Marianne Faithfull: Sunny Goodge Street

This is beautiful. Sunny Goodge street is a cover of a Donovan song and appeared on Marianne Faithfull's album 1966 North Country Maid. 

The Marianne Faithfull site says of it:

Marianne’s two folk albums from the 60's were conceived as a pair. Where her first folk album Come My Way, had largely been compiled from music of the American folk revival, Marianne’s second, released in April 1966 was built around songs from the British Isles. 

Rightly hailed as her finest LP of the 60s, North Country Maid conclusively established her as an artist with a unique stylistic approach, and many of its songs (such as Scarborough Fair) were not yet the established folk/pop standards they would soon become.

I recently learnt that Donovan lived in St Albans before fame came calling, and was part of the city's music scene along with the youthful Zombies and Maddy Prior.

You can hear Maddy Prior talking about those days on a recent Word in Your Ear podcast.

The Joy of Six 1441

"His central idea, as he has written before, is that people should own their data. Personal data is any data that can be linked to us, such as our purchasing habits, health information and political opinions." Alex Zarifis on Tim Berners-Lee's vision of the future of the internet.

Sarah Lyons on the ubiquity of violence towards women: "The one man present was in total shock, he had never heard women talk so candidly like this before, the way we talk amongst ourselves, and he genuinely could not comprehend how much violence we had all collectively endured He left that night visibly shaken, changed."

Niamh Gallagher reviews a history of the Great Famine: "There is no doubt that food was available in Ireland throughout the crisis – just not to those who needed it most. The year 1845 was a vintage one for oats; in 1846, 3.3 million acres were planted with grain, and Irish farms raised more than 2.5 million cattle, 2.2 million sheep and 600,000 pigs, most of which were exported to Britain." 

"For a man who said he hated politics, it is exactly his uncompromising sense of right and his engagement with the world that will make his legacy everlasting." Kenny Monrose pays tribute to Jimmy Cliff.

Jude Rogers says the Eighties television series Edge of Darkness speaks to the Britain of 2025: "As well as trusting its viewers with the complexity of its plot, much of the making of Edge Of Darkness was also audacious. It pioneered the use of Steadicam in its first episode, following Peck from his hotel room in the lift, through the foyer, down the stairs to a basement garage to meet shadowy government attaché Pendleton."

"Early 1645 Parliamentary forces seized Shrewsbury. In June 800 Parliamentarian men pushed south towards Ludlow, attacking Stokesay en route. The garrison were heavily outnumbered and defending what was now essentially an ornamental castle. A bit of back and forth parlay and the garrison surrendered." Keep Your Powder Dry has a survey of Civil War sites in Shropshire that confirms Stokesay Castle was built chiefly for show.

The Who: Substitute

I was 16 when The Who re-released Substitute in 1976. I went out and bought it because it was so much better than anything else in the charts at the time.

Johnny Bristol: Memories Don't Leave Like People Do

I was all over chart music in 1974, even though I was dimly aware that the records I was hearing weren't as good as the ones I could just remember from the Sixties. So I remember this one clearly and am surprised to find it wasn't a hit.

Johnny Bristol (1939-2004) recorded a few singles in the US from 1959, but he was best known as songwriter and producer at Motown. He wrote Love Me for a Reason for the Osmonds and was co-producer of Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell's classic Ain't No Mountain High Enough.

He had a big hit in the UK with Hang On in There Baby at the start of 1974, sounding rather like Barry White. This was his follow up.

A year later Bristol produced a Tom Jones album that included five of his songs. One of them was Memories Don't Leave Like People Do, which became its title track.

US judge resigns after being disciplined for wearing Elvis wig in court

BBC News wins our Headline of the Day Award.

"If judges are allowed to wear silly wigs in court, no one will take them seriously," said the judges.

No, Pope Leo XIV did not mail dead rats to American radio stations to promote The Boomtown Rats

Embed from Getty Images

This claim was made in a recent Word in Your Ear podcast, but sadly it appears not to be true.

In fact, the young Bobby Prevost, as the Holy Father was then known, was a temporary replacement for the man who did mail the rats.

So close, but no cigar. You can read the full details on Facebook. And Mike Bone tells the same story on Best Classic Bands, but doesn't mention the young temp there.

