Archives » 1960s

Friday on my Mind 242: Don’t Sleep in the Subway

Petula Clark was one of the most prominent female singers of the 1960s but had a reputation as being a bit old-fashioned – perhaps because her show business career had actually started in the 1940s.

However, this track always sounded to me like it had a touch of the Beach Boys about it.

This clip seems to be from a German – or Austrian – TV show.

Petula Clark: Don’t Sleep in the Subway

Friday on my Mind 241: Just One More Chance

 

A piece of 1967 psychedelia which also has echoes of The Herd. Member Jeff Christie went on to form the band Christie of Yellow River fame.

The Outer Limits: Just One More Chance

Friday on my Mind 240: Come and Stay with Me and Live It Up 125: Broken English

I saw Marianne Faithfull’s death announced last night.

She first came to prominence in 1964 due to her association with The Rolling Stones (Jagger and Richards wrote her first hit.) She had a sweet but almost insubstantial voice suited to soft pop songs but by the mid 60s her singing career had stalled, in part due to a drugs scandal. She took up acting with some success though but mostly fell out of public consciousness.

Here’s Faithfull’s version of a Jackie DeShannon song that gave her her highest UK chart placing (no 4 in 1965 as compared to the no 9 achieved by As Tears Go By the year before.)

Marianne Faithfull: Come and Stay with Me

 

The song below is from her 1980 “comeback”* album of the same title, which is widely regarded as her best, not least by herself.

*Even if Dreamin’ my Dreams had intervened in 1976

Marianne Faithfull: Broken English

Marianne Evelyn Gabriel Faithfull: 29/12/1946 – 30/1/2025. So it goes.

Not Friday on my Mind 89: I Shall Be Released. RIP Garth Hudson

And this week, Garth Hudson, keyboard player, and the last surviving member, of the Band went to the great rehearsal room in the sky.

This Bob Dylan song, from their first album Music From Big Pink, was also the B-side to The Weight, so I know it well.

The Band: I Shall Be Released

 

Eric Garth Hudson: 2/8/1937 – 21/1/2025. So it goes.

Friday on my Mind 239: Soul Man/Hold On I’m Comin’/Soul Sister, Brown Sugar

Sam Moore of US Soul duo Sam and Dave died last Saturday.

Perhaps their most is Hold On, I’m Comin’ (a 1966 US no 21 and R&B no 1) but their first UK top thirty hit was Soul Man in 1967. Their highest UK chart placing came at no 15 in 1969 with Soul Sister, Brown Sugar.

Sam and Dave: Hold On, I’m Comin’

 

Sam and Dave: Soul Man

 

 

Sam and Dave: Soul Sister, Brown Sugar

 

Samuel David (Sam) Moore: 12/10/1935 – 10/1/2025. So it goes

Babel Tower by A S Byatt

Chatto and Windus, 1996, 622 p.

I noted when Byatt died that I had only read one book by her and perhaps ought to remedy that so when I saw this in a second-hand bookshop (in Ulverston as it happens) I snapped it up. However only after I started reading it did I check her back catalogue and found this is the third novel in a sequence featuring Frederica Potter as the main character. Not that it matters because the book stands alone.

In this one, set in the nineteen sixties, Frederica is regretting marrying Nigel Reiver as she finds life in his grand home – dominated by his two sisters and his housekeeper – even with her son Leo, less than fulfilling. She had thought she might be allowed to work (she had met Nigel when she was at Cambridge – though he wasn’t – and still hankers after the intellectual life.) But Nigel is a traditional husband and though his work often takes him away for extended periods (with corresponding sexual encounters which Frederica only finds about later) thinks she should stay at home and resents any contact with her former University friends, all of them male of course. Her unhappiness turns into despair when he becomes violent towards her. He is a former soldier trained in violence and throws an axe at her when she tries to run away.

Some of the passages deal with members of Frederica’s extended family one of whom fields phone calls in a Samaritan-like service. They chat amongst themselves as they wait for calls and when questioned why the Church seems obsessed by sex a bishop says, “‘The Church has always been about sex, dear, that’s what the problem is. Religion has always been about sex. Mostly about denying sex and rooting it out.’” Apart from the odd visit later in the book to Frederica’s parental home this is a very minor strand.

Interleaved with Frederica’s story in the early stages here are extracts from a book called Babbletower, where an aristocrat leads a group of people away from their home land to a place named La Tour Bruyarde, to found a culture in which its inhabitants will be free to do as they wish without hindrance. This connects with Frederica after she finally escapes Nigel (her son Leo insisting on coming with her though he loves his father) when she gets a job – nepotistically through her old friends – as a publisher’s reader then teacher of English in the Samuel Palmer School of Art and Craft. Babbletower is one of the books she recommends for publication and its author, Jude Mason, an ill-dressed, ill-kempt and smelly individual, turns out to be a model for the life class at the School.

