Samples Small Faces's "Lazy Sunday"!
The bit about his grumpy next-doors objecting to the noise of loud fun - "wouldn't it be nice to get on wiv' me neighbours? / but they make it very clear they've got no room for ravers"
Features the phrase "mustn't grumble" - the soul of Englishness (pre-ravers, at any rate) quintessenced
There is also a blink-and-you'll-miss-it comb-and-paper quotation of a Stones song - "Satisfaction" it says at Wikipedia, although it sounds almost more like "Let's Spend the Night Together" to me
I should have put "Lazy Sunday" in my list of Greatest Number Twos
The album as a whole I've never quite clicked with except for the opening title track with its amazing colorized bass and phased drums and keyboards.
And of course enjoy the Stanley Unwin element
Got this album
"Lazy Sunday" is very much rooted in the same oh-so-English world as Carry On
A-wouldn't it be nice to get on with me neighbors?
But they make it very clear they've got no room for ravers
They stop me from groovin', they bang on me wall (what's going on in there?)
They doing me crust in, it's no good at all, ah
Lazy Sunday afternoon
I've got no mind to worry
I close my eyes and drift away
Here we all are sittin' in a rainbow
Gorblimey, hello, Mrs. Jones
How's old Bert's lumbago? ("He mustn't grumble")
I'll sing you a song with no words and no tune
(Tweedle-dee bite) to sing in the khazi while you suss out the moon, oh yeah
Lazy Sunday afternoon, ah
I've got no mind to worry, ah
Close my eyes and drift away, ah
A-roo-dee-doo-dee-doo
A-roo-dee-doo-dee-die-day
A-roo-dee-doo-dee-dum
A-roo-dee-doo-dee-doo-dee
There's no one to hear me
There's nothing to say
And no one can stop me from feeling this way, yeah
Lazy Sunday afternoon
I've got no mind to worry
Close my eyes and drift away
Lazy Sunday afternoon
I've got no mind to worry
Close my eyes and drift
Close my mind and drift away
Close my eyes and drift away
You could probably essay an, er, essay that claimed for Ogden's Nut Gone Flake what Greil M claims for The Band, i.e. the ravers (Sixties version of) generation mending the breach with the parent generation....
Which (despite "She's Leaving Home") already started happening on Sgt. Pepper's, to some extent. "Penny Lane", certainly.
Or perhaps simply that for all the trips and the dabbles with Eastern spirituality and all the other Sixties neophiliac adventures breaking loose from tradition.... you still wake up in England, embedded in centuries of history...
Tale "Itchycoo Park"
Spiritually hungering Ronnie Lane got into Sufism by 1968, but he lifted the melody or part of it from a 16th Century hymn, "God Be In My Head" while "the theme to the words" came from "a hotel in Bath or Bristol. There was a magazine in the room with a rambling account of some place in the country and it was about ‘dreaming spires’ and a ‘bridge of sighs’ – there was a write-up on this town – and I just thought they were nice lines.”
Steve Marriott meanwhile said lyrical inspirations come from stinging nettles and an actual park in Ilford:
"Ronnie Lane and I used to go to a park called Itchycoo Park... We used to bunk off school and groove there. We got high, but we didn’t smoke. We just got high from not going to school. Itchycoo Park is the nickname of Little Ilford Park in London. An “Itchycoo” is slang for a flower found in the park called a Stinging Nettle, which can burn the skin if touched.”
"Life is just a bowl of All Bran"
Talk about Englishness - Marriott as the Artful Dodger for the album-of-the-original-stage-musical Oliver! He was in the original stage production playing various boys roles.
Oliver! creator Lionel Bart appears in this delightful Georgia Brown (Nancy in the original stage version - did she share scenes with Marriott?) conceived and presented investigation of the Jewish East End and the question of what makes you a Cockney
Another amazing time travel capsule, a BBC report on Cockney idiom from 1976
10 comments:
What songs with a comedic slant (as opposed to a more general humorous aspect) have avoided the trap that afflicts comedy acutely: that of dating swiftly and often poorly? Due to the repetitive nature of popular music consumption, one may quite easily find oneself hearing the same joke in a song a few dozen times in a month. How can a joke survive that? I'd say Eminem's "lighter" songs are exemplars of gags that nowadays make one gag.
On a similar note, I found listening to Ogden's Nut Gone Flake to feel a little like an archaeological exercise.
