No Elvis, Beatles or Rolling Stones (pt I)

Ever since reading Nick Tosches' educating, entertaining and effervescent Unsung Heroes of Rock n Roll (Secker & Warburg, 1991) which profiles the musicians who came before Elvis, I've been meaning to start something similar for the British scene. Hard as it is to believe—certainly if you only watch/listen/read current popular media on this stuff, anyway—there were people who played a key part in the development of the way that pop culture developed post-WWII, and who become more and more obscure as time goes by. They're likely to remain obscure unless a smart researcher points Alan Yentob in their direction and lets him imagine that he's re-discovering them…

There's no point in listening to Gerald Walcan Bright's (b.1904; d-1974) recorded musical output for clues as to his influence on the development of rock n roll in England. Better known as Geraldo, the Royal Academy-trained pianist began his professional career performing during silent movies in cinemas (younger readers; see The Artist for reference). He moved to the fledgling BBC radio of the late 1920s, and formed an orchestra named after himself. They became regular performers on live radio, at dance nights at the Streatham Locarno (probably), in short British b-movies and on recordings released as 78rpm records from the 1930s on. During WWII his orchestra played at the still dancing and swinging big hotels in London (Putting on the Ritz during the Blitz). In 1944 Geraldo hired Wally Stott as saxophonist; Wally went on to form his own orchestra and supply the backing for Diana Dors recordings (among others). In 1972 Wally became Angela Morley, moved to Arizona and won Emmys for composing music for Dynasty and Dallas. None of that's why Geraldo was important in the days before Elvis, The Beatles and Rolling Stones, though.

Geraldo's prime contribution to the development of rock n roll culture in Britain was to open, in 1946, a booking agency which organised for British musicians to work cruise liners going to America and the West Indies. Those musicians brought back to London records from New York, San Francisco, Miami and New Orleans. They returned to grey old, ration-confined Blighty wearing suits made in the Land of Plenty—with long drop jackets, wide lapels and turn-up peg trousers. Geraldo's Navy, as Nik Cohn so elegantly put it in Today There Are No Gentleman (Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1971), 'provided an invaluable source of supply for all things American.'

Teddy Boy meets American Look, circa 1954

The suits that Geraldo's Navy came back wearing looked as if they'd been peeled from the back of Richard Widmark or Gregory Peck. At a time when the British Mens Fashion Council were advocating slim lapels and slim leg pants in order to save material that was still hard to get, the excesses of the American Look as one enterprising young clothes retailer called it, was irresistible. At his shop on London's Charing Cross Road, Cecil Gee catered for the musicians and song pluggers who worked and hung out in Tin Pan Alley (Denmark Street), smoking and bullshitting in the hours before work started at West End shows and clubs. Gee soon had his cutters creating the 'American Look' for regular customers who were not in Geraldo's Navy, but who wanted to look like they were.

Edwardian style in 1952 outside Cecil Gee's store

Cecil Gee continued dressing the musicians of Tin Pan Alley throughout the 1950s, supplying Marty Wilde and Tommy Steele, Vince Eager and all the one-hit wonders of the late-1950s pop chart, as well as the jobbing musicians in Saturday night dancehall orchestras who'd begun to travel to Soho from all over London to get 'the look'. The records that Geraldo's Navy brought back were quickly transcribed and re-scored for British versions, whether they were blues, R&B, Country or jazz  numbers, by musicians eager to score a hit or simply play something new and different at parties and after-show gigs. In Liverpool, the teenage Lennon and McCartney were similarly impressed with the new 45 rpm records that they could buy from second-hand stalls down by the docks. The records had often been sold for the fare to other parts of the UK by Geraldo's Navy who'd docked there instead of Southampton. By 1956 Gee had adopted the emerging Italian suit look—all bum freezer jacket and ankle-flapping straight leg pants—that pre-dated but subsequently inspired the Mod look of 1963 (in the process prompting Brian Epstein to ask Dougie Millings to copy it for his boys in preparation of visiting America). Soon after, Bill Green opened 'Vince', selling Italian tight pants, briefs and sweaters at a store just around the corner from Carnaby Street where rent was cheap. It was the beginning of a trend that John Stephen (Lord John) would take over and dominate within a couple of years, but Bill began it.

