Radio Comedy: 'ROUND THE HORNE'

GOING 

‘ROUND THE HORNE’ 

 …AGAIN 

 And suddenly – Radio Comedy is back, in a big way. 

As stage presentations of favourites such as ‘ROUND THE HORNE’, 

‘THE GOONS’, and ‘MORECAMBE & WISE’ are starting out in 

new West End productions, and playing to full houses. 

  ANDREW DARLINGTON catches up with them in Leeds...

 

 

 ‘BEYOND OUR KEN’... 

“My Lords, Ladies and Gentlemen 

Master of the Hounds, Mistress of the Ostler, 

Stable-Boys and Un-Stable-Boys, 

Ladies in Waiting, Ladies who’ve given up waiting, 

Whippers-in and Whippers-out, please be up-standing…” 

That stage up there is a giant radio, dull nut-brown with a luminous-lime tuning band. At the same time it’s also a sound-stage in the basement of ‘Paris Studios’, Lower Regent Street, the BBC annexe to the towering edifice of Broadcasting House. There’s a sound-effects booth stage-left, while overhead-panels illuminate, informing the audience to ‘APPLAUSE’ when necessary. And to the right, another dual sign that alternates ‘RECORDING’ with ‘REHEARSAL’. 

‘We start with the answer to last week’s photographic question,’ drolls Kenneth Horne, with only the barest hint of lurking humour. ‘Which was… that the big one belongs to Sean Connery, and the little one belongs to Cliff Richard.’ He’s talking about pens, of course, but this is a quiz to which no-one ever got to hear the question, and it’s a question that’s not previously been posed anyway. But after all, a photographic competition – on radio, is itself a surreal absurdity. Yet it sets the tone for the rest of the evening as laughter-detonations equal – and exceed the high expectations of a capacity-packed Leeds Grand. There’s always the risk of legendary radio-comedy becoming static during its translation to the stage. After all, this mismatched rabble of an audience have come on an impossible mission… to rekindle their years spent beside that radio the stage is designed to resemble. Yet no-one’s disappointed. 

Stephen Critchlow looms large as obligatory straight-man host Kenneth Horne, the ultimate foil around whom all else orbits. But Paul Ryan and Jonathan Moore ignite a riptide of applause the moment they mince ‘Hello, I’m Julian and this is my friend Sandy.’ They seem genuinely shook-up by the audience-wave of instant recognition (‘he gets touched, he gets easily touched… and moved, touched and moved, every time he goes to the Theatre he wilfully suspends his disbelief…’). Arguably theirs is tonight’s most daunting task, for the camp duo remain the show’s most recognisably memorable characters... unless, perhaps Rambling Syd? But this eerily accurate take on the limp-wristed bona pair, out of work ac-tors ‘between engagements’ who fill in with ‘Bona Drag’ or ‘Renta-Chap’ (‘domestic chores undertaken’), succeeds in eroding your most stubborn critical instincts. And how bona it is to vada their jolly old eeks again! Although – to be fair, the whole show is never less than a team affair, with Stephen Boswell as bumbling announcer Douglas Smith and Sherry Baines as Betty Marsden both punching above their weight. Surreal jokes rattle off like Gatling-gun fusillades, leaving no time for breath before the next wave of ‘insinuendoes and catch-penny horseplay’.

 

Just five microphones. Five actual performers. Surely not. My imagination is populated by dozens of outlandish characters. But of course, they were – they are created from the voice-pool of just five people. I always knew that. But knowing is an unreliable instrument when placed against the mind’s eye. Surely, Rambling Syd Rumbo is a kind of sleazy version of Donovan, all faded denim jacket, frayed cap, guitar and harmonica harness, singing “The Ballad of the Loom-Bogglers Boom” or “The Toddle-Groper’s Dance”. I see him now in my head exactly as I could see him then. Only, it’s not like that. ‘Kenneth Williams’ steps up the mike in his suit and does the vocal ‘dangle-oh my dearies’ stuff on “What Shall We Do With The Drunken Nurker”. Those weirdly dialected lacerations of Folk songs dug from his ‘ganderbag’, for which no-one knows exactly what he means but everyone has a damned good idea. And of course, that’s how it really was. Despite everything your brain tells you to the contrary. 

Attempts at re-conjuring past showbiz magic carries a high risk of failure. But this combination has already ‘done several exciting things in the West End, now we want to do something risky in Leeds’ to paraphrase Julian & Sandy. Now: 

‘Jules and I are going to do something we’ve always wanted to do, we’re going to mount a musical…’ ‘Mount a musical what?’ enquires Horne disingenuously. 

‘Well, it’s too early to tell…’ 

Really, it’s all in the delivery, the voices loaded with multiple-meaning, but hear it in its original and it’s enough to turn your lallies to water! Yet this stage version pulls it off better than most, because it’s largely made up of original material tweaked by Brian Cooke, the last surviving member of the original writing team. And it’s the scripts that are the genuine stars. Even if, for long-term devotees, it still takes some getting used to seeing performers other than Kenneth Horne, Kenneth Williams (in the original stage-version played by Robin Sebastian), Hugh Paddick, Betty Marsden and Douglas Smith delivering the bawdy jokes and smutty puns that so shocked Mary Whitehouse and disgusted MP’s. During its original radio-runs, J. Peasemould Gruntfuttock – ‘the world’s dirtiest old man’, drew predictable complaints from the Mary Whitehouse tendency while MP Sir Cyril Black raised questions-in-the House over Gruntfuttock’s free-wheeling lack of religious regard. 

And just perhaps – according to their own repressive Right-wing agenda, they had a point? Perhaps there is artful subversion in there? The tie-in radio docu-programme (BBC3, Sunday 13 June 2004) is preceded by a ten-minute exploration of ‘Polari’, the secret dialect adopted by the 1960s gay scene – pre-Wolfenden Report, which is used to such outrageously ‘bona’ effect by ‘Round The Horne’. And at a time when homosexuality was still illegal, Julian and Sandy’s camp sauciness does allow suburbia to laugh openly along with what had been strictly taboo. ‘OOOO – in’he BOLD!’ But – as Barry Took observes, ‘if you find some of the references in the show baffling just think how puzzled the hierarchy of the BBC were back in 1967’. 

 ‘YOU’RE NEVER ALONE WITH A SPLIT PERSONALITY...’ 

‘Round The Horne: For the young at heart, and the weak in the head…’ 

Meanwhile, over at the ‘West Yorkshire Playhouse’, you could be watching ‘Ying Tong’ written by Roy Smiles and produced by Michael Codron. A homage to ‘The Goons’, and especially the deranged genius of Spike Milligan, it sees Spike under increasing pressure to create The Goon Show to end them all, while simultaneously planning his escape from St Luke’s Psychiatric Hospital dressed only in pyjamas. Losing his grip on reality even further he applies to the British Museum to get his marbles back, while threatening to murder Eccles, the most notorious of the Goons menagerie of characters. And on. While later, here at ‘The Grand’, there’s ‘The Play What I Wrote’ replicating Morcambe & Wise, elaborated from Eddie Braben’s original scripts by Hamish McColl and Sean Foley. That same Braben, you recall, who penned for the duo for fourteen years. Originally produced for its West End run by Kenneth Branagh, there’s a vague plot-line in which Kim (Wall) has wrote a play – an epic set in the French Revolution called ‘A Tight Squeeze For The Scarlet Pimple’. While Clive (Hayward), on the other hand, wants their double act to continue. He believes that by performing their tribute to Eric & Ernie, Kim’s confidence will be restored and their act will go on. But first Clive needs to persuade a guest star to appear in the play what Kim wrote… you know the routine. Own up. You know you do. But, taking these three stage productions together – alongside Rhys Ifans impersonating Peter Cook in Channel 4’s Xmas 2004 ‘Not Only But Always’, the biopic written and directed by Terry Johnson around the careers of Pete and Dudley Moore, there’s definitely something stirring. A preoccupation with days of comedy past. And, at least on a two-thirds basis, with radio comedy. 

Around the time the comedy ‘New Wave’ was erupting it was fashionable to denigrate such stuff, Ben Elton referred derisively to radio shows made up exclusively of catch-phrases, ‘The Fast Show’s ‘Ken & Kenneth’ deliberately satirise punch-lines that aren’t funny and only become funny through relentless repetition. But in ‘Round The Horne’ it’s easy to spot prototypes for much of the BBC comedy that’s followed. Critic Stephanie Merritt points out that ‘where would ‘Little Britain’s ‘only gay in the village’ be without the pioneering innuendo of Kenneth Williams and Hugh Paddick as former chorus boys Julian and Sandy?’ (‘Observer’ 9 January 2005). Of course, she’s right. This is family tree material from which everything else grows.

 

Radio comedy still exists. Often it’s very good. Although sometimes not quite as smart as it thinks it is, with clumsy supposedly-satiric stabs at George Bush and Tony Blair to denote its alleged topicality. It’s just that then… way back then when the Goons and the ‘Round The Horne’ crew were at their peak, television had yet to completely dislodge radio as the dominant source of home entertainment. It defined its own time simply by being there. Radio could demand the most highly-regarded writers, performers and production teams. The kind of talent soon to be creamed off by TV. There were other programmes, equally as legendary. Tony Hancock, Sid James and Kenneth Williams in ‘Hancock’s Half-Hour’. Leslie Phillips and Jon Pertwee in the chaotic nautical escapades of ‘The Navy Lark’. A mischievous Jimmy Clitheroe in ‘The Clitheroe Kid’, all of which briefly – and with varying degrees of success, transfers to black and white TV. Plus Ted Ray starring in ‘Ray’s A Laugh’. And Jimmy Edwards as the devious headmaster in ‘Wacko’, which didn’t.

