Musical Memories of Simon Henderson (2)

1. Frank Sinatra, It Was a Very Good Year (1965): I started my previous selection with a song from Buddy Holly, my Dad’s favourite artist. My Mum was more into crooners; Andy Williams, Val Doonican, Perry Como and such like. She was also very keen on Frank Sinatra and I’ve chosen this particular song for two reasons. The first is that it might appeal to those of us in our third age, as it’s about a man looking back on his life from the benefit of late middle age. Sinatra was 50 at the time and the song is from his reflective album ‘September of My Years’. It was written by Ervin Drake in 1961, but somehow Sinatra makes the song his own.

The second reason for choosing this song is that CBS had cameras rolling while Sinatra recorded the song, so you can witness him at work in the studio. He never learned to read music, so he always recorded songs live with a band. He had left Capitol Records at that time and had just started up his own label, Reprise. The conductor is Gordon Jenkins, who was known for his lush strings. The following year, Jenkins won a Grammy for ‘Best Instrumental Arrangement’ for this song. Sinatra got the Grammy for ‘Best Male Pop Vocal Performance’. There’s a slightly extended version of this video on YouTube, which shows Sinatra rehearsing the song and then listening to a playback afterwards:

2. Edvard Grieg, Hall of the Mountain King (1875): I had no exposure to classical music growing up, which is perhaps a little surprising as my Mum was in the corps de ballet at Sadler's Wells before the war. We had a phenomenally lazy music teacher at school, whose idea of musical education was to play a record in class with no commentary. I do remember one day, though, as a 6 or 7 year old, he played us a version of this piece, which was my first wide-eyed introduction to the classical world.

Grieg composed the incidental music for the play ‘Peer Gynt' by fellow Norwegian, Henrik Ibsen. In this scene, the character Peer Gynt enters the Troll Mountain King's Hall in a dream-like fantasy. It starts slowly and quietly before becoming increasingly loud and frenetic. It was originally the sixth scene of Act 2, but because it became so popular, it now concludes Act 1. Grieg himself didn't like the piece at all.

This recording is by the Berlin Philharmonic in 2010 and the conductor is the Estonian Neeme Jarvi, who has a somewhat minimalist approach to conducting!

3. Smokey Robinson & the Miracles, Tears of a Clown (1967): Although my two eldest brothers built crystal radio sets and listened to crackly, intermittent ‘Radio Caroline’ and Radio Luxembourg’, I didn’t listen to pirate radio much. My music came to me via a tinny mono radio and the records that sounded best to me in those pre-stereo times were those from Motown.

I’ve chosen this song, because I’ve always loved it. The music was written by (Little) Stevie Wonder, who had been introduced to Motown by one of the Miracles. Wonder took his tape of the song to a Motown Christmas Party in 1966 and asked Robinson to write some lyrics for it. Robinson thought the music sounded like a carnival and, being a fan of the Italian opera ‘Pagliacci’, he came up with the idea of a clown who has to keep making people laugh while his heart is broken. It even includes the slightly iffy lyric: “Just like Pagliacci did/I’ll try to keep my sadness hid”.

After a number of lean years, Robinson was about to break away from the Miracles when this record became number 1 in the UK. On the strength of that, it was released as a single in the US and became a number 1 there too. He ended up staying with the bank until 1972.

The video is from 1970 and is distinctly odd. Feel free to just listen to the song with your eyes closed!

4.Velvet Underground & Nico, Femme Fatale (1967): Before I had the pocket money to buy my own records, I was reliant on the singles and LPs chosen by my three older brothers. They had eclectic tastes ranging from folk (Pentangle, Melanie) to blues (John Lee Hooker) to progressive (Pink Floyd). The record I played the most was the album ‘The Velvet Underground & Nico’, which is perhaps best known for the yellow banana on its cover designed by Andy Warhol, the record’s producer. I played it so much that, because of the ancient stylus on my Dad’s record player, I ended up scratching it and had to pay for a replacement.

The Underground were a fusion of nationalities; this song, for instance, was written by the Welshman John Cale with lyrics by the American Lou Reed, sung by the German Nico. Warhol asked Reed to write a song about his long-term muse, Edie Sedgwick, telling him “Oh don’t you think she’s a femme fatale, Lou?”

The video features photos of Edie Sedgwick, voted “The Girl of the Year” in 1965, together with Warhol in his art studio ‘The Factory’. Bob Dylan reportedly wrote ‘Just Like a Woman’ about her after a fling at the Chelsea Hotel in New York. She died of a barbiturate overdose in 1971, age 28.

