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You Are the GoZoo Band

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1966 was a great year for musical oddities: Mrs. Miller was ruling the roost internationally; in Canada musician and producer Tony Roman unveiled the wonderful Madame St Onge, those silly savages Teddy and Darrell were doing their thing, and around the world, the novelty album was big business. Every country – almost every label – had a left-field act that was doing decent business, charming TV audiences and selling enough copies of their latest opus to keep the men at the top happy.

 

It was into this heady age that the GoZoo Band suddenly appeared. ‘Sounding like a semi-melodic swarm of bees’, according to one contemporary reviewer, their gimmick was playing pop music using kazoos, a dozen years before Rhino founders Richard Foos and Harold Bronson formed the Temple City Kazoo Orchestra.

 

Originally released via their own Go Go Records label (distributed through Epic; reissued in the UK in 1968 on the President Records imprint Joy), the GoZoo Band’s solitary album, Sounds That Are Happening!, is just 25 minutes long. Featuring a mix of kazooed-up versions of recent pop hits (including Mellow Yellow and Winchester Cathedral) as well as old-timey vaudeville songs and a couple of originals, the album was produced by Tony Marer, who would go on to work with Norman Greenbaum, and featured musical arrangements from Jimmie Haskell (born Sheridan Pearlman), a prolific composer and arranger who specialised in movie soundtracks but who had worked with Ricky Nelson, Rosemary Clooney, Bobby Darin, the Lettermen, Pat Boone, Richard Chamberlain and dozens, if not hundreds, more. Haskell composed two of the tunes that appear on the album, including the 45 Sid’s Lid.

 

Unsurprisingly there is zero information on the jacket or on the disc itself about the individual members of the GoZoo Band. It’s safe to assume though that the kazoo-toting hipsters in the back of the Woodie on the front cover of the album were models and not one of them had the skill to blow through a plastic tube. My best guess would be that the album was recorded by a mix of session musicians and members of Dr. West's Medicine Show and Junk Band, the Norman Greenbaum-led psychedelic rock band who had a minor hit with The Eggplant That Ate Chicago... which was also issued by Go Go Records, also produced by Tony Marer and, crucially, also featured kazoos.

 

Anyway, here, for your enjoyment, are a couple of tracks from Sounds That Are Happening!, their covers of the Hollies’ Stop Stop Stop, and of Donovan’s Mellow Yellow.

 

Enjoy!

 

Download Stop HERE

Download Mellow HERE


Du Bist Die Beat-Oma

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No one seems to know the name of the real woman behind the name Die Beat Oma (the Beat Granny), the aged Austrian chanteuse who released just one 45... The very disc that I present for you today.

 

Issued in Germany in 1966, in the same year that both Mrs Miller and Mme St Onge were unleashed on an unsuspecting world, Ich Bin Die Beat Oma (I Am the Beat Grandmother), was a ‘cover’ of the Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night, with new lyrics by Andy Wölfel. Her solitary release, Ich Bin Die Beat Oma was backed by Balla Balla, a song written by bass player Horst Lippok and originally recorded by the German beat group The Rainbows, of which Lippok was a member, in 1965.

 

On the A-side of the single Die Beat Oma is accompanied by a group called Jerry & The G-Men. According to the Discogs listing, she toured with the band in the mid-60s, and a little ferreting around leads me to believe that she did indeed play dates during 1965 and 1966. Andy Wölfel - the man who liberally adapted the words of Messers Lennon and McCartney - acted as her manager (and, presumably, as manager of Jerry and co too), and on at least one occasion Die Beat Oma and Jerry & The G-Men played Wölfel’s hometown, Klosterneuburg in Austria.

 

No band is credited on the flip side, but The Rainbows' version of Balla Balla had also been issued by CBS, and to my ears both recordings seem to utilise the same basic backing track, not unlike how Tony Roman used backing tracks by his band Les Baronets for the Mme. St. Onge project. I understand that Wölfel, who also had a role in the 1967 German film Heubodengeflüster (a.k.a. Whispering In The Hayloft), and who was Austria’s first notable beat group manager, died of an overdose.  


That's all I have: any further information on this incredible disc and its perpetrators would be most welcome.


Enjoy!


Download Beat HERE

 

 Download Balla HERE

Two Faces of Virginia

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Virginia Anne McKenna, OBE, is an English stage and screen actress, author, and wildlife campaigner, who this month celebrated her 90thbirthday.

 

Best known for films including A Town Like Alice(1956), Born Free (1966), and Ring of Bright Water (1969), as well as her work with animal charity The Born Free Foundation, she landed her first film role in 1952. In 1954 she married the actor Denholm Elliot. The marriage was a disaster: Elliott was a closeted homosexual and the marriage failed after a few months, although they did not divorce until 1957. Soon after she married actor and decorated war hero Bill Travers: the couple went on to have four children and would remain together until Travers’ death in 1994.

 

Virginia had taken singing lessons while at drama school, and had appeared in a number of musicals, from the raging success of The King and I  with Yul Brynner through to the dismal flop Winnie… a musical about Winston Churchill starring Robert Hardy. As she admitted herself (in her autobiography The Life in My Years) ‘Although I was never a particularly talented singer, I don’t think I was ever happier as a performer than when I was in a musical atmosphere.’ Luckily for us, this sense of self-awareness did not prevent her from recording her own album of love songs.

 

McKenna has been involved with several film and stage soundtracks, but to date, Two Faces of Love remains her only pop music outing. First issued in 1975 through Rediffusion’s Gold Star imprint, with a cover illustration from her sister-in-law Linden Travers, the album was reissued four years later in a different sleeve by RIM, aka Rediffusion International Music Ltd.

 

‘I fear I am not wildly “pop”,’ she confided in the Daily Mirror’s Paul Callan. ‘I’m a bit too old for that.’ Revealing that she had composed two of the album’s dozen tracks herself, she told him that ‘One does get so terribly tabbed as an actress.’ Two Faces of Love was relatively well-received in some quarters, with acting trade newspaper The Stage stating that ‘Though she has no pretentions at being a great singer, Virginia McKenna has made a highly effective and sensitive album… Reciting some lyrics, singing others and sometimes combining the two, she steers away from sentimentality and in the process delivers as affecting a version of “Send in the Clowns” as one is likely to hear.’ Well, there’s no question that Ginny’s reading of the Sondheim classic is far superior to that from fellow Thespian Elizabeth Taylor.

 

Here are a couple of tracks from the album for you: The Love That I Have (Violette) which was also issued as the album’s sole single, and The Windmills of Your Mind.

 

Enjoy!

 

Download Love HERE  

Download Windmills HERE  

Pancho Sings!

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Regular Blog reader Dave Schmidt has been kind enough to send me several tracks recently, and today’s pairing comes from his collection. so it’s him you should be either thanking or cursing, depending on your standpoint!

 

Pancho the Parrot, ‘the amazing parrot with the voice of an opera star’ was one of the major attractions of the San Diego Wild Animal Park’s Bird Show. Making his debut at the park in 1979, along with his friends Bobby and Lolita, Pancho – a Mexican double yellow-headed parrot - would squawk his way into visitors’ hearts. Pancho and his pals became celebrities in their own right, with the taloned talent appearing on a number of TV shows, including The Tonight Show with the legendary Johnny Carson, That’s Incredible and the Mike Douglas Show.

 

In April 1981 the feathered friends released their sole 45, the A-side of which features Pancho – accompanied by an unnamed vocal group, ‘singing’ a medley of popular tunes, to whit I Left My Heart in San Francisco, When It’s Springtime in the Rockies and Bali Hai. The flip features Bobby (an African grey) and Lolita (a yellow-naped Amazon) squawking their way through a song called, perhaps unsurprisingly, Bobby and Lolita, a cheap and shameless rip-off of Barry Manilow’s Copacabana (At the Copa).The disc came about after Escondito DJ Clip Helps (what a great name!) of Radio KOWN telephoned the park’s bird trainer and had Pancho sing When It’s Springtime in the Rockies live on air.

