“Massive Jeri Southern fan here – you won't regret that purchase!” remarked the suave David Lance Callahan, when I posted up my find on Instagram a week or so ago. He followed up with, “Great, cigarette-toned torch singing.”

This is precisely how I remember Ms Southern. Although I hadn’t encountered her since the early 1980s, in my mind she is one of a handful of mostly sadly forgotten torch singers of the 1950s - Peggy Lee and Julie London of course, but also Anita O’Day and Jo Stafford. Marilyn Monroe, even. And much earlier, Helen Morgan.

Jeri Southern actually played piano for Anita O’Day for a while.

I always assumed torch singing was something to do with the lighting and decor in the nightclubs these chanteuses would perform in, swathed in cigarette smoke and so overwhelmed with the emotion of lost love, they sound almost detached from it. Minimal, stark, intimate. So quiet you can hear the sound of your own hushed breathing in places. I used to see Mari Wilson perform her 1980s version of Julie London - or could it have been Jeri Southern - in dingy Soho bars, nothing as outre as beer on the table. Whiskey, straight. Perhaps a little ice, and an ashtray to hand. I saw Eartha Kitt perform in a tiny Seattle nightclub with cartoonist Peter Bagge (this doesn’t have any particular relevance, just thought I’d mention it). Intimate.

Torch singing probably has more to do with keeping alight the flame of a lost love, though - as Dinah Shore’s ‘Jim’ has it:

Someday, I know that Jim will up and leave me
But even if he does you can believe me
I'll go on carryin' the torch for Jim.
I'll go on lovin' my Jim.

Or Peggy Lee singing about ‘Black Coffee In Bed’.

Sad, slow songs about unrequited love. Cue Ms Southern. Miles Davis once stated she was his favourite singer. You will find little about her online, which is weird seeing as how she near kickstarted the whole oeuvre with ‘When I Fall In Love’. It’s her version that counts, not Doris Day’s. Much as I love Ms Day, her image was way too wholesome to carry that song off; it needed someone who’d lived it, who knew what it was like to suffer unrequited love without any hope attached, who knew that the premise of the entire song was unreachable. Jeri Southern suffered from severe performance anxiety. In 1960, she collapsed on stage, cancelled a forthcoming tour and retired from singing. She died in 1991, a day before her 65th birthday.

As bassist Charlie Hann put it, “She sang the way she spoke, in the most pure, honest, and vulnerable ways. She bared her soul in her singing.” My number one torch singer will always remain Peggy Lee, but Jeri Southern alongside Julie London runs her a close second. A very close second indeed.

Minimal, stark, intimate.

Intense.

THE CONFESSIONAL BOX
Value for money: 8
Bragging rights: 6 (it’s a compilation, not an original)
Sleeve condition: 8
Vinyl condition: 8
Collectability factor: 7
Peak UK chart position: n/a
Sleeve film noir factor: 10
Price you can pick this up for on Discogs: £6.99 including postage
Quote for the ages: “Just the best. The very best.” - Frank Sinatra

You see, this is why I haunt boot fairs and charity stores, record fairs too (telling them to forget the quality, “it’s the trash I am after”) in the oft forlorn hope I might stumble across a pair of albums like these two. Now you tell me, are you gonna resist that red gingham, the mischievous smiles on the faces of the guitar-wielding women? Damn straight, you ain’t! This is why we do it, to discover records like these - entirely unknown to us, but that is most of the thrill.

And what a delight these two albums are! I cannot deny I know very little indeed about the folk music ‘explosion’ of the early 1960s which begat Dylan and Baez, and Simon & Garfunkel, and very rapidly became subsumed by the British Invasion (rock and/or roll). To this day, I have not heard The New Christy Minstrels. I love The Seekers though - and that is who The Womenfolk immediately reminded me of, with their genial yet intricate five-part harmonies and stand-out laments (c.f. ‘Bring Me A Rose’). Someone amid the five ladies that make up The Womenfolk is one that had the most beautiful velvety lower register voice (c.f. ‘White Lilacs’), very redolent of Judith Durham. I believe it belongs to Joyce Gibbs.

Did someone say The Roches? Well, it’s not of that standard, not quite, but you can certainly trace a link between these two 1964 albums (their second and third) and Maggie, Suzzy and Terre. I’m betting those three knew of these five, even if I had never heard their name even whispered before.

Not surprising perhaps. Their self-titled album was their biggest hit - a tantalising #118 on the Billboard Top 200 - and their sole hit single ‘Little Boxes’ (#83 on Billboard in April 1964) was notable principally for being the shortest single to date to reach the Billboard Top 100 (1.01 minutes long). You may well know it for The Kingston Trio’s version but it was The Womenfolk who brought it to public attention first. Them, and Pete Seeger (but his version was a flatulent two-minutes long).

By their very existence (the only all-female folk group in the early 1960s), it feels like it’s long overdue The Womenfolk were brought back to wider attention.

The sleeve-notes to both albums are nicely self-deprecating and a little humorous, in the manner of arch satirist Tom Lehrer - and whoa! Is that a Lehrer song I hear being covered on the second album, ‘Rickety Tickety Tin’? I do believe it is.

Full respect to Jean, Leni, Barbara, Judy and Joyce for brightening my August Saturday so considerably. Thank you ladies, wherever you may be.

THE CONFESSIONAL BOX
Value for money: n/a (not for me to judge)
Bragging rights: 9 (but only in the right circles)
Sleeve condition: 3 (sellotape city)
Vinyl condition: 8
Collectability factor: 10!
Peak UK chart position: n/a
Price The Womenfolk goes for on Discogs: £3 or thereabouts (plus p&p, natch)
Price Never Underestimate The Power Of The Womenfolk for on Discogs: the same
Year they split after releasing five albums in the four previous years: 1967
Year the University of NH in Newmarket created the Joyce Gibbs Award honouring contributions to “equity and inclusion”: 2001, or so
Quote for the ages: “Never Underestimate the Power of The Womenfolk”

This music makes me feel all warm and fuzzy and glad to be alive.

It makes me think of cloudy days spent on decomposing allotments; stuffy school corridors filled with bad late Seventies haircuts (still not as bad as 2026 haircuts) and no air conditioning, just a vague sense of claustrophobia; junkyards and massive signs in the middle of dust fields; tiny bedsits in Peckham where friends don’t want to eat your toast in case you can’t afford it; the sense of watching everything that is happening to you from a distance; late nights and shouts and too much cheap red wine; Dansette mono record players blaring out punk rock records indiscriminately; the occasional sign of companionship; Northern towns and wide Northern streets; knees rubbing underneath the table leading to… nothing. Laughter, and encountering the adult world for the first time, no safety net.

This music makes me jaunty and psyched and… I don’t know… a little wary but excited about what might just be round the corner. It doesn’t make me want to play it safe. It’s another world, another way of seeing. Cups of tea and nights spent plotting revolution under the table. Hopelessness. Love and distraction.

I came to Bix Beiderbecke via The Detectorists. Oh my God, I love The Detectorists! The sense of freedom in stifling suburban surrounds, flanked by, but oblivious of, the new builds that pop up on every corner. A reclamation of the streets and fields, pure revolution. I am thinking Ben Myers, Cider With Rosie, Bix Beiderbecke…

I came to Bix Beiderbecke via The Detectorists. A recommendation was asked for, and given - my man Billy Reeves was like, have you seen The Beiderbecke Affair? Was it Billy? Could it have been Howard Monk? Not sure. Anyway, 1985 ITV drama - Trevor Chaplin teaches woodwork and likes to listen to jazz. Jill Swinburne teaches English and wants to help save the planet. Trevor tries to buy some jazz records but this leads to meeting a “dazzlingly beautiful platinum blond”. Three seasons, set in Leeds. Got James Bolam in it. No, of course I never saw it. I never owned a TV in the Eighties.

Oh man, that’s good. We watched it avidly, like that boy in Kes.

The title of this album comes from a famous 1938 jazz novel by Dorothy Baker inspired by the short, tragic life of pioneering cornetist Bix Beiderbecke. (It was later adapted into a 1950 film starring Kirk Douglas.) I know nothing about either, and even less about Mr Beiderbecke, except to note that some of the rousing tunes on this double-album compilation are over 100 years old, but don’t suffer in the remastering. He has a purity of expression that was once compared to “shooting bullets at a bell”. (Eddie Condon described Beiderbecke's cornet playing as “like a girl saying yes”.) He died at the age of 28 from health issues tied to heavy drinking.

Sigh.

What wonderful music.

