“The loveliness of Paris seems somehow sadly gay
The glory that was Rome is of another day…”
If you’re of a certain age, those words will probably bring to mind the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band’s hilariously vicious parody of a lounge singer getting ready to murder “I Left My Heart in San Francisco”, from their 1967 LP,Gorilla. For even older folk, it can only mean Tony Bennett, whose signature tune it has become.
Next week, Mr. B releases a 21-track album entitled The Ultimate American Songbook, which means oodles of old standards like “The Very Thought of You,” “That Old Black Magic” and “A Foggy Day”.
I would rather eat my underpants than listen to a single track.
Bennett is, we’re told, the “last of the crooners”. Well, good! I don’t mind his voice, and he has always struck me as a nice enough chap, but it’s the whole tired, clapped-out routine I can’t stand – the whole, “Gee, I’m cool”, “Hello London”, bow-tie undoing, finger-clicking, greasy-grinning, smug “thank-you”ing every time the audience applauds probably his 12000th performance of that bloody awful song - or a host of others.
Maybe the violence of my reaction stems from the fact that no “Light Ent” TV programme in the 1960s and early 1970s was complete without some smarmy Frank Sinatra wannabe in a tuxedo drearing his way through “The Lady is a Tramp” or “The Very Thought of You” while some crappy British “band” exhumed the corpse of the tune and proceeded to give it the sort of vicious kicking that had caused it to expire in the first place. Even worse was when the show’s non-musical host would step forward with one of those silly little pencil mikes Englebert Humperdinck used to favour and start to sing “Chicago, Chicago, that toddlin’ town…” – invariably off-key. (Dickie Henderson and Dave King spring to mind - and Mike Yarwood was still doing it 20 years’ later!)
In the Fifties and early Sixties, of course, it was the desire of every young pop singer (or, more likely, their gay manager) to shift out of rock and roll into the Realm of the Living Dead (i.e. show-business). It was assumed that as we teenagers turned into adults, we’d put aside childish things and, just as we would inexorably don the same sort of clothes and adopt the hair-styles of our mums or dads, we’d also toss out our silly old record collections and switch allegiance to Frank Sinatra and Perry Como, with a smattering of light jazz thrown in to prove we were “modern”.
Of course, it didn’t happen that way: once rhythm and blues and rock and roll had entered our bloodstreams, the virus proved nigh on impossible to eradicate , and those who had been infected – millions of us – were never going to rush out to buy the latest Sammy Davis Jr LP or take an interest in Vic Damone’s “microphone technique”. Folk, blues, even country (well, some of it) – were fine. But show tunes and whatever navel-gazing nonsense was being peddled at Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club that particular week? Forget it!
There were, of course, exceptions. Even someone as opposed to middle-of-the-road warblers as I was had a soft-spot for hard-drinking, chain-smoking, tubby little East-Ender Matt Monro (“From Russia With Love”, “Born Free”) and that musical chameleon Bobby Darin (“Mack the Knife”, “Lazy River”). They tuxed it up and finger-snapped with the best of them, but you knew Mr. Monro was just an ordinary London geezer with a beautiful voice, and that Darin was just injecting a bit of rock and roll pizzazz into a dying genre.
But as for the rest of them – the Al Martinos, the Jack Joneses and Robert Goulets – no thank-you!
Part of the reason this is such a musical blind spot for me, I suspect, is that I don’t understand what effect the music is supposed to achieve. Why would anyone with a pulse want to listen to albums with titles like, “Jo Da Vinci …In A Comatose Mood” or “Jack Mussolini Sings Songs for the Terminally Bewildered”. And I can’t hear those old, classic song titles without the urge to desecrate them: “Anything Goes… But Usually My Bladder”, “The Very Thought of You… Makes Me Throw Up”, “The Way You Look Tonight…Is Really Quite Offputting”, “A Foggy Day… Brings on My Emphysema”, “They Can’t Take That Away From Me… Because I Might Die On the Operating Table”.
I know it’s horrible… but I can’t help it! Mind you, that sounds like yet another song-title. ..
“...two...three...four.” Ba-Ba-Da-Ba-Bang-Bing. “I know... thanyouvermush...” (throws head back, closes eyes) “It’s Horribu-oo-wull.” (Grins). “But I!” (Double finger-pop - music stops - points finger at himself) “Can’t help it.” (Undoes bow-tie as audience goes wild).
Besides, what milieu did this horde of creamy-voiced Italo-Americans occupy? The songs themselves seemed to apply in the main to rich globetrotters whose lives allowed them to jet everywhere and hang around in bars wearing trenchcoats and downing martinis till four in the morning. What sort of jobs did these people do? And what sort of women did you meet in bars, whilst drunk, at 3AM? Someone you could actually talk to… let alone fall in love with? They were songs about successful male singers or playboys squandering inherited wealth: a working businessman would have to have his wits about him for an early-morning presentation.
This style of singing and the seedy, meaningless lifestyle that seemed to go with it reached its apogee in the early 1960s at The Sands in Las Vegas when Sinatra and assorted bootlickers took to the stage every night for a hip, happening, drink-sodden extempore mixture of booze and broads and bawdy humour, while all the squares in the audience sat and dreamed of being part of Frankie’s little self-regarding gang.
Personally, I’d like to have smashed the self-important bullying little would-be gangster’s face in. How bad does your life have to be to dream about living such a repellently tenth-rate existence?
Sorry, Tony – not your fault I know, but the performance genre of which you are evidently a Master makes me quite irrational. “I’ll Be Seeing You… But Not if I See You First!”
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