 

Selling for $3.50 in the Parks’ gift shop, within a few months the disc had sold over 4,000 copies. Such was the demand for this souvenir soundie that a cassette version was issued as well, although it seems that neither Pancho, Bobby nor Lolita were ever called upon to record a follow-up. Perhaps the parrots were a one-trick pony?

 

Anyway, here are both sides of this marvellous monstrosity. Dave’s copy of the 45 appears to be slightly off-centre. adding an extra dimension and a wonderfully ethereal feel to the whole thing. If you want one with less wobble, the tracks are readily available on YouTube.

 

Enjoy!

 

Download Pancho HERE 

Download Bobby HERE

A Crop of Crap From Columbine

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It's been a little quiet around here of late, hasn't it? Well, let's make up for that right this very now, with the first of a bunch of stiffs from the ever-popular Columbine label of Hollywood, one of the greatest - and most prolific - song-poem outfits of all time.


Best known for the hundreds of compilations issued in the 70s and 80s, under such titles as the Now Sounds of Today, Music of America, New Favorites Of…, Gospel Jubilee and so on, for the next couple of posts on the blog I'm going to be concentrating on their 45 and EP output, a series of releases less well documented, but which also adds up to hundreds of discs.


First up we have all four tracks from a Columbine EP issued in 1977, with two songs each from Kay Weaver and the redoubtable Ralph Lowe. 


The first cut, the opening track of the EP if you will, is the fairly forgettable You're My Spark, composed by John P. Kane, and performed in her usual disinterested style by Kay Weaver. The song, copyrighted in October 1977, is dull, and Weaver's performance lacks any of the 'spark' that the title infers. Kay Weaver had a secondary career as a performer of religious music, and her bland county rambles might work quite well in that genre, but for me she only really gets going as a song-poem stylist when offered rockier tunes to torture.


Next up is Ralph Lowe, and My Love Is Going Away, composed by the colourfully-monikered Alvaro de Jesus Buenfil. Copyright in this 'classic' was registered in November 1977, and Alvaro had already submitted other songs to Columbine for their careful consideration: Lowe performed his classic In The Way of Dancin'on one of the company's Music of America collections. Confusingly the title of the song does not appear in the lyric at all.


Flip the disc over and we're back with Kay Weaver and Dola Lindsay's When Our Song Starts To Play. Dola Lindsay came from Port Orchard, Washington and, like our friend Alvaro, had also contributed other songs to Columbine: her composition Shadow of Your Heart appears on the seventeenth iteration of the New Favorites of Kay Weaver series.    


The final track on the disc is the real highlight. From erstwhile lyric writer Glenn Aldrich comes the harrowing My Darling's Grave. Like John Kane, Glenn registered copyright for the song, words and music no less, in October 1977, and this performance, by song-poem titan Ralph Lowe, is simply wonderful. Glenn's lyric is rendered utterly devoid of emotion, and Ralph's doleful delivery is driven by boredom, not sentiment, plodding along like a carthorse rather than a funeral cortege.  


Enjoy!


Download Spark HERE


Download Love HERE


Download Song HERE 


Download Grave HERE

Four More Columbine 'Hits'

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Another bunch of cuts from Columbine for you today, another four song-poems for you to ‘enjoy’… if that’s possible.

 

I had intended to give you all four tracks from one EP, but on playback I realised that two of the cuts had flaws, so instead here are four tracks from two different EPs, ripped from my own collection.

 

First up is a brace of cuts from EP-176. This particular EP is undated, but the subject matter of at least one of the tracks makes it clear that it cannot have been released before 1981. It also features one of the later Columbine vocalists, Kate Markowitz on three tracks, with Sonny Cash – the veteran singer who also recorded as Buddy Ray and, for MSR, under the names of Dick Castle and Dick Kent, but whose real name was Elmer Plinger – on the opener.

 

And it is Sonny who kicks off side one of the disc with Why Should You Care, a question that collectors have been asking of song-poem lyricists for decades. It’s a dull little song with Sonny’s vocal accompanied by a trio featuring bass guitar, a plodding piano, and a clearly bored drummer. The lyric was written by Prince O. Williams, born in 1929 in the colourfully-sounding Prosperity, South Carolina, and who passed away in New Jersey in November 2014.

 

Peter Sirbopoulos’s tribute to the recently murdered John Lennon was penned, according to the author, shortly after the former Beatle’s death, and copyright registered in May 1981. Of Greek heredity, his great Grandfather (also called Peter, or Petros) emigrated to the United States in November 1902 but it seems as if, in later life, our Peter moved back to Athens: he was certainly living there between 2001 and 2003, but has dropped off the radar since then. Performed by Kate Markowitz, John Lennon could be viewed as a companion piece to Sonny’s To Yoko, which I featured on this very blog last September: https://worldsworstrecords.blogspot.com/2020/09/sonny-buddy-elmer-and-dick.html

 

Talking about Sonny brings us nicely to the next track. As well as working under the names mentioned above, Sonny Cash has also been credited, erroneously, as Ralph Lowe, leading several writers – including me – to assume Sonny/Elmer and Ralph were one and the same, but the ‘real’ Ralph Lowe (if indeed there was a ‘real’ Ralph) has a deeper, more stentorian voice. And, as if to prove my point, next up is the ‘real’ Ralph Lowe with Kenneth Skasick’s C.B. Heartbreak

 

Issued in 1977 on Columbine EP-39, on C.B. Heartbreak Ralph is accompanied by the same piano/bass/drums trio that act as sidemen to Sonny Cash on Why Should You Care. Authorship of the lyric is credited to one Kenneth Skasick, and I’ve only ben able to find two men with that name: one was born in Missouri in 1930 and seems to have spent much of his working life in the employ of the US Air Force. He passed away in 2002. The other, born in 1972 (so he would only have been 25 when this disc was issued), was once arrested for stealing a cooker from an abandoned house and several years later needed hospital treatment after being attacked by a pair of pit bulls while trespassing, and for some reason, to my mind, this makes him a less likely candidate.

 

The final track comes from the same 1977 EP, and is once again performed by Ralph Lowe, with the ubiquitous trio now augmented with an electric guitar player. Nobody Else For You Except Me was written by James Travagline, who I believe may have come from Saskatoon and (if that is the case) passed away in 2015. 


I really cannot tell you anything else about it, but as the other two cuts on the EP were performed by the dull and derivative Kay Weaver I simply thought that you would appreciate this more.

 

 Enjoy!


Download Care HERE  

Download Lennon HERE  

Download Heartbreak HERE  

Download Nobody HERE  

Another Collection of Cacophony from Columbine

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Another four tracks from my personal Columbine stash for you this week, this time the entire 1983 release, Columbine EP-189. It's a fairly mediocre release, but the final cut is a real pip!

 

Katherine Maynard’s They’re Coming After Me is a deeply confusing song. A typical country shuffle, the lyrics make it sounds as if the protagonist, presumably Maynard herself (although here voiced by Kay Weaver) has some sort of death wish and is praying to the Lord above for release. Who are the two little angels though? Has Katherine murdered her own twins, presumably back in Nashville if any kind of sense is to be extrapolated from her lyric, and now she’s on the run from the law and seeking absolution from the divine? Perhaps I’m reading too much into it.

 

G.B. Tan’s lounge bossa nova Whene’r I Make My Wish is a peculiar little song about yearning. Ms. Tan’s wishes she had been brought up in the country, win a room that had a window sill (not a window, you understand: G.B. seems to have the ability to be able to see through wood or concrete) so that she could gaze out into the night. Now, irrespective of what part of the country she had been raised in, what kind of parents bring up a child in a windowless – and window sill-less - room? The Fritzl-esque monsters!

