This is another record on which Hal Blaine (see last week’s post) played drums, the song one of the fruits of Sinatra’s working relationship with Lee Hazlewood.

This video is something else. OK, I get the fact that the performers’ boots were being emphasised, but the skirts didn’t need to be so short for that did they?

The list of hits on which Hal Blaine played drums is enormous. His obituary in the Guardian mentions only a few. A fuller (though possibly partial) list is here. Looking at that it could almost be said that he was the sound of the sixties.

He was certainly a major component of the “wall of sound” on those Phil Spector productions he played on. No more so than on Be My Baby.

Harold Simon Belsky (Hal Blaine): 5/2/1929 – 11/3/2019. So it goes.

It’s safe to say the Prodigy’s music wasn’t really to my taste. What you couldn’t say about it was it was that it didn’t make a statement. It stands in stark contrast to the ocean of blandness into which modern music has submerged in the late teen years of the twenty-first century, where all the performers seem to merge into one generic

It was therefore sad to hear of the demise of Keith Flint who fronted the Prodigy in their mid-90s pomp. Even sadder that it seems he took his own life. Any life cut short is a misfortune but more so when it might have been prevented.

I also discovered from the obituaries a personal connection with the band as it was formed in Braintree, Essex, a town where I lived for two years during 1980 and 1981.

Listening to this (and to their only other number one Firestarter) now, I find myself warming to their work. Too late, alas.

Keith Charles Flint: 17/9/1969 – 4/3/2019. So it goes.

Talk Talk were never makers of big hits but nevertheless produced four or five songs which still show their quality over thirty years after they were written and recorded. The group also influenced many later bands as quoted in the Guardian obituary of Talk Talk’s singer and composer Mark Hollis who died earlier this week.

Hollis seems to have been one of the few people who could walk away from a musical career as, barring a solo album in 1998, after 1991 he made few forays into music making.

Mark David Hollis: 4/1/1955 – 25/2/2019. So it goes.

Sad news again. This time it is Peter Tork of The Monkees who has joined the great lost band in the sky.

He played keyboards and bass in the band – once they were finally allowed to play on their records – but was cast as the least intellectually gifted of the four fictional band members; a role which I believe came to irritate him.

He was, though, a capable musician and wrote a few of the band’s songs including the one which ran under the TV show’s closing credits, For Pete’s Sake.

End Credits. (They all look so young.):-

This is a fuller version of the song, taken from the band’s third album Headquarters.

Peter Halsten Thorkelson (Peter Tork): 13/2/1942 –21/2/2019. So it goes.

A piece of typical mid-60s pop. Never a hit (though apparently it still sold 10,000 copies in the UK) but one that nevertheless stuck in the memory.

The version below I’d never heard until I researched this post. It was a hit for Lynne Randell in Australia. I think I prefer its faster pace.

This is one of those songs whose jaunty sound hides a darker underside in the lyric. The video here more than hints at that but undercuts it at the end.

A couple of weeks ago I featured a song with this title. It’s not the first one that would have come to my mind when I thought of it.

That would be the following, side 2, track 3 on the album Led Zeppelin III, from 1970.

The title of the book I’m reading just now* (if you’re looking at this later than 26/1/2019 just put The Driver’s Seat into my search bar.) naturally put me in mind of this song, the only hit in the UK – another single in the Netherlands apart, their only hit anywhere – for the unforgettably named band Sniff ‘n’ the Tears. I doubt the book and the song will have anything in common.

*Edited to add: I’ve finished it.

A bit of polished pop from 1996. With the added bonus of a Scottish lead singer in Shirley Manson.