Back catalogue

Some time earlier in the century we began bringing together the dark corners of Spotify, the places where few listeners tread, the sort of records that only end up there because the distributors signed a deal for better known stuff. Our findings before now are obtainable if you follow that label link at the bottom of the post, or we've playlisted tracks from most albums selected. Regardless, fascinating new material keeps cropping up, and here's a brand new selection. As ever, suggestions welcome via comments.

WWE Anthology
An anthology! Of wrestling themes! Most of these 86 tracks are the handiwork of one Jim Johnston, a commercial jingle writer who's been with the panda copyright-avoiding 'sports entertainment' company since the mid-80s, and herein are guest appearances by Lil Kim, Slick Rick, Naughty by Nature, celebrated German punks H-Blockx and Rick Derringer, whose band The McCoys did one-time 1960s TV-advertised compilation staple Hang On Sloopy and uses his elevated status to get the vocal on Hulk Hogan's Real American. RIYL: cheap takes on arena rock dynamics, sappiness beyond credit when the moment requires (the theme to Randy Savage and Elizabeth's wedding! She's dead now, you know), a range of redolent styles as the years progress from synths to nu-metal, all suffering from a deficiency of production values. It's entirely possible we're missing a million layers of subtlety in Billy Gunn's theme being called Ass Man, but listening to the lyrics we increasingly doubt it.

Spitting Image - 20 Great Golden Gobs
We don't know what Nashville-via-Boston hard rock band The Spitting Image will make of Spotify grouping them together with some Limey impressionists, if they ever find out, but it amuses us. Released in 1990 it's a compilation of the songs with which the weekly latex lampoonery often ended, not featuring The Chicken Song or anything else casual viewers would recognise. The style variation, if as with the above clearly on a tight budget, is testament to the dab (re)creative hand of musical director Philip Pope, occasionally aided by regular TV composer and sometime Glen Ponder actor Steve Brown (who produced Rumer's album, MOR kids) plus lyrical contributions from Ian Hislop and Grant & Naylor, neither/none responsible for the three seperate jibes at ageing rock stars. Unless you count the last track on which one of the four credited vocalists is Carl Wayne - of The Move? - the characters do their own singing, which means Italia 90 cliche previewing Sick As A Moon has credited vocals to Steve Coogan, Chris Barrie and Hugh Dennis - a super three!* - pretending to be Ian St John, Jimmy Greaves, Bobby Robson, Emlyn Hughes (whose name Dennis has to include), Jimmy Hill, David Coleman (who hadn't done football commentary for nine years by this point) and whoever Coogan's being at 0:49. Partridge several years early, by the sounds of it.

4th of July Patriotic Favorites - The Best Of Documentary Recordings
Should you ever require a one-stop shop of army drills, bugle calls, male choirs, military bands and the theme to Those Magnificent Men In Their Flying Machines, it's all here. There's also a bluegrass song about a young soldier being killed when his parachute wraps around his body ("Intestines were a'dangling from his paratrooper suit"). Our favourite is Hard Work, a handclapped call and response drill only a horn section away from resembling a lost Stax classic and surely ready to be sampled by someone, unless it already has been.

Max Miller - The Cheeky Chappie
Ere, now listen! Music hall commandeur, man of the white book and the blue book, wearer of suits that go somewhere beyond flamboyancy, master of double entrendres, influence on a range from Bob Monkhouse to Paul Merton to Ross Noble, captured in various stages of his live act. Superb track titles: Max Sings Of Some Of The Girls He Has Met And Tells Of Some His Father Knew!!, Max Is Now A Swimming Instructor But Is Never Out Of His Depth, Chats On Etiquette & Manners, Jean Carr Asks Some Questions But Max Knows All The Answers, He Now Recites 'What Ju Ju Wants, Ju Ju Must Have', the blunt He Tells Some More and the refusal to let us be the judge Is There No End To His Cleverness.

(* See, you'd know what this was if you followed this feature)

Digital wrongs

Haven't done a sortie through the darker corners of Spotify for a while, which is timely as just in the last week or two a record approaching legendary status, one we've mentioned before in this feature, has appeared. (As has two albums and an EP short of the Half Man Half Biscuit back catalogue, come to mention it.) In the meantime...

Morecambe & Wise: EMI Comedy Classics
All the family favourites - Positive Thinking, Boom Oo Yata-Ta-Ta, a nascent Grieg's Piano Concerto, obviously Bring Me Sunshine - but also a lot of obscure silliness and music hall adaptation, not to mention sketches which involve Ern punching Eric's face in, a sketch in which much of Morecambe's sketch involves the phrase "I'll smash yer face in" and the ultra-meta song The B Side. And an answer song to Who Put The Bomp. Suspect much of this comes from their pre-Christmas colonising ITV phase, much like this triumph of improvised crosstalk:



Mary Schneider: Yodelling The Classics
Oh, and she does alright. Clarinet Polka Yodel may be her personal Mexican Whistler, but the last track Yodelling Comedians is worth your time for how it sees her start phrases in some remarkable octaves.