 

There’s not much to say about the third track on the EP, You Bring Tears to My Eyes. With lyrics penned by W.G. Lassetter, it is a slow, dull plod delivered in Miss Weaver’s usual slow and plodding style. The tune owes something to the Beatles’ This Boy, but there’s little to recommend it apart from the rather wonderful line ‘I’m flying high in a gay paradise’.

 

Finally, the reason we’re all here: Pansy Loop’s marvellous Disco Blues, credited like all four tracks on this particular EP to Kay Weaver, but clearly sung by the unctuous John Muir, who of course worked for Preview as Gene Marshall, but whose real name is Gene Merlino. The lyrics are wonderfully inane and often downright stupid - just what does ‘let’s rent out those blue jean shoes’ actually mean? – but our Pansy was lucky enough to also have her song included on one of Columbine’s many, many The Now Sounds of Today compilations, this time correctly attributed to Muir. They may have given her this as a sop for miscrediting the original release, or more likely conned poor Pansy out of even more money to have her song featured as the album’s opening track.

 

Enjoy!

 

Download Coming HERE

 

Download Wish HERE

 

Download Tears HERE


Download Disco HERE

When Is a Smurf Not a Smurf?

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Enough with the song poems already… although if you are interested in song-poems, especially those from Ted Rosen’s hallmark stable, I urge you to check out Bob Purse’s latest post and then this fascinating blog from Bruce Baryla which offers some fascinating info that could go some way to clearing up the mystery of the two Bob Storms AND the origin’s of Ted’s music beds. [UPDATE 4/9/21: link dead... I'll fix as soon as I can!]

 

But back to today.

 

Papa, Schenk Mir Einen Teddybär (Father, Give me a Teddy Bear), released by Die Schlümpfe in Germany in 1975 is notorious: the sleeve turns up in all of those ‘terrible record art’ lists, but few people have actually heard it. In fact, the sleeve is so ridiculously bad that for a long time I assumed it was a fake. But no, not only does it exist, but here are both sides for you to enjoy (or endure).

 

The duo’s name, Die Schlümpfe, may seem familiar to you. That’s because Die Schlümpfe is the German name for The Smurfs, although as far as I can ascertain these two Smurfs have no connection to Peyo or to Father Abraham… in fact, the only thing that seems to connect them is their love of blue and white and the ridiculous, cartoonish voices employed on the disc.

 

Doris Kocks, author of the A-side (and co-author of the flip) worked in children’s television in what was then East Germany. She was one of the producers of the popular kid’s puppet show Das Spielhaus (The Playhouse) throughout the 1980s. Kai Holland, the co-author of B-side, Der Kaiser Mitschliki, would later find fame as an artist, specialising in collage. However, the male voice on the disc, and the man pictured on the front of the single sleeve, was a singer known only as Felix, who was still performing and recording well into the mid-2010s.

 

5,000 copies of the disc were pressed and issued on the Blackfield Tonstudio label, based in Kirchhellen, In what was then West Germany. Blackfield specialised in custom recordings and pressings, so the chances are that Doris, Kai, and Felix funded production themselves. Felix recalled (in 2013) that although the disc received no publicity at the time, it sold well at the duo's performances.


I have read that there was supposed to be a second single by Die Schlümpfe, but this has been denied by Felix. However, while writing this blog I discovered an earlier release from 

Die Schlümpfe, issued in 1974 on Storec Schallplatten, of Munster. This 45 features a different recording of Papa, Schenk Mir Einen Teddybär, backed with another song, Nichts Gegen Liebe, also penned by Doris Kocks. To me the male vocalist on both versions of Papa, Schenk Mir Einen Teddybär sounds the same, but I guess it is possible that Felix only sang on the second version, which would explain why he was unaware of the existence of a second Die Schlümpfe single.


Anyway, here are all four Die Schlümpfe tracks. Enjoy!

 

Download Papa 75 HERE

Download Kaiser HERE


Download Papa 74 HERE

 

 Download Nichts HERE


To Be Perfectly Frank

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Four cuts today, recorded at La Motte Street studios in St. Helier, and issued by Mousehole Records of Jersey (the in-house, custom label of Mousehole Studio) in 1983, the entire Jersey’s Love EP from Francisco Javier.

 

Sung in English by a heavily-accented, non-native singer, the four songs are tales of love dedicated to Francisco’s newly-adopted home in the Channel Islands, and to the most important women in his life.

 

Jersey’s Love (subtitled ‘Song of the Summer’) would probably be more correctly titled Jersey Is Love, although Francisco’s delivery makes it difficult to understand what the lyric writer was after. As the sleeve announces, the song is both ‘dedicated to those in love’ and ‘very personal’, phrases that could just as easily apply to the other cuts on the EP: Time Of Love For Evelyn, Date In New Street, and She Is Gone.

 

Francesc Xavier Charles Gòdia was born in Alcarràs, Lleida, on 16 November 1945, and is better known as Frank Charles. Starting his recording career in Madrid in 1966, and issuing a Spanish-language version of Winchester Cathedral the following year, he became a well-known face on Spanish TV, appearing on many talent and musical shows, performing around the country and winning awards. During the 1970s he appeared with the group Francis Charles y sus Cinco Go Gos (Francis Charles and his Five Go Gos) and spent three years living and working in London, appearing on UK television programmes alongside Cliff Richard and Tom Jones.

 

In the 1980s he moved to Jersey, making a home on the island and becoming well known as a singer in local restaurants, hotels, and cabarets. In 1982, the same year that he recorded the four cuts I present for you today, he was hosting Spanish-themed dinner and dance nights at the Panorama Restaurant in Ouaisne Bay.

 

I would love to be able to tell you why he recorded this EP under the pseudonym Francisco Javier, when he was still working on the island as Frank Charles. This becomes more of a conundrum when you discover that his next release, the 1986 single Himne D´Estat Català was credited to Francesc Xavier Charles, and that, following that release, he would revert back to his Frank Charles persona. My assumption is that he was under contract to a Spanish label as Frank Charles, so had to issue this self-penned, self-financed single under a different name… but perhaps someone out there knows the whole story?

 

Now living in Barcelona, over the years Frank has written songs in honour of the Barcelona Olympics, Barcelona FC, Jersey, Madeira, and even Diana, Princess of Wales: according to Frank’s website, Tears And White Roses For A Caring Princess‘was recognised by Tony Blair and Bill Clinton and Harrods department store,’ the latter, one assumes, for services to the Al Fayed family. His most recent success was the 2012 composition The Scent Of London, apparently ‘the first song dedicated to the London Olympic Games, credited and recognised by Queen Elizabeth II and Boris Johnson, [the then] Mayor of London.’ It’s clear Boris had not heard Jersey’s Love though, as both songs use the same tune and arrangement… which begs the question, why not call it London’s Love?

 

Now in his late 70s, Frank is still performing today, 55 years after he made his debut. Check out his YouTube channel HERE

 

Download Jersey HERE

Download Evelyn HERE

Download New Street HERE

Download Gone HERE

Hail to the Chief

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How, in 14 years of blogging, have I never written about Chief Kooffreh before. one of the most original, and most ‘outsidery’ of all outsider artists?

 

Alternatively known as Bassey Kooffreh, Bassey Kooffreh Bassey, and Kooffreh Bassey Kooffreh, the Chief has been making music since at least 2007, recording and releasing dozens – if not hundreds - of albums in the process. Hugely prolific, and anything but the shy and retiring type, at one point the Chief was claiming that he was ‘a voting member of the Grammy USA and the most recorded published music Star in the Eastern Sea Board of the United States East Coast of USA. 120 Albums, 2400 tracks 250 videos according to Itunes, Spotify and Amazon.com. Chief Kooffreh values Family and his millions of fans and friends worldwide.’

