I'm in charge!

Continuing my trip back through the 1959 album charts.

26/07/59 : Curtain Up - Various Artists

Skipping over three weeks with no new albums, we come to this that would certainly be ignored in a normal year because it's just a collection of random artists and tracks. And it nearly got ignored even though it's '59 - but there are a few interesting names on there, so I thought I'd give it the benefit of the doubt.

And I'm glad I did, because what a peculiar album it is! It's basically a selection of cabaret-ish numbers with some of them being boringly normal, but some are really quite odd. Each track is performed by a different artist with the whole thing presented as a variety show compered by Bruce Forsyth - and boy does he build his part up! They were a surprising number of artists I'd actually heard of on there including Roy Castle, Petula Clark, Lonnie Donegan and Dickie Valentine - and plenty I'd no clue about, but I'm going to mention Lita Rosa, Marion Ryan and Cherrie Wainer (who does a most peculiar cha-cha version of "The Blue Danube") because they're women who, along with Petula Clark, make up 30% of acts, they actually get their name on the album cover and the billing is alphabetical, which all seems remarkably fair for these unenlightened times.

For what sounds like a live recording, the sound quality is actually pretty decent although they've done a weird thing of cutting it into separate tracks which involves Bruce's patter dropping in volume and sometimes repeating between tracks. The whole thing is surprisingly bearable - it all feels very inessential these days, but I can see it was filling a music hall shaped hole in people's lives back in the day. It also features an early version of "Tequila" which is a song which has proved to be remarkably popular across the years.

We're at #6 in the charts this week on their last week of a lengthy 13 week run, with a couple of weeks at #4 being as high as it got. The top five this week were South Pacific, Gigi, Frank Sinatra, My Fair Lady and Buddy Holly and there were no new entries or named women in the charts - but I do have to credit this album for acknowledging that women actually existed in the 50s.

Wikipedia has entries for a book, play and film of the same name, but nothing on the album and the rest of the internet has it down as existing but there's no further information on it - which is a bit of a shame because I'm intrigued as to how it came about.

"Customers also listened to" "no similar recommendations" which doesn't surprise me in the slightest because this was a bit of an odd album. But not an unpleasant one and I can much more easily understand how people would have enjoyed this than, for example, Russ Conway's monstrosities - it was also nice to hear a bit of Brucie (and he didn't change over the years!).

26/04/59 - Very dated
23/08/59 - Absolutely dreadful