Nina Simone: Wild Is the Wind

Wild Is the Wind was written for the 1957 film of the same name by the Hollywood team of composer Dimitri Tiomkin and lyricist Ned Washington, where it was sung by Johnny Mathis. The wonderful Nina Simone first recorded it for a live album in 1959.

This studio version dates from 1966. Bill Janovitz says of it:

On a recording by David Bowie and on Mathis' lush original ... it is a romantic torch song; the narrator is haunted by the possibility – one senses more of a probability – that his lover will not "run away with" him. There is a sense of longing and despair, especially in Bowie's passionate guitar-driven rendering. But there is a glimmer of hope in the narrator's desperate imploring in both interpretations. 

With Simone, though, all hope seems lost; she sounds as mournful as she has on almost any of her recordings – resolved that her lover is gone, yet singing to herself as if he were there. ... Her own sparse piano accompaniment is measured, with resonating and sustaining low notes and grand arpeggios.

"And Wendy's stealing clothes from Marks and Sparks"

There was a Bluesky meme the other day asking you to post a song from the year you turned 12. I chose this one – Ian Hunter sings David Bowie.

Early on in it comes the lyric:

"And Wendy's stealing clothes from Marks and Sparks."

When I was young, Marks and Sparks was both an affectionate nickname for Marks & Spencer and the abbreviation that everyone used. Today, everyone follows the company's own branding and calls them M&S.

I wondered when the change took place. The earliest use of Marks and Sparks I could find in the British Newspaper Archive is more recent than I expected: it dates from 1957.

Marks & Spencer dropped St Michael from its clothing labels in favour of M&S in 2000, and my feeling is that M&S was being pushed for some time before that.

I do remember using "Marks and Sparks" when I worked at Golden Wonder, which dates it to 1988 at the latest, and it had a retro feel to me even then.

Arthur Brown: Give Him a Flower

Before Arthur Brown released Fire, he released a single called Devil's Grip on Me. And this was on the B-side.

Give Him a Flower is a mixture of groovy Hammond organ, Kevin Ayres vocals and an early David Bowie novelty record.

An interview with Psychedelic Baby! reveals that Brown fits my ideal profile of a Sixties musician: he had a father who played jazz and he sang as a boy.

It also reveals that he was one of the first graduates on the scene - before then the expectation was that you would put away childish things like "pop music" when you went to university.

There's more about Brown's career in a Classic Rock interview from earlier this year.

When I saw Arthur Brown at the Harborough Theatre ten years ago, his show was all about looking back at his life and career:

Finding himself treated as a guru by some because of the themes of his songs, he felt a fraud and has dedicated his life since to seeking enlightenment.

And tonight the way brought him to Market Harborough.

But, wonderfully, despite occasionally setting himself alight with the flaming headdress he wears when he sings Fire, Arthur Brown is still with us and still touring as The Crazy World of Arthur Brown at the age of 82. 

Catch him in York, Milton Keynes or Bromsgrove next month. He was one of the pioneers of combining rock with elements of theatre, circus and other arts, and we should cherish him.

Maybe the cancellation of Time Team is the event after which everything started going wrong

Time Team, Channel 4's (ahem) groundbreaking archaeology programme, ran for 20 years from 1994. At its best it was like a nonfiction version of Detectorists.

So Time Team's cancellation rivals the death of David Bowie as the event after which everything started going wrong.

This special programme celebrates those 20 years.

I've been watching old episodes of Time Team on YouTube recently and have noticed one way in which it changed over the years. In its final year or two, the programme included a montage of the best bits to come in that episode to dissuade people from changing channel.

That's life in a multimedia, multichannel world, but as my mother's second husband used to say, it was like unwrapping your presents before Christmas.

Hear Joni Mitchell play a lost Leicester Market Place pub in 1967

What a find! And what a performance! Here's an hour-long bootleg recording of Joni Mitchell singing at the White Swan in Leicester on 16 September 1967.