 

The typical Chief K track is spoken work polemic over a sampled loop or karaoke backing, with the Chief announcing himself and the title at the very start, usually something like, ‘Here comes Chief Kooffreh with my millions of fans… ’ before launching into a rap about anything from the evils of Viagra to the death of Diana, Princess of Wales or the dangers of cheating on your woman.

 

His biggest ‘hit’, if you can quantify these things, is the classic She Will Cut Your Balls Off, although Bitch Get Out Of My Life You Are The Devil is rather special too, as it Bad Medical Doctors Out Of Control Killed Michael Jackson, and the wonderful Stop Beating Gays, Stop The Violence Against Gays Oprah Denial Closet (Download Supporters And Fans). Confusingly, although he claims to have thousands of songs in his catalogue, many are identical: Doctor Viagra, for example, is the same song as Danger Viagra Can Hurt You, Doctor Viagra Hard Hammer and Viagra Can Hurt You Part Two, making it difficult and downright frustrating for Chief Kooffreh completists. To complicate matters even further, Big Viagra Hard Stone is the same song with added echo and eardrum-piercing police siren effects.

 

Originally from Calabar, Nigeria, the Chief married his wife, Elizabeth, in 2013 and although he claims to work in the financial district of New York, the couple appear to reside in Boston where he works as a supply teacher. In recent years, after studying online with Harvard, he has become involved in IT and software development. I can’t help but wonder if Chief Kooffreh is a character, a persona that Bassey inhabits for his musical forays (rather like Vince Furnier becoming Alice Cooper), and that outside of music he and his wife live a pretty ordinary existence.

 

In July 2020 Chief K published his first book, Cyber Security Intelligence Bible American Big Dark War Cost $400 Billion a Year, his masterwork on how the American government, and many American companies, are at the mercy of criminal hackers, whose unlimited resources allow them to steal classified information. This was followed shortly afterwards by Skills for Men and Women to Love, Live and Work Successfully with Each Other, credited to Chief Kooffreh Harvard Honors. Later the same year he filed to have his name recognised as a trademark: that application was granted in March 2021, which I guess ow means we have to refer to him as Chief Kooffreh tm

 

There are dozens upon dozens of Chief Kooffreh songs for you to listen to on YouTube, iTunes, Spotify and other platforms, but here are a couple of personal favourites: the brilliantly bonkers (and NSFW) She Will Cut Your Balls Off and, from the album STARRR, the original version of Tragedy of Princess Diana England, listed as one of ‘the 101 strangest records on Spotify’ by the Guardian in 2012.

 

Enjoy!


Download Balls HERE 

Download Diana HERE

Have You Heard the Fut?

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It is the ninth of October tomorrow, the day that would have been John Lennon’s 81st birthday. On next Wednesday’s World’s Worst Records Radio Show I shall be playing an hour of Beatle-related nonsense in tribute to the great man, my first and most enduring musical hero.

 

The hour is made up of song-poems, bad cover versions, Beatle novelties and some of the most dire tribute discs you have heard in your life, but today I bring you a sneak peek, with one of the most controversial, and confusing Beatle-related discs of all time, The Fut and Have You Heard the Word.

 

Issued by Beacon records here in the UK in 1970, this disc has confounded Beatles fans for decades. So much so that it turned up time and time again on Beatles bootlegs and as late as 1985 Yoko Ono attempted to register copyright in the song, convinced after years of seeing her late husband’s name attached to it that he must be involved.

 

He wasn’t.

 

The Fut were, in fact, Steve Kipner and Steve Groves of the Kinetics, a group originally formed in Australia in 1966. The duo noted the success enjoyed by the Bee Gees after their relocation to London and, in 1969, followed them across the ocean. Forming a new band, Tin Tin, the pair went in search of their old friend Maurice Gibb, who soon persuaded his manager, Robert Stigwood, to sign the new act. Maurice also offered up his services as producer for the band’s debut album, playing bass on several tracks.

 

Sessions for the album took place over a seven-month period between May and November 1969, taking far longer than anticipated because, in August, Gibb fell down a flight of stairs and broke his arm.

 

And that’s where things get interesting. That evening, Maurice turned up at IBC studios wearing a cast on his arm, high as a kite on painkillers, accompanied by his wife, Lulu (who he had married in February), and her brother, Billy Lawrie (often miscredited as Laurie). Stories differ as to whether he also came armed with a full bottle of whiskey or simply took advantage of the open bar in the studio. When it came time to work on a new, and unfinished song Kipner and Groves had brought with them the session deteriorated, and after tempers flared they left.

 

Maurice, off his face and having far too much fun, decided to finish off the song, thinking it would be a scream to put on tape his imitation of John Lennon. No one seems to recall who attempted the impersonation of Yoko One heard at the start of the song, but I somehow doubt it was his Scottish songstress wife.

 

Dismissed as a potential track for the as-yet-incomplete Tin Tin album, somehow - and Gibb would later admit that he had no idea how it happened – the song was issued on the tiny Beacon label, credited to The Fut. The flip side, Futting, with authorship credited to The Tuf, has absolutely nothing to do with any of those involved with the A-side: it’s a pleasant, if unremarkable, ska instrumental. One can only assume that someone at IBC heard the tape and thought that they could make a quick buck, although I very much doubt that they saw much in the way of financial reward. Issued at around the same time that the Beatles officially called it a day, it did not take long for it to start appearing on Beatles bootlegs, usually listed as an unissued outtake, although occasionally credited to John and Yoko.  

 

Tin Tin would score a Top 20 U.S. hit with Toast and Marmalade for Tea in 1971. The group disbanded in 1973, although Kipner continued working as a songwriter, producing hits for various acts including Chicago, George Benson and Olivia Newton-John. Gibb and Billy Lawrie would continue to work together: Gibb produced Lawrie’s 1971 cover of the Chuck Berry standard Roll Over Beethoven and, in 1972 the pair wrote and played the theme tune to the film Bloomfield, which was issued as a 45, credited to the Bloom-Fields, that same year. In a far less tenuous Beatle connection Rock and Roller, a track on Lawrie’s sole solo album, Ship Imagination,was co-written by one Richard Starkey... a well-known drummer who was not involved in any way with the Fut single. Honestly. 

 

Here are both sides of the 45. Don’t forget to tune in to the show on Wednesday, when you can hear a further 55 minutes or so of similar Beatle-related nonsense!

 

Enjoy!


Download Word HERE

 

 Download Futting HERE

Nasty Little Record

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It is not unusual for a sports star to flex his or her vocal cords, and over the years it seems that almost anyone who has enjoyed a modicum of fame on the sports field has been coerced into the recording studio. And thank goodness for that, for without singing sporting celebrities this blog would have petered out long ago.

 

Some have produced something listenable – although I really am struggling to think of an example right now – but, and let’s be honest here, most are downright despicable. As is the effort I bring you today, with both sides of the 1987 single by tennis bad boy Ilie ‘Nasty’ Năstase, Globe Trotter Lover, and Pour Être Un Homme (To Be a Man).

 

Born in 1946, in Bucharest, Romania, Năstase was one of the world’s top players during the 1970s, and the World No. 1 1973 and 1974. He is one of only six players in history to win more than 100 ATP professional titles, and has won seven Grand Slam titles, four Masters Grand Prix year-end championship titles, and seven Championship Series titles. In 1991 he was inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame, and in 2005, Tennismagazine ranked him as the 28th-best player of the preceding forty years. Pretty impressive. He’s also a major sleaze bag, reprimanded for inappropriate comments towards female tennis players (including the former Mrs. James Bond and World Number Three women’s singles player Pam Shriver), racist remarks towards Serena Williams’ then-unborn baby (at a press conference Năstase was heard to say, ‘Let’s see what colour it has. Chocolate with milk?’), and for calling Johanna Konta and Anne Keothavong ‘fucking bitches’. These last few acts finally led to his suspension from the World tennis Federation. The following year he was arrested twice within a six-hour span for drink-driving, and for driving through a red light.

