What Kind of Music Makes You?

There's a pivotal scene in Woody Allen's Manhattan where he reels off the things he couldn't live without into a tape recorder. Although you might argue with some of them, it's difficult to defend anyone who says they could live without the voice of Frank Sinatra. 

I really only have two loves, reading and music. I tried to make a quick list. I realise how useless these lists are (and the longer, the more useless, I have found). Perhaps, however, such a list might help me find a core interest.

Musicians and composers Irving Berlin Johnny Mercer George Gershwin (especially Porgy & Bess) Bessie Smith Pink Floyd (with and without Syd Barrett, but not without Roger Waters) The Beatles Joe Meek Tom Waits Bob Dylan (any period) Louis Armstrong Music hall legends (Sam Mayo, Ronald Frankau, Talbot O'Farrell) Tchaikovsky Aaron Copland Mabel Mercer Noel Coward Stephen Sondheim	Poets Philip Larkin John Keats Wallace Stevens Ted Hughes Sylvia Plath Carol Ann Duffy W.H. Auden
Novelists Martin Amis Armistead Maupin Margaret Atwood Ian McEwan Milan Kundera Saul Bellow John Updike Henry Green Flann O'Brien Albert Camus	Assorted (Critics, humorists, non-fiction writers, short story writers) V.S. Pritchett Richard Rorty St. Augustine S.J. Perelman Martin Heidegger Whitney Balliett Thomas Nagel

If you are a regular reader of this site, has a similar list of interests brought you here? Are there things I should be getting into that my Amazon recommendations have missed?

Johnny Mercer

Brian Solomon’s guest post at Emma’s Music - The Genius of Johnny Mercer

Another Talbot O’Farrell Video – Little Green Heaven

Again, from the Pathe website. Before singing ‘Little Green Heaven’ he gives us some comic patter about the use of microphones on stage: “God’s gift to the anaemic terror.”

Other posts on Tablot O'Farrell, including those with mp3s: 

The Great Tablot O’Farrell

An Encounter with Talbot O’Farrell

Talbot O’Farrell: Yorkshireman or Irishman?

The Voice of the Iron Lady

After watching The Iron Lady, about which I suppose my feelings are about as mixed as they are about Thatcher herself, I was almost entirely consumed by one conviction: that hers is the most recognisable voice ever in British politics (no doubt partly because she is still probably the most discussed – and most polarising – woman in the Western world).

During the premiership of Margaret Thatcher, Wendy Richard
was a frequent and conspicuous supporter of Thatcher's policies and accomplishments.

So it’s no surprise that the scene that most intrigued me is a relatively minor one where she undergoes vocal training to ‘feminise’ her voice. Now, I’ve read that a recording of one such session used to be in circulation among journos, but I’ve never heard it. Here’s an illustration of the difference. According to Max Atkinson (in Our Masters’ Voices)

She achieved a reduction in pitch of 46 Hz, a figure which is almost half the average difference in pitch between male and female voices.

One record that made excellent use of Thatcher’s distinctive voice was this Pete Harman-produced tune from 1991, which apparently reached No. 10 in the 12” charts (sounds apocryphal to me, but I’m sure I could find out if I could be bothered).

Maggie’s Last Party – V.I.M.

I had a go at doing a mix using an interview with her myself. It’s a dystopian tale that also features little Prince and the theme from Are You Being Served? You can listen to it here.

An Interview with June Honri about ‘Working the Halls’

(This post complements my post on Peter Honri’s book Working the Halls.

You might want to read that first!)

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You may remember my post in October about Peter Honri’s book Working the Halls. I was so impressed by the book and the accompanying flexidisc that I felt that rare desire Holden Caulfield talks about in Catcher in the Rye to call up the author. To that end I contacted the Honris and managed to speak to June Honri, Peter’s wife, later that month to ask her about the circumstances under which the book was written.

