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Fáilte ar ais chuig eagrán nua de Ar An Lá Seo ar an 1ú lá de mí Aibreán, liomsa Lauren Ní Loingsigh. I 1981 scuab Uachtarán Regan a chuid fhiacla agus shínigh sé bille reachtach ina leaba san ospidéal. Nuair a bhí sé ann dúirt na dochtúirí go raibh téarnamh iontach aige. I 2005 tháinig an nuacht amach go raibh botún teicniúil sa mbanc agus bhí tionchar ar níos mó ná 60,000 duine. I 1998 bhí an tAonach Urmhumhan an baile is móréilimh chun cónaí ann de réir staitisticí. Bhí an daonra ag ardú go tapúla gach bliain. I 2002 tháinig an nuacht amach go mbeadh 50 post nua chun teacht chuig an chontae I mBuiríos Ó Luigheach. Dúirt siad go mbeadh 2.5 milliúin euro ag teacht isteach chun níos mó ná 500 post nua a dhéanamh timpeall an tír. Sin Duran Duran le Is There Something I Should Know – an t-amhrán is mó ar an lá seo i 1983. Ag lean ar aghaidh le nuacht cheoil ar an lá seo I 1966 tháinig David Bowie amach lena chéad singil Do Anything You Say. Bhí sé a chéad amhrán a tháinig sé amach leis faoi a ainm stáitse. I 2020 fuair amhránaí Adam Schlesinger bás ag aois 52 de bharr Covid. Tá sé cáiliúil de bharr gur bhunaíodh sé Fountains Of Wayne agus tháinig siad amach le cúig albam le chéile. Agus ar deireadh breithlá daoine cáiliúla ar an lá seo rugadh amhránaí Susan Boyle san Albain I 1961 agus rugadh aisteoir Asa Butterfield I Londain ar an lá seo I 1997 agus seo chuid de na rudaí a rinne sé. Beidh mé ar ais libh amárach le heagrán nua de Ar An Lá Seo. Welcome back to another edition of Ar An Lá Seo on the 1st of April, with me Lauren Ní Loingsigh In 1981 President reagan brushed his teeth and signed a legislative bill in his hospital bed as he made what his doctors called a remarkable recovery. In 2005 About 60,000 bank of ireland customers fell victimed to a technical error this weeek, the bank admitted. In 2002- A welcome announcement of FIFTY new jobs were to be created at Tipperary Natural Mineral Water in Borrisoleigh. The € 2.5 million program will expand the company to employ over 500 people. In 1998 NENAGH was the most popular town in North Tipperary in which to live, according to statistics. Nenagh's population has been rising for almost the past half-century. That was Duran Duran with is there something i should know – the biggest song on this day in 1983. Onto music news on this day in 1966, David Bowie released his maiden solo single, “Do Anything You Say,” on the Pye label. Produced by Tony Hatch, it was the London artist's first recording under his new stage name. In 2020, singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist Adam Schlesinger died at the age of 52 from COVID-19. Schlesinger was best known as the co-founder of the power-pop band Fountains Of Wayne, with whom he released five albums. And finally celebrity birthdays on this day – susan boyle was born in scotland in 1961 and actor asa butterfield was born in london on this day in 1997 and this is some of the stuff he done. I'll be back with you tomorrow with another edition of Ar An Lá Seo.
Fáilte ar ais chuig eagrán nua de Ar An Lá Seo ar an 1ú lá de mí Aibreán, liomsa Lauren Ní Loingsigh. I 1981 scuab Uachtarán Regan a chuid fhiacla agus shínigh sé bille reachtach ina leaba san ospidéal. Nuair a bhí sé ann dúirt na dochtúirí go raibh téarnamh iontach aige. I 2005 tháinig an nuacht amach go raibh botún teicniúil sa mbanc agus bhí tionchar ar níos mó ná 60,000 duine. I 1967 tháinig teachtaireacht amach ó Pope Paul a bhí 20,000 focail chuig na gCaitliceach agus bhí sé ag iarradh ocras, bochtaineacht agus cíocras a stopadh sa domhain. I 2005 bhí imní ag na oibreoirí ag aerfort na Sionainne de bharr go raibh plean acu chun seachfhoinsiú an lónadóireacht don chéad uair I 60 bhliain. Sin Duran Duran le Is There Something I Should Know – an t-amhrán is mó ar an lá seo i 1983. Ag lean ar aghaidh le nuacht cheoil ar an lá seo I 1966 tháinig David Bowie amach lena chéad singil Do Anything You Say. Bhí sé a chéad amhrán a tháinig sé amach leis faoi a ainm stáitse. I 2020 fuair amhránaí Adam Schlesinger bás ag aois 52 de bharr Covid. Tá sé cáiliúil de bharr gur bhunaíodh sé Fountains Of Wayne agus tháinig siad amach le cúig albam le chéile. Agus ar deireadh breithlá daoine cáiliúla ar an lá seo rugadh amhránaí Susan Boyle san Albain I 1961 agus rugadh aisteoir Asa Butterfield I Londain ar an lá seo I 1997 agus seo chuid de na rudaí a rinne sé. Beidh mé ar ais libh amárach le heagrán nua de Ar An Lá Seo. Welcome back to another edition of Ar An Lá Seo on the 1st of April, with me Lauren Ní Loingsigh In 1981 President reagan brushed his teeth and signed a legislative bill in his hospital bed as he made what his doctors called a remarkable recovery. In 2005 About 60,000 bank of ireland customers fell victimed to a technical error this weeek, the bank admitted. In 1967 Pope Paul, in a moving 20,000 word messsage to catholics appealed to the world to bring an end to hunger,poverty,strife and greed. In 2005 There was mounting unease and worker unrest at shannon airport over the plans to outsource the catering operation for the first time in 60 years. That was Duran Duran with is there something i should know – the biggest song on this day in 1983. Onto music news on this day in 1966, David Bowie released his maiden solo single, “Do Anything You Say,” on the Pye label. Produced by Tony Hatch, it was the London artist's first recording under his new stage name. In 2020, singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist Adam Schlesinger died at the age of 52 from COVID-19. Schlesinger was best known as the co-founder of the power-pop band Fountains Of Wayne, with whom he released five albums. And finally celebrity birthdays on this day – susan boyle was born in scotland in 1961 and actor asa butterfield was born in london on this day in 1997 and this is some of the stuff he done. I'll be back with you tomorrow with another edition of Ar An Lá Seo.
No musician is more closely associated with London or left more footprints than Bowie, and you can trace its influence on his life and work (and vice versa) through a series of landmarks from the suburbs to the centre. Author and curator Paul Gorman has just published an annotated street-map – David Bowie's London - listing the places that played a formative role in his world and music, the places he rehearsed, performed, filmed and recorded, the homes of friends and managers, his schools and the addresses where he lived, worked and was photographed, made connections, bought clothes and generally raised the temperature. We talk here about many of those old haunts and the stories attached to them, which include… … mysterious manager Ralph Horton who got him to change his name to Bowie and then vanished from the face of the earth. … the fate of Heddon Street, home of K-West and the Ziggy phone-box. … Marc Bolan refusing to let him sing at an all-night benefit at Middle Earth. … “the Fairy Godmother of the New Romantics” at the WAG Club. … when Lionel Bart came to Haddon Hall. … Bowie and Steve Marriott auditioning for the Lower Third. … how he levered his way into a Fabulous magazine fashion shoot. … “the end of the age of Showbiz”: performing Chim Chim Cher-ee at the Marquee when at a crossroads between rock and roll and cabaret. … the magical piano at the Trident Studios. … a chance encounter with the otherworldly Vince Taylor whose ‘UFO map' helped inspire the concept of Ziggy Stardust. … the legend of Mr Fish, creator of the man-dress on the cover of The Man Who Sold The World. … the days when people had a white Rolls Royce and matching Alsatian – and “the Great Sarong Scare of the ‘90s”. … and various fringe figures including his art teacher Owen Frampton, Konrads agents Bob Knight and Eric Easton, muse and heartbreaker Hermione Farthingale, producers Shel Talmy and Tony Hatch (“the original Mr Nasty from Opportunity Knocks”) and slum landlord and racketeer Peter Rackman. Order Paul's street-map here:https://www.amazon.co.uk/David-Bowies-London-Paul-Gorman/dp/1068523476Find out more about how to help us to keep the conversation going: https://www.patreon.com/wordinyourear Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
No musician is more closely associated with London or left more footprints than Bowie, and you can trace its influence on his life and work (and vice versa) through a series of landmarks from the suburbs to the centre. Author and curator Paul Gorman has just published an annotated street-map – David Bowie's London - listing the places that played a formative role in his world and music, the places he rehearsed, performed, filmed and recorded, the homes of friends and managers, his schools and the addresses where he lived, worked and was photographed, made connections, bought clothes and generally raised the temperature. We talk here about many of those old haunts and the stories attached to them, which include… … mysterious manager Ralph Horton who got him to change his name to Bowie and then vanished from the face of the earth. … the fate of Heddon Street, home of K-West and the Ziggy phone-box. … Marc Bolan refusing to let him sing at an all-night benefit at Middle Earth. … “the Fairy Godmother of the New Romantics” at the WAG Club. … when Lionel Bart came to Haddon Hall. … Bowie and Steve Marriott auditioning for the Lower Third. … how he levered his way into a Fabulous magazine fashion shoot. … “the end of the age of Showbiz”: performing Chim Chim Cher-ee at the Marquee when at a crossroads between rock and roll and cabaret. … the magical piano at the Trident Studios. … a chance encounter with the otherworldly Vince Taylor whose ‘UFO map' helped inspire the concept of Ziggy Stardust. … the legend of Mr Fish, creator of the man-dress on the cover of The Man Who Sold The World. … the days when people had a white Rolls Royce and matching Alsatian – and “the Great Sarong Scare of the ‘90s”. … and various fringe figures including his art teacher Owen Frampton, Konrads agents Bob Knight and Eric Easton, muse and heartbreaker Hermione Farthingale, producers Shel Talmy and Tony Hatch (“the original Mr Nasty from Opportunity Knocks”) and slum landlord and racketeer Peter Rackman. Order Paul's street-map here:https://www.amazon.co.uk/David-Bowies-London-Paul-Gorman/dp/1068523476Find out more about how to help us to keep the conversation going: https://www.patreon.com/wordinyourear Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
No musician is more closely associated with London or left more footprints than Bowie, and you can trace its influence on his life and work (and vice versa) through a series of landmarks from the suburbs to the centre. Author and curator Paul Gorman has just published an annotated street-map – David Bowie's London - listing the places that played a formative role in his world and music, the places he rehearsed, performed, filmed and recorded, the homes of friends and managers, his schools and the addresses where he lived, worked and was photographed, made connections, bought clothes and generally raised the temperature. We talk here about many of those old haunts and the stories attached to them, which include… … mysterious manager Ralph Horton who got him to change his name to Bowie and then vanished from the face of the earth. … the fate of Heddon Street, home of K-West and the Ziggy phone-box. … Marc Bolan refusing to let him sing at an all-night benefit at Middle Earth. … “the Fairy Godmother of the New Romantics” at the WAG Club. … when Lionel Bart came to Haddon Hall. … Bowie and Steve Marriott auditioning for the Lower Third. … how he levered his way into a Fabulous magazine fashion shoot. … “the end of the age of Showbiz”: performing Chim Chim Cher-ee at the Marquee when at a crossroads between rock and roll and cabaret. … the magical piano at the Trident Studios. … a chance encounter with the otherworldly Vince Taylor whose ‘UFO map' helped inspire the concept of Ziggy Stardust. … the legend of Mr Fish, creator of the man-dress on the cover of The Man Who Sold The World. … the days when people had a white Rolls Royce and matching Alsatian – and “the Great Sarong Scare of the ‘90s”. … and various fringe figures including his art teacher Owen Frampton, Konrads agents Bob Knight and Eric Easton, muse and heartbreaker Hermione Farthingale, producers Shel Talmy and Tony Hatch (“the original Mr Nasty from Opportunity Knocks”) and slum landlord and racketeer Peter Rackman. Order Paul's street-map here:https://www.amazon.co.uk/David-Bowies-London-Paul-Gorman/dp/1068523476Find out more about how to help us to keep the conversation going: https://www.patreon.com/wordinyourear Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Hello everyone and welcome to today's episode of Bob Barry's Unearthed Interviews. It's more music and memories with singer and actress Petula Clark. And I emphasize actress because I saw Petula star, in London, as Norma Desmond in a performance of “Sunset Boulevard.” She was magnificent. You all know her from her timeless hits, most written by British composer Tony Hatch. Her first number one song was inspired by the energy and excitement on the streets of New York. “My Love” was another song written by Hatch for Clark. It relates a deep, personal expression of love and promising devotion and shows an emotional side to the singer. “I Know a Place” was recorded in London, where most of her hits were made. Hatch used a catchy piano riff and brass section which made it lively and upbeat. Her music conveyed a carefree feeling and a celebration of life. Petula Clark's career spanned generations. She is an artist from the golden age of pop to Broadway, television, and beyond, making her a beloved figure in entertainment. It was early in the morning in Las Vegas and I was as surprised as she was when she answered the phone.
Book Vs. Movie: Travels with My AuntThe 1969 Graham Greene Novel Vs. the 1972 Maggie Smith FilmThe Margos pack their suitcases for Graham Greene's Travels with My Aunt and its 1972 film adaptation. The story of Henry Pulling, a reserved Englishman, whose life changes when his eccentric Aunt Augusta leads him on an adventurous journey across Europe. Greene explores the novel's themes of self-discovery, rebellion, and unconventional relationships with his signature dark humor. Augusta's vibrant, morally ambiguous character makes Henry question his life choices. The film, directed by George Cukor and starring Maggie Smith as Augusta, takes a lighter, comedic approach. Henry's character becomes more of a comedic foil to Augusta, and the adaptation focuses less on Augusta's complex past. While the movie brings energy and charm, fans of the book often feel it lacks Greene's depth.So, which did the Margos prefer? Listen to find out! In this ep, the Margos discuss:The work of Graham GreeneMaggie Smith!!!!! The differences between the novel and the film. The Movie Cast: Maggie Smith (Augusta Bertram,) Alec McGowen (Henry Pulling,) Louis Gosset Jr. (Zachary Wordsworth,) Robert Stephens (Ercole Visconti,) Cindy Williams (Tooley,) Robert Flemyng (Achille Dambreuse,) Corinne Marchand (Louise) and Valerie White as Mme. Dambreuse. Clips used:“Aunt August at the Funeral”Travels with My Aunt (original 1972 trailer)1973 Academy Awards Best Costume Design“Aunt Augusta and Henry fly to Paris.”Travels with My Aunt soundtrack by Tony Hatch.Book Vs. Movie is part of the Frolic Podcast Network. Find more podcasts you will love Frolic.Media/podcasts. Join our Patreon page “Book Vs. Movie podcast”You can find us on Facebook at Book Vs. Movie Podcast GroupFollow us on Twitter @bookversusmovieInstagram: Book Versus Movie https://www.instagram.com/bookversusmovie/Email us at bookversusmoviepodcast@gmail.com Margo D. Twitter @BrooklynMargo Margo D's Blog www.brooklynfitchick.com Margo D's Instagram “Brooklyn Fit Chick”Margo D's TikTok https://www.tiktok.com/@margodonohuebrooklynfitchick@gmail.comYou can buy your copy of Filmed in Brooklyn here! Margo P. Twitter @ShesNachoMamaMargo P's Instagram https://www.instagram.com/shesnachomama/Margo P's Blog https://coloniabook.weebly.com/ Our logo was designed by Madeleine Gainey/Studio 39 Marketing Follow on Instagram @Studio39Marketing & @musicalmadeleine
Book Vs. Movie: Travels with My AuntThe 1969 Graham Greene Novel Vs. the 1972 Maggie Smith FilmThe Margos pack their suitcases for Graham Greene's Travels with My Aunt and its 1972 film adaptation. The story of Henry Pulling, a reserved Englishman, whose life changes when his eccentric Aunt Augusta leads him on an adventurous journey across Europe. Greene explores the novel's themes of self-discovery, rebellion, and unconventional relationships with his signature dark humor. Augusta's vibrant, morally ambiguous character makes Henry question his life choices. The film, directed by George Cukor and starring Maggie Smith as Augusta, takes a lighter, comedic approach. Henry's character becomes more of a comedic foil to Augusta, and the adaptation focuses less on Augusta's complex past. While the movie brings energy and charm, fans of the book often feel it lacks Greene's depth.So, which did the Margos prefer? Listen to find out! In this ep, the Margos discuss:The work of Graham GreeneMaggie Smith!!!!! The differences between the novel and the film. The Movie Cast: Maggie Smith (Augusta Bertram,) Alec McGowen (Henry Pulling,) Louis Gosset Jr. (Zachary Wordsworth,) Robert Stephens (Ercole Visconti,) Cindy Williams (Tooley,) Robert Flemyng (Achille Dambreuse,) Corinne Marchand (Louise) and Valerie White as Mme. Dambreuse. Clips used:“Aunt August at the Funeral”Travels with My Aunt (original 1972 trailer)1973 Academy Awards Best Costume Design“Aunt Augusta and Henry fly to Paris.”Travels with My Aunt soundtrack by Tony Hatch.Book Vs. Movie is part of the Frolic Podcast Network. Find more podcasts you will love Frolic.Media/podcasts. Join our Patreon page “Book Vs. Movie podcast”You can find us on Facebook at Book Vs. Movie Podcast GroupFollow us on Twitter @bookversusmovieInstagram: Book Versus Movie https://www.instagram.com/bookversusmovie/Email us at bookversusmoviepodcast@gmail.com Margo D. Twitter @BrooklynMargo Margo D's Blog www.brooklynfitchick.com Margo D's Instagram “Brooklyn Fit Chick”Margo D's TikTok https://www.tiktok.com/@margodonohuebrooklynfitchick@gmail.comYou can buy your copy of Filmed in Brooklyn here! Margo P. Twitter @ShesNachoMamaMargo P's Instagram https://www.instagram.com/shesnachomama/Margo P's Blog https://coloniabook.weebly.com/ Our logo was designed by Madeleine Gainey/Studio 39 Marketing Follow on Instagram @Studio39Marketing & @musicalmadeleine
Welcome to the Gold Medal winning* podcast 'Trash Talk... with Count Binface'In this episode we're talking borders. As the poet Robert Frost once wrote; good fences make good neighbours, and as Tony Hatch (and his wife Jackie) wrote; everybody needs good neighbours, Neighbours should be there for one another, that's when good neighbours become good friends.Our guest this week is neither Robert Frost nor Tony Hatch. It is in fact author Jonn Elledge who's written this book all about some of the most bizarre borders and border disputes in history.He's the perfect guest to speak to during the global quest for dominance that is the Paris Olympics and at a time of heightened border tensions around the globe.Still reading? Good - you're dedicated - perhaps dedicated enough to review this podcast, give it some stars (say... five?), and hit 'follow' to ensure you get the latest episodes as they're released? Yes... we thought so. A true Count Binister.*Sigma IX podcast olympiad Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
In this podcast, Tony Hatch offered up his views on various aspects of the freight railroad and intermodal sectors, including: market conditions, service levels, volumes, and nearshoring, among others.
Welcome to the American Railroading Podcast! In this episode our host Don Walsh, is joined by guest Tony Hatch, Senior Wall Street Transportation Analyst, Founder and President of ABH Consulting based in New York City, NY. Together they discuss railroading's 2023 year in review, including everything from pending changes at the STB, to railroad safety and service improvements. Tune in to this final episode of Season 1 now to gain valuable insights and broaden your understanding of American Railroading. You can find the episode on the American Railroading Podcast's official website at www.AmericanRailroading.net . Welcome aboard! KEY POINTS: Mr. Hatch is a graduate of Harvard University and has been a Sr. Analyst on Wall Street for over 20 years.Tony's passion for railroading is only surpassed by his love of the L.A. Dodgers.Don and Tony discuss STB leadership changes announced in November 2023, and what can affect the decision of the new appointee in 2024.The Canadian Pacific and Kansas City Southern class 1 railroad merger in 2023 (now CPKC), may be the last one we see in our lifetime. Tony explains why.Class 1 railroad service has improved in 2023 but will always need to continuously improve as shippers' expectations will continuously be raised.Tony gives a great explanation and breakdown of the well-publicized railroad labor contract negotiation in 2023, and what was nearly a labor strike…or was it?Class 1 railroads have been partnering with and even acquiring short-line railroads in 2023. Tony breaks down the “why's” of these partnerships and acquisitions.The East Palestine, OH train derailment in February 2023 prompted many responses and calls for action and change. Tony shares his opinions on both.Tony shares his insight on the investment capital spending done by railroads in 2023 and beyond.Thank you all for joining us for Season 1 of the American Railroading Podcast! We wish you all a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! See you in 2024 for Season 2! LINKS MENTIONED: https://www.americanrailroading.net/ https://therevolutionrailgroup.com/ https://www.buymeacoffee.com/dwalshX https://www.abhatchconsulting.com https://www.railtrends.com
Mike Baudendistel interviews independent railroad analyst Tony Hatch following his Rail Trends conference. Follow the People Speaking Rail Podcast Other FreightWaves Shows Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on August 13th 2023 Fans of archive television didn't used to talk about CROSSROADS much, despite it having an iconic theme tune written by TONY HATCH, an amazing array of guest performers, a whole host of top behind-the-scenes talent often cutting their teeth on this show, and being a series that ran for twenty-four years across several golden ages of British television production, which, for a lot of its long history produced an astonishing five episodes of drama week after week after week. Produced by first ATV and later Central Television, CROSSROADS, the story of the ups and downs in the lives of the people populating a Midlands-set Motel, was created by HAZEL ADAIR and PETER LING and started in November 1964, and would clock up a staggering 4510 episodes before finally closing its doors in April 1988, and then even managed to be resurrected for another 320 episode run between 2001 and 2003 which may, or may not, have all been a dream. Despite the fame of its most high-profile star, NOELE GORDON, around whom the series was initially built, and creating a whole host of iconic – and much imitated - TV characters, CROSSROADS was never considered to be the highest quality television series ever made. In fact, in certain quarters it became the benchmark for everything that was bad about cheaply made television, and yet it may have inspired some comedy gold from the mind of VICTORIA WOOD, and been an inspiration for NEIGHBOURS in Australia. However, in recent times, CROSSROADS has been getting a lot more favourable reappraisal, both with RUSSELL T DAVIES' high profile drama NOLLIE telling the story of the troubled era in the show's production when it chose to dispense with its star, and with arguably the last great release from the much-missed NETWORK DISTRIBUTING, who sold a box set containing over 700 episodes across more than ninety discs earlier this year, a box set which sold out, by the way, as it found a new and very delighted audience. Those regular contributors to VISION ON SOUND, LISA and ANDREW were amongst those eager purchasers, and have become huge advocates for the series, and so they offered to join us today to share their views on CROSSROADS as they continue to work their way through that stack of shiny discs crammed full of high drama, controversial issues, and unintentional moments of hilarity. PLEASE NOTE - For Copyright reasons, musical content sometimes has to be removed for the podcast edition. All the spoken word content remains (mostly) as it was in the broadcast version. Hopefully this won't spoil your enjoyment of the show.
From October 25, 2017: Iconic songstress Petula Clark was a guest on the show to talk about her new album, Living For Today, and an upcoming local show at the Arcadia Theater in St. Charles, Illinois. ABOUT PETULA CLARKPetula Clark was born in Epsom, England, but her love of music began at a very early age in her mother's land of Wales. She was already a star in the U.K. by the age of 9, singing for the troops stationed in England during World War II.Many years later, when, after marrying French PR man Claude Wolff, she moved to France. Almost without trying, she soon became a star in that country, and across Europe, also recording in French, Italian, German and Spanish, finding time to produce two delightful daughters, Barbara and Kate (and later a splendid son, Patrick).While still living in Paris, English songwriter Tony Hatch presented her with his new composition: Downtown. The recording was made in London and was destined to become a worldwide hit, leading to a string of top ten records (including I Know A Place, My Love, A Sign Of The Times, Don't Sleep In The Subway, etc.), winning her 2 Grammy awards, and taking Petula's career to international level. She has been living in Geneva, Switzerland for many years, where she met up with Charlie Chaplin who wrote one of her major hits This Is My Song.She has performed in her own TV shows in the U.K., the U.S.A. and France. She has starred in movies (including Finian's Rainbow with Fred Astaire, Goodbye Mr. Chips with Peter O'Toole), theater in London's West End and on Broadway.
Inauguramos nueva estación con nuestro “Disco Subterráneo del Verano”. Y el galardón este año se va a Portland gracias a “Thomas Lauderdale meets The Pilgrims” (Heinz Records). Este trabajo ha unido a dos figuras de renombre; Thomas Lauderdale, pianista y líder de Pink Martini, y la poderosa banda de surf instrumental The Satan’s Pilgrims. Esta alianza comenzó a forjarse a mediados de los 90, cuando comenzaron a trabajar en un álbum conjunto que quedaría inacabado guardándose en un cajón. Veinticinco años después el proyecto llega a su fin con una selección de versiones de piezas clásicas procedentes de musicales, cine, televisión y cultura pop de mediados del siglo pasado, todo llevado a ese sonido que combina el piano clásico con la humedad de la música surf. Sencillamente fabuloso. Playlist; (sintonía) PAUL WHITEMAN ORCHESTRA and GEORGE GERSHWIN PIANO “Rhapsody In Blue pt. 1” (1924) THOMAS LAUDERDALE and THE SATAN’S PILGRIMS “Rhapsody in Blue” FRANK SINATRA “Bali Ha’i” (1949) THOMAS LAUDERDALE and THE SATAN’S PILGRIMS “Bali Ha’i” THE WAILERS “Tall cool one” (1959) THOMAS LAUDERDALE and THE SATAN’S PILGRIMS “Tall cool one” LEO REISMAN and HIS ORCHESTRA with FRED ASTAIRE “Night and day” (1932) THOMAS LAUDERDALE and THE SATAN’S PILGRIMS “Night and day” BILL CARLE with RALPH CARMICHAEL ORCHESTRA and CHORUS “How great thou art” (1954) THOMAS LAUDERDALE and THE SATAN’S PILGRIMS “How great thou art” THE BEACH BOYS “Girls on the beach” (1964) THOMAS LAUDERDALE and THE SATAN’S PILGRIMS “Girls on the beach” THOMAS LAUDERDALE and THE SATAN’S PILGRIMS “Malagueña” TONY HATCH “Out of this world” (1962) THOMAS LAUDERDALE and THE SATAN’S PILGRIMS “Out of this world” KYU SAKAMOTO “Sukiyaki” (1961) THOMAS LAUDERDALE and THE SATAN’S PILGRIMS “Sukiyaki (Ue o Muite Arukou)” FRAN JEFFRIES “Meglio stasera (It had better be tonight)” (1963) THOMAS LAUDERDALE and THE SATAN’S PILGRIMS “It had better be tonight” LAWRENCE WELK “Calcutta” (1960) THOMAS LAUDERDALE and THE SATAN’S PILGRIMS “Calcutta” Escuchar audio
On this episode, Walt chats with rail industry icon Tony Hatch, Senior Transportation Analyst, ABH Consulting. With over 30 years of experience as an independent transportation analyst, he wants to change the dynamics of railroads and the current public perception of the industry through the power of accurate information. Hatch pulls no punches as the duo discuss the latest news and events on everyone's mind. From derailments and safety to changes in the C-Suite at Class 1s to the bright future ahead for rail, no topic is off limits on this fascinating and fast-paced episode.
Shhhhh. Or not? Listen up for an exploration of library soundscapes. This episode features a collection of ambient sound recordings from Edmonton Public Library and the University of Alberta's Rutherford Library.Musical Credit:The rendition of "Downtown", by Tony Hatch, that aired on this episode was performed by the Edmonton Downtown Men's Choir during one of the group's rehearsals at the Stanley A. Milner Library. The choir is a community outreach program of the Sing for Life Society of Alberta.
In this podcast, Tony Hatch offered up his views on various aspects of the freight railroad and intermodal sectors, including: market conditions, service levels, volumes, capital expenditures, and safety, among other topics.
