Sunday Evening Fire-side Hymns: Maurice McKenzie On The Hammond Organ - Emerald Gem 1970

Back in the day when I was a young lad in school, one of my classmates stood out through coming from a very religious family background. He never seemed that involved with it himself and he pretty much managed to keep a lid on it during the week; the main manifestation of the dogma he was living under came through never being allowed out on a Sunday. As we all grew older, rebellion entered into the picture in the form of the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal, a genre of music that was officially a VERY BIG THING 'round 'our way' in the early 1980's. 

 

AC/DC, Black Sabbath, Judas Priest, Saxon, Rainbow, denim jackets and tight jeans - all were grist to the metal mill and all were indulged in by myself and my contemporaries, including my religious mate, but it was with Iron Maiden's 1982 'The Number Of The Beast' album that his parents decided they knew a final straw when they saw one and to nip all this nonsense in the bud they sat him down to watch 'The Exorcist' on video. And not just watch it, they told him it was a documentary and that what happened to Regan McNeil would happen to him too if he didn't mend his ways and get back on the right path. Needless to say, it worked, and his next brush with the world of metal was when he brought his albums to school and gave them away because (he claimed) he could hear the devil tempting him through the drum beats. He was thirteen years old.

 

I have to say that the cover here reminded me of him for the first time in decades, and it kind of gave me an insight into what his home life must have been like back then - all starchy discipline in a strait laced humour vacuum where unhappy looking kids, togged out to the nines in a style more 1870 than 1970, sit grouped around a blazing fire while a stern patriarch torments them with readings from a well thumbed text, only putting his pipe and glasses down to reach for a just out of shot bamboo cane that's flecked with the dried blood of misremembered Bible passages past. Whatever your own views on this sort of carry on are (and I have plenty), let me say that whilst by no stretch am I a religious person (in fact, I'm about as atheistic as they come), I will own up to liking a lot of gospel. A good call and response revivalist holler can uplift and inspire even at a secular level and I don't mind straight ahead hymns either as long as they're belted out with joy and enthusiasm. That's what I like anyway, so shame then that 'Sunday Evening Fire-side Hymns' delivers an opposite that's as polar as night is to day.

 

For a start, there are no vocals here to impart anything; this is a purely instrumental affair. From the title, I'm assuming the idea is that you gather the family of  Sunday evening, put this on the stereo then sing along to it.* That's ok in itself I suppose, but there's no room here for anybody to cut loose with the abandon I favour; McKenzie tackles every single one of these hymns in the manner of a beaten dog cowering before his master, eager to please but more scared of causing offence to risk putting a foot out of place. The pace of his playing is so leaden that the gaps between the notes mean that, over time, the hymns themselves become meaningless - almost unrecognisable - as they leak into and over each other in a low key ebb and flow of continuous, ambient misery until I'm dazed to the point I can't tell where 'How Great Thou Art' starts and 'I Am Thine O Lord' stops.

 

There's no joy to be had here whatsoever, no spreading of the good news, no spirited Hosanna's or shouted 'praise be's, nothing except the weary sound of an organ played at the sodden pace of a funeral in the rain and with just as much spirit - oh never mind funereal; if the mother of those children were lying in state in the room next door then the funeral directors would probably think twice about playing this on the grounds that it would be inappropriately maudlin. It's morose to the point of it being positively unhealthy, a suffocating dirge that clings like a plastic bag pulled tightly over your head, the oxygen slowly depleting until all you want to do is open a window and let some air in. As if Sunday evenings needed to be made any more depressing - this, I'm afraid, is dreadful stuff. Time to put some Maiden on I think.

 

 

* Looking at the set up there though, I'm not sure that a record of this sort would be of any use to them anyway; they look like the sort of family who'd consider disembodied sounds emanating from a gramophone as the work of he devil and refuse to let one through the door.

Hammond Organ My Way: Michael Conradd - Happy Face 1977

My heart skipped a beat or two when I fished this one out of the crate - from the cover, I thought at first blush I'd stumbled upon some obscure Brian Wilson/Beach Boys bootleg that I wasn't previously aware of. Alas though, it wasn't to be; Hawaiian of shirt and pudding bowl of haircut he might be, Michael Conrad is not a beach boy from the West Coast. He's actually from the north of England. Tant pis I guess.