10cc: I'm Mandy Fly Me

People rave about I'm not in Love, but it's a bit of a dirge and was played to death on the radio at the time. It's the cleverness of the production that people admire about it.

But I still love I'm Mandy Fly Me and want to listen to it again if I hear it. The song exemplifies what made 10cc so interesting: the combination of, even tension between, two very different types of musician. Eric Stewart and Graham Gouldman were Tin Pan Alley songwriters: Kevin Godley and Lol Creme were art-school experimentalists.

I'm Mandy Fly Me began as a conventional song by Stewart that wasn't quite working, then Godley turned it into something wonderful.

The Standells: Try It

The first time I featured Patience and Prudence here they led me to a record about Prudence's other half – Signed D.C. by Love.

Patience also married a former member of Love, Johnny Fleck. He left Love after a fist fight with Albert Lee and later joined The Standells.

Fleck is playing bass on Try It, which for a few seconds sounds like it's going to be like something by Lou Reed, but quickly settles into a tone that reminds us that the permissive society came some years before women's liberation.

The song was banned from his stations by the American radio mogul Gordon McLendon. As an archived page about McLendon and his radio station KLIF says:

It could never be proven what The Standells were referring to when they encouraged their fans to "Try It". Was it sex, drugs, or something else? Whatever the case, the content was too much for McLendon and KLIF.

Johnny Fleck's full name was John Fleckenstein, and under that name he later became a Hollywood cinematographer. He has an impressive list of credits on IMDb. He died in 2017.

Trivia dump: Woman wakes to find she's bought an emu egg

A BBC News story was shortlisted for Headline of the Day – Woman fulfils childhood dream of rearing an emu – but lost out to a demonic jumper.

The story beneath it does deserve some sort of award though:

A late night shopping spree turned into a dream come true for one animal lover after she successfully hatched an emu egg. 

Rhi Evans, from Cirencester, Gloucestershire, has no memory of buying the egg but woke one morning in 2022 to an email confirmation from eBay saying it was on its way.

We've all been there.

This item gives me an excuse to repost my favourite clip of Rod Hull and Emu. As someone said, "I've watched it dozens of times, but still all I can see is an emu throwing a man into a chest freezer."

Rod Hull began his career on a children's television show in Australia. As it the way with such shows, the presenters sat in front of some shelves with interesting things on them. And among them was an emu's egg.

Someone wrote in to ask if it was ever going to hatch, and shortly after that Hull saw an emu puppet in a shop. The rest is history.

Like the Bee Gees, Rod Hull was given his break into television by an executive called Desmond Tester. Tester had begun his career as a child actor in Britain before the war – he is the boy with the bomb on the bus in Hitchock's Sabotage.

I'm also reminded of a story about someone at Liberal Democrat News finding they needed an illustration for an article on European Monetary Union. Without much hope, they turned to the paper's artwork files, only to find an envelope labelled 'EMU'.

They opened it and found a photograph of an emu. And that complete's today's trivia dump.

Eurythmics: When the Day Goes Down

When the Day Goes Down, performed live here on the David Letterman Show, is my favourite Eurythmics song. 

As the recent evening devoted to her on BBC4 confirmed, Annie Lennox is an amazing talent.

Patience and Prudence: Gonna Get Along Without Ya Now

Viola Wills featured in the Top 20 countdown on one of Friday's vintage Top of the Pops on BBC4. I had to look her up to see what song it was and found that it was her disco interpretation of Gonna Get Along Without Ya Now.

A little research into the song showed that the most influential, though not the first, version of it was by this blog's old friends, the slightly spooky Patience and Prudence.

Patience and Prudence? A reminder from Ear Candy:

Patience & Prudence were actually sisters and the daughters of orchestra leader Mack McIntyre. Patience (11 years old) and Prudence (14 years old) McIntyre were encouraged by their father, who was already a well know piano player and songwriter (who also co-wrote the B-sides of their two hits). 

Mack McIntyre brought his daughters into the Liberty Records recording studios in Los Angeles in the summer of 1956. One of the songs from their audition tape was a cover of the 1927 hit by Gene Austin called, Tonight You Belong to Me. 

Liberty Records (also the home of rocker Eddie Cochran) signed Patience and Prudence and rushed the tune into distribution. The bouncy song became a hit, charting at #4 in September of 1956 and became Liberty's biggest selling record for two years.