 

So, what brings the audiences trolling in ‘ere?’ Well, ‘Round The Horne’ was always that bit different. Avuncular’s always the easy term to describe Mr ‘Orne, a benignly indulgent uncle, a ‘master of the revels’ to the anarchic misfits and deviants he presides over, an impression emphasised by his stature, and his rich eyebrows which compensate for the total lack of hair above them. Essentially a solid establishment figure with a broad streak of silliness, Charles Kenneth Horne was born 27 February 1907 in Anthill Square off the Tottenham Court Road, within a stone’s throw of Broadcasting House. According to Leslie Philips he was ‘not a comedian, a singer or even an actor, he was a successful business man who had a way with words, words which he used to sell everything.’ They’d once appeared together in a stage version of Jerome K. Jerome’s ‘Three Men In A Boat’. Horne began as the youngest of seven – four girls and three boys, in the close-knit family of Congregational Minister Sylvester Horne. He went on to Cambridge and the LSE, but was ‘sent down’ in 1927 after an all-play and no-work regime devoted to rugger and tennis. For a time he played tenor sax in Dance Bands and sold records part-time while working for a Safety Glass Firm in Birmingham… before the RAF intervened. 

Like many comedy-activists of his generation, National Service, the War Years and the immediate adjustment-period after provides career-opportunities. As Spike Milligan’s autobiographies indicate. So his slightest of show-biz experience determines that Acting Pilot Officer Horne is recruited to organise an ‘Ack-Ack Beer-Beer’ outside radio-show (1939-1944), where he meets up with Richard ‘Stinker’ Murdoch. They discover – apart from an affinity for irreverent humour, that they’d been Cambridge contemporaries, although they’d never actually interacted before. Yet from there, they soon graduate to working together on the cult war-time radio series ‘Much-Binding In The Marsh’, working alongside moustachioed future-DJ Sam Costa, Maureen Riscoe, Maurice Deham, and Dora Bryan. Originally part of the BBC General Forces Programme it runs to five series, and translates to both the new ‘Light Programme’ from 28 July 1945, as well as prime-time Radio Luxembourg. In a pervasively monochrome pre-TV Britain lit by this single Pop-orientated radio-channel, this strange sit-com of mildly comic songs, inoffensive running gags and catch-phrases soon becomes part of the national vocabulary, a show that hits massive response, and survives until 1954. And within which Horne and Murdock’s scripts were already exploiting the inner-CGi of pure-sound to conjure the confused ineptitude of this fictional RAF base, in ways that would escalate into what follows.

 

Horne graduates to hosting the BBC’s follow-up – ‘Beyond Our Ken’, despite the interruption of a violent stroke in February 1958 which necessitates speech therapy. He’s joined by ENSA and Stage School-graduate Betty Marsden, by Kenneth Williams – already what Leslie Phillips calls ‘a refugee from the Hancock purge’, and the rest. Linked by the continuity of Horne’s rich, urbane and genial tones, it’s an instant success. Until, after a falling-out with the BBC in 1964 writer Eric Merriman opts out of the show – taking the title with him, so collaborator Barry Took – commissioned to create a replacement, teams up with a young Marty Feldman. Hence the first fifty-ish scripts of ‘Round The Horne’ are created by the Took/Feldman team. With a final season involving Johnnie Mortimer, Brian Cooke and Donald Webster – although Marty is still on call for consultation over the ‘Julian & Sandy’ sketches. 

Horne also finds time to DJ for ‘Housewives Choice’, guests with Ted Ray on ‘Does The Team Think’ – a kind of panel-game precursor to ‘Have I Got News For You’, and reads ‘The Art Of Coarse Acting’ for ‘Woman’s Hour’, although his deteriorating health mean he’s by now on long-term anti-coagulant drugs and physiotherapy – and even has consultations with a Faith Healer. But it’s the two shows operating around elements of his name that define his celebrity. And after its full four seasons, plus occasional Xmas specials, and a peak audience of fifteen-million, ‘Round The Horne’ is only brought to a halt by Horne’s untimely death. He falls off the podium mid-speech at the ‘Annual Guild of TV Producers Presentation’ at the Dorchester Hotel, and dies shortly afterwards. It is 14 February 1969.

 

‘KEEP TAKING THE (ROMAN) TABLETS…’ 

‘That sinful city of ancient times, the seat of a corrupt empire which 

 wallowed in bacchanalian orgies and sadistic spectacles…’ 

 ‘Oh, Bognor?’ suggests Horne 

Each radio edition of ‘Round The Horne’ has a dramatic presentation from Horne-Ographic Productions, frequently a ‘Kenneth Horne: Master Spy’ James Bond spoof, or perhaps a ‘The Palone Ranger’ Western, The Three Musketeers or a ‘Little Caesar’ Mafia quasi-epic. On stage tonight they adapt two such scripts, ‘The Lost Island Of Gonga’ – first broadcast 2 April 1967 (in association with Pound-A-Flesh Ltd, the ‘friendly loan company’), and the Movie-Go-Wrong film adaptation ‘Continuum Medicum Romanum’, from 19 May 1968. This ‘Gladiator’-style swords-&-sandals drama concerns a second-hand British slave in good nick – Frigidius Maximus (Horne), the girls call him Frigid Maxie for short (‘…but not for long!’). He’s sold to new master Glucosius (Kenneth Williams). ‘I sprawled at his feet, all I could see was the rays of the setting sun gleaming on the strap of his sandals – yes, just a thong at twilight!’ ‘Gird up your loins, I can’t bear an ungirded loin’ demands his new master, a Tribune who hopes to be a New Statesman. He ‘tugged me to my feet by pulling at my chain… I flushed!’ (a lavatorial reference that now probably requires explanation). His new role – from when he ‘sundials on in the morning until he sundials off at half-past V’ is to wait on Glucosius hand and foot ‘and any other part of me that requires waiting upon.’ Until – Russell Crowe-style, he’s sent to ‘St Hilda’s Gladiatorial School’, and from there to the arena. He whets the edge of his sword (‘well, it takes some of us that way’). Douglas Smith plays the lion – ‘growl growl, roar roar’. And an impressed Nero (same Kenneth Williams, different voice) recruits him, so he changes ‘to Praetorian Guards’. Nero is ‘a nervous man and would allow no weapons in his presence, so day and night I stood at his side with a drawn cucumber’… and on. There’s a special civic orgy, a splendid affair where ‘wine flowed like water, the fountains gushed with milk stout, and scantily-clad maidens performed wild sinuous dances – it was all I could do to keep my cucumber steady.’ Seduced by Nero’s wife Popaia (pronounced ‘Popeye’), Frigidius protests ‘but I’m Nero’s guard, Madam, love is a word that’s forbidden to me.’ ‘Oh very well’ she responds, ‘tonight is made for politics. Come with me.’ So he goes and ‘all night long I politiced her’… until they wake, ‘no, it can’t be dawn, it’s only X-to-IV’, to find Rome in flames while Nero fiddles the closing number, a square dance ‘doin’ the Appian Way’. Of course, some of the humour depends on your familiarity with now-lost cultural references. Toilets that flush when you pull the chain. TV cigarette-ads. And cheesy old Pop hits.

 

But then again, the show’s surreal invention was never pointedly satirical. There’s clear topicality in the person of inept chat-show host Seamus Android (Eamonn Andrews), Fanny Haddock (a survivor from ‘Beyond Our Ken’ modelled on domestic goddess Fanny Craddock), and the movie-spoofs featured in ‘Armpit Theatre’. Even Julian & Sandy were originally based (although subsequently caricature-exaggerated) on West End Musical writers Sandy Wilson and Julian Slade. You can guess at the archetypes behind ‘Charles & Fiona’, with Betty Marsden as Dame Celia Molestrangler and Hugh Paddick as ‘aging juvenile’ Binkie Huckerback, those dated cinema idols engaged in their stilted Noel Coward-style dialogue – ‘I know’, ‘I know you know’, ‘I know you know I know’, pause – ‘I know’. But among the further cast of absurd creations, from Kenneth Williams’ Dr Chou En Ginsberg MA (failed), with his ‘lovely concubine’ Lotus Blossom played by lumbering Hugh Paddick, to Betty Marsden’s seductive Daphne Whitethigh and astrologer Madam Osiris Gnomeclencher, you’re left to draw your own conclusions. All that’s now left to mention is the music of Edwin Braben & The Hornblowers. A mid-point close-harmony song from the Fraser Hayes Four. And… of course, Ramblin Syd’s “The Ballad of the Woggler’s Moolie” or his paean of praise to “My Grandfather’s Grunge” – ‘they don’t make them like that anymore, you can’t get the drippets’ he explains, ‘limply but cunning’. 

And ultimately – own up, watching ‘Round The Horne’ on stage can add a shared contact-high appreciation to the experience. Giving you the chance to see, for the first time since select studio-audience’s saw it first time around, how Horne and the gang performed the show in its heyday. This is actually how it must have been. ‘Kenneth Williams’ tends to steal the show. But then Kenneth Williams always stole the show anyway. This version comes to Leeds with a lot was riding on it and a reconfigured cast from the one that made ‘Revisited’s first London run such an odd success – but, if anything, they deliver more doppelganger-accurate performances that their West End counterparts. ‘What brings you down to these parts?’ ‘I’ve got a lousy agent’. Until there are moments when it’s almost possible to forget you’re not still at home, ear pressed to your Bacolite Bush. It’s a unique experience, an event, and unbridled fun en masse. In fact, I remember one episode in which J Peasmould Gruntfuttock applies for a job with the ‘stuffy and hide-bound’ BBC intent on bringing ‘the fresh clean wind of reality up your corridors of power’, only to be told ‘your work is obviously the product of a one-track degenerate childish mind.’ ‘I suppose that means you’re giving me the sack?’ he queries. ‘Oh good heavens no, you’re just the chap we need to write for ‘Round The Horne’!’ It’s almost possible to believe that almost, just possibly, it might really have happened something exactly like that. Fantabuloso... 