5. Elvis Costello & The Attractions, Oliver’s Army (1979): There was someone in my year at school called Steve Nason. He was a very gifted piano player. I don’t know where he got this from; it certainly had nothing to do with our aforementioned music teacher. He used to play the piano at school assemblies and would normally play a sombre, respectful piece as the teachers filed out at the end. One day, however, he achieved folk hero status when he decided to play Benny Hill’s theme tune Yakety Sax as they filed out and was promptly suspended:

I didn’t see him again until he appeared on ‘Top of the Pops’ a few years later, playing the piano with Elvis Costello as one of the Attractions. Costello wrote this song on the plane back from his first trip to Belfast, where he’d been shocked to see such young British soldiers walking the streets with machine guns. Costello’s real name is Declan McManus; his grandfather was an Ulster Catholic who had served with the British army in World War 1 and the Easter Uprising. He couldn’t make the song come to life in the studio until Steve suggested that he “do a sort of Abba piano part on it”. Nick Lowe, the record producer, said that “suddenly the thing went from black and white to fireworks”. It was Costello’s most successful single, reaching number 2 in the UK charts (where it was beaten by Bony M!); he’s not had a number 1 to date. The piano riff is from Abba’s ‘Dancing Queen’.

Steve was known as ‘Steve Nieve’ in the Attractions. He got the nickname when he was on tour with Ian Drury & The Blockheads. There was a discussion about groupies on the tour bus and Steve asked “what’s a groupie?” and Drury gave him the moniker which stuck. The video is from ‘Top of the Pops’ in 1979 with Peter Powell annoyingly talking over Steve’s intro.

6. Miles Davis, Generique (1958): I studied modern languages at school: French, German and English. As I couldn’t afford to go to France at the time, it was suggested that I immerse myself in the language by listening to French radio and watching French films. The BBC occasionally showed a foreign language film late at night and this was the one of the first ones I saw. The film is ‘Ascenseur pour L’Echafaud’ (translated in the UK as ‘Lift to the Scaffold’) by Louis Malle, who was only 25 at the time.

Miles Davis happened to be on his second tour of Paris with his new band when Malle’s assistant, a jazz fan, suggested that he write the soundtrack for the completed film (even though he’d never composed a soundtrack before). Malle briefly discussed the plot of the film with Davis and a few days later, on 4 December 1957, Davis was shown the film for the first time and improvised the soundtrack while watching the recording. As David pointed out, there’s a YouTube video, purportedly showing Davis making this recording in the studio:

In the film, Jeanne Moreau plots with her lover Julien to kill her husband. Julien looks to have got away with the murder, but when leaving the building in the lift, the caretaker turns off the electricity and he ends up being stuck in the lift between floors. Meanwhile, the car that he left outside is stolen and Jeanne who has been waiting for Julien in a nearby café sees the car driven away with a young girl leaning out of the window. Thinking that she has been betrayed, Jeanne wanders the streets of Paris despondently all night. It’s this scene that Davis improvises the track that’s become known as ‘Generique’.

7. Dave Bowie, Five Years (1972): When I was about 7 or 8, we moved about 2 miles from Sydenham in South London to a place called Beckenham. There were a few local musical celebrities who’d been born there (Julie Andrews, Peter Frampton), but the one who had most impact on me was Dave Bowie who moved there in the 1970s from Brixton. He started a folk club in my local pub, ‘The Three Tuns’, composed ‘Space Oddity’ on the steps of the bandstand in the ‘Rec where I walked to and from school every day and lived in Haddon Hall, about half a mile from me. Some of my friends used to hang around outside after school looking for an autograph and I joined them one day and we were let in by Angie, his wife at the time, who gave us some lemonade. I remember we had to be very quiet, as various band members were asleep in the corridors upstairs and she had her young baby with her, Zowie (now known as Duncan Jones, the film director). They left Haddon Hall a few years later (ironically because they were fed up with people hanging around outside!) and ended up in the basement of Diana Rigg’s house in Maida Vale, where they were kicked out for being too noisy.

The song I’ve chosen is the opening track from his Ziggy Stardust album. It’s based on a dream Bowie had of his dead father telling him never to fly again and that he’d die in 5 years. It shows Bowie as an early environmentalist, imagining how the world would react if it finds out that it will die in 5 years due to a lack of natural resources.

The video is from an ‘Old Grey Whistle Test’ recording that was made 5 months before the album was released.

8. Madness, One Step Beyond (1979): After I left college, I lived in a grungy bedsit in Islington which was 300 yards to the right from where George Orwell lived and where he finished ‘Animal Farm’ and started ‘1984’ (and, yes, it’s true, there is a CCTV camera just next to his blue plaque!) 300 yards in the opposite direction was the ‘Hope & Anchor’ pub on Upper Street, which is one of London’s best pub rock venues. Loads of bands have played there: Ian Drury, Dr Feelgood, Joy Division had its first London gig there, U2 once played to 9 paying customers. If the wind was in the right direction, I could open my window and listen to the music being played and decide whether it sounded worth going to.