Oh my God, ‘Singin’ The Blues’ has just started playing…

THE CONFESSIONAL BOX
Value for money: 7 (great value, but kind of ubiquitous in charity stores right now)
Bragging rights: n/a
Sleeve condition: 8
Vinyl condition: 8
Collectability factor: n/a (although if the TV series is to be believed, certain Beiderbecke recordings contain immense collectability value)
Peak UK chart position: n/a
Number of Beiderbecke albums I have bought over the last couple of years because of The Beiderbecke Affair: Just one, oddly. A CD. Maybe they’re a little pricier than I thought.
Quote for the ages: “He pulled me in and pointed to the bed. His whole body was trembling violently. He was screaming there were two Mexicans hiding under his bed with long daggers. To humor him, I looked under the bed and when I rose to assure him there was no one hiding there, he staggered and fell, a dead weight, in my arms. I ran across the hall and called in a woman doctor, Dr. Haberski, to examine him. She pronounced him dead.”

Ah, Feargal. At one point, I would have taken a bullet for you.

You seem like a top bloke (figurehead for the campaign to prevent water companies dumping sewage into UK waterways). You fronted one of my three favourite male punk bands, full stop. You have a voice that beckons angels down from the rafters, so beautiful, so well equipped to express desire and trembling loss. In the past three or months, I have managed to restock my vinyl collection with all FOUR initial Undertones albums - all equally as wonderful, a run that beats even initial Buzzcocks (unless you count Singles Going Steady, which many do).

You made it more than OK for me to sound like a “choirboy lost in a field of out-of-tune guitars” as John Robb so memorably reviewed one of my Legend! records decades ago.

You didn’t allow for cheap commerce to sully The Undertones’ name when John Peel died and ‘Teenage Kicks’ would have been a shoo-in for a very well-deserved Number One slot.

I have even grown to adore your initial run of post-Undertones records, especially the chart-topping Maria McKee-penned 1985 ‘A Good Heart’ and its answer song, the follow-up ‘You Little Thief’… the whole of the debut album, really. Took me a fuck of a long time to like that one, though (the two solo pre-LA singles certainly helped). First, I had to get past The Undertones’ split and your quiff-hungry slick new image. That sure as fuck was not how I imagined my Undertones, although I guess every working-class boy deserves to wear some designer clobber now and then.

Also, The Undertones’ final album, 1983’s criminally underrated The Sin Of Pride, contains many songs the equal of, but superior to ‘A Good Heart’.

Honours equal then. I respected the fact you retired from performance many years back: good on ya for sticking to your guns and not watering down the memories. But then… I had no idea that you’d released more than one solo album until a couple of weeks ago, while visiting my brother Mick in Liverpool (the one who got me into Ramones), I chanced across Wish in a high street charity store.

Oh man. It’s gonna take me a fuck of lot longer to like this one - to get past what sounds suspiciously like a synthesiser-derived saxophone that comes in halfway through each song, regular as fucking clockwork, to ruin every fucking song that hasn’t been ruined already. I’ve played it twice now, and I am sweating to think of a single nice word to say. It flopped, and deservedly so. The songs are garbage. The session musicians sound like session musicians, and not in a good way.

I believe this used to be called designer soul.

Ever wondered what it sounds like when AOR meets punk? Wonder no more.

Lola Borg of Smash Hits nailed it when she wrote that “Sharkey’s very lovely voice” is “wasted on these plodding, over-orchestrated and unexciting croons”. Billboard, on the other hand, described Wish as an “even-better follow-up” to Sharkey’s debut, one that “should soon be sitting firmly at the top of the charts”.

Nice one, Billboard.

… and now I discover he released a third solo album!

Yes, of course, I am going to look for it.

THE CONFESSIONAL BOX
Value for money: 4
Bragging rights: 1
Sleeve condition: 7
Vinyl condition: 7
Collectability factor:1
Peak UK chart position: … well, it reached #22 on the Swedish chart.
Would I have bought this if I had seen it in a box of £2 records? Yeah, of course. It’s Feargal!
Quote for the ages: “I’ve never devoted myself so much to an album before, so if it comes out, and nobody gives a damn about it, I would be extremely disappointed, to say the least.” Oh, Feargal!

So. This is where it began for me. First single I ever bought, must have been on 7” although I did have the 12” for years. (No, it was on 12” - the 7” was called ‘No One Is Innocent’, and that’s not the one I had.) Great sound, wicked dynamics. Still leaps out the speakers, that gorgeous Steve Jones guitar sound and pounding Paul Cook drums. Damn, it still cuts through. Risibly forgettable ‘controversial’ lyrics of course, but the rabble-rousing singing style suits its marketplace.

Ronnie Biggs was doing time until he done a bunk
Now he says he’s seen the light and he sold his soul for punk

Damn it all, why did I choose this to be my first single? McLaren trying to rubbish the social impact of the Pistols because he’d had a spat with Johnny (they’d already split up by the time this, their fifth single was released). I knew what I wanted to buy already, the song that bust the floodgates open for me, latecomer as I was (17, when I finally bought me a record) - ‘Denis’ by Blondie. That was the one where it all suddenly made sense to me: the desire, the longing, the sheer nerve-trembling drums and blissful harmonies. I didn’t think it would be as cool to buy that so I went for a substandard Pistols track instead. I reckon it was probably cheap, that’s why I went for it. I didn’t even particularly like punk, certainly not the pseudo-macho swagger of it anyway.

I recall taking it to the under-18s YMCA disco where we used to furtively hang out (could have been Chelmsford Boys Club). We were allowed to bring new records in for the DJ to spin - I asked him to play the B-side, Sid Vicious’ snarling, cynical take on ‘My Way’. (It was the double A-side on the 7”.) Playing it now, it pales next to the A-side but back then it sounded ferocious, untamed, genius even in its overt rejection of another generation’s values. (It remains one of my three favourite versions of the song. It’s funny!) Well I recall sitting round my mate Phil’s house, the three of us trying to note down every word, refusing to believe Sid might have deviated from the original.

There were times, I'm sure you knew
When there was fuck fuck fuck all else to do
But through it all, when there was doubt
I shot it up or kicked it out I faced the wall and the world
And did it my way

The DJ never played one of my records again. Absolute tumbleweed.

THE CONFESSIONAL BOX
Value for money: 7
Bragging rights: 2
Sleeve condition: 7
Vinyl condition: 7
Collectability factor: 8
Peak UK chart position: 7 (Sid’s version of ‘My Way’ being a rare example of a UK Top 10 hit that contains the word "cunt").
Peak US chart position: n/a (Sex Pistols’ American record company decided not to release it in America).
Would I have bought this if I had seen it in a box of £2 records? Fuck yes. Still would.
Quote for the ages: “I never liked [‘My Way’] except when Sid Vicious did it. Sung straight, it somehow deprives the appetite of a certain taste we'd like to have on our lips. When Sid Vicious did it, he provided that other side to the song; the certainty, the self-congratulation, the daily heroism of Sinatra's version is completely exploded by this desperate, mad, humorous voice.” - Leonard Cohen

All grades are out of 10, and provisional until accepted by Exam Board

To think, I killed a cat and may I say, not in a gay way
Oh no, no not me I did it my way

There are some people who doubtless love Steve Harley. My mate Stephen, for instance. Now, I love my mate Stephen, and wish he lived on the other side of the bloody world again so I could regularly partake of his canny Geordie insights… It feels like there’s going to be a ‘but’ here. No ‘but’. If Stephen wants to love Steve Harley and his Cockney Rebel then good on him. We’re roughly the same age, but he got into music several years before - i.e. the early 70s - whereas me? For decades, I didn’t really get any pop music after 1965 and earlier than 1977.

‘Make Me Smile (Come Up And See Me)’, though - what a corking great pop song! (And it also gave rise to one of my favourite scenes in Gregory’s Girl, one of the greatest coming-of-age movies set in a Scots new town to awful, awful music, no argument.) Yeah, I can hear that one Stephen.

‘Judy Teen’, that’s another good ‘un - I was tipped off to that by some Facebook pals after Steve’s death a couple of years back. “Judy Teen, the queen of the scene, she’s rag doll amour Verbal slang, American twang, you dare not ignore”… yeah, I love a little of that rock’n’roll mythologising (Bowie did have a lot to answer for, didn’t he?).

Scars, too. Doubtless someone from my favourite early 80s post-punk pre-New Romantic, Peter Porter-quoting Scots band loved Steve Harley too, cos they turned in a cracking good, edgy version of Cockney Rebel’s ‘Psychomodo’ on the B-side to 1980 single ‘Love Song’. Way better than Steve’s version, to these ears.

Well, whatever. It turns out that Steve Harley’s first solo album is nowhere up to those heady Cockney Rebel heights either. It starts off all wishy-washy and by the time side two reaches its conclusion, the music sounds like a forewarning of Jamiroquai 15 years early.

Marc Bolan features on two tracks.