Gonna Get Along Without Ya Now had charted earlier that year, but it and Tonight You Belong to Me were their only hits in the US or the UK.

Prudence, who died in September 2023, grew up to embrace the counter-culture, marrying Dan Conka, a founder member of Arthur Lee's band Love. Conka, the correct spelling of his name and his drug problems are discussed on Andrew Hickey's post on the Love song Alone Again Or.

Patience, the older sister, is still with us. She was married to John Fleck of the Sixties American band The Standells for a while.

Dead 2 Rights has an article on The Tragedy of Patience and Prudence, but I don't know how much of it is true.

Talking of girl stars, I can recommend this Gyles Brandreth interview with Petula Clark.

High Flying Around: Memories of the 1960s Leicester Music Scene Volume II by Shaun Knapp

In Leicester this afternoon, I called in at the launch of Shaun Knapp's book High Flying Around: Memories of the 1960s Leicester Music Scene Vol II.

As the publisher's website says: 

High Flying Around Volume II continues the remarkable story of Leicester’s 1960s arts and music scene via the people who were there. Their memories and reminiscences bring back to life the buildings long since demolished, the groups who packed out the venues and the people who filled the halls and clubs.

Find out how some of the biggest names in music performed in some of Leicester’s smallest and long-lost venues, revisit the 1969 free festival, and discover the incredible stories of Leicester band Gypsy and the 1960s creatives. Discover the importance of the college and university circuit, the arts lab, the city’s underground music, folk and poetry scenes and the music that influenced Leicester playwright Joe Orton.

Leicester women tell their stories about life in the city during the 1960s, while singer/songwriter Ryan Dunn explains how the decade influences his songwriting and fashion.

Dipping into it, I find plenty of new bands to research and the odd anecdote I might share here.

And, yes, my home town gets at least one mention:

The first time we played in Market Harborough was at a place called the Embi Club, on St Mary's Road. The building had a great doorway, which was the entrance, then you went to the back building through a small yard. That was where the club was. The club itself was long and it looked like a few rooms had been knocked into one. It was a very busy venue. Jethro Tull had played there as did Edwin Starr. I later learned the site had been an old cinema. the Oriental, which opened in 1921. The interior decor consisted of Egyptian mummies Chinese dragons, palm trees and pyramids.

The main building had, I think, gone by the time I moved here – the length of it ran behind what is now the House of Art tattoo studio and probably a couple of other vanished buildings – but the exotic domed entrance on St Mary's Road lasted through the Seventies.

Scott Walker: Farmer in the City (Remembering Pasolini)

The fiftieth anniversary of Pier Paolo Pasolini's death put me in mind of this wonderful track from Scott Walker's album Tilt.

In a Guardian article last Saturday, Olivia Laing argued that Pasolini's warnings of corruption and rising totalitarianism offer a chilling message for our times.

The Kinks: Autumn Almanac

Time to get his posted before autumn turns to winter. Autumn Almanac is a non-album single from 1967 that made no. 3 in the UK singles chart.

Ray Davies once explained its genesis:

The words were inspired by Charlie, my dad’s old drinking mate, who cleaned up my garden for me, sweeping up the leaves. I wrote it in early autumn, yeah, as the leaves were turning colour.

And Andy Partridge of XTC has commented:

It’s a miniature movie, basically, that unravels itself as you are listening to it, and it has all these little movements or scenes. And they all seem to take place in the kind of mythical cozy London that the Ealing studios always had in their films, like The Lavender Hill Mob. The song just keeps turning and changing; you see a new facet every few seconds. But there’s nothing unsettling about the fact that there are so many parts.

Thanks to PowerPop for these quotes.

The character sketches you get in British songs of the later Sixties hark back to the traditions of music hall, and those songs, in turn, influenced the Britpop bands of the mid Nineties.

So maybe it was appropriate that Britpop took place during the premiership of John Major, the son of two music hall artists, and not that of Tony "Young Country" Blair.

Joanna Newsom: Baby Birch

When I first posted this back in 2010 I described it as "a lament for a child who is lost or never was".

Today, I know that Joanna Newsom is the second cousin, twice removed, of Gavin Newsom, the governor of California.