‘wonders will never cease, but for the time being, 

‘Round The Horne’ will, so – till we meet again, 

from all of us, ALL OF US, cheerio…’

 

‘BEYOND OUR KEN’ 

From Tuesday 1 July 1958 to 16 February 1964. Seven Seasons (108 episodes) 

‘ROUND THE HORNE’ 

From 7 March 1965 to 9 June 1968. Four Seasons (66 episodes) 

Complete Episode Guide: www.britishcomedy.org.uk/kwas/rth 

‘SOLO FOR HORNE’ 

biography by Norman Hackforth 

 Excerpt published in: 

‘SELEXIO’ edited by Andy Robson 

(UK – September 2020)

COMEDY RECORDS OF THE ROCK 'N' ROLL ERA

ON THE TRANSISTOR RADIO: 

COMEDY RECORDS 

OF THE ROCK ‘N’ ROLL ERA 

Pop Novelty records – we loved them, didn’t we? 

from the Goons to the Goodies, 

from Charlie Drake to Jasper Carrott, 

they’ve tickled our chuckle-muscles, 

and how tickled we were…!

Any survey of UK comedy records of the Rock ‘n’ Roll era has to start with the Goons. Not only because their “Bloodnok’s Rock ‘n’ Roll Call” c/w “The Ying Tong Song” was a September 1956 ‘New Musical Express’ no.3 – below Doris Day and Anne Shelton, and a few positions above Elvis’ “Hound Dog”, but because it sits at the ignition-point of a web of interconnections into Pop culture that leads directly through to the Beatles and beyond. Yet bizarrely, that wasn’t the oldest record to chart. 20 December 1975 saw Laurel & Hardy at no.2 with “The Trail Of The Lonesome Pine”, originally featured in the 1937 movie ‘Way Out West’, but gathered as part of a comedy compilation from which it was championed on Radio One by John Peel. The original film-clip shows Stan Laurel miming to the deep bass voice of Chill Wills, with the last few falsetto lines – after he’s been hit on the head by Ollie’s mallet, by Rosina Lawrence. A fitting extension to the duo’s long and distinguished career. But the Goons should be the starting point. 

“The Ying Tong Song” is brilliantly timeless insanity, virtually impossible to evoke in flat text, it shifts through a sequence of gentle soothing orchestration, into an operatic lullaby his mother used to sing as she tucked him in when he was ninety-three, interrupted by Spike Milligan’s ‘who what that bum?’, directly into a nonsense sing-along chorus, a rasping horn break, an angelic voice, a rude raspberry… disrupted by an explosion, hasty footsteps dashing into the adjoining room – ‘LOOK OUT!’ another explosion, after which they sing in posthumous speeded-up voices. At a time of dull buttoned-down conformity the Goons radio-show was a force of chaotic anarchy, virtually incomprehensible to adults, but just as much a vital release as the incendiary insurrection of Rock ‘n’ Roll itself. Largely the manic creation of an inspired Spike Milligan, with co-conspirators Harry Secombe and Peter Sellers, the radio episodes form a kind of embryonic adolescent counter-culture, a style of absurdist surrealism featuring “The Search For The Bearded Vulture”, “Ten Thousand Fathoms Down In A Wardrobe”, “The Dreaded Batter-Pudding Hurler (Of Bexhill-On-Sea)” and “The Mystery Of The Fake Neddie Seagoons”, routines imitated by schoolkid listeners including John Lennon, the future Monty Pythons… and me. An earlier single – “I’m Walking Backwards To Christmas” c/w “Bluebottle Blues”, hit no.4 in June 1956. There had never been anything remotely resembling the Goons, and there never would be again. 

But Peter Sellers went on to have a couple of duet hits with the very wonderful Sophia Loren with whom he was filming the romantic comedy ‘The Millionairess’ (1960). Originally intended for – but omitted from the soundtrack, they were taken instead from the 1960 ‘Peter And Sophia’ album. For “Goodness Gracious Me” – a no.4 hit on November, ‘conceived and instigated’ by none other than George Martin who also carries producer credits, Sophia is the patient in love with Sellers’ examining Doctor Ahmed el Kabir, done in exaggerated Asian accent. Her heart goes ‘boom-biddy-boom-biddy-boom’ in his presence. Was it racially offensive? Possibly it could be retrospectively interpreted that way, at the time it was purely seen as evidence of Sellers’ talent for amusing mimicry. “Bangers And Mash” – no.22 in January 1961 has Sellers as the Cockney Tommy who marries the Italian Sophia, but he prefers simple English home-cooking to her macaroni and minestrone. 

There’s an irresistible sixties Pop-culture gravitation connecting George Martin, the Goon’s electronic experimentation with bizarrely edited sound effects, and the Beatles, which result in Peter Sellers’ no.14 hit reading of “A Hard Day’s Night” in December 1965, delivered as a Shakespearian soliloquy. Granted, at that point, anything with a Beatles-link was likely to chart. Comedy actress Dora Bryan had already got to no.6 with “All I Want For Christmas Is A Beatle” in December 1963. While the Beatles connection extends into the Peter Sellers movie of Terry Southern’s novel ‘The Magic Christian’ (1969), which had Ringo following him around like a big amiable dog. 

By which time Harry Secombe had returned to the charts with the syrupy sentimental mush of “This Is My Song”, with Wally Stott’s string arrangement taking it up to a high of no.2 – despite a rival version by Petula Clark at no.1, at the same moment that Jimi Hendrix and “Strawberry Fields Forever” were charting. The song is only salvaged by its being composed by an ageing Charlie Chaplin, the century’s first and enduring comic genius, as an almost fitting deliberate eulogy to the nostalgic ideal of romance. And yet the Goons were not quite finished. “The Ying Tong Song” was reissued in July 1973, when it climbed back into the charts, as high as no.9, illuminating a new generation with its inspired madness. 

Novelty records have a long history. A catchy tune, a nonsense lyric – ‘mairzy doats and dozy doats and liddle lamzy divey,’ that briefly but persistently stick in the brain, and it’s a fad, even in sheet-music editions. “The Sheik Of Araby” was written in 1921 in response to the success of the Rudolph Valentino film ‘The Sheik’, and became an early jazz favourite notably performed by song-&-dance star Eddie Cantor. In a unique constellation of connections, the Beatles perform it as part of their failed Decca audition, with George Harrison taking lead plus John and Paul adding silly-voice interjections. Accelerated by the potential of studio technology to create amusing effects, as well as by the ingenious radio drama and comedy department’s ability to conjure vast mental images through the strategic manipulation of evocative sounds, the 78rpm single, and then its 45rpm successor became the perfect accessible low-budget vehicle for novelty. Including the speeded-up voices of – for example, the 1958 US no.1 “Witch Doctor” by David Seville (the real-life Ross Bagdasarian) and his spin-off creation the Chipmunks. In the days before VHS – the first home-recording technology, the only way to hear favourite comedy routines over and over again, was through record albums. And before video killed the Radio Stars, the 45rpm single offered the useful career bonus of a marketable promotional opportunity. 

Most comedians made records. Tommy Cooper had “Don’t Jump Off The Roof Dad” (1961), issued through the small Palette label. Punctuated by Tommy’s infectious laughter, he sings about how ‘Daddy came home from work tired,’ and after a particularly arduous day he decides to end it all with a suicidal leap from the roof, only for his kids to shout up at him, concerned not for his welfare but for the damage he’ll cause to mother’s petunia flowerbed below. They advise him to drown himself in the local park instead! Only Tommy Cooper could make suicide funny. The ‘Two Of A Kind’ Morecambe And Wise recorded one of their most popular comedy routines – “Boom Oo Yata-Ta-Ta”, written for them by Sid Green and Dick Hills, but shaped and evolved through a series of performances. Eric decides to go solo as a leather-clad Pop singer. Ernie says no, he needs a backing group, who just happen to consist of him, Sid and Dick. Although it doesn’t work out quite as intended, until the group take lead vocals and Eric is no longer required. ‘It’s tough at the top’ he complains into the fade-out groove. Popular, but neither Tommy Cooper nor Morecambe And Wise actually chart. 

‘The Lad Himself’ Tony Hancock and his ‘Hancock’s Half-Hour’ regular guest-voice Kenneth Williams had singles together – the 1963 Galton-Simpson penned “Wing Commander Hancock: Test Pilot” – in which the airborne Hancock discovers mechanic Ken still sitting on the airplane fuselage, and Ken’s solo “Hand Up Your Sticks” (Decca, 1961) written by Peter Cook – in which Ken rehearses his lines in order to rob a bank, but messes up with ‘hold hands, this is an up-stick’ during the raid itself. Both are clever and extremely funny, they receive plenty of radio airtime, but are essentially comedy routines, not songs, and hence don’t bother the chart compilers. 

Unlike the diminutive Charlie Drake, popular enough to star in his own front-cover ‘Radio Fun’ comic-strip (art by Arthur Martin), with his ‘Hello, My Darlings’ catchphrase. He was first levered into the chart by an opportunistic cover version of Bobby Darin’s US novelty Rocker “Splish Splash” which reached no.7 in September 1958, winning out over Darin’s original. Relaxing in the bathtub – with watery sounds, he doesn’t know there’s a Rock ‘n’ Rolling party going on below. He follows it with another cover, this time taking Larry Verne’s US no.1 “Mr Custer” – a comedy song about a cavalryman reluctant to ride into the ill-fated Battle of Little Bighorn massacre. Taking elements from its style as his starting point, “My Boomerang Won’t Come Back” was co-written by Drake himself, with a Johnnie Spence arrangement and George Martin production sheen. The story-song of the boy who was ‘a big disgrace to the Aborigine race’ forms a complete self-contained audio comic-strip in itself, with the kind of sound effects – the exploding Flying Doctor’s plane, and silly voices – the annoyed kangaroo, that prefigures “Yellow Submarine”. It peaked at no.14 during October 1961. He followed it with “I Bent My Assegai”, a similar scenario transplanted to an African setting. 