Sam Fazeli, Head of Euro Research and Pharma Analyst for Bloomberg Intelligence, joins the program to discuss Pfizer's potential acquisition of Seagan. Tony Hatch, consultant and analyst with ABH Consulting, joins the program to discuss the latest on the Ohio Trail Derailment, issues with trains in the US, the government response, and risks for other incidents. Jill O'Donovan, advisor to Impact Shares YWCA Women's Empowerment ETF (NYSE: WOMN), and former Chief Innovation Officer at YWCA Metropolitan Chicago, joins the program to discuss the ETF and equality in investing. Alison Williams, Senior Global Banks and Asset Managers Analyst with Bloomberg Intelligence, joins to preview Goldman Investor Day. Wes Kosova, host of The Big Take podcast for Bloomberg, joins us to talk about this week's lineup. Hosted by Paul Sweeney and Matt Miller.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
We're broadcasting a special interview never heard before with the creator of Crossroads, the pioneering female TV executive Hazel Adair. Ashley Byrne conducted Hazel's very last interview and met her son Charles Marriot back in 2015. Hazel's memory wasn't what it had been but she did remember plenty of key points from her long career in radio, tv and film. There's a few surprises along the way as Hazel talks about making several TV breakthroughs including the very first female focused soap. Enjoy!Distinct Nostalgia is an MIM Production. NOTE: The Distinct Nostalgia theme is owned by MIM Productions and composed by Rebecca Applin and Chris Warner. The Crossroads refrain by Tony Hatch.Support the show
As the TV drama Nolly goes live on ITVX find out the real story behind Crossroads and Noele Gordon here as we re-release our special interview with Nolly's friend Tony Adams who played Adam Chance in the hit ATV drama serial which began in 1964 and ran for 24 years the first time round.In a candid and often very funny look back, Tony talks to Ashley Byrne about joining the soap in 1978 and recalls some of the great actors he worked with on the show. Wobbly sets, missing lines, running short, 'as live' mistakes, it's all here as Tony remembers the iconic show which critics panned but the viewers loved (and still love years later).Enjoy!And scroll down Distinct Nostalgia to hear the very last interview ever conducted with Crossroads creator Hazel Adair.Distinct Nostalgia is an MIM Production. www.madeinmanchester.tvNOTE: The Distinct Nostalgia theme is owned by MIM Productions and composed by Rebecca Applin and Chris Warner. The Crossroads Theme was composed by Tony Hatch.Support the show
For Christmas, we're broadcasting a special interview never heard before with the creator of Crossroads Hazel Adair. Ashley conducted Hazel's very last interview and met her son Charles Marriot back in 2015. Hazel's memory wasn't what it had been but she did remember plenty of key points from her long career in radio, tv and film. There's a few surprises along the way. Enjoy!Distinct Nostalgia is an MIM Production. NOTE: The Distinct Nostalgia theme is owned by MIM Productions and composed by Rebecca Applin and Chris Warner. The Crossroads refrain by Tony Hatch.Support the show
It's time to take a break from the stresses of life and all of the people who are mean to you with Ben Silverio and Andy Huttel. They're pop culture observers/zany podcasters/ excellent friends, who have banded together to rib each other's sandwich choices, do impressions and talk about every movie including the one they watched for this podcast. This week we're taking the time to deepen our collective knowledge about the technologies, features and art of the movie with a little edutainment. This is our accidental musical episode featuring shallow dives into Downtown by Petula Clark and I've Got My Mind Set On You by James Ray. Though, in a surprise to no one, the guys also got distracted with covers of these songs, covers of other songs and then martinis. Music Featured in this Episode:“Love of Power” written and performed by Marlon Longid, written for Time 2 Party“Downtown” performed by Petula Clark, written by Tony Hatch. Property of Universal-McA Music Publishing Div. of Universal Music Corp.'“Downtown” performed by the B-52s. Property Kobalt Music Copyrights“I've Got My Mind Set On You” performed by James Ray, written by Rudy Clark. Property of MGM Records.“[This Song's Just] Six Words Long” performed by Weird Al Yankovic, written by Rudy Clark & “Weird Al” Yankovic. Property of Volcano/Way Moby.“Istanbul (Not Constantinople)” performed by The Four Lads, lyrics by Jimmy Kennedy and music by Nat Simon. Released by Columbia Records“Downtown (Downtempo)” by Anya Taylor-Joy. From the soundtrack to “Last Night in Soho” Property of MGM Records. Ben Silverio is @Bsilverio20 on Twitter and IG. Andy Huttel is @Andohasissues on Twitter. Ansel Burch is @Indecisionist on Twitter and @TheIndecisionist on IG. Make sure you're subscribed because four Mondays a month, it's #Time2Party.
Ira Jersey, Chief US interest rate strategist with Bloomberg Intelligence, discusses Treasury yields peaking and the latest JOLTS data. Anurag Rana, Senior Software and IT analyst with Bloomberg Intelligence, joins the show to talk about the latest Bloomberg Intelligence findings on iPhone sales, outlook for Apple, and outlook for retail in 2022. Erik Schatzker, editor-at-large at Bloomberg News, joins the show to discuss the breaking story that Ray Dalio is giving up control of Bridgewater Associates. Tony Hatch, consultant with ABH consulting, joins the show in studio along with BI analyst Lee Klaskow to discuss the latest on the supply chain. Vivek Ramaswamy, founder of Strive Asset Management, joins the show to discuss his latest ETF, ESG investing, and outlook for the markets and ESG trading. Hosted by Paul Sweeney, Matt Miller, and Barry Ritholtz.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Y'all asked for more of Tony and Cristina so here you go! An episode all about their + my Sexcapades. Topics covered: Fantasies Come True Weirdest Situations Newbie Mistakes Kinkiest Story First Sex Party Most Grateful For Our Wish Lists Tony & Cris has the top #1 and #2 episodes on my podcast so when you're done listening to this one, check out: #42: Open Relationships 101 #48: Open Relationships Part II Follow Tony & Cris & me on Instagram: @yogafit.tony @wildflower.adventures @nomads.adventure @jenniferkayloruscinpodcast @jenniferkayloruscin --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/theopenbedroompodcast/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/theopenbedroompodcast/support
Andrea Auerbach, Head of Private Investments at Cambridge Associates, joins the show to talk about private equity and weathering the storms of inflation and market volatility. Elisabeth Behrmann, head of autos and industry coverage for Bloomberg News in Europe, joins the show to talk about the Porsche PO and Ferrari's new “SUV” that's not an SUV. Tony Hatch, consultant with ABH consulting, discusses the railroad strike and the state of labor in transportation/rails in the US. Lee Klaskow, Senior Analyst – Freight, Transport, and Logistics with Bloomberg Intelligence, joins the show to discuss FedEx, General Electric, and supply chain constraints and costs. Ed Loh, Head of Editorial with MotorTrend, discusses the new MotorTrend Software-Defined Vehicle Innovators Awards program, car tech trends, and EV trends. Hosted by Paul Sweeney and Matt Miller.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
One FM presenter Josh Revens and Steve Dowers present 'Whatever Happened To?' This week's topic is Singing and Songwriting duo Jackie Trent & Tony Hatch. This program originally aired on Monday the 26th of July, 2022. Contact the station on admin@fm985.com.au or (+613) 58313131 The ONE FM 98.5 Community Radio podcast page operates under the license of Goulburn Valley Community Radio Inc. (ONE FM) Number 1385226/1. PRA AMCOS (Australasian Performing Right Association Limited and Australasian Mechanical Copyright Owners Society) that covers Simulcasting and Online content including podcasts with musical content, that we pay every year. This licence number is 1385226/1.
My Open Relationships 101 is my most listened to podcast so I've brought Tony & Cris back for Part II! Today's conversation is focused on how to have that difficult conversation with your partner about opening up + tactical ways to start the opening up process. Other fun topics: Don't add another human to fix the relationship What's / Who's meant for you will always come back Stop "Sitting in Stuck" The 4 steps to alignment with your partner before opening your relationship "Rules" Easy partnerships Plus a fun Q&A lightning round at the end Resources / References: Blueprints Podcast (created by Jaiya & Ian from Jaiya Inc.) Tinder Podcast with my partner Scott STI / STD Testing Frequency Podcast Follow us!: @wildflower.adventures @yogafit.tony @jenniferkayloruscin This podcast was recorded with live video - watch on Spotify! --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/theopenbedroompodcast/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/theopenbedroompodcast/support
Septiembre de 1969. II Festival Internacional de la Canción de Barcelona. En el fin de fiesta Serrat, entre otros temas, estrena una nueva canción que todavía está componiendo y no publicará en disco hasta el año siguiente pero que en el futuro le acompañará en todos sus conciertos, FIESTA. Con fotografías sacadas de la película “Escala en Tenerife” (1964) de León Klimovsky en la carátula, pero con varios temas ajenos a dicha película se publica este disco en el que el Dúo Dinámico cuenta con el acompañamiento de un conjunto de la época: Los Ángeles Negros. Y les sienta bastante bien cambiar la orquestina por un grupo que le tiene bien cogida la medida al beat simple y efectivo. Del disco que se extrae de la banda sonora de “Una Chica Para Dos” (Leon Klimovsky, 1965), que fue la última aparición cinematográfica del Dúo Dinámico, en su cara A figuran dos canciones que ya habían conocido el vinilo en el anterior EP del grupo y en la cara B, dos canciones compuestas por Arcusa y de la Calva e interpretadas por Irán Eory, partenaire femenina y chica a la que hace alusión el titulo. Los Brincos firmaron una de las canciones más psicodélicas del pop español. La Fuente; este sencillo no consiguió llegar a ser número uno en las listas, pero sí relanzó la carrera discográfrica de Los Brincos, BILLY J KRAMER tocaron el éxito con varias canciones compuestas por Lennon-MCartney Frankie Avalon era un trompetista que con el tiempo empezó a cantar y cantaba con gusto era un ídolo de las adolescentes lo que se llamaba un “pretty face” (una cara bonita). Y le puso voz a una canción de ‘Grease' que era la historia de amor entre un rebelde y una inocentona. «Sleep Walk» es una canción de rock instrumental escrita y publicada en 1959 por el dúo estadounidense Santo & Johnny. Las páginas del Vogue señalaron a Françoise Hardy como la French girl, el símbolo de la modernidad made in france que se presentaba en el Hotel Savoy de Londres como embajadora de la nouvelle vague de la moda francesa enfundada en el esmoquin de Yves Saint-Laurent o vestida por Paco Rabanne con futuristas minifaldas metálicas. En noviembre de 1965, en un vuelo de Londres a Los Ángeles, Tony Hatch estaba dando los toques finales a su composición "La vida y el alma de la fiesta", que planeaba grabar con Petula Clark en Los Ángeles para que sirviera como su próximo sencillo. Luego, Hatch procedió a escribir la letra de una canción cuyo título, "My Love", no podía presentar ningún problema de comprensión; la letra se completó durante el vuelo y Hatch completó la música poco después de aterrizar en Los Ángeles. Los discos de Nico Fidenco son sin duda material de coleccionista, como este single de otra de sus canciones más conocidas, y que también gozó de bastante popularidad en 1964 en España, es "Con te sulla spiaggia", un tema muy alegre, sesentero y pegadizo
El Guateque es como el Guadiana, guapamente vuelve a guapear los sábados a las 22,05h en Onda Regional de Murcia (orm.es). Con su voz magnífica, única, casi operística, sus canciones oscuras y melodramáticas y un sonido a caballo entre rockabilly y country, Roy Orbison inspiró a futuros artistas como Bruce Sringsteen, John Lennon y Tom Petty. Elvis Presley consideraba su voz la más grande que había oído nunca. Good Morning Starshine fue originalmente del musical Hair de 1967 (tenía 7 años). La maravillosa interpretación de Oliver salió en 1969. El 19 de abril de 1968 se publicó en el Reino Unido, 'Odessey & Oracle', segundo álbum del grupo británico The Zombies, que ante las pobres ventas aceleró la disolución de la banda. Contenía, entre otras grandes composiciones, el tema 'Time of the Season'. Después de que Los Brincos lograran el número uno con “El pasaporte”, se antojaba imprescindible que Juan y Junior demostraran que también ellos podían vivir sin sus ex-compañeros, y con su primer single lo consiguieron. Con “Mónica”, Los Ángeles consiguen su último gran éxito y vuelven a rozar el nº1. Es una canción de amor muy elaborada con un formidable uso de la orquesta a cargo de Rafael Trabuchelli. Para algunos fue la gran canción de amor de la década. Voces Amigas eran cuatro, dos chicos y dos chicas, igual que “The Mamas and The Papas”, aunque en eso se quedaba toda la semejanza. “Canta con Nosotros”, compuesta por Herrero y Armenteros,fue su primer sencillo, y salió al mercado en las postrimerías del emblemático 68, subiendo en las listas como la espuma.Los 4 de la Torre han pasado a la historia del pop nacional por ser los principales adalides de la canción turística en la España del desarrollismo, el sesicientos, las suecas y el Ministerio de Información y Turismo de don Manuel Fraga. A principios de 1964 sale su primer EP: “Ven a bailar el Hully Gully Con Enrique Lozano ya fuera de la formación, Los Íberos editan en 1970 dos sencillos con temas extraídos de su único LP, editado el año anterior. Voz de niña, coros masculinos y un conjunto detrás dirigido por el maestro Martínez Mestres para el debut de la adolescente Marta Baizán. “Sé de un lugar” es un clásico compuesto por Tony Hatch para Petula Clark, que aquí grabaron Bruno Lomas y Silvana Velasco. You got a friend fue creado en el año 1971 por Carole King. Su etapa de compositora, junto a su primer marido Gerry Goffin, fue prolífica en canciones históricas pero fue en el álbum Tapestry donde apareció este tema. Brenda Lee fue un ídolo adolescente (una Princesa del Pop) durante la década de los 50 y 60. Su primera aparición en el cine fue en ‘Two Little Bears' en 1961 con un pequeño papel junto a Eddie Albert y Jane Wyatt donde interpretaba ‘Speak To Me Pretty'. En el Día del Libro rescatamos una melodía delicada, creada por Luis Eduardo Aute, y un estribillo escrito por Jesús Munárriz, «Todo está en los libros». Cabecera histórica que resuena en la memoria de todos los que veían la televisión en los años ochenta , y a Sánchez Dragó desde el programa Biblioteca Nacional. Y la Rosa: Leonardo Favio fue , amén de cineasta, cantante y compositor, uno de los grandes precursores de la balada romántica argentina que hacía furor en las décadas del 60 y 70. Una canción fue la contraseña que puso en marcha la revolución encabezada por los militares portugueses que acabó con la dictadura salazarista. Eran las 0.20 del 25 de abril de 1974 y por una emisora sonó Grândola, vila morena, que ha quedado inmortalizada como un símbolo del restablecimiento de la democracia en el país vecino. Su autor, José Afonso, popularmente conocido por el sobrenombre de Zeca, compuso el tema cautivado por el ambiente de fraternidad que saboreó durante una actuación en esta villa del Alentejo.
*UPDATE: We have recorded an "Open Relationships Part II", so head over there once you're done with this episode! Since the beginning of human life, there have been all kinds of different types of relationships. There were tribes where women ruled. And others where many men "contributed" their seed during procreation to ensure the strength and virility of the babies. We lived in community. Today's world is dominated by a patriarchal society where we view partnership as property and ownership and lifelong obligation. Today I'm interviewing my closest friends Tony Hatch & Cristina Lopez, an engaged couple in a 9 year polyamorous partnership. We discuss the different types of open relationship, the negatives and positives of being "in the lifestyle", and our unique experiences dating multiple people at one time.
In this episode we welcome the excellent Devon Powers — beamed in from Philadelphia — and ask her to talk about The Village Voice, Red Hot Chili Peppers, the White Stripes… and music journalism since the turn of the century.Devon begins by talking about the music she loved when growing up in her native Michigan — and her first awareness of "rock critics". We hear about her move to New York City in 1999, her early pieces for the PopMatters site, and the Anglophilia that led to umpteen pieces about the likes of Clinic, Starsailor, Badly Drawn Boy and, yes, even Ocean Colour Scene. Citing a great 2003 piece she wrote about Red Hot Chili Peppers, who released a new album the week of this recording, we ask Devon what those punk-funk Californicators meant to her in the '90s and noughties.After a brief discussion of Devon's 2004 thinkpiece 'Is Music Journalism Dead?', we turn our attention to Writing the Record: The Village Voice and the Birth of Rock Criticism, the 2013 book which came out of her doctoral dissertation at NYU. She talks about the vital New York weekly paper, and the "rock critics" who were such a key part of its arts coverage — particularly Richard Goldstein, several of whose '60s Voice pieces we have on RBP. We then pay tribute to another Voice contributor, John Swenson, lost to us a few days before this recording, as well as to Foo Fighter Taylor Hawkins and Mighty Diamonds frontman "Tabby" Shaw.Two clips from Ira Robbins' 2001 audio interview with the White Stripes prompt a general chinwag about Jack, Meg, blues etc., after which Mark zips through the most notable of the interviews & reviews he's just added to the RBP library, including pieces about the Kingston Trio, Paul Revere & the Raiders, Canned Heat and Teddy Pendergrass. Barney then rounds things off by flagging up pieces on Marc Bolan, the Prodigy, Tony Hatch, Jack Good and the Descendents.Many thanks to special guest Devon Powers; visit her website at devonpowers.com and find Writing the Record in all good bookshops.The Rock's Backpages podcast is proud to be part of the Pantheon podcast network.Pieces discussed: The Village Voice and the Birth of Rock Criticism, PJ Harvey, Is Music Journalism Dead?, Red Hot Chili Peppers audio, Blood Sugar Sex Magik, Rick Rubin, The White Stripes audio, Taylor Hawkins audio, Foo Fighters, Crawdaddy, The Mighty Diamonds, Alexis Korner, Paul Revere, Disco, Teddy Pendergrass, Little Richard, Steve Paul, Canned Heat, Curtis Mayfield, Oasis, Marc Bolan audio, The Prodigy, Tony Hatch, Jack Good and the Descendents.
In this episode we welcome the excellent Devon Powers — beamed in from Philadelphia — and ask her to talk about The Village Voice, Red Hot Chili Peppers, the White Stripes… and music journalism since the turn of the century. Devon begins by talking about the music she loved when growing up in her native Michigan — and her first awareness of "rock critics". We hear about her move to New York City in 1999, her early pieces for the PopMatters site, and the Anglophilia that led to umpteen pieces about the likes of Clinic, Starsailor, Badly Drawn Boy and, yes, even Ocean Colour Scene. Citing a great 2003 piece she wrote about Red Hot Chili Peppers, who released a new album the week of this recording, we ask Devon what those punk-funk Californicators meant to her in the '90s and noughties. After a brief discussion of Devon's 2004 thinkpiece 'Is Music Journalism Dead?', we turn our attention to Writing the Record: The Village Voice and the Birth of Rock Criticism, the 2013 book which came out of her doctoral dissertation at NYU. She talks about the vital New York weekly paper, and the "rock critics" who were such a key part of its arts coverage — particularly Richard Goldstein, several of whose '60s Voice pieces we have on RBP. We then pay tribute to another Voice contributor, John Swenson, lost to us a few days before this recording, as well as to Foo Fighter Taylor Hawkins and Mighty Diamonds frontman "Tabby" Shaw. Two clips from Ira Robbins' 2001 audio interview with the White Stripes prompt a general chinwag about Jack, Meg, blues etc., after which Mark zips through the most notable of the interviews & reviews he's just added to the RBP library, including pieces about the Kingston Trio, Paul Revere & the Raiders, Canned Heat and Teddy Pendergrass. Barney then rounds things off by flagging up pieces on Marc Bolan, the Prodigy, Tony Hatch, Jack Good and the Descendents. Many thanks to special guest Devon Powers; visit her website at devonpowers.com and find Writing the Record in all good bookshops. The Rock's Backpages podcast is proud to be part of the Pantheon podcast network. Pieces discussed: The Village Voice and the Birth of Rock Criticism, PJ Harvey, Is Music Journalism Dead?, Red Hot Chili Peppers audio, Blood Sugar Sex Magik, Rick Rubin, The White Stripes audio, Taylor Hawkins audio, Foo Fighters, Crawdaddy, The Mighty Diamonds, Alexis Korner, Paul Revere, Disco, Teddy Pendergrass, Little Richard, Steve Paul, Canned Heat, Curtis Mayfield, Oasis, Marc Bolan audio, The Prodigy, Tony Hatch, Jack Good and the Descendents. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In this episode we welcome the excellent Devon Powers — beamed in from Philadelphia — and ask her to talk about The Village Voice, Red Hot Chili Peppers, the White Stripes… and music journalism since the turn of the century.Devon begins by talking about the music she loved when growing up in her native Michigan — and her first awareness of "rock critics". We hear about her move to New York City in 1999, her early pieces for the PopMatters site, and the Anglophilia that led to umpteen pieces about the likes of Clinic, Starsailor, Badly Drawn Boy and, yes, even Ocean Colour Scene. Citing a great 2003 piece she wrote about Red Hot Chili Peppers, who released a new album the week of this recording, we ask Devon what those punk-funk Californicators meant to her in the '90s and noughties.After a brief discussion of Devon's 2004 thinkpiece 'Is Music Journalism Dead?', we turn our attention to Writing the Record: The Village Voice and the Birth of Rock Criticism, the 2013 book which came out of her doctoral dissertation at NYU. She talks about the vital New York weekly paper, and the "rock critics" who were such a key part of its arts coverage — particularly Richard Goldstein, several of whose '60s Voice pieces we have on RBP. We then pay tribute to another Voice contributor, John Swenson, lost to us a few days before this recording, as well as to Foo Fighter Taylor Hawkins and Mighty Diamonds frontman "Tabby" Shaw.Two clips from Ira Robbins' 2001 audio interview with the White Stripes prompt a general chinwag about Jack, Meg, blues etc., after which Mark zips through the most notable of the interviews & reviews he's just added to the RBP library, including pieces about the Kingston Trio, Paul Revere & the Raiders, Canned Heat and Teddy Pendergrass. Barney then rounds things off by flagging up pieces on Marc Bolan, the Prodigy, Tony Hatch, Jack Good and the Descendents.Many thanks to special guest Devon Powers; visit her website at devonpowers.com and find Writing the Record in all good bookshops.The Rock's Backpages podcast is proud to be part of the Pantheon podcast network.Pieces discussed: The Village Voice and the Birth of Rock Criticism, PJ Harvey, Is Music Journalism Dead?, Red Hot Chili Peppers audio, Blood Sugar Sex Magik, Rick Rubin, The White Stripes audio, Taylor Hawkins audio, Foo Fighters, Crawdaddy, The Mighty Diamonds, Alexis Korner, Paul Revere, Disco, Teddy Pendergrass, Little Richard, Steve Paul, Canned Heat, Curtis Mayfield, Oasis, Marc Bolan audio, The Prodigy, Tony Hatch, Jack Good and the Descendents.
In this episode we welcome the excellent Devon Powers — beamed in from Philadelphia — and ask her to talk about The Village Voice, Red Hot Chili Peppers, the White Stripes… and music journalism since the turn of the century. Devon begins by talking about the music she loved when growing up in her native Michigan — and her first awareness of "rock critics". We hear about her move to New York City in 1999, her early pieces for the PopMatters site, and the Anglophilia that led to umpteen pieces about the likes of Clinic, Starsailor, Badly Drawn Boy and, yes, even Ocean Colour Scene. Citing a great 2003 piece she wrote about Red Hot Chili Peppers, who released a new album the week of this recording, we ask Devon what those punk-funk Californicators meant to her in the '90s and noughties. After a brief discussion of Devon's 2004 thinkpiece 'Is Music Journalism Dead?', we turn our attention to Writing the Record: The Village Voice and the Birth of Rock Criticism, the 2013 book which came out of her doctoral dissertation at NYU. She talks about the vital New York weekly paper, and the "rock critics" who were such a key part of its arts coverage — particularly Richard Goldstein, several of whose '60s Voice pieces we have on RBP. We then pay tribute to another Voice contributor, John Swenson, lost to us a few days before this recording, as well as to Foo Fighter Taylor Hawkins and Mighty Diamonds frontman "Tabby" Shaw. Two clips from Ira Robbins' 2001 audio interview with the White Stripes prompt a general chinwag about Jack, Meg, blues etc., after which Mark zips through the most notable of the interviews & reviews he's just added to the RBP library, including pieces about the Kingston Trio, Paul Revere & the Raiders, Canned Heat and Teddy Pendergrass. Barney then rounds things off by flagging up pieces on Marc Bolan, the Prodigy, Tony Hatch, Jack Good and the Descendents. Many thanks to special guest Devon Powers; visit her website at devonpowers.com and find Writing the Record in all good bookshops. The Rock's Backpages podcast is proud to be part of the Pantheon podcast network. Pieces discussed: The Village Voice and the Birth of Rock Criticism, PJ Harvey, Is Music Journalism Dead?, Red Hot Chili Peppers audio, Blood Sugar Sex Magik, Rick Rubin, The White Stripes audio, Taylor Hawkins audio, Foo Fighters, Crawdaddy, The Mighty Diamonds, Alexis Korner, Paul Revere, Disco, Teddy Pendergrass, Little Richard, Steve Paul, Canned Heat, Curtis Mayfield, Oasis, Marc Bolan audio, The Prodigy, Tony Hatch, Jack Good and the Descendents.
In this podcast, Jeff Berman, Group News Editor for Logistics Management and the Peerless Media Supply Chain Group, interviews Tony Hatch, principal...
