It’s true I’ve been led an amazing dance but why should I ever complain?

Continuing my trip back through the 1956 album charts.

23/09/56 : Salad Days OCR - Various Artists

Another week skipped over - Oklahoma! was #1 and, for some strange reason, there only seemed to be four albums in the charts, which I can assure you I'm not going to investigate.  Which brings us to a curious one - I am aware of Salad Days but I've no idea know why and I don't think I'm aware that it's ever been revived.  Maybe listening to the album will explain why...

Errr.  Not really.  It does sound dreadfully dated, but I suspect there's enough there for someone to work with - but the technology employed for the recording is so basic that it's really hard to get a feel for any of it.  Unlike Carousel, the sound quality is actually fine but it just sounds like they put a microphone in the theatre miles from the stage, pressed record and just left it there.  You can hear that singing is going on but it's often impossible to work out the words (and some of the songs have a lot of words in them) - you also get the polite audience applause at the end of each track.  I appreciate that things were very different back then but this is basically unlistenable-to - so I'm none the wiser about the charms of the musical.

We're at #5 in the charts this week with a new entry - and that's the only appearance it ever made, which is weirdly impressive given how few albums there appear to have been around at the time (there were only four albums in the chart the week after!).  And the rest of the top five were Oklahoma!, Bill Haley, Carousel and TKAI.

Wikipedia doesn't have an entry for the album, but the entry for the musical is quite something.  It starts off gently by explaining that the phrase "salad days" comes from Shakespeare's Anthony & Cleopatra and then whammies you by explaining the plot of the musical - buckle up for quite the ride here.  Timothy needs a job and has several influential uncles who could sort him out but obviously he and Jane (his new wife) decide he has to take the first job he's offered - which, perfectly normally, comes from a passing tramp who offers them £7 a week to look after a piano.  And, whaddyaknowit, it's a magic piano which makes people dance so the Minister of Pleasure and Pastime (one of Tim's uncles) tries to ban it - which makes the piano disappear.  Well, it can't get weirder than that can it?

Ah OK - Tim & Jane now decide to enlist the help of the scientific uncle (Zed) to find the piano, so they go off in his - FLYING SAUCER!  At which point, the tramp reappears and it turns out he's ANOTHER uncle ("the one we don't mention") - and their time is up with the magical piano.  WTAF?!?  However much nonsense it might have been, it was very popular nonsense and played in the West End for 2,283 performances which made it the longest running musical in history at the time.  The transfer to New York was slightly less successful - there was a newspaper strike, so it didn't get reviewed and closed after 80 shows when they ran out of money.  It has been revived in London twice in '76 and '96 but I get the impression that it has dated rather badly (which probably doesn't surprise you from the plot description).  And one amusing fact to finish - "the musical was parodied, in a particularly bloody manner, by Monty Python in their sketch "Sam Peckinpah's Salad Days"".

"Customers also listened to" "no similar recommendations" - that does not surprise me in the slightest.  Part of me is a little disappointed that the recording was so rubbish, but I seriously doubt I would have enjoyed a better quality one any more - it wasn't that it was terrible, it just sounded so amateur.

07/10/56 - A fine album