In order to demonstrate their All-Round entertainer versatility, Music Hall stars frequently finished their sets with a song. Hence the biggest-selling comedy star of the sixties, bizarrely, was the Squire of Knotty Ash – the tatiffilarious Ken Dodd, although his numerically-impressive string of nineteen Top 50 hits are only laughable in the broadest sense of the word. The tickling-stick wielding Liverpool star discovered an alternate career as a romantic balladeer of big overblown cheesy Italianate dirges, starting with the pre-Beatles “Love Is Like A Violin” (no.8, July 1960), then going on to dominate the chart at no.1 for six weeks with the execrable “Tears” through October 1965 while Manfred Mann, the Yardbirds and Small Faces had to be content with lesser positions below it. In his defence, one of his TV shows has Doddy warble his November 1965 no.3 hit “The River” in its original impeccable Italian as “Le Colline Sono In Fioro”, only for him to hastily produce a lyric-sheet to then sing it in English. How tickled we were. With his theme-song “Happiness” Ken Dodd was still touring and performing until his 11 March 2018 death. 

But when it came to strict comedy-records, naughty mischievous Benny Hill not only took the cover of the ‘Radio Fun Annual’ (1960) but was still around in 1975 for the cover of ‘Look-In’ with ‘The Many Faces Of Benny Hill’. With only mild innuendoes, “Gather In The Mushrooms”, a song sung ‘in the modern idiot’ with accompaniment directed by Tony Hatch, gave him not only his debut hit (no.12, February 1961), but a first outing for his joke about bathing in ‘pasteurised milk’ – ‘I’ll be happy if it comes up to my chin.’ “Transistor Radio” (no.24, June 1961), co-written with Hatch (under his ‘Mark Anthony’ guise), is even better. Taking the fad for portable music, Benny’s attempts at love-making are consistently thwarted by interruptions from his girlfriend’s radio, allowing him to spoof various current music styles. She first tunes into a speeded-up Chipmunks-Pinky & Perky insert, then an Elvis voice ‘I do not have a wooden heart, I have a wooden head’, followed by a ‘Two-Way Family Favourites’ announcer making dedications to ‘Ngia Gooki of British Honduras, Umbongo Appledory of New Guinea, and Fred Glockenlocker of British Hartlepool’, and – in Jimmy Jones “Handy Man” falsetto style, ‘you told me you were just eighteen on the telephone, I thought that you meant eighteen years, but you meant eighteen stone’. The record’s punch-line closer is that when she turns to him with romantic intentions in their honeymoon hotel room, he asks ‘ere, where’s the radio?’ to her dismissive retort ‘Music he wants!’. 

A more complex character than surface impressions suggest, Benny insisted on writing his own material, unlike many of his contemporaries. Which worked well during these inventive early years of his career. The next hit single – “Harvest Of Love” (no.20, May 1963), is an innuendo-laden rural romp, ‘I’m gonna sow the seed of deep devotion, fertilize it with emotion, water it with warm desire, and then I’ll reap the harvest of love,’ adding cheekily, ‘if the wife ever finds out she’ll kill me.’ By 1965 his “I’ll Never Know” was an affectionate Doo-Wop parody, and with the arrival of the ‘Protest’ boom, he was singing “What A World” while wearing a mop-top wig – ‘now the folksinger came from America, to sing at the Albert Hall, he sang his songs of protest and fairer shares for all, he sang how the poor were much too poor and the rich too rich by far, then he drove back to his penthouse in his brand new Rolls Royce car,’ a snipe at Bob Dylan just that’s as acutely perceptive as Chumbawamba’s “Give The Anarchist A Cigarette” would be decades later.

 

But as the pressures and demands of fresh TV series intensified he fell back increasingly on the racial stereotypes and the sketches in which an attractive girl’s clothing gets ripped away to reveal designer underwear, resulting in speeded-up chase sequences through the park. The comic potential of repellent old men letching after beautiful younger girls may have a history that goes back as far as the ribald humour of ancient Rome, but it set Benny Hill up as the most obvious target for the more idealistic non-exploitational New Wave of comedy. His career suffered, and has never fully recovered, although he retains a cult following in the most unexpected of places. Dolly Parton plays his “Yakety Sax” chase theme during her Glastonbury set, and Rapper Snoop Dogg cracks up laughing while he describes how he loves to watch the sketches in which Benny slaps ‘Little’ Jackie Wright on the bald-head. Yet there’s a sense in which Benny Hill gets the last laugh, when his single “Ernie (The Fastest Milkman In The West)” topped the chart – no.1 for five weeks through December 1971, above T Rex, Slade and the mighty Who. Reprising his line about bathing in pasteurised milk, ‘Ernie, I’ll be happy if it comes up to my chest’, the story of Ernie facing off in a Western-style duel with Two-Ton Ted from Teddington for the love of a widow known as Sue, ends with the sound of ‘Ernie’s ghostly gold top a-rattling in their crate’. I hated the record’s success at the time. After the sensational evolutions of music through the build-up last few years of the sixties, it seemed a poor portent for what was to come in the new decade. Looking back now, I quite enjoy its harmless silliness. 

For the era of ‘Dark Side Of The Moon’ (1973), ‘Hotel California’ (1976) and ‘Rumours’ (1977), no suburban ‘Abigail’s Party’ was complete without the comedy album revolving on the front-room stereogram turntable, usually either Monty Python or Billy Connolly. For less confrontational evenings there was always the more mild-mannered humour of ‘The Two Ronnies’ – Barker and Corbett, with their amiably twee repertoire of amusing songs. But Python records sold like Rock albums, with all the generational cult following once enjoyed by the Goons. Fans recite sketches word-for-word, the Dead Parrot, the Five-Minute Argument, Spam Spam Spam and Spam. Inevitably there’s a hit single, in the belated shape of Eric Idle’s curiously whistleable existentialism. “Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life” is sung during the crucifixion scene of ‘The Life Of Brian’ (1979) – ‘life’s a piece of shit, when you look at it, life’s a laugh and death’s a joke, it’s true, you’ll see it’s all a show – keep ‘em laughing as you go, just remember that the last laugh is on you.’ When reissued as a single it became a no.2 chart hit, 26 October 1991, and despite all the Moody Blues Prog-Rock profundity posturing, this could just about be the most philosophical truth ever committed to vinyl. 

Connolly albums were a private pleasure that involved liberal naturalistic use of ‘adult’-content four-letter words, something you couldn’t hear elsewhere, outside of demolition-raconteur ‘Blaster’ Bates or Roy ‘Chubby’ Brown. The Big Yin started out as a Glasgow Folk musician, with Gerry Rafferty (and originally Tam Harvey) in the Humblebums, recording three albums for Transatlantic alongside near-hit 1970 single “Shoeshine Boy”. Solo, his freewheeling between-songs banter expanded in exact ratio to the reducing song-content. Seemingly unscripted, rampaging off into expletive-laden improvisational forays, his huge albums included ‘Cop Yer Whack For This’ (1974) – done live at the Glasgow ‘Kings Theatre’, and ‘Get Right Intae Him!’ (1975), at the Glasgow ‘Apollo’, which spun-off the Tammy Wynette-spoof “D.I.V.O.R.C.E” which took him to no.1 for the single week of 22 November 1975, more in recognition of his contagiously enjoyable performance than for any incidental cleverness involved, burbling with laughter at his own bleeped-out tale of taking his dog to the vet. Although he followed it with another parody, “No Chance (No Charge)”, no.24 the next July, his future lay in movies and TV rather than hit singles. 

Meanwhile, Tony Blackburn introduced Jasper Carrott on ‘Top Of The Pops’ (28 May 1975), to lip-synch his no.5 hit “Funky Moped”, recorded with the full Brummie Jeff Lynne ELO mafia on hand to play back-up. This Shangri Las-referencing refutation of the Heavy Rock ‘Born To Be Wild’ Biker-chic was the acceptable ‘A’-side way of navigating around the BBC ban on his even more popular “Magic Roundabout” ‘B’-side, supposedly a filched advance-script in which Dougal and Dylan speculate about Florence’s ‘horizontal pleasures’ and her Toy-Town promiscuity with Noddy. The audience instantly pick up on and respond to each sniggery in-joke about the innocent children’s animation with a disturbing familiarity. 

With the advent of ‘Alternative Comedy’ The Young Ones found it necessary to hijack an unsuspecting Cliff Richard – who may have assumed the anarchic foursome to be some kind of tribute act, and a more knowing Hank Marvin, in order to return “Living Doll” to no.1 (5 April 1986), as a Comic Relief charity single. Although Nigel Planer’s ‘Neil’ took Dave Mason’s “Hole In My Shoe” – with lyrics that even his fellow Traffic members considered a tad risible, and tipped it over into pure comedy with very little added effort, equalling Traffic’s chart place by taking it up to no.2 (21 July 1984) just below “Two Tribes” by Frankie Goes To Hollywood.

 

But – unless we’re compelled to include the Wombles, it was the Goodies who proved to be the biggest comedy chart act of the period with five hits promoted by regular ‘Top Of The Pops’ spots spaced between the December’s of 1974 – with a bowdlerised version of ‘Rugby Song’ “Oh Sir Jasper” reconfigured into “Father Christmas Do Not Touch Me” (no.7) and 1975’s “Make A Daft Noise For Christmas” (no.20). Although they share histories across an impressive spread of radio and TV projects with Marty Feldman and various Pythons, including ‘I’m Sorry, I’ll Read That Again’ and ‘At Last The 1948 Show’, their own series – launched on BBC2 in November 1970, was more wacky than subversive. It was a kind of sit-com flaunting Monkees-style surreal touches with bits of stop-motion animation (including the rampaging ‘Kitten Kong’), dismissed as a ‘kid’s programme’ by John Cleese in a guest appearance – as the Genie, in ‘The Goodies And The Beanstalk’ episode. 