Byatt uses this and Frederica’s peripheral involvement with the Steerforth Committee on the teaching of English (and specifically whether grammar ought to be taught in schools) to have discussions about literature, especially E M Forster and D H Lawrence, as well as the usefulness of cut-ups in condensing meaning.

George Murphy, one of Frederica’s students, says novels are obsessed with sex and love and God and food (which he agrees most people are) but they are also obsessed by work, commodities, machines and property on which they do not lavish the contempt and loathing which novelists tend to. At one point a character realises that it is possible for human beings to spend the whole of their lives on nonsense.

From time to time the ferment of the sixties is noted parenthetically. The Lady Chatterley trial, the 1964 General Election, the abolition of the death penalty, the decriminalization of homosexuality, the Moors murders, Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the beginning of colour TV transmission all get a nod.

There are two main set pieces in the novel, both describing court cases, Frederica’s divorce and Babbletower’s trial for indecency. Byatt uses these to demonstrate how the legal system distorts the truth.

In entering various liaisons after leaving Nigel, Frederica seems to be very naive in her conduct as it never once occurs to her that her husband will be having her watched.

A nice touch comes when Jude Mason opines in court – “‘The English vice is not what is said to be but, precisely, indignation. We get furiously upset about everything ….. It is indignation that has put my book on trial.’”

At 622 pages Babel Tower is something of a marathon read but it has its moments.

Pedant’s corner:- a missing end quote mark after a piece of dialogue, staunch(es) (x 2, stanch(es),) genii (the plural of genie is genies,) aureoles (areolae,) (behalves?) “Moor Murders” (Moors Murders which is used elsewhere,) “which neither of them quite understand” (neither of them understands,) “he has not read Babbletower, as a teacher, she is now” (he has not read Babbletower. As a teacher,) “marmelade skies” (marmalade.)

Friday on my Mind 238: Gimme Little Sign. RIP Brenton Wood

I heard Brenton Wood’s death reported on the radio on 3/1/2025. The piece referred to a song of his I couldn’t remember ever hearing, The Oogum Boogum Song, which apparently became famous after being used in various films and TV shows.

What I remember Woods for is his 1967 hit Gimme Little Sign, a UK no 8. Here’s a Top of the Pops clip from February 1968.

Brenton Wood: Gimme Little Sign

 

Alfred Jesse Smith (Brenton Wood,) 26/7/1941 – 3/1/2025. So it goes.

Because They’re Young. RIP Johnnie Walker

It was announced on Hogmanay that DJ Johnnie Walker has died. He was one of the original pirate DJs and eventually joined the BBC when the pirate radio became untenable.

I remember listening to his lunchtime show on Radio 1 back in the day, indeed it was on that show I first heard Barclay James Harvest’s I’m Over You, one of my favourites of that band’s songs.

He was too much of a rebel to last at the BBC and moved to the US for a few years.

When he eventually came back to the UK he finally settled in at Radio 2 with the show Sounds of the Seventies, taking over as presenter from Steve Harley and also took the helm of The Rock Show. He had a short stint presenting Sounds of the Sixties in the aftermath of Brian Mathhew’s departure from that show before Tony Blackburn took over the slot. His increasing health problems saw him give up broadcasting only a few months ago.

His voice is missed.

This Duane Eddy track was so beloved by Walker that it became his signature tune. No excuses for featuring it again:-

Duane Eddy: Because They’re Young

Peter Waters Dingley (Johnnie Walker;) 30/3/1945 – 31/12/2024. So it goes.

Tull at Christmas: Bourée

Merry Christmas.

I’ll be running out of these Christmas numbers soon. This will be the second last track from Tull’s Christmas Album to be featured here, an adaptation of Bach’s Bourrée.

The tune was one of the tracks on Tull’s second LP Stand Up and was also released as a single in 1969 in Europe but not the UK. It has appeared on many Tull compilation albums.

Jethro Tull: Bourée

https://youtu.be/ATXBf4UNkIE?si=lbbPAnlOoTNROt13

Friday on my Mind 237: Like I Do / Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh (A Letter from Camp)

A bit of a change this week. Two for the price of one; both adapted from Dance of the Hours from the opera La Gioconda by Amilcare Ponchielli.

First a straightforward use of the tune with love song lyrics. I did not know until I looked this up that it had first been recorded by Nancy Sinatra in 1962. In the UK Maureen Evans had a hit with it a year later.

Maureen Evans: Like I Do

 

Also in 1963 comic Allan Sherman released a novelty single setting the tune to his own lyrics, a satirising of the US summer camp experience after receiving letters from his son about Camp Champlain in New York. This is I believe a colourised clip.

Allan Sherman: Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh (A Letter from Camp)

https://youtu.be/_V_LMncr-mg?si=2zck0pspTgAIVoR_

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