The bootleg mistake was an easy one to make though; from the cheap cardboard to the sparse design, the way 'Hammond Organ My Way' is packaged has a definite 'knock off' lack of quality to it. I don't know if this is a private pressing, but it doesn't look like much time, money or effort went into it - they've even manage to spell Conradd's name as 'Micheal' on the back. It's the music that matters though and, once again, what we have here is another mixed bag of tunes ('Amazing Grace', 'Send In The Clowns', 'Una Paloma Blanca' to name three) played as instrumentals on a Hammond organ.

And played at a very low volume at that - I commented on the previous entry that Stef Meeder's playing was dull and pedestrian, but he plays like Steve Vai fronting Metallica compared to Mr Conradd. Maybe the neighbours had been complaining about the noise, but for whatever reason the volume of the mix here is set firmly at the lower end of the dial and the music is played as slowly as treacle dripping off the end of a wooden spoon. Even the fist pumping patriotism of the 'Dambusters March' is reduced to an arthritic crawl and whisper by Conradd's organ burbling away on a very low flame.*

Unlike most releases of this genre that I've come across so far, most of the tunes here are played self contained and whole instead of as part of a medley, though at just 10 tracks, it's not the longest album in the world. Not that I'd particularly want to hear any more you understand; there's enough here for me to get the measure of Michael Conradd and his album is an inoffensive as they come, yet criticising it feels almost like criticising a painting done by a five year old child for a lack of realism, poor perspective and childish use of colour. If that 'Hammond Organ - My Way' is a like it or lump it, stall setting statement of intent, then fair enough, but I'm afraid in that case I'm just going to have to lump it. This is Dullsville USA all the way.


* A word too about his sidekick Horace Jeffery on drums. Though his name is given prominence on both sides of the cover, I'm not at all sure that this isn't some kind of 'in joke'. Because whilst I wasn't expecting Keith Moon, the drum sound and patterns on display here are indistinguishable from the pre-set drum tracks you find on most home organs.

Games That Lovers Play 30 Hits For Hammond Organ: Stef Meeder - Gemini 1969

Oh I say, steady the buffs there - I'm no mystic, but I know I don't have to look much past that cover to know this isn't of British origin. We don't have too many problems in decking our cheapo compilations out in candid cheesecake shots of women in their underwear, but we're far more squeamish when it comes to adding a bloke in the same state of undress. A chap in a tux or dinner jacket arriving to take his fiancée out to a meal maybe, but bare chested and skin on skin with a female? You won't see that staring out of the cheap racks down at Woolworth's.

And sure enough, Stef Meeder is from the Netherlands and 'Games That Lovers Play' is a Dutch release. That though is where the exoticism ends; this is yet another album of Hammond organ led, instrumental versions of contemporary songs with no obvious thematic link that vary from 'Puppet On A String' to 'Sloop John B' to 'Lara's Theme from Dr Zhivago' via more obscure tracks that were probably big news on the Continent during the sixties but which have passed me by. 

That '30 Hits For Hammond Organ' title is a bit disingenuous though - as far as I know, none of these tunes were actually scored specifically for a Hammond, and there's not really 30 in content either as most of them are excerpts performed in clusters of three songs as a medley. It's like marketing a DVD full of trailers as '30 Films'. What's also highly misleading is that cover shot and album title; from that evidence alone I'd be expecting music of wild, lid-off abandon or else the sound of sensual, red light lit sleaze, but not a bit of it - 'Games That Lovers Play' is another faithful but pedestrian stroll through the tunes that's not going to pop anyone's cork; that cover is just about the most exciting thing about it.*

The act here is billed on the back as 'Stef Meeder with rhythm section' with the four players of his quartet listed individually, yet despite that we're never in any doubt as to who's running this show - there's no jazzy improvisation or spark of individuality between the players and the only purpose of the other three seems to be a glorified click track to keep Meeder's organ on course and to fill in the gaps between the notes of the melody; I'm no musician, but I'm pretty sure I could pick up a bass or sit behind the drums and play along to this. It's all rather safe and dull all told, music more suited for a rainy Sunday indoors than a day in the sun down at the topless beach. Which, I suppose, is the last place you'd expect to find a Hammond organ anyway.


