I was sad to hear of the death of Bobby Robson.

He was one of the last of the links with a time when football was the people’s game rather than the plaything of media moguls and moneyed oligarchs.

I don’t remember him as a player but his career as a manager surely marks him as one of the best.

What he did with Ipswich Town – though failing to match the League Championship that Alf Ramsey managed there, he surpassed Ramsey’s achievements with an FA Cup win and the Uefa Cup and sustained Ipswich in the top division for a goodly length of time – was a measure of how great a manager he was, given that, even then, a provincial club was at a huge financial disadvantage compared to those from big cities.

He also had success in foreign parts (winning championships in Holland and Portugal and cups in Portugal and Spain) not a common claim for British managers.

In nigh on thirty years as a manager his teams finished lower than sixth only eight times.

Through it all, he seemed to be a thoroughly decent man, a quality somewhat lacking in the game these days.

Bobby Robson, 18/2/33 -31/7/09. So it goes.

I mentioned Procol Harum a few posts ago. When I wrote about America by The Nice I said, under the influence of a programme I’d seen on the history of the form on BBC 3 or 4, that it seemed that was where Prog Rock began. However it is arguable that Procol Harum’s A Whiter Shade Of Pale, with its debt to Air on the G String, is a truer progenitor.

Among other reasons, A Whiter Shade Of Pale is famous for the opacity of its lyric. I confess to a soft spot for the follow up single, Homburg, (based more on Sheep May Safely Graze) where the lyric is not quite so opaque. The verses are a shade apocalyptic but not the refrain.

Verse 2 runs like this:
The Town Clock in the market square stands waiting for the hour,
When its hands they both turn backwards and on meeting will devour
Both themselves and also any fool who dares to tell the time,
And the sun and moon will shatter and the signposts cease to sign.

SF/fantasy imagery or what?

But then we get a refrain dealing with (a lack of) sartorial elegance.
Your trouser cuffs are dirty and your shoes are laced up wrong,
You’d better take off your homburg cause your overcoat is too long.

Utterly bizarre.

I couldn’t find a version where the first few notes are not omitted.

Edited to add. I have now.

I featured the real Nirvana‘s Pentecost Hotel recently. After the posting I began to think about songs featuring named hotels in their titles. There aren’t all that many that came to mind. Hotel California, obviously, and Heartbreak Hotel. A quick scan of You Tube – up to page 16! – only revealed Procol Harum’s Grand Hotel as one I hadn’t heard. (I’ve listened to it now and it’s a bit overblown.)
The only other named hotel song I can remember is this from Mike Batt. From the sublime (Nirvana) to the bathetic.

The Railway Hotel

Perhaps that bathetic should have been pathetic after all. Or is that too harsh?

This is the real Nirvana‘s track, Rainbow Chaser, their third single, which is said to be the first to utilise throughout what became almost a trademark of musical psychedelia, phasing.

I must confess that, to me, the verses seem to be without phasing.

Nirvana: Rainbow Chaser

Since the nice Mr David O’List has commented on one of my previous posts about his early ground-breaking band I thought I’d link to the You Tube rendering of America (2nd Amendment) performed by the Nice – credited on the label to Sondheim, Bernstein, Emerlist Davjack – so you could hear what we were both rabbitting on about.

The embedding is of the long version as on the single. There is no video with the clip; just a picture of the band. I avoided the shorter four minute cut (which was given a play on Radio 2’s Sounds Of The Sixties a couple of months back) as it has, to my ears, a clumsy edit about ¾ of the way through.

The single is sub-titled 2nd Amendment. The second amendment to the US constitution is of course the famous one about the right to bear arms.

I was at school at the time of the single’s release and my music teacher expressed interest in the “rock version of the New World symphony” that he’d heard about – as I said in my previous post about it the track quotes from Dvorak – so I brought America in and he played it to the class. All went well until the spoken bit at the end where he went ballistic about “ruining a perfectly good piece of music with political rubbish.” So much for social comment.

Not only was this single over twice as long as was then common, the track was also, except for the spoken outro, an instrumental. By that time in the sixties, unlike earlier in the decade, instrumental releases had become unusual and hits extremely rare. A doubly brave decision, then.

This, it seems, is where prog rock may have started.

The Nice: America

One of the glories mysteries of Scottish kitsch culture has died.

Anna Watt was one half of the unbelievable duo of “singing” sisters Fran and Anna.

I first encountered them on the Scottish Television show Thingummyjig which featured artistes and dancers performing songs and dances in the broad Scottish folk tradition but couched in a light-hearted not-taking-itself-too-seriously style; much in contrast with the BBC’s earlier effort on these lines “The White Heather Club.”

Thingummyjig’s host, Jack McLaughlin, the self-styled Laird o’ Coocaddens, used to refer to Fran and Anna, famous more for their mini-kilts and general tartanry, as “the Gruesome Twosome.”

They made even more of an impact on Terry Wogan who quite clearly could not believe what he was witnessing when he first had them on his TV interview show.

How anyone could make a living peddling this sort of stuff beats me.

The really scary thing is Anna was 85. I thought she was almost that old all those years ago. Looking at the clips on the Scottish news tonight she and her sister in their heyday looked relatively young. Michty me!

Anna Watt, 1924-2009. So it goes.

I mentioned Australian band Python Lee Jackson in a recent post about the Nice.