Child prodigies: A column for the Journal of Critical Psychology, Counselling and Psychotherapy

Here's another of the discursive Sighcology columns I write for the Journal of Critical Psychology, Counselling and Psychotherapy. 

Chess, cricket, Steve Winwood... it covers several topics dear to this blog's heart.

You can see Aksel Rykkvin as a treble above and as a baritone below.

Prodigious talent

Prodigies aren’t always popular with their elders. When Sir Martin Shee, the president of the Royal Academy of Arts, encountered the nine-year-old John Everett Millais in 1838, he suggested the boy should be sweeping chimneys rather than seeking to train as an artist. 

And sometimes prodigious genius is misunderstood. At a very young age, my favourite musician, Steve Winwood, was turned away by the man round the corner who gave piano lessons. He found that if the boy heard a tune once he could play it from memory, so it was hard to convince him of the point of learning to read music.

Others were more appreciative. In 1959 his elder brother’s jazz group found themselves short of a pianist, so he brought Steve along:

"He was only 11, but he played everything perfectly. They stood with their mouths open. Because he was under age, we had to get him long trousers to make him look older, and even then we'd sneak him in through the pub kitchens. He'd play hidden behind the piano so nobody would know." 

Soon after that Steve was jamming with newly arrived Jamaican musicians in his home city of Birmingham, and then backing some of the greats of American blues: Sonny Boy Williamson, T-Bone Walker, Charlie Foxx, John Lee Hooker, Memphis Slim.

So by the time he joined the Spencer Davis Group at 15, and they had their first number one when he was 17, Winwood was an immensely experienced musician. Something to open the eyes of these new Beatles fans who are convinced there was nothing before the Fab Four and precious little else at the same time as them.

******

The youngest person to play first-class cricket in England was Barney Gibson, who kept wicket for Yorkshire against Durham MCC University in 2011 at the age of 15 years and 27 days. He was also on the books of Leeds United as a goalkeeper.

Most of us heard nothing more of him for a decade. Then an article appeared in a cricket magazine saying Gibson had “chosen enjoyment and freedom” and given up professional sport:

"It wasn’t until I got to the age of 18 that I asked myself: 'Is this what I’m going to be doing forever?'" Gibson recalls. "I think it was just a case of no longer enjoying what I used to wake up looking forward to doing every day."

I hope he is happy, whatever he is doing now.

******

I once attended the first London recital by an 18-year-old Norwegian baritone called Aksel Rykkvin. What was interesting about the event was that a few years before he had been the most celebrated boy treble in the world. For once the American term ‘boy soprano’ seemed justified.

It soon became clear that his wonderful clarity and instinctive understanding of the text had survived his change of voice unscathed. But not every prodigy is lucky or talented enough to pass through puberty with such grace.

Leaving aside the many chess talents lost to a discovery of sex and drugs and rock ‘n roll, a growth spurt can wreak havoc. The future England captain Nasser Hussain grew a foot in a single winter and found he could no longer pitch his leg breaks on a length:

"I went from bowling out Graham Gooch in the indoor school with everyone watching, to hitting the roof of the net or bowling triple-bouncers to deadly silence."

Hussain was able to reinvent himself as a batsman, but always said batting never felt as natural to him as spin bowling had.

And puberty is the great killer of child actors – boys at least. Either you lose your fetching looks and no one casts you, or you keep them and find you are still playing schoolboys when you are 20, with no one seeing you as a possible adult lead.

But maybe being a child actor isn’t much like being an adult actor. Take the case of William Betty, ‘the Young Roscius’, who enjoyed phenomenal success as a boy at the start of the 19th century. His appearance at the Covent Garden Theatre sparked extraordinary scenes:

Shrieks and screams of choking, trampled people were terrible. Fights for places grew; Constables were beaten back; the boxes were invaded. The heat was so fearful that men all but lifeless were lifted and dragged through the boxes into the lobbies which had windows.

Betty announced his retirement at the age of 17, only to spend the rest of his life making comebacks that failed to excite the public. Perhaps the great Sarah Siddons had him right: “My lord, he is a very clever, pretty boy but nothing more.”

