the music glumly thumps into a series of pastiches (West Side Story, Carousel, “Wheels Cha Cha”) and a dull cry of “See you at the dance tonight!” – West Side Story’s “Tonight” stripped of all its threat and ambiguity. Who knows? They might be real devils and stay up as late as ten!

Cliff and the Shads then proceed to stride straight into the number and admirably rip it up (to a point) with the moderately engaging but finally rather troublesome “Got A Funny Feeling.” Although Cliff growls and hiccups like a non-defected believer his Presleyisms are slightly forced and sentiments such as “Yes, you’re the one/Don’t try to run” regrettable (to say the very least). The song’s most interesting element is the John Cale-pre-empting one-note high piano motif which doesn’t quite chime in concordance with Hank Marvin’s guitar solo.

After “Peace Pipe,” a pleasant but by-the-book Shadows workout, Cliff seems to fit right back into 1952 with the feeble Palais swing of “Nothing’s Impossible” which despite rhyming “slab of granite” with “plan it,” offers nothing against which Hamilton Black would offer complaint. Ms Frame joins in midway and does her best (despite Cliff’s woefully underfed cry of “Ah, sing it, sister” – Beyoncé he is not). By the time Cliff proclaims “Those trumpets hit that rock ‘n’ roll beat” – those trumpets? – the war is already lost.

The seemingly inescapable Tepper and Bennett were prevailed upon to write a couple of songs for the movie but both are among their more convincing. The first is the title track, which as a single topped the charts over the exact same period that its parent album did, and moreover became the first single by a British act to debut at number one; it’s not a bad opening for its year, the first of several 1962 chart toppers to offer that wistfully hopeful horizon of the sea beyond Tilbury Docks, the opened air, the brighter new future proferred on the planners’ breezeblocks (see also “Wonderful Land,” “I Remember You” and above all “Telstar”), Norrie Paramor’s seesawing arches of strings flying like semi-liberated seagulls over Hank’s buoy-like guitar and Tony Meehan’s cymbal samba crests of the Newer Wave. Plus that never more hopeful purity of Cliff’s voice, a sense of quiet determination set within his eagerness which for whatever reasons always reminds me of Midge Ure.

The danger is of course when you end up teaching the young ones of your own the same thing that your parents might have mistaught you. While nowhere near as wretched as the similarly-titled 1994 effort (to listen to) by Bryan Adams, Rod Stewart and Sting (but then little is), “All For One” is a terrible affair designed to house one of those Big Production Numbers which has tended to sink British musical films in general; despite its lame lyrical lunges – “Call us square and oblong,” “Me and thou and thee and also you” – this is a very square pseudo-brightness, or as Lena put it, “No worries about nuclear war here – it’s all a ra-ra future!”

“Lessons In Love” again proves that when left to their own devices, as Cliff and the Shadows should have been throughout the entire project, they don’t come off too badly; it’s a good song, arranged with some imagination and well (and truthfully) performed (including Cliff’s central and totally unexpected wink of “Let me show you now!”). But then we have to negotiate the dim, tempoless wastes of “No One For Me But Nicky” before landing headfirst in the Dantean inferno of the properly wretched “Vaudeville Routine,” an interminable embarrassment which the cast appear to be performing at gunpoint. At least the George Mitchell Minstrels were what they were and could be taken or left, but to hear Cliff and his colleagues rhyme “berserk and” with “working” or go through some rancid old music hall tags (with accents so arch that the “jokes” are mostly obscured) a decade after the Goons had begun to deconstruct and demolish them, or much, much worse, the Mike Sammes Singers bleating their narrow way through various whiskery old pub singalong standards, brings to mind Olivier as Archie Rice (filmed in 1960, a year ahead of The Young Ones); essays from a decayed anti-culture, despite the archer references to West Side Story and entreaties of a “great and glorious, gay, uproarious” show, and despite the notion of the history of post-Victorian live entertainment apparently culminating in “Living Doll” (disposed of in a quickfire sideways reference). “That’s showbusiness – to coin a phrase,” winks Cliff, even then acutely conscious of the importance of The Industry. Was this really what the expectant youth of 1962 wanted?

“When The Girl In Your Arms” is the song credited in the film to the “Mystery Singer” (i.e. Cliff) in order to drum up publicity for his club’s fundraising concert (filmed at the Finsbury Park Empire – eventually to become the Rainbow Theatre) and the album’s second Tepper/Bennett effort, and again it works because of its relative, unhurried simplicity, the fact that both singer and Shadows can imbue themselves with the song’s hues, and the absence of any necessity to make a Big Number out of it.

The “Mambo” sequence, in contrast, is wretched (and the “Just Dance” segment bears no relation whatsoever to Lady GaGa), a succession of every cliché in the post-West Side Story book, and one understands why Lennon felt the need to employ these singers to yelp “Wooooo!!!” and “Oompah oompah stick it up yer joompah!” barely half a decade later. In its final stretch, however, the record manages to find a firm connection with the 1962 present; “The Savage” had already been a top ten hit for the Shadows and remains one of their darker, more jagged moments (even though it was composed by Paramor) including a tense, frustrated drum solo from Meehan as though impatient to wait for the explosion that surely had to come. It still sounds like the most advanced thing on the album. Finally, the young troops are rallied as Cliff and the Shads romp their way through “We Say Yeah” (“Mommy say no! Daddy say no! Brother say no!”) and it could be seen as a kind of triumph; the old ways having finally been overcome and the New Britain at long last allowed to flex its lungs and breathe independently. In addition, one of the bonus CD tracks is a rare instance of Cliff singing Bacharach and David; “(It’s) Wonderful To Be Young” was commissioned and recorded to fit the title the picture was given in the States, several months after the rest of the music had been taped, and its easy mastery of song construction and unexpected byways puts much of the rest of the album’s hackwork in its proper place. But catch that moment towards the end of “Lessons In Love” where Cliff plaintively whispers “Baby, love me do,” and see the wave steadily gathering in the distance.

(Postscript: listening to the Mike Sammes Singers grunting their pseudo-gleeful way through “Have A Smile For Everyone You Meet” reminds me to remind you of the excellent new album by Charles Spearin (of Broken Social Scene, Do Make Say Think etc.), The Happiness Project; a concept based on that same principle but applied to everyday speech and mildly steered conversations with friends to create exciting, entrancing and rather radical new music, thriving somewhere between Alvin Lucier and El Guincho, but based on a premise as old and as true as life as it should be lived)