There are many other unsung heroes of British rock n roll, some of whom should make an appearance here, soon-ish. One—Jack Good, deserves a blog all of his own, so maybe that'll be next. It'll not only include Rock n Roll icons (Good put Gene Vincent into black leather), but the cream of British jazz of the 1950s, too. See Lord Rockingham's XI, for clues.

Born Too Late

It's an odd thing for an old man like me to walk around London these days and be confronted with 3-D memories. Turning a corner into the Exmouth Market the other day I thought I'd stumbled into a video shoot for The Smiths in 1983 (I ran the mixing desk at a Smiths gig attended by 250 lucky students that year). There were four or five young men with quiffs, National Health spectacles and loose v-neck sweaters worn over t-shirts gathered together by a vegetarian food stall.

A month or so ago I saw a young couple (no more than 20 years old) dressed as if they were members of the Thompson Twins circa 1984; she even had a red quiff poking out from under a cap just like Alannah Currie. Both wore donkey jackets and turn-ups on their dark denim jeans, both probably unaware of the 1950s-reference in their dress,  thinking only of the 1980s as a 'golden period' of fashion, music and youth in revolt. Well, it was, kind of. It's the 1950s element of fashion and music that really surprises and delights me these days, though.

When I was 12 years old I managed to bluff my way into a cinema at the seaside town I grew up in, to watch David Essex and Ringo Starr in the excellent That'll Be The Day. Twenty years after Bill Haley (a fat, middle-aged C&W singer tricked up like a rocker) had inspired the original Teddy Boys into ripping up seats in cinemas, Rock n Roll and Teddy Boys were enjoying a renaissance among British youth. BTW, they were called Teddy Boys because, in the early part of the 1950s, with rationing still in place in the UK, young men with jobs and a little money to spend found the menswear shops empty of anything except demob suits. So they took their grandfather's suits into local tailors to have them refitted. The grandfathers having been Edwardians, the shortening to Teddy Boys seemed natural.

Original Teddy Boys wore much more ornate waistcoats, jackets and shirts than those worn by the post-Elvis Teddy Boys who usually just stuck some velvet on their lapels, bought brothel-creeper shoes, wore bootlace ties and grew their hair into quiffs. Teddy boys numbered thousands across the UK by 1957, and became infamous for their rowdy behaviour, violent disposition (according to the gutter press of the time) and wild dancing, with women who liked their men tough.

That'll Be The Day tells the story of a boy (David Essex) who rejects lower middle-class life as a shopkeeper in favour of a summer spent working at a holiday camp, and the pursuit of dream to be a rock star. He's roomed with an older Teddy Boy (Ringo Starr) who shows him how to live life properly. The scene in which Ringo short changes a customer is taken from real life. Or at least, I did it often enough when working the waltzers in the late 1970s. The soundtrack to the movie was so familiar to me that I didn't realise how old a lot of the music on it actually was. I'd grown up hearing the Everly Brothers, Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard, Johnny & The Hurricanes and Johnny Tillotson etc constantly blaring out of the amusement arcades and parks along the seafront since I can remember. Naturally I thought it was all contemporary.

The movie's mix of sex and violence, the misunderstood Essex and fabulous music was thrilling. I fell in love with the wordily, sensual Deborah Watling (above) and didn't realise she'd been a Dr Who assistant.  The pop charts of the time were filled with bands who'd been born during he first wave of Teddy Boy uprising, and were now using glam versions of the clothes to sell their versions of 1950s classics. I despised Showaddywaddy, the Rubettes and Alvin Stardust because of their inauthenticity. Dr Feelgood, The Pirates (who'd once been Johnny Kidd's backing band) and Sha Na Na however, seemed to be the real thing. Teddy Boys in the 1970s were pub rockers and proud of it.