 

The failed mayoral candidate can’t sing, either. Although in all fairness he doesn’t even attempt to sing on the B-side, simply reeling off the words in a matter of fact (or is it ‘can’t be arsed’) style.

 

The disc was recorded and released specifically for the French market; with both sides co-written by French songwriters Hervé Faure Lacaussade and Mario Santangeli, and produced by French musician Christian Delagrange. Financed at least in part by his sponsors Adidas, I haven’t tried too hard to translate the lyrics, but the A-side seems to have been based on Năstase’s biographer’s claim of his having slept with 2,500 women. The flip side is some tossed-off nonsense about how hard it is to be a man from his hometown. Perhaps. Do you really care? He certainly didn’t, complaining to one interviewer that, ‘They put it together, I said I cannot do this.’

 

Bizarrely, this horrible little disc, which took Năstase two whole weeks to record, reached Number Three in the French pop charts, and ‘Nasty’ was asked to appear on several TV shows to promote the disc. In June 1987 he appeared on the well-known entertainment show Champs Elysee, where he actually performed the song live, accompanied by dancers and a small choir. By the time it became a hit he must have softened to the idea, telling the host of the show that ‘A friend from Adidas asked me to do this. At first, I thought it was weird, then I liked it.’

 

See what you think.

 

Download Globe HERE

Download Pour HERE

Down, Down, Down to St Helier

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This week I would like to introduce you to the late singer, composer, author and tutor Bob Anthony. I am hugely indebted to Richard Heath and the Jersey Evening Post for a good chunk of what follows.

 

Born in South Africa as Thomas Coleman-Gloss, Bob Anthony, the man behind the 1975 classic Jersey… Ile d’Amour, was a regular in the Johannesburg club scene and was a member of the army’s Entertainment Corps, under the stewardship of sitcom and Carry On… legend Sid James.

 

In the early 1960s he moved to London to find fame and fortune. He changed his name by deed poll to Robert Anthony, and met his second wife, Marie, who was working in a club. ‘We aren’t 100 per cent sure why he changed his name,’ his daughter Angela told Richard Heath, a reporter from the Jersey Evening Post, in 2017. ‘But he probably thought Tommy Gloss was a bit cheesy. Robert Anthony had much more class about it, although he did become known as Bob.’

 

Bob became a regular on the capital’s club circuit, and in 1962 he began to teach singing to other hopefuls. By the end of the 1960s he was running a training school for singers, the London School of Modern Singing, which had its own Singers Variety Club attached. Bob and members of his school made their first appearance on TV in May 1970, on the London Weekend show Do Your Own London (presented by Eric Thompson, father of Sophie and Emma, and producer of the UK version of the Magic Roundabout) and they held regular Sunday afternoon sessions at the Horseshoe Hotel on Tottenham Court Road. He also penned a guidebook for people hoping to break into showbiz, Singing to Stardom.

 

In 1973 Bob issued his first album, We’d Like to Teach You to Sing. Yearning to go back on stage, he also came up with the rather clever idea of accompanying himself via remote control: performing with Mary the Magic Organ - an ingenious set-up where his pre-programmed Yamaha organ was happily playing away on stage - Bob would walk around the audience, using a home-made device to switch between himself, the organ and a tape deck. He became a favourite at Butlins in Bognor Regis, and soon moved his family there.

 

Bob and the family travelled a lot, and in the summer of 1974 he first went to perform on Jersey. ‘I remember when I was six or seven we went to Jersey on holiday as dad was playing there,’ Angela told Richard Heath. ‘He was playing at a hotel called the Woodlands. He loved the Island so much and spent a few summer seasons performing there. It was long enough for him to fall in love with the Island and write an album about it. He was very enthusiastic about it and put his heart and soul into it. He always spoke very fondly of Jersey and you only have to listen to the lyrics to see how much research he did about the Island.’

 

Bob was Woodlands’ resident singer for the summer season of 1975, and despite the hotel keeping him busy he clearly had enough free time to explore the island, penning songs about the sights (and sites) he saw along the way. The resulting album was the self-produced, self-funded and self-released classic that is Jersey… Ile d’Amour. Recorded at Basing Street Studio, in London, Jersey… Ile d’Amour is a 12-track song of love to the island, and Bob had a hand in everything, right down to the cover art.

 

Bob had planned two albums to follow the success of Jersey… Ile d’Amour, and in April 1976 the Stage reported that he had been working on material for one LP about the other major Channel Island, Guernsey, and one about London. The Guernsey album does not appear to have materialised, but around 1977 he issued his third album, The Magic of London. Half of the tracks were Bob’s own songs, with the rest of the album made up of traditional cockney singalongs and pub standards. the back of the sleeve boasted that Bob was a Guinness World Record holder, having twice held the World Non-Stop Singing record, first in 1969 (over 24 hours) and again in 1973, when he more than doubled his previous record at 50 hours.

 

In 1978 he released his last record, a 45 on the Bognor-based independent label Regis Rose Records, Mama Light a Candle for Me backed with Christmas in London. The A-side, composed by Bob, was apparently the winner of the 1978 Nice Song Festival. The following year, he finished an epic 153-hour and ten minutes continuous solo singing marathon – beating the world record he had set twice previously.

 

After a period working as a timeshare salesman in the Canary Islands, Bob retired from the stage to spend more time with his family. He died on 13 December 2008, aged 87. For years he had suffered from a degenerative brain disorder that left him with progressively less movement and speech, and during the final year of his life, he hardly moved or said a word.

 

One day, a nurse at his care home put on Frank Sinatra’s My Way, the same song Bob had chosen as the closer for the Magic of London. ‘Dad suddenly stood up and sang along and then just sat back down again,’ Angela recalled. It was the perfect ending for a man who had done it his way his entire life. In 2017 Jersey theatre group Plays Rough wrote and performed several pieces inspired by Bob’s masterwork.

 

Here are a couple of tracks from the utterly wonderful Jersey… Ile d’Amour: Down to St Hellier and Au Revoir Ile d'Amour. Enjoy!


Download Helier HERE

Download Au Revoir HERE

The Rudest Man in Britain

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Three years ago this very week we broadcast the very first episode of The World’s Worst Records Radio Show. It was a stumbling and shaky start, but I have now presented more than 150 episodes, or 150 hours if you will, of tortuous music over the ether, in excess of 2,300 different songs of varying degrees of awfulness.

 

Looking back over those early programmes, I see that there were a few discs in that first show I have not featured on this here very blog, so I shall start to rectify that right now. Today I present for your edification a serious rarity, both sides of the 1953 release from British television celebrity Gilbert Harding and actress Hermione Gingold, It Takes Two to Tango and Oh Grandma!

 

Harding has become a bit of an obsession for me: an irascible cove who was known as the rudest man in Britain, but underneath the gruffness was a severely troubled and lonely man, who spent his life caught in conflict between his deeply held religious beliefs and his homosexuality. So wrapped up in his life I became that I included his story in my recent book, the Velvet Mafia.

 

Harding was not an actor, a comedian nor a presenter but his presence would guarantee any TV show vast audiences; the term ‘television personality’ was coined specifically to describe him. The irascible former policeman/teacher/journalist gained an unprecedented level of fame as a panel game juror (he also appeared, as himself, in the Cliff Richard vehicle Expresso Bongo), but few outside of Harding’s immediate circle knew that he was homosexual and, as he put it in his last interview, ‘profoundly lonely’.

