Where the scenery's attractive and the air is radioactive

Continuing my trip back through the 1958 album charts.

16/11/58 : Songs By Tom Lehrer - Tom Lehrer


I am aware of a couple of Tom songs and I like them, so I'm looking forward to this.

Hmmm - it's an interesting one. It's all him singing ditties whilst playing the piano - and the ditties cover a most peculiar selection of styles and subjects including Harvard, nuclear testing, Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky (a mathematician, obviously) and familicide. For most the part they're wry rather than particularly humorous, but they're all very clever with some intelligent wordplay and rhymes. It's more something I appreciated rather than enjoyed, but I was glad to catch up with it - and at 24 minutes long it positively flew by.

We're at #8 with a re-entry in the charts this week on his first week of a two week run (his second), but things really took off for him in '59 when he had a 13 week run, peaking at the dizzy heights of #7. The top five this week were the usual suspects of South Pacific, My Fair Lady, Elvis, Frank and Elvis and we have two new entries in the chart for Russ Conway (#9) and Pat Boone (#10).

Wikipedia tells us that Tom recorded the album in '53 in a single one hour session (no messing about) and paid for the original pressing himself. And that's pretty much it apart from the completely useless information that he rerecorded it in '66 (because the record company asked him to improve the sound quality) and he rewrote bits of it to be more contemporary and promptly hated it. He's got quite an interesting entry - he basically gave up "showbiz" in the early 70s to concentrate on teaching the obvious combination of mathematics and musical theatre history and he's still with us at the ripe old age of 96.

"Customers also listened to" Allan Sherman, Ogden Edsl, Napoleon XIV and Barnes & Barnes - all of whom I can tell you absolutely nothing about. I was pleased to listen to this, but I'll not be rushing back to it - a best-of including "The Elements" and "Poisoning The Pigeons In The Park" would be more my thing.

09/11/58 - Such a lovely voice
23/11/58 - Irredeemably awful

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