In the 1980s the dead Elvis effect spawned new quiffs and an American interest in rockabilly music outside of the South. As well as Morrisey's quiff, The Stray Cats and Billy Idol put faux rockabilly into the charts both sides of the Atlantic. Punk's adoption of certain Teddy Boy clothing items, particularly the brothel creepers, was misinterpreted by the original Teds and their sons as an insult; we meant it as a compliment.

Seeing a renewal of interest in Teddy Boys and 1950s-era Rock n Roll today is both oddly nostalgic—my old man had been a Ted who wore razor blades sewn into his drape jacket lapels; anyone grabbing them in a fight got sliced doing so. It was another trick learned from the original 1940s Mexican zoot suit rebels of LA—and weirdly 'original'. Imelda May looks the part, even if she sounds too clean and packaged. New Teds really know how to look like the 1970s version of the originals, though. They make this old man feel almost as though he were born too late.

Much Too Young

Frank, the guy who cuts my hair, was born and raised in little Italy, New York in the 1950s and '60s. When his Ma, bless her, moved back to the old country (Sicily) to spend her final days in the sunshine and mountain air, Frank kind of went with her, or rather he moved the England for 2/3 of the year and spends the rest of the time in Palermo. He's a cool guy with a penchant for the doo-wop and lounge singers of his youth, and after a lifetime spent cutting the heads of Hollywood and St Christopher's Place royalty he's getting to know about the past and present of a very different culture.

Frank and I often shoot the breeze as he teases what's left of my barnet into a semblance of a decent haircut, sometimes about different cuts ("that's a French crop, a Napoleon", he told me as he scraped hair toward by forehead. "Or a Sinatra", I countered. Pause. "Yeah", Frank agreed with a shrug.) We also share musical and old movie tales. On Saturday Frank told me he'd just seen "that movie Quadrophenia? You know, about those Mods; that what they're called?"
"The Who".
"Mods—ain't that right?"
"No, sorry, yes, but the movie's based on The Who's concept album".
"Oh yeah? They're the ones used to smash up their gear, right?"
"Yeah, it was an expensive gimmick".
"I bet. But that other guy, Sting, he's the main man who turns out to be a what, a bell-hop?"

"That's right, he's the 'ace face', the guy that Nik Cohn based the character of Tony Manero in Saturday Night Fever on. Townsend was never an ace face. Cohn was an original Mod, and knew Townsend when the Who were still the High Numbers, back in the early 1960s. He didn't go into Odyssey nightclub the night he was supposed to, just went back to his apartment in Manhattan and wrote up an episode or three from his own Mod teens, changing the action from Soho London, to Bay Ridge".
"Loved those scooters with all the mirrors".
"A familiar sight of my childhood. I loved the balcony scene though".

Growing up in a British seaside town in the 1960s, one of my earliest memories is of watching Mods and Rockers fighting in a Woolworth's cafeteria. One of my abiding teen memories is standing in the gents toilets in a ring with ten or so other, similarly dressed youths, watching the local hardman ('Sailor' I think his name was), pick a fight with a guy just because he was several inches taller than anyone else at the club. The tall guy didn't want to fight, but Sailor hit, kicked and stomped him anyway. Out in the club the DJ played "Boogie Nights" and all I wanted to do was dance. I didn't get the need for the tall guy to be stomped and felt chickenshit for just watching and in doing so, condoning Sailor's dumb, macho act.

After that I chose my time to visit the gents carefully. Nightclubs and violence go together like soccer and expletives. No stranger to violence—I'd grown up with a Chelsea Shed End hooligan for a brother who was four years and several pounds heavier than me—I had enough of it at home to want to indulge when out and dressed up to dance and flirt.

Post-punk, the slight return of Mod culture to England was favoured by younger brothers of the Punks who didn't want to be just like their elder siblings. It was a shadow of the original movement, but it had its positives, the main one being anti-racism and the reintroduction of social realism into song lyrics. Unfortunately there would also be Absolute Beginners, but then again, we also saw the launch of Nick Logan's ace magazine, The Face. Its title was a reference to Mr Logan and his business associate Rod Sopp's formative years spent chasing down the clothes, records (and girls) that The Who, Small Faces and Equals etc so wanted to have, own, be. The mag featured hip young things in bright new clothes and conveyed the insouciance of effortless cool (even if it did major on the ridiculous Buffalo style for a while). The Face gave me one of my first writing commissions, for which I'll always be grateful—they didn't pay, but then having your name in the mag was considered (by them, mostly) as payment enough.

