Mayfair

A Celebration of Sellers

sellersI have a lot of box sets that sit on my shelves, starved for attention. A Celebration Of Sellers is one of them. I’m not even sure if this is still in print, but here are a few reasons you should seek it out -

Those who remember Peter Sellers best as the bumbling Inspector Clouseau of the Pink Panther series may be surprised to learn that, while making those movies, he had a parallel career as a recording artist. This 4-CD box set collects the many albums, EP’s and singles Sellers cut for EMI in the 60s and early 70s. Produced by George Martin, these delightfully warped recordings capture Sellers in all his glory - as a man of a thousand voices.

Highlights include:

Disc One: “The Trumpet Volunteer,” in which a dim-witted pop star tells an interviewer how he’d like to update the classics of Bach and Beethoven; a sniffly old man who sounds like a Cockney cousin of Elmer Fudd warbles the standard “All The Things You Are”; “Party Political Speech,” a brilliant 3-minute filibuster that says absolutely nothing in doublespeak language; and a dead-on Jimmy Durante imitation on “Never Never Land.”

Disc Two: “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly,” a spoof on My Fair Lady that features an all Hindi cast and sitar-tabla songs such as “Get Me To Taj Mahal On Time” and “I’ve Grown Accustomed To Your Dothi”; and “After The Fox,” a collaboration with The Hollies on a Bacharach-David tune.

Disc Three: the unlikely duo of Peter Sellers and Sophia Loren romp through four campy songs, full of suggestive lyrics and cartoon-ish arrangements; in a medley of the most entertaining Beatle covers you’ll ever hear, Sellers inflates “A Hard Day’s Night” into a melodramatic Shakespearean soliloquy, turns “Help!” into a booming Protestant sermon and renders “She Loves You” as a drunken conversation between two pub-dwelling Cockneys (“She said she loves you.” “Yeah?” “Yeah, yeah.”)

Disc Four: the world’s first morse code version of “Night And Day,” featuring a telegraph with a symphony orchestra; “A Compleat Guide To Accents Of The British Isles” is a tour-de-force for Sellers’ remarkable powers of mimicry; and near the end, Inspector Clouseau makes an appearance, singing “Thank Heaven For Little Girls.”

While some of the material in this box set may be too British for general audiences, there are plenty of moments of comic genius here that will keep you laughing, even on repeated listenings. A Celebration Of Sellers reminds us that when Peter Sellers passed away in 1980, we lost one of the world’s most gifted funnymen.

10 Things I Like This Summer

lifeonmarsesbbc1104_468x320Life On Mars on DVD (A British TV series that’s funny, intelligent, suspenseful, with great early ’70s music from Bowie, T. Rex, Sweet, etc)

Dick Cavett: Hollywood Greats on DVD (It reminds you how engaging and interesting a talk show can be)

You Bet Your Life on DVD (I love to see Groucho’s mental wheels spinning as he cooks up the perfect retort)

Nick Lowe – Labour Of Lust (Why on earth is this album out of print?!)

Don’t Look Now: The Stories of Daphne Du Maurier (The story “Escort,” about a ghost ship, is especially spooky)

What’s Going On: Marvin Gaye and the Last Days of the Motown Sound by Ben Edmonds (The best book ever written on Marvin AND Motown!)

Quorn chicken cutlets (Mmm, especially with barbecue sauce)

The New York Mets (They’re scrappy contenders . . .for now, at least)

Shindig! Magazine (’60s garage, soul, psychedelic, power pop)

Bonus Track: Silver Seas - Chateau Revenge (Daniel Tashian is my favorite songwriter in Nashville, and this record sounds amazing!)

The Adventures of Davey Ukulele & The Gag Time Gang - Live!

paul1This Saturday, June 26th, 4 pm Bongo Java East, Nashville, TN

David Mead, Bill DeMain, David Henry and Paul Deakin (plus special guests) will be performing this
fun, poppy kids’ album from top to bottom. Imagine Harry Nilsson meets the Muppets!

For more info:

Davey Ukulele Show

Everyday I Write The Book

sheetmusiceveryday_i_write_the_bookWhen I interviewed Elvis Costello, he had this to say about his song “Everyday I Write The Book” -

I wrote it just for a joke. But that’s often the way to write a hit record (laughs). We had a group on the road with us that was trying to write these very self-conscious pop jangly kind of songs and that was their trip. So I thought I’d tease them by writing something that was like what they did, only sort of better than them. I wrote it in ten minutes. It’s [producer] Clive Langer that took it more seriously and heard that it could be a contemporary pop record. We did this whole kind of modern R & B arrangement. That little interlocking guitar pattern and stop time thing had a vague relationship to “Sexual Healing,” which was popular at the time. We were just copying that kind of feel. Ours doesn’t groove as hard. But it wasn’t written to be played like that. It was written to be played like “From Head to Toe” by The Escorts. I was always attracted to that sort of innocent Merseybeat sound. Songs like “Away From You” by Gerry & The Pacemakers. There’s a harmonic disposition in Liverpool, I don’t know where it comes from, but it’s definitely there. It’s not just The Beatles. It’s everybody else. There’s a sudden shift to the minor that’s unexpected. It’s like sped-up doo-wop or something. It’s something to do with being a port town.

Everyday I Write The Book

Moondust

mdlgWhere do you go after you’ve gone to the moon?

That’s the question addressed in Moondust by Andrew Smith, a wonderful book about the twelve astronauts who walked on the moon and how their lives were forever altered by the experience. I’m only about sixty pages in, but I’m completely caught up in the story.

Here’s Smith describing his first meeting with astronaut Edgar Mitchell:

“The undertaking may have ended abruptly thirty years ago, but it has never been equaled since - in fact, with every passing year it has come to seem more eccentric and incredible. Science has advanced and technology leapt forward at a dizzying rate, but in this one domain, Deep Space, their domain, there has been . . . nothing. So while the world has changed, we have changed, the pictures and deeds of the Moonwalkers have remained ever present, yet frozen definitively in the imagination as they were then, making sight of them as they are now a shock. It’s like Dorian Gray in reverse; they have a real age and a Moon age and your first impulse is to stamp your feet and cry, “How dare you be old!”

Another passage about perspective from space:

“Only twenty-four people have ever left Earth orbit and seen her from the perspective of Deep Space - all American and all between the Christmases of 1968 and 1972. The difference between the two enterprises is enormous: the orbital astronaut experiences the planet as huge and majestic, while from afar it is tiny, beautiful and shockingly alone. In a rare instance of candor, Neil Armstrong once remarked that while on the Moon, he became aware that he could blot out the Earth with his thumb and when someone asked whether this made him feel really big, he replied, “No, it made me feel really, really small.”

Get the book here:

Moondust