Bobby 'Boris' Pickett and the Crypt Kickers - The Original Monster Mash
Variations on a theme of Pickett's Halloween classic, mostly on how the success of his and the Crypt Kicker Five - make your mind up, Bobby - had affected various players in the extended story and on the whole idea of partying the crypt down.

St Winifred's School Choir - Children's Party Time
No idea whether this is the classic Grandma line-up - it's not on the album, St Winifred's were very much singles artists but contracts are contracts. They have a solo shot at the school's other vocal choir hit, Matchstalk Men And Matchstalk Cats And Dogs, as well as a miniature Yellow Submarine, an unnecessarily electro Zip A Dee Doo Dah, a fully emotive bordering on sickly in those numbers Bright Eyes and a spirited for their age Dancing Queen. If You're Happy And You Know It, Old McDonald, London Bridge and Simon Says restore the schoolkid equilibrium.

Chartbusters Go Pop!! 16 Legendary Covers From 1969/70 As Sung By Elton John
Elton was a staff songwriter and session pianist - he's on He Ain't Heavy He's My Brother, Back Home and a Barron Knights record - with a sideline in sub-Top Of The Pops albums PRS-avoiding 'recreation' compilations. In The Summertime (with raspberries), Yellow River, Spirit In The Sky and Signed Sealed And Delivered are among the few that have survived time's cruel mistress ways. Hearing him having a shot at Young, Gifted And Black is a proper eye-opener.

Van Morrison - Payin' Dues
It's the contractual obligation album! Fantastic! All you need to know is that in 1967 Morrison was contracted to a final session with Bang Recordings, the US label he hated, so he went in and made up 31 stupid songs on the spot with an out of tune guitar. The label still released them. Ring Worm is on there. Want A Danish ("no, I just ate") is on there. The Big Royalty Check is on there. The Wobble. Here Comes Dumb George. Blow In Your Nose. Nose In Your Blow. You Say France And I Whistle. The lot.

Spotify's dark secrets

More of these, in other words. Firstly, though, a complaint. In an update last week Van Morrison's The Complete Bang Sessions was uploaded. What value to this feature is mentioning a selection of Van's work between Them and Astral Weeks? Because, in a bold and magnificent move, the second half is what is commonly referred to as The Contractual Obligation Album. Morrison hated the Bang Records label but still owed them a album session, so, with much fortification, he went into the studio one afternoon and cut 31 improvised songs on a rapidly detuning guitar, including such classics as You Say France and I Whistle, Want A Danish and The Big Royalty Check, plus the smash hit:



But it's not available in the UK. Fools.

What we can recommend is, as described by Broken TV, Bruce Forsyth Presents..., an odd Not Live At The Palladium variety show with full I'm-in-charge Bruce aforefront. Also, these:

Roger Whittaker - Now And Then: 1964-2004
Our early childhood seemed blighted by Roger Whittaker, the sort of post-Val Doonican easy listening singer that you don't get any more now that even opera singers and lively jazz musicians are marketed in the same vein as Timberlake or Spears. Although born in 1936, by the mid-80s he seemed wizened enough to have seen it all and played it traditional folk songs throughout. It seems this collection has partly been re-recorded, as is the wont of veteran acts on budget labels - the production values are the giveaway - but here you'll find his surprise 1986 top ten re-entry with Des O'Connor and three of his other four top 20 singles, all made for Sunday afternoons with a mug of cocoa and the Sunday papers hidden away just in case. Oh, and then there's the whistling. Whittaker's proper skill, if one not often exhibited on his biggest hits, was his virtuoso whistling ability. The Mexican Whistler is highly recommended for the way it heads right around the scale without pausing for proper singing. And yes, there's still an audience - this reached number 21 in 2004 and back in January he came one away from cracking the top ten with a fifty year retrospective.

John Arlott Talks Cricket
An Evening With Johnners
Cricket commentators more than most like a good Evening With or after dinner speaking role, especially as when they can get into the terminology. Recorded in 1982 Arlott, voice rich as gravy browning, gloriously weaving the natural rhythms of speech, seems to have just stuck a C90 in and talked into a mike in his house until it ran out about his memories from earliest exposure to his favourite personalities, reserving understandable pride for CB Fry. He probably should have hidden the clock before about the two minute mark, though. While Arlott's reminiscences are very much on-field, Brian Johnston, 80 when he recorded this in front of a studio audience in 1993, very much utilises his love of music hall jokes and the sort of public school injokery that led to sundry cakes and nicknaming. At 109 minutes he's got plenty of his life experiences to go round, even if you suspect some might be citation required. He doesn't play the 'leg over' incident. No, that's here. (That's from British & American Comedy Legends, which is well worth your time)

Dating And Seduction Secrets: Seduction Guide For Bachelors
Track one is called You Just Had Great Sex - What to Do the Next Morning. Given it's advertising itself as a guide to initial pulling, that's forward. Maybe you should take the cover's advice and buy her some big shoes.

