There’s another reminiscence in my head all ready to transfer to my fingers, but Nostalgiopolis is not my city of residence and you can always skip the boring present-day stuff and pop back in a day or two. Or later on today indeed, depends how hard I relax this afternoon (the morning went well).
I’m chuckling just now, in fact. Last night I took part in Day One of Mike’s “Part Four of our collaborative annual quest to establish the Greatest Decade For Pop Music Ever” as he eloquently puts it – and only now has it occurred to me that he might possibly check out the people who have voted and if he does so he just might – but he’s a busy man, surely he has better things to do? – look at my profile and see my appreciative mention of the Singing Postman.
If the man does not instantly delete my comments then he is a true, come-what-may, democrat and I salute him (he hasn’t deleted them in fact and he quotes one of the most opinionated, which I wasn’t quite expecting).
I hadn’t knowingly heard any of the songs before; I listened three times and then cast my vote, with reasons. Well, I might not have taken much notice of ‘the charts’ for the last few decades, but arguably that just makes me more open-minded and disinterested. I gave up on them in the early 70s with the advent of music designed to appeal to children. Or ‘teenyboppers’ as the newly coined term put it (when even that wasn’t childish enough they called them ‘weenyboppers’). I’ve dipped in and out since, but hardly enough to sully the perfect plummy bloom of ignorance.
The Singing Postman was surely much underrated. I can’t believe Mike would take offence at such influences.
Hello Jonnyb, welcome. Mike might have been amused at my presumption – but of course the musical taste of anyone who has sung along to ‘Hev Yew Gotta Loight Bor’ is beyond criticism. Surely.
The singing whazzat? Never heard of him, I must confess… and CBATG either (hey, it’s late). Enlighten me, do!
Hello, Mike and a rather embarrassed salute. Allan Smethurst had his toothy heyday in the late 60s with his Norfolk dialect songs. He was a bona fide postman before his thrust into the limelight. Unfortunately he tried to overcome his stage fright with somewhat too much beer and became unable to perform. He got an American tour, I think, but couldn’t go through with it.
‘Molly Wimbley, she smoke like a chimbley and she’s my little nicotine gal’ – yep, I even know the lyrics.
The Norfolk accent as illustrated in that song is the most difficult to do. (Wesker’s Roots)
If nothing else the song is a valuable aide to actors.
On television and radio, Norfolk or Suffolk accents are usually portrayed in the most dreadful generic Mummerset. It wouldn’t be permitted if, for example, Liverpudlian was done in cod Mancunian. But we yokels don’t matter, sadly.