* That's not quite true - the producer is listed as one Joke Van Halen, which made me laugh as it sums up everything the band put out when Sammy Hagar was fronting them.

Songs: Don Juans - Bullseye Records Ltd 1980

'What is this shit'? So began Greil Marcus's famous 1970 Rolling Stone review of Bob Dylan's 'Self Portrait' album. I kind of know how he felt. Sometimes all attempts at objective criticism or fair and balanced assessment seem obsolete - worthless even - in the face of what you've been presented with to write about. 

 

At least Marcus's bafflement had a context  - 'Self Portrait' always was a curate's egg of an album made up of cover versions of old standards, live recordings, instrumentals and random cover versions. Coming directly after the mighty 'John Wesley Harding' and 'Nashville Skyline', it must have seemed like Dylan had taken one left turn too many and run straight up his own arse. For my own part I've got no context at all with this, I've never heard of Don Juans (no 'The') before and I've no idea where or how 'Songs' sits in their canon. And yet after sitting through it I'm left with the same base response that Marcus felt - 'What is this shit'?

 

Where to start? Well, let's start with the sleeve, because that's what caught my eye in the first place. On the front we have line portraits that (and taking my cue from the name of the act) aim for a Hall and Oates level of swish but instead offer up the two faces of the seventies incarnations of David Van Day of Dollar and Bobby Knutt, set above a tramp stamp flash straight off the wall of a backstreet tattooists and sat on background that any honest colour chart would surely call 'shit brown'. Turn it over and, as well as the tracklist, there's a short poem of hope that runs "So all you soldiers everywhere, put down your arms and have some care. Instead of bullets, tanks and bombs, give the world some happy songs".

 

Ignoring the pedantry that it's not a soldier's remit to sing happy songs to the world, the feelgood message of that doggerel is somewhat short circuited by a song selection listed above it, made up as it is of death ballads ('Johnny Remember Me', 'Green Green Grass of Home') and songs of wallowing self pity ('You've Lost That Loving Feeling', 'It's Only Make Believe', I Just Can't Help Believing') that serve up a severe mismatch between aspiration and method; these are not by any stretch a set of songs that will stop you feeling blue. Adding to the weirdness, side two, track seven is listed as an 'Elvis Medley' yet is sandwiched in between a run of songs that were made famous by Elvis Presley, and a keen set of eyes will see that among the random capitalisation of the song list, 'Jezebel' and 'Johnny Remember Me' aren't even spelled properly.

 

Yes, this was definitely something in need of further investigation and, having investigated, I'm going to start my piece with a broad brush conclusion: to these ears, Don Juans are the Ed Wood of popular music and 'Songs' is their 'Plan 9 From Outer Space', a work that dazzles in its ineptitude yet comes shot through with the tempering pity of knowing it's actually the output of people working in good faith and to the limits of their talent and ability.

 

To break it down - Don Juans have two lead singers (who I'm assuming are the pair on the cover) and both sing flat and in different keys that harmonise as well as water and electricity in a bathtub. One of the pair audibly 'fancies himself' and takes the lead on the more difficult numbers, yet even though he's staring at the stars, he never breaks clear of the gutter, which is no surprise given that most of these songs are suicide karaoke material and not easy money for anyone to interpret. His vocal falls into a vague Vegas era Elvis impersonation where a vague Elvis impersonation is required and a generic American one where it's not (I've since discovered Don Juans are from Newcastle), and at all times it's drenched in a wash of booming echo that adds nothing to the quality but probably hides a multitude of sins of pitch and tone. Add to this a backing band of musicians who manage to consistently play in different keys to different arrangements, female backing vocals who sing in neither tune, time nor harmony and a production job that makes it sound like it was recorded underwater then the end result is, perhaps unsurprisingly, an absolute mess.

 

'Songs' is the sound of keen amateurs having a first bash run through to get everyone warmed up that inadvertently got released as the final version. To describe it as 'ramshackle' would be charitable, because that suggests a certain amateur charm; make no mistake, there's no charm about any of this, no 'so bad it's good' get out of jail free card angle ( so prevalent in Ed Wood's films) that lets you rubberneck at it's awfulness with a voyeuristic smirk. The only element that's vaguely tolerable is that 'Elvis Medley', a Stars On 45 type sequence of Presley's more well known Fifties rock & roll hits ('Hound Dog', 'All Shook Up' etc) played with the enthusiasm of a small child splashing in a puddle but with the same level of artistic integrity. 

