Beep-beep-beep-deeep

Continuing my trip back through the 1961 album charts.

09/04/61 : The Big Sound Of Johnny And The Hurricanes - Johnny And The Hurricanes

I've heard of Johnny and the lads, but I'm not entirely sure what they're like - I seem to recall it's early "rock and roll" when nobody really knew what rock and roll was, but I could be totally wrong.

And once again, we have an album that somewhat defies description.  It's all instrumental tracks, mostly (I think) old stuff relentlessly perked up, often using a saxophone or a very peculiar sounding Hammond organ - the first track is a very odd version of "Greensleeves", which for some reason is called "Molly-O".  It's all quite like a simpler version of Ray Conniff's stuff, but about 20 bpm faster - it's not exactly horrible, but I'd struggle to call it great.  You wouldn't describe it as dated either because it's just sounds timeless - but more in the way that it never was, and it's never going to be, in style.  All very odd - but it's got a surprisingly cool album cover!

We're are #13 in the charts of the second of four separate one week runs it had throughout the year - this was as high as it got.  The top five this week were Elvis, South Pacific (these two are in the middle of a run of eleven weeks sharing the top two spots), Cliff, The Everly Brothers and Frank.  There are no new entries in the chart but something miraculous has happened in the lower reaches of the charts because we've got, not one, but TWO more women named on albums - Sophia Loren (paired with Peter Sellers on a album we're definitely going to hear at some point and I suspect it will be extremely odd) and Connie Francis (with a best-of which I think we're going to miss out on).

Wikipedia doesn't have anything on the album but their entry tells me that they "specialized in adapting popular traditional melodies into the rock idiom, using organ and saxophone as their featured instruments on their hits" - you're sold now, aren't you? They developed a following in Europe and in '62 played a club in Hamburg where they were supported by a little-known band called The Beatles - I wonder what happened to them? And well, they just kept playing Europe - until '05, just before Johnny Paris (the sax dude) died. Johnny was the only constant member of the band and over 300 people played in the band over the years.

"Customers also listened to" "no similar recommendations" - which doesn't really surprise me because this is another one that has left me thinking "hmmm".

02/04/61 - A very pleasant surprise
16/04/61 - Enjoyable different