******

If I didn’t love the music so much, I might agree there was something ridiculous about white, middle-class British boys playing the blues – “Can blue men play the whites/Or are they hypocrites?” as Viv Stanshall asked. But then I generally prefer to leave dreams of cultural purity to the right.

Besides, it’s widely claimed that the Spencer Davis Group had to film what we’d now call a video before their records could get played on white radio stations in the US. It had been widely assumed there, because of Steve Winwood’s vocals, that the band was black.

Eric Clapton had no doubts about Winwood’s authenticity. Here he his explaining his decision to switch to a Stratocaster guitar:

“Steve Winwood had so much credibility, and when he started playing one, I thought, oh, if he can do it, I can do it.”

Or as Clapton once put it more strongly:

“I’d always worshipped Steve, and whenever he made a move, I would be right on it. I gave great weight to his decisions because to me he was one of the few people in England who had his finger on some kind of universal musical pulse.”

Prodigious talent does encourage such reverence, though personally, when drawn against a chess prodigy, I found myself with a sneaking sympathy for Sir Martin Shee.

Roger Miller: King of the Road

This may be the first record I can remember liking. It arrived in the British singles chart just before my fifth birthday and was to top it for a week.

Born in 1936, Roger Miller was an Oklahoman who began his songwriting and then singing career while serving in the US Army.

Country Reunion Music quotes his liner notes for his 1970 album A Trip in the Country:

Before the days of Dang Me, King of the Road and such, I was a young, ambitious songwriter walking the streets of Nashville, trying to get anybody and everybody who would to record my songs. All in all, I wrote about 150 songs for Ray Price, George Jones, Ernest Tubb and others. Some were hits, and some were not.

He was one of those country artists who appealed to the mainstream too, and continued writing and performing up to his death in 1992.

Vampire Weekend: Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa

I heard this in 2008 on Radio 3's Late Junction, and thought I had discovered an obscure new band I rather liked. 

On further investigation, Vampire Weekend turned out to be about the trendiest band in the world just then. Their detractors called their music "Upper West Side Soweto" and "trust fund frat rock".

Paul Simon: One Trick Pony

 

I was in my favourite coffee shop the other day, when I found I half-recognised a song they were playing. Eventually, despite the ambient noise, I worked out what it was: Somebody from Paul Simon's neglected solo album One Trick Pony.

So I included a review of the album in my last The Joy of Six, and here's its title track, brilliant lyrics and all, as my Sunday music video.

The Joy of Six 1423

"The study, which examined nearly 300 child-arrangement case files and observed over 100 hearings, found that domestic abuse featured in almost nine in ten (87 per cent) of cases. Yet judges routinely treated it as background noise. In over half of those cases, courts ordered unsupervised overnight contact between children and alleged abusers." England and Wales's family courts aren’t just failing survivors, they are complicit in state-sanctioned abuse, argues Zoe Grunewold after a reading a report by two academics from Loughborough University.

George Foulkes says broadcasters are warping our politics by failing to subject Nigel Farage to the scrutiny that other politicians rightly experience.

"Along with restoring trust in the church’s safeguarding processes, Mullally must also heal divisions within the church’s hierarchy over leadership culture. In the weeks leading up to Welby’s resignation, both he and the archbishop of York, Stephen Cottrell, were accused of using 'coercive language' by the bishop of Newcastle, Helen-Ann Hartley." George Crozier on the many challenges facing the new Archbishop of Canterbury.

"Today, Denmark's wolf population is estimated to be just over 40 wolves, with at least seven breeding pairs known to have produced cubs. Yet even this small number has sparked fierce debates over livestock and public safety in one of Europe's most intensively farmed countries, with views on wolves seeming to reflect wider political divides across Denmark." Kristian Kongshøj and Troels Fage Hedegaard explain why 40 wolves have shaken Danish politics.

Ellen Hawley sets out the long history of curry in Britain.

Mike Taylor champions an undervalued Paul Simon album: "One of the most striking qualities of One Trick Pony as an album is how understated everything is. There are no big, heart-on-sleeve emotions, no vocal histrionics. Many of the songs have a stumbling quality, and almost all of them feel gentle. Every time a song starts to seem like it has a clear emotional shading, something undercuts it – whether it’s Simon’s idiosyncratic vocal delivery, a flash of colour from the band (and all of them are superb), or a switch in direction in a bridge or chorus."