Pinkie Sings Downtown by Anthony Peter Hatchhttp:/PinkieThePigPodcast.com
This week's episode looks at “Tomorrow Never Knows”, the making of Revolver by the Beatles, and the influence of Timothy Leary on the burgeoning psychedelic movement. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a fifteen-minute bonus episode available, on "Keep on Running" by the Spencer Davis Group. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Errata A few things -- I say "Fairfield" at one point when I mean "Fairchild". While Timothy Leary was imprisoned in 1970 he wasn't actually placed in the cell next to Charles Manson until 1973. Sources differ on when Geoff Emerick started at EMI, and he *may* not have worked on "Sun Arise", though I've seen enough reliable sources saying he did that I think it's likely. And I've been told that Maureen Cleave denied having an affair with Lennon -- though note that I said it was "strongly rumoured" rather than something definite. Resources As usual, a mix of all the songs excerpted in this episode is available at Mixcloud.com. I have read literally dozens of books on the Beatles, and used bits of information from many of them. All my Beatles episodes refer to: The Complete Beatles Chronicle by Mark Lewisohn, All The Songs: The Stories Behind Every Beatles Release by Jean-Michel Guesdon, And The Band Begins To Play: The Definitive Guide To The Songs of The Beatles by Steve Lambley, The Beatles By Ear by Kevin Moore, Revolution in the Head by Ian MacDonald, and The Beatles Anthology. For this episode, I also referred to Last Interview by David Sheff, a longform interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono from shortly before Lennon's death; Many Years From Now by Barry Miles, an authorised biography of Paul McCartney; and Here, There, and Everywhere: My Life Recording the Music of the Beatles by Geoff Emerick and Howard Massey. For information on Timothy Leary I used a variety of sources including The Most Dangerous Man in America by Bill Minutaglio and Steven L. Davis; Timothy Leary: Outside Looking In by Robert Forte; The Starseed Signals by Robert Anton Wilson; and especially The Harvard Psychedelic Club by Don Lattin. I also referred to both The Tibetan Book of the Dead and to The Psychedelic Experience. Leary's much-abridged audiobook version of The Psychedelic Experience can be purchased from Folkways Records. Sadly the first mono mix of "Tomorrow Never Knows" has been out of print since it was first issued. The only way to get the second mono mix is on this ludicrously-expensive out-of-print box set, but the stereo mix is easily available on Revolver. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Before I start this episode, I'd like to note that it deals with a number of subjects some listeners might find upsetting, most notably psychedelic drug use, mental illness, and suicide. I think I've dealt with those subjects fairly respectfully, but you still may want to check the transcript if you have worries about these subjects. Also, we're now entering a period of music history with the start of the psychedelic era where many of the songs we're looking at are influenced by non-mainstream religious traditions, mysticism, and also increasingly by political ideas which may seem strange with nearly sixty years' hindsight. I'd just like to emphasise that when I talk about these ideas, I'm trying as best I can to present the thinking of the people I'm talking about, in an accurate and unbiased way, rather than talking about my own beliefs. We're going to head into some strange places in some of these episodes, and my intention is neither to mock the people I'm talking about nor to endorse their ideas, but to present those ideas to you the listener so you can understand the music, the history, and the mindset of the people involved, Is that clear? Then lets' turn on, tune in, and drop out back to 1955... [Opening excerpt from The Psychedelic Experience] There is a phenomenon in many mystical traditions, which goes by many names, including the dark night of the soul and the abyss. It's an experience that happens to mystics of many types, in which they go through unimaginable pain near the beginning of their journey towards greater spiritual knowledge. That pain usually involves a mixture of internal and external events -- some terrible tragedy happens to them, giving them a new awareness of the world's pain, at the same time they're going through an intellectual crisis about their understanding of the world, and it can last several years. It's very similar to the more common experience of the mid-life crisis, except that rather than buying a sports car and leaving their spouse, mystics going through this are more likely to found a new religion. At least, those who survive the crushing despair intact. Those who come out of the experience the other end often find themselves on a totally new path, almost like they're a different person. In 1955, when Dr. Timothy Leary's dark night of the soul started, he was a respected academic psychologist, a serious scientist who had already made several substantial contributions to his field, and was considered a rising star. By 1970, he would be a confirmed mystic, sentenced to twenty years in prison, in a cell next to Charles Manson, and claiming to different people that he was the reincarnation of Gurdjieff, Aleister Crowley, and Jesus Christ. In the fifties, Leary and his wife had an open relationship, in which they were both allowed to sleep with other people, but weren't allowed to form emotional attachments to them. Unfortunately, Leary *had* formed an emotional attachment to another woman, and had started spending so much time with her that his wife was convinced he was going to leave her. On top of that, Leary was an alcoholic, and was prone to get into drunken rows with his wife. He woke up on the morning of his thirty-fifth birthday, hung over after one of those rows, to find that she had died by suicide while he slept, leaving a note saying that she knew he was going to leave her and that her life would be meaningless without him. This was only months after Leary had realised that the field he was working in, to which he had devoted his academic career, was seriously broken. Along with a colleague, Frank Barron, he published a paper on the results of clinical psychotherapy, "Changes in psychoneurotic patients with and without psychotherapy" which analysed the mental health of a group of people who had been through psychotherapy, and found that a third of them improved, a third stayed the same, and a third got worse. The problem was that there was a control group, of people with the same conditions who were put on a waiting list and told to wait the length of time that the therapy patients were being treated. A third of them improved, a third stayed the same, and a third got worse. In other words, psychotherapy as it was currently practised had no measurable effect at all on patients' health. This devastated Leary, as you might imagine. But more through inertia than anything else, he continued working in the field, and in 1957 he published what was regarded as a masterwork -- his book Interpersonal Diagnosis of Personality: A Functional Theory and Methodology for Personality Evaluation. Leary's book was a challenge to the then-dominant idea in psychology, behaviourism, which claimed that it made no sense to talk about anyone's internal thoughts or feelings -- all that mattered was what could be measured, stimuli and responses, and that in a very real sense the unmeasurable thoughts people had didn't exist at all. Behaviourism looked at every human being as a mechanical black box, like a series of levers. Leary, by contrast, analysed human interactions as games, in which people took on usual roles, but were able, if they realised this, to change the role or even the game itself. It was very similar to the work that Eric Berne was doing at the same time, and which would later be popularised in Berne's book Games People Play. Berne's work was so popular that it led to the late-sixties hit record "Games People Play" by Joe South: [Excerpt: Joe South: "Games People Play"] But in 1957, between Leary and Berne, Leary was considered the more important thinker among his peers -- though some thought of him as more of a showman, enthralled by his own ideas about how he was going to change psychology, than a scientist, and some thought that he was unfairly taking credit for the work of lesser-known but better researchers. But by 1958, the effects of the traumas Leary had gone through a couple of years earlier were at their worst. He was starting to become seriously ill -- from the descriptions, probably from something stress-related and psychosomatic -- and he took his kids off to Europe, where he was going to write the great American novel. But he rapidly ran through his money, and hadn't got very far with the novel. He was broke, and ill, and depressed, and desperate, but then in 1959 his old colleague Frank Barron, who was on holiday in the area, showed up, and the two had a conversation that changed Leary's life forever in multiple ways. The first of the conversational topics would have the more profound effect, though that wouldn't be apparent at first. Barron talked to Leary about his previous holiday, when he'd visited Mexico and taken psilocybin mushrooms. These had been used by Mexicans for centuries, but the first publication about them in English had only been in 1955 -- the same year when Leary had had other things on his mind -- and they were hardly known at all outside Mexico. Barron talked about the experience as being the most profound, revelatory, experience of his life. Leary thought his friend sounded like a madman, but he humoured him for the moment. But Barron also mentioned that another colleague was on holiday in the same area. David McClelland, head of the Harvard Center for Personality Research, had mentioned to Barron that he had just read Diagnosis of Personality and thought it a work of genius. McClelland hired Leary to work for him at Harvard, and that was where Leary met Ram Dass. [Excerpt from "The Psychedelic Experience"] Ram Dass was not the name that Dass was going by at the time -- he was going by his birth name, and only changed his name a few years later, after the events we're talking about -- but as always, on this podcast we don't use people's deadnames, though his is particularly easy to find as it's still the name on the cover of his most famous book, which we'll be talking about shortly. Dass was another psychologist at the Centre for Personality Research, and he would be Leary's closest collaborator for the next several years. The two men would become so close that at several points Leary would go travelling and leave his children in Dass' care for extended periods of time. The two were determined to revolutionise academic psychology. The start of that revolution didn't come until summer 1960. While Leary was on holiday in Cuernavaca in Mexico, a linguist and anthropologist he knew, Lothar Knauth, mentioned that one of the old women in the area collected those magic mushrooms that Barron had been talking about. Leary decided that that might be a fun thing to do on his holiday, and took a few psilocybin mushrooms. The effect was extraordinary. Leary called this, which had been intended only as a bit of fun, "the deepest religious experience of my life". [Excerpt from "The Psychedelic Experience"] He returned to Harvard after his summer holiday and started what became the Harvard Psilocybin Project. Leary and various other experimenters took controlled doses of psilocybin and wrote down their experiences, and Leary believed this would end up revolutionising psychology, giving them insights unattainable by other methods. The experimenters included lecturers, grad students, and people like authors Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs, jazz trumpeter Maynard Ferguson, and Alan Watts, who popularised Zen Buddhism in the West. Dass didn't join the project until early 1961 -- he'd actually been on the holiday with Leary, but had arrived a few days after the mushroom experiment, and nobody had been able to get hold of the old woman who knew where to find the mushrooms, so he'd just had to deal with Leary telling him about how great it was rather than try it himself. He then spent a semester as a visiting scholar at Berkeley, so he didn't get to try his first trip until February 1961. Dass, on his first trip, first had a revelation about the nature of his own true soul, then decided at three in the morning that he needed to go and see his parents, who lived nearby, and tell them the good news. But there was several feet of snow, and so he decided he must save his parents from the snow, and shovel the path to their house. At three in the morning. Then he saw them looking out the window at him, he waved, and then started dancing around the shovel. He later said “Until that moment I was always trying to be the good boy, looking at myself through other people's eyes. What did the mothers, fathers, teachers, colleagues want me to be? That night, for the first time, I felt good inside. It was OK to be me.” The Harvard Psilocybin Project soon became the Harvard Psychedelic Project. The term "psychedelic", meaning "soul revealing", was coined by the British psychiatrist Humphrey Osmond, who had been experimenting with hallucinogens for years, and had guided Aldous Huxley on the mescaline trip described in The Doors of Perception. Osmond and Huxley had agreed that the term "psychotomimetic", in use at the time, which meant "mimicking psychosis", wasn't right -- it was too negative. They started writing letters to each other, suggesting alternative terms. Huxley came up with "phanerothyme", the Greek for "soul revealing", and wrote a little couplet to Osmond: To make this trivial world sublime Take half a gramme of phanerothyme. Osmond countered with the Latin equivalent: To fathom hell or soar angelic Just take a pinch of psychedelic Osmond also inspired Leary's most important experimental work of the early sixties. Osmond had got to know Bill W., the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, and had introduced W. to LSD. W. had become sober after experiencing a profound spiritual awakening and a vision of white light while being treated for his alcoholism using the so-called "belladonna cure" -- a mixture of various hallucinogenic and toxic substances that was meant to cure alcoholism. When W. tried LSD, he found it replicated his previous spiritual experience and became very evangelistic about its use by alcoholics, thinking it could give them the same kind of awakening he'd had. Leary became convinced that if LSD could work on alcoholics, it could also be used to help reshape the personalities of habitual criminals and lead them away from reoffending. His idea for how to treat people was based, in part, on the ideas of transactional analysis. There is always a hierarchical relationship between a therapist and their patient, and that hierarchical relationship itself, in Leary's opinion, forced people into particular game roles and made it impossible for them to relate as equals, and thus impossible for the therapist to truly help the patient. So his idea was that there needed to be a shared bonding experience between patient and doctor. So in his prison experiments, he and the other people involved, including Ralph Metzner, one of his grad students, would take psilocybin *with* the patients. In short-term follow-ups the patients who went through this treatment process were less depressed, felt better, and were only half as likely to reoffend as normal prisoners. But critics pointed out that the prisoners had been getting a lot of individual attention and support, and there was no control group getting that support without the psychedelics. [Excerpt: The Psychedelic Experience] As the experiments progressed, though, things were becoming tense within Harvard. There was concern that some of the students who were being given psilocybin were psychologically vulnerable and were being put at real risk. There was also worry about the way that Leary and Dass were emphasising experience over analysis, which was felt to be against the whole of academia. Increasingly it looked like there was a clique forming as well, with those who had taken part in their experiments on the inside and looking down on those outside, and it looked to many people like this was turning into an actual cult. This was simply not what the Harvard psychology department was meant to be doing. And one Harvard student was out to shut them down for good, and his name was Andrew Weil. Weil is now best known as one of the leading lights in alternative health, and has made appearances on Oprah and Larry King Live, but for many years his research interest was in mind-altering chemicals -- his undergraduate thesis was on the use of nutmeg to induce different states of consciousness. At this point Weil was an undergraduate, and he and his friend Ronnie Winston had both tried to get involved in the Harvard Psilocybin Project, but had been turned down -- while they were enthusiastic about it, they were also undergraduates, and Leary and Dass had agreed with the university that they wouldn't be using undergraduates in their project, and that only graduate students, faculty, and outsiders would be involved. So Weil and Winston had started their own series of experiments, using mescaline after they'd been unable to get any psilocybin -- they'd contacted Aldous Huxley, the author of The Doors of Perception and an influence on Leary and Dass' experiments, and asked him where they could get mescaline, and he'd pointed them in the right direction. But then Winston and Dass had become friends, and Dass had given Winston some psilocybin -- not as part of his experiments, so Dass didn't think he was crossing a line, but just socially. Weil saw this as a betrayal by Winston, who stopped hanging round with him once he became close to Dass, and also as a rejection of him by Dass and Leary. If they'd give Winston psilocybin, why wouldn't they give it to him? Weil was a writer for the Harvard Crimson, Harvard's newspaper, and he wrote a series of exposes on Leary and Dass for the Crimson. He went to his former friend Winston's father and told him "Your son is getting drugs from a faculty member. If your son will admit to that charge, we'll cut out your son's name. We won't use it in the article." Winston did admit to the charge, under pressure from his father, and was brought to tell the Dean, saying to the Dean “Yes, sir, I did, and it was the most educational experience I've had at Harvard.” Weil wrote about this for the Crimson, and the story was picked up by the national media. Weil eventually wrote about Leary and Dass for Look magazine, where he wrote “There were stories of students and others using hallucinogens for seductions, both heterosexual and homosexual.” And this seems actually to have been a big part of Weil's motivation. While Dass and Winston always said that their relationship was purely platonic, Dass was bisexual, and Weil seems to have assumed his friend had been led astray by an evil seducer. This was at a time when homophobia and biphobia were even more prevalent in society than they are now, and part of the reason Leary and Dass fell out in the late sixties is that Leary started to see Dass' sexuality as evil and perverted and something they should be trying to use LSD to cure. The experiments became a national scandal, and one of the reasons that LSD was criminalised a few years later. Dass was sacked for giving drugs to undergraduates; Leary had gone off to Mexico to get away from the stress, leaving his kids with Dass. He would be sacked for going off without permission and leaving his classes untaught. As Leary and Dass were out of Harvard, they had to look for other sources of funding. Luckily, Dass turned William Mellon Hitchcock, the heir to the Mellon oil fortune, on to acid, and he and his brother Tommy and sister Peggy gave them the run of a sixty-four room mansion, named Millbrook. When they started there, they were still trying to be academics, but over the five years they were at Millbrook it became steadily less about research and more of a hippie commune, with regular visitors and long-term residents including Alan Ginsberg, William Burroughs, and the jazz musician Maynard Ferguson, who would later get a small amount of fame with jazz-rock records like his version of "MacArthur Park": [Excerpt: Maynard Ferguson, "MacArthur Park"] It was at Millbrook that Leary, Dass, and Metzner would write the book that became The Psychedelic Experience. This book was inspired by the Bardo Thödol, a book allegedly written by Padmasambhava, the man who introduced Buddhism to Tibet in the eighth century, though no copies of it are known to have existed before the fourteenth century, when it was supposedly discovered by Karma Lingpa. Its title translates as Liberation Through Hearing During the Intermediate State, but it was translated into English under the name The Tibetan Book of the Dead, as Walter Evans-Wentz, who compiled and edited the first English translation was, like many Westerners who studied Buddhism in the early part of the twentieth century, doing so because he was an occultist and a member of the Theosophical Society, which believes the secret occult masters of the world live in Tibet, but which also considered the Egyptian Book of the Dead -- a book which bears little relationship to the Bardo Thödol, and which was written thousands of years earlier on a different continent -- to be a major religious document. So it was through that lens that Evans-Wentz was viewing the Bardo Thödol, and he renamed the book to emphasise what he perceived as its similarities. Part of the Bardo Thödol is a description of what happens to someone between death and rebirth -- the process by which the dead person becomes aware of true reality, and then either transcends it or is dragged back into it by their lesser impulses -- and a series of meditations that can be used to help with that transcendence. In the version published as The Tibetan Book of the Dead, this is accompanied by commentary from Evans-Wentz, who while he was interested in Buddhism didn't actually know that much about Tibetan Buddhism, and was looking at the text through a Theosophical lens, and mostly interpreting it using Hindu concepts. Later editions of Evans-Wentz's version added further commentary by Carl Jung, which looked at Evans-Wentz's version of the book through Jung's own lens, seeing it as a book about psychological states, not about anything more supernatural (although Jung's version of psychology was always a supernaturalist one, of course). His Westernised, psychologised, version of the book's message became part of the third edition. Metzner later said "At the suggestion of Aldous Huxley and Gerald Heard we began using the Bardo Thödol ( Tibetan Book of the Dead) as a guide to psychedelic sessions. The Tibetan Buddhists talked about the three phases of experience on the “intermediate planes” ( bardos) between death and rebirth. We translated this to refer to the death and the rebirth of the ego, or ordinary personality. Stripped of the elaborate Tibetan symbolism and transposed into Western concepts, the text provided a remarkable parallel to our findings." Leary, Dass, and Metzner rewrote the book into a form that could be used to guide a reader through a psychedelic trip, through the death of their ego and its rebirth. Later, Leary would record an abridged audiobook version, and it's this that we've been hearing excerpts of during this podcast so far: [Excerpt: The Psychedelic Experience "Turn off your mind, relax, float downstream" about 04:15] When we left the Beatles, they were at the absolute height of their fame, though in retrospect the cracks had already begun to show. Their second film had been released, and the soundtrack had contained some of their best work, but the title track, "Help!", had been a worrying insight into John Lennon's current mental state. Immediately after making the film and album, of course, they went back out touring, first a European tour, then an American one, which probably counts as the first true stadium tour. There had been other stadium shows before the Beatles 1965 tour -- we talked way back in the first episodes of the series about how Sister Rosetta Tharpe had a *wedding* that was a stadium gig. But of course there are stadiums and stadiums, and the Beatles' 1965 tour had them playing the kind of venues that no other musician, and certainly no other rock band, had ever played. Most famously, of course, there was the opening concert of the tour at Shea Stadium, where they played to an audience of fifty-five thousand people -- the largest audience a rock band had ever played for, and one which would remain a record for many years. Most of those people, of course, couldn't actually hear much of anything -- the band weren't playing through a public address system designed for music, just playing through the loudspeakers that were designed for commentating on baseball games. But even if they had been playing through the kind of modern sound systems used today, it's unlikely that the audience would have heard much due to the overwhelming noise coming from the crowd. Similarly, there were no live video feeds of the show or any of the other things that nowadays make it at least possible for the audience to have some idea what is going on on stage. The difference between this and anything that anyone had experienced before was so great that the group became overwhelmed. There's video footage of the show -- a heavily-edited version, with quite a few overdubs and rerecordings of some tracks was broadcast on TV, and it's also been shown in cinemas more recently as part of promotion for an underwhelming documentary about the Beatles' tours -- and you can see Lennon in particular becoming actually hysterical during the performance of "I'm Down", where he's playing the organ with his elbows. Sadly the audio nature of this podcast doesn't allow me to show Lennon's facial expression, but you can hear something of the exuberance in the performance. This is from what is labelled as a copy of the raw audio of the show -- the version broadcast on TV had a fair bit of additional sweetening work done on it: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I'm Down (Live at Shea Stadium)"] After their American tour they had almost six weeks off work to write new material before going back into the studio to record their second album of the year, and one which would be a major turning point for the group. The first day of the recording sessions for this new album, Rubber Soul, started with two songs of Lennon's. The first of these was "Run For Your Life", a song Lennon never later had much good to say about, and which is widely regarded as the worst song on the album. That song was written off a line from Elvis Presley's version of "Baby Let's Play House", and while Lennon never stated this, it's likely that it was brought to mind by the Beatles having met with Elvis during their US tour. But the second song was more interesting. Starting with "Help!", Lennon had been trying to write more interesting lyrics. This had been inspired by two conversations with British journalists -- Kenneth Allsop had told Lennon that while he liked Lennon's poetry, the lyrics to his songs were banal in comparison and he found them unlistenable as a result, while Maureen Cleave, a journalist who was a close friend with Lennon, had told him that she hadn't noticed a single word in any of his lyrics with more than two syllables, so he made more of an effort with "Help!", putting in words like "independence" and "insecure". As he said in one of his last interviews, "I was insecure then, and things like that happened more than once. I never considered it before. So after that I put a few words with three syllables in, but she didn't think much of them when I played it for her, anyway.” Cleave may have been an inspiration for "Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)". There are very strong rumours that Lennon had an affair with Cleave in the mid-sixties, and if that's true it would definitely fit into a pattern. Lennon had many, many, affairs during his first marriage, both brief one-night stands and deeper emotional attachments, and those emotional attachments were generally with women who were slightly older, intellectual, somewhat exotic looking by the standards of 1960s Britain, and in the arts. Lennon later claimed to have had an affair with Eleanor Bron, the Beatles' co-star in Help!, though she always denied this, and it's fairly widely established that he did have an affair with Alma Cogan, a singer who he'd mocked during her peak of popularity in the fifties, but who would later become one of his closest friends: [Excerpt: Alma Cogan, "Why Do Fools Fall in Love?"] And "Norwegian Wood", the second song recorded for Rubber Soul, started out as a confession to one of these affairs, a way of Lennon admitting it to his wife without really admitting it. The figure in the song is a slightly aloof, distant woman, and the title refers to the taste among Bohemian British people at the time for minimalist decor made of Scandinavian pine -- something that would have been a very obvious class signifier at the time. [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)"] Lennon and McCartney had different stories about who wrote what in the song, and Lennon's own story seems to have changed at various times. What seems to have happened is that Lennon wrote the first couple of verses while on holiday with George Martin, and finished it off later with McCartney's help. McCartney seems to have come up with the middle eight melody -- which is in Dorian mode rather than the Mixolydian mode of the verses -- and to have come up with the twist ending, where the woman refuses to sleep with the protagonist and laughs at him, he goes to sleep in the bath rather than her bed, wakes up alone, and sets fire to the house in revenge. This in some ways makes "Norwegian Wood" the thematic centrepiece of the album that was to result, combining several of the themes its two songwriters came back to throughout the album and the single recorded alongside it. Like Lennon's "Run For Your Life" it has a misogynistic edge to it, and deals with taking revenge against a woman, but like his song "Girl", it deals with a distant, unattainable, woman, who the singer sees as above him but who has a slightly cruel edge -- the kind of girl who puts you down when friends are there, you feel a fool, is very similar to the woman who tells you to sit down but has no chairs in her minimalist flat. A big teaser who takes you half the way there is likely to laugh at you as you crawl off to sleep in the bath while she goes off to bed alone. Meanwhile, McCartney's two most popular contributions to the album, "Michelle" and "Drive My Car", also feature unattainable women, but are essentially comedy songs -- "Michelle" is a pastiche French song which McCartney used to play as a teenager while pretending to be foreign to impress girls, dug up and finished for the album, while "Drive My Car" is a comedy song with a twist in the punchline, just like "Norwegian Wood", though "Norwegian Wood"s twist is darker. But "Norwegian Wood" is even more famous for its music than for its lyric. The basis of the song is Lennon imitating Dylan's style -- something that Dylan saw, and countered with "Fourth Time Around", a song which people have interpreted multiple ways, but one of those interpretations has always been that it's a fairly vicious parody of "Norwegian Wood": [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Fourth Time Around"] Certainly Lennon thought that at first, saying a few years later "I was very paranoid about that. I remember he played it to me when he was in London. He said, what do you think? I said, I don't like it. I didn't like it. I was very paranoid. I just didn't like what I felt I was feeling – I thought it was an out and out skit, you know, but it wasn't. It was great. I mean he wasn't playing any tricks on me. I was just going through the bit." But the aspect of "Norwegian Wood" that has had more comment over the years has been the sitar part, played by George Harrison: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Norwegian Wood"] This has often been called the first sitar to be used on a rock record, and that may be the case, but it's difficult to say for sure. Indian music was very much in the air among British groups in September 1965, when the Beatles recorded the track. That spring, two records had almost simultaneously introduced Indian-influenced music into the pop charts. The first had been the Yardbirds' "Heart Full of Soul", released in June and recorded in April. In fact, the Yardbirds had actually used a sitar on their first attempt at recording the song, which if it had been released would have been an earlier example than the Beatles: [Excerpt: The Yardbirds, "Heart Full of Soul (first version)"] But in the finished recording they had replaced that with Jeff Beck playing a guitar in a way that made it sound vaguely like a sitar, rather than using a real one: [Excerpt: The Yardbirds, "Heart Full of Soul (single)"] Meanwhile, after the Yardbirds had recorded that but before they'd released it, and apparently without any discussion between the two groups, the Kinks had done something similar on their "See My Friends", which came out a few weeks after the Yardbirds record: [Excerpt: The Kinks, "See My Friends"] (Incidentally, that track is sometimes titled "See My Friend" rather than "See My Friends", but that's apparently down to a misprint on initial pressings rather than that being the intended title). As part of this general flowering of interest in Indian music, George Harrison had become fascinated with the sound of the sitar while recording scenes in Help! which featured some Indian musicians. He'd then, as we discussed in the episode on "Eight Miles High" been introduced by David Crosby on the Beatles' summer US tour to the music of Ravi Shankar. "Norwegian Wood" likely reminded Harrison of Shankar's work for a couple of reasons. The first is that the melody is very modal -- as I said before, the verses are in Mixolydian mode, while the middle eights are in Dorian -- and as we saw in the "Eight Miles High" episode Indian music is very modal. The second is that for the most part, the verse is all on one chord -- a D chord as Lennon originally played it, though in the final take it's capoed on the second fret so it sounds in E. The only time the chord changes at all is on the words "once had" in the phrase “she once had me” where for one beat each Lennon plays a C9 and a G (sounding as a D9 and A). Both these chords, in the fingering Lennon is using, feel to a guitarist more like "playing a D chord and lifting some fingers up or putting some down" rather than playing new chords, and this is a fairly common way of thinking about stuff particularly when talking about folk and folk-rock music -- you'll tend to get people talking about the "Needles and Pins" riff as being "an A chord where you twiddle your finger about on the D string" rather than changing between A, Asus2, and Asus4. So while there are chord changes, they're minimal and of a kind that can be thought of as "not really" chord changes, and so that may well have reminded Harrison of the drone that's so fundamental to Indian classical music. Either way, he brought in his sitar, and they used it on the track, both the version they cut on the first day of recording and the remake a week later which became the album track: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)"] At the same time as the group were recording Rubber Soul, they were also working on two tracks that would become their next single -- released as a double A-side because the group couldn't agree which of the two to promote. Both of these songs were actual Lennon/McCartney collaborations, something that was increasingly rare at this point. One, "We Can Work it Out" was initiated by McCartney, and like many of his songs of this period was inspired by tensions in his relationship with his girlfriend Jane Asher -- two of his other songs for Rubber Soul were "I'm Looking Through You" and "You Won't See Me". The other, "Day Tripper", was initiated by Lennon, and had other inspirations: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Day Tripper"] John Lennon and George Harrison's first acid trip had been in spring of 1965, around the time they were recording Help! The fullest version of how they came to try it I've read was in an interview George Harrison gave to Creem magazine in 1987, which I'll quote a bit of: "I had a dentist who invited me and John and our ex-wives to dinner, and he had this acid he'd got off the guy who ran Playboy in London. And the Playboy guy had gotten it off, you know, the people who had it in America. What's his name, Tim Leary. And this guy had never had it himself, didn't know anything about it, but he thought it was an aphrodisiac and he had this girlfriend with huge breasts. He invited us down there with our blonde wives and I think he thought he was gonna have a scene. And he put it in our coffee without telling us—he didn't take any himself. We didn't know we had it, and we'd made an arrangement earlier—after we had dinner we were gonna go to this nightclub to see some friends of ours who were playing in a band. And I was saying, "OK, let's go, we've got to go," and this guy kept saying, "No, don't go, finish your coffee. Then, 20 minutes later or something, I'm saying, "C'mon John, we'd better go now. We're gonna miss the show." And he says we shouldn't go 'cause we've had LSD." They did leave anyway, and they had an experience they later remembered as being both profound and terrifying -- nobody involved had any idea what the effects of LSD actually were, and they didn't realise it was any different from cannabis or amphetamines. Harrison later described feelings of universal love, but also utter terror -- believing himself to be in hell, and that world war III was starting. As he said later "We'd heard of it, but we never knew what it was about and it was put in our coffee maliciously. So it really wasn't us turning each other or the world or anything—we were the victims of silly people." But both men decided it was an experience they needed to have again, and one they wanted to share with their friends. Their next acid trip was the one that we talked about in the episode on "Eight Miles High", with Roger McGuinn, David Crosby, and Peter Fonda. That time Neil Aspinall and Ringo took part as well, but at this point Paul was still unsure about taking it -- he would later say that he was being told by everyone that it changed your worldview so radically you'd never be the same again, and he was understandably cautious about this. Certainly it had a profound effect on Lennon and Harrison -- Starr has never really talked in detail about his own experiences. Harrison would later talk about how prior to taking acid he had been an atheist, but his experiences on the drug gave him an unshakeable conviction in the existence of God -- something he would spend the rest of his life exploring. Lennon didn't change his opinions that drastically, but he did become very evangelistic about the effects of LSD. And "Day Tripper" started out as a dig at what he later described as weekend hippies, who took acid but didn't change the rest of their lives -- which shows a certain level of ego in a man who had at that point only taken acid twice himself -- though in collaboration with McCartney it turned into another of the rather angry songs about unavailable women they were writing at this point. The line "she's a big teaser, she took me half the way there" apparently started as "she's a prick teaser": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Day Tripper"] In the middle of the recording of Rubber Soul, the group took a break to receive their MBEs from the Queen. Officially the group were awarded these because they had contributed so much to British exports. In actual fact, they received them because the Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, had a government with a majority of only four MPs and was thinking about calling an election to boost his majority. He represented a Liverpool constituency, and wanted to associate his Government and the Labour Party with the most popular entertainers in the UK. "Day Tripper" and "We Can Work it Out" got their TV premiere on a show recorded for Granada TV, The Music of Lennon and McCartney, and fans of British TV trivia will be pleased to note that the harmonium Lennon plays while the group mimed "We Can Work it Out" in that show is the same one that was played in Coronation Street by Ena Sharples -- the character we heard last episode being Davy Jones' grandmother. As well as the Beatles themselves, that show included other Brian Epstein artists like Cilla Black and Billy J Kramer singing songs that Lennon and McCartney had given to them, plus Peter Sellers, the Beatles' comedy idol, performing "A Hard Day's Night" in the style of Laurence Olivier as Richard III: [Excerpt: Peter Sellers, "A Hard Day's Night"] Another performance on the show was by Peter and Gordon, performing a hit that Paul had given to them, one of his earliest songs: [Excerpt: Peter and Gordon, "A World Without Love"] Peter Asher, of Peter and Gordon, was the brother of Paul McCartney's girlfriend, the actor Jane Asher. And while the other three Beatles were living married lives in mansions in suburbia, McCartney at this point was living with the Asher family in London, and being introduced by them to a far more Bohemian, artistic, hip crowd of people than he had ever before experienced. They were introducing him to types of art and culture of which he had previously been ignorant, and while McCartney was the only Beatle so far who hadn't taken LSD, this kind of mind expansion was far more appealing to him. He was being introduced to art film, to electronic composers like Stockhausen, and to ideas about philosophy and art that he had never considered. Peter Asher was a friend of John Dunbar, who at the time was Marianne Faithfull's husband, though Faithfull had left him and taken up with Mick Jagger, and of Barry Miles, a writer, and in September 1965 the three men had formed a company, Miles, Asher and Dunbar Limited, or MAD for short, which had opened up a bookshop and art gallery, the Indica Gallery, which was one of the first places in London to sell alternative or hippie books and paraphernalia, and which also hosted art events by people like members of the Fluxus art movement. McCartney was a frequent customer, as you might imagine, and he also encouraged the other Beatles to go along, and the Indica Gallery would play an immense role in the group's history, which we'll look at in a future episode. But the first impact it had on the group was when John and Paul went to the shop in late 1965, just after the recording and release of Rubber Soul and the "Day Tripper"/"We Can Work It Out" single, and John bought a copy of The Psychedelic