Hammond Pops 8: Klaus Wunderlich - Telefunken 1972

From my own personal experience, Klaus Voormann and charity shops go together like vomit and too much alcohol; where you have one then sooner or later you will inevitably have the other. That's not to single out Klaus for the bumps - along with James Last and Burt Kaempfert they form the unholy trinity of Germanic peddlers of easy listening albums that clog up the vinyl crates in their hundreds. I was going to stay clear of all three as far as I could for the purposes of this blog because, with a back catalogue as daunting as theirs, I'd have no idea where to start.

I've broken my rule on this one for two reasons. First, and once again, the cover - what a wonderful shot. Yes, there's still plenty of room to tut tut over it being another blatant 'selling sex' product from the dark days of the sexist seventies, but surely even the most hardcore revisionist can't deny an eye catching design that's well executed (and if they can't then to hell with them). Second, an album with 'Pops' in the title that has tracks in its line-up called 'Es fahrt Zug nach nirgendwo', 'Eine neue Liebe ist wie ein neues Leben' and 'Es ist schwer, dich zu vergessen' made me laugh out loud. 'Popular' where I wonder? But whatever, there was more than enough here to warrant my further investigation.

I have to confess that before the needle hit the groove, even though I didn't have much of an idea what to expect, it's fair to say I expected rather more than I actually got. Wholly instrumental, 'Hammond Pops 8' sounds exactly like Klaus has plugged his Hammond in, played some tunes to the pre-set percussion until he had enough music to get away with calling an 'album' (this isn't the longest record you'll ever hear), and then stopped. Because that's literally pretty much all there is to it, the sort of stuff I bet any organist of mediocre talent could saw off by the yard. Each of the selections last less than two minutes and the overall impression is of Klaus on shuffle mode, losing interest after playing a few bars of one tune and then moving on to the next.

A frustrating listen then, and what doesn't help to make that listen any easier is my complete unfamiliarity with almost any of the music here. Most of the selections appear to be indigenous German tunes and so it comes as something of a  relief when the opening bars of 'A Whiter Shade Of Pale' pipe up to put me on some kind of home ground. For a while anyway, and it at least gives me some breathing space to be able to make a qualitative judgement on the way Klaus strip mines all the solemnity out of Matthew Fisher's original playing and converts it into general rinky dink cheesiness. But once the main organ riff is done and dusted, Klaus is off into the next tune and I'm back playing away. 

And yet for all that restlessness, the music always swings in the same relentless key in the same relentless direction and with the low key swagger and faded jollity of an off season holiday camp; it's about as one dimensional as it comes. If this were a private recording of a keen amateur at the keys then I'd say fair enough, but surely a career of such longevity has to be based on more than this? 'Hammond Pops 1-7 has to have some variation surely? Surely? Cracking cover though.