My life in music, part seven...

THE LIGHT STUFF

I pinched that title from a long-defunct and much missed fanzine produced by my friend and fellow filker Rhodri James. The past six pages might have given the impression that music for me was a serious matter, all that romantic angst and progressive pomp. In fact progressive rock labours under the same silly misconception as science fiction, that it's humourless and earnest and boring and dull. Nothing could be further from the truth in both cases...but in any case, even that brown one on top of the wardrobe whose locks don't work any more, it wasn't all classical and prog that got me going.

CLANG HONK TWEET

From my earliest days I had loved the comedy records of Bernard Cribbins, Anthony Newley and Stan Freberg and such, and of course the Goons. When I found an EP with not only "The Ying Tong Song" but three other songs I had never heard, I was over the moon. It would be many years before I was able to sample the delights of "Dance With Me Henry," "You Gotta Go OWWW" and "My September Love," but in the meantime I practiced my Goon voices reciting "Bluebottle Blues" and "I'm Walking Backwards For Christmas" to myself, over and over again till I could get the intonation of every line right in my head.

"Here, I didn't think much of that, I think my side was better."

"Get that child out of here!"

But even the almighty Goons had their own inspiration, and I found it in a little song about the repeal of Prohibition, performed by the one, the only, Lindley Armstrong Jones (presumably no relation to Lord Snowdon).

Spike Jones and his City Slickers were, quite apart from anything else, superb musicians. Nowadays, when you can buy electronic kit to fix the timing, the tuning, and almost everything except the actual talent, constructing a comedy record like "Laura" or "You Always Hurt The One You Love" would be so easy as to be not worth doing; back then, it was a case of playing it live, at breakneck speed, and being absolutely sure of hitting the right note at the right moment. Otherwise you have a leaky balloon, a damp squib. Mr Jones did not deal in damp squibs. I laughed myself silly over "The Glow-Worm" and "Chloe" and others, and I still do.

SO IS IT PHILIPP DIETRICH QUENTIN, OR WHAT...?

There were, of course, many performers who combined well-played music with funny words. Tom Lehrer springs to mind, as does Bill Oddie, both with the Goodies and in ISIRTA, Flanders and Swann, Morecambe and Wise, Victor Borge and many more. As for funny music as such, I was to come across another past master later on, in the form of Professor Peter Schickele (composer of the soundtrack to Silent Running, about which an anecdote next time) and his shadowy alter ego P D Q Bach.

Funny music as such is a tricky razorblade to dance on, if it's not going to be a "funny-once." I'm sure you can all think of examples: one for me was "The Last Time I Saw Paris", by a duo whose names escape me, in which the joke was that the singer couldn't sing. Even Spike Jones managed one with "I Went to Your Wedding." I don't need to hear those ever again, thanks. The trick, as with mocking anything, is to care about the music. Schickele does. The Missa Hilarius is a wonderful travesty of the Mass, with all the usual sound effects, popular tunes worked in, and so on, and it rises to a climax of bathos in the final section...and then, right at the end, there's a perfect baroque cadence on high trumpets that brings me to tears every single time because it's just so musically perfect. If P D Q Bach was just an idiot he wouldn't be funny. As it is, he's an idiot with flashes of pure Bachian genius that take the whole experience to a new and higher level.

You can't be funny without being serious.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. You find me, as 1978 draws to a close, about to return to London and the next phase of my musical life. See you in part eight.