Experience by Leary, Dass, and Metzner. He read the book on a plane journey while going on holiday -- reportedly while taking his third acid trip -- and was inspired. When he returned, he wrote a song which became the first track to be recorded for the group's next album, Revolver: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Tomorrow Never Knows"] The lyrics were inspired by the parts of The Psychedelic Experience which were in turn inspired by the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Now, it's important to put it this way because most people who talk about this record have apparently never read the book which inspired it. I've read many, many, books on the Beatles which claim that The Psychedelic Experience simply *is* the Tibetan Book of the Dead, slightly paraphrased. In fact, while the authors use the Tibetan Book of the Dead as a structure on which to base their book, much of the book is detailed descriptions of Leary, Dass, and Metzner's hypotheses about what is actually happening during a psychedelic trip, and their notes on the book -- in particular they provide commentaries to the commentaries, giving their view of what Carl Jung meant when he talked about it, and of Evans-Wentz's opinions, and especially of a commentary by Anagarika Govinda, a Westerner who had taken up Tibetan Buddhism seriously and become a monk and one of its most well-known exponents in the West. By the time it's been filtered through so many different viewpoints and perspectives, each rewriting and reinterpreting it to suit their own preconceived ideas, they could have started with a book on the habitat of the Canada goose and ended with much the same result. Much of this is the kind of mixture between religious syncretism and pseudoscience that will be very familiar to anyone who has encountered New Age culture in any way, statements like "The Vedic sages knew the secret; the Eleusinian Initiates knew it; the Tantrics knew it. In all their esoteric writings they whisper the message: It is possible to cut beyond ego-consciousness, to tune in on neurological processes which flash by at the speed of light, and to become aware of the enormous treasury of ancient racial knowledge welded into the nucleus of every cell in your body". This kind of viewpoint is one that has been around in one form or another since the nineteenth century religious revivals in America that led to Mormonism, Christian Science, and the New Thought. It's found today in books and documentaries like The Secret and the writings of people like Deepak Chopra, and the idea is always the same one -- people thousands of years ago had a lost wisdom that has only now been rediscovered through the miracle of modern science. This always involves a complete misrepresentation of both the lost wisdom and of the modern science. In particular, Leary, Dass, and Metzner's book freely mixes between phrases that sound vaguely scientific, like "There are no longer things and persons but only the direct flow of particles", things that are elements of Tibetan Buddhism, and references to ego games and "game-existence" which come from Leary's particular ideas of psychology as game interactions. All of this is intermingled, and so the claims that some have made that Lennon based the lyrics on the Tibetan Book of the Dead itself are very wrong. Rather the song, which he initially called "The Void", is very much based on Timothy Leary. The song itself was very influenced by Indian music. The melody line consists of only four notes -- E, G, C, and B flat, over a space of an octave: [Demonstrates] This sparse use of notes is very similar to the pentatonic scales in a lot of folk music, but that B-flat makes it the Mixolydian mode, rather than the E minor pentatonic scale our ears at first make it feel like. The B-flat also implies a harmony change -- Lennon originally sang the whole song over one chord, a C, which has the notes C, E, and G in it, but a B-flat note implies instead a chord of C7 -- this is another one of those occasions where you just put one finger down to change the chord while playing, and I suspect that's what Lennon did: [Demonstrates] Lennon's song was inspired by Indian music, but what he wanted was to replicate the psychedelic experience, and this is where McCartney came in. McCartney was, as I said earlier, listening to a lot of electronic composers as part of his general drive to broaden his mind, and in particular he had been listening to quite a bit of Karlheinz Stockhausen. Stockhausen was a composer who had studied with Olivier Messiaen in the 1940s, and had then become attached to the Groupe de Recherche de Musique Concrète along with Messiaen, Pierre Boulez, Edgard Varese and others, notably Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry. These composers were interested in a specific style of music called musique concrète, a style that had been pioneered by Schaeffer. Musique concrète is music that is created from, or at least using, prerecorded sounds that have been electronically altered, rather than with live instruments. Often this would involve found sound -- music made not by instruments at all, but by combining recorded sounds of objects, like with the first major work of musique concrète, Pierre Schaeffer's Cinq études de bruits: [Excerpt: Pierre Schaeffer, "Etude aux Chemins de faire" (from Cinq études de bruits)] Early on, musique concrète composers worked in much the same way that people use turntables to create dance music today -- they would have multiple record players, playing shellac discs, and a mixing desk, and they would drop the needle on the record players to various points, play the records backwards, and so forth. One technique that Schaeffer had come up with was to create records with a closed groove, so that when the record finished, the groove would go back to the start -- the record would just keep playing the same thing over and over and over. Later, when magnetic tape had come into use, Schaeffer had discovered you could get the same effect much more easily by making an actual loop of tape, and had started making loops of tape whose beginnings were stuck to their ending -- again creating something that could keep going over and over. Stockhausen had taken up the practice of using tape loops, most notably in a piece that McCartney was a big admirer of, Gesang der Jeunglinge: [Excerpt: Karlheinz Stockhausen, "Gesang der Jeunglinge"] McCartney suggested using tape loops on Lennon's new song, and everyone was in agreement. And this is the point where George Martin really starts coming into his own as a producer for the group. Martin had always been a good producer, but his being a good producer had up to this point mostly consisted of doing little bits of tidying up and being rather hands-off. He'd scored the strings on "Yesterday", played piano parts, and made suggestions like speeding up "Please Please Me" or putting the hook of "Can't Buy Me Love" at the beginning. Important contributions, contributions that turned good songs into great records, but nothing that Tony Hatch or Norrie Paramor or whoever couldn't have done. Indeed, his biggest contribution had largely been *not* being a Hatch or Paramor, and not imposing his own songs on the group, letting their own artistic voices flourish. But at this point Martin's unique skillset came into play. Martin had specialised in comedy records before his work with the Beatles, and he had worked with Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan of the Goons, making records that required a far odder range of sounds than the normal pop record: [Excerpt: The Goons, "Unchained Melody"] The Goons' radio show had used a lot of sound effects created by the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, a department of the BBC that specialised in creating musique concrète, and Martin had also had some interactions with the Radiophonic Workshop. In particular, he had worked with Maddalena Fagandini of the Workshop on an experimental single combining looped sounds and live instruments, under the pseudonym "Ray Cathode": [Excerpt: Ray Cathode, "Time Beat"] He had also worked on a record that is if anything even more relevant to "Tomorrow Never Knows". Unfortunately, that record is by someone who has been convicted of very serious sex offences. In this case, Rolf Harris, the man in question, was so well-known in Britain before his arrest, so beloved, and so much a part of many people's childhoods, that it may actually be traumatic for people to hear his voice knowing about his crimes. So while I know that showing the slightest consideration for my listeners' feelings will lead to a barrage of comments from angry old men calling me a "woke snowflake" for daring to not want to retraumatise vulnerable listeners, I'll give a little warning before I play the first of two segments of his recordings in a minute. When I do, if you skip forward approximately ninety seconds, you'll miss that section out. Harris was an Australian all-round entertainer, known in Britain for his novelty records, like the unfortunately racist "Tie Me Kangaroo Down Sport" -- which the Beatles later recorded with him in a non-racist version for a BBC session. But he had also, in 1960, recorded and released in Australia a song he'd written based on his understanding of Aboriginal Australian religious beliefs, and backed by Aboriginal musicians on didgeridoo. And we're going to hear that clip now: [Excerpt. Rolf Harris, "Sun Arise" original] EMI, his British label, had not wanted to release that as it was, so he'd got together with George Martin and they'd put together a new version, for British release. That had included a new middle-eight, giving the song a tiny bit of harmonic movement, and Martin had replaced the didgeridoos with eight cellos, playing a drone: [Excerpt: Rolf Harris, "Sun Arise", 1962 version ] OK, we'll just wait a few seconds for anyone who skipped that to catch up... Now, there are some interesting things about that track. That is a track based on a non-Western religious belief, based around a single drone -- the version that Martin produced had a chord change for the middle eight, but the verses were still on the drone -- using the recording studio to make the singer's voice sound different, with a deep, pulsating, drum sound, and using a melody with only a handful of notes, which doesn't start on the tonic but descends to it. Sound familiar? Oh, and a young assistant engineer had worked with George Martin on that session in 1962, in what several sources say was their first session together, and all sources say was one of their first. That young assistant engineer was Geoff Emerick, who had now been promoted to the main engineer role, and was working his first Beatles session in that role on “Tomorrow Never Knows”. Emerick was young and eager to experiment, and he would become a major part of the Beatles' team for the next few years, acting as engineer on all their recordings in 1966 and 67, and returning in 1969 for their last album. To start with, the group recorded a loop of guitar and drums, heavily treated: [Excerpt: "Tomorrow Never Knows", loop] That loop was slowed down to half its speed, and played throughout: [Excerpt: "Tomorrow Never Knows", loop] Onto that the group overdubbed a second set of live drums and Lennon's vocal. Lennon wanted his voice to sound like the Dalai Lama singing from a mountaintop, or like thousands of Tibetan monks. Obviously the group weren't going to fly to Tibet and persuade monks to sing for them, so they wanted some unusual vocal effect. This was quite normal for Lennon, actually. One of the odd things about Lennon is that while he's often regarded as one of the greatest rock vocalists of all time, he always hated his own voice and wanted to change it in the studio. After the Beatles' first album there's barely a dry Lennon solo vocal anywhere on any record he ever made. Either he would be harmonising with someone else, or he'd double-track his vocal, or he'd have it drenched in reverb, or some other effect -- anything to stop it sounding quite so much like him. And Geoff Emerick had the perfect idea. There's a type of speaker called a Leslie speaker, which was originally used to give Hammond organs their swirling sound, but which can be used with other instruments as well. It has two rotating speakers inside it, a bass one and a treble one, and it's the rotation that gives the swirling sound. Ken Townsend, the electrical engineer working on the record, hooked up the speaker from Abbey Road's Hammond organ to Lennon's mic, and Lennon was ecstatic with the sound: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Tomorrow Never Knows", take one] At least, he was ecstatic with the sound of his vocal, though he did wonder if it might be more interesting to get the same swirling effect by tying himself to a rope and being swung round the microphone The rest of the track wasn't quite working, though, and they decided to have a second attempt. But Lennon had been impressed enough by Emerick that he decided to have a chat with him about music -- his way of showing that Emerick had been accepted. He asked if Emerick had heard the new Tiny Tim record -- which shows how much attention Lennon was actually paying to music at this point. This was two years before Tim's breakthrough with "Tiptoe Through the Tulips", and his first single (unless you count a release from 1963 that was only released as a 78, in the sixties equivalent of a hipster cassette-only release), a version of "April Showers" backed with "Little Girl" -- the old folk song also known as "In the Pines" or "Where Did You Sleep Last Night?": [Excerpt: Tiny Tim, "Little Girl"] Unfortunately for Emerick, he hadn't heard the record, and rather than just say so he tried bluffing, saying "Yes, they're great". Lennon laughed at his attempt to sound like he knew what he was talking about, before explaining that Tiny Tim was a solo artist, though he did say "Nobody's really sure if it's actually a guy or some drag queen". For the second attempt, they decided to cut the whole backing track live rather than play to a loop. Lennon had had trouble staying in sync with the loop, but they had liked the thunderous sound that had been got from slowing the tape down. As Paul talked with Ringo about his drum part, suggesting a new pattern for him to play, Emerick went down into the studio from the control room and made some adjustments. He first deadened the sound of the bass drum by sticking a sweater in it -- it was actually a promotional sweater with eight arms, made when the film Help! had been provisionally titled Eight Arms to Hold You, which Mal Evans had been using as packing material. He then moved the mics much, much closer to the drums that EMI studio rules allowed -- mics can be damaged by loud noises, and EMI had very strict rules about distance, not allowing them within two feet of the drum kit. Emerick decided to risk his job by moving the mics mere inches from the drums, reasoning that he would probably have Lennon's support if he did this. He then put the drum signal through an overloaded Fairfield limiter, giving it a punchier sound than anything that had been recorded in a British studio up to that point: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Tomorrow Never Knows", isolated drums] That wasn't the only thing they did to make the record sound different though. As well as Emerick's idea for the Leslie speaker, Ken Townsend had his own idea of how to make Lennon's voice sound different. Lennon had often complained about the difficulty of double-tracking his voice, and so Townsend had had an idea -- if you took a normal recording, fed it to another tape machine a few milliseconds out of sync with the first, and then fed it back into the first, you could create a double-tracked effect without having to actually double-track the vocal. Townsend suggested this, and it was used for the first time on the first half of "Tomorrow Never Knows", before the Leslie speaker takes over. The technique is now known as "artificial double-tracking" or ADT, but the session actually gave rise to another term, commonly used for a similar but slightly different tape-manipulation effect that had already been used by Les Paul among others. Lennon asked how they'd got the effect and George Martin started to explain, but then realised Lennon wasn't really interested in the technical details, and said "we take the original image and we split it through a double-bifurcated sploshing flange". From that point on, Lennon referred to ADT as "flanging", and the term spread, though being applied to the other technique. (Just as a quick aside, some people have claimed other origins for the term "flanging", and they may be right, but I think this is the correct story). Over the backing track they added tambourine and organ overdubs -- with the organ changing to a B flat chord when the vocal hits the B-flat note, even though the rest of the band stays on C -- and then a series of tape loops, mostly recorded by McCartney. There's a recording that circulates which has each of these loops isolated, played first forwards and then backwards at the speed they were recorded, and then going through at the speed they were used on the record, so let's go through these. There's what people call the "seagull" sound, which is apparently McCartney laughing, very distorted: [Excerpt: Tomorrow Never Knows loop] Then there's an orchestral chord: [Excerpt: Tomorrow Never Knows loop] A mellotron on its flute setting: [Excerpt: Tomorrow Never Knows loop] And on its string setting: [Excerpt: Tomorrow Never Knows loop] And a much longer loop of sitar music supplied by George: [Excerpt: Tomorrow Never Knows loop] Each of these loops were played on a different tape machine in a different part of Abbey Road -- they commandeered the entire studio complex, and got engineers to sit with the tapes looped round pencils and wine-glasses, while the Beatles supervised Emerick and Martin in mixing the loops into a single track. They then added a loop of a tamboura drone played by George, and the result was one of the strangest records ever released by a major pop group: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Tomorrow Never Knows"] While Paul did add some backwards guitar -- some sources say that this is a cut-up version of his solo from George's song "Taxman", but it's actually a different recording, though very much in the same style -- they decided that they were going to have a tape-loop solo rather than a guitar solo: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Tomorrow Never Knows"] And finally, at the end, there's some tack piano playing from McCartney, inspired by the kind of joke piano parts that used to turn up on the Goon Show. This was just McCartney messing about in the studio, but it was caught on tape, and they asked for it to be included at the end of the track. It's only faintly audible on the standard mixes of the track, but there was actually an alternative mono mix which was only released on British pressings of the album pressed on the first day of its release, before George Martin changed his mind about which mix should have been used, and that has a much longer excerpt of the piano on it. I have to say that I personally like that mix more, and the extra piano at the end does a wonderful job of undercutting what could otherwise be an overly-serious track, in much the same way as the laughter at the end of "Within You, Without You", which they recorded the next year. The same goes for the title -- the track was originally called "The Void", and the tape boxes were labelled "Mark One", but Lennon decided to name the track after one of Starr's malapropisms, the same way they had with "A Hard Day's Night", to avoid the track being too pompous. [Excerpt: Beatles interview] A track like that, of course, had to end the album. Now all they needed to do was to record another thirteen tracks to go before it. But that -- and what they did afterwards, is a story for another time. [Excerpt, "Tomorrow Never Knows (alternate mono mix)" piano tag into theme music]
This episode of The Stockout focuses on the rail industry. Mike Baudendistel interviews Tony Hatch, an independent railroad analyst and host of RailTrends, the premier rail industry conference. Tony shares his thoughts following his discussions with rail industry C-level executives, shippers, regulators and consultants.Follow The Stockout on Apple PodcastsFollow The Stockout on SpotifyMore FreightWaves Podcasts
This episode of The Stockout focuses on the rail industry. Mike Baudendistel interviews Tony Hatch, an independent railroad analyst and host of RailTrends, the premier rail industry conference. Tony shares his thoughts following his discussions with rail industry C-level executives, shippers, regulators and consultants.Follow The Stockout on Apple PodcastsFollow The Stockout on SpotifyMore FreightWaves Podcasts
Episode one hundred and thirty-six of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs is a special long episode, running almost ninety minutes, looking at "My Generation" by the Who. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a fifteen-minute bonus episode available, on "The Name Game" by Shirley Ellis. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Errata I mispronounce the Herman's Hermits track "Can't You Hear My Heartbeat" as "Can You Hear My Heartbeat". I say "Rebel Without a Cause" when I mean "The Wild One". Brando was not in "Rebel Without a Cause". Resources As usual, I've created a Mixcloud playlist of the music excerpted here. This mix does not include the Dixon of Dock Green theme, as I was unable to find a full version of that theme anywhere (though a version with Jack Warner singing, titled "An Ordinary Copper" is often labelled as it) and what you hear in this episode is the only fragment I could get a clean copy of. The best compilation of the Who's music is Maximum A's & B's, a three-disc set containing the A and B sides of every single they released. The super-deluxe five-CD version of the My Generation album appears to be out of print as a CD, but can be purchased digitally. I referred to a lot of books for this episode, including: Generations: The History of America's Future, 1584 to 2069 by William Strauss and Neil Howe, which I don't necessarily recommend reading, but which is certainly an influential book. Revolt Into Style: The Pop Arts by George Melly which I *do* recommend reading if you have any interest at all in British pop culture of the fifties and sixties. Jim Marshall: The Father of Loud by Rich Maloof gave me all the biographical details about Marshall. The Who Before the Who by Doug Sandom, a rather thin book of reminiscences by the group's first drummer. The Ox by Paul Rees, an authorised biography of John Entwistle based on notes for his never-completed autobiography. Who I Am, the autobiography of Pete Townshend, is one of the better rock autobiographies. A Band With Built-In Hate by Peter Stanfield is an examination of the group in the context of pop-art and Mod. And Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere by Andy Neill and Matt Kent is a day-by-day listing of the group's activities up to 1978. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript In 1991, William Strauss and Neil Howe wrote a book called Generations: The History of America's Future, 1584 to 2069. That book was predicated on a simple idea -- that there are patterns in American history, and that those patterns can be predicted in their rough outline. Not in the fine details, but broadly -- those of you currently watching the TV series Foundation, or familiar with Isaac Asimov's original novels, will have the idea already, because Strauss and Howe claimed to have invented a formula which worked as well as Asimov's fictional Psychohistory. Their claim was that, broadly speaking, generations can be thought to have a dominant personality type, influenced by the events that took place while they were growing up, which in turn are influenced by the personality types of the older generations. Because of this, Strauss and Howe claimed, American society had settled into a semi-stable pattern, where events repeat on a roughly eighty-eight-year cycle, driven by the behaviours of different personality types at different stages of their lives. You have four types of generation, which cycle -- the Adaptive, Idealist, Reactive, and Civic types. At any given time, one of these will be the elder statespeople, one will be the middle-aged people in positions of power, one will be the young rising people doing most of the work, and one will be the kids still growing up. You can predict what will happen, in broad outline, by how each of those generation types will react to challenges, and what position they will be in when those challenges arise. The idea is that major events change your personality, and also how you react to future events, and that how, say, Pearl Harbor affected someone will have been different for a kid hearing about the attack on the radio, an adult at the age to be drafted, and an adult who was too old to fight. The thesis of this book has, rather oddly, entered mainstream thought so completely that its ideas are taken as basic assumptions now by much of the popular discourse, even though on reading it the authors are so vague that pretty much anything can be taken as confirmation of their hypotheses, in much the same way that newspaper horoscopes always seem like they could apply to almost everyone's life. And sometimes, of course, they're just way off. For example they make the prediction that in 2020 there would be a massive crisis that would last several years, which would lead to a massive sense of community, in which "America will be implacably resolved to do what needs doing and fix what needs fixing", and in which the main task of those aged forty to sixty at that point would be to restrain those in leadership positions in the sixty-to-eighty age group from making irrational, impetuous, decisions which might lead to apocalypse. The crisis would likely end in triumph, but there was also a chance it might end in "moral fatigue, vast human tragedy, and a weak and vengeful sense of victory". I'm sure that none of my listeners can think of any events in 2020 that match this particular pattern. Despite its lack of rigour, Strauss and Howe's basic idea is now part of most people's intellectual toolkit, even if we don't necessarily think of them as the source for it. Indeed, even though they only talk about America in their book, their generational concept gets applied willy-nilly to much of the Western world. And likewise, for the most part we tend to think of the generations, whether American or otherwise, using the names they used. For the generations who were alive at the time they were writing, they used five main names, three of which we still use. Those born between 1901 and 1924 they term the "GI Generation", though those are now usually termed the "Greatest Generation". Those born between 1924 and 1942 were the "Silent Generation", those born 1943 through 1960 were the Boomers, and those born between 1982 and 2003 they labelled Millennials. Those born between 1961 and 1981 they labelled "thirteeners", because they were the unlucky thirteenth generation to be born in America since the declaration of independence. But that name didn't catch on. Instead, the name that people use to describe that generation is "Generation X", named after a late-seventies punk band led by Billy Idol: [Excerpt: Generation X, "Your Generation"] That band were short-lived, but they were in constant dialogue with the pop culture of ten to fifteen years earlier, Idol's own childhood. As well as that song, "Your Generation", which is obviously referring to the song this week's episode is about, they also recorded versions of John Lennon's "Gimme Some Truth", of Johnny Kidd and the Pirates' "Shakin' All Over", and an original song called "Ready Steady Go", about being in love with Cathy McGowan, the presenter of that show. And even their name was a reference, because Generation X were named after a book published in 1964, about not the generation we call Generation X, but about the Baby Boomers, and specifically about a series of fights on beaches across the South Coast of England between what at that point amounted to two gangs. These were fights between the old guard, the Rockers -- people who represented the recent past who wouldn't go away, what Americans would call "greasers", people who modelled themselves on Marlon Brando in Rebel Without A Cause, and who thought music had peaked with Gene Vincent and Eddie Cochran -- and a newer, younger, hipper, group of people, who represented the new, the modern -- the Mods: [Excerpt: The Who, "My Generation"] Jim Marshall, if he'd been American, would have been considered one of the Greatest Generation, but his upbringing was not typical of that, or of any, generation. When he was five, he was diagnosed as having skeletal tuberculosis, which had made his bones weak and easily broken. To protect them, he spent the next seven years of his life, from age five until twelve, in hospital in a full-body cast. The only opportunity he got to move during those years was for a few minutes every three months, when the cast would be cut off and reapplied to account for his growth during that time. Unsurprisingly, once he was finally out of the cast, he discovered he loved moving -- a lot. He dropped out of school aged thirteen -- most people at the time left school at aged fourteen anyway, and since he'd missed all his schooling to that point it didn't seem worth his while carrying on -- and took on multiple jobs, working sixty hours a week or more. But the job he made most money at was as an entertainer. He started out as a tap-dancer, taking advantage of his new mobility, but then his song-and-dance man routine became steadily more song and less dance, as people started to notice his vocal resemblance to Bing Crosby. He was working six nights a week as a singer, but when World War II broke out, the drummer in the seven-piece band he was working with was drafted -- Marshall wouldn't ever be drafted because of his history of illness. The other members of the band knew that as a dancer he had a good sense of rhythm, and so they made a suggestion -- if Jim took over the drums, they could split the money six ways rather than seven. Marshall agreed, but he discovered there was a problem. The drum kit was always positioned at the back of the stage, behind the PA, and he couldn't hear the other musicians clearly. This is actually OK for a drummer -- you're keeping time, and the rest of the band are following you, so as long as you can *sort of* hear them everyone can stay together. But a singer needs to be able to hear everything clearly, in order to stay on key. And this was in the days before monitor speakers, so the only option available was to just have a louder PA system. And since one wasn't available, Marshall just had to build one himself. And that's how Jim Marshall started building amplifiers. Marshall eventually gave up playing the drums, and retired to run a music shop. There's a story about Marshall's last gig as a drummer, which isn't in the biography of Marshall I read for this episode, but is told in other places by the son of the bandleader at that gig. Apparently Marshall had a very fraught relationship with his father, who was among other things a semi-professional boxer, and at that gig Marshall senior turned up and started heckling his son from the audience. Eventually the younger Marshall jumped off the stage and started hitting his dad, winning the fight, but he decided he wasn't going to perform in public any more. The band leader for that show was Clifford Townshend, a clarinet player and saxophonist whose main gig was as part of the Squadronaires, a band that had originally been formed during World War II by RAF servicemen to entertain other troops. Townshend, who had been a member of Oswald Moseley's fascist Blackshirts in the thirties but later had a change of heart, was a second-generation woodwind player -- his father had been a semi-professional flute player. As well as working with the Squadronaires, Townshend also put out one record under his own name in 1956, a version of "Unchained Melody" credited to "Cliff Townsend and his singing saxophone": [Excerpt: Cliff Townshend and his Singing Saxophone, "Unchained Melody"] Cliff's wife often performed with him -- she was a professional singer who had actually lied about her age in order to join up with the Air Force and sing with the group -- but they had a tempestuous marriage, and split up multiple times. As a result of this, and the travelling lifestyle of musicians, there were periods where their son Peter was sent to live with his grandmother, who was seriously abusive, traumatising the young boy in ways that would affect him for the rest of his life. When Pete Townshend was growing up, he wasn't particularly influenced by music, in part because it was his dad's job rather than a hobby, and his parents had very few records in the house. He did, though, take up the harmonica and learn to play the theme tune to Dixon of Dock Green: [Excerpt: Tommy Reilly, "Dixon of Dock Green Theme"] His first exposure to rock and roll wasn't through Elvis or Little Richard, but rather through Ray Ellington. Ellington was a British jazz singer and drummer, heavily influenced by Louis Jordan, who provided regular musical performances on the Goon Show throughout the fifties, and on one episode had performed "That Rock 'n' Rollin' Man": [Excerpt: Ray Ellington, "That Rock 'N' Rollin' Man"] Young Pete's assessment of that, as he remembered it later, was "I thought it some kind of hybrid jazz: swing music with stupid lyrics. But it felt youthful and rebellious, like The Goon Show itself." But he got hooked on rock and roll when his father took him and a friend to see a film: [Excerpt: Bill Haley and the Comets, "Rock Around the Clock"] According to Townshend's autobiography, "I asked Dad what he thought of the music. He said he thought it had some swing, and anything that had swing was OK. For me it was more than just OK. After seeing Rock Around the Clock with Bill Haley, nothing would ever be quite the same." Young Pete would soon go and see Bill Haley live – his first rock and roll gig. But the older Townshend would soon revise his opinion of rock and roll, because it soon marked the end of the kind of music that had allowed him to earn his living -- though he still managed to get regular work, playing a clarinet was suddenly far less lucrative than it had been. Pete decided that he wanted to play the saxophone, like his dad, but soon he switched first to guitar and then to banjo. His first guitar was bought for him by his abusive grandmother, and three of the strings snapped almost immediately, so he carried on playing with just three strings for a while. He got very little encouragement from his parents, and didn't really improve for a couple of years. But then the trad jazz boom happened, and Townshend teamed up with a friend of his who played the trumpet and French horn. He had initially bonded with John Entwistle over their shared sense of humour -- both kids loved Mad magazine and would make tape recordings together of themselves doing comedy routines inspired by the Goon show and Hancock's Half Hour -- but Entwistle was also a very accomplished musician, who could play multiple instruments. Entwistle had formed a trad band called the Confederates, and Townshend joined them on banjo and guitar, but they didn't stay together for long. Both boys, though, would join a variety of other bands, both together and separately. As the trad boom faded and rock and roll regained its dominance among British youth, there was little place for Entwistle's trumpet in the music that was popular among teenagers, and at first Entwistle decided to try making his trumpet sound more like a saxophone, using a helmet as a mute to try to get it to sound like the sax on "Ramrod" by Duane Eddy: [Excerpt: Duane Eddy, "Ramrod"] Eddy soon became Entwistle's hero. We've talked about him before a couple of times, briefly, but not in depth, but Duane Eddy had a style that was totally different from most guitar heroes. Instead of playing mostly on the treble strings of the guitar, playing high twiddly parts, Eddy played low notes on the bass strings of his guitar, giving him the style that he summed up in album titles like "The Twang's the Thang" and "Have Twangy Guitar Will Travel". After a couple of years of having hits with this sound, produced by Lee Hazelwood and Lester Sill, Eddy also started playing another instrument, the instrument variously known as the six-string bass, the baritone guitar, or the Danelectro bass (after the company that manufactured the most popular model). The baritone guitar has six strings, like a normal guitar, but it's tuned lower than a standard guitar -- usually a fourth lower, though different players have different preferences. The Danelectro became very popular in recording studios in the early sixties, because it helped solve a big problem in recording bass tones. You can hear more about this in the episodes of Cocaine and Rhinestones I recommended last week, but basically double basses were very, very difficult to record in the 1950s, and you'd often end up just getting a thudding, muddy, sound from them, which is one reason why when you listen to a lot of early rockabilly the bass is doing nothing very interesting, just playing root notes -- you couldn't easily get much clarity on the instrument at all. Conversely, with electric basses, with the primitive amps of the time, you didn't get anything like the full sound that you'd get from a double bass, but you *did* get a clear sound that would cut through on a cheap radio in a way that the sound of a double bass wouldn't. So the solution was obvious -- you have an electric instrument *and* a double bass play the same part. Use the double bass for the big dull throbbing sound, but use the electric one to give the sound some shape and cut-through. If you're doing that, you mostly want the trebly part of the electric instrument's tone, so you play it with a pick rather than fingers, and it makes sense to use a Danelectro rather than a standard bass guitar, as the Danelectro is more trebly than a normal bass. This combination, of Danelectro and double bass, appears to have been invented by Owen Bradley, and you can hear it for example on this record by Patsy Cline, with Bob Moore on double bass and Harold Bradley on baritone guitar: [Excerpt: Patsy Cline, "Crazy"] This sound, known as "tic-tac bass", was soon picked up by a lot of producers, and it became the standard way of getting a bass sound in both Nashville and LA. It's all over the Beach Boys' best records, and many of Jack Nitzsche's arrangements, and many of the other records the Wrecking Crew played on, and it's on most of the stuff the Nashville A-Team played on from the late fifties through mid-sixties, records by people like Elvis, Roy Orbison, Arthur Alexander, and the Everly Brothers. Lee Hazelwood was one of the first producers to pick up on this sound -- indeed, Duane Eddy has said several times that Hazelwood invented the sound before Owen Bradley did, though I think Bradley did it first -- and many of Eddy's records featured that bass sound, and eventually Eddy started playing a baritone guitar himself, as a lead instrument, playing it on records like "Because They're Young": [Excerpt: Duane Eddy, "Because They're Young"] Duane Eddy was John Entwistle's idol, and Entwistle learned Eddy's whole repertoire on trumpet, playing the saxophone parts. But then, realising that the guitar was always louder than the trumpet in the bands he was in, he realised that if he wanted to be heard, he should probably switch to guitar himself. And it made sense that a bass would be easier to play than a regular guitar -- if you only have four strings, there's more space between them, so playing is easier. So he started playing the bass, trying to sound as much like Eddy as he could. He had no problem picking up the instrument -- he was already a multi-instrumentalist -- but he did have a problem actually getting hold of one, as all the electric bass guitars available in the UK at the time were prohibitively expensive. Eventually he made one himself, with the help of someone in a local music shop, and that served for a time, though he would soon trade up to more professional instruments, eventually amassing the biggest collection of basses in the world. One day, Entwistle was approached on the street by an acquaintance, Roger Daltrey, who said to him "I hear you play bass" -- Entwistle was, at the time, carrying his bass. Daltrey was at this time a guitarist -- like Entwistle, he'd built his own instrument -- and he was the leader of a band called Del Angelo and his Detours. Daltrey wasn't Del Angelo, the lead singer -- that was a man called Colin Dawson who by all accounts sounded a little like Cliff Richard -- but he was the bandleader, hired and fired the members, and was in charge of their setlists. Daltrey lured Entwistle away from the band he was in with Townshend by telling him that the Detours were getting proper paid gigs, though they weren't getting many at the time. Unfortunately, one of the group's other guitarists, the member who owned the best amp, died in an accident not long after Entwistle joined the band. However, the amp was left in the group's possession, and Entwistle used it to lure Pete Townshend into the group by telling him he could use it -- and not telling him that he'd be sharing the amp with Daltrey. Townshend would later talk about his audition for the Detours -- as he was walking up the street towards Daltrey's house, he saw a stunningly beautiful woman walking away from the house crying. She saw his guitar case and said "Are you going to Roger's?" "Yes." "Well you can tell him, it's that bloody guitar or me". Townshend relayed the message, and Daltrey responded "Sod her. Come in." The audition was a formality, with the main questions being whether Townshend could play two parts of the regular repertoire for a working band at that time -- "Hava Nagila", and the Shadows' "Man of Mystery": [Excerpt: The Shadows, "Man of Mystery"] Townshend could play both of those, and so he was in. The group would mostly play chart hits by groups like the Shadows, but as trad jazz hadn't completely died out yet they would also do breakout sessions playing trad jazz, with Townshend on banjo, Entwistle on trumpet and Daltrey on trombone. From the start, there was a temperamental mismatch between the group's two guitarists. Daltrey was thoroughly working-class, culturally conservative, had dropped out of school to go to work at a sheet metal factory, and saw himself as a no-nonsense plain-speaking man. Townshend was from a relatively well-off upper-middle-class family, was for a brief time a member of the Communist Party, and was by this point studying at art school, where he was hugely impressed by a lecture from Gustav Metzger titled “Auto-Destructive Art, Auto-Creative Art: The Struggle For The Machine Arts Of The Future”, about Metzger's creation of artworks which destroyed