THE CONFESSIONAL BOX
Value for money: 4
Bragging rights: 3
Sleeve condition: 5
Vinyl condition: 7
Collectability factor: ??
Number of months Hobo With A Grin took to record: 18
Amount of money Hobo With A Grin took to record: £70,000
Stars awarded to it in Sounds: 1, the reviewer writing, “Harley’s album is undoubtedly the worst slab of vinyl from a relatively major artist since [Peter Frampton’s] I’m in You.”
Stars awarded to it in Record Mirror: 2, the reviewer writing, “If Steve Harley thinks this is rock and roll, he’s living in his own nightmare.”
Stars awarded to it retrospectively by AllMusic: 1.5, the reviewer writing, “Hobo with A Grin marks the utter desecration of everything which Harley once stood for.”
Stars awarded to it retrospectively by Q in 2000: 4, the reviewer writing, “Sneered at then, it’s aged rather well.” That’s Q for you.
Peak UK chart position: 50
Would I have bought this if I had seen it in a box of £2 records? Fuck no. One pound is more than enough to waste on this trash.
Quote for the ages: “I looked at that LP the other day – looking is enough. I can’t bear to listen to it. It’s the worst thing I’ve ever done. I just want to forget about it. Trash.” - Steve Harley in 1979 on Hobo With A Grin.

All grades are out of 10, and provisional until accepted by Exam Board

Oh, this is just fabulous. I must’ve played ‘White Rabbit’ by Jefferson Airplane in class a hundred times or more, and each time lamented that I couldn’t play it so loud that the building we were in would start to crumble and fall. (I did receive two noise complaints one semester. Lovely fellow from a business class next door came by, stuck his head around the door and wished aloud he could have as much fun as I did teaching.) And yes, I have searched out Jefferson Airplane ever since and am usually pleasantly surprised. But I don’t recall any of that there Airplane sounding as out-there, as full-on unleashed and buoyant, as Side One of their former singer Grace Slick’s debut solo album.

I mean, it’s nonstop.

It’s like listening to the emotional ferocity and tug of Janis Joplin ripping through ‘Piece Of My Heart’ over and over. It’s intoxicating, slightly terrifying and entirely committed to its own strange internal logic. The sort of performance where the singer sounds less like they’re interpreting songs and more like they’re clinging on to them for dear life.

The first time I put Manhole on, showing off my pitiful understanding of late-’60s and early-’70s American rock, I remember thinking, “Man, I never knew Fleetwood Mac sounded this demonic, this possessed”. I’d somehow managed to confuse Stevie Nicks and Grace Slick in my head. In my defence, it didn’t take long before that voice announced itself as belonging to somebody from an entirely different universe.

Because Grace Slick isn’t merely singing here. She’s charging.

Side One essentially consists of two pieces. The brief, flamenco-tinged opener ‘Jay’, adapted from music Slick had written years earlier for a student film, acts as a gentle invitation into the hall of mirrors. Then comes the 15-minute title suite, ‘Theme From The Movie Manhole’, which kicks the door off its hinges and wanders into progressive-rock, psychedelic, orchestral insanity… Spanish influences, multiple bass players, mandolin, piano, the London Symphony Orchestra and enough audacity to power a small city.

Scenes blur into one another. Tempos shift. Melodies appear and vanish. One moment you’re floating through something genuinely beautiful; the next you’re knee-deep in orchestral melodrama.

The A-side is pretty much all Slick. The B-side is not (it even features one song that doesn’t feature her at all). It’s bollocks, of course. (It’s the old Ramones puzzler, and something I never understood about the Airplane either: your singer happens to possess one of the greatest voices in the history of recorded music. Why the FUCK would you let someone else sing on your records?)

The whole thing carries the air of a group of stoned, talented people being given far too much freedom and deciding to see just how far they can push matters before somebody intervenes. No one intervened.

The Billboard full-page ad proclaimed Grace Slick as “the voice that launched a thousand trips”. The album sank without a splash. Critics scratched their heads. Robert Christgau at Village Voice moaned that “she sounds tired, and for the most part this is as inflated as the worst Airplane”.

And this is why you need second-hand albums to be £2 maximum in charity shops and boot fairs, people.

So the unwary and unwashed can stumble across some faded copy with a ridiculous cover, take it home on a whim, drop the needle and have their understanding of music rearranged for the price of a small Lucozade.

You don’t discover records like Manhole through algorithms.

You discover them because somebody bought it in 1974 after seeing that ludicrous Billboard advertisement, played it once, possibly twice, filed it, forgot about it, and 50 years later some idiot like me finds it wedged between Cliff and Jim.

And suddenly Grace Slick is in the room again, barking, soaring, seducing, commanding, sounding like she could tear through concrete if sufficiently motivated.

THE CONFESSIONAL BOX
Value for money: 7 (no pull-out psychedelic booklet, sadly)
Bragging rights: 10 (it’s Grace Slick’s first solo album. C’mon!) (Am I just showing off a woeful lack of knowledge here?)
Sleeve condition: 7
Vinyl condition: 8
Collectability factor: 5
Number of members of the London Symphony Orchestra who feature on the main track: 42
Amount of drugs taken during recording: How long you got?
Chart position (US): 127
Grade given by The Vinyl District: D+ (they didn’t like it)
Grade it’s probably worth: man, why the fuck we giving grades to rock music?
Time in the morning that the Mexican janitor would appear, so Slick could ask him to translate her made-up Spanish words: 6am
Would I have bought this if I had seen it in a box of £5 records at a record fair?: No. Some records need to be £2.
Quote for the ages: Slick later explained that the title was a reaction to, “Women badgering me about women’s liberation, so I was being very sarcastic and just calling myself a cunt. I assumed people would understand it and nobody did.”

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All grades are out of 10, and provisional until accepted by Exam Board

Those arch 1950s UK comedic songwriters Flanders and Swann are best known for those wonderful children’s songs, ‘The Hippopotamus Song’ and ‘The Gnu Song’. Best known to me, anyway. Both songs delighted me when I was young, with their smart and intricate wordplay, that slightly smug knowing edge of being able to understand the subtleties of adult humour and, of course, their rollicking tunes.

A bold hippopotamus was standing one day
On the banks of the cool Shalimar
He gazed at the bottom as he peacefully lay
By the light of the evening star

Away on the hilltop sat combing her hair
His fair hippopotami maid
The hippopotamus was no ignoramus
And sang her this sweet serenade

Mud, mud, glorious mud
Nothing quite like it for cooling the blood
So follow me, follow down to the hollow
And there let us wallow in glorious mud

These days, I am slightly thrown by what feels to me to be a slightly colonial, patronising tone in their music that typified the upper middle-class British male back then (both men went to Westminster School and Christ Church, Oxford) and still holds tiresome sway today. Some of this album is jolly good fun, of course (the winsome ‘Twosome - Kang And Jag’, the rather biting ‘The Chameleon’, and so forth), and much of it is not, being more an excursion into showing off how clever we all are, much cleverer than you leastways.

Even so, you can still hear traces on all those who followed - the Bonzos, Reeves & Mortimer, Monty Python, Morecambe & Wise, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore - and so it is worth picking up one of their albums just for the experience. Shouldn’t be too difficult: their albums litter charity stores the length of the land over, although I have to say I personally do not get along with At The Drop Of A Hat (one, two or three).

_________

I picked up a copy of the first five seasons of Are You Being Served? on DVD recently (£3), the classic Seventies UK comedy set in a department store and featuring a stand-out performance from John Inman, and have been glued to it since. It has aged surprisingly well - very little homophobia indeed (if anything, this series feels pro-gay at a time when the mainstream dialogue was anything but) or casual racism, just some great character actors (including Wendy Richards, pre-Pauline Fowler).

It was written by David Croft and Jeremy Lloyd. Lloyd was also responsible for Captain Beaky, a compilation of his poems about ardent animals set to music by Jim Parker, recited by sundry British celebrities. With numbers such as ‘Nathanial Gnat’, ‘Harold The Frog’ and ‘Jacques, A Penniless French Mouse’ (Peter Sellers doing what was by now his rather tiresome French turn again), it doesn’t feel too much of a stretch to see it as an updated ‘Bestiary’.

The album went on to generate another album, two books of poetry, BBC television shows, a West End musical, a pantomime, performances by the National Youth Ballet of Great Britain and a gala in aid of UNICEF..

It doesn’t always work - enough Harry Secombe already! - but when it does, it’s priceless. The title track, recited by actor Keith Michell with its rolling tea-dance jazz backing, is a joy to listen to, and anything featuring Twiggy’s broad Cockney accent has my vote. Again, this album is near ubiquitous in charity stores - please don’t pay more than £1 or 50p.

Hissing Sid is innocent!

TRUE CONFESSIONS
Value for money: 7
Sleeve conditions: 7/8
Vinyl conditions: 8
Microgroove flexible record count: 0
UK Singles Chart Position ‘Captain Beaky’ reached when released as a single in 1980: 5
Price these albums go for on Discogs: don’t be silly. Just pop into your local charity store.
Would I have bought these if I’d seen them in a box of £1 records at a record fair?: No. Too ubiquitous for that.
Question for the ages: “I'm a g-nu/Spelt G-N-U/I'm g-not a camel or a kangaroo/So let me introduce/I'm g-neither man nor moose/Oh, g-no, g-no, g-no - I'm a g-nu”

All grades are out of 10, and provisional until accepted by Exam Board

Here is a weird fact for you. I have a gold disc for the CD of this somewhere… I think. I have never owned a copy of this album on record or CD, until I bought this in Hove yesterday,

I think.

