Get that far out teen beat

Thursday music corner: California-born drummer Sandy Nelson (1938-2022), who died in Las Vegas on Valentine's Day 2022, had three hit singles from 1959 to 1962, all drum-led instrumentals. Teen Beat, his first and biggest hit, reached number four on the Billboard charts in 1959, and sold over a million copies. He also contributed as a session player to hits for other artists, including The Teddy Bears' 1958 hit To Know Him Is To Love Him, written by Phil Spector. A serious road accident in 1963 resulted in the amputation of Nelson's right foot and part of his right leg, but failed to derail his career. He continued recording until the early 1970s, until a 2008 comeback record, Nelsonized.

Nelson's New York Times obituary included details of Teen Beat's strip club inspiration, from a 2015 Las Vegas Weekly interview:

“While they were looking at these pretty girls in G-strings, guess what I was doing? I was looking at the drummer in the orchestra pit. He was doing kind of a ‘Caravan’ beat,” he added, referring to the jazz standard made famous by Duke Ellington. “‘Bum ta da da dum’ — small toms, big toms. That’s what gave me the idea for ‘Teen Beat.’” 

They can't bring you down from your higher ground

Thursday music corner: Al Green (b.1946) is a legendary soul singer who rose to prominence in the 1970s with recordings such as Tired Of Being Alone, 1971 US chart-topper Let's Stay Together, and three top-five singles in 1972: Look What You Done For Me, I'm Still In Love With You and You Ought To Be With Me. In November 1972 he was in Interview magazine:

I got started when I was nineteen. But I started singing earlier. I started singing when I was a little kid. I was about nine when we had a group with my four brothers. We sang spirituals. The old regular thing. The spiritual bag. Just about like everybody else I guess. It’s fun. A lot of religious feeling, but there’s no money. The money is funny. As they say. The group has since broken up you know. They’re all married fellows now. Big fellows. Families. That type of thing.

All N All features on Green's 1977 LP, The Belle Album, which was his last album before he turned to gospel music in the 1980s. Despite its secular setting, All N All is unashamedly a Christian record, setting out Green's religious devotion - 'Jesus is my everything, yeah' - but the effervescent, breathless enthusiasm of its taut pop funk and its acrobatic Green vocal performance helps the track stand out from its peers. It featured on the Beautiful South singer Paul Heaton's 2004 Under the Influence compilation album alongside tracks from Willie Nelson, Tower of Power and LaVern Baker.    

Green returned to pop material in his 1988 duet with Annie Lennox, Put A Little Love In Your Heart - which featured on the Scrooged soundtrack - and 1989 single The Message Is Love. He released his most recent studio album in 2008.

He is obstinate, in love and rather more than a little mad

SATURDAY 28TH NOVEMBER [1936]

I am bewildered, no, I am convinced. The battle for the throne has begun. On Wednesday evening (I know all that follows to be true; not six people in the Kingdom are so informed), Mr [Stanley] Baldwin spent 1 hr 40 minutes at Buckingham Palace with the King [Edward VIII] and gave him information that the govt would resign, and that the press could no longer be restrained from attacking the King, if he did not abandon all idea of marrying Mrs [Wallis] Simpson. Mr Baldwin hoped and thought to frighten the monarch; but he is obstinate, in love and rather more than a little mad, and he refused point-blank and asked for time to consult his friends. "Who are they?' Mr Baldwin demanded... the audience was not acrimonious but polite, sad, even affectionate, I am told... 'Lord Beaverbrook,' the King retorted. The Prime Minister gasped and departed. On Thursday Beaverbrook arrived back from America and spent the evening with the King... yesterday morning the Cabinet again met, an emergency meeting, and the situation in Spain was given out as the pretext.... The PM told the Cabinet of the King's determination. I hope he mentioned my suggestion to make her Duchess of Lancaster, and in ten years, when the country is used to her, she could be declared Queen. The King saw Beaverbrook Wednesday, and last night Beaverbrook went to see Wallis, and thus our dinner party chez elle was postponed. Now no one knows what will happen but the atmosphere vibrates with nerves and the storm may break any monarch. 

- Henry 'Chips' Channon, in The Diaries 1918-38, Simon Heffer (ed.), London, 2021, p.597

It's got a name but I prefer to call it nameless

Thursday music corner: Terry Hall (b. 1959) first came to prominence leading The Specials from 1977 until 1981, departing on a high when their single Ghost Town topped the UK charts. He went on to form Fun Boy Three (six UK top 40 singles from 1981 to 1983, including It Ain't What You Do (It's The Way That You Do It), with Bananarama) and The Colourfield (one UK top 20 hit, Thinking Of You, in 1985), and collaborate with a wide range of artists. His 1994 solo album Home was produced by Ian Broudie of the Lightning Seeds, and the ebullient, joyful Sense, co-written by Hall and Broudie, was the second single released from it. 

In 2019 Hall told Uncut magazine that he was comfortable growing older: 

I’ve wanted to be 60 since I was about 27, because at that point everything I liked was being performed by 60-year-olds like Andy Williams, Tony Bennett and Frank Sinatra,” he says. “I love how they’d carry on doing what they do. You have to shut everything out to do that. I feel blessed to have reached that stage. A lot of people think that 60 is part of the downward spiral, which it is if you allow it to be, but you can fight it and say, no it isn’t, it’s just part of this story.

“It means I got my Freedom Pass from Transport For London,” he adds with a grin. “I bloody love travelling around London on buses, and I plan to fully abuse this pass as much as I can. I bloody love being 60… I’ve always thought I’d make my best music in the years between 60 and 70.

Cindy Sherman meets Cate Blanchett

Did either of you grow up thinking that you had very malleable faces?

SHERMAN I didn’t.

BLANCHETT No. I used to do this thing with my sister where she would dress me up, stand me in front of the mirror and give me a name. Then I’d have to figure out that person. My favorite one — we kept saying we were going to make a movie about him — his name was Piggy Trucker. He was a little short guy, a bit like an Australian Wally Shawn [the actor and playwright Wallace Shawn], and he drove a pig truck. [I was] probably about 7, 8 years old.

SHERMAN It was playing dress-up. My mother would go to the local thrift store and for 10 cents buy these old prom dresses from the ’40s or ’50s. There was also, I think it was my great-grandmother’s clothes that were left in the basement. I discovered them, and it was like, wow. It looked like old lady clothes, but also the pinafore type of things. When I was 10 or 12, I would put them on, stuff socks to hang down to the waist to look like old lady [breasts], and walk around the block.

- Melena Ryzik, 'Cate Blanchett and Cindy Sherman: Secrets of the Camera Chameleons', New York Times, 4 May 2022

I know your secret delight in vice

Thursday music corner: The Triffids were a Western Australian alternative rock group formed in 1978, named for the terrifying science-fiction alien plant species in John Wyndham's 1951 novel The Day of the Triffids. Featuring David McComb as lead vocalist, the band were active until 1989. Of the band's five studio albums released between 1983 and 1989, Born Sandy Devotional (1986) and Calenture (1987) are both regarded as Australian classics. After a 1996 heart transplant and long-term illness, McComb died in 1999 aged 36.

Blinder By The Hour is a sweeping, romantically macabre track from the band's fourth album Calenture; the album title refers to a form of insanity suffered by mariners on long voyages. Bury Me Deep In Love and Trick Of The Light were both successful singles from the album, the former being used to soundtrack a wedding scene in the TV soap Neighbours in which Harold Bishop and Madge Mitchell were wed.