America’s First Man In Orbit – 7 incher…

Been sort of neglecting posting here for too long – plus I have a rather obscene amount of new vinyl that are accumulating in piles all over the house – leading to threats of marital disharmony – but heck – that is sort of normal round here !!

Grabbed the above classic piece of history this afternoon in car-boot land – The reocrd features Astronaut “John Glenn” in “Friendship 7″ (the name of the Mercury space capsule  he flew in) This took place on Pad 14 in Cape Canaveral on February 20th 1962.

Trust me on this – your record collection is a happier thing when it contains items such as these !!

Voices in Instrumentation – The Unique Vocal Interpretations of THE MEXCALI SINGERS

An absolutely amazing bag of discs found in Yeovil today – ranging from out-of-print pristine 60s blues, 70s stomping rock, late-70s prog and a bundle of novelty kids discs – more of that later however pop-pickers…

In the mean-time – you get The Mexicali Singers – from 1966 – a space-lounge-disc of fictitious Mexicans that a certain Anita Kerr apparently stumbled upon in ‘Old Mexico’ and dragged back to Hollywood waving a recording contract to a chorus of “Si Si Si ….” …  The LP comes with an in-depth description of said Mexicans – such as stated for the halucagenic-herb giving Marg:

“Alto for the group is Margarita Reales, a sultry, dark-skinned beauty of Indian heritage.  The gay wit of Marg, as her friends call her, is almost legendary in the unspoiled mesa region, from which she hails.  Marg is the prankster of the sextet, her most recent prank having been to fill 3000 tacos with loco-grass, causing a minor epidemic.  Marg likes to giggle and loves to be tickled.”

Well over here in the glitch-household – we also enjoy a good tickle – and for sure would not be offended by any offering of any-form of loco-grass !!

So what do you get of this wonderful piece of black-plastic ?  Well…  pour out that cocktail – slip on a nice mini – and swank with me – to a shiny-bright piece of ratt-a-tat-scat vocalisation of classics to an orchestral score – with a big big back-beat …    wooo – hold on there ‘A Taste of Honey’ has just blasted off into the cosmos from the woofers – and man – I need to suspend typing for a smooch !!

This is a classic find – and if like me you dig this mid 60s bachelor pad style thing – then this is IT BABY !!!

More on Anita Kerr (“easily the most remarkable and accomplished female musician of the Space Age Pop era”) can be found here.

Jeff Wayne – Eve of the War (Picture Disc), featuring Justin Hayward

Picked up this synth-laden-throbbing-conceptual-rock 12 inch monster just before Xmas - in a 4 for a quid deal in some ragged-old thrift shop in Wincanton.  Not a bad deal as these are apparently fetching upwards of 20 quid a pop at present.  Never much cared for old Wayne/Hayward back in the day – and the only time I have heard this stuff since has been on a couple of dodgy Hammond LPs – where a pliny-plonk interpretation has not quite convinced me to revisit the original. 

However – on sticking this on the old deck – and cranking up the sub-woofer – we get a sequenced-electro-floor-filler – this gets the old walls and curtains vibrating - not to mention what it does to these old knees.   A very nice piece of electronic rumbling  and tasty picture vinyl if ever there was one !!

The b-side tracks suck though (at least to these jaded ears) – you however may think differently !!

MOOG ! Claude Denjean and the Moog Synthesizer

Yes indeed – here we have a nice one – I have seen this sitting unloved and untouched for the past couple weeks on my local thrift-shop shelf of discarded plastic – not really wanting to pick it up due to over-exposure of cheese-coated early synth-disasters – stupid or what – turns out to be nothing short of a true-classic – and 50-english-new-pece well spent ..

The track listing is a real mix of late 60s poppers played to fine effect by a deep-full-on monster-moog sound.   

From the meandering-filter-sweep heaven that is “Everybody’s Talkin’”, a disco-romp-workout of “Na na hey hey kiss him goodbye”, a psychedelic-drug-fest of “House of the Rising Sun, not forgetting a creepy bass-driven “Come Together” – an excellent samplers delight of 1970 synth wig-out…

Hunt and buy !!   

Close Encounters of the Third Kind and other disco galactic themes.

More Geoff Love for you pop pickers – once again featuring his Big Disco Sound …..

Excellent cover or what !!- A standard disco collection of all your 70s sci-fi favs ..   A classic MFP release from 1978 – basically adding a thump-thump-thump-thump back beat and orchestral washes to pretty standard renderings of these theme tunez…

Unfortunately the string arrangements seem to make a lot of the tracks have build-ups that make one think of YMCA all too often (no bad thing you may think) – but in this house it results in chuckles rather than swollen dance floors (all right sitting-room floor) …

Hammond In Orbit

It’s 1969, baby, and the biggest event of the year (other than my birth) was of course the moon landings. Mankind got a collective shiver when the first pictures of our own fragile little planet, as seen from the moon, suspended in the depths of space, came beaming back. The so-called ‘Space Age’ had hit it’s peak of cultural impact.

Which might explain why neither poor old George Blackmore, nor his Hammond X77 feature on the sleeve of this record, which promises (and yet somehow fails to deliver) ‘sounds for easy listening in the Space Age!’ Though admittedly, I was rather taken by George’s latin-flavoured rendition of “Fly Me Too The Moon”.

According to the sleeve notes, George  was “an organist whose distinctive style will be immediately recognised by the thousands of people who’ve met him at Hammond Organ Concerts throughout England and the Continent”. Okay, fair enough, but if he was so distinguished in his field, how come the only George Blackmore on wikipedia is a cricketer?  And who were these ‘thousands of people’ who were checking his concerts instead of losing their minds to the sounds of Bob Dylan and Blodwyn Pig at that year’s Isle Of Wight festival?

Once again, one is left with the lingering suspicion that  a significant proportion of the British public have been seriously under-represented in the official history of post-war popular culture.