The White Swan (sometimes called Ye Old White Swan) was in the Market Place, tucked away behind the Corn Exchange. You can see some photos of this pub on its page at Pub History Project.

Paul Simon also played The White Swan, which was demolished in 1973.

There's a great Twitter thread about unlikely Leicester concert venues by The Chisit, and you may also enjoy my post about The Latin Quarter, a short-lived venue in the city where the young David Bowie and Elton John both played.

David Bowie: Queen Bitch

At the height of his fame, the Radio 1 disc jockey Stuart Henry had 11 million people listening to his Saturday morning show. I was one of them, and it was there - around 1971 - that I first became aware of David Bowie.

Henry, as I remember it, was always talking about the Bowie albums Hunky Dory and - later - Aladdin Sane.

It was also through Henry that I first heard Lou Reed, particularly Walk on the Wild Side and Satellite of Love.

So when choosing Queen Bitch, a song Bowie wrote under the influence of and as a tribute to Reed, it was natural that I should think of Henry.

Henry was dropped by Radio 1 in 1974 amid suggestions that overindulgence in alcohol or cannabis was causing him to slur his speech on air. In fact, he was suffering from multiple sclerosis, a  condition to which he succumbed in 1995 at the age of 53. There was a good obituary by Chris Welch in the Independent.

Reed followed him in 2013 and Bowie in 2016, so we may never know what a bibbity-bobbity hat was.

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"On New Year’s Day 1953, he signed up to become part of the greatest churn of young football talent English football had yet seen, the Busby Babes. The young Charlton, fair-haired and bequiffed, threw himself into metropolitan, cosmopolitan Mancunian life, the cinemas, cafes and dances a world away from his colliery hometown of Ashington." John Brewin pays tribute to Bobby Charlton.

Matthew Pennell on what happened in Mid Bedfordshire and why it will probably never happen again.

"An unfounded accusation that I had 'been unkind' to a non-statutory government document should not have been a reason to attempt to cancel my presence at professional events. Beyond the impact on me personally, it removes my expertise and connections with expert practice around the world from England’s state education system. If this is happening daily across the UK’s ministries, it also paints a frightening picture of a narrowing of discussion and expertise in policy making." Ruth Swailes has been blacklisted by the Department for Education for being critical of its policies.

Errol Morris is interviewed about John le Carré and the film he has made about the author's life and work, The Pigeon Tunnel.

"These days it’s where giddy teens and grizzled pros purchase shiny guitars, but before that it played a founding role in the careers of The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, David Bowie, Elton John, the Sex Pistols and more. But this history goes back even further. Before the Second World War, Denmark Street was home to music publishers, their windows piled high with sheet music." Peter Watts tells the story of Denmark Street.

Rail Engineer descends into the cutting at Edge Hill in Liverpool to find the site of the stationary steam engine that hauled trains up the gradient from Lime Street until the 1870s.

When a young David Bowie played a venue opposite the derelict Leicester Belgrave Road station

One of my favourite Twitter threads is one from The Chisit on gigs at unlikely venues in and around Leicester.

It reveals, for instance, that Joni Mitchell and Paul Simon both played Ye Old White Swan, a vanished pub that used to occupy a corner of the Market Place.

But it is the thought of David Bowie playing an obscure venue in Leicester as early as 1966 that really intrigues me, though not just for musical reasons.

The venue was The Latin Quarter in Belgrave Road and The Bowie Bible says Dave Bowie and the Buzz played there on Friday 12 August 1966. 

A few weeks ago I went to photograph it, and you can see my photo above.

Bowie played with The Buzz in 1966 and 1967. His first band, The Lower Third, had split with him because of a dispute with the management over pay. During their time together, The Buzz played on Bowie's fourth single You're Holding Me Down, which is a record that has not found its way on to YouTube.

