Work all night on a drink of rum

Continuing my trip back through the 1961 album charts.

07/05/61 : Nina & Frederik - Nina & Frederik 

FINALLY! An actual woman named on an album - yay! I seem to recall I've heard some Nina & Frederik stuff and it's either pleasant enough tunes or absolutely twee nonsense, but I'm not sure which - I guess I'm going to find out soon enough!

I have to admit I couldn't actually find the album, but there's no way I was going to not listen to the first woman of the year so I managed to find a tracklist and so was able to recreate it from the five million best-ofs there are out there. And I really wasn't expecting it to start with some cod-reggae - sung quite badly as well! As is the second track, but then we have some dodgy French folk which is much more what I was expecting. But that's the oddity here because it's mostly songs with a definite Caribbean flavour - we've even got "Banana Boat Song (Day-O)" on here!  

It's all generally sung in accents that you probably wouldn't have gotten away with on the Benny Hill show, let alone today - and I've no idea what the kids of today would think of "When A Woman Say No She Mean Yes". It's also all incredibly poor in terms of recording quality - I know that 1961 was a long time ago, but this is considerably worse than most of the other stuff we've heard this year. So this album is undoubtedly dreadful, but I do have to admit it's also kinda spellbinding - you find yourself waiting for the next track to see how many hate crimes it's going to commit.  All in all, it's a most peculiar experience!

We're at #17 in the charts this week on their third week of a four week run - which is quite frankly astonishing. The top five this week were Elvis, South Pacific, Cliff, George and Frank and there were two new entries in the chart for Dean Martin (#18) and The Temperance Seven (#19).

Wikipedia doesn't have anything on the album, but there's all sorts of interesting facts about the pair.  This was their second album, helpfully given exactly the same title as the first one. Frederik was a Dutch baron - he and Nina first sang together at the age of four, but then he had to move to (obviously) Trinidad because his dad was an ambassador.  They starred in a Danish film in '58, married in '60, had a TV series in the UK in '61, had a three week residence at the Savoy Hotel and played the Royal Albert Hall in '63, divorced in '76 and Frederik died of gunshot wounds in the Philippines in '94. Nina is still with us at the tender age of 91 - I bet she still lapses into a Jamaican accent from time to time.

"Customers also listened to" - well, we'll never know. And, believe me, I think we're probably all better off that way - this is an abomination, albeit quite an amusing one.

30/04/61 - Interesting, but no more than that
14/05/71 - Hits the heights of "not dreadful"

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

I saw your mum - she forgot that I existed

Image
Continuing my trip forward in time through the album charts 22/12/23 :  Stick Season - Noah Kahan Well, this week surprises us on a couple of fronts.  Firstly, and probably the least expected, this is possibly the album I've heard most this year - because obviously I'm a massive Noah fan. Well, it might not surprise you to hear it's not me but my delightful daughter - but you might be surprised to hear just how much my youngest absolutely LOVES Noah, particularly given his folkiness.  She's got tickets to see him next year and (excluding festivals) they're the most expensive gig tickets I've ever bought.  But despite having heard the album loads, I've never actually listened to it, so I'm interested to see what I make of it on a one-on-one basis. You know what - the headline is that, having actually listened to it I can report that, at least in places, I liked this way more than I previously did.  I listened to it over headphones for the first time and t
Read more

She's got a wicked way of acting like St. Anthony

Image
I've done The Guardian's list of the top 50 albums of the year for the last three years and (mostly) enjoyed it, so here we go again with this year's list .  Last year I'd previously met ten of the list - it will be interesting to see whether that is repeated this year.   #50 : Crazymad, For Me - CMAT Coming off halfway between Jenny Lewis and Self Esteem, Dublin’s CMAT sets life’s greatest embarrassments to ritzy country showstoppers – the musical equivalent of piling your beehive high to distract from your tear-reddened eyes. On her second album, she tots up the price she has paid for her bad boyfriends, self-subjugation and knowing avoidance of less-than-romantic realities, always with mordant humour rather than self-pity: “I’m just some stewardess who feeds your pets / And does your dishes and pays your rent,” she sings on the delicate, harmony-heavy Such a Miranda. For all that she has lost in these songs – pride, love, literal cash – her perspective remains a firm
Read more

Croopied in the reames, shepherd gurrel weaves

Image
Continuing my trip down The Guardian's   top 50 albums of 2023 #30 : The Age Of Pleasure - Janelle Monáe Monáe’s last album, 2018’s Dirty Computer, saw the high-concept pop star returning to earth after several albums of space-age fantasia, showing a softer, fallible side for the rest time. Its songs were still divided into three categories – Reckoning, Celebration and Reclamation – indicating an artist who hadn’t quite let go of the structural safety rails. But on The Age of Pleasure, Monáe is resolutely grounded in pursuit of a new kind of body high. To the decadently rendered diasporic sounds of reggae, dancehall and Afrobeats, she hymns pleasure and desire, connecting (as did Jessie Ware also did this year) sex as self-empowerment and celebrating the kaleidoscopic nature of identity. Or, as she puts it on Phenomenal: “I’m lookin’ at a thousand versions of myself / And we’re all fine as fuck.” I have experienced a couple of Janelle albums and I found them somewhat inaccessible -
Read more