The trio enjoy their biggest Pop moment with the “Funky Gibbon” spoof dance-disc (no.4), romping around the TV-studio stage making knuckle-dragging monkey sounds. Principal songwriter Bill Oddie urges ‘will you give me an oooh? (to an answering ‘Ooooh’), will you give me another oooh? (‘Ooooh’), and will you give me an oooh? (‘oooh’), now put ‘em together, what’ve you got (to much manic ‘Oooh-oooh-oooh-ooohing’)’. “Black Pudding Bertha” (no.19) saw them trading Simian behaviour for hugely exaggerated flat-hats and northern accents, ‘when she starts to dance she shimmies like a plate of tripe’ sings Oddie, as backing-voices Graeme Garden and Tim Brooke-Taylor chant the ‘tripe and cowheels, tripe and cowheels’ chorus. With their tagline ‘We Do Anything, Anytime’, there was much harmless fun to be had on their Goodies-bicycle made for three.

 

It’s worth remembering that despite virtually inventing the cars and girls Rock ‘n’ Roll genre, the most respected guitarist and songwriter in the history of Rock, Chuck Berry’s only UK and US no.1 hit was with the silly suggestive nudge-nudge novelty of “My Ding-A-Ling” in 1972, a song that even Chuck himself was subsequently too embarrassed to play live. While Lonnie Donegan’s Music Hall “My Old Man’s A Dustman” with its drop-in comic gags – recorded live at Doncaster’s Gaumont cinema not only gave him a massive million-selling single and his final no.1 in March 1960, but virtually destroyed his credibility as Skiffle King. But Pop singles have always been an awkward contradiction of art and commerce, as well as being a novelty impulse-purchase, a disposable souvenir of passing fads and transient trends. There have always been comedy records, from Mike Sarne (“Come Outside”, with Wendy Richard, a 1962 no.1) to Bernard Cribbins (“Right Said Fred”, with George Martin magic, no.10 in 1962), from Ray Stevens (“The Streak”, no.1 in 1974) to Russ Abbot (no.7 with “Atmosphere” in December 1984), which gave way to TVs Spitting Image (“The Chicken Song” written by Rob Grant and Doug Naylor, no.1 in 1986) or the Firm (“Star Trekkin’”, no.1 in 1987). Or even – gulp, “Mr Blobby”, the Christmas no.1 for 1993 from Noel Edmunds inexplicably popular ‘House Party’ show. Popular. Forgotten. But also tangled up in ludicrous memory of time and place. Old singles found in dusty boxes stashed away in the loft. Oh yes, I remember that one, it was fun. That’s more than enough.

Poem: WHY A TRUMP-VOTER IS A FLIGHTLESS BIRD

 

WHY A TRUMP-VOTER 
IS A FLIGHTLESS BIRD 

I don’t see the 

point of a flightless bird, 

birds are made for 

the freedom of flight 

soaring to the 

limits of the sky, 

there’s just no point 

to a flightless bird, 

it’s like a 

thoughtless human, 

humans are designed 

for the freedom of thought, 

there’s just no point 

to neglectful misuse 

of the mind, 

I don’t see the point 

of a Trump-voter

Book Review: 'DESTINATION MARS', Mike Ashley, George RR Martin & Gardner Dozois

 

DESTINATION MARS!!!! 

Book Review of:

‘LOST MARS: 

THE GOLDEN AGE OF THE RED PLANET’ 

edited by 

MIKE ASHLEY 

(British Library Science Fiction Classics, 

2018, ISBN 978-0-7123-5240-6, 304pp) 

and 

‘OLD MARS’ edited by 

GEORGE RR MARTIN and GARDNER DOZOIS 

(2013, Bantam Books 

ISBN 978-0-345-53727-0, 486pp)

 

Mars is both a planet, and an idea. Unlike the Forest-Moon of Endor or Mr Spock’s Vulcan, it is possible to look up into the night sky and see the gleam of Mars with the naked eye. It has been known and recognised as a world – a moving star, since ancient times. And fiction abhors a vacuum. Wherever there are Terra Incognitas, we populate them with fantasia. And Mars has been the subject of more fantasias than just about anywhere else. The cover of Mike Ashley’s generous paperback gathering of ten tales – plus the editor’s own learned and informative introduction, shows Chesley Bonestell’s 1953 ‘Exploring Mars’ artwork, picturing two finned rocket-ships on the ochre surface of our planetary neighbour, with twin track-marks in the dust left by exploratory vehicles, and a couple of space-suited figures climbing a rise to get a better vantage-point view of the alien terrain. Bonestell’s space-art is still regarded as some of the most visionary ever, indeed his art envisages the eerie Mars-scape for George Pal’s ‘The War Of The Worlds’ (1953) movie, another vital ingredient in Martian mythology. 

George RR Martin retells the familiar history of Milan astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli observing what he describes as ‘canali’ on the Martian surface during the 1877 close planetary opposition, but how this Italian word for channel was then mistranslated into English as ‘canals’. A small, understandable error – but with immense implications. ‘Channel’ can describe a natural phenomenon. ‘Canal’ can only mean an artificial structure. When the idea was taken up by Percival Lowell at the Flagstaff observatory in Arizona, he sketched out maps of the Martian canal system, designed to irrigate the red deserts of the dying world with polar melt-water, and he wrote three influential books on the subject, beginning with ‘Mars’ (1896), followed by ‘Mars And Its Canals’ (1906) – in which he writes ‘to find, therefore, upon Mars, highly intelligent life is what the planet’s state would lead one to expect,’ and ‘Mars As The Abode Of Life’ (1908). ‘Areographers’ – those who study the geography of Mars, continued to argue the veracity of canals well into the 1950s. 

Surely it can be no coincidence that young novelist HG Wells is represented here by an 1897 short story – “The Crystal Egg”, in which a dealer in antiquities acquires the titular egg that acts as an interplanetary lens, enabling him to see the vista of Mars through a corresponding crystal suspended on a pylon above a Martian city. The glimpses of winged beings and gigantic insectoid ‘mechanisms of shining metals and extraordinary complexity’ are teasing and tantalisingly incomplete, more so due to the loss of the crystal with the dealer’s untimely death. Appearing in the May issue of ‘The New Review’ even as “The War Of The Worlds” was being serialised in ‘Pearson’s Magazine’ (April to December 1897) it suggests maybe a cross-over of Wells’ preoccupations with the Red Planet. His serial prefaced by what editor Walter Gillings calls ‘a plausible summation of the problem which compelled his octopoid horrors to prosecute’ their invasion attempt (an essay “The Battle Of The Canals” in ‘Science Fantasy’ no.1, Summer 1950). 

Mars is both a dream, and a high frontier. Not just a place, but a continuing story. Ashley selects Stanley G Weinbaum’s much-anthologised “A Martian Odyssey”, perhaps because no collection of Mars-based stories would be complete without it, but then rediscovers a neglected gem in “The Forgotten Man Of Space” by veteran P Schuyler Miller, from ‘Wonder Stories’ (April 1933). Prospector Cramer is betrayed by his colleagues and marooned in the arid rust-red sands, only to be discovered in the ice-caves by the Maee, an elfin-rabbit desert-folk who scratch out a precarious existence by farming black beans in a limestone crater. He lives with them for ten long Martian years, only to find that when he’s finally rescued by brutal rapacious Earthmen, his loyalties lie with the simple Maee, and he dies in order to preserve their secret way of life. 

Mars is the Red Planet, yet writers tint it with hues of their own conjuring, Ray Bradbury mixes in the sepia of a yearning nostalgia, with his “Ylla” – first published as “I’ll Not Look For Wine” in ‘Maclean’s Magazine’ (January 1950), set before the coming of his ‘Silver Locusts’, with subtle sub-currents of hostility to refugee migrants that still uncomfortably echoes. 

ER Burroughs hijacked Barsoom for his own bejewelled purposes, denigrated by SF-purists as frivolous escapist fantasy, yet as probes and trundling surface-rovers have since proved, even more serious speculations on the nature of Martian geography and biology are just as fanciful. I was doubtful when I first read Leigh Brackett’s “Sea-Kings Of Mars” (first published in ‘Thrilling Wonder Stories’, June 1949), because everyone knows Mars is – and always has been, a dry desolate world, making Brackett’s great cities and bustling quays built on timeless sea-girt shores, seem a step too far. Yet maybe she was right and I was wrong? There’s no rugged hero armed with broadsword and limitless courage, but recent revelations show that Mars did indeed have shallow seas during earlier eras. 

Borrowing something of ERB’s gift cast through the illuminating lens of Leigh Brackett, Marion Zimmer Bradley adds “Measureless To Man” (from ‘Amazing Stories’, December 1962), with Mars-born Andrew Slayton joining John Reade’s expedition to the lost Martian city they call Xanadu, but which – as he discovers, the discorporate Martian Kaellin calls Shein-la Mahari. In a place of ‘madness and death’ the Martians find new hosts in the colony’s experimental chimpanzees, making this Mars a new planet of the apes. ‘In a place like this, imagination is worse than smallpox,’ yet here are beautiful imaginings that go viral. 