All of this flashed through my mind as Frank finished his work with a clip of my eyebrows, and Little Anthony & The Imperials cooed in the background. "Ya done," he said, whipping off the sheet from round my neck.
And sure enough, I was.

Deeper Roots

I like to use time while out running to go over work, letting my mind wander around whatever subject I have to write about, giving books shape and form, sorting out order in which things should go into a chapter or a blog. This morning, while struggling with a sore medial meniscus over 5 miles I found myself (once again) wishing that I'd started running when I was much younger. Like at High school, where I'd hated the 'cross country' runs we were forced to endure along snow-capped sand dunes in mid-winter so much, that I didn't even consider running for 'fun' until I was into my late 30s.

Thinking back so far though brought me to a time in my life when I seemed to gain consciousness for the first time, or rather realisation that I was a separate entity to my family, that I was developing an 'identity'. That time I now think, was 1972 (or at least it's become 1972, if only for the purposes of this blog). As a pre-teen I'd inherited from an uncle some 78 rpm records, a lot of 1960s-released 7" 45rpm singles and a few albums, and I'd found in music (and football) a sense of elation and freedom that the rest of my life seemed intent on restricting.

In 1972 I found a host of new—to me—music that raised my spirits, and made me want to dance, sing and do anything. Especially if it meant doing something that did not involve my restrictive family. Most of my school pals, being male, white and working class like me, were into awful, pretentious, boring prog rock. I really couldn't get into it. The glam rock bands of the time, such as Sweet, Slade and the Glitterband (see above) were funny and loud, but even then I found their macho male overweight builders' physiques squashed into satin and silk hilarious and impossible to believe.

T. Rex, David Bowie and the great Alice Cooper, however, were different. They all displayed acres of androgynous flesh, had attitude, hooks, great clothes and were unspeakably cool. The impact of Alice Cooper was particularly profound, especially because he so outraged parents and schoolteachers at the time. In 1976 Johnny Rotten and Glen Matlock would 'bond' over Alice Cooper, and Rotten got the job as singer with the Sex Pistols after miming to Cooper's "Eighteen" as it played on the jukebox in Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood's boutique. In 1972 Jean Genie, Children Of The Revolution and School's Out embedded themselves in my brain and heart.

I had my haircut like Bowie, bought some silver stack-heeled, zip-up boots and a cheesecloth shirt and made my first trip to a discotheque. Looking back, I can only wonder at my luck. In my unreliable memory of the first night at Tiffany's I tripped down the staircase onto the dance floor as the Temptations' "Papa Was A Rolling Stone" hit its groove—and stayed there for the full 11+ minutes of the album version. Next up was the O'Jays' "Backstabbers" which merged easily into Stevie Wonder's "Superstition" and then became The Meters' "Do The Dirt" before Curtis Mayfield told us all the tragic story of "Freddie's Dead".

The end of that first night at the disco (or perhaps not) saw me slow-dance with someone whose name I can't recall, but whose presence remains pressed against my psyche. Harold Melvin & The Blue Notes' "If You Don't Know Me By Now" featuring the inimitable Teddy Pendergrass, "I'm Still In Love With You" by Al Green and the perennial floor-filling, last-dance hit, "Me & Mrs Jones" by Billy Paul made up an unholy trinity of sensual smooch songs to which countless teenagers in 1972 discovered their  sexual orientation.

Other unreliable memories of that year include learning how to really dance to the sound of James Brown's "Get On The Good Foot"(this is a great version, by the way), War's "City, Country, City" and, surprisingly perhaps, Boz Scaggs' "Dinah Flo". 'Surprising' because at the time Scaggs was barely known in the UK except as the former guitarist with the Steve Miller Band, and therefor thought to be a hippie, rock-oriented, AOR artist. Yet "Dinah Flo", like his later "Lowdown" (1976) was a disco hit, at least where I learned to dance, it was.