themselves. Townshend was at art school during a period when the whole idea of what an art school was for was in flux, something that's typified by a story Townshend tells about two of his early lectures. At the first, the lecturer came in and told the class to all draw a straight line. They all did, and then the lecturer told off anyone who had drawn anything that was anything other than six inches long, perfectly straight, without a ruler, going north-south, with a 3B pencil, saying that anything else at all was self-indulgence of the kind that needed to be drummed out of them if they wanted to get work as commercial artists. Then in another lecture, a different lecturer came in and asked them all to draw a straight line. They all drew perfectly straight, six-inch, north-south lines in 3B pencil, as the first lecturer had taught them. The new lecturer started yelling at them, then brought in someone else to yell at them as well, and then cut his hand open with a knife and dragged it across a piece of paper, smearing a rough line with his own blood, and screamed "THAT'S a line!" Townshend's sympathies lay very much with the second lecturer. Another big influence on Townshend at this point was a jazz double-bass player, Malcolm Cecil. Cecil would later go on to become a pioneer in electronic music as half of TONTO's Expanding Head Band, and we'll be looking at his work in more detail in a future episode, but at this point he was a fixture on the UK jazz scene. He'd been a member of Blues Incorporated, and had also played with modern jazz players like Dick Morrissey: [Excerpt: Dick Morrissey, "Jellyroll"] But Townshend was particularly impressed with a performance in which Cecil demonstrated unorthodox ways to play the double-bass, including playing so hard he broke the strings, and using a saw as a bow, sawing through the strings and damaging the body of the instrument. But these influences, for the moment, didn't affect the Detours, who were still doing the Cliff and the Shadows routine. Eventually Colin Dawson quit the group, and Daltrey took over the lead vocal role for the Detours, who settled into a lineup of Daltrey, Townshend, Entwistle, and drummer Doug Sandom, who was much older than the rest of the group -- he was born in 1930, while Daltrey and Entwistle were born in 1944 and Townshend in 1945. For a while, Daltrey continued playing guitar as well as singing, but his hands were often damaged by his work at the sheet-metal factory, making guitar painful for him. Then the group got a support slot with Johnny Kidd and the Pirates, who at this point were a four-piece band, with Kidd singing backed by bass, drums, and Mick Green playing one guitar on which he played both rhythm and lead parts: [Excerpt: Johnny Kidd and the Pirates, "Doctor Feel Good"] Green was at the time considered possibly the best guitarist in Britain, and the sound the Pirates were able to get with only one guitar convinced the Detours that they would be OK if Daltrey switched to just singing, so the group changed to what is now known as a "power trio" format. Townshend was a huge admirer of Steve Cropper, another guitarist who played both rhythm and lead, and started trying to adopt parts of Cropper's style, playing mostly chords, while Entwistle went for a much more fluid bass style than most, essentially turning the bass into another lead instrument, patterning his playing after Duane Eddy's work. By this time, Townshend was starting to push against Daltrey's leadership a little, especially when it came to repertoire. Townshend had a couple of American friends at art school who had been deported after being caught smoking dope, and had left their records with Townshend for safe-keeping. As a result, Townshend had become a devotee of blues and R&B music, especially the jazzier stuff like Ray Charles, Mose Allison, and Booker T and the MGs. He also admired guitar-based blues records like those by Howlin' Wolf or Jimmy Reed. Townshend kept pushing for this music to be incorporated into the group's sets, but Daltrey would push back, insisting as the leader that they should play the chart hits that everyone else played, rather than what he saw as Townshend's art-school nonsense. Townshend insisted, and eventually won -- within a short while the group had become a pure R&B group, and Daltrey was soon a convert, and became the biggest advocate of that style in the band. But there was a problem with only having one guitar, and that was volume. In particular, Townshend didn't want to be able to hear hecklers. There were gangsters in some of the audiences who would shout requests for particular songs, and you had to play them or else, even if they were completely unsuitable for the rest of the audience's tastes. But if you were playing so loud you couldn't hear the shouting, you had an excuse. Both Entwistle and Townshend had started buying amplifiers from Jim Marshall, who had opened up a music shop after quitting drums -- Townshend actually bought his first one from a shop assistant in Marshall's shop, John McLaughlin, who would later himself become a well-known guitarist. Entwistle, wanting to be heard over Townshend, had bought a cabinet with four twelve-inch speakers in it. Townshend, wanting to be heard over Entwistle, had bought *two* of these cabinets, and stacked them, one on top of the other, against Marshall's protestations -- Marshall said that they would vibrate so much that the top one might fall over and injure someone. Townshend didn't listen, and the Marshall stack was born. This ultra-amplification also led Townshend to change his guitar style further. He was increasingly reliant on distortion and feedback, rather than on traditional instrumental skills. Now, there are basically two kinds of chords that are used in most Western music. There are major chords, which consist of the first, third, and fifth note of the scale, and these are the basic chords that everyone starts with. So you can strum between G major and F major: [demonstrates G and F chords] There's also minor chords, where you flatten the third note, which sound a little sadder than major chords, so playing G minor and F minor: [demonstrates Gm and Fm chords] There are of course other kinds of chord -- basically any collection of notes counts as a chord, and can work musically in some context. But major and minor chords are the basic harmonic building blocks of most pop music. But when you're using a lot of distortion and feedback, you create a lot of extra harmonics -- extra notes that your instrument makes along with the ones you're playing. And for mathematical reasons I won't go into here because this is already a very long episode, the harmonics generated by playing the first and fifth notes sound fine together, but the harmonics from a third or minor third don't go along with them at all. The solution to this problem is to play what are known as "power chords", which are just the root and fifth notes, with no third at all, and which sound ambiguous as to whether they're major or minor. Townshend started to build his technique around these chords, playing for the most part on the bottom three strings of his guitar, which sounds like this: [demonstrates G5 and F5 chords] Townshend wasn't the first person to use power chords -- they're used on a lot of the Howlin' Wolf records he liked, and before Townshend would become famous the Kinks had used them on "You Really Got Me" -- but he was one of the first British guitarists to make them a major part of his personal style. Around this time, the Detours were starting to become seriously popular, and Townshend was starting to get exhausted by the constant demands on his time from being in the band and going to art school. He talked about this with one of his lecturers, who asked how much Townshend was earning from the band. When Townshend told him he was making thirty pounds a week, the lecturer was shocked, and said that was more than *he* was earning. Townshend should probably just quit art school, because it wasn't like he was going to make more money from anything he could learn there. Around this time, two things changed the group's image. The first was that they played a support slot for the Rolling Stones in December 1963. Townshend saw Keith Richards swinging his arm over his head and then bringing it down on the guitar, to loosen up his muscles, and he thought that looked fantastic, and started copying it -- from very early on, Townshend wanted to have a physical presence on stage that would be all about his body, to distract from his face, as he was embarrassed about the size of his nose. They played a second support slot for the Stones a few weeks later, and not wanting to look like he was copying Richards, Townshend didn't do that move, but then he noticed that Richards didn't do it either. He asked about it after the gig, and Richards didn't know what he was talking about -- "Swing me what?" -- so Townshend took that as a green light to make that move, which became known as the windmill, his own. The second thing was when in February 1964 a group appeared on Thank Your Lucky Stars: [Excerpt: Johnny Devlin and the Detours, "Sometimes"] Johnny Devlin and the Detours had had national media exposure, which meant that Daltrey, Townshend, Entwistle, and Sandom had to change the name of their group. They eventually settled on "The Who", It was around this time that the group got their first serious management, a man named Helmut Gorden, who owned a doorknob factory. Gorden had no management experience, but he did offer the group a regular salary, and pay for new equipment for them. However, when he tried to sign the group to a proper contract, as most of them were still under twenty-one he needed their parents to countersign for them. Townshend's parents, being experienced in the music industry, refused to sign, and so the group continued under Gorden's management without a contract. Gorden, not having management experience, didn't have any contacts in the music industry. But his barber did. Gorden enthused about his group to Jack Marks, the barber, and Marks in turn told some of his other clients about this group he'd been hearing about. Tony Hatch wasn't interested, as he already had a guitar group with the Searchers, but Chris Parmenter at Fontana Records was, and an audition was arranged. At the audition, among other numbers, they played Bo Diddley's "Here 'Tis": [Excerpt: Bo Diddley, "Here 'Tis"] Unfortunately for Doug, he didn't play well on that song, and Townshend started berating him. Doug also knew that Parmenter had reservations about him, because he was so much older than the rest of the band -- he was thirty-four at the time, while the rest of the group were only just turning twenty -- and he was also the least keen of the group on the R&B material they were playing. He'd been warned by Entwistle, his closest friend in the group, that Daltrey and Townshend were thinking of dropping him, and so he decided to jump before he was pushed, walking out of the audition. He agreed to come back for a handful more gigs that were already booked in, but that was the end of his time in the band, and of his time in the music industry -- though oddly not of his friendship with the group. Unlike other famous examples of an early member not fitting in and being forced out before a band becomes big, Sandom remained friends with the other members, and Townshend wrote the foreword to his autobiography, calling him a mentor figure, while Daltrey apparently insisted that Sandom phone him for a chat every Sunday, at the same time every week, until Sandom's death in 2019 at the age of eighty-nine. The group tried a few other drummers, including someone who Jim Marshall had been giving drum lessons to, Mitch Mitchell, before settling on the drummer for another group that played the same circuit, the Beachcombers, who played mostly Shadows material, plus the Beach Boys and Jan and Dean songs that their drummer, Keith Moon, loved. Moon and Entwistle soon became a formidable rhythm section, and despite having been turned down by Fontana, they were clearly going places. But they needed an image -- and one was provided for them by Pete Meaden. Meaden was another person who got his hair cut by Jack Marks, and he had had little bit of music business experience, having worked for Andrew Oldham, the Rolling Stones' manager, for a while before going on to manage a group called the Moments, whose career highlight was recording a soundalike cover version of "You Really Got Me" for an American budget label: [Excerpt: The Moments, "You Really Got Me"] The Moments never had any big success, but Meaden's nose for talent was not wrong, as their teenage lead singer, Steve Marriott, later went on to much better things. Pete Meaden was taken on as Helmut Gorden's assistant, but from this point on the group decided to regard him as their de facto manager, and as more than just a manager. To Townshend in particular he was a guru figure, and he shaped the group to appeal to the Mods. Now, we've not talked much about the Mods previously, and what little has been said has been a bit contradictory. That's because the Mods were a tiny subculture at this point -- or to be more precise, they were three subcultures. The original mods had come along in the late 1950s, at a time when there was a division among jazz fans between fans of traditional New Orleans jazz -- "trad" -- and modern jazz. The mods were modernists, hence the name, but for the most part they weren't as interested in music as in clothes. They were a small group of young working-class men, almost all gay, who dressed flamboyantly and dandyishly, and who saw themselves, their clothing, and their bodies as works of art. In the late fifties, Britain was going through something of an economic boom, and this was the first time that working-class men *could* buy nice clothes. These working-class dandies would have to visit tailors to get specially modified clothes made, but they could just about afford to do so. The mod image was at first something that belonged to a very, very, small clique of people. But then John Stephens opened his first shop. This was the first era when short runs of factory-produced clothing became possible, and Stephens, a stylish young man, opened a shop on Carnaby Street, then a relatively cheap place to open a shop. He painted the outside yellow, played loud pop music, and attracted a young crowd. Stephens was selling factory-made clothes that still looked unique -- short runs of odd-coloured jeans, three-button jackets, and other men's fashion. Soon Carnaby Street became the hub for men's fashion in London, thanks largely to Stephens. At one point Stephens owned fifteen different shops, nine of them on Carnaby Street itself, and Stephens' shops appealed to the kind of people that the Kinks would satirise in their early 1966 hit single "Dedicated Follower of Fashion": [Excerpt: The Kinks, "Dedicated Follower of Fashion"] Many of those who visited Stephens' shops were the larger, second, generation of mods. I'm going to quote here from George Melly's Revolt Into Style, the first book to properly analyse British pop culture of the fifties and sixties, by someone who was there: "As the ‘mod' thing spread it lost its purity. For the next generation of Mods, those who picked up the ‘mod' thing around 1963, clothes, while still their central preoccupation, weren't enough. They needed music (Rhythm and Blues), transport (scooters) and drugs (pep pills). What's more they needed fashion ready-made. They hadn't the time or the fanaticism to invent their own styles, and this is where Carnaby Street came in." Melly goes on to talk about how these new Mods were viewed with distaste by the older Mods, who left the scene. The choice of music for these new Mods was as much due to geographic proximity as anything else. Carnaby Street is just round the corner from Wardour Street, and Wardour Street is where the two clubs that between them were the twin poles of the London R&B scenes, the Marquee and the Flamingo, were both located. So it made sense that the young people frequenting John Stephens' boutiques on Carnaby Street were the same people who made up the audiences -- and the bands -- at those clubs. But by 1964, even these second-generation Mods were in a minority compared to a new, third generation, and here I'm going to quote Melly again: "But the Carnaby Street Mods were not the final stage in the history of this particular movement. The word was taken over finally by a new and more violent sector, the urban working class at the gang-forming age, and this became quite sinister. The gang stage rejected the wilder flights of Carnaby Street in favour of extreme sartorial neatness. Everything about them was neat, pretty and creepy: dark glasses, Nero hair-cuts, Chelsea boots, polo-necked sweaters worn under skinny V-necked pullovers, gleaming scooters and transistors. Even their offensive weapons were pretty—tiny hammers and screwdrivers. En masse they looked like a pack of weasels." I would urge anyone who's interested in British social history to read Melly's book in full -- it's well worth it. These third-stage Mods soon made up the bulk of the movement, and they were the ones who, in summer 1964, got into the gang fights that were breathlessly reported in all the tabloid newspapers. Pete Meaden was a Mod, and as far as I can tell he was a leading-edge second-stage Mod, though as with all these things who was in what generation of Mods is a bit blurry. Meaden had a whole idea of Mod-as-lifestyle and Mod-as-philosophy, which worked well with the group's R&B leanings, and with Townshend's art-school-inspired fascination with the aesthetics of Pop Art. Meaden got the group a residency at the Railway Hotel, a favourite Mod hangout, and he also changed their name -- The Who didn't sound Mod enough. In Mod circles at the time there was a hierarchy, with the coolest people, the Faces, at the top, below them a slightly larger group of people known as Numbers, and below them the mass of generic people known as Tickets. Meaden saw himself as the band's Svengali, so he was obviously the Face, so the group had to be Numbers -- so they became The High Numbers. Meaden got the group a one-off single deal, to record two songs he had allegedly written, both of which had lyrics geared specifically for the Mods. The A-side was "Zoot Suit": [Excerpt: The High Numbers, "Zoot Suit"] This had a melody that was stolen wholesale from "Misery" by the Dynamics: [Excerpt: The Dynamics, "Misery"] The B-side, meanwhile, was titled "I'm the Face": [Excerpt: The High Numbers, "I'm the Face"] Which anyone with any interest at all in blues music will recognise immediately as being "Got Love if You Want It" by Slim Harpo: [Excerpt: Slim Harpo, "Got Love if You Want it"] Unfortunately for the High Numbers, that single didn't have much success. Mod was a local phenomenon, which never took off outside London and its suburbs, and so the songs didn't have much appeal in the rest of the country -- while within London, Mod fashions were moving so quickly that by the time the record came out, all its up-to-the-minute references were desperately outdated. But while the record didn't have much success, the group were getting a big live following among the Mods, and their awareness of rapidly shifting trends in that subculture paid off for them in terms of stagecraft. To quote Townshend: "What the Mods taught us was how to lead by following. I mean, you'd look at the dance floor and see some bloke stop during the dance of the week and for some reason feel like doing some silly sort of step. And you'd notice some of the blokes around him looking out of the corners of their eyes and thinking 'is this the latest?' And on their own, without acknowledging the first fellow, a few of 'em would start dancing that way. And we'd be watching. By the time they looked up on the stage again, we'd be doing that dance and they'd think the original guy had been imitating us. And next week they'd come back and look to us for dances". And then Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp came into the Railway Hotel. Kit Lambert was the son of Constant Lambert, the founding music director of the Royal Ballet, who the economist John Maynard Keynes described as the most brilliant man he'd ever met. Constant Lambert was possibly Britain's foremost composer of the pre-war era, and one of the first people from the serious music establishment to recognise the potential of jazz and blues music. His most famous composition, "The Rio Grande", written in 1927 about a fictitious South American river, is often compared with Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue: [Excerpt: Constant Lambert, "The Rio Grande"] Kit Lambert was thus brought up in an atmosphere of great privilege, both financially and intellectually, with his godfather being the composer Sir William Walton while his godmother was the prima ballerina Dame Margot Fonteyn, with whom his father was having an affair. As a result of the problems between his parents, Lambert spent much of his childhood living with his grandmother. After studying history at Oxford and doing his national service, Lambert had spent a few months studying film at the Institut des hautes études cinématographiques in Paris, where he went because Jean-Luc Godard and Alain Renais taught there -- or at least so he would later say, though there's no evidence I can find that Godard actually taught there, so either he went there under a mistaken impression or he lied about it later to make himself sound more interesting. However, he'd got bored with his studies after only a few months, and decided that he knew enough to just make a film himself, and he planned his first documentary. In early 1961, despite having little film experience, he joined two friends from university, Richard Mason and John Hemming, in an attempt to make a documentary film tracing the source of the Iriri, a river in South America that was at that point the longest unnavigated river in the world. Unfortunately, the expedition was as disastrous as it's possible for such an expedition to be. In May 1961 they landed in the Amazon basin and headed off on their expedition to find the source of the Iriri, with the help of five local porters and three people sent along by the Brazillian government to map the new areas they were to discover. Unfortunately, by September, not only had they not found the source of the Iriri, they'd actually not managed to find the Iriri itself, four and a half months apparently not being a long enough time to find an eight-hundred-and-ten-mile-long river. And then Mason made his way into history in the worst possible way, by becoming the last, to date, British person to be murdered by an uncontacted indigenous tribe, the Panará, who shot him with eight poison arrows and then bludgeoned his skull. A little over a decade later the Panará made contact with the wider world after nearly being wiped out by disease. They remembered killing Mason and said that they'd been scared by the swishing noise his jeans had made, as they'd never encountered anyone who wore clothes before. Before they made contact, the Panará were also known as the Kreen-Akrore, a name given them by the Kayapó people, meaning "round-cut head", a reference to the way they styled their hair, brushed forward and trimmed over the forehead in a way that was remarkably similar to some of the Mod styles. Before they made contact, Paul McCartney would in 1970 record an instrumental, "Kreen Akrore", after being inspired by a documentary called The Tribe That Hides From Man. McCartney's instrumental includes sound effects, including McCartney firing a bow and arrow, though apparently the bow-string snapped during the recording: [Excerpt: Paul McCartney, "Kreen Akrore"] For a while, Lambert was under suspicion for the murder, though the Daily Express, which had sponsored the expedition, persuaded Brazillian police to drop the charges. While he was in Rio waiting for the legal case to be sorted, Lambert developed what one book on the Who describes as "a serious anal infection". Astonishingly, this experience did not put Lambert off from the film industry, though he wouldn't try to make another film of his own for a couple of years. Instead, he went to work at Shepperton Studios, where he was an uncredited second AD on many films, including From Russia With Love and The L-Shaped Room. Another second AD working on many of the same films was Chris Stamp, the brother of the actor Terence Stamp, who was just starting out in his own career. Stamp and Lambert became close friends, despite -- or because of -- their differences. Lambert was bisexual, and preferred men to women, Stamp was straight. Lambert was the godson of a knight and a dame, Stamp was a working-class East End Cockney. Lambert was a film-school dropout full of ideas and grand ambitions, but unsure how best to put those ideas into practice, Stamp was a practical, hands-on, man. The two complemented each other perfectly, and became flatmates and collaborators. After seeing A Hard Day's Night, they decided that they were going to make their own pop film -- a documentary, inspired by the French nouvelle vague school of cinema, which would chart a pop band from playing lowly clubs to being massive pop stars. Now all they needed was to find a band that were playing lowly clubs but could become massive stars. And they found that band at the Railway Hotel, when they saw the High Numbers. Stamp and Lambert started making their film, and completed part of it, which can be found on YouTube: [Excerpt: The High Numbers, "Oo Poo Pa Doo"] The surviving part of the film is actually very, very, well done for people who'd never directed a film before, and I have no doubt that if they'd completed the film, to be titled High Numbers, it would be regarded as one of the classic depictions of early-sixties London club life, to be classed along with The Small World of Sammy Lee and Expresso Bongo. What's even more astonishing, though, is how *modern* the group look. Most footage of guitar bands of this period looks very dated, not just in the fashions, but in everything -- the attitude of the performers, their body language, the way they hold their instruments. The best performances are still thrilling, but you can tell when they were filmed. On the other hand, the High Numbers look ungainly and awkward, like the lads of no more than twenty that they are -- but in a way that was actually shocking to me when I first saw this footage. Because they look *exactly* like every guitar band I played on the same bill as during my own attempts at being in bands between 2000 and about 2005. If it weren't for the fact that they have such recognisable faces, if you'd told me this was footage of some band I played on the same bill with at the Star and Garter or Night and Day Cafe in 2003, I'd believe it unquestioningly. But while Lambert and Stamp started out making a film, they soon pivoted and decided that they could go into management. Of course, the High Numbers did already have management -- Pete Meaden and Helmut Gorden -- but after consulting with the Beatles' lawyer, David Jacobs, Lambert and Stamp found out that Gorden's contract with the band was invalid, and so when Gorden got back from a holiday, he found himself usurped. Meaden was a bit more difficult to get rid of, even though he had less claim on the group than Gorden -- he was officially their publicist, not their manager, and his only deal was with Gorden, even though the group considered him their manager. While Meaden didn't have a contractual claim though, he did have one argument in his favour, which is that he had a large friend named Phil the Greek, who had a big knife. When this claim was put to Lambert and Stamp, they agreed that this was a very good point indeed, one that they hadn't considered, and agreed to pay Meaden off with two hundred and fifty pounds. This would not be the last big expense that Stamp and Lambert would have as the managers of the Who, as the group were now renamed. Their agreement with the group had the two managers taking forty percent of the group's earnings, while the four band members would split the other sixty percent between themselves -- an arrangement which should theoretically have had the managers coming out ahead. But they also agreed to pay the group's expenses. And that was to prove very costly indeed. Shortly after they started managing the group, at a gig at the Railway Hotel, which had low ceilings, Townshend lifted his guitar up a bit higher than he'd intended, and broke the headstock. Townshend had a spare guitar with him, so this was OK, and he also remembered Gustav Metzger and his ideas of auto-destructive art, and Malcolm Cecil sawing through his bass strings and damaging his bass, and decided that it was better for him to look like he'd meant to do that than to look like an idiot who'd accidentally broken his guitar, so he repeated the motion, smashing his guitar to bits, before carrying on the show with his spare. The next week, the crowd were excited, expecting the same thing again, but Townshend hadn't brought a spare guitar with him. So as not to disappoint them, Keith Moon destroyed his drum kit instead. This destruction was annoying to Entwistle, who saw musical instruments as something close to sacred, and it also annoyed the group's managers at first, because musical instruments are expensive. But they soon saw the value this brought to the band's shows, and reluctantly agreed to keep buying them new instruments. So for the first couple of years, Lambert and Stamp lost money on the group. They funded this partly through Lambert's savings, partly through Stamp continuing to do film work, and partly from investors in their company, one of whom was Russ Conway, the easy-listening piano player who'd had hits like "Side Saddle": [Excerpt: Russ Conway, "Side Saddle"] Conway's connections actually got the group another audition for a record label, Decca (although Conway himself recorded for EMI), but the group were turned down. The managers were told that they would have been signed, but they didn't have any original material. So Pete Townshend was given the task of writing some original material. By this time Townshend's musical world was expanding far beyond the R&B that the group were performing on stage, and he talks in his autobiography about the music he was listening to while he was trying to write his early songs. There was "Green Onions", which he'd been listening to for years in his attempt to emulate Steve Cropper's guitar style, but there was also The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, and two tracks he names in particular, "Devil's Jump" by John Lee Hooker: [Excerpt: John Lee Hooker, "Devil's Jump"] And "Better Get Hit in Your Soul" by Charles Mingus: [Excerpt: Charles Mingus, "Better Get Hit In Your Soul"] He was also listening to what he described as "a record that changed my life as a composer", a recording of baroque music that included sections of Purcell's Gordian Knot Untied: [Excerpt: Purcell, Chaconne from Gordian Knot Untied] Townshend had a notebook in which he listed the records he wanted to obtain, and he reproduces that list in his autobiography -- "‘Marvin Gaye, 1-2-3, Mingus Revisited, Stevie Wonder, Jimmy Smith Organ Grinder's Swing, In Crowd, Nina in Concert [Nina Simone], Charlie Christian, Billie Holiday, Ella, Ray Charles, Thelonious Monk Around Midnight and Brilliant Corners.'" He was also listening to a lot of Stockhausen and Charlie Parker, and to the Everly Brothers -- who by this point were almost the only artist that all four members of the Who agreed were any good, because Daltrey was now fully committed to the R&B music he'd originally dismissed, and disliked what he thought was the pretentiousness of the music Townshend was listening to, while Keith Moon was primarily a fan of the Beach Boys. But everyone could agree that the Everlys, with their sensitive interpretations, exquisite harmonies, and Bo Diddley-inflected guitars, were great, and so the group added several songs from the Everlys' 1965 albums Rock N Soul and Beat N Soul to their set, like "Man With Money": [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, "Man With Money"] Despite Daltrey's objections to diluting the purity of the group's R&B sound, Townshend brought all these influences into his songwriting. The first song he wrote to see release was not actually recorded by the Who, but a song he co-wrote for a minor beat group called the Naturals, who released it as a B-side: [Excerpt: The Naturals, "It Was You"] But shortly after this, the group got their first big break, thanks to Lambert's personal assistant, Anya Butler. Butler was friends with Shel Talmy's wife, and got Talmy to listen to the group. Townshend in particular was eager to work with Talmy, as he was a big fan of the Kinks, who were just becoming big, and who Talmy produced. Talmy signed the group to a production deal, and then signed a deal to license their records to Decca in America -- which Lambert and Stamp didn't realise wasn't the same label as British Decca. Decca in turn sublicensed the group's recordings to their British subsidiary Brunswick, which meant that the group got a minuscule royalty for sales in Britain, as their recordings were being sold through three corporate layers all taking their cut. This didn't matter to them at first, though, and they went into the studio excited to cut their first record as The Who. As was typical at the time, Talmy brought in a few session players to help out. Clem Cattini turned out not to be needed, and left quickly, but Jimmy Page stuck around -- not to play on the A-side, which Townshend said was "so simple even I could play it", but the B-side, a version of the old blues standard "Bald-Headed Woman", which Talmy had copyrighted in his own name and had already had the Kinks record: [Excerpt: The Who, "Bald-Headed Woman"] Apparently the only reason that Page played on that is that Page wouldn't let Townshend use his fuzzbox. As well as Page and Cattini, Talmy also brought in some backing vocalists. These were the Ivy League, a writing and production collective consisting at this point of John Carter and Ken Lewis, both of whom had previously been in a band with Page, and Perry Ford. The Ivy League were huge hit-makers in the mid-sixties, though most people don't recognise their name. Carter and Lewis had just written "Can You Hear My Heartbeat" for Herman's Hermits: [Excerpt: Herman's Hermits, "Can You Hear My Heartbeat?"] And, along with a couple of other singers who joined the group, the Ivy League would go on to sing backing vocals on hits by Sandie Shaw, Tom Jones and others. Together and separately the members of the Ivy League were also responsible for writing, producing, and singing on "Let's Go to San Francisco" by the Flowerpot Men, "Winchester Cathedral" by the New Vaudeville Band, "Beach Baby" by First Class, and more, as well as their big hit under their own name, "Tossing and Turning": [Excerpt: The Ivy League, "Tossing and Turning"] Though my favourite of their tracks is their baroque pop masterpiece "My World Fell Down": [Excerpt: The Ivy League, "My World Fell Down"] As you can tell, the Ivy League were masters of the Beach Boys sound that Moon, and to a lesser extent Townshend, loved. That backing vocal sound was combined with a hard-driving riff inspired by the Kinks' early hits like "You Really Got Me" and "All Day and All of the Night", and with lyrics that explored inarticulacy, a major theme of Townshend's lyrics: [Excerpt: The Who, "I Can't Explain"] "I Can't Explain" made the top ten, thanks in part to a publicity stunt that Lambert came up with. The group had been booked on to Ready, Steady, Go!, and the floor manager of the show mentioned to Lambert that they were having difficulty getting an audience for that week's show -- they were short about a hundred and fifty people, and they needed young, energetic, dancers. Lambert suggested that the best place to find young, energetic, dancers, was at the Marquee on a Tuesday night -- which just happened to be the night of the Who's regular residency at the club. Come the day of filming, the Ready, Steady, Go! audience was full of the Who's most hardcore fans, all of whom had been told by Lambert to throw scarves at the band when they started playing. It was one of the most memorable performances on the show. But even though the record was a big hit, Daltrey was unhappy. The man who'd started out as guitarist in a Shadows cover band and who'd strenuously objected to the group's inclusion of R&B material now had the zeal of a convert. He didn't want to be doing this "soft commercial pop", or Townshend's art-school nonsense. He wanted to be an R&B singer, playing hard music for working-class men like him. Two decisions were taken to mollify the lead singer. The first was that when they went into the studio to record their first album, it was all soul and R&B apart from one original. The album was going to consist of three James Brown covers, three Motown covers, Bo Diddley's "I'm a Man", and a cover of Paul Revere and the Raiders' "Louie Louie" sequel "Louie Come Home", retitled "Lubie". All of this was material that Daltrey was very comfortable with. Also, Daltrey was given some input into the second single, which would be the only song credited to Daltrey and Townshend, and Daltrey's only songwriting contribution to a Who A-side. Townshend had come up with the title "Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere" while listening to Charlie Parker, and had written the song based on that title, but Daltrey was allowed to rewrite the lyrics and make suggestions as to the arrangement. That record also made the top ten: [Excerpt: The Who, "Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere"] But Daltrey would soon become even more disillusioned. The album they'd recorded was shelved, though some tracks were later used for what became the My Generation album, and Kit Lambert told the Melody Maker “The Who are having serious doubts about the state of R&B. Now the LP material will consist of hard pop. They've finished with ‘Smokestack Lightning'!” That wasn't the only thing they were finished with -- Townshend and Moon were tired of their band's leader, and also just didn't think he was a particularly good singer -- and weren't shy about saying so, even to the press. Entwistle, a natural peacemaker, didn't feel as strongly, but there was a definite split forming in the band. Things came to a head on a European tour. Daltrey was sick of this pop nonsense, he was sick of the arty ideas of Townshend, and he was also sick of the other members' drug use. Daltrey didn't indulge himself, but the other band members had been using drugs long before they became successful, and they were all using uppers, which offended Daltrey greatly. He flushed Keith Moon's pill stash down the toilet, and screamed at his band mates that they were a bunch of junkies, then physically attacked Moon. All three of the other band members agreed -- Daltrey was out of the band. They were going to continue as a trio. But after a couple of days, Daltrey was back in the group. This was mostly because Daltrey had come crawling back to them, apologising -- he was in a very bad place at the time, having left his wife and kid, and was actually living in the back of the group's tour van. But it was also because Lambert and Stamp persuaded the group they needed Daltrey, at least for the moment, because he'd sung lead on their latest single, and that single was starting to rise up the charts. "My Generation" had had a long and torturous journey from conception to realisation. Musically it originally had been inspired by Mose Allison's "Young Man's Blues": [Excerpt: Mose Allison, "Young Man's Blues"] Townshend had taken that musical mood and tied it to a lyric that was inspired by a trilogy of TV plays, The Generations, by the socialist playwright David Mercer, whose plays were mostly about family disagreements that involved politics and class, as in the case of the first of those plays, where two upwardly-mobile young brothers of very different political views go back to visit their working-class family when their mother is on her deathbed, and are confronted by the differences they have with each other, and with the uneducated father who sacrificed to give them a better life than he had: [Excerpt: Where the Difference Begins] Townshend's original demo for the song was very much in the style of Mose Allison, as the excerpt of it that's been made available on various deluxe reissues of the album shows: [Excerpt: Pete Townshend, "My Generation (demo)"] But Lambert had not been hugely impressed by that demo. Stamp had suggested that Townshend try a heavier guitar riff, which he did, and then Lambert had added the further suggestion that the music would be improved by a few key changes -- Townshend was at first unsure about this, because he already thought he was a bit too influenced by the Kinks, and he regarded Ray Davies as, in his words, "the master of modulation", but eventually he agreed, and decided that the key changes did improve the song. Stamp made one final suggestion after hearing the next demo version of the song. A while earlier, the Who had been one of the many British groups, like the Yardbirds and the Animals, who had backed Sonny Boy Williamson II on his UK tour. Williamson had occasionally done a little bit of a stutter in some of his performances, and Daltrey had picked up on that and started doing it. Townshend had in turn imitated Daltrey's mannerism a couple of times on the demo, and Stamp thought that was something that could be accentuated. Townshend agreed, and reworked the song, inspired by John Lee Hooker's "Stuttering Blues": [Excerpt: John Lee Hooker, "Stuttering Blues"] The stuttering made all the difference, and it worked on three levels. It reinforced the themes of inarticulacy that run throughout the Who's early work -- their first single, after all, had been called "I Can't Explain", and Townshend talks movingly in his autobiography about talking to teenage fans who felt that "I Can't Explain" had said for them the things they couldn't say th
Label: Co & Ce 229Year: 1965Condition: M-Last Price: $25.00. Not currently available for sale.How is it that a vocal group from Pennsylvania got a crack at this great tune penned by then-popular Petula Clark and hubby Tony Hatch before Petula did? Her version of "You're The One" did chart as a single in the U.K., but only a couple of months after The Vogues release on Co & Ce. And don't forget, this essential Vogues recording had already been released on the small label Blue Star, which is what brought the group to the attention of slightly larger Co & Ce. (I suspect that Petula recorded this as a cut on one of her albums, and that's how the Vogues discovered it.) By the way, the reason I call this Power Pop rather than Sunshine Pop is because of the awesome electric guitar lead — it's a signature of the evolving Power Pop sound. Note: This beautiful copy grades very close to Mint in appearance (Labels, Vinyl) and has pristine Mint sound. The A side audio is so awesome I had to make an mp3 snippet for the "jukebox"... so have a listen!