Both EC Tubb (“Without Bugles”) and Walter M Miller Jr (“Crucifixus Etiam”) try for a more gritty less romanticised vision. No Martians, just remorseless punishing Mars-is-Hell aridity. With Tubb’s ‘New Worlds’ story which was also chapter four of his hard-hitting ‘Alien Dust’ (1955) novel, and Miller’s story from the February 1953 ‘Astounding SF’, both show pioneer labourers doomed never to leave Mars due to a kind of silicosis caused by inhaling Martian dust, or in Miller’s tale by dependence on the aerator oxygenating implants that cause lungs to atrophy. Finally, JG Ballard’s “The Time Tombs” – from ‘If’ (March 1963) is not really set on Mars at all, more a kind of enclave of his ‘Vermillion Sands’ where embittered grave-robbers carry out an illicit traffic in dead souls plundered from ‘ten-thousand-year-old tombs’ submerging in sand-seas beside the lava-lakes of the Sea of Vergil.

 

In the thematically related anthology – ‘Old Mars’ (2013, Bantam Books), George RR Martin and Gardner Dozois assemble modern stories deliberately recast and set on mythical lost Mars – maybe even the Mars of a parallel universe, including a playfully exuberant Michael Moorcock romp. David D Levine’s “The Wreck Of The Mars Adventure” even offers an entertaining steampunk variant in which imprisoned ‘Pirate Of The Caribbean’ Captain Kidd is pardoned from the noose on condition he flies a balloon-elevated ship through the stormy ‘interplanetary atmosphere’ to Mars. Martin himself muses how ‘the Mars of my childhood was not the invention of HG Wells or Percival Lowell or even Edgar Rice Burroughs, as important and influential as they were, each adding their own touches and twists over the years and decades to create a kind of consensus setting, a world that belonged to everyone and no-one.’ 

If the tales in his anthology seem less authentic than the ones Mike Ashley collects, that is because they are more knowingly contrived, in deliberate homage. Even Stephen Youll’s cover-art shows a more stylised multi-finned spaceship, with a phantom white city glimpsed in the red-desert distance. There are references to Wells’ Tripod attack on Horsell Common in Ian McDonald’s “The Queen Of The Night’s Aria”, as operatic virtuoso Count Jack Fitzgerald and his narrator Faisal are led into the Hall of the Martian Queen in the subterranean city beneath Tharsia. Allen M Steele prefers to use a specific scene from George Pal’s ‘War Of The Worlds’ screen adaptation for “Martian Blood” – ‘the camera-eye is wrapped in Ann Robinson’s scarf, which was splattered with gore when Gene (Barry) clobbered a little green monster with a broken pipe.’ Elsewhere, from a hotel decked out in ERB-ian memorabilia, a Dr al-Baz uses a sample of ‘shatan’ blood to prove the genetic ‘panspermian’ link between Earthman and Martian. Joe R Lansdale uses the Martian polar region as setting for pursuit through a pyramid by a relentless ice-shark, in “King Of The Cheap Romance”, asking ‘if you die on Mars, do you go to Martian Heaven?’ In Matthew Hughes “The Ugly Duckling” there are graceful cities of bone being machine-chewed into fertiliser by human colonists, and desert-schooners menaced by sand-sharks in Chris Roberson’s “Mariner” – it’s protagonist, Jason Carmody, snatched Pulp-fiction style by a Caribbean vortex to ‘the distant past of the red planet, or its future? Or perhaps into some analogue of the fourth planet that existed in another dimension?’ A world haunted by tall slender Martian ghosts, dark they were, and golden eyed… 

Because – of course, none of these stories deal with the real Mars we see as a gleam in the night sky. The world that – even now, new probes scour, hunting not for winged beings or gigantic insectoids, but for the possibility of virus that may conceivably have thrived in shallow billion-year-old seas. Instead, these beautiful and brilliantly-compiled anthologies form a tribute to fantasias of the imagination.

Jazz: RAHSAAN ROLAND KIRK

KIRK’S WORK WAS 

REEDS AND DEEDS: 

 AN OVERVIEW OF 

THE CAREER OF 

RAHSAAN ROLAND KIRK

 

The unpredictable contortions and theatrical excesses of Roland Kirk’s career vividly chronicles the dilemma of black consciousness in jazz over two vital decades. To funk or not to funk. Whether ‘tis nobler to go with the flow or to chart for the heart. On the sleeve of the Benny Golson LP Kirk is sharp hipster cat, oozing Bop left-bank existentialism from Dizzy Gillespie berry to goatee, later on, with the adoption of his ‘spiritual’ Rahsaan prefix he’s all Muslim kaftan weirdness, and by the time of ‘Volunteered Slavery’ (1969, Atlantic 588-207) he’s into a spaced-out PVC boiler-suit ethos – playing three instruments simultaneously in a spectacular circular-breathing obstacle course jazz circus. 

Kirk, a large physically formidable presence, died 5 December 1977 aged just forty-two. He reputedly played forty instruments. He was born Ronald Theodore Kirk, 7 August 1935 in Columbus, Ohio. Thirty-six years later the Columbus mayor would proclaim a city-wide ‘Roland Kirk Day’, paying homage to the musician at a press conference, while the man himself would be giving an Ohio State University lecture. But the beginnings of Kirk’s career were less auspicious, blinded at the age of two from ‘improper medical treatment,’ he studied at the Ohio State School For The Blind. 

An early album sleeve tells how the unprepossessing black child had an ‘offbeat instrument bag’ from the age of six, striving to extract coherent sounds from a garden hose. Such is the stuff of legend. But his parents were counsellors at a local Summer Camp and Kirk became camp bugle boy, then trumpet-player in the school band, until by his mid-teens was touring with a R&B group. On the advice of a doctor who felt the strain was too great, Kirk switched to clarinet and sax. The tenor sax would remain the instrument on which his style would be built, yet it was a style to be channelled in many diverse directions.

 

‘After dreaming one night he was playing three instruments at once, Kirk went to a local music store too see which horns had the sound that suited him’ continues the legend-shaping sleeve-notes. ‘After rummaging around in a basement for what the instrument dealer referred to as ‘the scraps’ he came across the manzello, which looks like at alto but has a big, fat, odd-looking bell, and the stritch, which resembles a soprano with a thyroid condition.’ These oddities would be lugged around the world, snorted at ‘Ronnie Scotts’ in London’s Soho, at the ‘Village Gate’ off Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village, at Festivals and concerts through all the strangeness to come. They would be played individually, in tandem, or in various odd combinations with other, more conventional instruments. Kirk’s showmanship was unique – but not exactly unprecedented, thirty years earlier Wilbur Sweatman had reputedly played three clarinets simultaneously. 

In his early twenties – bristling with manzello, stritch, tenor sax, whistle-siren and flute, he began to wander into Louisville and Chicago jam sessions. He joined Charles Mingus for a period, began to acquire merit and approving asides that, with a certain logical inevitability, led to his first record date in 1960. At this time he was scuffing with a young black piano-payer called Tommy Tucker. In 1975 Kirk would acknowledge the association by recording Tucker’s huge R&B dance-hit “High Heel Sneakers” (on his ‘The Case Of The Three-Sided Dream In Audio Colour’ LP 1975, Atlantic SD1674). 

The first years of the sixties might be the last high-water mark of pure jazz acceptance. Since the turn of that decade black protest in jazz became more explicit, taking on tones of anger, violence, social and political relevance. Music as uncompromising as Max Roach’s “Freedom Now Suite”, and the apparently anarchistic chartings of the jagged, often atonal music’s of Archie Shepp, John Coltrane, Albert Ayler and Cecil Taylor. The whole New Thing, the whole New Jazz which – although often impenetrably intellectual, also expressed the private language of black ambition, and in this sense represented a re-immersion in ghetto spirit. Later – during the seventies, freshly affluent black audiences would be drawn away by the energies of Disco Funk, but as the fifties bled into the sixties Detroit was still a place where African-Americans work mean shifts making autos they can’t afford. For them, the Blues smacks too much of the earth, and its electric child R&B lacks the intellectual commitment of the jazz musicians. Kirk spoke of jazz being ‘black classical music’, and for their newly liberated aspirations jazz was an art associated with black consciousness, at least since the Muslim flirtations and the arrogant posturings of the BeBop insurrection. 

According to German jazz critic Joachim Berendt, Kirk had ‘the wild, untutored quality of a street musician coupled with the subtlety of a modern jazzman,’ a bifurcation of talent that was at once his strength – and also, arguably, his weakness. By the time of the 1962 ‘Downbeat’ critics poll, he scooped the miscellaneous instrumentalist section, and as the year fed into 1963 a UK tour prompted ‘Melody Maker’ to headline Kirk ‘the most controversial musician in jazz’. 

Much of Kirk’s formative early stuff from this period, largely recorded for the Mercury label, later fell off catalogue. Made up from a 1963 session ‘Reeds And Deeds’ (Mercury SMWL 21032) sees Kirk alongside Virgil Jones (trumpet), Charlie Greenlee (trombone) and Walter Perkins (drums). Then – cut towards the end of his Mercury stay, there were sessions teaming him with the Benny Golson Orchestra, with music produced at these dates making up one side of a subsequent LP (‘The Roland Kirk Quartet Meets The Benny Golson Orchestra’, 1964, Mercury 20-002). The orchestra setting was probably an A&R concept, yet it works surprisingly well, the two men mesh together despite Kirk’s greater musical breadth of vision, with some fine examples of Kirk’s early playing. Side one includes his reading of the Charlie Mingus tune “Ecclusiastics”, a recognition of an earlier fruitful Mingus partnership that resulted in two fine albums, one of them recorded live at Carnegie Hall. Kirk also tributes the great bass player again on “Kingus Mingus”, a sequence on his ‘Left And Right’ album (1969, Atlantic 588178). The Benny Golson album, in the meantime, goes on to feature a Kirk work-out called “Variation On A Theme”, an idea lifted from modern classical composer Paul Hindemith. Its vague oriental overtones prompts ‘Gramophone’ magazine to suggest a passing resemblance to the current Fry’s Turkish Delight TV-ad. 