The original price was £15, a couple of very friendly females selling a handful of records among the tie-dyed T-shirts and formative books (“I wouldn’t wear a tie-dye T-shirt unless it was dyed with the urine of Phil Collins and the blood of Jerry Garcia” - Kurt Cobain). I looked sad, and explained that although I felt its worth was certainly more than that, I have to impose a strict limit on what I spend on albums lest my addiction becomes totally out of hand.

(What do you mean, that it already has? There is only 120 CDs sitting right next to where I type because I can’t find anywhere else to place them… feel the quality, though. Miles Davis, Nick Cave, Low, Beastie Boys, PJ Harvey, Belle & Sebastian… all for a pound or less.)

They immediately agreed to lower the price to a tenner, even though I advised them against it. I said that it would make me very happy to buy it, but that they could certainly sell what looked to be a NM copy for way more than that. They were OK with that, so I started to tell them my personal connection to the album - that I had the opportunity to attend the recording but turned it down. (That wasn’t the full story I told them, but I am conscious of who might be reading this Substack, and that I might have got a little carried away in my enthusiasm yesterday.) The two women were gratifyingly astonished to hear my tale: I did warn them it might not be true.

I walked across to the adjourning stall, where the feller had a copy of The Beat’s album What Is Beat? for sale. “I very much enjoy hearing such an agile raconteur,” he said, before allowing me to buy The Beat album off him for £2 and then launching into a mini-rant against the way Discogs have ruined charity stores for a generation that might have come from my very lips. “You don’t need to prove it one way or another,” he said. “I just enjoyed hearing the story.”

It was something about being on someone’s hotel floor that morning, and that someone asking me not to attend cos… well, MTV sucks, right?

To this day, I have not listened to the full album. Except now. And side one has been playing on my tinny portable record player just behind the 120 or so CDs on my computer desk, and it means nothing to me, wallpaper music.

I am taking it off now. Maybe in another 30 years…

Still, it’s nice to have one Nirvana record in my collection.

THE CONFESSIONAL BOX
Value for money: 9
Sleeve condition: 9
Vinyl condition: 9
Guilt Factor: 10
Price this sells for on Discogs: £20 (I am assuming it’s not an original pressing)
Number of months after Kurt killed himself this was released: 7
US Billboard debut chart position: 1
Copies sold in US alone: 8 million
Number of takes it took to film all 14 songs: 1
Amount Kurt’s Martin D-18E guitar sold for at auction in 2020: $6 million
Would I have bought this if I’d seen it in a crate of £10 records?: Yes. Depending on condition.
Quote for the ages: “I knew I was different. I thought that I might be gay or something because I couldn’t identify with any of the guys at all. None of them liked art or music. They just wanted to fight and get laid. It was many years ago but it gave me this real hatred for the average American macho male” - Kurt Cobain

All grades are out of 10, and provisional until accepted by Exam Board

After the light (Nana Mouskouri), the darkness…

Like Pinky & Perky crossed with a Grimm Brothers adaptation of the Charles Manson story, there is little as unsettling as listening to Tiny Tim’s debut album. You say Pee-wee Herman and I say you don’t have a fucking clue, do you? Pee-wee Herman has beauty at his disturbing heart. Sometimes I am convinced that Tiny Tim never had anything but the malice he so often gleefully paraded within his music at the centre of his being. Experiencing the 15 songs here is like being stuck on a ten-second loop of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang where the Child Catcher always wins. I mean, do we need this? Is this not simply evil masquerading as dementia hiding in plain sight?

Or was Tiny Tim just a superb vaudevillian actor?

The very fact that Tiny Tim disturbs me is much of what I find appealing about his music, though. It is so wrong, wrong, wrong (or, as Jules Feiffer once termed it, Sick! Sick! Sick!). Spoken word, insanely high vocals, sudden cackling: it’s like all the nightmarish moments from Pan’s Labyrinth somehow finding a sarcastic, horrifying voice. Did children buy this? Did adults? Really, beyond the three-second novelty of “Tiptoe Through the Tulips” (represented here), what is the appeal of these horrific visions? And yet I keep returning. And yes, of course I would pick up any other Tiny Tim albums that crossed my path.

Part of the fascination may be that Tiny Tim occupies a strange place somewhere between novelty act, outsider artist and genuine musical scholar. Beneath the unsettling falsetto and carnival-barker presentation was Herbert Khaury, a man obsessed with American popular music from the turn of the 20th Century onwards. He wasn’t simply singing old songs for laughs. He had spent decades devouring sheet music, collecting shellac records and immersing himself in forgotten corners of musical history. There was something almost monastic about his dedication.

And “monastic” is an interesting word when applied to Tiny Tim. Khaury spent much of his life living according to bizarre personal rules and deeply religious convictions. He could be painfully shy, intensely superstitious, sexually conflicted and consumed by notions of purity and morality. His diaries reveal someone forever attempting to impose order on desires and emotions he couldn’t quite understand. The result was a public figure who often appeared profoundly unnatural - as though he had assembled himself from fragments of old records, Bible verses, vaudeville routines and private anxieties.

His physical condition only added to the sense that he existed slightly outside ordinary life. Tiny Tim suffered from diabetes, poor circulation and eventually congestive heart failure. By the mid-1990s he was seriously ill, with an enlarged heart and an irregular heartbeat. Even on stage he often looked fragile, stooped and ghostly, yet he stubbornly refused to follow medical advice that would have curtailed his performances. There is something faintly tragic about watching late-period Tiny Tim: a man visibly deteriorating while remaining utterly committed to the strange mission he had set himself decades earlier.

I love Tod Browning’s 1932 sideshow eulogy Freaks too, for the humanity at its core. Maybe Tiny Tim keeps reminding me never to take humanity for granted. I dunno. Unlike the exploitative gaze that often surrounded him, Khaury was not merely a curiosity. He was an eccentric and often deeply troubled performer who transformed aspects of his own vulnerabilities, physical limitations and social awkwardness into art. Disturbing art, certainly, but art nonetheless.

Produced by Richard Perry, who had also produced Captain Beefheart’s first album - you can hear parallels. Not in the music itself, perhaps, but in the willingness to push audiences into uncomfortable territory. Both artists seemed to exist in worlds entirely their own, indifferent to whether listeners laughed, applauded or ran for the exit.

Tiny Tim’s fame peaked with ‘Tiptoe Through the Tulips’, but the song has always seemed almost beside the point. The hit obscures the much stranger figure behind it: a walking archive of forgotten American music who somehow became a counterculture star while appearing more like a visitor from another century. He was simultaneously ridiculous and fascinating, repellent and compelling.

Tiny Tim’s final words were perfectly in character. On 30 November 1996, while performing ‘Tiptoe Through the Tulips’ at a benefit in Minneapolis, he suffered a heart attack on stage. His wife Susan asked him if he was all right.

“No, I’m not.”

Moments later he collapsed and never regained consciousness.

ADDENDA:

His religious convictions shaded into some unpleasant territory. Khaury’s views on sexuality could be deeply reactionary, and he would express homophobic attitudes that sat oddly alongside the ambiguities and contradictions of his own life. Even by the standards of professional eccentrics, songs such as ‘Santa Claus Has Got the AIDS This Year’ feel less like provocations than glimpses of a man whose obsessions with morality, purity and sin could curdle into something extremely mean-spirited. The darkness that sometimes seems theatrical elsewhere in Tiny Tim’s work was, on occasion, all too real.

THE CONFESSIONAL BOX
Value for money: 7 (please can I take it off now?)
Sleeve condition: 6
Vinyl condition: 7
Price the reissue sells for on Norman Records: £36.49 (yellow with magenta tulip splatter vinyl LP
US Billboard chart position for God Bless Tiny Tim: 7
Year Khaury began performing ‘Tiptoe Through The Tulips’: 1958
Year ‘Tiptoe Through The Tulips’ became a hit: 1968
Year ‘Tiptoe Through The Tulips’ was written: 1929
Amount Khaury got paid for performing at the NYC gay club, the Page Three, six hours a night, six days a week, in 1963: $96 per month
Amount $96 is equivalent to in 2025: $1,010.
Number of times Khaury appeared on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson between 1968 and 1974: 22
Estimated size of audience that watched Khaury marry Miss Vicki live on The Tonight Show on December 17, 1969: between 30 and 35 million.
Would I have bought this if I’d seen it in a crate of £5 records?: Probably, but thankfully I don’t feel the need now to pay so much for his other albums… oh, wait…
Quote for the ages: “Remember, it’s better to be a has-been than a never-been” - Tiny Tim.