Russ Abbot's Madhouse
Bear in mind how long the Mighty Boosh have been promising an album for. Abbot had been in a signed variety band but only became famous upon stepping up once Freddie Starr had walked out on his ITV series. Such was the way of comedy sketch shows then that every show had its own song based on a style (early rock'n'roll and rockabilly, usually) or existing song - hello to such triumphs of the imagination as Julio Doubleglazias, The Bleach Boys' Upper Norwood Girls and Daftness, for which Abbot seems to invent Billy Bragg's vocal style. There's a lot of musical care and attention been put in. Lyrically, less so.

Invites ridicule - the latest collection of Spotify oddities

100 Greatest Sports Moments

'Sports' rather than 'Sporting', so already you know it's an American product. There's a few newsreel based albums we could go into over time, but this one is set out by its mix of radio commentaries and a wayward musical showreel. Nobody needs a percussively double time remix of Ballroom Blitz, especially when flanked by two clips from at least a decade earlier, or Quiet Riot re-recording their cover of Cum On Feel The Noize, not least as those aren't actually sports moments no matter where you plan the line to be drawn. For a compilation deeming itself the arbiter of sports' greatest moments, moreover, we're not sure the 1972 Olympic terrorist tragedy, Dale Earnhardt's death, Olympic boycotts, baseball strikes, steroid trials or - and we're not making this up, although we suspect it's in to make up the numbers - David Beckham resigning as England captain quite counts. Also, nobody ever needs to hear a cover of Let's Get It Started.

Superhits prasentiert vom Palast Orchester mit seinem sanger Max Raabe

"Max Raabe is a German singer and band leader of the Palast Orchester. He and his orchestra specialise in recreating the sound of German dance and film music of the 1920s and 1930s, especially by performing songs of the Comedian Harmonists." So yeah, it's a post-ironic covers album, but crucially done by a German so you're never quite sure how much comedy is intended, with the result We Will Rock You just sounds uncomfortably odd, Eiffel 65's Blue (Da Ba Dee) has some sort of King's Singers arrangement that hopes you don't notice the copout dance beats behind - they should speak to Mike Flowers, he ended up teaming up with Stock Aitken Waterman and somehow forgetting the point of his act - and we're not sure replacing Kiss' guitar with a banjo under the treacle-thick carousing of the very un-Prince vocal is entirely in the spirit of reversioning. They also have a crack at Manu Chao's already fairly odd King Of The Bongo, and that'll blow your sinuses clear away.

Sounds Of London

Recorded in 1961, exactly what it says it is. What situation would you play this in, even if you were a subscriber? Even a day pass purchaser. We're not sure the arguments about atheism and war on the track recorded at Speaker's Corner would unduly tax Richard Dawkins or George Galloway.

Funny In The Head - The Best Of The Barron Knights

And when all else fails, the late Duke D'Mond and colleagues will always come up with the goods. We've already had a Barron Knights compilation in one of these round-ups, but this one is more contemporary - where the hell is that audience? - and features entirely different tracks throughout. What that means is up for streaming is their surprise number 3 single of Christmas 1978 A Taste Of Aggro, relocating Rivers Of Babylon and The Smurf Song in dental and criminal situations. The fun never starts stops after that for eighteen further tracks of country laments to Shep and Barbara Woodhouse, an impression of Lene Lovich, Supertramp versus the three day week and songs called Heavin' On A Jet Plane and Little White Bum. Farewell To Punk ("welcome new wave!") certainly opens up old arguments.

Suitopia Parkway

We're aware that someone's started a whole proper blog picking out odd albums on Spotify, but the person who runs it has written that the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band have "no redeeming features" and so can fuck right, right off. Instead, here's some more of the oddities we've excavated and summarised for little benefit.


The Very Best Of The Wombles
The Very Best Of Windsor Davies & Don Estelle
Witness the two sides of the novelty 1970s coin. On the one hand the Wombles, a successful transition from not overly song-based stopmotion series of no little charm to glam hitmakers. Mike Batt, of course, the story being that deep in debt from a failed musical venture he was invited to write the theme and instead of straight payment asked if he could have the character rights for musical production, which he was granted as the estate of Elisabeth Beresford didn't think they'd be worth anything. Four gold albums and four top ten singles later, with a studio band featuring the astonishingly prolific drummer Clem Cattini and hard sessioning rock'n'roll guitarist Chris Spedding (he produced the Sex Pistols' demos) the clean up campaigners who must have seen their fair share of cruising on their travels nearly became worldwide stars. Writing Bright Eyes and pretty much being front centre of the rise of pop-classical never comes into it now biography-wise. Cuh. Fair to say Batt and co had real fun playing with various genres from classical to folk to Beatles, the absolute standout being The Myths And Legends Of King Merton Womble And His Journey To The Centre Of The Earth, which ploughs the rarely visited furrow between kid-friendly dayglo pop and taking the piss out of Rick Wakeman. And it really does.
On the other hand, the two stars of It Ain't Half Hot Mum were pretty much left at the mercy of producers with doo-wop and bobbysoxer obsessions once their treble/baritone cover of The Ink Spots' Whispering Grass had hit number one in 1975. Pretty much the rest of it is hotel piano-heavy slung out covers of standards with a slim panacea of light crosstalk comedy, apart from the slightly odd Davies in character monologue A Message From Battery Sgt-Major Williams. The version of Nagasaki (from a spinoff of a WWII comedy?) isn't as good as the one from Jeeves & Wooster, by the way.

