Arthur St, Onehunga

 

Quelle vibration de s’envoyer sur le paillasson

Thursday music corner: Plastic Bertrand (b. Roger François Jouret, 1954) is a Belgian musician and TV presenter who was catapulted to fame thanks to his 1977 (mostly) French-language single Ça Plane Pour Moi, which exhibits boisterous and perhaps semi-satirical punk-pop energy. The single topped the pop charts in France and Switzerland, hit the top five in Australia, Ireland, the Netherlands, Quebec and the Walloon region of Belgium, and reached the top 10 in the UK, Germany and New Zealand. The 1978 album that included the single, An 1, reached number 2 in the French album charts, and number 7 in Quebec. The song's title is an expression that translates as 'Everything's gliding for me'. Most of its lyrics, both French and English, are pure nonsense.

The musical backing track that was used to record Ça Plane Pour Moi was also used in a contemporary single recorded by English punk / new wave band Elton Motello under the title Jet Boy, Jet Girl. While this was released before Ça Plane Pour Moi and managed to reach the top 40 in Australia, it is now mainly remembered for the cover recording of it by Captain Sensible & the Softies, a side project during a hiatus for the Damned. The recording featured on a 1981 Damned best-of album. 

In 2010 Bertrand admitted that he didn't perform any of the vocals on his first four albums, from An 1 to 1981's Plastiquez vos baffles. The songwriter and producer of Ça Plane Pour Moi, Lou Deprijck, was the actual vocalist.

Plastic Bertrand - Ça Plane Pour Moi (1977)

It seemed now that only a miracle could save Chamberlain

FRIDAY 10TH MAY 1940

Perhaps the darkest day in English history. I was still asleep, recovering from the emotions of the past few days, when my private telephone tinkled and it was Harold [Balfour] speaking from the Air Ministry. Holland and Belgium invaded; bombs falling on Brussels, parachutists landing at The Hague etc. Another of Hitler's brilliantly conceived coups done with lightning precision. Of course he seized upon the psychological moment when England is politically divided and the ruling caste is seething with dissension and anger. I suppose he heard of Wednesday's debate and fatal division yesterday morning and immediately acted upon it.* It took only a few hours to prepare this further crime and all day Holland and Belgium have been invaded. I rang up Alan [Lennox-Boyd] who curiously enough never knows anything, nor did Rodney Wilkinson - who for all his really invidious charm has a middle-class mind - then I dressed and went to the [Foreign Office]. Princess Olga [of Greece and Denmark] rang up asking for news and suggested going out tonight! I telephoned about frantically to find a free young man and could only get Rodney. At the Office all was in confusion, and the mandarins, some of them, seemed more downhearted that the invasion of the Low Countries had probably saved Chamberlain, than depressed by the invasion itself. It was the popular view this morning that Neville was saved, for after all his policy had been vindicated swiftly, surely, suddenly in the last twenty-four hours. Had he sent immense numbers of troops to Norway, where should we be now? This latest coup is probably the prelude to a concentrated attack on England with all imaginable horrors [...]

Now the drama begins: the Chamberlains returned to No. 10, and sometime during the afternoon a message came from the Labour people that they would join a govt, but refused to serve under Chamberlain. Action had to be taken immediately: Neville hesitated for half an hour, and meanwhile [Alexander Douglas-Home, Lord] Dunglass rang me - couldn't Rab [Butler] do anything with Halifax, plead with him to take it on? Rab was doubtful as he had already this morning and yesterday had such conversations with 'the Pope' who was firm - he would not be Prime Minister. I don't understand why, since a more ambitious man never lived, nor one with, in a way, a higher sense of duty and noblesse oblige. Nevertheless I persuaded Rab to go along to Halifax's room for one last final try: he found H closed with [the Duke of] Alba, and waited. Three minutes later H had slipped out to go to the dentist's without Rab seeing him and Nicholas Valentine Lawford, the rather Third Empire secretary, who neglected to tell Halifax that Rab was waiting, may well have played a decisive negative role in history. Rab came back to our room, angry and discouraged, and we rang No. 10; but Alec Dunglass said that already the die had been cast: it seems that Winston [Churchill] had half thrown away his mask and was pressing the PM to resign and at once. Winston feared that the Dutch invasions would bring about a reaction in Neville's favour. A message was sent to the Palace and an audience arranged for six o'clock - it seemed now that only a miracle could save Chamberlain, and perhaps England.

- Henry 'Chips' Channon MP, in Simon Heffer (ed.) Henry 'Chips' Channon: The Diaries 1938-43, London, 2021, p.310-11.

* Heffer notes: 'He did nothing of the sort. Hitler had ordered plans for the invasion to be drawn up the previous October and had resolved to do it once matters were settled in Denmark and Norway'. At the audience Channon mentions at the close Winston Churchill became Prime Minister. Chamberlain would be dead of cancer within six months.

See also:
Blog: NZ declares war on Germany, 3 September 2014

Blog: The Audience, 14 July 2013
Blog: Chartwell, 12 August 2007

Most people I know think that I'm crazy

Thursday music corner: Manchester-born Billy Thorpe (1946-2007) arrived with his parents in Australia as a child. In 1964 he had his first hits with the Aztecs, which for a time until the emergence of the Easybeats was Australia's preeminent beat group. After a much-publicised bankruptcy and a hiatus for the Aztecs, the band had a new lease of life and adopted a louder, blues-rock style that built a considerable live following and eventually paid major dividends. 

Their most well-remembered track, Most People I Know (Think That I'm Crazy), was popularised by this storming live performance at the January 1972 Sunbury Music Festival (which also featured emigre New Zealanders The La De Das and Max Merritt & the Meteors). The single version of the song reached number 2 in the Australian charts and the August 1972 double live album Aztecs Live at Sunbury reached number 4 in the Australian album charts and was certified gold four times over.

Billy Thorpe & the Aztecs - Most People I Know (Think I'm Crazy) (live, 1972)

Nothing hides the colour of the lights that shine

Thursday music corner: English new wave artist Joe Jackson (b.1954) first achieved success with his 1978 debut single Is She Really Going Out With Him, which reached number 13 on the UK pop charts on reissue in August 1979, went top 10 in Canada and Ireland, hit the top 20 in Australia and New Zealand, and reached number 21 in the US charts. His fifth studio album, the Cole Porter-influenced Night and Day, was released in June 1982 and was his most successful of his career, reaching number 3 in the UK, and hitting the top five in Australia, Canada, the Netherlands, New Zealand, and the US. Steppin' Out was the third single released from Night and Day, and was widely popular, reaching the top 10 in the UK, Ireland, Canada and the US. The song received Grammy award nominations for Record of the Year and Best Pop Vocal Performance, Male.

Joe Jackson - Steppin' Out (1982)

Allenby Terrace 'mural cat'

(Mural not pictured)

 

Rhapsody in Green

Tonight's penultimate Wellington FilmSoc outing of the year was the splendid and quite bonkers King of Jazz (1930) in glorious, bizarre two-strip Technicolor - a highly innovative film process that could portray red and green moderately well but couldn't cope with the colour blue. (This is a full nine years before colour pioneers Gone With the Wind and The Wizard of Oz, remember). Which makes this extravaganza of George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue - written originally for the Paul Whiteman Orchestra featured in the film - even more ambitious. And while it might not seem credible, this sequence involving a giant piano big enough to contain the entire orchestra is by no means the most overblown spectacle the film contains.