At first when I realised it was Peter’s wife I was to speak to, I must admit I feared the worst, but June soon explained that she was speaking on Peter’s behalf because he sadly now has Alzheimer’s disease. However, I found June to be quite the raconteur, with a disarmingly youthful voice – indeed, very soon into our conversation she explained that people who assumed she is younger than she is were sometimes a bit ‘offhand’ with her!

MUSIC MAKES ME: Hello June! I really wanted to ask about Working the Halls. The book is unusual in coming with a ‘gift record’ – I think they call them flexidiscs. [You can listen to it here.]

JUNE: Oh, you’re lucky. You’ve got the original one. It was just done for the book. You’re very lucky to get one with the record intact. Where did you get it?

MMM: I think in a second-hand bookshop in Whitby.

J: In Whitby! Oh, well done!

MMM: I don’t think I realised it had the record in it until I’d finished reading it! And it seems to me an invaluable part of the book. Was it always a part of the book?

J: Yes. It was done through a Dutch publisher. Peter had ended up writing a show for Farnham Castle Theatre Music Hall. The next day after the opening night the phone rang about five o’clock in the evening – when you’ve got three children and you’re doing tea, not a very convenient time – and a Dutch voice, which I just about managed to understand, asked me could Peter write a book about music hall? So I said ‘Yes,’ straight away. And then he said, ‘Could he do it in eight weeks?’ and I said ‘Yes.’ So that book was written in eight weeks. It took over the entire house.

MMM: Really? Eight weeks?

J: He’d already done a lot of research in piecing it together, you see.

MMM: Yes. I can see that. To me, it’s like a brilliant scrapbook. Now, I have to confess I haven’t read any of Peter’s other books.

J: You’d like Music Hall Warriors [The full title is Music Hall Warriors: A History of the Variety Artistes Federation 1906-1967].

MMM: Thanks for the recommendation! Now, there is a passage later in the book where Peter speculates about the Arts Council officially recognising music hall as a part of the living arts. Did anything ever come of that?

J: I couldn’t tell you about that, but if you read Music Hall Warriors you’ll find the Variety Artistes Federation could be very awkward fellows! And Wilton’s Music Hall – which is a fictitious diary of its owner John Wilton. [Oddly enough, Wilton’s Music Hall was featured in a Michael Grade documentary which aired while we were speaking. It’s called The Story of Music Hall with Michael Grade]

MMM: How did the Spike Milligan preface, or ‘Overture’, come about?

J: I think through Wilton’s Music Hall. But Peter was a very well known performer in the West End, anyway, so possibly through Equity.

MMM: The book is very positive about the halls, with none of the doom and gloom about the death of a way of life. In fact, Peter appeared in a production of Beyond the Fringe in 1966, a show often said to be the death-knell of variety. Is it an age that we’ve lost?

J: No… Peter’s idea was that music hall is present-day. Today’s top-liners are today’s music hall. The likes of Elton John are the present-day music hall.

MMM: Some would argue that some modern talent shows, like Britain’s Got Talent, recapture the spirit of the halls. What do you think? Do you watch the show?

J: We have occasionally. But there are other programmes we happen to like! But again, we do see that as present-day music hall. They would be the Marie Lloyds of the present day.

MMM: Quite right. Peter was a Shakespearean too, which reminds me that the Music Hall was not just about sentiment and cheap gags. In particular, in the book, Percy’s show Concordia comes across as being a real spectacular.

J: Yes; full of innovations.

MMM: And did you meet Percy [Peter’s grandfather] yourself?

J: No. But I knew Grandma and his wife – and, also, I was approved of by the family up in Blackpool!

MMM: Of course! Now, the accordion – or the concertina – is quite a tough instrument, isn’t it?

J: It is, yes.

MMM: My granddad played the accordion up until very recently. Does Peter still play?