The opening of The Latin Quarter was announced in a feature that took up the best part of a page of the Leicester Daily Mercury on Friday 27 May 1966, which announced:

New Teenage Night Spot

Opening Tomorrow

The Latest in Coffee Clubs and Restaurants 

A special all night live music session opens the Latin Quarter on Saturday night with local groups playing from 8 pm through till 6 am Entrance is in Belgrave Road by the lights junction with Abbey Park Road The tunnel of wicker hurdles through which grow ferns and down the stairs under the baleful watch of Pagan masks 

Not only is this to be a restaurant by day but will provide the ultimate in the city as a dusk-’til-dawn coffee club complete with most up-to-date Rock-ola Grand Prix Juke Box with stereophonic sound Meals will be served on occasional tables and diners on Design Centre chairs of a brilliant 'flame' colour.

The feature also promised:

Continuous Music by Local Groups

Every evening at eight ... that is the motto of the Latin Quarter for your entertainment entertainment that we know you will like all the best in the local groups provided by PS Promotions.

And to be fair to PS Promotions, among the bands announced for the venue's first week are The Farinas, who were soon to become Family, Leicester best band of the era.

The Latin Quarter was clearly meant to be a big deal - the feature has notices from its suppliers wishing well. I was intrigued to see that all the internal design work was by Derrick Knightley Associates of Leicester, because Derrick Knightley was an Independent member of Harborough District Council when I was a councillor.

All of which makes it rather sad that I can find no reference to The Latin Quarter after 1966. Among the non-Leicester bands who did play it that year were Bluesology, whose young keyboard player was Reg Dwight. He was to make a stage name from those of two other musicians who were members of the band: Elton Dean and Long John Baldry.

What interested me as much as The Latin Quarter is what was on the other side of Belgrave Road.

It doesn't look much today, but in 1966 this store and car park were the site of Leicester Belgrave Road station, the Great Northern Railway's old terminus in the city.

It had closed to passengers - by then it was mainly used for holiday trains to the Lincolnshire coast - in 1962, but the last railway buildings on the site were not demolished until 1985. The photo before shows the station many decades before that

So I like to think that David Bowie popped out for a fag and discovered the old station as a haunt of pigeons with its masonry stained green by leaking gutters and plants forcing their way from every crack and cranny they could find.

If I had a time machine, I might well set it for the evening of 12 August 1966.

Stage: The lost David Bowie film directed by David Hemmings

Wandering around Braunston a couple of weeks ago, I thought of Running Scared, the lost David Hemmings film that was shot there.

Released in 1972, that was his first film as director, But there was another Hemmings project from the Seventies that is never seen.

The Bowie Bible explains:

The London concerts were also filmed, and were to be part of Stage, a planned 90-minute documentary on Bowie’s Isolar II tour. Bowie and director David Hemmings hoped to have the film in cinemas later in 1978, but it was still unfinished in early 1979. ...

According to Hemmings, "At the end of it he didn’t like the cut, or he didn’t like the fact that we had to cut in between numbers in order to get all the coverage. So he never released it."

In 2000 Bowie said of the film: "I simply didn’t like the way it had been shot. Now, of course, it looks pretty good and I would suspect that it would make it out some time in the future."

This documentary includes some of the concert footage Hemmings shot as well as clips of interviews with both Hemmings and Bowie.

Jane Street-Porter can be seen dancing in the club scene in Blow-Up. Hemmings must have thought she was stalking hem.

Paul Rodgers and Bruce Thomas were in the same band

Is it just because I'm older now that I think popular culture doesn't evolve as quickly as it used to?

I don't think it is entirely. Compare 1961 and 1971 and you might as well be comparing two different planets. Compare 2012 and 2022 and the differences are much more subtle, even if I'm not the best person to spot them.

The reason for this preamble is that I have found another conjunction of musicians from the Sixties and Seventies who feel like they come from different eras. Let's give it my Trivial Fact of the Day Award.