All grades are out of 10, and provisional until accepted by Exam Board

It started in France last year. There was only one brocante in our village worth visiting: amid the stuffed goats and broken bicycles were several racks of dusty vinyl, the French equivalent of Jim Reeves and Cliff Richard. There was extremely slim pickings, sadly: mostly, I was beset by endless arrays of Nana Mouskouri albums and seven-inch singles, dozens and dozens of different ones.

I was not interested. I firmly believed Nana Mouskouri was not for me, the very definition of a certain type of MOR pop tinged with classical/hymnal leanings that really, really did not interest me. Her look intrigued me - how many other female singers can you name from that era who wore glasses? - but that was it. Then, a few months back, I found myself unable to resist the strange magnetic pull of the sleeve to her 1967 Greek folk album Songs Of My Country.

Simultaneously, I asked someone I trusted: which Nana should I be looking out for? Early ones, where she is still singing direct from her heart (not our TV screens). Albums like this one, came the reply.

Very rapidly, I found myself hooked. (I am not denying that the relative cheapness of her records in charity stores helped.) I currently own 15 Nana Mouskouri albums (not as many as by Peggy Lee, but more than by Melanie), including today’s haul. According to Google AI, her singing style is defined by a pure, crystal-clear tone, a smooth crossover between classical technique and gentle folk simplicity, and a uniquely airy vocal quality shaped by having only one functioning vocal cord. And you know what? If it ain’t broke don’t fix it. I ain’t gonna disagree with that - except to note that often her crystal-clear tone can bring a hymnal quality to her readings of popular songs, which works very nicely thank you when covering ‘Seasons In The Sun’, or Neil Young’s ‘After The Gold Rush’ (both featured on Nana’s Book Of Songs).

Far more interesting however is her Greek heritage showing through in the arrangements on the double live French album Une soirée avec Nana Mouskouri et Les Athéniens; indeed, when shed of the need to commercialise her wares, her music is quite stunning. One heckuva voice.

Around 1986, the live editor at NME Alan Jackson thought it would be a wheeze to send his most archetypal anti-commercialism writer The Legend! to a series of concerts at places like the Royal Albert Hall and Wembley Arena (I usually only attended venues where 60 was a very decent attendance). Nana Mouskouri was one such occurrence at the Royal Albert Hall: I have no memory of the event whatsoever sadly, and I certainly wouldn’t have known who she was at the time, or how immensely popular or beloved she was within vast sections of the world. A bit of a mischievous scamp, my editor had arranged for my photo to be taken with her - it duly was, and it was reprinted in the NME the following week, captioned “The Legend! with Nana Mouskouri”.

Much to my bemusement, I found that the tagline for my sporadic NME live reviews over the next few months was, “The Legend! with Nana Mouskouri”.

She is my Charity Store Queen.

Man, I wish I could see that photo again.

THE CONFESSIONAL BOX
Guilt factor: zero (she is my Charity Store Queen!)
Value for money: 6 (great price, but I can’t shake the feeling these records are worth around 20p each)
Sleeve conditions: between 5 and 8
Vinyl condition: 7 (all pretty good)
Price these sell for on Discogs, on average: do you need to ask?
Number of ‘core’ studio albums released: 130 (estimated)
Number of regional variations released: estimated to be between 400-800
Number of albums sold over the course of her career: 350 million (contested)
Number of records she still sells per year: 2 million (contested)
Number of different languages she has released albums in: 13 (including Welsh and Corsican)
Number of copies sold of ‘The White Rose of Athens’: over 1.5 million
Position she reached in the 1963 Eurovision Song Contest, representing Luxembourg: 8
Number of weeks her 1969 album Over And Over spent in the UK charts: 102
Number of streams her song ‘Guten Morgen, Sonnenschein’ has received on Spotify: 48.9 million
Year she became a spokesperson for UNICEF: 1993
Year she got elected to the European Parliament as a Greek deputy: 1994
Year that her French record company released a 34-CD box set of more than 600 of her mostly French songs: 2004
Age she embarked upon a three-year ‘Happy Birthday Tour’: 80
Current age: 91 (last seen performing at the age of 90)
Would I have bought these if I’d seen them in a crate of £2 records?: No no no. One has to have limits! Oh, OK… one of them possibly, the double live album.
Quote for the ages: “When I was young I was singing all the time, but there was a time that I started to sing officially - professionally - choosing songs that I could learn something from, but were not against my feelings. So there were songs of love and peace, of hope. You learn to sing Leonard Cohen, for example, because it it very important what he says.”

All grades are out of 10, and provisional until accepted by Exam Board

No disrespect intended, but I would not recommend even a fleeting visit to Plumpton. Ten minutes is too long, even.

Or was it Cooksbridge? Either way, brrr. Don’t bother.

You could argue it was worth it because I managed to pick up a great Lonnie Donegan compilation, and some Melanie, but tbh you can pick up both artists in pretty much any charity store you wander into around mid-Sussex and often for cheaper. No disrespect to either artist or set of fans intended. I mean, Lonnie Donegan - and his Skiffle Group - was pretty much my introduction to great rock’n’roll music at the age of 5 or 6, racing around the living room to the sound of his rambunctious 78rpm ‘Puttin’ On The Style’ on the family radiogram. It took me at least another 10 years to find another rock group as high energy, as great - the Ramones.

I kinda miss the snaps, crackles and pops on my parents’ copy, though.

The song is featured here, alongside at least three others of equal stature - ‘Battle Of New Orleans’, the ferocious romp ‘Cumberland Gap’ and… oh wait, am I going to undervalue my entire eulogy if I include ‘My Old Man’s A Dustman (Ballad Of A Refuse Disposal Officer)’ as one of the four? Bugger. Still, you could argue it invented Ian Dury 15 years early.

Yeah, ignore Lonnie’s vaguely Norman Wisdom-esque cheeky chappie persona that permeates many of his songs… or rather embrace it for full enjoyment of his music, as he always counters it with a slightly out-of-control manic energy. It was de rigour for musician folk back then to adapt a jovial counter-persona on TV (just look at Elvis). Bloody middle America.

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No ‘Rock Island Line’, though. Bah. Guess I will have to junk this and hold onto my more exhaustive Lonnie compilation Golden Hour of Golden Hits, even though it’s got a shit cover, or the eight-track

10” Lonnie Donegan Showcase (great sound!) or even Tops With Lonnie for its ace sleeve…

THE CONFESSIONAL BOX
Value for money: 5 (I already had all these tracks, and £2 was too much to pay, no disrespect intended)
Sleeve condition: 7
Vinyl condition: 7 (
Price it sells for on Discogs: £0.05 (plus £4.50 shipping, natch)
Number of copies ‘Rock Island Line’ sold: over 3 million
Number of Top 30 UK singles: 31
Number of Number One UK Hits: 4 - ‘Rock Island Line’, ‘Cumberland Gap’, ‘Gamblin’ Man / Puttin’ On The Style’ (the last UK chart-topper to be solely issued in 78 rpm format), and ‘My Old Man’s A Dustman’
US Billboard chart position that ‘Does Your Chewing Gum Lose Its Flavour (On the Bedpost Overnight?)’ reached in 1961: 5
Value of Lonnie Donegan’s estate when the King of Skiffle died in 2002: £82,000
Would I have bought this if I’d seen it in a crate of £1 records?: Yes. Probably still will!
Quote for the ages: “He was the first person we had heard of from Britain to get to the coveted No. 1 in the charts, and we studied his records avidly. We all bought guitars to be in a skiffle group. He was the man” – Paul McCartney

All grades are out of 10, and provisional until accepted by Exam Board

Andy Burnham was born in a suburb of Liverpool. How the HELL isn’t a record by Pete Wylie (The Mighty Wah!) in his Top 10?

‘Better Scream’ (Pete’s debut as Wah! Heat) is one of the greatest singles ever… and then he only went and released at least four more singles its equal (and in the case of the life-affirming/changing ‘Story Of The Blues’, its better).

This is one of them. A heart as big as Liverpool. The 12” is great cos it contains three versions, including the one on the A-side which just keeps pumping out hope and self-belief over and over again. I wish it was still playing. So inspirational. So sussed. So beautiful. An era when Socialism was something to be believed in (it still should be).

Down by the docks the talking turned:
"As some are striving to survive, the others thrive"
(Reaching the realm of no return)
"I don't want charity, just half a chance and it's all up to you, yes it's all up to you"
Come Back! I'm willing to try
Come Back! Don't let time go by
Come Back! The will to survives
Come Back
Come Back! With time on my hands
Come Back! I'm making a stand
Come Back! To kill or to cure
Come Back! To God-given belief
Well did you ever hear of hope?
Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!
A small belief can mean you'll never walk alone
And did you ever hear of faith?
Encouragement! Development!
And it's all to you!
Yes, it's all to you!