J: He does, yes. Unfortunately, because of the Alzheimer’s, he still thinks he should be doing a show. So I have to ration the concertina, because it can get a bit over the top – Peter standing at the front door wanting to go out with it!

MMM: I’m glad to hear he still plays, though! It’s been really nice to chat to you and I wish you and Peter well for the future.

J: Thanks. And don’t forget to keep your eye out for a copy of Music Hall Warriors! [Available from Greenwich Exchange]

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I would also like to thank Whitchurch Arts for making this interview possible, as well as everything they have done to recognise the Honris’ achievements.

Two Visuals: The Contents of Music Makes Me, Represented Visually

The Venn diagram shows the overlap of the different tags which accompany each post on the site; the bar graph shows how many posts there are under each tag.

Click on either pic to be taken to a list of all the mp3-related posts. It makes it a lot easier to search for content.

Links of the Month - November 2011

Very much indulging in shellac and that sort of thing this month: a reminder that there are many, many good blogs on 78s at the moment.

Dark Sweets - Soothing Sounds of Shellac for a Long Winter At the top of my list is this delicious compilation of obscure 78s. Even the cassette tape cover art is spot on, in an anachronistic kind of way.

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Symphonies on American Odeon A 1921 recording of Schubert’s 8th Symphony conducted by Eduard Mörike. (The 8th is the Unfinished, for those among us who love classical music but can’t count.)

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Thomas Mann’s Top 12 78rpm Records Alex Ross looks at the Death in Venice and Magic Mountain author’s pick of classical records.

Let’s Put The Beatles Back Together Again: Book Review

About the Beatles it’s hard to write anything new. The Beatles already have their chroniclers: their Lewisohns, their Ryan & Kehews, their MacDonalds. Everyone with any claim to be the Fifth Beatle already has a book to their name.

One thing that is certainly left, and a thing that is accomplished with fearless dilettantism by Jeff Walker in his book Let’s Put The Beatles Back Together Again, is the job of pruning what exists. This book is a veritable orchard of the resulting bonsai trees. To put it more crudely, this is a listmaker’s wet dream. ¹

Walker structures the book around the idea that, contra Lennon’s song ‘God’, the dream is not over. That is to say, there is a way to claw back the Beatles’ solo careers and construct a Beatlesque canon. To do this, Walker proposes a thought experiment. Suppose the Beatles, upon officially splitting up, had made a pact to continue to group their best recordings together under the moniker of the Beatles Recording Collective (the BRC).

Some amusing hypotheticals fall into place here. John still dies on December 8, 1980, but he ‘survives’ as ‘ghost-John’ as a recording artist through the virtue of having a fair bit of unreleased work in the can.² They still release their various solo albums, although the best tracks (‘Nineteen Hundred and Eighty-Five’ but not ‘No Words’ from Band on the Run) are creamed off and packaged for the BRC.

Links of the Month - October 2011

Nikon Small World Photomicrography Competition A selection of photographs created using a microscope. The objects are sometimes shown 2000 times their original size.

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Bizarre Love Triangle – Frente Lovely cover of an already beautiful song. The soaring melody is sung against guitar arpeggios.

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The Composer as Accompanist This site posts some astounding classical 78s, including a solo piano piece by John Ireland. The Shellackophile have some really nice pieces.

Links of the Month - September 2011

Songs to lie on your bed and stare at the ceiling to A Stumbleupon mix of such songs.

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Space is the Place The 1974 meandering film version of Sun Ra’s album.

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The sugary secret of self control An intruiging book review of Roy F. Baumeister and John Tierney’s book Willpower by Steven Pinker.

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Cliff Edwards and Buster Keaton play a duet on the same ukulele It’s two minutes long but I could watch this for 200.

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Celebrities by Ron Galella The original pap. Love the shot of Dustin Hoffman.

Also, there was a great interview with Roy Harper at 17 Seconds.