Despite the band’s origins the voice doing the singing here is unmistakable – and not Australian. There are varying accounts of how Rod Stewart came to do the vocal on this track.

In A Broken Dream was, I believe, the first single – as opposed to EP (ask your Mum or Dad; or even your Grandad) – in the UK to have a picture sleeve. Prior to that each label had its own generic sleeve with a circular cut out so that you could see the label, song title, artist, composer, lyricist and copyright info printed on the label. These would have a lower unit cost as they were used for every single the label put out.

You Tube had this listed under Rod Stewart, despite the fact it wasn’t released under his name. I had heard Rod no longer wished to be associated with this track and hounded unmercifully those who referred to it.

Blame You Tube, Rod, not me.

Edited to add: Rod now seems to have come to terms with this as I’ve since seen him perform it on TV.

This was the Nice’s first single and a smallish hit.

Emerlist Davjack was an amalgamation of the group’s surnames; Keith Emerson, David O’List, Brian Davison and Lee Jackson. Lee Jackson was said to have taken exception to the band name Python Lee Jackson under which a song called In A Broken Dream was released as he thought it was some sort of barbed reference to him.

I watched a couple of TV programmes on the BBC recently about progressive rock and they featured the Nice’s America. I hadn’t exactly thought of the Nice as progenitors of the form but listening to The Thoughts Of Emerlist Davjack (for the first time in decades) I can hear foreshadowings of Nursery Cryme era Genesis, though.

The Nice’s version of America – quotations from Dvorak’s New World symphony, portentous spoken word bit at the end made weirder by being voiced by a child – was certainly a conceit, going way beyond the standard format of the time.

I suppose it did point the way to a widening of rock’s horizons, the possibility of song structures more complicated than verse, verse, chorus; verse, chorus; middle eight; chorus; fade out.

Rock had always ripped-off mined classical sources, though. When A Man Loves A Woman was a direct steal from Pachelbel’s canon (as was The Farm’s Altogether Now many years later.) The Beatles weren’t afraid of instrumentation outwith guitars, drums, piano and organ and Procol Harum’s early hits leaned heavily on a classical sensibility.

The Moody Blues “Days Of Future Passed” album went a stage further in utilising full orchestral passages to surround, extend and link the songs. Deep Purple flirted with orchestral settings for a while and Barclay James Harvest went so far as to take an orchestra on tour.

Longer more involved pieces were probably inevitable once the 12″ LP came into being. Given the greater space, some rock musicians were bound not to restrict themselves to around fifteen or so different songs each only about three minutes in length – however perfect encapsulations of a moment or a situation those might have been.

And some of those longer tracks are superb. Pink Floyd’s Echoes from the album Meddle is a great example as is Genesis’s Firth Of Fifth from Selling England By The Pound.

The Nice: The Thoughts of Emerlist Davjack

Something about the Electric Prunes’ I Had Too Much To Dream Last Night reminded me of R Dean Taylor.

His classic Gotta See Jane starts (after the tyre screeching) with a bass line that sounds similar to Dream‘s.
There is also some Beatle-like cello after the first two “Gotta See Jane”s, and with the second pair the song gets into its stride by developing a driving beat (pun surely intended.)

The three high notes (which he seems to strain for a bit) at 1 min 38 seconds in, 10 seconds later and at 2 min 30, emphasise the desperation expressed by the lyric.

It all gets very Eleanor Rigby indeed in the instrumental middle passage.

It’s a somewhat literal video but: enjoy.

R Dean Taylor: Gotta See Jane

– the actor, has died. So it goes.

He was best known for The Prisoner, a deeply surreal TV series which McGoohan was instrumental in bringing about. I didn’t see the first showing in the 60s but caught up with it on a late-night repeat during my first year at University.

Portmeirion, Clough Williams-Elliss’s fantasy village, was a perfect setting for this tale of paranoia and imprisonment, harking back to Orwell’s 1984 and, in a way, forward to TV’s Big Brother today, cleverly adumbrating the suspicion of authority which is now widespread and the way in which (some of) the masses can be kept quiet by diversionary entertainment.

In the programmes McGoohan resigns his (secret service?) job but is drugged, kidnapped and wakes up in “The Village” as Number Six. All together now, “I am not a number. I am a free man.” In each of 16 episodes he tries to escape. He always fails – or is brought back.

While having the trappings of a thriller or spy type story there was more than a hint of Science Fiction in the treatment, not so much Portmeirion itself, though that is a surrealist’s dream, as the famous bouncing white balloon guards and the behind-the-scenes activities of Number Two and his minions. (What was that seesaw thingy with the cameras at either end all about? We already knew the village’s inhabitants were under surveillance.)

I did think the 17th, final, episode – which was apparently made up on the hoof – was a bit bonkers, though. “Them Bones” sung chorally as a background to a kind of trial of Number Two? Eh?

I saw an episode a few months ago and it was striking how 1960s it looked. But the premise behind it held up well.

The whole thing would never see the light of day now. Schedulers would run kicking and screaming at the thought.

I never really watched McGoohan’s earlier success, Danger Man, – but remember him playing the Earl of Moray, Lord James Stewart – Mary Queen of Scots’s illegitimate half brother – with a fine display of impatience towards his feckless sister. McGoohan also made a marvellous Edward Longshanks in Mel Gibson’s Braveheart.

Patrick McGoohan 1928-2009.

Be seeing you.