The death of Glen Campbell and his rendering of Wichita Lineman (and Galveston) reminded me of how good a songwriter Jimmy Webb was. Webb’s style was kind of out of tune (ahem) for the times but there were still a lot of hits that came from his pen.

Looking it up I’m surprised this one wasn’t a hit in the UK. As I recall it a got a lot of airplay.

Sad to hear the news earlier this week of the death of Glen Campbell.

He had one of the clearest voices in popular music. Though he had among other things previously been a touring member of The Beach Boys and I must have heard his version of By the Time I Get to Phoenix he first really came to my attention with Wichita Lineman written by Jimmy Webb which it seems Campbell recorded even though apparently Webb hadn’t finished the song.

This apparently live performance doesn’t have the “Morse Code” strings which come in at the end of the refrain.

The video below – featuring clips from throughout Campbell’s career – does though, as the recorded version provides the backing.

Glen Travis Campbell: 22/4/1936-8/8/2017. So it goes.

Produced (and sung on) by Roy Wood of the Move, early ELO and Wizzard, this is an absolutely typical Roy Wood song (compare Blackberry Way) as credited to The Acid Gallery. Wood’s voice on the chorus is unmistakable though.

The Acid Gallery later became Christie (of Yellow River No 1 fame.)

This is one of those songs which started out in the US and was recorded by a British band who had the bigger hit in the UK albeit this time with an altered lyric. Unusually the hit US version by The American Breed, which I think I prefer, also reached the UK charts. In the video below (set to the recording I would suggest, but with added screams) they were obviously hamming up the miming.

For some reason this song came into my head this week.

Good enough reason to feature it here as a typical example of The Monkees’ ability to bang out a good tune. (Or or their handlers’ ability to pick one.)

I had a comment this week on the post I made about my absolute favourite 1960s single, Rupert’s People’s Reflections of Charles Brown, to the effect that airplay for it had actually preceded the release of Procol Harum’s A Whiter Shade Of Pale but a hiatus in its own resulted in “Reflections” losing out.

In my post I noted a previous version from which “Reflections” had been adapted. The comment reminded me to try to source that single again. And I have succeeded.

So here is Charles Brown as by Sweet Feeling, a much more psychedelic effort than “Reflections”.

The song was actually the B-side of All So Long Ago, which I append here:-

I’ve not used much Tamla Motown in this category but the driving beat of this song could almost sum up that label’s output in the mid-60s.

A track by Mark Wirtz – he of the Teenage Opera – released as by The Mood Mosaic.

It seems this was used as the theme music for a German TV show called Musikladen among others.

How sixties does this sound?

A curio.

For some reason the 60s TV import Captain Zeppos came into my head recently. The series was made in Belgium and as such was a very unusual thing to be shown in Britain where foreign-made programmes were very thin on the ground (bizarre animated shorts from Eastern Europe apart.)

I vaguely remembered Captain Zeppos as a sort of detective show but it seems it was much odder.

The tune was performed by Bert Kaempfert and his Orchestra. Kaempfert was a German band leader of the easy-listening type.

This is very typically European in its style.

It was with great sadness I heard on Sunday of the death of Brian Matthew, one of the voices of my youth and, through the BBC Radio 2 programme Sounds of the Sixties, also of my recent adulthood.

This came only a few days after the BBC had mistakenly reported his death.

Despite his apparent dismay at a crass decision by the powers that be to replace him, and his stated intention to make further programmes for Radio 2, Mathew was obviously not as hale and hearty as he once was (none of us are.) There had been another lengthy absence from the programme a couple of years ago so the final news was merely a confirmation of what I had feared.

Whatever, Sounds of the Sixties is not – and never can be – the same without him. The new incumbent, Tony Blackburn, is far too chatty (what is all that stuff with Dermot O’Leary, who follows him on air? Just play the music and give us the information about the acts) and always sounds fundamentally unserious about the show’s contents. It’s Blackburn’s style and has always been his style but it grates somehow.

So. Here is the tune that will forever now be associated with Matthew – the one with which Sounds of the Sixties played (and plays) out every episode and which I will never in future be able to hear without a further tinge of sadness.

Brian Matthew: 17/9/1928 – 8/4/2017. So it goes.