I realised a couple of weeks ago that in all of this category Iâd never put up any songs from that strange time in the musical 60s that was pre-Beatles.
Partly this is because the very early 60s was before my time – I only really started listening to pop music (as it was then) when we got a tranny* in 1966. Prior to that we had to listen (collectively) as a family to an old cabinet radio – with valves: it had to warm up before any sound would issue from it. It had been replaced as a focal point in the living room by a television set by 1960, though. The TV schedules were very restricted in those days: no afternoon programmes for example.
*For you young things this was not a cross-dresser but a transistor radio.
So strange was the early 60s that there was actually a vogue for jazz that manifested itself in the charts. Chris Barber, Acker Bilk and Kenny Ball all had bands that released successful hit singles. Something like that trad-jazz boom is almost impossible to imagine happening now.
That was my eldest brotherâs time, though, so I recall with some fondness quite a few jazz tracks that he used to play on the gramophone, as they were called then. One of his favourites was Kenny Ball And His Jazzmen. Midnight In Moscow came out in 1961. It was an adaptation of a Russian composition known previously as Moscow Nights or Leningrad Nights.
Kenny Ball And His Jazzmen: Midnight In Moscow
The Jazzmen released March Of The Siamese Children, which originally came from the musical The King And I, in 1962.
Kenny Ball And His Jazzmen: March Of The Siamese Children
The Green Leaves of Summer by The Brothers Four was the theme tune from the film The Alamo. (Donât get me started on the myths that surround that shabby episode in history.) Kenny Ballâs band recorded the tune in 1962.
Kenny Ball And His Jazzmen: The Green Leaves of Summer
The Shadows were a bit before my time though they were a kind of Saturday night variety televisual backdrop to my childhood.
But I do know that they were important and that without them there might have been no Beatles, no Clapton, no Jeff Beck, Peter Green, Jimmy Page etc etc.*
It’s only right to mention, then, the passing of bassist Jet Harris.
Terence (Jet) Harris. 6/7/1939 -18/3/2011. So it goes.
*This is maybe overstating the case a little as some of these might have come to prominence anyway but there is more than a grain of truth in it.
Just before my time there was a vogue for instrumental bands – The Shadows, The Ventures, The Tornados – but this more or less petered out with the advent of The Beatles.
Booker T and The MGs started out in that earlier era but carried on in that vein; so unusually for bands in the mid to late 1960s continued to eschew actual songs. According to Wikipedia they were (ahem) instrumental in shaping the sound of Southern and Memphis Soul.
I believe I first heard of them when they released Soul Limbo, a minor hit in Britain – and a track now much more famous as being the theme music for Cricket coverage on the BBC (TV and radio) – after which their earlier records received some retrospective airplay. They later had a much bigger hit with Time Is Tight.
I was going to have this track in the Friday slot a few weeks ago but a restricted blog which I frequent got there before me so I’ve held it over till now.
This is a live version of the band’s first single, Green Onions.
Every time I hear this song it takes me back to the Church Hall in Dumbarton and the youth club I used to go to.
I suggested it to the guy in charge of putting the records on. He asked if it was any good. It was.
It is.
The guitar riff at the start of the break is similar to the one in You Never Give Me Your Money (repeated in Carry That Weight) from that great medley of songs on side two of The Beatles’ Abbey Road. Not surprising since George Harrison had a hand in Badge’s conception and he and Eric Clapton often worked together.
Cream: Badge
Later edited to add: the line about “the swans that they live in the park” was apparently thought up by one Ringo Starr.