That first night at Tiffany's (wishing I looked as cool as this guy above) led to regular Friday and Saturday night visits and the beginning of a long-lasting romance with disco. It's probably where I first damaged my medial meniscus.

Goin' Back To My Roots

On Christmas Day I was lucky enough to find a free ebook in my virtual stocking. The inventive folk at Essential Works (who have created all of my books in the past five years) sent me and a few thousand others a link where we could download a copy of Rocket 88: Classic Singles. It's a quirky thing, being an appreciation of the single record release, a now pretty much redundant physical format, but which, between 1949 and 1999 (the book argues) helped to shape the musical tastes, youth cults and experiences of generations of people who grew up in an era when you had to go looking for new, different forms of music because they didn't come looking for you.

Some of the choices of singles of 'the year' are wilfully perverse—"My Boy Lollipop" beats out "Hard Day's Night" in 1964, for instance—but the inclusion of records which were not considered mainstream and didn't trouble the official charts compilers of the day adds to the depth and breadth of the revisionist view of pop music history. Such a view is often, increasingly, missing when pop show 'researchers' put together simplistic programmes detailing at how quaint the 20th century was. I once spent more than an hour trying to explain to a 'researcher' that, while I had been a punk in 1976, like all punks of the first wave, I didn't have a mohican, didn't wear Westwood and still danced my ass off at discos to great dance music. She just couldn't get it that different musical and social cults co-existed and didn't neatly simply follow on from one another. I didn't even try to explain why Teddy Boys razored Rotten or why soul boys with wedge haircuts and shoes like dead pigs' noses stood side-by-side with punks during physical confrontations with moronic leather-jacketed rockers.

Reading the entries in R88: Classic Singles reminded me of how diverse, enterprising and inventive the music scene was all those years ago. This being the first blog of a new year, I thought I'd begin in a manner that befits the world in 2012; by looking backwards. Sitting in an England currently suffering under the yoke of a repressive, divisive, right-wing-dominated, public-school-educated political elite with as much understanding of, and care for, any class other than their own, naturally had me casting my mind back thirty years. How could it not? Hearing a prominent US senator quoting Thatcher recently in his dismissal of our NHS as being the reason that she couldn't make Britain as 'great' as Reagan had the US, had me spluttering with rage just as I used to, constantly, in the days when she sacrificed thousands of lives in the Falklands in order to get re-elected.

So, inspired by R88, I'd like to guide you through some of my personal favourite singles of random years past, beginning with 1982, because it was thirty years ago today that I said goodbye to the Morgan family home for good, and lit out for the territory. Having learned to drive as soon as I was able, I promptly lost my license for six months because of the unroadworthy state of my beloved 1967-registered Triumph Spitfire MkII. That had been in 1981. A year later I was busy compiling cassette tapes for the in-car stereo of a slightly more road-worthy Opel Kadett and bombing around with sounds blasting out of a permanently wound-down window (it was broken). While my tapes consisted of a lot of old material, from the'60s on, I also added a lot of newly released singles to them.

Having been a fan since day one, The Clash's "Rock The Casbah" was a natural tape opener, particularly in it's dance mix version ("Mustapha Dance"). Alone among their peers, The Clash had experimented with soul and dance music as well as reggae, and had given support slots on their many tours to a lot of musicians from different backgrounds, including Country singer Joe Ely, proto-rocker Bo Diddley and in 1981, the then emerging hip-hopper Grandmaster Flash (and the Treacherous Three) at Bond's Casino in New York.

With the Furious Five, Grandmaster Flash's "The Message" was a game-changing release in 1982. It was an enormous dance hit, brought rapping into the mainstream for the first time proper and while it's arrest-section mimicked Stevie Wonder's "Living For The City", the return of a political message to urban music was quickly taken up by a new wave of emerging artists—Public Enemy got together in 1982.