Damn, I wish this was Burnham’s anthem right now.

THE CONFESSIONAL BOX
Guilt factor: 0 (are you kidding!)
Value for money: 8 (slightly marred by the enthusiastic immovable sticker the original owner put on the front sleeve)
Sleeve condition: 6
Vinyl condition: 7 (no major concerns)
Price it sells for on Discogs: too low
Would I have bought this if I’d seen it in a crate of £3 records?: Well, I actually argued this one - and a Specials 12”, Sade 12”, Sister Sledge 12”, Scritti 12” and Odyssey album - down from £3 by pointing out the rather lived-in condition of the sleeves.
Quote for the ages: “...well that’s my story and I’m sticking to that. So let’s have another drink and let’s talk about the blues. Blues is about dignity, it’s about self-respect, and no matter what they take away from you - that’s yours for keeps. I remember how it was, how every medium - T.V. and papers and radio and all those people were saying: ‘you’re on the scrap-heap, you’re useless’, and I remember how easy it was to start believing that. I remember how you’d hear people take it for granted that it was true - just ‘cause someone with an ounce of power said so. And that’s a problem now, too many oddballs, too many pocketbook psychologists and would-be philosophers with an axe to grind. But there’s a solution, it’s not easy, but it’s a matter of coming to terms in your heart with situation you’re in, a matter of choosing how things go for you and not having things forced upon you. There are plenty of forces against you, forcing you against your will, your ideals - you’ve got to hope for the best, and that’s the best you can hope for - you’ve got to hope against hope... I remember something Sal Paradise said, he said: ‘the city intellectuals of the world are debauched from the full body blood-of-the-land and are just rootless fools.’ So listen, when the smile, the condescending pat-on-the-back comes and says: ‘we’re sorry, but you’re nothing, you’ve got nothing for us and we’ve got nothing for you,’ you say: ‘No,’ and say it loud: “NO!” and remember, people who talk about revolution and a class-struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life, without understanding what is subversive about love, and what is positive in the refusal and constraint...since people have a corpse in their mouth...”

All grades are out of 10, and provisional until accepted by Exam Board

In retrospect, always go after the sacred cows.

In retrospect, man you had to be buying into the whole Everything But The Girl/Tracey Thorn/’Long Hot Summer’ aesthetic to truly appreciate this. (I didn’t.)

In retrospect, what a brilliant piece of marketing - all the better because it felt naive, genuine, fresh - releasing a 17-track compilation on Christmas Day 1982 with the famous slogan PAY NO MORE THAN 99p emblazoned on its cover, as a time when very few labels dared to do the same, or if they did it just felt cynical. It went on to top the Independent Charts for eons (five weeks anyway) and sold more than 120,000 copies, and doubtless helped soothe great sections of middle England with its rather too pleasant folksy bent, and wistful meanderings.

I despised Pillows And Prayers when it came out. (Did I really? Or was I just playing to the balcony? Certainly, I was extreme and passionate in my musical tastes - I treated music like a “bruised lover”, as David Callahan once put it - and so I probably believed in my hatred.) It appeared just when Alan McGee and I were putting together the second issue of Communication Blur, and doubtless he encouraged me to give voice to my hatred - seeing, no doubt, a rival to overcome in his own plans for World Domination, a rival that sadly (in retrospect) gave voice to much more diverse and interesting music than his label. (This is not intended as an insult. There is plenty I like about Creation - particularly early Creation.) So I included a throwaway line about it in my inarticulate rage column The Sound Of Music, something about how I wanted to write something positive about the current music scene, but this album is just a bunch of fucking hippies (Nightingales excluded).

(Of course, I liked hippies and some hippie music just fine. It was just a throwaway insult, one that seemed to particularly sting in the aftermath of punk.)

My mate from work (and Swinging Soul Sister) Dave “The Very Busy Man” Smith drew an awesome OTT one-page comic strip for the fanzine, which culminated with me bursting into the offices of Cherry Red with a machine gun and mowing the entire office down. At the time, I thought it hilarious. In retrospect, I can see why some might have been offended.

Mike Alway, the genius behind él Records and the man responsible for Pillows And Prayers, certainly was. He phoned me up at my silkscreen work place a few days after the fanzine came out and ranted at me down the phone for 45 minutes. I was in a state of shock. I was a complete unknown punk kid, and here was this record company magnate tearing me off several strips. (He later told a friend he did it because he thought me and McGee were going to be running the music press in a couple of years time.) But later, I got to thinking - isn’t this what I wanted to happen? That I should upset the person responsible who allowed so much shit music to be released?

In retrospect, Pillows And Prayers is nowhere near as bad as I painted it, of course. It remains too pastoral and post-prog rock (The Misunderstood) for my tastes, and starts with the weakest track on the compilation, Five Or Six’s sub-Durutti Column ‘Portraits’, and man - enough Ben Watt already!, but there are some real gems among the polite guitar runs. The Nightingales, of course - and I always did have a love-hate relationship with both Eyeless In Gaza and The Passage - but wow, that Kevin Coyne track is gold (something I probably didn’t realise at the time). The Marine Girls track is probably their weakest (too EBTG), the Felt track is out of this world… and is that Robert Wyatt masquerading under the name Joe Crow I hear?

Oh, and great Monochrome Set track too.

This compilation has been reissued several times. I have in my possession a three-CD set that contains an astonishing 54 bonus tracks, including entire Nightingales and Kevin Coyne Peel Sessions, plus some wicked hidden jewels (The Reflections’ ‘4 Countries’, Dead Kennedys of course, Jane’s superlative ‘It’s A Fine Day’, Felt’s mesmeric ‘Penelope Tree’, Grab Grab The Haddock, the wickedly misjudged ‘Kinky Boots’, Swallow Tongue…). That’s the one worth grabbing, frankly. But I am still oddly pleased to be reunited with the original album, a pivotal moment in my ultimately failed career as a music critic.

THE CONFESSIONAL BOX
Guilt factor: 9 (in deference to my 20-year-old self, who would have been absolutely appalled to see my words above)
Value for money: 1 (twice the cost of the original!)
Sleeve condition: 8
Vinyl condition: 7 (couple of jumps on Tracey Thorn tracks)
Number of Top 40 singles released by Everything But The Girl: 12
Number of Top 40 singles released by Marine Girls: none
Number of Top 40 singles released by The Nightingales: none
Amount it sold for on Discogs 10 days ago (VG condition): £5 (plus p&p, natch)
Would I have bought this if I’d seen it in a crate of £5 records?: Yes.
Quote for the ages: “Pillows and Prayers is not just a record. It is a philosophy.”

All grades are out of 10, and provisional until accepted by Exam Board

How much twang do you need?

Two things leap out at me, scanning the track listing on this 20-song greatest hits. First, 10 of the songs are co-written with arch moustachioed man Lee Hazelwood. Second, three of the tracks (including the song which gives this album, and many many, others its title) are published via Twangy Music.

Listening in, shut that fucking Benny Hill-style saxophone up already! By about midway side one, what started off as a rather pleasing and enjoyable (if undemanding) excursion into the netherworlds of the King of Twang has merged into one long indistinguishable morass of nothingness, not helped by the shapeless percussion and backing vocals parading as lead. ‘Play Me Like You Play Your Guitar’, the lady pleads - methinks, you don’t really mean that. The title track is horrendous bland filler that makes Mantovani sound cutting edge. ‘Peter Gunn’ is great, in the way Star Wars is great: inescapable. I dunno. I am aware of Eddy’s stature and role in the formation of (say) spaghetti western music, surf music, The Shadows and George Harrison’s guitar sound. All I can say is, thank fuck the musical world moved on.

Sorry, didn’t mean that to come out so harsh - I’d much rather a guitar solo played on Eddy’s low E, A, and D strings than an interminable David Gilmour solo any day. Sorry. Didn’t mean that to come out so harsh, either. And ‘Rebel Rouser’ is great.

Producer Hazelwood famously used a 2,000-gallon metal water storage tank as an echo chamber to give Eddy’s low notes their cavernous, resonant decay. And he sure does have a way round a bent note, a simple, blues-tinged pitch bent note. Just wish the rest of the music was up to his innovation, and not so deliberately generic.

THE CONFESSIONAL BOX
Guilt factor: 5 (why am I buying these records, precisely? It’s not like the cover is alluring.)
Value for money: 3
Sleeve condition: 8
Vinyl condition: 8
Number of records Duane Eddy had sold by 1962: 12 million
US chart position of ‘Rebel Rouser’: 6
Number of weeks Eddy’s debut album, 1958’s Have ‘Twangy’ Guitar Will Travel stayed on the Billboard Top 100: 82
Available in the UK on Discogs for: £1 (plus p&p, natch)
Would I have bought this if I’d remembered how much I dislike the generic sound Eddy usually gets saddled with, and especially that fucking Benny Hill-style saxophone?: No,
Year that NME’s readers voted him World’s Number One Musical Personality, ousting Elvis Presley: 1960
UK chart position of 1959 album The “Twangs” the “Thang”: 2
Quote for the ages: When asked by Conan O’Brien what his greatest contribution to music was, Eddy replied, “Not singing”.