The Best Of Arthur Askey - The Bee Song
Well, it's answered its own discussion point already. More music hall shenanigans with no 'side' as it was being done at the time when everything was straight up and all-round entertainers could get by on a limited catalogue of song ideas. He liked his playful songs about sprites (The Bee Song, The Pixie, Ev'ry Little Piggy's Got A Curly Tail, Chirrup!), he did. Then there's things like I Want A Banana that make you wonder what 1995 Damon Albarn really saw in all this, then there's the routines straight off the stage. Big And Stinker's Parlour Games has the least repossessing title ever, and is a seven minute routine about deciding on a board game. 1940's More Chestnut Corner, on the other hand, is the sort of routine that was still playing well on BBC radio into the 1970s. Best bit: Sarah! Sarah!, which begins not only with high grade self-deprecation but the suggestion "don't play this first, this is the other side". Not like double sided records to be superceded. Aythangyou.

The Wedding Album
So is the idea here cutting costs by playing a CD of organs and choirs playing and singing appropriate songs meaning you don't have to hire the church organist? Graham Jackson's our man on the pipes attempting to imbue Sheep May Safely Graze with some sort of pastoral longing that surely wouldn't work in a cathedral setting.

Celebrity Commercials Of The 1950s & 1960s
And that's exactly what it is, American radio adverts with figures of the day, some even broadcast. Pat 'county bassoon' Boone, pre-Metal Mood, eulogises both the Chevrolet and the country in acapella. Ray Charles gets all emotional over Coca-Cola. Nat King Cole "doesn't pretend to be a wine expert" but he seems to know Italian Swiss Colony California Pale Dry Sherry inside out. Bill Haley shills for government schemes, while Frank Sinatra avers "communism will destroy our way of life just before he suggests haircuts are the way forward and well before reworking High Hopes in campaigning for JFK. Dusty Springfield, Tom Jones, Wilson Pickett, the Spencer Davis Group and Martha & the Vandellas are among those taking part in the cola wars with judicious rewording of their hits. BB King and Kenny Rogers put the case for credit card debt. There's plenty to feed off in these 73 tracks of all someone's yesterdays. The track that really makes this our pick of the week? Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, when not plugging marching for the poor, attempting to plug their 1953 film The Caddy without breaking down into wanton and unbroadcastable swearing. They fail miserably.

Baiting McAfee

Given informed opinion on Spotify at the moment is a) it's merely the acceptable public face of an IPFI/DMCA plot to undermine The Pirate Bay and b) it's going to go under soon anyway because it can't sustain its business model, it's probably best you share in its myriad wonders while you still can. To that end, here's another four oddities we dredged up from the back of its operations.


The Grimethorpe Colliery Brass Band - Movie Brass
You could not get a colliery band anywhere else in the world, we suspect. Admittedly we doubt proper collieries exist any more elsewhere in the world, nor brass bands in the Johnny Briggs style as opposed to the US college football ra-ra style. Anyway, the Grimethorpe lot are Britain's longest lasting and most famous, having soundtracked and been the basis of love-in-the-time-of-Heseltine sleeper post-Full Monty comedy hit Brassed Off, and alongside many explorations into traditional brass band music came this Pop Goes The Classics shot at widening the audience. Some tracks fare much better than others, largely due to the inherent heroic fanfare nature and dialling down of the cliched tuba, but a shot at the Rocky theme seems to be affected by an outbreak of professional pride, Colonel Bogey is trampled underfoot and the Star Wars theme, however dramatic its arrangement, can't quite carry off bringing a little bit of Hollywood to South Yorkshire.

Dirty Fan Male (NSFW)
"Were I alive you wouldn't have to be doing this..." Followers of film and library music and general semi-kitsch ephemera will know of Trunk Records, Jonny Trunk's excavationary life's work mostly and justly famed for putting back into print the soundtracks to the likes of The Wicker Man, Dawn Of The Dead and The Clangers. Jonny's sister is glamour model and forthcoming lonely Googler bait Eve Vorley, and he ended up running her fan club. Amused by the specific and odd nature of some of the correspondence she received, he put some of the letters to his actor friend Duncan Wisbey, resulting in an Edinburgh Fringe stage show that ended up as a book and this CD. The Ladies' Bras, later of Scott Mills propelled top 40 fame, is here, but get past that for all sorts of highly guilty pleasures. My special message: penis. (By the way, somehow the track titles have been reversed)

America's Bugle Calls
The whole world's bugle calls, we like to think. That's pretty much what it is, in truth, the key of G bugle repertoire you'd find in an army outpost or passing-out ceremony, so there's no solo bugle versions of the theme from Live And Let Die or covers of Whiter Shade Of Pale or anything like that. The likes of Adjutants Call and Sick Call are quite lively, though, and Roast Beef Of Old England somehow finds a midpoint between merrie albion and Vietnam military call.