One day I realized that I kept thinking to myself that my dryer must be shrinking my clothes. I noticed that each time I put on clothes they seemed to fit tighter and tighter. But surely that's the only explanation, right? Just last week my husband was yammering on about how our scale must be broken. (There was lots of eye rolling on my part!) These are the excuses we tell ourselves. You have permission to take care of yourself today. Start small, then build upon each self care act that you incorporate so that it becomes a habit. Grab some health and mindset tips over on our podcast today! PS: The freebies at the end of this video have expired. Find Tony at: https://www.facebook.com/wholehealthinsights https://www.instagram.com/wholehealthinsights/ --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/theopenbedroompodcast/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/theopenbedroompodcast/support
Time for best bits, some new bits and possibly even Schnorbitz as Ben Baker revisits the Keighley Olympics, school stupidity, lost tapes, Alan Bennett updated for 2021, the wonder of Yorkshire and lots more, alongside music from Sparks, the Pound Shop Boys, Luke Hirst, Shampoo, The Pooh Sticks, Pixies, The Freshies, Fightmilk, The Plimptons, Tony Hatch and more. Find full tracklists and links to where you can buy the music played on the Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/groups/beninthebasement or the Twitter feed where you can submit your own music for the forthcoming series three: https://twitter.com/BenBasement And you can buy Ben's books for Kindle or print on Amazon here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/-/e/B079KSMVXK And there's a complete as possible playlist of songs I've played on Spotify here: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2IT11vbC1OJXksTQod6T3s?si=79c290f7c4c547a9
#614 - Tony Hatch The Tony Hatch Interview is featured on The Paul Leslie Hour. British songwriter Tony Hatch is one of the world's most successful songwriters. An inductee of the Songwriters Hall of Fame, his songs like "Downtown" have been recorded by the biggest names in music. A record producer, arranger, conductor and songwriter, Tony Hatch is a great musical talent. His songs have been featured on television, in countless films and on many albums. Some fo the recording artists who have sung Tony Hatch songs include Petula Clark,Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr., Jack Jones, Paul McCartney, George Shearing, Ella Fitzgerald, Pearl Bailey, Dolly Parton, Nancy Wilson and Shirley Bassey just to name a few. Tony Hatch makes for a great interview guest. He's a really lovely man and you'll be glad you listened. Right here on The Paul Leslie Hour. The Paul Leslie Hour is a talk show dedicated to “Helping People Tell Their Stories.” Some of the most iconic people of all time drop in to chat. Frequent topics include Arts, Entertainment and Culture.
En El Guateque de Onda Regional de Murcia(orm.es; domingos, 22,05h) rescatamos olvidadas melodías del ayer. Este finde vamos el sábado a las 17,05h. Sylvie Vartan, una de las abanderadas del yeye francés, entona el ritmo de la lluvia. Ana Belén grabó su primera canción con apenas doce años. Aprovechando su reciente aniversario, recuperamos aquellas primeras canciones. El 1 de junio de 1967 apareció en el Reino Unido uno de los álbumes que más ha dado que hablar en la historia del pop. 'Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band', el octavo álbum de los Beatles. Un crítico del Times escribió: "este disco marcará un momento decisivo en la historia de la civilización occidental". Los Mustang también hicieron su propia versión del Sargento Peppers. El 1 de junio de 1926 nació en Los Angeles (California) la actriz y cantante norteamericana Norma Jeane Mortenson, más conocida como Marilyn Monroe. Entre 1947 y 1962 intervino en 41 películas y, tras su muerte, se convirtió en un icono pop y cultural de los años sesenta. El rey del mambo, Dámaso Pérez Prado escribió en 1955 "Marilyn Monroe Mambo", quizá la primera pieza musical inspirada en el mito erótico. Grabaron en 1964 con el nombre de The Epsilons, pero después de grabar dos LP comenzaron a presentarse como Kano y los Bulldogs, obteniendo cierto éxito con "Sobre Un Vidrio Mojado". Antonio Prieto fue un cantante y actor chileno, muy popular internacionalmente durante la década de 1950 y 1960 en Latinoamérica y algunos países de Europa. En total en su carrera llegó a grabar más de 1.000 canciones, siendo su canción más exitosa y recordada el vals La Novia, editada el año 1961. Cuando parecía que aquel "Ojo por ojo" quedaba en un momento puntual en la carrera de Los Pasos. llegaba "Lluvia en la estación" cargada de energía, con un más que efectivo riff. Voz de niña, coros masculinos y un conjunto detrás dirigido por el maestro Martínez Mestres para el debut de la adolescente Marta Baizán en el mundo vinílico. “Sé de un lugar” es un clásico compuesto por Tony Hatch para Petula Clark, que aquí grabaron también Bruno Lomas y Silvana Velasco. Connie Francis, considerada una niña prodigio, la ídolo juvenil estadounidense, interpretó esta versión en español de ‘Someone Else's Boy', que se convirtió en uno de sus mayores éxitos internacionales, y es la única canción en su repertorio que grabó en ocho idiomas. Hace 15 años que “La más grande”, ROCÍO JURADO, nos dejó para siempre. Fue el 1 de junio de 2006 cuando se apagó su voz. La embajadora de Chipiona por el mundo, era una mujer de carácter que nos dejó momentos irrepetibles. Su trayectoria está repleta de temas grabados a fuego en nuestro imaginario. Nos dijo que nunca se iría. Y es verd
In this podcast, Jeff Berman, Group News Editor for Logistics Management and the Peerless Media Supply Chain Group, interviews Tony Hatch, Principal...
Musique Mécanique par le Théâtre Électrique ::"Downtown" by Tony Hatch
Travis & Lee discuss the recent death of murderer Ronald DeFeo, Jr., the man whose real life atrocities inspired the film, The Amityville Horror, and the weird and wild conclusions drawn by the FBI in their Investigation of the Downtown Nashville RV Christmas Day Bomber, Anthony Warner, a man who was consumed with conspiracy theories.Support the show (http://patreon.com/crimeficionados)
This week’s episode looks at “Needles and Pins”, and the story of the second-greatest band to come out of Liverpool in the sixties, The Searchers. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a sixteen-minute bonus episode available, on “Farmer John” by Don and Dewey. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ (more…)
This week’s episode looks at “Needles and Pins”, and the story of the second-greatest band to come out of Liverpool in the sixties, The Searchers. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a sixteen-minute bonus episode available, on “Farmer John” by Don and Dewey. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ —-more—- Resources No Mixcloud this week, as there are too many recordings by the Searchers. My two main resources for this episode have been the autobiographies of members of the group — Frank Allen’s The Searchers and Me and Mike Pender’s The Search For Myself. All the Searchers tracks and Tony Jackson or Chris Curtis solo recordings excerpted here, except the live excerpt of “What’d I Say”, can be found on this box set, which is out of print as a physical box, but still available digitally. For those who want a good budget alternative, though, this double-CD set contains fifty Searchers tracks, including all their hits, for under three pounds. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Last week we had a look at the biggest group ever to come out of Liverpool, and indeed the biggest group ever to play rock and roll music. But the Beatles weren’t the only influential band on the Merseybeat scene, and while we won’t have much chance to look at Merseybeat in general, we should at least briefly touch on the other bands from the scene. So today we’re going to look at a band who developed a distinctive sound that would go on to be massively influential, even though they’re rarely cited as an influence in the way some of their contemporaries are. We’re going to look at The Searchers, and “Needles and Pins”: [Excerpt: The Searchers, “Needles and Pins”] The story of the early origins of the Searchers is, like everything about the Searchers, the subject of a great deal of dispute. The two surviving original members of the group, John McNally and Mike Pender, haven’t spoken to each other in thirty-six years, and didn’t get on for many years before that, and there have been several legal disputes between them over the years. As a result, literally everything about the group’s history has become a battlefield in their ongoing arguments. According to a book by Frank Allen, the group’s bass player from 1964 on and someone who took McNally’s side in the split and subsequent legal problems, McNally formed a skiffle group, which Mike Pender later joined, and was later joined first by Tony Jackson and then by a drummer then known as Chris Crummey, but who changed his name to the more euphonic Chris Curtis. According to Pender, he never liked skiffle, never played skiffle, and “if McNally had a skiffle group, it must have been before I met him”. He is very insistent on this point — he liked country music, and later rock and roll, but never liked skiffle. According to him, he and McNally got together and formed a group that was definitely absolutely not in any way a skiffle group and wasn’t led by McNally but was formed by both of them. That group split up, and then Pender became friends with Tony Jackson — and he’s very insistent that he became friends with Jackson during a period when he didn’t know McNally — and the group reformed around the three of them, when McNally and Pender got back in touch. The origin of the group’s name is similarly disputed. Everyone agrees that it came from the John Wayne film The Searchers — the same film which had inspired the group’s hero Buddy Holly to write “That’ll Be The Day” — but there is disagreement as to whose idea the name was. Pender claims that it was his idea, while McNally says that the name was coined by a singer named “Big Ron”, who sang with the band for a bit before disappearing into obscurity. Big Ron’s replacement was a singer named Billy Beck, who at the time he was with the Searchers used the stage name Johnny Sandon (though he later reverted to his birth name). The group performed as Johnny Sandon and The Searchers for two years, before Sandon quit the group to join the Remo Four, a group that was managed by Brian Epstein. Sandon made some records with the Remo Four in 1963, but they went nowhere, but they’ll give some idea of how Sandon sounded: [Excerpt: Johnny Sandon and the Remo Four, “Lies”] The Remo Four later moved on to back Tommy Quickly, who we heard last week singing a song the Beatles wrote for him. With Sandon out of the picture, the group had no lead singer or frontman, and were in trouble — they were known around Liverpool as Johnny Sandon’s backing group, not as a group in their own right. They started splitting the lead vocals between themselves, but with Tony Jackson taking most of them. And, in a move which made them stand out, Chris Curtis moved his drum kit to the front line, started playing standing up, and became the group’s front-man and second lead singer. Even at this point, though, there seemed to be cracks in the group. The Searchers were the most clean-living of the Liverpool bands — they were all devout Catholics who would go to Mass every Sunday without fail, and seem to have never indulged in most of the vices that pretty much every other rock star indulged in. But Curtis and Jackson were far less so than Pender and McNally — Jackson in particular was a very heavy drinker and known to get very aggressive when drunk, while Curtis was known as eccentric in other ways — he seems to have had some sort of mental illness, though no-one’s ever spoken about a diagnosis — the Beatles apparently referred to him as “Mad Henry”. Curtis and Jackson didn’t get on with each other, and while Jackson started out as a close friend of Pender’s, the two soon drifted apart, and by the time of their first recording sessions they appeared to most people to be a group of three plus one outsider, with Jackson not getting on well with any of the others. There was also a split in the band’s musical tastes, but that would be the split that would drive much of their creativity. Pender and McNally were drawn towards softer music — country and rockabilly, the Everly Brothers and Buddy Holly — while Jackson preferred harder, stomping, music. But it was Chris Curtis who took charge of the group’s repertoire, and who was the group’s unofficial leader. While the other band members had fairly mainstream musical tastes, it was Curtis who would seek out obscure R&B B-sides that he thought the group could make their own, by artists like The Clovers and Richie Barrett — while many Liverpool groups played Barrett’s “Some Other Guy”, the Searchers would also play the B-side to that, “Tricky Dicky”, a song written by Leiber and Stoller. Curtis also liked quite a bit of folk music, and would also get the group to perform songs by Joan Baez and Peter, Paul, and Mary. The result of this combination of material and performers was that the Searchers ended up with a repertoire rooted in R&B, and a heavy rhythm section, but with strong harmony vocals inspired more by the Everlys than by the soul groups that were inspiring the other groups around Liverpool. Other than the Beatles, the Searchers were the best harmony group in Liverpool, and were the only other one to have multiple strong lead vocalists. Like the Beatles, the Searchers went off to play at the Star Club in Hamburg in 1962. Recordings were made of their performances there, and their live version of Brenda Lee’s “Sweet Nothin’s” later got released as a single after they became successful: [Excerpt: The Searchers, “Sweet Nothin’s”] Even as every talent scout in the country seemed to be turning up in Liverpool, and even bands from nearby Manchester were getting signed up in the hope of repeating the Beatles’ success, the Searchers were having no luck getting any attention from the London music industry. In part that was because of one bit of bad luck — the day that Brian Epstein turned up to see them, with the thought of maybe managing them, Tony Jackson was drunk and fell off the stage, and Epstein decided that he was going to give them a miss. As no talent scouts were coming to see them, they decided that they would record a demo session at the Iron Door, the club they regularly played, and send that out to A&R people. That demo session produced a full short album, which shows them at their stompiest and hardest-driving. Most of the Merseybeat bands sounded much more powerful in their earlier live performances than in the studio, and the Searchers were no exception, and it’s interesting to compare the sound of these recordings to the studio ones from only a few months later: [Excerpt: The Searchers, “Let’s Stomp”] The group eventually signed to Pye Records. Pye was the third or fourth biggest record label in Britain at the time, but that was a relative matter — EMI and Decca between them had something like eighty-five percent of the market, and basically *were* the record industry in Britain at the time. Pye was chronically underfunded, and when they signed an artist who managed to have any success, they would tend to push that artist to keep producing as many singles as possible, chasing trends, rather than investing in their long-term career survival. That said, they did have some big acts, most notably Petula Clark — indeed the company had been formed from the merger of two other companies, one of which had been formed specifically to issue Clark’s records. Clark was yet to have her big breakthrough hit in the USA, but she’d had several big hits in the UK, including the number one hit “Sailor”: [Excerpt: Petula Clark, “Sailor”] The co-producer on that track had been Tony Hatch, a songwriter and producer who would go on to write and produce almost all of Clark’s hit records. Hatch had a track record of hits — we’ve heard several songs he was involved in over the course of the series. Most recently, we heard last week how “She Loves You” was inspired by “Forget Him”, which Hatch wrote and produced for Bobby Rydell: [Excerpt: Bobby Rydell, “Forget Him”] Hatch heard the group’s demo, and was impressed, and offered to sign them. The Searchers’ manager at the time agreed, on one condition — that Hatch also sign another band he managed, The Undertakers. Astonishingly, Hatch agreed, and so the Undertakers also got a record contract, and released several flop singles produced by Hatch, including this cover version of a Coasters tune: [Excerpt: The Undertakers, “What About Us?”] The biggest mark that the Undertakers would make on music would come many years later, when their lead singer Jackie Lomax would release a solo single, “Sour Milk Sea”, which George Harrison wrote for him. The Searchers, on the other hand, made their mark immediately. The group’s first single was a cover version of a song written by Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman, which had been a top twenty hit in the US for the Drifters a couple of years earlier: [Excerpt: The Drifters, “Sweets For My Sweet”] That had become a regular fixture in the Searchers’ live set, with Tony Jackson singing lead and Chris Curtis singing the high backing vocal part in falsetto. In much the same way that the Beatles had done with “Twist and Shout”, they’d flattened out the original record’s Latin cha-cha-cha rhythm into a more straightforward thumping rocker for their live performances, as you can hear on their original demo version from the Iron Door sessions: [Excerpt: The Searchers, “Sweets For My Sweet (live at the Iron Door)”] As you can hear, they’d also misheard a chunk of the lyrics, and so instead of “your tasty kiss”, Jackson sang “Your first sweet kiss”. In the studio, they slowed the song down very slightly, and brought up the harmony vocal from Pender on the choruses, which on the demo he seems to have been singing off-mic. The result was an obvious hit: [Excerpt: The Searchers, “Sweets For My Sweet”] That went to number one, helped by an endorsement from John Lennon, who said it was the best record to come out of Liverpool, and launched the Searchers into the very top tier of Liverpool groups, their only real competition being the Beatles and Gerry and the Pacemakers — and though nobody could have known it at the time, the Pacemakers’ career had already peaked at this point. Their first album, Meet The Searchers, featured “Sweets For My Sweet”, along with a selection of songs that mixed the standard repertoire of every Merseybeat band — “Money”, “Da Doo Ron Ron”, “Twist and Shout”, “Stand By Me”, and the Everly Brothers’ “Since You Broke My Heart”, with more obscure songs like “Ain’t Gonna Kiss Ya”, by the then-unknown P.J. Proby, “Farmer John” by Don and Dewey, which hadn’t yet become a garage-rock standard (and indeed seems to have become so largely because of the Searchers’ version), and a cover of “Love Potion #9”, a song that Leiber and Stoller had written for the Clovers, which was not released as a single in the UK, but later became their biggest hit in the US (and a quick content note for this one — the lyric contains a word for Romani people which many of those people regard as a slur): [Excerpt: The Searchers, “Love Potion #9”] Their second single was an attempt to repeat the “Sweets For My Sweet” formula, and was written by Tony Hatch, although the group didn’t know that at the time. Hatch, like many producers of the time, was used to getting his artists to record his own songs, written under pseudonyms so the record label didn’t necessarily realise this was what he was doing. In this case he brought the group a song that he claimed had been written by one “Fred Nightingale”, and which he thought would be perfect for them. The song in question, “Sugar and Spice”, was a blatant rip-off of “Sweets For My Sweet”, and recorded in a near-identical arrangement: [Excerpt: The Searchers, “Sugar and Spice”] The group weren’t keen on the song, and got very angry later on when they realised that Tony Hatch had lied to them about its origins, but the record was almost as big a hit as the first one, peaking at number two on the charts. But it was their third single that was the group’s international breakthrough, and which both established a whole new musical style and caused the first big rift in the group. The song chosen for that third single was one they learned in Hamburg, from Cliff Bennett and the Rebel Rousers, a London group who had recorded a few singles with Joe Meek, like “You Got What I Like”: [Excerpt: Cliff Bennett and the Rebel Rousers, “You Got What I Like”] The Rebel Rousers had picked up on a record by Jackie DeShannon, a singer-songwriter who had started up a writing partnership with Sharon Sheeley, the writer who had been Eddie Cochran’s girlfriend and in the fatal car crash with him. The record they’d started covering live, though, was not one that DeShannon was the credited songwriter on. “Needles and Pins” was credited to two other writers, both of them associated with Phil Spector. Sonny Bono was a young songwriter who had written songs at Specialty Records for people like Sam Cooke, Larry Williams, and Don and Dewey, and his most famous song up to this point was “She Said Yeah”, the B-side to Williams’ “Bad Boy”: [Excerpt: Larry Williams, “She Said Yeah”] After working at Specialty, he’d gone on to work as Phil Spector’s assistant, doing most of the hands-on work in the studio while Spector sat in the control room. While working with Spector he’d got to know Jack Nitzsche, who did most of the arrangements for Spector, and who had also had hits on his own like “The Lonely Surfer”: [Excerpt: Jack Nitzsche, “The Lonely Surfer”] Bono and Nitzsche are the credited writers on “Needles and Pins”, but Jackie DeShannon insists that she co-wrote the song with them, but her name was left off the credits. I tend to believe her — both Nitzsche and Bono were, like their boss, abusive misogynist egomaniacs, and it’s easy to see them leaving her name off the credits. Either way, DeShannon recorded the song in early 1963, backed by members of the Wrecking Crew, and it scraped into the lower reaches of the US Hot One Hundred, though it actually made number one in Canada: [Excerpt: Jackie DeShannon, “Needles and Pins”] Cliff Bennett and the Rebel Rousers had been covering that song, and Chris Curtis picked up on it as an obvious hit. The group reshaped the song, and fixed the main flaw with DeShannon’s original. There’s really only about ninety seconds’ worth of actual song in “Needles and Pins”, and DeShannon’s version ends with a minute or so of vamping — it sounds like it’s still a written lyric, but it’s full of placeholders where entire lines are “whoa-oh”, the kind of thing that someone like Otis Redding could make sound great, but that didn’t really work for her record. The Searchers tightened the song up and altered its dynamics — instead of the middle eight leading to a long freeform section, they started the song with Mike Pender singing solo, and then on the middle eight they added a high harmony from Curtis, then just repeated the first verse and chorus, in the new key of C sharp, with Curtis harmonising this time: [Excerpt: The Searchers, “Needles and Pins” (middle eight on)] The addition of the harmony gives the song some much-needed dynamic variation not present in DeShannon’s version, while repeating the original verse after the key change, and adding in Curtis’ high harmony, gives it an obsessive quality. The protagonist here is spiralling – he keeps thinking the same things over and over, at a higher and higher pitch, getting more and more desperate. It’s a simple change, but one that improves the song immensely. Incidentally, one thing I should note here because it’s not something I normally do — in these excerpts of the Searchers’ version of “Needles and Pins”, I’m actually modifying the recording slightly. The mix used for the original single version of the song, which is what I’m excerpting here, is marred by an incredibly squeaky bass pedal on Chris Curtis’ drumkit, which isn’t particularly audible if you’re listening to it on early sixties equipment, which had little dynamic range, but which on modern digital copies of the track overpowers everything else, to the point that the record sounds like that Monty Python sketch where someone plays a tune by hitting mice with hammers. Here’s a couple of seconds of the unmodified track, so you can see what I mean: [Excerpt: The Searchers, “Needles and Pins”] Most hits compilations have a stereo mix of the song, and have EQ’d it so that the squeaky bass pedal isn’t noticeable, but I try wherever possible to use the mixes that people were actually listening to at the time, so I’ve compromised and used the mono mix but got rid of the squeaky frequencies, so you can hear the music I’m talking about rather than being distracted by the squeaks. Anyway, leaving the issue of nobody telling Chris Curtis to oil his pedals aside, the change in the structure of the song turned it from something a little baggy and aimless into a tight two-and-a-half minute pop song, but the other major change they made was emphasising the riff, and in doing so they inadvertently invented a whole new genre of music. The riff in DeShannon’s version is there, but it’s just one element — an acoustic guitar strumming through the chords. It’s a good, simple, play-in-a-day riff — you basically hold a chord down and then move a single finger at a time and you can get that riff — and it’s the backbone of the song, but there’s also a piano, and horns, and the Blossoms singing: [Excerpt: Jackie DeShannon, “Needles and Pins”] But what the Searchers did was to take the riff and play it simultaneously on two electric guitars, and then added reverb. They also played the first part of the song in A, rather than the key of C which DeShannon’s version starts in, which allowed the open strings to ring out more. The result came out sounding like an electric twelve-string, and soon both they and the Beatles would be regularly using twelve-string Rickenbackers to get the same sound: [Excerpt: The Searchers, “Needles and Pins”] That record is the root of jangle-pop and folk-rock. That combination of jangling, reverb-heavy, trebly guitars and Everly Brothers inspired harmonies is one that leads directly to the Byrds, Love, Big Star, Tom Petty, REM, the Smiths, and the Bangles, among many others. While the Beatles were overall obviously the more influential group by a long way, “Needles and Pins” has a reasonable claim to be the most influential single track from the Merseybeat era. It went to number one in the UK, and became the group’s breakthrough hit in the US, reaching number sixteen. The follow-up, “Don’t Throw Your Love Away”, a cover of a B-side by the Orlons, again featuring Pender on lead vocals and Curtis on harmonies, also made number one in the UK and the US top twenty, giving them a third number one out of four singles. But the next single, “Someday We’re Gonna Love Again”, a cover of a Barbara Lewis song, only made number eleven, and caused journalists to worry if the Searchers had lost their touch. There was even some talk in the newspapers that Mike Pender might leave the group and start a solo career, which he denied. As it turned out, one of the group’s members was going to leave, but it wasn’t Mike Pender. Tony Jackson had sung lead on the first two singles, and on the majority of the tracks on the first album, and he thus regarded himself as the group’s lead singer. With Pender taking over the lead on the more recent hit singles, Jackson was being edged aside. By the third album, It’s The Searchers, which included “Needles and Pins”, Jackson was the only group member not to get a solo lead vocal — even John McNally got one, while Jackson’s only lead was an Everlys style close harmony with Mike Pender. Everything else was being sung by Pender or Curtis. Jackson was also getting involved in personality conflicts with the other band members — at one point it actually got to the point that he and Pender had a fistfight on stage. Jackson was also not entirely keen on the group’s move towards more melodic material. It’s important to remember that the Searchers had started out as an aggressive, loud, R&B band, and they still often sounded like that on stage — listen for example to their performance of “What’d I Say” at the NME poll-winners’ party in April 1964, with Chris Curtis on lead vocals clearly showing why he had a reputation for eccentricity: [Excerpt: The Searchers, “What’d I Say (live)”] The combination of these musical differences and his feelings about having his place usurped meant that Jackson was increasingly getting annoyed at the other three band members. Eventually he left the group — whether he was fired or quit depends on which version of the story you read — and was replaced by Frank Allen of Cliff Bennett and the Rebel Rousers. Jackson didn’t take this replacement well, and publicly went round telling people that he had been pushed out of the band so that Curtis could get his boyfriend into the band, and there are some innuendoes to this effect in Mike Pender’s autobiography — although Allen denies that he and Curtis were in a relationship, and says that he doesn’t actually know what Curtis’ sexuality was, because they never discussed that kind of thing, and presumably Allen would know better than anyone else whether he was in a relationship with Curtis. Curtis is widely described as having been gay or bi by his contemporaries, but if he was he never came out publicly, possibly due to his strong religious views. There’s some suggestion, indeed, that one reason Jackson ended up out of the band was that he blackmailed the band, saying that he would publicly out Curtis if he didn’t get more lead vocals. Whatever the truth, Jackson left the group, and his first solo single, “Bye Bye Baby”, made number thirty-eight on the charts: [Excerpt: Tony Jackson and the Vibrations, “Bye Bye Baby”] However, his later singles had no success — he was soon rerecording “Love Potion Number Nine” in the hope that that would be a UK chart success as it had been in the US: [Excerpt: Tony Jackson and the Vibrations, “Love Potion Number Nine”] Meanwhile, Allen was fitting in well with his new group, and it appeared at first that the group’s run of hits would carry on uninterrupted without Jackson. The first single by the new lineup, “When You Walk In The Room”, was a cover of another Jackie DeShannon song, this time written by DeShannon on her own, and originally released as a B-side: [Excerpt: Jackie DeShannon, “When You Walk In The Room”] The Searchers rearranged that, once again emphasising the riff from DeShannon’s original, and by this time playing it on real twelve-strings, and adding extra compression to them. Their version featured a joint lead vocal by Pender and Allen: [Excerpt: The Searchers, “When You Walk In the Room”] Do you think the Byrds might have heard that? That went to number three on the charts. The next single was less successful, only making number thirteen, but was interesting in other ways — from the start, as well as their R&B covers, Curtis had been adding folk songs to the group’s repertoire, and there’d been one or two covers of songs like “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” on their albums, but “What Have They Done to the Rain?” was the first one to become a single. It was written by Malvina Reynolds, who was a socialist activist who only became a songwriter in her early fifties, and who also wrote “Morningtown Ride” and “Little Boxes”. “What Have They Done to The Rain?” was a song written to oppose nuclear weapons testing, and Curtis had learned it from a Joan Baez album. Even though it wasn’t as big a success as some of their other hits, given how utterly different it was from their normal style, and how controversial the subject was, getting it into the top twenty at all seems quite an achievement. [Excerpt: The Searchers, “What Have They Done To The Rain?”] Their next single, “Goodbye My Love”, was their last top ten hit, and the next few singles only made the top forty, even when the Rolling Stones gave them “Take It Or Leave It”. The other group members started to get annoyed at Curtis, who they thought had lost his touch at picking songs, and whose behaviour had become increasingly erratic. Eventually, on an Australian tour, they took his supply of uppers and downers, which he had been using as much to self-medicate as for enjoyment as far as I can tell, and flushed them down the toilet. When they got back to the UK, Curtis was out of the group. Their first single after Curtis’ departure, “Have You Ever Loved Somebody”, was given to them by the Hollies, who had originally written it as an Everly Brothers album track: [Excerpt: The Searchers, “Have You Ever Loved Somebody”] Unfortunately for the Searchers, Chris Curtis had also heard the song, decided it was a likely hit, and had produced a rival version for Paul and Barry Ryan, which got rushed out to compete with it: [Excerpt: Paul and Barry Ryan, “Have You Ever Loved Somebody”] Neither single made the top forty, and the Searchers would never have a hit single again. Nor would Curtis. Curtis only released one solo single, “Aggravation”, a cover of a Joe South song: [Excerpt: Chris Curtis, “Aggravation”] The musicians on that included Jimmy Page, John Paul Jones, and Joe Moretti, but it didn’t chart. Curtis then tried to form a band, which he named Roundabout, based on the concept that musicians could hop on or hop off at any point, with Curtis as the only constant member. The guitarist and keyboard player quickly decided that it would be more convenient for them if Curtis was the one to hop off, and without Curtis Jon Lord and Richie Blackmore went on to form Deep Purple. The Searchers didn’t put out another album for six years after Curtis left. They kept putting out singles on various labels, but nothing came close to charting. Their one album between 1966 and 1979 was a collection of rerecordings of their old hits, in 1972. But then in 1979 Seymour Stein, the owner of Sire Records, a label which was having success with groups like the Ramones, Talking Heads, and the Pretenders, was inspired by the Ramones covering “Needles and Pins” to sign the Searchers to a two-album deal, which produced records that fit perfectly into the late seventies New Wave pop landscape, while still sounding like the Searchers: [Excerpt: The Searchers, “Hearts in Her Eyes”] Apparently during those sessions, Curtis, who had given up music and become a civil servant, would regularly phone the studio threatening to burn it down if he wasn’t involved. Unfortunately, while those albums had some critical success, they did nothing commercially, and Sire dropped them. By 1985, the Searchers were at breaking point. They hadn’t recorded any new material in several years, and Mike Pender and John McNally weren’t getting on at all — which was a particular problem as the two of them were now the only two members based in Liverpool, and so they had to travel to and from gigs together without the other band members — the group were so poor that McNally and Pender had one car between the two of them. One of them would drive them both to the gig, the other would drive back to Liverpool and keep the car until the next gig, when they would swap over again. No-one except them knows what conversations they had on those long drives, but apparently they weren’t amicable. Pender thought of himself as the star of the group, and he particularly resented that he had to split the money from the band three ways (the drummers the group got in after Curtis were always on a salary rather than full partners in the group). Pender decided that he could make more money by touring on his own but still doing essentially the same show, with hired backing musicians. Pender and the other Searchers eventually reached an agreement that he could tour as “Mike Pender’s Searchers”, so long as he made sure that all the promotional material put every word at the same size, while the other members would continue as The Searchers with a new singer. A big chunk of the autobiographies of both Pender and Allen are taken up with the ensuing litigation, as there were suits and countersuits over matters of billing which on the outside look incredibly trivial, but which of course mattered greatly to everyone involved — there were now two groups with near-identical names, playing the same sets, in the same venues, and so any tiny advantage that one had was a threat to the other, to the extent that at one point there was a serious danger of Pender going to prison over their contractual disputes. The group had been earning very little money anyway, comparatively, and there was a real danger that the two groups undercutting each other might lead to everyone going bankrupt. Thankfully, that didn’t happen. Pender still tours — or at least has tour dates booked over the course of the next year — and McNally and Allen’s band continued playing regularly until 2019, and only stopped performing because of McNally’s increasing ill health. Having seen both, Pender’s was the better show — McNally and Allen’s lineup of the group relied rather too heavily on a rather cheesy sounding synthesiser for my tastes, while Pender stuck closer to a straight guitar/bass/drums sound — but both kept audiences very happy for decades. Mike Pender was made an MBE in 2020, as a reward for his services to the music industry. Tony Jackson and Chris Curtis both died in the 2000s, and John McNally and Frank Allen are now in well-deserved retirement. While Allen and Pender exchanged pleasantries and handshakes at their former bandmates’ funerals, McNally and Pender wouldn’t even say hello to each other, and even though McNally and Allen’s band has retired, there’s still a prominent notice on their website that they own the name “The Searchers” and nobody else is allowed to use it. But every time you hear a jangly twelve-string electric guitar, you’re hearing a sound that was originally created by Mike Pender and John McNally playing in unison, a sound that proved to be greater than any of its constituent parts.