 

When the needle reached the run-out groove at the end of side two I was left to ponder what on earth the people involved were trying to achieve and what they thought they had achieved when they packaged this up and sent it out into the world with the expectation that the public would part with money to hear it. Family and friends maybe? I honestly don't know.  Which means I've not really answered my 'What is this shit?' question have I? Unless the answer is, simply, 'it's shit'. I need a lie down after this one.

Wunderlich Pops 4: Klaus Wunderlich And His New Pop Organ Sound - Telefunken 1976

I'll hold up my hands and confess I gave Wunderlich some pretty short shrift the last time our paths crossed on these pages. In doing so though, I'm conscious that was also the first time our paths had ever crossed and it's been nagging at me a bit that I risk damning an entire fifty or so year career based on my reaction to a single album that may or may not be representative of the whole. So with that in mind, and in order to honour the maxim that everybody deserves a second chance, I've given him another go by giving this album a listen, and I chose it because, on the one hand, having the words 'New Pop Organ Sound' in the title at least offers the promise of something a bit different and, on the other, that woman on the cover put me in mind of a young Kate Bush, albeit a young Kate Bush who looks like she wishes she was elsewhere doing something better.

So what of it then? Well it's probably easier to start with what's the same - 'Wunderlich Pops 4' is another set of instrumentals played medley style primarily on a Hammond organ. The tracklist is there on the cover and it's the usual mix of the familiar, the rather less so and the 'I have absolutely no idea what this is', but again, it doesn't matter too much; although Wunderlich doesn't take any liberties with the tunes and trots them out faithfully, none of them stick around long enough to allow any kind of purchase - no sooner does a melody appear that's familiar enough to whistle, Klaus drops it and is off to the next one before it has chance to bed down. So far, so plus ca change then.

Where this does differ though is that, unlike the previous album, 'Wunderlich Pops 4' is not just Klaus plonking away at the Hammond; there's a live band backing him on much of this too, including a bassist so clipped he sounds like he's using a masonry nail as a pick. What this serves to do is round out the sound into another dimension other than the flat plain of previous. And not only that - 'Wunderlich Pops 4' also has plenty of changes of key, tempo and rhythm, meaning that compared to 'Hammond Pops 8', we're definitely closer to Oz than Kansas. It actually sounds like 'proper' music that someone has put some thought into.

Saying that, Klaus's tendency to suddenly pull rugs at the drop of a hat so that happy becomes maudlin and quick becomes slow are as disconcerting and violently unexpected as a funeral car suddenly pulling a handbrake turn into the cemetery, which doesn't do much for any mood maintenance. I guess that's kind of inevitable when you have tunes as eclectic as 'The Hustle', 'I'm Not In Love', 'Sailing' and 'Love Theme From The Godfather' bumping up against each other - it might serve to keep you on your toes, but it also means this is still never going to be any kind of 'go to' album for me whenever I want to hear some music, and I'm still at a loss as to why anyone would ever want more than one album of this stuff.

This Is Gunter Kallman: The Gunter Kallman Choir - Polydor 1970

'This Is Gunter Kallman'? Well you can read that as either a promise or a threat I guess. Kallman* was (yet) another German bandleader peddling a strain of easy listening music during the sixties and seventies, but his own wrinkle was that, like his contemporary Ray Conniff, he came with his own resident male and female choir who added vocal harmonies to the music. From what I can surmise, 'This Is Gunter Kallman' is a 'best of' compilation taken from four other Polydor albums and has title tracks of each present on this album. I'm assuming that was done to give the back catalogue maximum exposure, but it also goes some way to explaining why this particular release sounds like such a trainwreck.  

Because whilst I don't know if those other releases were thematic in nature, I do know that if you wanted a German choir singing a phonetic English version of 'Strangers In The Night', an oompah version of 'Put A Little Love In Your Heart', a faithful interpretation of Binge's patriotic 'Elizabethan Serenade', albeit with a German language vocal pasted over the top of it or a fairly straight take on Handel's 'Largo' then you've come to the right place; this is nothing if not eclectic. For those of us up to date with our bipolar medication though, then even though there's an undeniable voyeuristic curiosity in hearing all these tunes crash into and then bounce off each other in a bagatelle of no rhyme, reason or thematic continuity, it makes for a far from relaxing listen.  

