My 'Turntable Twenty'.

I've had enough doom and gloom, from now on over Christmas I'm posting my 'Turntable Twenty'. These will be 20 remarkable pieces of music that I think you should hear - even if, in many cases, you've already heard them!

It's not my favourite 20 songs - they would be different and probably change from day to day.

I suppose the best justification for taking up your time in this way is that it comes from when I worked in a record shop in the 1980's. There weren't many benefits in the job - the wages and the staff discount were rubbish. The only benefit was that even though the shop was a major chain, they hadn't yet realised how corporate they needed to be.... so the one perk was that the staff got to choose the music to be played in the store, taking turns to have half an hour each throughout the day. It forced me to listen to a huge range of music I would otherwise never have discovered.

We used to have a little competition - we would try and see who could play a record that someone would come up and insist on buying straight off the turntable. This was pre CD's, when customers normally wanted a record that had never been played before. So these pieces had to be irresistible.

Now I can't claim that for any of the 'Turntable Twenty' but I think each of them is very special in their own way.

Tune number one you would never guess from me - it's Humphrey Littleton and his band playing 'Bad Penny Blues'.

Back in the 1950's Jazz was big in Britain but split into two bitterly rival groups. There were those more dull and conservative types who liked traditional New Orleans jazz and up against them were the followers of Cool, Modern Jazz, dressed in existential black and wearing sunglasses indoors. The two groups often came to blows. It was from the 'Modernists' that the 'MODS' came.

Joe Meek was a remarkable producer/sound engineer working for the bureaucratic Music giant; E.M.I.  Lyttleton recorded what he thought was a typical piece of Trad Jazz Blues and then went away on holiday.

He heard the record when he came back and was horrified.

Meek (probably bored with what he was doing) had altered the sound dramatically. He distorted the piano's low notes lower, raised the pitch of the trumpet and brought the drums out of the 'back' of the sound and pushed them to the front. In addition he 'lost' the really 'trad' instruments like the trombone somewhere along the way.
 
The result was something that was pretty much modern jazz.

Despite his horror, Lyttleton was quite pleased that his record was now a top twenty hit and kept quiet about how he felt.

Meek soon left E.M.I. and set up on his own, producing remarkable records from his bedsitter on the Holloway Road throughout the 1960's. He was notorious for placing some performers in the hall, or the bathroom or on the stairs to take advantage of the different acoustics.

His life ultimately ended in tragedy, but before then his output of remarkable records helped produce the sound of the sixties.

Here's the link to Track number one; Bad Penny Blues.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zrX0Lv6v42k

Neil Harris
(a don't stop till you drop production)
Home: helpmesortoutstpeters.blogspot.com
Contact me: neilwithpromisestokeep@gmail.com