A later album provides a further, if less pleasing, juxtaposition. ‘A Meeting Of The Times’ (1972, Atlantic SD 1630) teams Kirk with the wobbling vibrato of ex-Duke Ellington vocalist Al Hibbler, with largely flawed results, maybe due to the singer’s advancing years? In the meantime – the second side of the Golson LP is made up of Kirk’s quartet pieces, with Harold Mabern (piano) Abdullah Rafik (bass) – both of whom feature on ‘Reeds And Deeds’, plus Sonny Brown (drums). In this more familiar setting, the Kirk quartet play pieces like “I’ve Got Your Number”, for the most part a pleasing enough piece – until the coda, which erupts into an amazing duel between manzello and tenor, with Kirk playing both simultaneously! Such moments, oddly aligned among more conventional numbers such as “A Nightingale Sang In Berkeley Square”, prove unique tasters for the coming wildness and weirdness. 

In October 1966 Kirk played ‘Ronnie Scott’s’ with the legendary Phil Seaman on drums and Dave Green on bass. Phil, a bastion of British Jazz, was later to feature in Ginger Baker’s Airforce. During the performance of a piece called “Whistle Man”, Kirk hands out little bamboo whistles to the club audience, on which they’re expected to join in. He also demonstrates his amazing ‘circular breathing’ technique which – like some Zen exercise, consists of continually inhaling through the nostrils while exhaling through the mouth, allowing the musician to play extended solos without pausing for breath. Playing music that, according to journalist Chris Welch ‘lurches crazily, but creatively from the humorous to the bizarre, from the harsh to the beautiful’ (‘Melody Maker’). This technique, also adopted by Harry Carney, is taken to its manic marathon extremes on a twenty-one-minute continuous tenor solo called “Saxophone Concerto” on an October 1973 album (‘Prepare Thyself To Deal With A Miracle’, Atlantic SD 1640). 

Such apparent eccentricity meant that Kirk’s style never slots easily into a category, neither avant-garde nor mainstream. Instead, his obsessional preoccupation was with sound, pure sound. He told Welch ‘it’s like the piano where each key is an instrument and a challenge to the player’ – a perfect, and then perfectly unconventional view of instruments as ‘sound machines’, devices for generating sound. In a different field, John Cage takes the idea to its logical fulfilment in his “Music For Prepared Piano” by totally ignoring every conventional precept of piano playing. To a lesser extent, Kirk uses the pads on his flute unconventionally, to produce a kind of ‘percussion’. Bestrung with diverse and self-customised instruments his experiments in eclecticism are based on whatever unusual sound they can be induced to produce when played solo, or in different combinations. 

He even experiments with tapes of electronic music. 

A couple more early albums were then enjoying reissue interest. ‘Rip, Rig And Panic’ (1965, Trip TLP-5592) – a name later adopted by Neneh Chery’s extreme 1980s post-Punk band, which has Kirk playing against Jaki Byard (piano), Richard Davis (bass) and powerhouse drummer Elvin Jones, a set that – according to ‘Melody Maker’ draws inspiration from almost ‘every jazz era’. Plus the influential ‘Kirk’s Work’ (1961, Prestige PRLP 7210), which sees him sharing the masthead billing with Jack – later ‘Brother’ Jack McDuff. Although the organist was later to become group leader in his own right, on this set he seems content to embroider around the edges of Kirk’s multiple instrumentation, but in no way can his contribution be considered anything less that dynamic, and again the fusion works well. Arthur ‘Art’ Taylor (drums) and Joe Benjamin (bass) flesh out the sound with compulsive walking rhythms on the Kirk-composed Gillespie tribute “Three For Dizzy”, and Kirk-arranged “Skater’s Waltz” from an original by French classical pianist-composer Emil Waldteufel. 

The McDuff collaboration also features a Kirk cut called “Funk Underneath”, and it’s tempting to suggest that the Funk content was to ‘come out from underneath’ during subsequent years when, after quitting Mercury he entered the second phase of his career with the more sympathetic Atlantic records. In January 1967 he played a return three-week stint at ‘Ronnie Scott’s’, coming from gigs on the continent, before flying back to his New Jersey home. But as the sixties blur uneasily into the seventies the musical commitment to jazz seemed to lose its edge of centrality. It was too cerebral. It lacks the feel of the street. Motown, Elridge Cleaver, Stax and Soul siphon off the audience, leaving jazz musicians playing to white college kids too busy taking thesis-notes on social significance to listen to their intellectual sloganeering. 

Kirk attempts a near-overkill rearguard action. He leads the disruption of the ‘Merv Griffin’ CBS-TV show as a protest against television’s conspicuous lack of black jazz musicians. Chanting placard-carrying demonstrators bring the show to a halt while Lee Morgan and Kirk perform impromptu jazz from the audience. This was the media direct-action technique later employed by Abbie Hoffman against David Frost. Kirk also aims articulate rhetoric at Ed Sullivan’s monopoly networked TV slot, with the result that in February 1971 he’s allowed a token slot on the CBS show playing alongside Archie Shepp, Charlie Mingus and Roy Haynes. 

Kirk ties in this anti-racist politicising with a series of poorly-received albums drawing energy from Soul. ‘Volunteered Slavery’ (Atlantic SD 1534), issued in late 1969, neatly straddles the period. The first side features studio takes of Stevie Wonder’s “My Cherie Amour” and Aretha Franklin’s Bacharach-David hit “I Say A Little Prayer”. Less impressively adventurous, two later cuts – “Spirits Up Above” and “Search For The Reason Why” use massed vocals called the Roland Kirk Spirit Choir – likely made up of Kirk’s own multi-tracked voice. However, the title number builds to a classic roaring climax that continues onto the second side, recorded live at the 7 July 1968 Newport Jazz Festival. In fact the recording was not taken from Kirk’s main set, but from the encore, which may account for the hysterical audience reaction. Kirk works with a trio rhythm section, tributes John Coltrane, and plays with demonic possession, particularly on the flute-piece closing track “Three For The Festival’. 

It’s said that Jethro Tull’s Ian Anderson based his entire flute style on such a Kirk piece! 

For ‘Natural Black Invention: Root Strata’ (September 1971, Atlantic SD 1578) the sleeve-notes inform that ‘with a few minor exceptions Rahsaan Roland Kirk is the only musician on this album.’ While the Soul inroads continue on the April 1972 ‘Blacknuss’ (Atlantic K 40358) which features Cissy Houston – fresh from her work with Doris Troy and Dionne Warwick, singing on the Kirk-penned title-track as well as the standout Gloria Gaynor hit “Never Can Say Goodbye”. Ace session-man Bernard ‘Pretty’ Purdie – veteran of Larry Coryell and Steely Dan gigs and later a Hummingbird member plays drums, while Kirk weaves his way through an odd Soul-Jazz collection, from Bill Withers’ “Ain’t No Sunshine” to Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Goin’ On/ Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)”, Smokey Robinson’s “My Girl”, “I Love You Yes I Do”, and even David Gates’ romantic “Make It With You”. 

There are Leon Thomas’ Soul-tinged vocals on Kirk’s “Dream” on the flawed ‘A Meeting Of The Times’, while Dee Dee Bridgewater and Jeanne Lee sing slogans ‘it’s about time we started checkin’ out our beautiful black miracle’ on ‘Prepare Thyself To Deal With A Miracle’, an album that closes uncompromisingly with “Dance Of Revolution”. If the first few years of the decade see a steady adjustment of his jazz reputation at the expense of this Soul content, a couple of hefty retrospectives chart the process. For the double-vinyl ‘The Art Of Rahsaan Roland Kirk: The Atlantic Years’ (1973, Atlantic SD 2-303), Kirk’s melodic composition “Lady’s Blues” features strings, then he runs the swinging “Afro-Blue” into the one-man-band performance of “Baby Let Me Shake Your Tree”. Yet the selection also focuses attention on the consistently exciting underpinning of the Atlantic label session-men, seasoned musicians such as drummer Steve Gadd – highly rated among Rock cognoscenti, trombonist Dick Griffin and drummer Sonny Brown who’d played with Kirk since 1963, guitarist Cornel Dupree (on “Blacknuss”) and pianist Ron Burton. 

There’s also an impressive ‘Bright Moments’ (1973, Atlantic SD 2-907) double-set captured live at San Francisco’s ‘Keystone Korner’ – ‘The World’s First Psychedelic Jazz Club’, with Kirk’s jive-talking banter and Todd Barkan on synthesiser. By their process of selection, both sets forcefully prove that Kirk had lost none of his fiery ability, and that beneath the sloganeering of the more recent sessions there still lurks the heart of a jazzman. 

But there were other forces at work within Kirk’s eclectic music that also conspired to attack his critical integrity. White Rock was forging out on wild acid-fuelled free-form expeditions to inner consciousness via electronic experiment and the use of ‘pure sound’ effects. Kirk’s philosophy was all-embracing enough too glimpse beyond Charles Lloyd’s attempt to gatecrash this market – in many ways Kirk had already pre-empted many of Rock’s ventures into extemporisation at earlier stages in his career. With ‘The Case Of The Three Sided Dream In Audio Colour’ he came up with an album that – in conceptual terms, could have been as innovatory as Miles Davis’ apocalyptical ‘Bitches Brew’ (March 1970), except where the execution somewhat betrays the grandeur of its aspirations. It was a unique three-sided double-album (an idea later picked up on a Taj Mahal set, if memory serves), which features a thirty-eight-second sequence of galloping horses – played backwards, and eight “Revolution No.9”-type ‘dream sequences’ of muted ‘dub’ conversations drifting in and out of focus, with barking dogs, loops, and what would later be termed sampled sounds (the snatched voices of Paul Robeson and Billie Holiday). Spaced between these musique-concrète sections are two alternate takes of Scott Joplin’s “The Entertainer” (the theme later used for the 1973 movie ‘The Sting’) one ‘Done In The Style Of The Blues’, two versions of the standard “Bye Bye Blackbird”, plus attention-grabbing titles “Freaks For The Festival” and “Echoes Of Primitive Ohio And Chilli Dogs”. Produced in New York’s Regent Sound Studios by Joel Dorn, it’s an oddly intriguing and only occasionally infuriating album, which brought Kirk’s long and patchy association with Atlantic to an end. 