The band perhaps most associated with the ‘Hope & Anchor’ are Madness, who all came from the neighbouring borough of Camden (apart from lead singer Suggs, who was born in Hastings). I’ve chosen this song, because it’s from their debut album (also called ‘One Step Beyond’) which is dedicated to ‘Big John’, the pub’s landlord who gave them their first break. The video starts with the band playing around on the graffitied stairs of the pub and then shows them jumping up and down on its stage.

This was their second single. The first was ‘The Prince’, which was written about Prince Buster, a Jamaican ska musician. ‘One Step Beyond’ is a fusion of two of Prince Buster’s songs.

9. Dr Feelgood, Roxette (1974): Around about this time, I took advantage of living in central London and watched as much live music as I could afford. ‘Time Out’ would tell you which gigs you could get in for free or I’d just wander down Upper Street, where there seemed to be a band playing live in every pub. One of my favourite bands was ‘Dr Feelgood’, who were originally from Canvey Island in Essex, but quickly became known as a great pub rock bank on the London circuit.

I’ve chosen this song, because I think it shows them at their best live. It was written by Wilko Johnson, their lead guitarist, and features Lee Brilleaux on vocals, channelling Howlin’ Wolf. It didn’t chart at all and Wilko left the band 3 years later. The video is from a recording on ‘The Old Grey Whistle Test’ on 1975. As Chris says, the band are still performing, but with none of the original members. Brilleaux died of cancer in 1994.

The Swedish pop band ‘Roxette’ took their name from this song. Their lead singer, Marie, died of a brain tumour in December last year.

10. John Barry, Walkabout (1971): I moved to Australia when I was about 30 and lived there for 14 years. I tried to come up with a song that best summed up my experience of living over there and I opted for another film soundtrack, John Barry’s ‘Return to Nature’ theme from Nicolas Roeg’s film ‘Walkabout’. Barry, Roeg and the actress Jenny Agutter are all English and the film shows the Australian outback from an English perspective. Though people over here think of Crocodile Dundee as typically Australian, most Australians live in the city (including Paul Hogan); in fact, it has the most urban population of any country. The film shows the English settlers as being lost and out of place in the harsh, unforgiving new world of outback Australia.

Edward Bond’s screenplay was only 14 pages long, so a lot of the film is improvised. It features a ‘girl’ (Jenny Agutter), a ‘white boy’ (played by Roeg’s son) and a ‘black boy’ (David Gumpilil, who spoke no English at the time). The video shows the final scene, as a now grown up and married Agutter is stifled by her urban background while she looks back fondly on her walkabout in nature. It includes an excerpt from A E Houseman’s poem, ‘A Shropshire Lad’ (sometimes known as the ‘Blue Remembered Hills’): “That is the land of lost content, I see it shining plain. The happy highways where I went and cannot come again”.

11. Gipsy Kings, Bamboleo (1987): I’ve spent a lot of time in Spain over the last 5 years, trying to learn the language. One thing that’s helped me (sort of) is listening to Spanish speaking records on YouTube, especially those which include an English translation. Spanish speaking songs are unbelievably popular on YouTube; 4 of the top 10 most viewed videos last year were in Spanish, including Despacito which is the most liked video on YouTube of all time with 6.6 billion views.

I chose this song and video, because the sound of the cicadas at the beginning transports me straight back to Spain and its Latin rhythms. The Gipsy Kings comprise 5 brothers with the surname of Reyes (which means Kings in English) and 3 of their cousins. The brothers’ parents were both Spanish flamenco gypsies who fled Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s. The brothers started out as a gypsy band, travelling around the South of France, playing at weddings, festivals and in the street. The song’s chorus is: “Bamboleo, bambolea. Por que mi vida yo la prefiero vivir asi”, which roughly translated means: “Swaying, swaying. Because I prefer to live my life this way”.

12. Mark Ronson, Uptown Funk, featuring Bruno Mars (2014): As you can probably tell, I’m a bit of an evangelist for YouTube. I’m a fan of their What’s the Mash-Up? channel, which has produced a number of videos where an original film (or series of film clips) is juxtaposed or ‘mashed-up’ with a different song: For instance, there’s a video of Rita Hayworth dancing to the Bee Gees’ Staying Alive.

Mark Ronson composed ‘Uptown Funk’, which became number 1 in 19 countries. The original video for it is the 6th most viewed YouTube video of all time (with 3.7 billion views). Ronson is perhaps best known as the British record producer behind Amy Winehouse’s ‘Back to Black’ single and album.

Some bright spark who goes by the name of ‘Nerdfest UK’ thought it would be a good idea to mash this song up with clips from the Golden Age of Hollywood. The editing is very precise and none of the film clips has been sped up or slowed down.