In the past I have blogged about Billy Fury singing David Bowie and about Helen Shapiro and Marc Bolan and Richard Thompson and Hugh Cornwell being in bands together at school.

So here goes with the new example. Paul Rodgers came to fame at the turn of the Seventies as the lead singer of Free. His first band, formed in his home town of Middlesbrough, was The Roadrunners, which also included Bruce Thomas, later the bass player in Elvis Costello's band The Attractions.

Which gives me an excuse to post this immaculate performance again.

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"Who displayed the strength and bravery to keep calling it out? Two women. Margaret Oliver, a former detective loathed by senior police command; and Joan Agoglia, the grandmother of a vulnerable teenage girl whose death she simply wanted investigating." Jennifer Williams on the Manchester child abuse scandal,

Chris Dillow points out the massive difference between the sort of conservatism Roger Scruton championed and free market economics.

"British tweeters skew left and toward remaining in the European Union, which reflects their demographic makeup." Helen Lewis reminds us that the Twitter electorate isn't the real electorate.

Anna McKie asks if standing up for expertise is a fool's errand.

Christopher Bray sees David Bowie's career as a Thatcherite parable of hard work by a boy from the suburbs.

Two Dario Argento films - Suspiria and Inferno - are discussed on the Evolution of Horror podcast.

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"More than any other English-language narrative filmmaker, Roeg apprehended Tarkovsky's notion of "sculpting in time" with the same radical freedom as the Russian director himself did. Roeg came into filmmaking as a cinematographer, and two of the directors he worked for, David Lean and Richard Lester, both had as astute a grasp of editing as any filmmaker you can name. During his most creatively fecund time as a director, Roeg made temporal leaps and jumps that were exhilarating provided you could keep up, which was sometimes a challenge." Glenn Kenny tribute to Nicolas Roeg.

Robert Reich calls for Facebook to be broken up.

Grammar schools aren't the enemy, private schools are, says Charles Turner.

"The only other building in Norwich 'with the authority of the cathedral' was St James Yarn Mill on the Wensum, built in 1843 to give a boost to our waning textile trade." Reggie Unthank looks at Ian Narin looking at Norwich.

"Like David Bowie before her, she took a fascination with literature, theatre, dance and the avant-garde into the mainstream. She traded in the unusual from the beginning, and only became more radical as she went on." The Economist's Prospero reminds us what an extraordinary career Kate Bush has had.

Meg Olmert on how the Victorians invented our modern dog breeds.

David Bowie and David Hemmings on Just a Gigolo

As I once remarked:

Before drink and American television dulled his talent, David Hemmings was a promising film director.

The film that harmed his reputation was his third, Just a Gigolo. It is remembered, fairly or not, as a disaster.

Here its star, David Bowie, and Hemmings himself talk about it.

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"Months before the United States narrowly elected Trump, the United Kingdom narrowly elected to withdraw from the European Union. Both votes advanced Russian foreign policy goals — in the latter case, by splitting up the Western alliance. (Trump has energetically pursued this strategy, too.) Russia employed many of the same tools to influence both elections." Jonathan Chait joins the dots.

Ray Lakeman’s sons died after taking ecstasy. In an interview with Decca Aitkenhead he says that had the drugs been legal and regulated, it might have saved them

Paul Butler reviews a book on the renewal of urban life in the United States: "The United States is nearly the safest that it has been in 50 years. You would not realise this if you watch local news programs — which still lead with sensational violent offences conducted by young black men — or believe President Trump, who has made the false claim that the murder rate is the highest it has been in 47 years."

The adolescent egalitarianism of Ayn Rand enjoys an undeserved popularity. Skye C. Cleary argues that ignoring her won't do anything to challenge this.

"He treated me not as a freak, but as a person dealing with great difficulties." An Open Culture article looks at the friendship between Helen Keller and Mark Twain.

James Gent celebrates the 45th birthday of David Bowie's album Aladdin Sane by looking at the other artists who influenced it.