Mike Sammes & The Mike Sammes Singers - Music For Biscuits
Not an avant-garde concept piece. It's a less disturbed/disturbing element from the Trunk catalogue, and one with a backstory that's pure cultural age England. Sammes' ensemble worked for the best part of four decades recording backing vocals and jingles - that's them backing up on Delilah and Green Green Grass of Home, leading on the strident theme to Stingray, even providing the "oompah, oompah, stick it up your jumper" on I Am The Walrus. They worked with Crosby, Sinatra, Streisand and Garland, Bacharach, George Martin and Andrew Loog Oldham. They occasionally did the voices for Pinky & Perky. After Sammes died in 2001 Trunk helped rescue a cache of master tapes found in his back room, from which this is a cross-section of radio advertising spots for the likes of Ariel, Timex, Fairy, Heineken, Dulux, Westminster Banks and, yes, biscuits. The skill of the complex close harmonies against easy listening instrumentation is almost unworthy of throwing away on adverts for International Harvester agricultural equipment, but that's how things were in the 60s advertising game. "Secombe, Sellers and Spike... Aldrin, Collins and Armstrong, a super three!"

The hot Spotify

We might have had a good cataloguing go here and here, but trawls of Spotify will keep throwing up things which really make no sense in the Web 2.0 world...

Klaxons - Accordeon Millenium

Jamie Reynolds recently claimed his band had had their second album rejected on the grounds of it being too weird. On this evidence you can see what he means.



Ah! There's a few bands on Spotify with namealikes - search out Los Campesinos or Broadcast, by all means let us know of more - and this is in fact The Klaxons (sorry, poetic licence up there), the brainchild of one Burt Blanca. Having founded The King Creole, regarded as Belgium's first true rock'n'roll band, he schlepped around the local scene for a while before forming this band with Jean-Marie Trois Fontaine and Roger Verbestel. That up there, The Clap Clap Sound, charted across Europe - number 45 in Britain - and if we're reading this Google translation correctly spent half a year atop in South Africa. It's also the last track on this album, which suggests they laugh in the face of frontloading albums. The whole thing really is instrumental accordion led shanties and hoedowns, sometimes with possibly synthesized horns (Divertida Mexicana - it's like you're in El Paso right now - and the steam train rockabilly of The Choo Choo Express), sometimes dangerous stylistic alterations (Youpiyo has some voices on; Mr Spikes and its sound effects is a particular winner), often superior lift muzak, quite often cashing in on the hit soundalikes. There's even a ballad.

Toto Coelo - I Eat Cannibals

Go on, La so-called Roux, adopt this.



Quite a few people on YouTube seem convinced they were ripped off by the Spice Girls, fourteen years later, but then that's YouTube for you. What it is is an attempt to do new wave and siren-y synthpop at the same time, backwards, blindfolded. By name they were Anita Mahadervan, Lacey Bond, Lindsey Danvers, Ros Holness and Sheen Doran, and there was a point where everyone in Britain knew that one of them - go on, guess which one - was Bob Holness' daughter. This update's "album by one hit wonder" selection features the further adventures of the day-glo bin liner clad Fuzzbox of the Fairlight synth and Toni Basil chanting age. Dracula's Tango is exactly what a 1983 Ting Tings would sound like.

Johnny Wakelin - Invincible

Speaking of taking your main chance on, here's a wonderful example of such. Johnny Wakelin was a club singer from Brighton who scored a UK top ten single and a sizeable US hit with Black Superman, about Muhammed Ali, and then here at least an even bigger hit with In Zaire ("in Zai-ear!"), a tribute to the Rumble In The Jungle. Far be it for us to suggest he then decided to take his big idea and run with it throughout his career, but Invincible is a twelve track album on which every song is about a boxer. He's paid more attention to working into rhyming scheme and metre the biographies of Naseem Hamed, Sugar Ray Leonard ("stole the show, it's down on the record!"), Mike Tyson, Rocky Marciano, Frank Bruno and Lennox Lewis than not making the production sound instantly dated, especially when he discovers Italo-house just for Tyson's benefit. For Lennox Lewis, only white reggae and 1993 rave will do. In more sensible times here's In Zaire in the Top Of The Pops studio in August 1976, the Hairy Cornflake introducing Wakelin's number four sound, looking like a member of Dr Hook, at 2:40 between Dancing Queen ("I'll dedicate that one to David Hamilton, he loves that record") and a pensive Bryan Ferry video. He actually comes up with a third different pronunciation of the titular country.



Best Of The Barron Knights
The Barron Knights - Songs For Traffic Jams



Yes.