 

Harding broke through at a time when the BBC had the monopoly on British media, controlling the radio airwaves and maintaining the country’s only television channel (Independent Television did not begin broadcasting until 1955). His face, and his voice, was broadcast to millions of homes each and every week, but he was a complex, unhappy man. His struggle to reconcile his sexuality with his Catholic faith caused him to drink heavily, and his stint in the police force made him acutely aware of the inhuman way the law of the land dealt with people like him at that time. He also lived in constant fear of being blackmailed.

 

Loved and loathed in equal measure, Harding struggled with his fame, calling himself ‘an over-employed phoney’, and he suffered from debilitating stage fright that, like his battle with his sexuality, he relieved through alcohol. By 1957, fed up with fame, he was begging the BBC to cancel What’s My Line?, the very programme that had consolidated his status as Britain’s favourite curmudgeon. ‘I hate being made to jump through the same old hoops,’ he told friend and neighbour Godfrey Winn over supper one evening. ‘I hate being regarded by the public as a circus act.’

 

In London Harding’s closest friend was the columnist Nancy Spain, and the pair were regularly seen at the Golden Guitar Club, a bar frequented by the LGBT media and that was co-owned by Larry Parnes. Harding was envious of Spain’s ability to live openly with her lover, Joan Werner Laurie. The women were accepted as a couple among their friends, although occasionally stories about a romantic entanglement between Harding and Spain would surface in the press, a sheen of faux-respectability that kept the tabloids and gossip magazines off their tail.

 

Harding was a man divided: often petulant and testy, he was also enormously kind and generous and, although he tried to keep his sexuality secret from his adoring fans, he was not always so circumspect. When in the mood, Harding would drop in at the nearest pub and drink until well past closing time, invariably accompanied by a group of young male ‘friends’. One day, Harding was in Edinburgh to record an episode of the popular radio show Round Britain Quiz. About an hour before the show was due to go on air, he rang the studios in a panic: he could not leave his hotel room as he had no clothes. His entire wardrobe had vanished. Harding could hardly admit that the young man he had taken back to his room had robbed him, taking everything including his wallet, his luggage, the clothes he had been wearing and the script for that afternoon’s recording.

 

Another incident occurred in Bristol, when Harding became involved in an animated and noisy argument with another young man he had picked up. His friend Eric Dehn, a broadcaster who had for many years taught in Bristol, managed to deal with the demanding youth, an angry pub landlord as well as unimpressed and unaccommodating hotel staff, and keep Harding’s name out of the newspapers, which would often use coded language when reporting on the exploits of the ‘confirmed bachelor’ who ‘shunned the company of women’.

 

Although he had worked at the BBC since the war, Harding was starting to become a liability. As one producer put it: ‘A time came when we at the BBC began to wonder how much longer we could go on displaying this drunken homosexual like a freak at a sideshow.’ The last line in his ghost-written autobiography, Along My Line, was the gloomy ‘I do wish that the future were over.’ He spent the last eight years of his life in Brighton, with a chauffeur, his loyal secretary Roger ‘Podge’ Storey, a housekeeper, his beloved dogs and a budgerigar. After Harding’s death many of them sent reporters to Brighton to sniff out scandal: they returned having made barely a scratch in their notebooks.

 

A few weeks before his death, Harding had been grilled about his personal life by the former Labour MP John Freeman for the TV series Face to Face. Britain’s rudest man was reduced to tears when discussing the death of his mother and admitted to the interviewer that he ‘should be very glad to be dead’, but he refused to be drawn on his sexuality, talking vaguely about living in ‘a cloud of sexual frustration’ and admitting that he thought himself impossible to live with. With the partial decriminalisation of homosexuality still seven years away, no one of his standing could have been open with the public about their sexuality without ruining their career. Freeman later referred to him as ‘just about the most deeply miserable man I have ever encountered’.

 

On 16 November 1960 Harding collapsed on the steps of Broadcasting House shortly after completing a recording of Round Britain Quiz. His chauffeur attempted to revive him, but he died on the spot from a massive heart attack, aged just 53.

 

Born in December 1897, Hermione Gingold an English actress known for her sharp-tongued, eccentric character. Her signature drawling, deep voice was a result of nodules on her vocal cords she developed in the 1920s and early 1930s.

 

After a successful career as a child actress, she later established herself on the stage as an adult, playing in comedy, drama and experimental theatre, and broadcasting on the radio. She appeared in dozens of films, including the wonderful Bell Book and Candle, and was a frequent guest on television chat shows and situation comedies. She also appeared on stage on both sides of the Atlantic, and was a member of the original 1973 Broadway cast of Stephen Sondheim's A Little Night Music.

 

She died from heart problems and pneumonia in Manhattan on 24 May 1987, aged 89. Her autobiography, How to Grow Old Disgracefully, was published posthumously the following year.

 

Here are both sides of the pair’s Philips 78, It Takes Two to Tango and Oh Grandma!

 

Enjoy!

 

Download Tango HERE

Download Grandma HERE

There's A New Sound

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Here's a classic I've not included on the blog before, despite having written about the artist on the B-side... and it also gives me a good excuse to look into the work of pianist, composer and music teacher Anthony Tamburello.


Known professionally as Tony Burrello and Tony Burrell, Tamburello is probably best known around these here parts for his novelty release There’s a New Sound, the flip side to the Leona Anderson (incorrectly credited at Leonna) classic Fish.

 

Issued in 1953 on their own Horrible Records, There’s a New Sound and Fish were both written by Burrello and Tom Dwight Murray, although Burrello had been writing (both solo and with Murray) since at least 1950, while still working as a teach at New York’s Anthony Scotti School of Music, Drama and Dance.

 

Murray and Burrello (variously credited as Burrell or as Anthony Tam Burrello) had worked together for several years, with a slew of novelty songs to their names, including Pastafazool, I Didn’t Want To But I Did, and Fulton’s Folly Blues. But major success eluded them, until There’s a New Sound gave them the breakthrough they had been looking for. Time called the song 'an unrelenting and fairly unforgettable satire on such gimmicks as echo chambers and dog barks', and reported that, after an intial pressing of just 500 copies, the pair had received orders for 100,000 more. In August 1953 Billboard reported that the pair were now in great demand, and ‘experiencing a windmill of activity’. Soon they were writing for Tony Bennett, and they even turned their hands to writing commercials, penning several tunes for Coca Cola.

 

The duo continued to work with Leona when she moved, first to Columbia Records and then to Unique, with Burrello co-writing Limburger Lover (with Simon) and Rats in my Room with Murray. In the same year as …Worms, Murray and Burrello had also written God Bless Us All, a sugary-sweet kiddie dittyrecorded by a number of artists including Spike Jones (with vocals by George Rock), Brucie Weill, Jimmy Boyd, Mollie Bee and Baby Pam. and covered in the 1980s by NRBQ.

 

The following year, Burrello and Murray composed How Do You Want Me To Sing My Love Song?, a novelty for singer Larry Foster on which Foster imitates several big-name singers of the time, including Nat “King” Cole, Al Jolson and Perry Como. The flipside, A Trip to Hollywood, featured Foster imitating a number of movie stars, including Edward G. Robinson, Cary Grant, and Jimmy Stewart.

 

Burrello (rear right) with Murray
After working with Leona, Burrello moved back to his first love, jazz, issuing several albums including Jazz a la Waller, on the tiny Manhattan Productions label (also available on Cambridge Recordings as Salute to Fats Waller) with his own Tony Burrello Trio, as well as accompanying Broadway star Pat Northrop on the LP I Love New York. In the late 1950s the Tony Burrello Trio issued at least two 10” LPs, Selections from Oklahoma and South Pacific and The Songs Of Hoagy Carmichael, on the British budget label Solitaire, which appear to have been licensed from the US owners of the masters, rather than recorded in Blighty. He continued to work with Tom Murray however, the duo writing material for singer Jerry Vale (for his 1963 season at New York’s Copacabana club),

 

Under his given name, Burrello has achieved lasting fame with cult TV fans and library music aficionados by composing the instrumental Party Dress, a tune featured in Arrival, the opening episode of the Prisoner, but which first turned up on a Chappell Recorded Music 10” in 1957.