If there are any constants here, then it's the pushed right up in your face choir who sound like they've learned English from a book as a fifth language, and an over reliance on percussive bells and tinkles that rattle along behind the tunes and which make for some rather harsh and bright sounding recordings that are as sharp, brittle and overdone as burned sugar and just as sickly. This is not an album for quiet reflection. And if all that wasn't migraine inducing enough, the back cover prints the running order as aqua blue on a dark green background, making it more akin to the later pages of colour blindness test book than anything remotely readable; when you don't know what's coming next then it makes the experience of listening to this something of a mystery tour but without any magic. Whatever merits any of Kallman's other albums may have I cannot say, I haven't heard them. But I defy anybody to listen to this one in a single sitting and come out the other end with a smile on their face.  

* Oddly, the front and back cover spell the name as Kallman, but the spine adds an extra 'n' to it both times. I won't lose much sleep over which is correct.

Your Favourite TV Themes: Geoff Love & His Orchestra - Music For Pleasure 1973

Two reasons why I picked this one up. First one - unless I stumble upon some old recordings of Hitler's speeches, I don't think I'm going to be writing about another album that has a swastika in the middle of the cover, along with a nice watercolour of two SS officers, so there's a novelty value in reviewing something that would probably be banned for sale from ebay. Second, it has one of my all time favourite TV themes on it's tracklist - 'Galloping Home', Denis King's wonderful theme music to the seventies Sunday tea time staple 'The New Adventures of Black Beauty', a piece of music that, along with the themes to 'Robinson Crusoe' and 'Van Der Valk' are evocative enough of my childhood so as bring a tear to my eye. 

 

Geoff's version on this brought a tear to my eye too, but for all the wrong reasons; King's theme is all urgent strings of motion punctuated by the hoofbeat pound of kettledrums, in other words music fit to soundtrack scenes of a thoroughbred stallion charging though an English meadow on his way home. On his version, Love dispenses with the kettledrums and adds a constantly ticking drum rhythm that's less indicative of speed and power and sounds more like a Yorkshire Terrier scampering for a biscuit, while the horns smear the tune all over the shop like so much cheap jam on so much white bread. This is not a good start Geoffrey.

 

Maybe I should be too surprised though - for the observant, the back cover note give a heads up on what's to come: "Now Geoff Love has selected a further twelve of your favourite TV themes, investing them with his own attractive and popular brand of arrangement to enable you to enjoy these familiar pieces of music in their entirety". The problem of course is that 'attractive' is a rather subjective concept isn't it? And what's so attractive about putting 'favourite TV themes' through the Geoff Love mangle? Because elsewhere, even though the triumphant march of the World of Sport theme had a sense of occasion out of all proportion to the 'sports' the show tended to feature (usually wrestling from Northern town halls and Canadian tractor pulling), Love's arrangement speeds it up, thins it out and adds musical 'jokes' and 'laughs' that would be better suited to soundtracking a sitcom.

 

Elsewhere, the 'Nationwide' theme is chivvied along with added banjo and quite spectacular walking bassline while on 'Upstairs Downstairs' Love plays the same 'Black Beauty' card and adds an incessant drum pattern that rattles like a click track and shakes all the stateliness clean out of the music, sitting it firmly 'Downstairs' in the cheap seats. This is a constant theme to all on offer here - Love does not play it like it was written and instead fiddles around until the familiar becomes just unfamiliar enough to be irritating. All, that is, except the theme from Colditz where even Love seems to know better than to piss off the Nazis and offers up an almost carbon copy of Robert Farnon's stirring theme. Which means he can do it when he wants to, but the fact he rarely does makes this release a frustrating affair and largely redundant in my eyes. Maybe it made more sense back in 1973 when direct comparisons to the originals were harder to come by, making the back cover claim that this album will 'serve as a permanent reminder of the programmes you enjoy' more honest. If all you're after is a 'reminder' then I suppose it works well enough, but those wanting to add accuracy to the pot had best look elsewhere. Start with YouTube.