Let's just consider something here. Due to rights issues The Beatles, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Metallica and AC/DC cannot be found on Spotify, which makes articles like the one in the new Q about how you don't need a record or mp3 collection any more with it less sustainable. On top of that there's a pile of excellent and influential artists whose work just hasn't been added yet.

And yet, currently streaming on Spotify and added within the last week, are two Barron Knights albums.

One of which was recorded in 2002.

And the Best Of hasn't even got A Taste Of Aggro on.

Or Live In Trouble.

Or Food For Thought.

Or Get Down Shep.

The Barron Knights, for our younger readers, were a band formed FIFTY YEARS AGO who would parody recreate hits of the day in a montage form with, it says here, amusing new lyrics. One of them was called Duke D'Mond. They're still going too, although like the Sugababes they only have one original member. This Best Of does feature Call Up The Groups, Pop Go The Workers, Merry Gentle Pops and An Olympic Record (the latter with Reg Dwight sessioning on piano), then jumps from 1968 to 1992. Call Up The Groups '92 is about the Iraq War and includes an impression of Antoine de Caunes, and there's a song about Cilla Black losing her hat in the wind.

Songs For Traffic Jams, perhaps the last album that should start by taking the piss out of ageing rock bands, gives modernity a shot. Po-faces is a Wonderwall parody, insomuch as it would be were Liam Gallagher a Scouser. We actually don't understand The Ballad of Jarvis & Michael, a song sung from the perspective of a Welsh teacher and featuring the groundbreaking revelation that "Cocker" and "rocker" rhyme. Three Little Maids is about Blind Date. At least three tracks have 'beats'. Don't Let The Germans Nick Your Sunbeds is as appealing as an Ibiza rave track about Germans and sunbeds presented to the Barron Knights sounds. Hall Of The Curry King is even more dubious. One track runs entirely on the notion that the word 'knickers' is still inherently amusing. It's like stepping into another musical world. That's because it is.

Spotify defy

After the success of our first trawl through the darker corners of Spotify ("sort of like finding an old mouldy bag of tapes in your loft, plucking ten out at random and trying to make the most kick ass mixtape ever" - David Roy, Dananananaykroyd), here's a disappointingly rush released second selection:

Mel Blanc - Greatest Hits
"We make fudge and we play cribbage every day!" If Bernard Cribbins qualifies for this, then Mel Blanc certainly does, as Mark X helped us discover. The great voice artist of Warner Bros animation, right from when he's vocalising both sides of the Sylvester/Tweetie Pie conflict his talent is clearly exemplary. Even aside from the great character vocalising there's inspired madness at hand, The E.I.O. Song just a load of ridiculous rhyming, Somebody Stole My Gal warp speed piano, There's A Hole In The Iron Curtain dinner jazz meets Spike Jones (we'll get round to him eventually) meets Cold War propaganda at its lightest, and the four Christmas songs at the end really need saving for a more festive day. The only drawbacks are a) his natural voice appears to be nearest to Bugs Bunny's which makes the almost serious songs about why he can't get on with his wife sound awkward and surreal and b) Woody Woodpecker gets no less trying with time.

Vince Guaraldi - The Charlie Brown Suite And Other Favourites
And while we're on cartoons... Commissioned television music is big business among collectors and aficionados, from the pioneering work of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop recently lovingly compiled by Mute Records to the likes of Alan Hawkshaw and Keith Mansfield, here giving a rare live outing to one of the latter's masterworks:



In fact, here's a Hawkshaw compilation featuring his Grange Hill and Dave Allen At Large themes plus some glorious library music and a track called Flapjack.

But this is not about Alan Hawkshaw, it's about the San Franciscan jazz pianist Vince Guaraldi and a live recording with his Trio of his seven song Suite for Peanuts prosperity. Basically, it's forty minutes of orchestral playful light jazz to wonder what Woodstock was supposed to be to.

Eilert Pilarm - Best Of Elvis
Thommo pointed this out to us, and it's a gem. Pilarm, he tells us, "is said to have gone into a coma and woken up believing himself to be the Swedish reincarnation of Elvis Presley, despite not only looking and sounding nothing like him but also having little grasp of either English or musical convention". He's been given the production values his talents suggest. According to one source "in 1999 he went to London and appeared on the BBC where he was given the "Best Impersonation By A Swede Of The Past 1,000 Years" award from the hands of none other than John Peel." What?

And this week's special feature:
Cockerel Chorus - Nice One Cyril
Again, this is going to have to take some setting up for the kids. In 1972 the undiplomatically named Wonderloaf bread outlet launched an advertising campaign, directed by Alan Parker and copywritten by future travel writer Peter Mayle, involving bakers determining who was responsible for each new loaf, to which the tagline was "nice one, Cyril". Tottenham fans picked up on this and applied it to their beloved left back Cyril Knowles in chant form, and eventually a group calling themselves the Cockerel Chorus recorded it and took it to number 14. Although some online sources reckon it was recorded by the team itself - after all, they would later prove their flair for self-reference with Ossie's Dream - the man behind it was in fact one Harold Spiro, a 1970s songwriter for hire whose biggest hit was Olivia Newton John's Long Live Love and also penned We're On The Ball, which Ant & Dec went and decimated for the official England song in 2002. Nice One Cyril, in fact, won an Ivor Novello award. In what category, we have no idea. Cheek, possibly.

