Steptoe and Son was a sitcom written by Ray Galton and Alan Simpson about two rag and bone men living in in Shepherd’s Bush, London. Initially it was a written as a one-off play for the BBC’s Comedy Playhouse slot, but its success led to a full series being commissioned, which lasted from 1962 into the 1970s.
It focussed on the family conflict between “dirty old man” Albert Steptoe and his 37-year-old son Harold whose ambitions and social aspirations are constantly thwarted – usually by his fathe.
Albert was played by Wilfrid Brambell (1912-1985) – an Irish actor who also played Paul McCartney’s grandfather in A Hard Day’s Night. When we watched the first series in 1962 he seemed ancient, but actually Brambell was in his forties and only 12 years older than his co-star. He was also, it turns out, tormented by his own gay sexuality and addicted to alcohol.
Harry H. Corbett (1925-1982) had been a promising Shakespearean actor who’d played Richard II and worked with Joan Littlewood at Stratford East. The success of the sitcom made him a star, but ended his serious acting career. He played Hamlet in 1970 but by then he was too closely associated with Harold Steptoe and neither critics nor audiences took him seriously.
Actually I only know any of this because of a brilliant 2008 BBC 4 TV play called The Curse of Steptoe – which explored the bleak real-life drama behind Corbett and Brambell’s comedy partnership.
In the early fifties Lonnie was the banjo and guitar player in Chris Barber‘s Jazz Band and during a group recording session he knocked out a cover version of Leadbelly‘s “Rock Island Line” which became a huge international hit in 1956. But because he’d recorded it on a band recording session, the record company paid him nothing beyond his original session fee. But it was enough to launch his solo career and he became the UK’s first superstar of the rock’n’roll age.
In the late 50s when my big brother became a teenager, he bought several 78s by Donegan including “Cumberland Gap”, “Tom Dooley” and “Battle Of New Orleans” but to my generation he was better known for novelty hits like “My Old Man’s A Dustman” and “Does Your Chewing Gum Lose Its Flavour”. The conventional wisdon in Tin Pan Alley was that skiffle, like rock’n’roll, was a passing flash in the pan. So the industry pressured Donegan to become an all-round Family Entertainer to safeguard his longterm career.
The great Warren Zevon at his macabre best. Other bleak classics from the same 1978 album include Roland The Headless Thompson Gunner and the title track Excitable Boy. Co-produced by Jackson Browne of all people, it also featured James Taylor sidekicks Leland Sklar, Danny Kortchmar and Russ Kunkel. Though as it happens Mick Fleetwood was the guest drummer on this track, which could (at the time of writing this) be heard below courtesy of the late lamented Grooveshark.
The marvellous Grooveshark used to let you embed pretty much anything from Bach to The Beatles pretty much anywhere you want, for free. Predictably the RIAA and BPI stomped all over them with lawyers and injunctions, and the service is now defunct. Comparitech have compiled a list of all the available, legal successors here: https://www.comparitech.com/blog/vpn-privacy/grooveshark-limewire-alternatives
Enjoy them while they last… Meanwhile at least Warren Zevon’s Werewolves can be heard and seen on YouTube:
Ironically it’s the Beatles’ crappest album that’s given posterity their most iconic image and turned the old EMI recording complex into the best known studios in the world.
By the time they recorded it, the Beatles were already effectively no longer a band and barely on speaking terms. The sound of the record was as immaculate as you might might expect from unlimited time & money, state of the art technology and the services of George Martin.
It’s got a couple of decent solo set pieces each by Lennon and McCartney, not to mention the best song George Harrison ever wrote. And by the time it came out the band were so famous on account of their earlier – genuinely astounding – work that it achieved saturation sales & coverage. As a result its one of their best known albums.
But if nobody had ever heard of them when it came out, it would have sunk like a fucking stone.
The Night Before by The Beatles has been inexplicably running round my head for a few weeks. It’s not remotely their greatest song but in their mid period even the throwaway album tracks were often tiny gems that could hit an emotional nerve. Cooped up in a small closed community in my late teens, the few other overtly gay boys – with one spectacular exception – didn’t much like me. I did manage to get laid but my partners tended to be bi curious at best and, at worst, simply oversexed and desperate. Thus their behaviour The Night Before was quite often quite different from The Morning After. One cynic there used to satirically sing “when I held you near… you were turning queer” to the tune of this song.
This is where I came in… Please Please Me had been good, while From Me To You topped the charts while I was still twelve. But when She Loves You burst into our lives in August 1963 the Fab Four really, truly became a national phenomenon: even my dad had heard of them. My (older) brother went to see them live in Cambridge that year, but said he couldn’t hear a thing because of all the screaming. I first heard the quip about “not a dry seat in the house” around the time of Beatlemania, tho Wikipedia dates it from Frank Sinatra.
It does look and sound as if they’re actually playing live in this clip. Except none of today’s artsts would get a sound as tight and polished as that without close miking the drums and singing right into the vocal mics ? This is the Beatles at their iconic early best – still strictly under Brian Epstein’s orders with the neat suits, well-cut fringes and bowing politely at the end of the song. But tight as fuck and ferociously ambitious. Anyone who remembers them looking and sounding like this will definitely be feeling their age.
Incidentally at a press conference in the first year of the Fabs’ early fame, some smart aleck journo asked why all their hits up until then had included the word ‘you’ or ‘your’ in the title. “So what should it be?” Lennon shot back “She Loves Them – or I Want To Hold Its Hand??”
