Our first decade completed

And with that, we complete our first decade! 

It's fair to say that each previous trip to the 50s had lowered my expectations to new depths, so there was a definite "let's get it out the way" feeling at the start of the year - so how did things pan out?

Well, I guess there was less Elvis and Frank than there might have been - just the one album from The King (although I did reject one) and two from Ol' Blue Eyes. We actually only saw 21 albums all year (up from fifteen in '58) - other artists with two visits were Cliff Richard, Duane Eddy and Russ Conway, with instrumental and comedy albums also being surprisingly popular this year. 

But looking at the year-end list, soundtracks definitely won the year. South Pacific took the #1 spot in the year-end list and given it was #1 all year, that's no surprise - and Gigi was #2, which is where it was in the charts for 29 weeks of the year, so again that isn't exactly unexpected. And, of the 23 weeks remaining, 12 of them had My Fair Lady at #2, so that's taken #3 in the year-end list. After that we have a somewhat strange mix of male solo artists in the form of Peter Sellers, Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, Cliff Richard and Russ Conway before Buddy Holly & The Crickets and The King And I complete the top ten.

But - were any of the albums we saw this year actually any good?

Let's start with that most minority of groups first - the women. Well, I guess there were at least some of them on the Curtain Up compilation, even if the whole thing felt very inessential, And they are also well represented on all the musical/opera albums we saw which were Gigi, West Side Story and Porgy & Bess - it seems odd how poorly represented women generally were in the charts, yet a lot of the musicals from the era which did well had very strong central female characters.

OK - having got the pesky women out of the way, let's move on to what would usually be quite a minority group, but was surprisingly popular this year - the instrumentals. We had quite the selection of genres here - twangy-twang, plinky-plonk or stringy-string. The two twangy-twang albums were from Duane Eddy, with the first being quite good and the second also being fine, but possibly more than anyone needs. Russ Conway served us up two plinky-plonk albums and they were both utterly dreadful and 101 Strings and Mantovani served us up stringy-string albums, both of which were fine, but somewhat perplexing in their popularity.

Looking at albums with words on, we have a choice of men playing it straight or men being "funny". On the serious side. we have a fine pair of albums as the picks of the year. Frank Sinatra's second visit and Johnny Mathis's late visit were both fine offerings with some nice arrangements on them which were slightly different from the other stuff we saw. However, I didn't imagine that for one second I'd also be mentioning a Perry Como compilation as a close third - yes, it was dated, but it was surprisingly good. 

Looking at the rest of the albums, Frank's other offering was fine but a bit of a lazy compilation, as was Elvis's offering for the year (and we rejected another compilation from him as well). Both of Cliff's offerings were mediocre but bearable (unlike his later not-even-close-to-mediocre work) - the main problem was that he didn't seem to know who he wanted to be at this time. Whereas Frankie Vaughan knew exactly what he was doing and it all felt very dated now. 

And our final category is comedy and a most peculiar mix it was too. Peter Sellers was easily the most successful of the lot and I can understand the appeal at the time but it felt awfully dated now. But weirdly, whilst both The Goon Show and Paddy Roberts felt like they could well have already been dated in the 50s, they were both more amusing now - I enjoyed them both a load more than I was expecting.

Doing our usual "looking at the #1 albums of the year", we don't have a lot to say - South Pacific was at the top all year and hence there were no new entries at #1. Which is quite boring to write up, but you have to admit it's pretty impressive - even if I don't think it's a particularly brilliant musical. Looking at the posts for the year, the most read posts were the comedy offerings, with Peter Sellers just pipping The Goons for first place and the least read post was the first Russ Conway album, which is fair enough because the blog content, like the musical content of the album, is minimal.

The generally accepted best albums from the year that we didn't come across unsurprisingly involves a lot of US jazz albums that never charted here - Miles Davis's Kind Of Blue, Charles Mingus's Mingus Ah Um, Ornette Coleman's The Shape Of Jazz To Come, The Dave Brubeck Quartet's Time Out (he's someone who's been unlucky not to be met yet), Duke Ellington's Side By Side, Art Blakey's Moanin', Nina Simone's Little Girl Blue and Ella Fitzgerald Sings the George and Ira Gershwin Song Book, with the last two being the rarest of events for this year - albums by women! Interestingly Ella also did a version of Porgy & Bess this year along with Louis Armstrong - I suspect I'd have enjoyed that one a lot more than the one I got. One other album that jumped out at me as being probably slightly different was Marty Robbins's Gunfighter Ballads And Trail Songs because Marty was, quite obviously, a singer, songwriter and NASCAR driver.

So '59 wasn't a great year but, with the exception of Russ Conway, it really wasn't terrible. In some ways, South Pacific has to be the album of the year because it was #1 all year but in terms of enjoyment Frank Sinatra Sings Only For The Lonely is probably my top choice - it's an album that's of its time, yet slightly different and still sounds great today. And picking two more to make a top three, Johnny Mathis is very much in a similar vein whereas The Goon Show very much isn't - all three were enjoyable and went some way to making '59 exceed my (admittedly low) expectations.

And finally, the picture above is the Xerox 914, which was introduced in 1959 and was the first successful photocopier. It weighed 300kg, could make seven copies a minute and cost $25 a month to rent, plus 10 cents a copy. Unfortunately, it was mechanically complex, required a large technical support force and had a tendency to catch fire when overheated - as part of the rental agreement, Xerox supplied a "scorch eliminator", which you or I would probably call a fire extinguisher. Amusingly, fires were more likely to happen if the document contained too many zeroes in them, so I assume finance departments were told to make copies at their own risk...

Next up - 1965!

28/12/58 - Guess who!?! (chart timeline)
18/01/59 - A very decent album
26/12/65 - A fine start to the year (blog timeline)