The subsequent Warner Brothers contract saw the period of experimentation abruptly and cruelly terminated. Shorty after the release of ‘The Case Of The Three Sided Dream In Audio Colour’ Kirk suffered a stroke. Following an initial recuperation period he found that he’d permanently lost the use of his right hand. Yet if he was subsequently forced to opt for a more conventional approach, his single-handedness was not allowed to stint his sense of presence. He had his tenor engineered to fit one hand, and even added a vertically-played flute, harmonica and kazoo to his arsenal! But his determined and ingenious recovery was short-lived. A further stroke killed him. 

In retrospect, Kirk’s contribution to the jazz-rock crossover was not great. The commercial form of fusion evolved by Chick Corea, Herbie Hancock, Joe Zawinul and Larry Coryell has a tendency to be a music castrated of its Rock ‘n’ Roll excitement but robbed of much of its jazz subtlety too. An uneasy hybrid, combining the low points of both, with the essential value of neither. Kirk was often clumsy in his translation of sounds, and created albums that were occasionally overstated, yet on sets such as ‘The Inflated Tear’ (1968, Atlantic 588-112) or ‘Left And Right’ he proved that his style of eclecticism could be made to work effectively. Derek Jewell recalled seeing Kirk’s last ‘Ronnie Scott’s’ stint, commenting ‘artistry and virtuosity may be admirable. Allied with courage they are irresistible’ (‘Sunday Times’, 7 November 1970). 

Through the sixties and the first half of the seventies the development of Kirk’s music charted the vagaries, and the dilemmas of jazz – an art-form caught up in ambiguous times. He chose to meet its challenges head on, neither relying on nostalgia for outmoded styles, nor taking the easy route of playing cop-out electric muzak. If it’s explorations have now been forcibly ended then it’s jazz’s loss. 

Published in: 

‘HAT no.6’ 

(UK – March 1978)

THE NEW ORLEANS BOUNCE: HUEY ‘PIANO’ SMITH AND SMILEY LEWIS

THE NEW ORLEANS 

BOUNCE: 

 

HUEY ‘PIANO’ SMITH 

AND SMILEY LEWIS 

 

CD Review of: 

‘PITTA PATTIN’’ 

 by 

HUEY ‘PIANO’ SMITH AND FRIENDS 

 (1987, Charly R&B CRB 1164) 

and 

‘NEW ORLEANS BOUNCE: 

THIRTY OF HIS BEST’ 

 by SMILEY LEWIS 

(1990, Sequel NEX CD 130)

 

‘Remember how that one went? Ah-ah-ah-ah, daaaay-o… gooba-gooba-gooba-gooba… ah-ah-ah-ah. Etcetera. The wit, wisdom, and social commentary of Huey ‘Piano’ Smith’ (page 258 of ‘The Stand’ by Stephen King. NEL, 1979). 

Early Rock ‘n’ Rollers were plagued by an alarming variety of ailments, including a ‘Paralysed’ Elvis Presley, Johnny Kidd And The Pirates “Shakin’ All Over”, the unique testicular agony of Jerry Lee Lewis’ “Great Balls Of Fire” – but the most contagious of them all was “The Rockin’ Pneumonia And The Boogie-Woogie Flu” spread infectiously by Huey ‘Piano’ Smith. It’s most distinctive symptoms being uncontrollable all-night partying and compulsive jitterbug bopping.

 

Born in 1934, Smith was a ubiquitous ingredient in what lesser journalists would probably refer to as the steaming New Orleans soul-gumbo of fifties cross-over R&B. Even on CD – or perhaps PARTICULARLY on CD, his bands sound authentically primitive, practically Neolithic, his loping four-to-the-bar rhythms and pounding stride piano single-miked but inflicted with energy levels insidious enough to bust beyond the technological limitations of the age, and serve up the Crescent City 1956 time-capsuled raw and uncooked to your state-of-the-art Music Centre. The excellent ‘Ace Records’ reissue programme has already scooped the pick of the litter by sampling sides first available here from the magic Sue-Island label catalogue. With ‘Rockin’ Pneumonia And The Boogie-Woogie Flu’ (1978, Chiswick Records CH9) they grab both sides of the initially two-sided Huey ‘Piano’ Smith And The Clowns title song, plus his biggest American chart single “Don’t You Just Know It” (no.9 in 1958). While ‘Somewhere There’s Honey For The Grizzly Bear, Somewhere There’s A Flower For The Bee’ (1984, Ace CH100) sucks in the slapstick “Somebody’s Put A Tack (In The Cotton Pickin’ Chair)” and “Susie Q” plus the novelty “Doing The Beatnik Twist”. ‘Pitta Pattin’’ itself selects cuts from a lazy drift further down the Louisiana bayou, tracks collected from a mid-sixties session and production hook-up with the Instant label, drawing on material from Smith’s part-time groups the Pitta Pats (“Bury Me Dead”), the Hueys (“Coo Coo Over You”), and even Shindig Smith And The Soulshakers, as well as his continuing line-ups of Clowns. No great shakes vocally himself, Huey hives off vocal chores to Clowns frontmen Bobby Marchan, Junior Gordon or Curley Moore – or Alex Scott in the Pitta Pats, with Smith himself content to mainline good-timey keyboard pounding. 

Before he eventually vanished into late-seventies Jehovah’s Witnessing, other names glide in and out of his career like a vinyl train-spotter’s vision of the grail. He’d begun in 1949 as Guitar Slim’s pianist, legend has it he plays on Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti”, as well as on Johnny Otis and Lloyd Price sessions, while guitarist Earl King – and ‘Doctor John’ Rebennack are graduates of Smith’s boogie academy. It was Huey Smith and his band – New Orleans to a man, or a Clown! who first recorded “Sea Cruise” before Ace label-chief Johnny Vincent substituted voice-overs by his white protégé Frankie Ford, who subsequently took the song into the Top Ten and Rock ‘n’ Roll history. While Huey’s piano also doctors Smiley Lewis sessions (including “I Hear You Knocking”), giving the New Orleans bounce to, and putting a smile to Smiley’s best work. 

When Dave Edmunds took “I Hear You Knocking” to a bizarrely incongruous November 1970 UK no.1, he breathed the name ‘Smiley Lewis’ into the instrumental break, acknowledging the originator. The song might have been written by Dave Bartholomew, it might have been produced by Allen Toussaint, Fats Domino might have cut a version in 1958 – as Status Quo would in 1990, but Smiley Lewis (aka Overton Amos Lemons) is the name on the Imperial-label original. But here we are still dealing aces. He never cracked the big time outside Bourbon Street clubs in the French Quarter, but these records stand scrutiny, even though Lewis himself succumbed to stomach cancer 7 October 1966. Less prolific or wide-ranging than Huey Smith, all you ever really need to know – and more, about Smiley is here, across thirty tracks from “Tee Nah Nah” through “Shame Shame Shame” (from Carroll Baker’s much-banned 1956 movie ‘Baby Doll’), to the song he bequeathed to Elvis Presley – “One Night”. Here Lewis sings the original ‘one night of sin, that’s what I’m now paying for, the things I did and saw, would make the earth stand still’ – and, though Elvis cleaned the lyric up, his white version still sounds more intensely DIRTY than Smiley’s rather world-weary grind. 

But in 1950s New Orleans, Huey ‘Piano’ Smith and Smiley Lewis are irresistible, individually or in various combinations. As Stephen King says – wit, wisdom and social commentary!

 

Retro Book Review: BARRY EDGAR PILCHER

 

POEMS GROWN

 

IN BISCUIT CRUMBS

 

BESIDE THE RADIATOR

 

Retro Book Review of:
‘VASE OF 
A THOUSAND CRANES’
by 
BARRY EDGAR PILCHER
(Originally from Speed Limit Publications)

Barry plays ambidextrous clarinet stuffed with flowers. He’s been known to grow additional limbs for greater aural dexterity and sound manipulation that flows across pearlescent seas of skin. Birthed in 1943, a commercial artist for a half-decayed, Fire Watcher, member of the London Zen Buddhist community beneath thunderous peach clouds, he’s known to quote Balinese dictums in forests of aphorisms. He was a year at Detroit Motor-town artist’s workshop (hone of ‘golden fiery vaporous sky rockets’). And he writes poetry that infiltrates like autumn rain, like blown leaves, like paint spattered by Abstract Expressionists – thoughts floating in the void, haiku serene and transcendental, with a laugh of profound Dharma absurdity. Poems clustered like dust in a bohemian bedroom stacked with magic mandalas and mystic caballistic texts and hexes – poems of rolling madness like exotic narcotic plants of luxuriantly lush vegetation with tight tight tight buds (pregnant with hallucinatory dreams) grown in biscuit crumbs beside the radiator, wild wiry and wanton as uncombed hair, wet gleaming and salivating as a perfect Reichtian fuck that melts all sensual sensation into the white energy-dance webs of eternity. Check out the dual anthology ‘Magic City’ with Barry’s poems set against Mark Williams euphorically free-wheeling commentary on the Cardiff scene in general and the Pilcher’s pad in particular, while the poems in this booklet, like a day spent in the country, are as long as it takes to get there – and as worth the effort.