Similarly political and just as funky, The Gang Of Four's "I Love A Man In Uniform" saw the agit-prop punk-funkers get as close to sounding like Chic as guitarist Andy Gill could get them. They never troubled the pop charts with any single releases although this and 1979's "At Home He's A Tourist" came close. "I Love A Man" did make #27 on the US Dance charts. In the wake of the UK punk movement, a number of Northern bands emerged from former industrial powerhouse cities that had become socially deprived wastelands, making funky dance music. One of the best was Manchester's A Certain Ratio, whose "Knife Slits Water" provided a fabulous slice of scratchy funk to incite the kind of dislocated, alienated dance moves favoured by the 1980-departed Ian Curtis of Joy Division. ACR's use of horns where other bands preferred guitars was a trend then becoming a rule of dance.

Pigbag's James Brown-tribute, "Papa's Got A Brand New Pigbag" would become an enormous hit when re-released (and speeded up) in 1985, but the original release of 1982 was a slight hit on the pop charts and an enormous one in clubs. Pigbag looked much like their pop peers who appeared on TV music shows of 1982, even if they sounded unlike anything else. Their embracing the pop ethic was something frowned upon by 'serious' music fans, writers and even some bands who, like the pompous prog rock acts so ruffled by punk a few years earlier, eschewed pop single stardom. Although they did like the recently invented 'indie' single stardom, whereby their records appeared in charts created by and for supposedly 'independent' record labels and the stores who sold their releases. Scritti Politti first found indie fame on the daddy of the punk indie labels, Rough Trade. Their gorgeous funky-pop single of 1982, "Asylums In Jerusalem" made it into the official pop charts though (#43), and the next year Green Gartside (who was Scritti) signed to Virgin records.

Like Gartside, The Associates' Billy Mackenzie had a unique voice and vocal style. After beginning their recording career with an indie label (Fiction, home of The Cure), and releasing critically acclaimed but unsuccessful singles, The Associates signed to WEA and in 1982  scored a huge hit with the sublime synth-dance hit, "Party Fears Two". The same year a former founder member of Duran Duran, Stephen Duffy released the first version of what would become—in 1985—his biggest hit single, "Kiss Me". Duffy, one of the UK's greatest living songwriters, ingeniously uses sections of The Song of Songs set against a dance floor-filling electronic backing. The original sneer in the vocals perhaps belies the irony of his pure-pop approach to the music biz, which is why the re-recorded version is more 'up' in tone. Or perhaps his voice simply matured.

Lacking Duffy's irony, wholly embracing a pure-pop approach to music, Haircut 100's "Love Plus One" simply sails along on the warmth of a hook-laden chorus, funky backing and laid-back vocals. The band at least had the wit to look dumb in the accompanying video. In contrast, one of the bet live acts I saw in 1982 (or since, in fact) Kid Creole And The Coconuts look smart, funny and sassy in the video for their "Annie, I'm Not Your Daddy" single. The extended mix is a great dance record, and rivalled only by the Weather Girls' "It's Raining Men" that year for wit and funk. You gotta love the Coconuts' backing vocal of 'Onna-onna-onomatopoeia'.

Finally, two records which made it on to no charts anywhere, but which were staples of my 1982 mix tape. You couldn't exactly dance to "The Fire Of Love" by The Gun Club in the same way that you simply had to dance to the other singles here, but I still find Jeffrey Lee Pierce's Elvis-inflected delivery over Ward Dotson's trashy guitar and Terry Graham's splashing drums compelling and thrilling. In 1982 The Gun Club sort of made sense of Goth.

James 'Blood' Ulmer's "Jazz Is The Teacher Funk Is The Preacher" was originally released in 1980, but it was never far from my turntable for most of the following decade. A thrilling, driving mess of a mix of horns, way-wah guitar, Calvin Weston's brilliant paradiddling drums and Ulmer's strangled raw vocal, it remains one of the greatest unsung dance records of all time. It's tempting to include it on any subsequent list of great records from any year post-1980, although I might just slip "Are You Glad To Be In America" onto one or two instead.

Switched On Santa?