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Links of the Month - August 2011

Many fascinating reads this month, mainly because I’ve been on holiday and so had more time to read. Anyway, here’s my top five:

August 28: Jafaican Doesn’t Exist A glorious response to some of the comments made by David Starkey on Newsnight about the recent London riots, including the now much-qualified claim that “the whites have become black”, speaking a “Jamaican patois”. Don’t worry: it’s not a political but a linguistic reading of the situation.

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August 25: Eeker Listens To Kick Drum Heart Sample quote: “There are some weeks when a certain event influences the songs in your head. Other times, a news story could trigger a reaction. Or it could even be something someone has said to you. This week has not been any of those.”

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August 24: Early Wildlife Recordings: Songs of British Birds In 1953, Ludwig Koch, the renowned wildlife sound recordist, was responsible for a number of recordings of common species, providing an aural identification guide to British birds.

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August 23: Leiber & Stoller on Charlie Gillett The site, which frequently features old Gillett shows, here becomes a double tribute, since the DJ’s guests are none other than Mike Stoller and his songwriting partner the late Jerry Leiber (left in the pic).

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August 21: Dmitri Nabokov Sings The Music from Tetris That is, here are some Russian lieder performed by the author’s son, who is, as his father was, to say the least, multitalented: at various times he’s been curator of lepidoptery at Harvard, a semi-professional racecar driver and translator of many of his father’s works.

Links of the Month: July 2011

July 2011 was a gripping month in terms of breaking news. In fact, I think news itself ‘broke’ several times, and has since had to be painstakingly reassembled by the often out-of-touch presenters on our screens.

There was the dramatic re-emergence of the phone hacking scandal (with dramatic consequences for Rupert Murdoch, about whom I’ve learned an awful lot), the massacre in Norway and the death of Amy Winehouse.

But these things have already been given blanket coverage already, so I’m picking out five completely unrelated sites that have most satisfactorily intrigued me this month. 

‘Music for Mentalists: Unexpected Sounds for the Connoisseur’ (19th July) This collection of miscellaneous mental music made my day by reminding me of a tune from my childhood: ‘Patel Rap’. At the time, my best friend lived above a corner shop and so the lyrics rang true. It’s funny when something so silly causes you to get all nostalgic. It’s full of all the usual unusual juxtapositions: Jim Bowen raps, Arnold Layne is given a disco reworking, and Boon’s Michael Elphick sings a song from the perspective of a predatory male.

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Alternative Ghostbusters (14th July) If, as I suspect, we are all learning to be retronauts and hauntologists at the moment, this site really is as indispensable to us as its name suggests. This post re-imagines how the film Ghostbusters would have been advertised in bygone years.

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‘The Sunscreen Smokescreen’ (11th July) There is still time left to read this before your summer holiday (or vacation, if you’re in the US). David McCandless’s site Information is Beautiful goes from strength to strength in demonstrating how information can be both informative and beautiful. Here he tackles the proliferation of misinformation about sun cream.

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‘I Sure Wish He’d Shave!’ (10th July) A novelty record about a woman obsessed with her man’s facial hair. The site, run by Bob Purse, specialises in vanity records and song-poems.

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Crack The Surface (10th July) The first in a series of documentaries on Urban Explorers, who risk it all to access and infiltrate closed or forgotten spaces, abandoned buildings in the like. It’s delightfully amateurish and doesn’t try to mythologise them too much. One surprise is how urban explorers are often middle class. As one of the contributors says: “If you live in a situation that resembles an abandoned building, why the hell would you go and explore another abandoned building?”

See the Links of the Month for June 2011.

See the Links of the Month for May 2011.

Links of the Month - June 2011

Another month, another five musical links that reveal to what extent the real world has slipped away from our reaches.

Hey John: 11 Beatles-Related Web Goodies

First of all, a musical treat: Blossom Dearie extends her tiny-voiced affection to John Lennon, whom she met on a chat show:

“Hey John, look at me digging you digging me!”