After a long and varied career, which included time in the studio with Sinatra and tours with Tony Bennett, Tony Burrello died in September 1992.

 

For an insight into Tony’s work in the novelty field, here he is with the magnificent There’s a New Sound, plus Baby Pam and the sickly God Bless Us All, and Larry Foster with How Do You Want Me To Sing My Love Song?

 

Enjoy!

 

Download Sound HERE

Download Bless HERE

Download Sing HERE


Christmas Cavalcade 2021: Part One

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Welcome, everyone, to the first installment of this year’s Christmas Cavalcade. Yes, it’s December already, which means that every blog post between now and Christmas day will be given over to the discussion, and appreciation, of terrible yuletide tunes.

 

And what better place to start than with a magnificent Christmas collection from song-poem giant M.S.R.?

 

For those of you new to, or with just a passing acquaintance to, the genre, song-poems are paid-for recordings, where amateur lyric writers are encouraged, usually through semi-display advertisements in the small ads, to send in their scribblings (alongside a rather meaty money order, naturally) to companies who promise to turn them into potential hit singles. M.S.R. (the initials stand for founder Maury S. Rosen) is one of the giants of the song-poem world, and alongside Preview, Columbine and Halmark one of the most productive of all of the song-poem stables, producing in excess of 3,000 45s and 300 albums over its lifetime.

 

The tracks today come from M.S.R.’s 1975 Christmas Album, 16 songs from thirteen different writers (Thomas Guygax Sr., Mabel M. Jost and Nana Smith all contribute two lyrics apiece) issued, unsurprisingly, in late 1975. Nana Smith, who clearly forgot to send in her photo alongside her cheque, is the only author not featured among the baubles on the cover. The tracks are performed by the Sisterhood, M.S.R.’s go-to all-girl vocal group, which consisted of regular M.S.R session singers including Bobbi Blake. She also recorded as Bobbi (or Bobbie) Boyle, but I‘m not sure if that’s the same Bobbi Boyle from Encino, California who recorded a number of songs and appeared on the soundtrack to the Incredible Two Headed Transplant.

 

I’ve chosen to share a few tracks with you today: to be honest, like most of the Sisterhood alums this collection is a mostly dull affair, with that horrid washy synth sound that permeates M.S.R. productions from this period, but here are three of my favourites, Earl Wyer’s silly Those Elves Have Got To Go (the highlight of the album for me), Thomas Guygax Sr.’s typically wordy and peculiar During Evening and the Christmas Wish, written by Ken Cummings.

 

if you like these and want more, obscure music collector Sammy Reed posted the entire album on his blog a couple of years ago and it’s still available to download.

 

Enjoy!

 

Download Those Elves HERE

Download Evening HERE

Download Wish HERE

Christmas Cavalcade 2021: Part Two

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Over the years, I have featured a number of festive-themed, Beatle-related novelties during the Christmas Cavalcade. In fact, it’s almost become a tradition In It’s Own Write (see what I did there?) There are so many Beatle-themed Christmas songs out there, ranging from the wonderful to the totally awful; why not grab those that I have already featured, add them to the ones from today’s post and compile your own album?

 

First up is Santa Bring Me Ringo, the 1964 single from Christine Hunter. Co-written by Angelo Badalamenti (yes, Mr. Twin Peaks himself) in one of his first credited studio roles, and covered in Britain by Ray Alan and his tearaway schoolboy puppet Tich (as featured on this very blog last year). According to Discogs, at the time she recorded this, Christine was a member of Capella Cordina, an American early music ensemble founded in 1963 by Alejandro Planchart and disbanded in 1975.  It is, of course, perfectly possible that there were two Christine Hunters recording around the same time.

 

I’ve also included the flip side of the disc, the oddly-titled Where Were You Daddy (Q) (When Santa Got Stuck In The Chimney Chute). Both sides of the disc were arranged and conducted by Badalamenti, and although he did not take a writer credit for this tune, both sides were co-authored by Murray Semos, best known for having co-written the wonderful Busy Line for Rose Murphy, the Chee-Chee Girl.

 

Next up, and again from 1964, is Ringo Bells from the Three Blonde Mice. The lyrics, credited to record producer George T. Simon, have been set to the tune Jingle Bells (as if you hadn’t already guessed), and the flip featured a cover of the traditional carol The Twelve Days of Christmas. As well as working as a producer, Simon was a jazz critic and former drummer in the Glenn Miller Orchestra; the following year the Three Blonde Mice issued a Chipmunks-esque cover of the Ray Charles classic What’d I Say, again produced by Simon.

 

Last up is I Want a Beatle For Christmas, by Patty Surbey and the Canadian VIPs, issued like all of the above in time for Christmas 1964, the year that the Beatles made their big breakthrough Stateside. First brought to my attention last year by blog follower Brett Alan, this is the third different song with the same title issued that year, alongside The Fans and Becky Lee Beck, both of which have featured on the blog previously. It’s not a bad record at all, and is included here simply because it follows my theme; Patty and her VIPs would issue one more 45, Hey Boy!, the following year.


Enjoy!


Download Santa HERE 

Download Daddy HERE

Download Bells HERE

 

Download Beatle HERE

 

Christmas Cavalcade 2021: Part Three

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The big day is getting closer, but we still have time for a few more festive fails.

 

First up was suggested to me by my friend The Squire, over at the Squire Presents. Our annual Christmas chin-wag will be up for streaming soon, but here’s a little disc he thought you might enjoy, Marlene Paula and her 1956 single I Want to Spend Christmas With Elvis. Paula, aka Marlene VerPlanck, was the wife of jazz bandleader J. Billy VerPlanck, and once sang with the Tommy Dorsey orchestra.

 

This particular 45 was backed with the rather dull Once More It’s Christmas, but at around the same time that she was hoping to find Elvis the Pelvis under her tree, she was also claiming that I Got the Asian Flu for Christmas, in a spectacularly badly timed release aimed squarely at the children’s market. The Asian flu pandemic of 1956 to 1958 eventually resulted in the deaths of approximately two million people, nearly 70,000 of whom were in the US, and therefore lost potential customers for her discs. I’ve not been able to find a copy of that particular disc on the ‘net, but if anyone here has a copy they are willing to rip for me I would be incredibly grateful.

 

Next up is another disc brought to my attention by the Squire, its Reece Shipley and Santa Miss Those Missiles. Originally issued around 1960, at the height of the paranoia over the impending Cold War (and two years before the Cuban Missile Crisis) on his own Shipley records, the track was later compiled on the 2003 collection Tennessee Swing.

 

The third and final track for today is Honky, the Christmas Goose issued by Johnny Bower in 1965. Bower was goalkeeper for the Toronto Maple Leafs (surely that should be Maple Leaves?), and the flat as a pancake kiddie voice that accompanies him on this disc came from his son, John Junior. Recorded at the studios of CBC in Toronto on November 5 that year, the song was the brainchild of CBC producer Chip Young and composer Orville Hoover. Bower, apparently nominated for the role by his teammates, was the perfect choice for vocalist  - the veteran player regularly took on the role of Santa Claus at team Christmas parties, and he was enormously popular with young fans.

 

‘I told Chip the only singing I did was in the shower,’ Bower admitted in a 1992 interview. ‘But the challenge appealed to me and he talked me into it. He came over to the house and wanted to get my son, John Jr., who was about 11, involved in a little choir. So we all went down to the studio -- a bunch of neighborhood kids who couldn't sing worth a hoot and myself -- and we made the record.’

 

Enjoy! 