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A hard border would be a disaster for Northern Ireland, argues Naomi Long.

Chris Grey offers a new angle on the Brexit debacle: "The whole situation is beginning to resemble the plot of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, with Jack being the Brexit Ultras, the mythical Beast being the EU, Ralph being, perhaps, Theresa May, and the Conch being the Referendum result. Remainers play the role of Simon, whilst the British people have to be cast as poor old Piggy. Alas, there seems as yet to be no one to take the part of the adult who arrives to rescue the children and chide them for their un-British, brutal behaviour."

The BBC should repeat Shoulder to Shoulder, their 1974 drama series on the struggle for women's suffrage, say Janet McCabe and Vicky Ball.

Jonathan Coe on film-makers' obsession with the doomed British sailor Donald Crowhurst.

"'There’s a writer in England called … er, Peter Ackroyd,' David Bowie said in a short film he made in 2003, 'who wrote a book called … Hawksmoor I think it was. Wasn’t it? Yeah.'" Anna Aslanyan reads it 33 years on.

"This landscape has seen a lot, it has seen multiple religious settlements, a village grow up and gradually recede. A church consecrated and centuries later deconsecrated." William Tregaskes visits Lancaut beside the River Wye near Chepstow.

David Bowie and David Hemmings on Marlene Dietrich and Just a Gigolo

David Hemmings wrote in his memoirs:

The greatest challenge on Gigolo was filming the 78-year-old Marlene Dietrich. She had refused, of course, to come to Germany, where she hadn't been since before the war. Instead we had to transport a complete set to Paris.

He also reminisces about being introduced to Berlin's more bizarre clubs by Kenneth More, but that is not relevant here.

As well as Dietrich, Just a Gigolo starred David Bowie, Kim Novak and Hemmings himself.

Here you can listen to Bowie and Hemmings talking about the film.

It was written of as a flop when it came out in 1978. As Hemmings explains:

Somehow, all the tensions during production seemed to show through in the picture. I cut and recut it to suit possible distributors (who were not easy to find) and, when the money ran out, I left and the whole thing was cut to ribbons in a way that lost all the humour and irony.

Hemmings also shot a documentary on Bowie at about the same time, which has never been seen. That may be a great loss.

The Strange World of Gurney Slade

What to make of Anthony Newley?

The young Tony Robinson wasn’t sure, and he played his son on the West End stage:

I was awestruck by Tony Newley; he was intense, anguished, and seemed completely detached from the rest of the world. He never spoke to me – that was part of his mystery – but I watched him obsessively from the wings … Every night I mimicked his words, and gazed agonisingly into the spotlight pulling a heartbroken face, just like he did. 

Today, when Newley is something of a forgotten figure, it is hard for any of us to be sure, but I have a feeling he was more important than we realise.

He links two great eras of 20th-century British culture – 1940s cinema and 1960s pop – co-wrote the songs Feelin’ Good and Goldfinger, influenced David Bowie’s singing and was negotiating for a regular role in EastEnders when he died.

So what to make of The Strange World of Gurney Slade?

I have long heard of this 1960 comedy series and recently bought and watched the DVD.

It begins with the hero Gurney Slade, played by Newley, escaping from an awful situation comedy and going out to explore the world.

There he indulges in internal monologues about the absurdities of everyday life that you can imagine in Tony Hancock’s voice. Then a section about the absurdities of dating, featuring Una Stubbs in a very early role, looks forward to observational comedy.

After that things get really strange. There are a group of children – strange symbolic children who resemble the ones you find in 1940s Hollywood films such as The Blue Bird and The Boy with Green Hair.

And it ends with a spot of the absurdist theatre that was popular in 1960s as the characters sit round and waiting to be written into another show.

The cast is strong: Bernie Winters, Hugh Paddick and Fenella Fielding turn up, while the floor manager Newley brushes off as he makes his escape at the start is played by a young Geoffrey Palmer.

But is it funny?

