Clap 'ands, stamp yer feet, bangin' on the big bass drum

Continuing my trip back through the 1963 album charts.

26/05/63 : Half A Sixpence - Tommy Steele

Skipping over another week (and once again you absolutely know who was #1) brings us to a pretty highly regarded musical which gets revived on a reasonably regular basis - but I've never seen it, so I'm interested to see what we've got here.

Yeah - it's alright without, I think, ever quite being great. It give strong vibes of wanting to be "My Fair Lady" - it doesn't quite make it, but it certainly gives it a good go. It has strong "big musical" numbers which work well on the album, so I imagine they're doubly impressive on stage - "Flash Bang Wallop" is the stand-out, but there were quite a few others that I imagine got rousing rounds of applause. It's also very much a star vehicle for Tommy - it's surprisingly hard to find out any of the other people on the album. However, there are definitely some women on there and Wikipedia tells us that Marti Webb (still with us at 82) played his original love interest in her first stage lead role - she also went on to sing for the '67 film, but Julie Foster took the on-screen part.

We're all the way down at #20 in the chart this week on a one week run - with it previously having had another one week run, also spent at #20. The top five this week were The Beatles, Cliff Richard, Buddy Holly, Elvis Presley and West Side Story with there being no new entries in the chart this week.

Wikipedia doesn't have an entry for the soundtrack but the musical's entry tells us it is based on the 1905 HG Wells novel Kipps and was written specifically as a vehicle for Tommy Steele. In "interesting faces in the background" news, the initial cast of the musical featured John Cleese in a minor role and the film version (which obviously also starred Tommy) had Lesley Judd in the dancing chorus. However, it seems like I wasn't entirely correct that it gets revived on a regular basis, because the only subsequent run that's mentioned is the '16 revised version starring Charlie Stemp - Mrs Reed is a big fan of his and he was very good when we saw him in Crazy For You.

discogs.com only has five copies available, so you can choose to spend anything from £3-9.50 on it. I didn't mind this, but suspect it would be a lot more enjoyable on stage - it's a shame I didn't listen to it back in '16 because I would have been tempted to go and see it.

19/05/63 - Dated before it came out
09/06/63 - Almostly entirely without merit

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