It’s a lovely little soufflé called Hey John.  Kind of makes you wonder what Dearie would've thought of the Plastic Ono Band record he was making? Now that would be some cover version!

Right, now onto the links!

Links of the Month - May 2011

Every month I’ll post five links to sites that I’ve really liked. Some will be music, some for people blogging their opinions, pictures or other silly crap. This is the first one.

2nd May To My Family - From Dad (Letters of Note) A moving letter from Carl Selinger, written when he believed he was going to die in what later transpired to be a failed terrorist attack. Love this site.

2nd May Working with Samuel Beckett Nine-minute documentary excerpt featuring interviews with Samuel Beckett’s friends and colleagues, including Jean Martin, who played Lucky in the original French production of Waiting for Godot.

4th May Amateur Cylinder Recordings: experimental sounds from over a century ago Turn-of-the-century home recordings on old Edison cylinders, including a drunken singalong to ‘John Brown’s Body’.

5th May Sex - B I G S L E E P A bit of a tune, this. There's a really nice B&W video that accompanies it here. Don’t be fooled by the anthemic 80s-style chorus: we’re in the presence of our contemporaries here.

10th May The AV Vote was a Fiasco Stuart Weir has written the best article I’ve read yet on why the AV vote was such a failure — arguing very persuasively that referendums will always fail to be democratic.

Different Views of Music Makes Me

You can now view this blog in funky new ways. It kind of defeats the object in me designing the blog, but then I think it might appeal to some readers. If you like either of these, maybe bookmark that link.

Music Makes Me - Snapshot View

Music Makes Me - Timeslide View

Shedloads v. Shitloads

I always thought the ‘shedload’ was a strange unit of measurement. I can, however, imagine people using ‘shit’ to reckon amounts.

This quick Google Ngram search would suggest that this is because ‘shitloads’ came first.

Presumably, then, ‘shedloads’ is a euphemising version, or some kind of genteelism?

If anyone has any more information, please let me know.

Why Harrison Preferred Minors: Notes Towards An Analysis Of The Beatles’ Use Of Descending Chord Progressions

Whenever someone proclaims in a review of a new single that it is ‘Beatlesque’, my ears prick up. Of course, you’re going to give any song with this kind of press a hard time, but what really bugs me is when lazy reviewers describe as ‘Beatlesque’ any song that features a descending chord progression.

I wondered if there was any truth in the idea. I looked around on a few sites and forums and found nothing on this topic – in fact, I was told it was unquantifiable. I liked the idea of the challenge. So here is my attempt to quantify the Beatles’ use of such figures.

A Highlight from Kenneth Clarke's Civilisation

I’ve mentioned Clark before, but I didn’t know he’d been put on YouTube yet, so now I can point you towards one of my favourite bits.

One of the most startling moments of Kenneth Clarke's Civilisation comes halfway through the first episode, where he examines a Viking longboat.

The sequence I am referring to begins at the three minute mark, with a collage of Pagan images. There’s Clark’s wonderful pronunciation of 'mythology' (my-thology) and this splendid moment, at 6:09, where the camera follows Clark’s hand tracing the lines of the ship. Everytime it gets me. It’s simultaneously beautiful and unintentionally hilarious (especially at 6:34). It is truly beyond verbal expression, so go and watch it and see what I mean.

Nine Web Recommendations - Literary, Arty, Druggy, and Bloggy

Nine suggestions for idle readers that I've come across in the past few months. Sorry but I can’t remember when I bookmarked these and who to thank for sending me links to them!

1. The full range of beauty, from the (literally) pedestrian to the ineffable: The 9 Eyes of Google Street View.

2. Garfield Without Garfield Garfield Minus Garfield is a site dedicated to removing Garfield from the Garfield comic strips in order to reveal the existential angst of a certain young Mr. Jon Arbuckle.

3. Russia in Colour An extraordinary collection of colour photographs taken between 1909 and 1912.