The Small Faces were not so provincial, as they acted as the backing band on a Johnny Halliday album, which sounds exactly like a random French bloke fronting the Small Faces:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9AuP3sH6unU&list=OLAK5uy_m3cAwNyaXUf0ZAOkD2JhbFrWHrFrn47-o
Quite a bit of this kind of Anglo-French collaboration going on at this time, which tends to be overlooked by the history. For example, the Pretty Things did an album with French millionaire Philippe DeBarge, who wanted to be an English pop star:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P3_VoOGrFsU&list=RDP3_VoOGrFsU&start_radio=1
A moment when both countries found the other irresistibly exotic. A lot of the best preserved video clips of sixties British bands are from French TV:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3fPUumEUiyU&list=RD3fPUumEUiyU&start_radio=1
The dating of comedy....
I don't know if the ratio is that much worse in comedy than in music or any other entertainments
there's a lot of topical comedy and a lot of just really shit, lame comedy (the sketches on Mike Yarwood, stand-up comedy aspirants on New Faeces - most comedy really!)
but I have exclaimed, while watching Fawlty Towers, probably for 10th time in my life at that point, "this is as good as Shakespeare"
i find so long as you are not watching IMMEDIATELY after seeing it, really good comedy can be watched again and again over the years.
There is something about pop music in general to do with its repeatability that I find fascinating. Like you wouldn't read a book over and over again, or watch most films over and over again (there are exceptional ones where people do go repeatedly to see a film in the first weeks of it being out; and i do remember one of my kids finishing the new Harry Potter and then immediately starting it again at the beginning). But with pop - i guess it's generally a non-narrative form - you seem to be able to hear it over and over again without it getting stale.
So maybe with 'funny' songs the inherent repeatability of pop works helps to protect it from getting stale. Ian Dury songs amuse me every time but it's also because the playing is so good, the grooves, all the clever Chas Jankel arrangement bits - and Dury's cadence.
Well, that's as maybe - I love the Small Faces provincialism. I wouldn't want them to be any less mired in East London and Sixties light entertainment culture than they are.
Increasingly I really enjoy these sort of connections and crossovers between the cabaret / West End / variety show side of things and Rock Music. Like the Bowie / Anthony Newley thing. Or people have gone to performing arts schools and knowing how to do tap, but then becoming rockstars. There's quite a number of them who were in Oliver!. Like Gary Holton as in Heavy Metal Kids but also Auf Wiedersen Pet
Steve Marriott was a stage school alumnus IIRC. I suspect if it wasn't for the beat boom he would have been a Tommy Steele style all-round entertainer.
Funnily enough, when Marriott became a rock star he also became an anti-commercial purist. I read an interview with Peter Frampton, who was an ambitious get-ahead type, where he expressed his constant frustration with Marriott turning down endless golden opportunities.
Yes, Fawlty Towers is still excellent. I've said this before, but one comedy that has aged spectacularly well is Rising Damp, which was absolutely masterful. Less surprisingly, Porridge also holds up well.
But I think the secret of longevity in comedy is the strength of the characters and the class of the performances, rather than the humour per se. The secret ingredient of Porridge for example is Fulton Mackay as Mr. Mackay, who is really the fulcrum of the show. Take him out and I suspect Porridge would have been quite ordinary.
It's a great ensemble, isn't it Porridge? Richard Beckinsale obviously but also I love Mr Barraclough. And then all the little petty crim roles.
Fletcher is a Falstaff-level creation.
I've never actually seen the Likely Lads but Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads stands up still, again it's the acting.
But aren't all of these by the same writers I think of it? Ian La Frenais and Dick Clement.
Actually Rising Damp is someone else.
Stubbs in his comedy book writes about how Steptoe and Son is just an inch from Pinter and Beckett.
Porridge and Whatever Likely Lads are also cases where the films are not only good as, but possibly even better than the TV series
The best moments in Porridge are when Mr. Mackay's cheek does an involuntary spasm when one of Fletcher's barbs hits home.
Rising Damp is fascinating because of the opposing race/class dynamic between Rigsby and Philip. Rigsby wants to feel superior to Philip because he's black, and yet Philip is far above Rigsby in the social hierarchy, and is perfectly happy to let him know it.
I'm slightly trepidatious to admit this, but...
...I don't think Fawlty Towers has aged that well. I mean, the principal characters include a foreign simpleton and a senile old man. And there are notable periods of languor in such a broad farce. It doesn't help that, when asked to name their favourite sitcom in around 1999, Tony Blair, William Hague and Charles Kennedy all chose Fawlty Towers.
I concur that Porridge, Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads and Steptoe and Son have stood up very well. Perhaps because they didn't rely on stock characters?
The British sitcom most inspired by Beckett? Bottom was a conscious reimagining of Waiting for Godot (Rik Mayall and Ade Edmonson played Vladimir and Estragon on stage the same year Bottom started).
A disproportionate number of comedy songs tend to be novelty numbers. The musician who most employed comedy (as opposed to a comedian whose act incorporated music) is Zappa, surely? And aren't his comedic tracks generally considered the most dated part of his oeuvre?
Post a Comment