Why are there no really good Christmas disco recordings? There are plenty of standard Holiday songs done in a 'disco' style, all jingling hi-hat, swooping strings and soft-pedalled wah-wah guitar under breathy choral voices, but there's no killer Xmas disco floor-filler. It's not as if there was no precedent, of course. A Christmas Gift For You, released in 1963 became an instant gold standard by which all other Holidays-themed soul records would be judged. Released in mono, Spector's trademark wall-of-sound featuring a band, horns, strings and backing singers complemented by constantly jingling bells, as Ronnie Bennett (later Spector), Darlene Love and Dolores 'La La' Brooks sing like debauched angelic hosts on top of the mad genius of sound's musical Christmas tree.

Just like previous albums by Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby and Doris Day (to name but three of many, many more), Spector's album includes standard seasonal songs, the oldest of which is Silent Night (written in 1818) credited to Phil Spector and Artists. There's also a version of White Christmas, of course, sung by Darlene Love, who gets the lead vocal on the only 'new' song, written with and for Spector by Ellie Greenwich and Jeff Barry, Christmas (Baby Please Come Home). It's this song which perhaps best epitomises why there's never been a great disco Christmas song.

Like Blane and Martin's Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas or Irving Berlin's White Christmas, Christmas (Baby Please Come Home) is almost a blues song. Full of longing, it's a sung-through wish for something that money cannot buy; love and companionship at what is meant to be the most spiritual time of the year (at least in the Christian calendar). How does that translate to disco? It can't.

Disco is the ultimate good-time, high-energy dance music, created to get people moving and not thinking. Slow disco numbers are as much about desire and need as uptempo disco numbers, where the beat has to be felt before the emotion and substitute sex for love. Christmas is a time for reflection and contemplation, both of which are to be found in the best Christmas songs. Even those songs which engage with the rampant materialism of the 20th century, such as Santa Claus Is Coming To Town, do so with a plea to consider life and its consequences ('He knows when you've been good or bad').

Crass attempts to earn a Holiday dollar by harnessing traditional songs of the season to the hottest sound of the day fail when those involved fail to understand that the singer—or arranger—needs to embody the sense and meaning of the song in their performance. While there are thousands of people for whom the Christmas Disco album holds fond memories, that is more because of their fanciful recollection of past family gatherings than the quality of the music on the album. The recordings having been created by session musicians in Nashville and sold around the world as anonymous season songs, they have surfaced at regular intervals since the early 1970s under different titles.

The Mistletoe Christmas Band's Christmas Album of 1971 was also released the same year as Switched On Christmas by TheHit Crew as Disco Noel by The Mistletoe Christmas Band and by Mirror Image. It later appeared titled Yuletide Disco by Mirror Image, and Christmas Disco Party by DJ Santa & The Dance Squad. Whatever it's called though, it all sounds like the kind of thing best heard in a crowded mall or a working elevator. Similarly, The Salsoul Orchestra's Christmas Jollies album is mostly musical slush, with only Sleigh Bells standing out as being worth tapping a toe to.

Following Spector's lead, somewhat inevitably, Berry Gordy produced many Christmas records by his stable of soul superstars, one of the best being the Jackson 5's 1970 version of the 1847-written Up On The House Top, on which the bouncy pre-pubescent Michael manages to mix some of the zaniness of Huey 'Piano' Smith with his pure pop freshness. The Supremes' Merry Christmas album isn't exactly up to the standard of The Ronettes seasonal offerings, but Diana Ross' voice has the right edge of longing and heartbreak in it to make the slower numbers work.

While there ain't no good disco songs worth adding to a Christmas playlist, there are still plenty of decent recordings worth spinning which will get people up cutting a rug—or crying a river. James Brown's Santa Claus Go Straight To The Ghetto, Otis Redding's Merry Christmas Baby, R Kelly's Merry Christmas, Stevie Wonder's That's What Christmas Means To Me, Marvin Gaye's (live) Christmas Song, Ike & Tina Turner's Merry Christmas Baby (or the Etta James version) and the definitive version of This Christmas by The Whispers all do it for the Morgan household.

Merry Christmas, wherever you are.