It didn’t make me laugh, but then Charlie Chaplin doesn’t make me laugh even though I can see he is a genius. In the same way, I can see that The Strange World of Gurney Slade is important and interesting.

And the show gives its own answer. At one point Newley is put on trial for not being funny. After rejecting the defence counsel supplied by the court, an awful red-nosed comedian, he defends himself. 

If being like him is what is meant by being funny, he asks by implication, who wants to be funny? 

The best comment on the show is to be found in a trailer Newley made, still in character, for its second showing.

As Andy Murray once described it on We Are Cult:

On a dark street, a smartly-dressed young man stands with a panting sheepdog, peering at a tattered advertising hoarding for a TV show. Addressing the figure pictured on the hoarding, the man says, “Well, it was a noble effort, wasn’t it? You tried. I give you that, you tried. But the public is no man’s fool, you know. The public knows what it wants, and you had no right to even try and suggest something different. Anyway, the public doesn’t like anything… suggestive.” 

The man nods down towards the sheepdog. “He thinks you were before your time. Personally, I don’t think we’re ever going to reach the time that you’re in.”

David Bowie and David Hemmings on the set of Just a Gigolo

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Released in 1978, Just a Gigolo is remembered as something of a disaster. That despite a cast that included Marlene Dietrich, David Bowie and David Hemmings, who also directed the film.

Hemmings wrote in his memoirs Blow-Up and Other Exaggerations:

Before Bowie confirmed that he would play the part, I had to go to Montreux, where he then lived, and convince him that he should. He was, as I had expected, hugely stimulating to deal with - clever, funny, original and with a very special natural elegance. He had a face that always looked beautiful on camera; he didn't have any bad angles, which, as it happened, posed a problem on the film. We went to a lot of trouble to make him look filthy and down-and-out, buying the scruffiest clothes we could find, but as soon as he put them on, they became an elegant new look.

The photograph above shows Hemmings and Bowie with Kim Novak and Maria Schell on the set of the film.

Billy Fury: Silly Boy Blue

It's a sign of how quickly music developed in the 1960s that Billy Fury and David Bowie seem to belong to quite different eras.

But here (played by Danny Baker yesterday morning) is an early Bowie song recorded by Fury.
Anorak Thing explains its genesis. Bowie's manager Kenneth Pitt:

managed to convince Billy Fury's manager Larry Parnes that Bowie had something to offer his client. By 1968 Billy Fury's hit days were long gone. Despite a switch from Decca to Parlophone in January 1967 he hadn't scored a hit on EMI's label. Game for a chance at anything Parnes agreed to record a version of "Silly Boy Blue", a track that had already graced Bowie's debut album, as Fury's next single. Sadly it did nothing for either the artist or the composer.

Which is a shame, because it was a good record.

Ziggy Stardust came from Isleworth

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A treasure turned up on BBC Radio 4 Extra the other day: Ziggy Stardust came from Isleworth.

It tells the story of Vince Taylor, a British rocker from that lost period before the Beatles.

As the iPlayer blurb says:

Ziggy Stardust was a rock and roll fantasy. But David Bowie's fictional rockstar, around whom his 1972 album, stage show, and film were built, was inspired by a real performer, Vince Taylor, born in Isleworth, Middlesex. 

This programme uncovers the truth about a singer whose wild lifestyle ultimately destroyed him, but in so doing he gave rise to a myth that transcended glam-rock and science fiction. 

His record "Brand New Cadillac" remains to this day a British rock 'n' roll classic, covered later by The Clash.

And Bowie is interviewed in it:

Vince Taylor underwent a kind of public breakdown at his next gig, where he started claiming he was a divine being. David Bowie bumped into him in London and later said: 

"Vince Taylor was the inspiration for Ziggy...He always stayed in my mind as an example of what can happen in rock n roll. I'm not sure if I held him up as an idol or as something not to become. There was something very tempting about him going completely off the edge."