This week's episode looks at "Needles and Pins", and the story of the second-greatest band to come out of Liverpool in the sixties, The Searchers. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a sixteen-minute bonus episode available, on "Farmer John" by Don and Dewey. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ ----more---- Resources No Mixcloud this week, as there are too many recordings by the Searchers. My two main resources for this episode have been the autobiographies of members of the group -- Frank Allen's The Searchers and Me and Mike Pender's The Search For Myself. All the Searchers tracks and Tony Jackson or Chris Curtis solo recordings excerpted here, except the live excerpt of "What'd I Say", can be found on this box set, which is out of print as a physical box, but still available digitally. For those who want a good budget alternative, though, this double-CD set contains fifty Searchers tracks, including all their hits, for under three pounds. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Last week we had a look at the biggest group ever to come out of Liverpool, and indeed the biggest group ever to play rock and roll music. But the Beatles weren't the only influential band on the Merseybeat scene, and while we won't have much chance to look at Merseybeat in general, we should at least briefly touch on the other bands from the scene. So today we're going to look at a band who developed a distinctive sound that would go on to be massively influential, even though they're rarely cited as an influence in the way some of their contemporaries are. We're going to look at The Searchers, and "Needles and Pins": [Excerpt: The Searchers, "Needles and Pins"] The story of the early origins of the Searchers is, like everything about the Searchers, the subject of a great deal of dispute. The two surviving original members of the group, John McNally and Mike Pender, haven't spoken to each other in thirty-six years, and didn't get on for many years before that, and there have been several legal disputes between them over the years. As a result, literally everything about the group's history has become a battlefield in their ongoing arguments. According to a book by Frank Allen, the group's bass player from 1964 on and someone who took McNally's side in the split and subsequent legal problems, McNally formed a skiffle group, which Mike Pender later joined, and was later joined first by Tony Jackson and then by a drummer then known as Chris Crummey, but who changed his name to the more euphonic Chris Curtis. According to Pender, he never liked skiffle, never played skiffle, and "if McNally had a skiffle group, it must have been before I met him". He is very insistent on this point -- he liked country music, and later rock and roll, but never liked skiffle. According to him, he and McNally got together and formed a group that was definitely absolutely not in any way a skiffle group and wasn't led by McNally but was formed by both of them. That group split up, and then Pender became friends with Tony Jackson -- and he's very insistent that he became friends with Jackson during a period when he didn't know McNally -- and the group reformed around the three of them, when McNally and Pender got back in touch. The origin of the group's name is similarly disputed. Everyone agrees that it came from the John Wayne film The Searchers -- the same film which had inspired the group's hero Buddy Holly to write "That'll Be The Day" -- but there is disagreement as to whose idea the name was. Pender claims that it was his idea, while McNally says that the name was coined by a singer named "Big Ron", who sang with the band for a bit before disappearing into obscurity. Big Ron's replacement was a singer named Billy Beck, who at the time he was with the Searchers used the stage name Johnny Sandon (though he later reverted to his birth name). The group performed as Johnny Sandon and The Searchers for two years, before Sandon quit the group to join the Remo Four, a group that was managed by Brian Epstein. Sandon made some records with the Remo Four in 1963, but they went nowhere, but they'll give some idea of how Sandon sounded: [Excerpt: Johnny Sandon and the Remo Four, "Lies"] The Remo Four later moved on to back Tommy Quickly, who we heard last week singing a song the Beatles wrote for him. With Sandon out of the picture, the group had no lead singer or frontman, and were in trouble -- they were known around Liverpool as Johnny Sandon's backing group, not as a group in their own right. They started splitting the lead vocals between themselves, but with Tony Jackson taking most of them. And, in a move which made them stand out, Chris Curtis moved his drum kit to the front line, started playing standing up, and became the group's front-man and second lead singer. Even at this point, though, there seemed to be cracks in the group. The Searchers were the most clean-living of the Liverpool bands -- they were all devout Catholics who would go to Mass every Sunday without fail, and seem to have never indulged in most of the vices that pretty much every other rock star indulged in. But Curtis and Jackson were far less so than Pender and McNally -- Jackson in particular was a very heavy drinker and known to get very aggressive when drunk, while Curtis was known as eccentric in other ways -- he seems to have had some sort of mental illness, though no-one's ever spoken about a diagnosis -- the Beatles apparently referred to him as "Mad Henry". Curtis and Jackson didn't get on with each other, and while Jackson started out as a close friend of Pender's, the two soon drifted apart, and by the time of their first recording sessions they appeared to most people to be a group of three plus one outsider, with Jackson not getting on well with any of the others. There was also a split in the band's musical tastes, but that would be the split that would drive much of their creativity. Pender and McNally were drawn towards softer music -- country and rockabilly, the Everly Brothers and Buddy Holly -- while Jackson preferred harder, stomping, music. But it was Chris Curtis who took charge of the group's repertoire, and who was the group's unofficial leader. While the other band members had fairly mainstream musical tastes, it was Curtis who would seek out obscure R&B B-sides that he thought the group could make their own, by artists like The Clovers and Richie Barrett -- while many Liverpool groups played Barrett's "Some Other Guy", the Searchers would also play the B-side to that, "Tricky Dicky", a song written by Leiber and Stoller. Curtis also liked quite a bit of folk music, and would also get the group to perform songs by Joan Baez and Peter, Paul, and Mary. The result of this combination of material and performers was that the Searchers ended up with a repertoire rooted in R&B, and a heavy rhythm section, but with strong harmony vocals inspired more by the Everlys than by the soul groups that were inspiring the other groups around Liverpool. Other than the Beatles, the Searchers were the best harmony group in Liverpool, and were the only other one to have multiple strong lead vocalists. Like the Beatles, the Searchers went off to play at the Star Club in Hamburg in 1962. Recordings were made of their performances there, and their live version of Brenda Lee's "Sweet Nothin's" later got released as a single after they became successful: [Excerpt: The Searchers, "Sweet Nothin's"] Even as every talent scout in the country seemed to be turning up in Liverpool, and even bands from nearby Manchester were getting signed up in the hope of repeating the Beatles' success, the Searchers were having no luck getting any attention from the London music industry. In part that was because of one bit of bad luck -- the day that Brian Epstein turned up to see them, with the thought of maybe managing them, Tony Jackson was drunk and fell off the stage, and Epstein decided that he was going to give them a miss. As no talent scouts were coming to see them, they decided that they would record a demo session at the Iron Door, the club they regularly played, and send that out to A&R people. That demo session produced a full short album, which shows them at their stompiest and hardest-driving. Most of the Merseybeat bands sounded much more powerful in their earlier live performances than in the studio, and the Searchers were no exception, and it's interesting to compare the sound of these recordings to the studio ones from only a few months later: [Excerpt: The Searchers, "Let's Stomp"] The group eventually signed to Pye Records. Pye was the third or fourth biggest record label in Britain at the time, but that was a relative matter -- EMI and Decca between them had something like eighty-five percent of the market, and basically *were* the record industry in Britain at the time. Pye was chronically underfunded, and when they signed an artist who managed to have any success, they would tend to push that artist to keep producing as many singles as possible, chasing trends, rather than investing in their long-term career survival. That said, they did have some big acts, most notably Petula Clark -- indeed the company had been formed from the merger of two other companies, one of which had been formed specifically to issue Clark's records. Clark was yet to have her big breakthrough hit in the USA, but she'd had several big hits in the UK, including the number one hit "Sailor": [Excerpt: Petula Clark, "Sailor"] The co-producer on that track had been Tony Hatch, a songwriter and producer who would go on to write and produce almost all of Clark's hit records. Hatch had a track record of hits -- we've heard several songs he was involved in over the course of the series. Most recently, we heard last week how "She Loves You" was inspired by "Forget Him", which Hatch wrote and produced for Bobby Rydell: [Excerpt: Bobby Rydell, "Forget Him"] Hatch heard the group's demo, and was impressed, and offered to sign them. The Searchers' manager at the time agreed, on one condition -- that Hatch also sign another band he managed, The Undertakers. Astonishingly, Hatch agreed, and so the Undertakers also got a record contract, and released several flop singles produced by Hatch, including this cover version of a Coasters tune: [Excerpt: The Undertakers, "What About Us?"] The biggest mark that the Undertakers would make on music would come many years later, when their lead singer Jackie Lomax would release a solo single, "Sour Milk Sea", which George Harrison wrote for him. The Searchers, on the other hand, made their mark immediately. The group's first single was a cover version of a song written by Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman, which had been a top twenty hit in the US for the Drifters a couple of years earlier: [Excerpt: The Drifters, "Sweets For My Sweet"] That had become a regular fixture in the Searchers' live set, with Tony Jackson singing lead and Chris Curtis singing the high backing vocal part in falsetto. In much the same way that the Beatles had done with "Twist and Shout", they'd flattened out the original record's Latin cha-cha-cha rhythm into a more straightforward thumping rocker for their live performances, as you can hear on their original demo version from the Iron Door sessions: [Excerpt: The Searchers, "Sweets For My Sweet (live at the Iron Door)"] As you can hear, they'd also misheard a chunk of the lyrics, and so instead of "your tasty kiss", Jackson sang "Your first sweet kiss". In the studio, they slowed the song down very slightly, and brought up the harmony vocal from Pender on the choruses, which on the demo he seems to have been singing off-mic. The result was an obvious hit: [Excerpt: The Searchers, "Sweets For My Sweet"] That went to number one, helped by an endorsement from John Lennon, who said it was the best record to come out of Liverpool, and launched the Searchers into the very top tier of Liverpool groups, their only real competition being the Beatles and Gerry and the Pacemakers -- and though nobody could have known it at the time, the Pacemakers' career had already peaked at this point. Their first album, Meet The Searchers, featured "Sweets For My Sweet", along with a selection of songs that mixed the standard repertoire of every Merseybeat band -- "Money", "Da Doo Ron Ron", "Twist and Shout", "Stand By Me", and the Everly Brothers' "Since You Broke My Heart", with more obscure songs like "Ain't Gonna Kiss Ya", by the then-unknown P.J. Proby, "Farmer John" by Don and Dewey, which hadn't yet become a garage-rock standard (and indeed seems to have become so largely because of the Searchers' version), and a cover of "Love Potion #9", a song that Leiber and Stoller had written for the Clovers, which was not released as a single in the UK, but later became their biggest hit in the US (and a quick content note for this one -- the lyric contains a word for Romani people which many of those people regard as a slur): [Excerpt: The Searchers, "Love Potion #9"] Their second single was an attempt to repeat the "Sweets For My Sweet" formula, and was written by Tony Hatch, although the group didn't know that at the time. Hatch, like many producers of the time, was used to getting his artists to record his own songs, written under pseudonyms so the record label didn't necessarily realise this was what he was doing. In this case he brought the group a song that he claimed had been written by one "Fred Nightingale", and which he thought would be perfect for them. The song in question, "Sugar and Spice", was a blatant rip-off of "Sweets For My Sweet", and recorded in a near-identical arrangement: [Excerpt: The Searchers, "Sugar and Spice"] The group weren't keen on the song, and got very angry later on when they realised that Tony Hatch had lied to them about its origins, but the record was almost as big a hit as the first one, peaking at number two on the charts. But it was their third single that was the group's international breakthrough, and which both established a whole new musical style and caused the first big rift in the group. The song chosen for that third single was one they learned in Hamburg, from Cliff Bennett and the Rebel Rousers, a London group who had recorded a few singles with Joe Meek, like "You Got What I Like": [Excerpt: Cliff Bennett and the Rebel Rousers, "You Got What I Like"] The Rebel Rousers had picked up on a record by Jackie DeShannon, a singer-songwriter who had started up a writing partnership with Sharon Sheeley, the writer who had been Eddie Cochran's girlfriend and in the fatal car crash with him. The record they'd started covering live, though, was not one that DeShannon was the credited songwriter on. "Needles and Pins" was credited to two other writers, both of them associated with Phil Spector. Sonny Bono was a young songwriter who had written songs at Specialty Records for people like Sam Cooke, Larry Williams, and Don and Dewey, and his most famous song up to this point was "She Said Yeah", the B-side to Williams' "Bad Boy": [Excerpt: Larry Williams, "She Said Yeah"] After working at Specialty, he'd gone on to work as Phil Spector's assistant, doing most of the hands-on work in the studio while Spector sat in the control room. While working with Spector he'd got to know Jack Nitzsche, who did most of the arrangements for Spector, and who had also had hits on his own like "The Lonely Surfer": [Excerpt: Jack Nitzsche, "The Lonely Surfer"] Bono and Nitzsche are the credited writers on "Needles and Pins", but Jackie DeShannon insists that she co-wrote the song with them, but her name was left off the credits. I tend to believe her -- both Nitzsche and Bono were, like their boss, abusive misogynist egomaniacs, and it's easy to see them leaving her name off the credits. Either way, DeShannon recorded the song in early 1963, backed by members of the Wrecking Crew, and it scraped into the lower reaches of the US Hot One Hundred, though it actually made number one in Canada: [Excerpt: Jackie DeShannon, "Needles and Pins"] Cliff Bennett and the Rebel Rousers had been covering that song, and Chris Curtis picked up on it as an obvious hit. The group reshaped the song, and fixed the main flaw with DeShannon's original. There's really only about ninety seconds' worth of actual song in "Needles and Pins", and DeShannon's version ends with a minute or so of vamping -- it sounds like it's still a written lyric, but it's full of placeholders where entire lines are "whoa-oh", the kind of thing that someone like Otis Redding could make sound great, but that didn't really work for her record. The Searchers tightened the song up and altered its dynamics -- instead of the middle eight leading to a long freeform section, they started the song with Mike Pender singing solo, and then on the middle eight they added a high harmony from Curtis, then just repeated the first verse and chorus, in the new key of C sharp, with Curtis harmonising this time: [Excerpt: The Searchers, "Needles and Pins" (middle eight on)] The addition of the harmony gives the song some much-needed dynamic variation not present in DeShannon's version, while repeating the original verse after the key change, and adding in Curtis' high harmony, gives it an obsessive quality. The protagonist here is spiralling – he keeps thinking the same things over and over, at a higher and higher pitch, getting more and more desperate. It's a simple change, but one that improves the song immensely. Incidentally, one thing I should note here because it's not something I normally do -- in these excerpts of the Searchers' version of "Needles and Pins", I'm actually modifying the recording slightly. The mix used for the original single version of the song, which is what I'm excerpting here, is marred by an incredibly squeaky bass pedal on Chris Curtis' drumkit, which isn't particularly audible if you're listening to it on early sixties equipment, which had little dynamic range, but which on modern digital copies of the track overpowers everything else, to the point that the record sounds like that Monty Python sketch where someone plays a tune by hitting mice with hammers. Here's a couple of seconds of the unmodified track, so you can see what I mean: [Excerpt: The Searchers, "Needles and Pins"] Most hits compilations have a stereo mix of the song, and have EQ'd it so that the squeaky bass pedal isn't noticeable, but I try wherever possible to use the mixes that people were actually listening to at the time, so I've compromised and used the mono mix but got rid of the squeaky frequencies, so you can hear the music I'm talking about rather than being distracted by the squeaks. Anyway, leaving the issue of nobody telling Chris Curtis to oil his pedals aside, the change in the structure of the song turned it from something a little baggy and aimless into a tight two-and-a-half minute pop song, but the other major change they made was emphasising the riff, and in doing so they inadvertently invented a whole new genre of music. The riff in DeShannon's version is there, but it's just one element -- an acoustic guitar strumming through the chords. It's a good, simple, play-in-a-day riff -- you basically hold a chord down and then move a single finger at a time and you can get that riff -- and it's the backbone of the song, but there's also a piano, and horns, and the Blossoms singing: [Excerpt: Jackie DeShannon, "Needles and Pins"] But what the Searchers did was to take the riff and play it simultaneously on two electric guitars, and then added reverb. They also played the first part of the song in A, rather than the key of C which DeShannon's version starts in, which allowed the open strings to ring out more. The result came out sounding like an electric twelve-string, and soon both they and the Beatles would be regularly using twelve-string Rickenbackers to get the same sound: [Excerpt: The Searchers, "Needles and Pins"] That record is the root of jangle-pop and folk-rock. That combination of jangling, reverb-heavy, trebly guitars and Everly Brothers inspired harmonies is one that leads directly to the Byrds, Love, Big Star, Tom Petty, REM, the Smiths, and the Bangles, among many others. While the Beatles were overall obviously the more influential group by a long way, "Needles and Pins" has a reasonable claim to be the most influential single track from the Merseybeat era. It went to number one in the UK, and became the group's breakthrough hit in the US, reaching number sixteen. The follow-up, "Don't Throw Your Love Away", a cover of a B-side by the Orlons, again featuring Pender on lead vocals and Curtis on harmonies, also made number one in the UK and the US top twenty, giving them a third number one out of four singles. But the next single, "Someday We're Gonna Love Again", a cover of a Barbara Lewis song, only made number eleven, and caused journalists to worry if the Searchers had lost their touch. There was even some talk in the newspapers that Mike Pender might leave the group and start a solo career, which he denied. As it turned out, one of the group's members was going to leave, but it wasn't Mike Pender. Tony Jackson had sung lead on the first two singles, and on the majority of the tracks on the first album, and he thus regarded himself as the group's lead singer. With Pender taking over the lead on the more recent hit singles, Jackson was being edged aside. By the third album, It's The Searchers, which included "Needles and Pins", Jackson was the only group member not to get a solo lead vocal -- even John McNally got one, while Jackson's only lead was an Everlys style close harmony with Mike Pender. Everything else was being sung by Pender or Curtis. Jackson was also getting involved in personality conflicts with the other band members -- at one point it actually got to the point that he and Pender had a fistfight on stage. Jackson was also not entirely keen on the group's move towards more melodic material. It's important to remember that the Searchers had started out as an aggressive, loud, R&B band, and they still often sounded like that on stage -- listen for example to their performance of "What'd I Say" at the NME poll-winners' party in April 1964, with Chris Curtis on lead vocals clearly showing why he had a reputation for eccentricity: [Excerpt: The Searchers, "What'd I Say (live)"] The combination of these musical differences and his feelings about having his place usurped meant that Jackson was increasingly getting annoyed at the other three band members. Eventually he left the group -- whether he was fired or quit depends on which version of the story you read -- and was replaced by Frank Allen of Cliff Bennett and the Rebel Rousers. Jackson didn't take this replacement well, and publicly went round telling people that he had been pushed out of the band so that Curtis could get his boyfriend into the band, and there are some innuendoes to this effect in Mike Pender's autobiography -- although Allen denies that he and Curtis were in a relationship, and says that he doesn't actually know what Curtis' sexuality was, because they never discussed that kind of thing, and presumably Allen would know better than anyone else whether he was in a relationship with Curtis. Curtis is widely described as having been gay or bi by his contemporaries, but if he was he never came out publicly, possibly due to his strong religious views. There's some suggestion, indeed, that one reason Jackson ended up out of the band was that he blackmailed the band, saying that he would publicly out Curtis if he didn't get more lead vocals. Whatever the truth, Jackson left the group, and his first solo single, "Bye Bye Baby", made number thirty-eight on the charts: [Excerpt: Tony Jackson and the Vibrations, "Bye Bye Baby"] However, his later singles had no success -- he was soon rerecording "Love Potion Number Nine" in the hope that that would be a UK chart success as it had been in the US: [Excerpt: Tony Jackson and the Vibrations, "Love Potion Number Nine"] Meanwhile, Allen was fitting in well with his new group, and it appeared at first that the group's run of hits would carry on uninterrupted without Jackson. The first single by the new lineup, "When You Walk In The Room", was a cover of another Jackie DeShannon song, this time written by DeShannon on her own, and originally released as a B-side: [Excerpt: Jackie DeShannon, "When You Walk In The Room"] The Searchers rearranged that, once again emphasising the riff from DeShannon's original, and by this time playing it on real twelve-strings, and adding extra compression to them. Their version featured a joint lead vocal by Pender and Allen: [Excerpt: The Searchers, "When You Walk In the Room"] Do you think the Byrds might have heard that? That went to number three on the charts. The next single was less successful, only making number thirteen, but was interesting in other ways -- from the start, as well as their R&B covers, Curtis had been adding folk songs to the group's repertoire, and there'd been one or two covers of songs like "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?" on their albums, but "What Have They Done to the Rain?" was the first one to become a single. It was written by Malvina Reynolds, who was a socialist activist who only became a songwriter in her early fifties, and who also wrote "Morningtown Ride" and "Little Boxes". "What Have They Done to The Rain?" was a song written to oppose nuclear weapons testing, and Curtis had learned it from a Joan Baez album. Even though it wasn't as big a success as some of their other hits, given how utterly different it was from their normal style, and how controversial the subject was, getting it into the top twenty at all seems quite an achievement. [Excerpt: The Searchers, “What Have They Done To The Rain?”] Their next single, "Goodbye My Love", was their last top ten hit, and the next few singles only made the top forty, even when the Rolling Stones gave them "Take It Or Leave It". The other group members started to get annoyed at Curtis, who they thought had lost his touch at picking songs, and whose behaviour had become increasingly erratic. Eventually, on an Australian tour, they took his supply of uppers and downers, which he had been using as much to self-medicate as for enjoyment as far as I can tell, and flushed them down the toilet. When they got back to the UK, Curtis was out of the group. Their first single after Curtis' departure, "Have You Ever Loved Somebody", was given to them by the Hollies, who had originally written it as an Everly Brothers album track: [Excerpt: The Searchers, "Have You Ever Loved Somebody"] Unfortunately for the Searchers, Chris Curtis had also heard the song, decided it was a likely hit, and had produced a rival version for Paul and Barry Ryan, which got rushed out to compete with it: [Excerpt: Paul and Barry Ryan, "Have You Ever Loved Somebody"] Neither single made the top forty, and the Searchers would never have a hit single again. Nor would Curtis. Curtis only released one solo single, "Aggravation", a cover of a Joe South song: [Excerpt: Chris Curtis, "Aggravation"] The musicians on that included Jimmy Page, John Paul Jones, and Joe Moretti, but it didn't chart. Curtis then tried to form a band, which he named Roundabout, based on the concept that musicians could hop on or hop off at any point, with Curtis as the only constant member. The guitarist and keyboard player quickly decided that it would be more convenient for them if Curtis was the one to hop off, and without Curtis Jon Lord and Richie Blackmore went on to form Deep Purple. The Searchers didn't put out another album for six years after Curtis left. They kept putting out singles on various labels, but nothing came close to charting. Their one album between 1966 and 1979 was a collection of rerecordings of their old hits, in 1972. But then in 1979 Seymour Stein, the owner of Sire Records, a label which was having success with groups like the Ramones, Talking Heads, and the Pretenders, was inspired by the Ramones covering "Needles and Pins" to sign the Searchers to a two-album deal, which produced records that fit perfectly into the late seventies New Wave pop landscape, while still sounding like the Searchers: [Excerpt: The Searchers, "Hearts in Her Eyes"] Apparently during those sessions, Curtis, who had given up music and become a civil servant, would regularly phone the studio threatening to burn it down if he wasn't involved. Unfortunately, while those albums had some critical success, they did nothing commercially, and Sire dropped them. By 1985, the Searchers were at breaking point. They hadn't recorded any new material in several years, and Mike Pender and John McNally weren't getting on at all -- which was a particular problem as the two of them were now the only two members based in Liverpool, and so they had to travel to and from gigs together without the other band members -- the group were so poor that McNally and Pender had one car between the two of them. One of them would drive them both to the gig, the other would drive back to Liverpool and keep the car until the next gig, when they would swap over again. No-one except them knows what conversations they had on those long drives, but apparently they weren't amicable. Pender thought of himself as the star of the group, and he particularly resented that he had to split the money from the band three ways (the drummers the group got in after Curtis were always on a salary rather than full partners in the group). Pender decided that he could make more money by touring on his own but still doing essentially the same show, with hired backing musicians. Pender and the other Searchers eventually reached an agreement that he could tour as "Mike Pender's Searchers", so long as he made sure that all the promotional material put every word at the same size, while the other members would continue as The Searchers with a new singer. A big chunk of the autobiographies of both Pender and Allen are taken up with the ensuing litigation, as there were suits and countersuits over matters of billing which on the outside look incredibly trivial, but which of course mattered greatly to everyone involved -- there were now two groups with near-identical names, playing the same sets, in the same venues, and so any tiny advantage that one had was a threat to the other, to the extent that at one point there was a serious danger of Pender going to prison over their contractual disputes. The group had been earning very little money anyway, comparatively, and there was a real danger that the two groups undercutting each other might lead to everyone going bankrupt. Thankfully, that didn't happen. Pender still tours -- or at least has tour dates booked over the course of the next year -- and McNally and Allen's band continued playing regularly until 2019, and only stopped performing because of McNally's increasing ill health. Having seen both, Pender's was the better show -- McNally and Allen's lineup of the group relied rather too heavily on a rather cheesy sounding synthesiser for my tastes, while Pender stuck closer to a straight guitar/bass/drums sound -- but both kept audiences very happy for decades. Mike Pender was made an MBE in 2020, as a reward for his services to the music industry. Tony Jackson and Chris Curtis both died in the 2000s, and John McNally and Frank Allen are now in well-deserved retirement. While Allen and Pender exchanged pleasantries and handshakes at their former bandmates' funerals, McNally and Pender wouldn't even say hello to each other, and even though McNally and Allen's band has retired, there's still a prominent notice on their website that they own the name "The Searchers" and nobody else is allowed to use it. But every time you hear a jangly twelve-string electric guitar, you're hearing a sound that was originally created by Mike Pender and John McNally playing in unison, a sound that proved to be greater than any of its constituent parts.