All grades are out of 10, and provisional until accepted by Exam Board

Well, I ain’t gonna be playing this one in front of my kids.

In the 1970s, Derek And Clive - and Ian Dury’s New Boots And Panties - were schoolyard gold. Deliberately offensive, occasionally jaw-dropping hilarious (although most of the humour comes from the sheer disbelief that the duo are saying what they’re saying), definitely not to be played when your parents were around, this was comedy crack cocaine to a generation of schoolkids looking to find the simplest way to offend every person they could think of, and many they’d never dreamt of. Often a rambling drunk stream-of-consciousness from Peter Cook interspersed with the occasional comment from Dudley Moore, the Derek And Clive albums took the duo’s Pete and Dud TV personas to lewd, obscene extremes. (Hint: the TV personas are much funnier.)

Viz and all that, don’t come close; not least because Viz always seems good-natured: Pete and Dud never let good natured-ness get in the way of their sweartastic invective. Damn, but we still learnt some of these routines and speech inflections by heart.

Wikipedia puts it well:

Considered highly offensive by many at the time, the sketches primarily took the form of bizarre, sometime drunken streams of consciousness led by Cook, with interjections from Moore. Memorable moments from the records include Clive claiming that the worst job he ever had was retrieving lobsters from Jayne Mansfield‘s arsehole, Derek claiming his worst job was cleaning up Winston Churchill‘s bogeys (leading the pair to conclude that the Titanic was one such bogey), Clive claiming that he was sexually aroused by the sight of a deceased Pope lying in state, Derek’s account of a stranger accosting him and the ensuing profanity-laden conversation between them, followed by Clive’s reminiscence of viciously assaulting a man who had said “Hello” to him at a football match, and a horse-racing ‘commentary’ featuring horses given the names of sexual organs, often in their vulgar forms.

Though the recordings were far too crude for a mainstream audience, Derek and Clive bootleg recordings circulated. They were mostly unscripted dialogues incorporating copious swearing – including frequent use of the word “cunt“.

It must be noted that this, their second album, isn’t a patch on the first, Derek And Clive Live. As Wikipedia further explains, “while [Derek And Clive Live] was reasonably good-natured in its blasphemous subversiveness, Come Again was released at the height of the punk rock phenomenon and Cook, in particular, seems keen to elevate the excess to new heights of jaw-dropping offensiveness […] Throughout much of the album both Cook and especially Moore are drunk and out of control, with Moore in particular regularly collapsing in hysterics.”

Uncut also got it right when they wrote, “the second and third Derek and Clive records are remarkable for their sustained levels of cruelty: the awful misanthropic bleakness of the thing. They are comedy records that aren’t funny, principally.”

In other words, this record is mostly unlistenable, unfunny shit-covered offal.

Far more of interest to me, tbh, is the inner sleeve which lists all the albums in the Virgin Mid-Price Range including dozens I would dearly love to have in my collection right now, and dozens more I would rather pluck my arse hairs out one-by-one rather than be made to listen to again.

Including this album.

THE CONFESSIONAL BOX
Guilt factor: 10 (this purchase was for scientific purposes only)
Value for money: n/a
Sleeve condition: 8
Vinyl condition: 8
Length of time spent recording Derek And Clive Come Again: 1 day
Copies of Derek And Clive Live sold: 100,000
Copies of Derek And Clive Come Again sold: 60,000
Number of police forces who reported them to the DPP for obscenity: 4
Number of petrol station attendants who got fired from their jobs for owning a Derek And Clive record: 1
Number of Derek And Clive albums released before Dudley Moore got fed up with Peter Cook launching drunken, obscene, vindictive attacks on him: 3
Most this has sold for in the UK on Discogs: £22 (plus p&p, natch)
Amount it is currently being sold for in the UK on Discogs: £1 (plus £6 p&p, natch)
Would I have bought this if I’d remembered how fucking awful it is?: no
Minutes I spent listening to it: not many
Quote for the ages: “I’ll tell you, the other day some bloke came up to me and…”

All grades are out of 10, and provisional until accepted by Exam Board

For years, this was unavoidable.

One of the classic charity store records, alongside Saturday Night Fever and… fill in your own. I never went near it, of course. There is something about Frampton’s blank, glazed look on the fold-out sleeve of this best-selling 1976 double live album that warns me straight off - same way I couldn’t go near The Who for decades cos of Daltrey. Yet it was everywhere. Topped the Billboard Hot 100 for 10 weeks in 1976, and sold eight million copies in America alone. One of the most successful live albums of all time, blah blah blah - at one point I believe, it was mandatory to own a copy if you lived in the suburbs and were American and ‘liked’ rock music. The British had a little more sense - it only went gold over here (100,000 copies sold). Still, it couldn’t have been that fucking good if it was also mandatory for every U.S. thrift store to stock four copies during the 1980s and 1990s.

So it proves. Never having heard this before, I tried to play side one earlier and honest-to-God I cannot remember a single note or sound. I have no idea whether that is a safety mechanism, bearing in mind that I do recall hating every single anodyne second of it especially the guitar solos, but it’s true. I am stuck for a description except to describe this as anti-rock, a vortex of heat and bluster threatening to pull everything into its life-destroying gravitational pull. I mean, Coldplay and U2 and Smashing Pumpkins are bad, right? But I could describe all those loosely. I am entirely lost for words here. I believe I may have inadvertently stumbled across the worst music ever made: so bad it defies any attempt to explain why.

Damn, this shit is worse than even Pearl Jam.

I had a look at AllMusic’s (favourable) review for insight, but they seem to be unable to describe it as well. Rolling Stone don’t bother, either.

Of course, these days you can’t see a copy in a charity store for under 15 quid.

Coincidentally, I picked up a copy of the double Who retrospective The Story Of The Who from the same seller, same price - and man, that is fucking superb, poodle hairdo or no poodle hairdo! Nice packaging too.

THE CONFESSIONAL BOX
Guilt factor: 0 (this purchase was for scientific purposes only)
Value for money: 0 (absolute garbage from the previously unknown Humble Pie/The Herd band member)
Sleeve condition: 6 (you can tell it’s been sitting in a box of records unsold for around 30 years)
Vinyl condition: 8 (damn, I wish it would jump)
Length of Billboard Top 15 single ‘Do You Feel Like We Do’: 7.19 minutes
Position in 1976 Rolling Stone readers Album of the Year poll: 1
Cheapest you can currently buy it in the UK on Discogs: £1.47 (plus £5.95 p&p, natch)
Would I have bought this if I’d seen it in a box of £5 records at a record fair?: Possibly. For the curiosity value (I had never heard it). Bloody fool.
Quote for the ages: “Everybody has Frampton Comes Alive. If you lived in the suburbs, you were issued it. It came in the mail with free samples of Tide” - Wayne’s World 2

All grades are out of 10, and provisional until accepted by Exam Board

Right here is one of the main reasons I go hunting in charity stores, record and boot fairs, and record shops. There are certain records you just KNOW that you will pick up as long as the price is right, that make you feel all warm and tingly inside to be reunited with. £2 each! OK, so the cover to the 12” has a couple of rips, and a small sticker on the front of Songs To Remember honestly owned up to a skip at the start of side two but… Two quid!

Damn, I know I have never quite got Scritti Politti - heaven knows I have tried enough on so many different occasions, mainly because of the two records pictured above. For anyone old enough to have picked it up at the time, the NME’s C81 cassette tape was life-changing - such a great and diverse roster of artists, from James Blood Ulmer to a Buzzcocks rarity, from DAF to Robert Wyatt to Pere Ubu and The Specials, NOT A WEAK FUCKING TRACK ON IT, so so many personal favourites on it and yet, the opening song, all six minutes nine seconds of ‘"The “Sweetest Girl”’ is unquestionably the greatest thing on it.

It shouldn’t work. Even now, it shouldn’t work. Green Gartside’s voice is too fragile, too mannered, too obviously vulnerable to carry the weight of a song this devastatingly beautiful, and yet somehow every hesitant syllable only pulls you further in.

By the time that stately bassline arrives and the song unfurls into its slow-motion lament for love, uncertainty and human frailty, you’re already lost. Six minutes and nine seconds long, barely raising its voice above a murmur, and more rebellious than near all of the punk records that surrounded it.

God damn I was happy to see that 12” (never before owned)… am I imagining those last 30 seconds at its end as an extra, a voyage into noise and sound, an awakening where avant-garde always creates the sweetest pop (ask Robert Wyatt, he knows - oh wait, he played keyboards on it!) - and of course, its B-side (‘Lions After Slumber’). One of the eight greatest B-sides ever.