Download Elvis HERE 

 

 Download Santa HERE

 

 Download Honky HERE

Le Streak, C'est Chic

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 A fun little disc for you today to round of the year… perfect for your New Year’s Eve party!

 

Born in Quasqueton, Iowa as Larry Lee Blankenburg, Larry Lujack was a US Top-40 radio DJ who worked throughout the States for almost 50 years. Beginning in 1958, in his then-hometown of Caldwell, Idaho, he would become best-known while living and working in Chicago, where he ruled the airwaves for almost 20 years. He retired in 1987, after his son was killed in an accident and he underwent heart bypass surgery, but he was persuaded to return to the microphone several years later, finally retiring for good in August 2006.

 

Larry’s sole single, The Ballad of the Mad Streaker came out in 1974, the same year that novelty records supremo Ray Stevens had an international hit with The Streak, that funk band High Voltage issued their single Streakin’ backed with Here Come's The Streaker, and that blues singer Arelean Brown released her 45 I Am A Streaker.

 

Just in case you were unaware, ‘streaking’ is the act of taking off your clothes and running naked through a public area – it could be for publicity, as a prank, a dare, or even as a form of protest. In the early 1970s streaking became associated with sporting events, and the press was filled with photographs of nude men and topless women (in Britain, Erica Roe earned a place in the nation’s hearts after streaking at a cricket *rugby* match in 1982), usually pursued by sporting officials or policemen.

 

For a short time records about streaking were everywhere. In the UK, Willie Flascher and The Raincoats issued (Everybody Wants To Be A) Streaker which, for some odd reason was retitled Everybody Wants To See A (Streaker) when it was reissued in New Zealand, and reggae trumpeter Bobby Ellis issued Streaker Disco. Controversial comedian Rudy Ray Moore released his album The Streaker around 1975 in the US, and many more would follow. Elephant’s Memory, famed for their association with John and Yoko and the Beatles’ Apple label, released Rock 'N' Roll Streaker, and I’m sure that none of you will be remotely surprised to discover that there are several song-poems about streaking, including Lee Scott’s The Streaker, and Ralph Lowe’s Harold, the Drag Strip Streaker.

 

The flip side of the Lujack 45, Music to Streak By, is simply a slightly extended instrumental versionof the plug track that really does not work as a stand-alone, unless you have some perverse reason to perform the song karaoke-style, that is. Anyway, here are both sides of Larry’s 1974 single… just in case you do fancy streaking in a karaoke bar!

 

Enjoy!

 

Download Ballad HERE

Download Music HERE

Mavin James Revisited

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I’ve written about Mavin James before, both here and in my book The World’s Worst Records Volume 1, but to accompany the recent discovery of a previously-unknown fourth single release, here’s a bit of a recap. 

I was first introduced to the delights of Mavin James via Music For Mentalists, a CD compiled by Mick Dillingham and Nick Saloman of the Bevis Frond. It’s a great compilation, but by far and away the best track on the disc is Together In Iceland by one Mavin James.

Together in Iceland was originally the B-side to My Dad, Mavin’s third single, issued by Havasong Records, of Rochester, Kent in 1986. There's something utterly beguiling about Mavin's delivery of the A-side; it's a sweet, naive little ditty that you could easily imagine being performed by Clive Dunn. However, nothing can prepare you for the B-side. Drenched in reverb and redolent in blippy organ sounds, Together in Iceland comes across more like a lost Joe Meek masterpiece than the mid-80s electro-pop you would assume Mavin was going for.

Through the sleeve notes to his singles we get to learn a little about Mavin, and with a mixture of self-mockery and self-aggrandisement he lets us into his rather odd world. Once fined 15 shillings for having left his car more than 20 minutes in a 15-minute waiting zone (something Mavin does not refer to once in his sleeve notes, but it’s just about the most interesting thing about him prior to the launch of his recording career), on the back of the My Dad sleeve he informs us of how he came to be living in Rochester and how he started writing and performing, but it is via the notes on the reverse of his first 45, the oddly titled He-Be - Har-Be/Me Me and You, we begin to learn something of the great man’s formative years (reproduced here exactly as they appear on the sleeve itself): 

'Mavin James was born and at the age of only two years following the positioning of his high chair near the piano, soon found he could master the theories of music. Within a very short time original melodies were flowing from his toes and his future seemed assured. However the advent of shoes ruined this promising career and he was a has-been at the age of two and a half.

'Later in his life having found that fingers play better than toes he continued to play piano but eventually settled on playing the organ to the consternation of his family and friends. Discounting the first fifty tries which didn’t really count he sat down to write and play his debut record and at first try completed He-Be – Har-Be, Immediately following up with his disco ballad Me-Me And You, which is particularly suitable for close dancing when you’re in a don’t care mood.’

On that first 45 Mavin was joined by the Venatics, a band whose members are listed on the label as Russ, Joan and Neill. I assumed at the time that these people were related to Mavin in some way, and I now know that Russ was his son, Gary Russell Hirst-Amos. The single’s flip, Me Me And You (a ‘disco/ballad’ apparently), is a sweet little love song with some nicely atmospheric slide guitar touches, but disco it most certainly ain’t. The production values on this first single are a cut above the rest of Mavin’s catalogue – he’s clearly gone into a professional studio and had some help with mixing and multi-tracking. Sadly, or perhaps happily for lovers of the perverse and peculiar, the rest of his catalogue – including second single You’re Just Like a Bubble In Wine/Nothing to Do - was recorded direct to two-track: no overdubs, no guest musicians or backing vocalists, just Mavin and his trusty Bontempi organ.

Mavin, on the surface at least, appears to have been a rather lovely middle-aged guy who simply wanted to make the world smile a little. His fourth and last single, The Soldier on His Horse was issued in 1988, and by that time he had run out of steam. The flip side features an instrumental version of the plug side, Drum Beat and Music Track, and in the sleeve notes Mavin refers to the fact that this is only the seventh song that he had written and recorded. Perhaps more recordings followed, but nothing appears to have been released. Maybe somewhere in Rochester there is a battered old cardboard box containing the tapes of his unreleased album?

It could happen, as that’s exactly how I managed to get hold The Soldier on His Horse. Neil Pearce, the son of one of Jim’s friends, found a box in his late father’s garage with a handful of Mavin James 45s inside, including the copy of The Soldier on His Horse you can hear here. Perhaps one day, just like Joe Meek, someone will purchase a tea chest full of material at auction and slowly piece together a fuller picture of Mavin’s creative genius. What was once the home of Havasong Records, Mavin’s label, is now a car park; not that that fact will upset him. For the truth of the matter is that there never was a Mavin James.

Born in 1931, Jim Amos, or, to give him his full name James Mavin Hirst-Amos, was - according to drummer, songwriter and graphic artist Bruce ‘Bash’ Brand – ‘a television tube repair man by trade… who claimed on numerous occasions that he once wrote a song for Georgie Fame.’ He was, Neil tells me. also a keen snooker player and a bit of a gambler. Switching his first two given names and assuming the nom-de-plume Mavin James, Jim set up his own company – the jauntily-named Havasong – to publish his own compositions. Havasong swiftly mutated into a record company of sorts, issuing the four Mavin James singles already mentioned and working with a number of local acts, chief among them the Prisoners, the Milkshakes and the amazingly prolific Thee Headcoats – the last two of which featured Billy Childish and Bruce Brand.

Jim Hirst-Amos died in 2003 (wife Jean joined him in 2012), blissfully unaware of the notoriety his records would one day gain in collectors’ circles. I hope he’s up there somewhere, sitting at his organ, watching over us all and smiling. I know that his grandchildren are proud (and rightfully so) of his recorded legacy. Maybe, if they ever get to read this, his family will open up those boxes sitting in the corner of their garage and dust them off.


Download Soldier HERE 

Download Drum HERE

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