Travis & Lee wish all of our listening fam a very Happy New Year and talk about the Christmas Day RV bombing of downtown Nashville.Support the show (http://patreon.com/crimeficionados)
A Variety of Tunes to finish off 2020 - Featuring: Dionne Warwicke; Bob Scoby's Frisco Jazz Band; Andy Williams; Ray Turner; Jackie Trent & Tony Hatch; Sam Browne & The Rhythm Sisters; Billie Holiday; And, The High Sierra Jazz Band.
In this podcast, Jeff Berman, Group News Editor for Logistics Management and the Peerless Media Supply Chain Group, interviews Tony Hatch, principal...
Tim trained at Mountview before embarking on his successful career within the performing arts world.His directing credits include: Into the Woods, (Cockpit Theatre), Metropolis,Wonderful Town, A Little Night Music, Into the Woods, Days of Hope, She Loves Me, Follies. (Ye Olde Rose and Crown Theatre); NewsRevue (Edinburgh 2013, Canal Café Theatre, London 2013 and 2016), Sunny Side of The Street, Bewitched Bothered and Bewildered, Classic Moments, Hidden Treasures, Coloured Lights and Jack The Ripper (Jermyn Street Theatre); Sweeney Todd and Chess (University of Cumbria, Carlisle); Rubbed, Goosed, Fanny, Jack Sissy That Stalk, Charming Dick and Prince Bendover in Boots (RVT); Beans and Cream (Canal Café Theatre); Hot Lips Cold War (London Theatre Workshop), Maurice, My Beautiful Laundrette, Dangerous, When Harry met Barry, Orton, Rise Like A Phoenix, Boyes Play, Cleveland Street, The Blink Series, three seasons of the hit Bathhouse (Above The Stag Theatre, where Tim was Associate Artistic Director from 2009 – 2015) and The Milkman's on His Way, Slippered, a new musical with Tony Hatch.His acting credits include: In Gay Company (RADA); Bathhouse and Silence of The Lambs (Above The Stag Theatre); Assassins (Pleasance Theatre); Blair on Broadway (Arts Theatre); Forever Plaid (UK Tour); South Pacific (Aberystwyth Arts Centre) Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat (Chelmsford Civic Theatre and Middlesbrough Theatre); Godspell (Millfield Arts Centre); As You Like it, Aladdin and Dick Whittington (Mercury Theatre, Colchester); Another Country (Greenfields); Twelfth Night (Broadway Theatre, Catford); You're Gonna Love Tomorrow (Greenwich Playhouse) and The Golden Key (Greenwich Theatre); Fred Astaire (London Palladium); Dame in Aladdin, Sleeping Beauty, Dick Whittington and Cinderella (Courtyard Theatre, Hereford); Snow White with Linda Robson (Beck Theatre, Hayes) Aladdin (Chelmsford Civic Theatre) Charming Dick (Cockpit Theatre) Sleeping Beauty with Honey G and Jack and The Beanstalk with Michelle Collins (White Rock Theatre, Hastings)His cabaret credits include: Tim's debut his show Mountains at Feinstein's 54 Below in (New York) and a season at The Pride Arts Centre in Chicago Tim Sings Stephen Sondheim's Divas (Ye Olde Rose and Crown Theatre, Frankenstein's and Above The Arts, Pride arts Centre – Chicago, Tada Theatre - NYC); Mountains (St James Theatre, Kenneth Moore Theatre, Ilford, Jermyn Street Theatre and Above The Arts); Tim McArthur and Chums (London Hippodrome); A New Direction (Theatre Lounge, Kuala Lumpur); New York Ding Dong (Don't Tell Mama, NYC); Over the Rainbow (Upstairs at The Gatehouse, New End Theatre and Jermyn Street Theatre). Tim has supported Helen Lederer (UK Tour); Graham Norton (Hilton); Julian Clary (Savoy Theatre) and Bobby Davro (Bridlington Spa); Elton John's Christmas Party. For the past 2 years Tim has been the host for the monthly Sondheim Society Cabaret Night (Phoenix Artist Club) and most recently was one of the headline singers in Sondheim Unplugged at London's Hippodrome. For further information about Tim, visit his website timmcarthur.com
Musique Mécanique par le Théâtre Électrique ::"Downtown" by Tony Hatch
Musique Mécanique par le Théâtre Électrique ::"Downtown" by Tony Hatch
Musique Mécanique par le Théâtre Électrique ::"Downtown" by Tony Hatch
He's responsible for one of the most iconic TV theme tunes of all time. Simon May is famous for EastEnders, the accompanying Julia's Theme and of course those 'Doof, Doofs'. He composed the themes to Howard's Way, Eldorado and a plethora of other programmes. And although Tony Hatch wrote the iconic Crossroads theme, Simon May has more than a passing association with the show. Simon's been chatting to MIM's Ashley Byrne....The Distinct Nostalgia theme is owned by MIM Productions and composed by Rebecca Applin and Chris Warner. From now onwards you can enjoy 3 NEW Distinct Nostalgia shows every single week ...Wednesday is now Distinct Nostalgia soap day. Loads of retro soap chat with the actual stars who were there ... The regular Distinct Nostalgia programme moves to the weekend with a variety of shows celebrating all our tv and film yesterdays.And then we’ve the Distinct Nostalgia Mind of the Month Quiz with Andy Hoyle as well.Distinct Nostalgia - 3 Times A Week plus a treasure trove of programmes to listen to any time at DistinctNostalgia.com"Take a Chance" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 Licensehttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/AND"Lost Frontier" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 Licensehttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/distinctnostalgia)
Label: Co & Ce 229Year: 1965Condition: M-Last Price: $25.00. Not currently available for sale.How is it that a vocal group from Pennsylvania got a crack at this great tune penned by then-popular Petula Clark and hubby Tony Hatch before Petula did? Her version of "You're The One" did chart as a single in the U.K., but only a couple of months after The Vogues release on Co & Ce. And don't forget, this essential Vogues recording had already been released on the small label Blue Star, which is what brought the group to the attention of slightly larger Co & Ce. (I suspect that Petula recorded this as a cut on one of her albums, and that's how the Vogues discovered it.) By the way, the reason I call this Power Pop rather than Sunshine Pop is because of the awesome electric guitar lead — it's a signature of the evolving Power Pop sound. Note: This beautiful copy has Mint labels and pristine sound. The A side audio is so awesome I had to make an mp3 snippet for the "jukebox"... so have a listen! (This scan is a representative image from our archives.)
Crossroads was one of TV's most successful soaps. It lasted for 24 years in its first run on ITV. A product of Lew Grade's ATV, it was set in a motel on the outskirts of Birmingham. The characters became instantly popular including Noel Gordon as Meg Mortimer and Jane Rossington as her daughter Jill. In 1978 Tony Adams, who had starred previously in General Hospital, landed himself a part in the show and he was there for over a decade. He takes up the story with MIM's Ashley Byrne. The Distinct Nostalgia theme is owned by MIM Productions and composed by Rebecca Applin and Chris Warner. The Crossroads Theme was composed Tony Hatch. From now onwards you can enjoy 3 NEW Distinct Nostalgia shows every single week ...Wednesday is now Distinct Nostalgia soap day. Loads of retro soap chat with the actual stars who were there ... The regular Distinct Nostalgia programme moves to Fridays with a variety of shows celebrating all our tv and film yesterdays.And then we’ve the Distinct Nostalgia Mind of the Month Quiz every Sunday from 11.Distinct Nostalgia - 3 Times A Week plus a treasure trove of programmes to listen to any time at DistinctNostalgia.com"Take a Chance" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 Licensehttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/AND"Lost Frontier" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 Licensehttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Broadcasting live from pregame for the big Riverdale High School football game! Go Gummy Bears! Learn the Archie's dance, "The Touchdown"! Spotlight on Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids! A dramatic reading from a 1971 issue of 'Teen Magazine! Burt Ward's Teenage Bill of Rights! Strange gum from The Care Bears! An early bubblegum classic from The Raindrops! Plenty more great bubblegum music by The Ohio Express, Kasenetz and Katz Singing Orchestral Circus, Bobby Sherman, Dr. Norman Greenbaum, Pop Workshop, Peppermint Trolley Company, Peppermint Circus, Peppermint Rainbow, The Hardy Boys, Jackie Trent and Tony Hatch, The Drifters, and The Royal Guardsmen.
In this podcast, Jeff Berman, Group News Editor for Logistics Management and Peerless Media Supply Chain Group, interviews Tony Hatch, principal of...
Songwriter, arranger, producer TV theme tune-smith and impresario, Tony Hatch has done it all including writing one of THE iconic hits of the ‘60s, Petula Clark's Downtown. In this episode of SongStripper Phil and Tim talk to Tony about how the song came about and life lessons from 60 years in the music industry. anchor.fm/songstripper facebook.com/songstrippr twitter.com/songstripper instagram.com/songstripper
Probably the most successful female singer in British chart history, Petula Clark was also an actress and composer whose career spanned 7 decades.In 1964 she started her musical collaboration with Tony Hatch when the song "Downtown" was offered to her and it became an international hit.That was the beginning of a parade of hits for the Clark/Hatch combination and those songs still live on today.
Jackie Trent was a leading UK singer-songwriter during the '60's to the 80's -much of her success came during her partnership with husband Tony Hatch. They moved to Australia in 1982 and composed the theme song for the TV series, "Neighbours".For many years they were among the most popular club performers in Australia.Unfortunately, they divorced in 2002 and Jackie returned to the UK to star in the musical "High Society" before settling in Minorca, Spain with her second husband, Colin Gregory.Jackie sadly passed away in Spain during 2015, aged 74, but she left many musical memories for us to enjoy.
With a disapperance happening right before his very eyes, Alex knows that the only solution is to contact the proper authorities. Dee, however, has other ideas... To connect with the gang and have an opportunity to help us build the world of Marsh Haven join us on Brits on Bikes Twitter, @Brits_Bikes or you can connect our team on the handles below: Eve/Dee: @CopperHarpy Alex: @OxyOxspring Jimmy: @JimmySprinkless For exclusive access to further information about the world and its goings-on, you can join us at Patreon where we will be offering lots of insight into the world and a chance for you to leave your mark on our world. https://www.patreon.com/BritsonBikes Alternatively, come chat with us over on our discord: discord.gg/dSYyseT Closing Credits: 'Marsh Haven Theme' by Cat Faber - CatFaber.bandcamp.com Music from https://filmmusic.io "Killers" by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com) License: CC BY (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) Unfinished Soldier by Admiral Bob (c) copyright 2018 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/admiralbob77/57373 Ft: copperhead Horror/Creepy sound atmosphere ambience - 01- https://freesound.org/people/bolkmar/sounds/417496/ by bolkmar -> ID: 417496 Ambience, Children Playing, Distant, A.wav by InspectorJ (www.jshaw.co.uk) of Freesound.org "Crossroads" theme tune by Tony Hatch used without permission but a whole lot of love - please don't sue us! The show title is taken from 'Pioneers over C' by Van der Graaf Generator - H to he who am the only one (1970) Be sure to check out the promo from the adorable Shelly has opinions podcast who can be found on Twitter @SHOPcast
The post Whole Health Tips For Your Daily Life with Trainer Tony Hatch | Ep.38 appeared first on Jennifer Kaylo Ruscin.
This week DJ Dave welcomes a very special guest, Svetlana, for the first time! Svetlana is a vocalist, songwriter, arranger, and leader of The Delancey Five. Tune in to hear her story and incredible songs. DJ Dave also features music by Jose Feliciano, Mina, Tony Hatch, and Ahmad Jamal! SUBSCRIBE: iTunes TWITTER: @MusicFirstPcast FACEBOOK: Music First Podcast INSTAGRAM: MusicFirstPodcast EMAIL: MusicFirstPodcast@gmail.com
This week it’s all about the light and the dark or, more specificaly, the black and the white. Some have controversially argued that this might be a companion show to our Rainbow Collection. But nothing could be further from the … Continue reading →
Nick and Antonia discuss Sister Act - currently touring the UK - and we also hear from legendary songwriter Tony Hatch as he, along with David Wood, talk to Nick about their musical - Rock Nativity. Nick and Antonia also have a tiny rant about audience etiquette!
It’s time for the second in our series all about personal pronouns and this week it’s all about YOU, dear listener. Yes, for this show we move to the second person but without trying to point the finger. We cover … Continue reading →
Bobby Rydell (born Robert Louis Ridarelli, 26 April 1942, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) is an American professional singer, mainly of rock and roll music. In the early 1960s he was considered a "teen idol". According to Allmusic music journalist Kim Summers, Rydell, whose interest in show business began at the age of four years, "is one of the most sought-after nightclub and concert acts in the US. His performance in Bye Bye Birdie and his recordings "Wild One" and "Volare" made him a famous performer in the 1960s. Rydell used his talents as an impersonator and drummer mostly in pursuing a musical rather than an acting career. CareerIn 1950, Rydell competed on the amateur talent television series, Paul Whiteman's TV Teen Club; his first-place win gained him a regular role with the series. He worked with the Whiteman series for three years, changing his name to Bobby Rydell. He later joined several local bands in Philadelphia.[As a teenage drummer, he played alongside Frankie Avalon in a musical ensemble known as Rocco and the Saints. He later had a recording contract with Cameo Records company, and his debut success was "Kissin' Time", recorded during the summer of 1959. Rydell was considered a "teen idol" along with Frankie Avalon, Pat Boone (on whose program Rydell performed, The Pat Boone Chevy Showroom), Fabian, Johnny Tillotson, Jimmy Clanton and Bobby Vee. In May 1960, Rydell toured Australia with The Everly Brothers, Billy "Crash" Craddock, Marv Johnson, The Champs and The Crickets, recording an Australian version of "Kissin' Time" for the event.His second success "We Got Love" was his first million-album seller, gaining gold disc status. 1960's "Wild One," backed with "Little Bitty Girl", was his second million-selling single; his successes continued with "Swingin' School" backed with "Ding-a-Ling," and the million-album selling "Volare" later that year. After making his first successful recordings, he continued a solo career, performing at the Copacabana in New York in 1961, where he was the youngest performer to headline at the nightclub. In February 1961 he appeared at the Festival du Rock, at the Palais des Sports de Paris in Paris, France.Rydell's success and prospects led his father Adrio, foreman at the Electro-Nite Carbon Company in Philadelphia, to resign in 1961 after 22 years to become his son's road manager.Rydell released the song "Wildwood Days" in 1963. The song is about the shore town of The Wildwoods in New Jersey. His hometown of Philadelphia, also has a four block radius renamed "Bobby Rydell Boulevard" where the entertainer grew up.In 1963, he played Hugo Peabody in the movie version of Bye Bye Birdie with Ann-Margret and Dick Van Dyke. The original stage production of Bye Bye Birdie had no real speaking role for the character of Hugo, but the movie script was rewritten specifically to expand the part for Rydell. In 2011, Sony Pictures digitally restored this film. Rydell and Ann-Margret were in attendance at the restoration premiere in Beverly Hills by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.During the 1960s, Rydell had numerous hit records on the Billboard Hot 100 record chart. His recording career earned him 34 Top 40 hits, placing him in the Top 5 artists of his era (Billboard). These included his most popular successes, "Wild One" (his highest scoring single, at number 2), "Volare" (number 4), "Swingin' School" (number 5), "Kissin' Time" (number 11), "Sway" (number 14), "I've Got Bonnie" (number 18) and "The Cha-Cha-Cha" (number 10). His last major chart success was "Forget Him", which reached number 4 on the Hot 100 in January 1964. The song - written by Tony Hatch - was his fifth and final gold disc winner.During this time, Rydell also performed on many television programs, including the Red Skelton Show where a recurring role was written for him by Red Skelton as Zeke Kadiddlehopper, Clem Kadiddlehopper's younger cousin. He also appeared on the Danny Thomas Show, Jack Benny, Joey Bishop, and George Burns where his love of comedy was able to bloom. Rydell was also a regular on The Milton Berle Show.On October 6, 1964, he was a guest actor for an episode of the television series, Combat!.This was Rydell's first dramatic acting role.In January 1968, it was announced in the UK music magazine, NME, that Rydell had signed a long term recording contract with Reprise Records company.Rydell continued to perform in nightclubs, supper clubs and Las Vegas venues throughout the 1970s and 1980s, but his career was hampered by Cameo-Parkway catalogue owner ABKCO Records' refusal to reissue Rydell's music, so the entire catalog was unavailable until 2005 (although he re-recorded his old hits in 1995 for K-Tel Records).Rydell continued to perform as a solo act, and has toured as part of 'The Golden Boys' successful stage production since 1985 (with Frankie Avalon and Fabian). However, Rydell cancelled his 2012 Australia tour because his health had deteriorated significantly, and he was in need of urgent major surgery.In July 2012, Rydell underwent a double organ transplant to replace his liver and kidneys at Thomas Jefferson University in his hometown of Philadelphia.MediaIn both the Broadway musical drama, Grease and the film, Grease, the high school was named 'Rydell High' after Bobby Rydell.In 2000 in the book, The Beatles Anthology (pg. 96), Paul McCartney stated: "John (Lennon) and I wrote "She Loves You" together. There was a Bobby Rydell song out at the time and, as often happens, you think of one song when you write another. We'd planned an 'answering song' where a couple of us would sing 'she loves you' and the other ones would answer 'yeah yeah.' We decided that was a crummy idea but at least we then had the idea of a song called "She Loves You." So we sat in the hotel bedroom for a few hours and wrote it— John and I, sitting on twin beds with guitars.”No Rydell song title is named in The Beatles Anthology pg. 96. But in Bob Spitz's The Beatles: The Biography, the author claims McCartney originally modeled "She Loves You" on an earlier Rydell "answering song" called "Swingin' School," not "Forget Him," as is commonly cited. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bobby_Rydell
This week on the show we wish a very happy 75th birthday to pop and theme tune composer extraordinaire Tony Hatch. Of course, this does mean that Tony isn’t quite eligible for entry into the Moonbase Hall of Fame (which … Continue reading →
We always enjoy being fashionably late to a party so one week after the World Cup came to an end we thought the timing was perfect for a football special. This gives us a chance to play some of our … Continue reading →
The Pet Shop Boys, Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe talk about their world premiere at the BBC Proms. Caitlin Moran discusses her debut novel, How to Make a Girl and Maureen Lipman and Harry Shearer talk about their West End transfer of of Daytona. Tony Hatch takes us on a musical trip from Downtown and beyond. Richard Wilson on one of theatre's greatest challenges: Samuel Beckett's “Krapp's Last Tape”. Actor Mark Ruffalo talks about his latest film Begin Again and we review Monty Python's first live show in 30 years.
Screenwriter Jimmy McGovern talks about his new BBC drama, Common, which was inspired by a letter from a mother whose son was imprisoned under the controversial Joint Enterprise law. Tony Hatch, composer of TV theme tunes for Crossroads, Neighbours and Sportsnight, looks back over his career and the hits he wrote for Petula Clark, Scott Walker and The Searchers. Amanda Hopkinson reviews a new Royal Academy exhibition, Radical Geometry, which focuses on art produced during a 50-year period in distinct parts of South America, and Ryan Gilbey reviews The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed out the Window and Disappeared, a new film adapted from the novel by Swedish author Jonas Jonasson. And as Ed Sheeran's album X - which is pronounced "multiply" - reaches number one, David Quantick discusses numbers in music.
Libby Purves meets songwriter Tony Hatch; cabaret performer Le Gateau Chocolat; adventurer Bob Shepton and entrepreneur Barb Stegemann. Le Gateau Chocolat is a cabaret performer from Nigeria. His latest show, Black, is a portrait of his loves, fears and personal battle with depression. Le Gateau Chocolat has sung for the Queen as part of the Jubilee Flotilla and performed around the world with La Soirée and Le Clique. His solo show has been staged at the Sydney Opera House. Black is at the Soho Theatre, London. Bob Shepton is an ordained minister in the Church of England who now spends much of his time sailing into the Arctic region and climbing mountains. He has sailed approximately 130,000 miles and made over 100 first ascents. Bob has received the Piolet d'Or mountaineering award; the Blue Water Medal; the Tilman Medal and was Yachtsman of the Year in 2013. His autobiography Addicted to Adventure - Between Rocks and Cold Places is published by Adlard Coles Nautical. Tony Hatch is a songwriter and record producer. He wrote many of the era-defining songs of the 1960s including Downtown and Don't Sleep in the Subway for Petula Clark. He also wrote the themes for television series such as Crossroads, Emmerdale and Neighbours. In the Seventies he was a judge on the ITV talent show, New Faces. His work is being celebrated at his Life In Song concert at the Royal Festival Hall. Barb Stegemann is the Canadian CEO of the 7 Virtues perfume brand - a range of fragrances made from flowers and other essences farmed on land where there is conflict or devastation. Barb formed the company after her best friend was seriously wounded in Afghanistan in 2006. She works with local suppliers who supply the essential oils for her perfume. In 2010 Barb pitched and landed a venture capital deal on Canada's version of Dragons' Den. Producer: Paula McGinley.
A particularly confusing edition of the show this week dear listener, the result of a throwaway comment made in PMB167. Yes we’ve (just about) managed to pull together a whole show themed around herbs, those friends of the kitchen gardener. … Continue reading →
Broadcasting live from pregame for the big Riverdale High School football game! Go Gummy Bears! Learn the Archie's dance, "The Touchdown"! Spotlight on Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids! A dramatic reading from a 1971 issue of 'Teen Magazine! Burt Ward's Teenage Bill of Rights! Strange gum from The Care Bears! An early bubblegum classic from The Raindrops! Plenty more great bubblegum music by The Ohio Express, Kasenetz and Katz Singing Orchestral Circus, Bobby Sherman, Dr. Norman Greenbaum, Pop Workshop, Peppermint Trolley Company, Peppermint Circus, Peppermint Rainbow, The Hardy Boys, Jackie Trent and Tony Hatch, The Drifters, and The Royal Guardsmen.
We’re getting all seasonal on the show this week as we take the weather, or more accurately the various forms of precipitation, for our musical theme. This was largely inspired by another track on the recently released Sachal Studios album … Continue reading →
Petula talks about the success of "Downtown" and how she met writer/producer Tony Hatch.
Track list: 1. Soul Continentals/Goobah 2. Ray Barretto/Love Beads 3. Harvey Scales & the Seven Sounds/Love-itis 4. Timmy Norman & the O'Jahs/Let it all Hang Out 5. Davy Jones & the Voodoo Funk Machine/Sookie Sookie 6. Billy Mack/Son of a Lover 7. Andre Williams/Do the Popcorn 8. Shirley Ellis/Soul Time 9. Syl Johnson/Od to a Soul Man 10. Roy Lee Johnson/Boogaloo N°3 11. Panic Buttons/Lovin' Horns 12. Herbie Goins & the Night-Timers /Cruisin' 13. Gunga Din/Snake Pit 14. Tony Hatch & the Satin Brass/Sounds of the 70's 15. Doris/Don't 16. Soul Sisters/Think About the Good Times 17. Googie Renee Combo/Smokey Joe's La La 18. Mel Torme/I'm Coming Home 19. Chuck Jackson/Hand it Over 20. The Coasters/3 Cool Cats