Anyway, the novelty football hit was had. Everyone, obviously, would sit back with some satisfaction of the cross-media purposes of having taken a song about a full-back into chart folklore.

No, of course they didn't. They recorded a whole album of contemporary songs in the same style, that being lots of pro-am shouting men (fronted by Spiro) against a studio band with one of those jovial brass sections plus piccolo that seemed to come free with breakfast cereal during that decade to hire. In a song that's supposed to come directly from the hearts of the terraces, it works. On Tie A Yellow Ribbon Round The Old Oak Tree, a personal declaration of the hope of ongoing love, less so. Neither Dawn nor Tony Orlando stood a chance, and this is for a song with a long history of abuse:



And so it continues in the same shouting London choral vein. Power To All Our Friends is trampled underfoot. Part Of The Union kind of works in a 'men against The Man' sense, but it's still hamstrung by the fact the lead singer has a vocal style approaching latter day Mark E Smith. The Chorus' version of Long Haired Lover From Liverpool invents post-modern irony. A couple of tracks are, like the single, led by a pretend opera singer. And now, a kindly suggestion. Stop reading this now and load up Butterfly. It's a delicate folk song originally recorded by country singer Jim Ed Brown here given the treatment of said group of MEN getting their north London accents out. You will never, ever forget it. Or forgive it. Even before the mass whistling outro.


As before, kindly leave any suggestions for lesser regarded oddities we may feature in future - because believe us there's a couple more updates in this just from what we already know about - in comments or inbox.

Spotify the difference

Let's talk about Spotify, a service so spectacular that, apart from the STN playlist we've linked to before we're certain we should try and hijack it for our own means somehow.

So let's start doing that.

The great thing about Spotify, as we know, is their ever growing (apart from when it contracted) music library gives you the opportunity to catch up on that name you've never quite got round to investigating or just get away from continuous CD insertion misery. All musical life is here. And we mean all, because when labels present their wares for uploading the odd, erm, odd thing is always likely to slip through the cracks. Presenting...

FOUR ALBUMS HIDDEN AWAY ON SPOTIFY THAT THEY REALLY SHOULD BE ADVERTISING IN PLACE OF THOSE WAR CHILD HEROES TRAILS
(So you're telling us that, given every young band in the world, Elvis Costello wanted to hear one of his songs covered by The Like? We know Pete Thomas' daughter is in them, but really)

The Very Best Of Jive Bunny And The Mastermixers
Extraordinary how potent cheap music is. When we put out an appeal for suggestions on Twitter Archived Music Press suggested a recent Vanilla Ice album that includes four versions of Ice Ice Baby and covers of Buffalo Soldier and Baby Got Back among others, but you feel that if he's going to do that at this stage he must least have some iota of self-knowing about it all. No, we may bitch and whine and moan about the modern mainstream, we may wonder about our novelty hits and share in universal panic at the first thought of Crazy Frog returning, but consider this for something that was completely inexplicable then, no matter twenty plus years on: a father-son DJ team, hiding under the identity of a cartoon rabbit in a green jumper, had three number one singles in 1988 with megamixes of 1950s and 1960s hits with a basic drumbeat underneath. At least Stars On 45 recorded their own backings occasionally.



No, let's be fair. Us Jive Bunny zealots have reason to suspect, unless stereo is a deceiving mistress, that licensing laws having tightened since then and they've actually had to re-record bits of their three hits for this 2002 compilation, The Very Best no less. (For comparative purposes the second included number one That's What I Like is 4:02 into this, and here is Philip Schofield previewing the festive hit Let's Party) As for the album tracks there's a unique combination of Flintstones and salsa rhythms - very English salsa rhythms, obviously, with a heavy Modern Romance influence - a curious music hall collection over a horribly incongruous hi-hat and whatever The JB Shuffle is, because it seems to have as much to do with James Brown and the Famous Flames as Mastodon. Crazy Party Mix's sound effects and circus music is what they play at Guantanamo Bay, and Rock'n'Roll Beethoven... it's no ELO, let's say that, despite the key addition of arena drums.

The King's Singers - Good Vibrations
Before Kennedy, Vanessa Mae, Klass, Jenkins or Bond there was The King's Singers and their mission to take the classical repertoire into the modern age. Their televisual heyday being the 70s and 80s they were more circumspect about it, doing the endless talk show and musical break in studio sketch show rounds when Manhattan Transfer and Barbara Dickson were unavailable. Founded in 1968 in King's College Cambridge, their six-man largely acapella lineup has altered over the years but the madrigals remain the same. They've always had an eye for adapting pop their way, and it's unfortunate for the boundaries of this piece that some of their most remarkable choices are spread all round the place - Wichita Lineman (cheating with an orchestra, but retaining the oddness of those lyrics in upper crust English vocals), Kiss From A Rose, I Heard It Through The Grapevine, After The Goldrush, Golden Brown. Golden bloody Brown!