Madness covered it, you say? I do like some Madness, but - why?

Songs To Remember is, funnily enough, precisely as I remember it.

THE CONFESSIONAL BOX
Guilt factor: zero
Swoon factor: 10
Value for money: 8
Sleeve conditions: 5 / 7.5
Vinyl conditions: 8 / 7
UK chart position Scritti Politti’s version of ‘The “Sweetest Girl”’ reached: 64
UK chart position Madness’ version of ‘The “Sweetest Girl”’ reached: 35
Superiority factor of SP’s to Madness’ version of ‘The “Sweetest Girl”’: 1,000/1
Production cost of ‘“The Sweetest Girl”’, according to Rough Trade producer, the legendary Mayo Thompson: £60,000
Did it nearly bankrupt its label Rough Trade: Yes, until The Smiths popped up.
Number of times I had to go back and put in the missing speech marks around “Sweetest Girl”: 6
Sadness factor, knowing that Scritti Politti are currently playing at the Barbican as I type these words, and that I have never seen them play live: 8.7
Cheapest you can currently buy the 12” of ‘The “Sweetest Girl”’ in the UK on Discogs: £5.67 (plus p&p, natch)
Would I have bought these if I’d seen them in a box of £5 records at a record fair?: The album, yes. The 12”, no. Probably. Although now it feels like £2 is an appropriate price for both,
Quote for the ages: “There are a whole lot [of] people who aren’t happy to make pap but want to make pop. They understand that what sells means something. It finds a way into people’s hearts in a way that independent music never did” - Green Gartside

All grades are out of 10, and provisional until accepted by Exam Board

Before I go any further, I would like to say this is a cracker of an unknown album.

If you have heard of this duo, then it’ll almost certainly be because of the untrammelled energy and zip of their demented ‘hit’ single ‘Really Free’ which reached number 27 in the UK singles chart in 1977, or perhaps 1981’s brutal ‘Headbutts’. During a performance of ‘Really Free’ on the Old Grey Whistle Test, Otway vaulted on to a PA tower and overbalanced after Barrett’s signal began cutting out. “He brought down the speaker stack,” reported The Independent, “but fractured no bones when he landed on the sharp corner of a bass cabinet, as the impact was cushioned by his testicles.”

Me, too - that’s why I know of them. Except I have a further stake-holding in the pair because every now and then some rascal will compare my onstage presence to that of John Otway, and yes I do like to check out comparison points. (Wow! Nice compliment!)

All of this album is killer, not a weak track - not least the festival lament ‘Josephine’ or the cowboy-haunted ‘Riders In The Sky’ and ‘The Alamo’, or the Leonard Cohen rip ‘To Anne’ - but the brilliant pulsating beast-heart of the album comes third track in, ‘Beware Of The Flowers (Cos I’m Sure They’re Going To Get You Yeah)’, which rather brilliantly was voted Britain’s seventh most popular song lyric in a 1999 BBC online poll despite no one outside of Otway fans having heard it.

In places, the duo’s second album reminds me of Carter USM, Mekons and Wreckless Eric… Billy Bragg even… in its sardonic bent and energetic refusal to follow accepted routes of communication… and none of these are insults, that’s for sure.

Barrett is a skilled wood-worker and has produced highly unusual furniture over many years. Apparently.

Otway was renowned for some great publicity stunts: for the duo’s 1979 single ‘Frightened And Scared’, he promised to perform at the buyer’s house if their copy was one of three copies from which the vocal had been omitted.

In 2002, when Otway was asked what he wanted for his 50th birthday, he didn’t ask for a new car, a holiday or even a quiet life. He asked for a second hit single. A fan-led campaign followed, complete with a poll overseen by the Electoral Reform Society to choose the song. The eventual winner, ‘Bunsen Burner’ – built around a sample of the Trammps’ ‘Disco Inferno’ and lyrics inspired by helping his daughter with her chemistry homework – reached number nine in the UK singles chart and earned him an appearance on Top of the Pops.

Ten years later, to mark his 60th birthday, Otway celebrated in similarly understated fashion by booking the Odeon Leicester Square for a screening of a documentary about his life, Rock and Roll’s Greatest Failure: Otway the Movie. The film itself had been financed by fans becoming producers who were all individually credited in the movie credits.

I watched a series of videos of Otway last year when I was trying to summon up the courage to see him perform at Lewes Con Club (I bottled it, sadly) and fuck did he nail ‘House Of The Rising Sun’!!

Take time to click on the above link - one of the greatest videos I have seen on YouTube.

THE CONFESSIONAL BOX
Value for money: 8
Bragging rights: 9 (cult classic!)
Sleeve condition: 7 (some evident loving in the fraying on the edges)
Vinyl condition: 6.5 (jumps in the middle of ‘The Alamo’)
Collectability factor: 10 (cult classic!)
One-hit wonders?: not quite. Well, as a duo, I guess so.
Did Otway appear on Vivian and Ki Longfellow-Stanshall’s showboat, the Old Profanity Showboat in the Bristol Harbour?: yes
Did Otway appear on the final episode of The Young Ones?: yes
Number of fans who showed up at the Royal Albert Hall to celebrate Otway’s 46th birthday: 4,000
Number of fans credited by name on the B-side of ‘Bunsen Burner’ for their backing vocals on ‘House Of The Rising Sun’: 900
On 2 April 2022, Otway played his… show: 5,000th
Number of times I played this album complete from start to finish while writing all of this: 3
Number of times I was expecting to play this album complete from start to finish while writing all of this: zero
Bonus 7-inch single present and correct?: no
Cheapest you can currently buy this in the UK on Discogs: £2.43 (plus p&p, natch - which comes to twice that)
Would I have bought this if I had seen it in a box of £10 records?: no. Bloody fool.
Quote for the ages: “Enthusiasm and misplaced belief can take you a long way” - John Otway

All grades are out of 10, and provisional until accepted by Exam Board

I reckon even if I hadn’t been aware of “the million seller” ‘In The Year 2025’, I’d have taken a punt on this album, for the cover alone. So of its time! So random and meant to be appealing to the New Generation of turned-on, tripped-out teenagers. So painfully… I was going to say lacking, but it caught my attention, didn’t it?

‘In The Year 2525’, or ‘In The Year 2525 (Exordium & Terminus)’ to give it its full title, is one of those musical anomalies that used to pop up with pleasing regularity in the UK charts, and sometimes on Billboard as well. Number 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 for six weeks in ‘69, and Number 1 in the UK for three weeks! I mean, on the face of it, it’s clear watered-down hippie-inspired ideology made palatable for the masses in the Age of Aquarius but… what is wrong with that?

The song itself is first-rate bollocks. Over a solemn acoustic backing, Rick Evans marches us through thousands of years of human history, pausing every millennium or so to inform us that technology has stripped away another layer of what makes us human. By 3535, truth is dispensed from a pill. By 4545, your teeth, eyes and limbs have become redundant. By 6565, husbands, wives and children are old-fashioned inconveniences. By 9595, humanity has disappeared altogether.

Equal parts folk song, science fiction and bad Sunday sermon.

What makes it work, though (if it can be said to work), is that Zager & Evans don’t sound smug. There’s none of the arch knowingness that would infect later generations of dystopian pop. They sound ‘concerned’. The underlying ‘anxiety’ is recognisable. The idea that convenience might come at the expense of human connection is hardly an outlandish fear in 2026. For all its end-of-days melodrama, ‘In The Year 2525’ asks a question still worth asking: what exactly are we supposed to gain from all this progress? Hello AI!

The rest of the album is arrant forgettable middle-of-the-road nonsense, in case you were wondering. I guess you probably weren’t.

THE CONFESSIONAL BOX

Value for money: 2
Bragging rights: 2
Sleeve condition: 5 (some judicious Sellotaping)
Vinyl condition: 8
Collectability factor: 1
One-hit wonders?: the very definition of. A follow-up single ‘Mr Turnkey’ reached Number 48 in Canada. And that was it.
Number of copies of ‘In The Year 2525’ sold in America alone: 1 million
Number of countries ‘In The Year 2525’ was Number 1 in: 7
Retitled in Futurama Season 6 as: ‘In the Year 252525’
Number of songs withdrawn from airplay by the Clear Channel after the September 11, 2001, attacks, including ‘In The Year 2525’: 165
Number of times ‘In The Year 2525’ has been covered (est): 60
Number of languages ‘In The Year 2525’ has been sung in (est): 7
Most this has sold for in the UK on Discogs: £22.00 + p&p (you’d be mad to fork out that much, though).
Would I have bought this if I had heard it first?: Probably not. The 7-inch is all you need.
Quote for the ages: “In the year 4545/Ain’t gonna need your teeth, won’t need your eyes/You won’t find a thing to chew/Nobody’s gonna look at you.”

All grades are out of 10, and provisional until accepted by Exam Board