Frank and Gaga

Although he's no longer with us, Frank Sinatra (who would have celebrated his 96th birthday today, December 12) still casts a long shadow over the world of popular song. Although it's been 13 years since he passed, the man who had teenagers screaming at him a decade before Elvis (and two before the Beatles) continues to sell millions of CDs, capturing millions of views on youtube and prompting cores of imitators to try out versions of his back catalogue. Consider that Rod Stewart's last four albums, The Great American SongbookI-IV, have been his best-selling releases since the early 1970s, and they include almost solely songs made familiar by Frank. At the end of last month the rumours of Martin Scorcese's long mooted Sinatra biopic about to shoot resurfaced, with Di Caprio rumoured to be playing Frank. Having already made films about Dylan, a Beatle (George Harrison), the Stones and a history of sorts of the Blues, the Goodfellas, Casino and Gangs of New York director is apparently ready to begin retelling the life of the 20th century's most compelling and interesting performer.

Meanwhile, in imitation of Sinatra's Duets album of 1993, Tony Bennett released Duets in 2006, and just as Sinatra issued Duets II (1994), so Tony has issued his Duets II, on September 20 last. Like the first Sinatra release—which was universally slammed by critics at the time of release—Bennett's new album opens with a version of The Lady Is A Tramp. Lady Gaga's contribution to the song makes it undoubtedly the highlight of the album, and suggests that she and Frank might have tackled that, or any other song, brilliantly together. Her performance on the Bennett version uses vocal twitches and comic exaggerations ("Oimins and poils") that were first introduced into performances of classic American songs by Frank. Tony has always been a fine, strong vocalist, but he's always been strictly formal, and made his name as a belter rather than a song stylist—a term almost invented for Sinatra (the original version of the song, in Pal Joey, can be seen here).

In the accompanying promo film for Lady Is A Tramp, Gaga is dressed and coifed like Marilyn, and seems to have been watching both Frank and Anita O'Day performing in the car on her way to the studio. In her Tom Ford 'designed' black lace dress and a green bob, Gaga lifts the song way above the pedestrian level of many of the other tracks on Bennett's Duets II.

Sinatra's choice of Luther Vandross as duettist on his version of the song reflects perhaps Frank's regard for great vocalists above the merely popular. With the marked exception of the execrable Bono, Frank's Duets album is packed with fantastic singers, among them Barbra, Aretha, Liza, Anita, Charles Aznavour and Tony Bennett. (Tony also called in Barbra for his own first Duets release as well as, bizarrely, Bono.) The inclusion of Luther on Sinatra's Lady Is A Tramp, with it's smooth, soulful tones, reminds us that throughout his career, Frank often adapted well to new musical styles, as long as the song was good enough. In 1977 he re-recorded versions of Night And Day and All Or Nothing At All in an orchestral-disco mode, with the jazz guitarist Joe Beck as producer, and they're great.

Bennett's Duets II has also earned press because it includes a last recording by Amy Winehouse, on a version of Body & Soul. The song was possibly chosen because of its association with Billie Holiday, with whom Winehouse was most often compared. The video accompanying the recording lacks the wit and fun of Gaga's, but perhaps that's to be expected. Frank's late-1950s duet with Dinah Shore  is much more fun to watch.

Frank enjoyed duetting with people throughout his career. His radio appearances in the 1940s with the incomparable Jimmy Durante are both hilarious and they swing. The Rat Pack nights are correctly regarded as being legendary and every recording is worth listening to more than once. Even when chasing a quick dollar Frank raised the standards of the pop genre. He gave daughter Nancy a huge hike in her career when he recorded a duet of Something Stupid in 1967 (earning himself another #1 hit).   Compare that though, with this, recorded the same year; Frank's TV special duet with Ella Fitzgerald on a version of the fabulous Little Anthony & The Imperials song, Goin' Out Of My Head.

Frank's duet with Ella on The Lady Is A Tramp from the same show offers us both performers still at their performing peak, despite both being middle-aged. As the song progresses they can clearly be seen getting into the groove, digging what they're doing, knowing that it's something special. There's something of that to be seen in Gaga's performance with a the decidedly old-aged Bennett on their Lady Is A Tramp, and suggests that, had timing been right, Lady Gaga and the Chairman of the Board could have made a great team.