Inevitably they've done a whole Beatles covers album (Back In The USSR is particularly special), but this particular record is all contemporary classics in the high church acapella style. Good Vibrations is only a pin drop away from the Flying Pickets (whose celebrated, Smells Like Teen Spirit-featuring 00s covers album is also here) but the sound of four part male harmony impersonating the theremin line is quite something by itself. Things follow in much the same way through Cecilia, Father To Son, The Boxer, American Pie, Fifty Ways To Leave Your Lover and so forth. Sadly it doesn't feature their meisterwork, their explanation of the 1978 BBC radio frequencies shake-up (near the bottom), and by and large the kids preferred Instant Sunshine. But that's an entirely different story.

The Very Best Of Bernard Cribbins
In the old, prosperous, watchable days, there used to be times when ITV would underrun by five minutes and have to put a filler programme on. More often than not it'd just be a Bugs Bunny, but when those tapes weren't in reach the discerning viewer could expect anything from a collection of sporting blunders cut to Dan Hartman's Instant Replay to cartoon videos of faux-cyborg Pebble Mill At One favourite string section Rondo Veneziano to an animated version of Jasper Carrott's mole routine to Robert Plant's Big Log. One of the engineers' perennial favourites was Right Said Fred, which despite essentially being about the power of copious amounts of tea to cover all tracks, even when an inside wall (but not the rest of the room, oddly) has just fallen on your work colleague, felt strangely warming.

But thirty tracks? Alright, many will know the Womble voice's other hit Hole In The Ground, but the rest of it, although perhaps stretching a point, proves Cribbins had a yen for getting cabaret story songs out of unlikely sources. Here you'll find: a blues song about too small shoes, a song which features popular music's single greatest final line punchline; the none more 1970s sitcom The Bird On The Second Floor ("Cor, these stairs, still, Thursday, steak and kidney pie!"); a song about liking things called I Go A Bundle; the whitest calypso ever recorded, including that Leeds United one; the big percussive orchestration given to a song about a mouse falling for an elephant which we'd call a misdirected budget; a jazzy spoken word track (Double Thinks); I'm Hans Christian Anderson, which is a lie; the short-sighted (I Don't Like Your) Country Music, which - hey! - sounds like country and western; the excellently meta B Side Blues (another C&W song, confusingly); and Giggling Gertie The Laughing Traffic Warden, which is a rewrite of The Laughing Policeman and obviously you can probably leave well alone. But really, do you have the desire to hear Bernard Cribbins in lover's mode? You do? Well, here you are then.

And the winner by several nautical miles:
Richard Stilgoe & Peter Skellern - Who Plays Wins
Those of you younger than one of those Chinese men who habitually pop up with supposed proof that they are 136 years old won't know Peter Skellern. He was a traditional Northern singer and pianist whose You're a Lady was a hit here and, scarily, abroad and after that retreated to the concert halls, very much the 'INTERNATIONAL SINGING STAR' (when he wasn't forming a band with Julian Lloyd Webber and Mary Hopkin called Oasis in the mid-80s). Richard Stilgoe meanwhile is someone surely every British person is aware of through his many daytime magazine show appearances in our collective youths. His own private Bohemian Rhapsody, Statutory Right Of Entry To Your Home, got a re-run on that recent BBC4 Nationwide documentary and the sight of seven Stilgoes (Stilgii?) in perfect harmony regarding who has the titular doorstepping priority was a joy. Such was his skill and adaptability in the face of piano current affairs crossovers that he could easily stretch to running through key election results with a unique elan.



In 1985 the pair went on an amusing concert tour together, recorded one date of it for release, and now it's on Spotify (and, we gather, Deezer as well, in case any French readers want to experience a proper cross-cultural opportunity). This is almost certainly just us, but to us this turn of events is genuinely remarkable. It's an extraordiary thing to hear too, as you don't get this kind of piano-based cabaret recital any more, dripping in its own songsmithery - check the bit about vocal ranges in the first song, just before the surprise tambourine - and sub-Instant Sunshine comment on the day. A one joke ragtime routine about the Sinclair C5! A dubious in many ways routine about James Galway! A bit taking the piss out of Instant Sunshine! Little and Large-style duo interplay, and a bit later Chas & Dave references! The extraordinary sound effects and drum machine on SAS, which we need you to listen to to make sure we didn't make it up in some torpor-induced audial hallucination! The (we think) Skellern song about Mr James "who teaches ethnic studies", and the rest you can probably fear for yourselves! An audience willing to treat everything as if Del Boy has fallen through a bar right in front of them! The fact that we were actually the ninth last.fm user to listen to this album!

We feel this is appropriate at this stage.




We're going to try and do more of these, so let us know if you've found anything that seems particularly out of place being interrupted by Glasvegas and MGMT trails.