#craig douglas

[mudwerks]

(via Pulp International - Elaine Duillo art for The Hungry Ones by Craig Douglas)

[vinylespassion]

Craig Douglas (né Terence Perkins le 12 août 1941) est un chanteur pop anglais qui a connu la popularité à la fin des années 1950 et au début des années 1960. Son seul titre à atteindre la première place des charts au Royaume-Uni, « Only Sixteen » (1959), s'est plus vendu dans le pays que la version originale de Sam Cooke.

[shadowland]

Eddie Cochran and Craig Douglas, 1960

[allthemusic]

Week ending: 25th July

Well, we've got a bit of theme, this week, with two songs that both approach the topic of memories, and in particular, what we do with memories, once a relationship is over - good memories, bad memories, and memories that were good at the time, but that have since turned bittersweet or even sad. Which feels quite grandiose, but there you have it, I call them as I see them. Also, yodelling.

I Remember You - Frank Ifield (peaked at Number 1)

This is quite a distinctive song, and I can already feel it worming its way into my brain. It's not a Frank Ifield original - the song actually dates all the way back to 1941, and is a Johnny Mercer original - but Frank brings his own charm to it. Frank, born in Britain but based in Australia since childhood, was particularly known for his yodelling. This is something that I've given quite short shrift, historically, on this blog, but if there's such thing as a tasteful way to yodel, this is surely it. There's not overly much of it, it's mostly limited to one or two lines, and the rest of the song has this pleasantly easy and listenable vibe. Frank's singing does most of the heavy lifting, in this, but you've got also these lowkey, smooth strings, a guitar to give things shape, and then, cutting through it all strikingly, a harmonica, which reminds us even more than the yodelling that yes, this is at least has the trappings of a country song.

It's quite melancholy, when you listen to the words, with Frank singing about I remember you / You're the one who made my dreams come true / A few kisses ago. The last bit of that's the important bit, because yes, it's about being really happy together. But you get the sense that Frank's looking back on a love affair that's ended. He's got the grace and delicacy not to talk about it - or perhaps it's too painful to talk about - but it's all about looking back, about fond memories and nostalgia. He's no longer got this person by his side, but is instead left reminding them how you're the one who said "I love you", too. Which is kind of sad. And yet, rather than mope about it, we get this glorious, grand, kind of idealised description of a distant bell, and stars that fell / Like the rain out of the blue. Which sure is a poetic way of describing falling in love. And what what will Frank do when my life is through / And the angels ask me to recall the thrill of them all? Why, he'll remember this lost love, of course. Which is sweet, but also a little bit tragic, that he's so certain that this person was it for him, that he'll never love anyone else in the same way. It's a bittersweet thing, and one that's underscored marvellously by the chords and the music itself, which often throws in a more minor chord, a quieter beat, a softer tone.

This is also where knowing the song's history comes in clutch. Because apparently the song, written by Johnny Mercer, was pretty explicitly about a brief but intense affair he had with the then 19-year old Judy Garland. If we can put aside the slight ickiness of this - Johnny was in his 30s, and Judy was engaged to somebody else at the time, besides - then it's quite the story, a brief thing that didn't come to anything, and Johnny left with all these fond but painful memories, nostalgia for a relationship that didn't end up going anywhere, but that he clearly looked back on quite warmly. So yeah, a sad song, with a sad backstory that Frank's performance suits, despite - or possibly even because of - the yodelling.

Our Favourite Melodies - Craig Douglas (9)

And then, this. Of the two songs this week, this one's the rocker, a quick-paced number with strings that honestly kind of remind me of the backing singers from Rubber Ball. Actually, the whole thing here sounds a bit like a mish-mash of other rock and roll songs, complete with some very Buddy Holly-esque strings, some doo-wop backing singers, and a melody that's like rock-and-roll-by-numbers, predictable and kind of forgettable - there's certainly no big hook, here, or memorable moments.

But that's kind of the point, because this is a song, more than many we've had so far, that about rock and roll, and the power of turning the radio and hearing a specific song at the right or the wrong time, the effect that can have. We set the scene right off the bat. Just when I think I'm over you / Just when I'm through with being blue / I pass the record store, and coming through the door / I hear those golden melodies. What follows is a bunch of quotations, each pulling from a different popular song of the era. The records are telling Craig hit the road, Jack, telling his rival to take good care of my baby, even encouraging his love to run to him, my baby. It's a mish-mash of quotations, matching the song's kind of generic feel perfectly - of course this feels like ever other rock and roll song. That's largely the point.

I also appreciate that most of the song's quotations are pulled from songs that I know and have listened to, thanks to this project, and it's nice to see these little snippets, referenced quick-fire. It's the same thing I liked in songs like Let's Thing About Living, though that was more parodic in intention. And it's the same slightly meta thing I like in more modern songs - the example I'm thinking off, off the top of my head, and if you don't know it, you absolutely should go listen, is Greatest Hits by Mystery Jets, which also chronicles the breakup of a relationship by quoting titles or iconic lines of songs that the singer and his love used to listen to together. Because that's something that happens, in all relationships, romantic or not. You end up with songs linked to certain times, certain people, certain points in your life. And yeah, when things have gone south and you hear one at the wrong time, it can really hurt. It's the sort of meta, post-modern thing I love, looking at the way the music and the media we consume shape how we feel and how we mentally categorise whole eras of our life - all of it presented as a song, naturally.

I do feel for Craig, then as he sings about how it makes no differencе what I do / The songs they play remind me of you. Day and night, he's chased by the melodies and songs that bring up these painful memories. It's a difficult situation. And yet, I will say, there's something decidedly petulant about the final verse, which fades out on Craig, weirdly vehemently, encouraging some unknown person the Stop saying "Hit the road Jack" / Stop saying "You'll come back" / Stop playing " Goodbye cruel world" / Stop saying "Hey little girl" / Stop saying "I love You" / Stop saying "Hey girl it's true". I think it's funny, because it's really unclear who he's addressing, here. Is he shouting this at the record store he passed by, just walking past and telling them off for being a record store? Is it more aimed at the radio and the singers of the songs, themselves? Is it aimed at us, the listeners? I don't know, but it just comes off kind of childish - it's not like shouting at us in the outro to a song's going to achieve anything, here.

In some ways, these feel like two perspectives on the break-up of the same relationship. Craig's about the painful side of memories, the heat of the break-up, when everything on the radio reminds you of them, and where half the songs you used to like are suddenly tainted. It's a meta, clever thing, and the sort of song I normally would eat up with a spoon. But in terms of charm, I think Frank's got him beat, with a song that's more about what happens later, when the pain's faded to a dull, wistful ache, and where the memories become a source of comfort, of nostalgia even, something you can now look back on with a measure of fondness and warmth (and yes, yodelling).

Favourite song of the bunch: I Remember You

[vintagetvstars]

Lord of the Rings Vintage TV Recast - Éowyn

You're traveling through another dimension - a dimension in which director Peter Jackson is currently getting ready to direct one of his biggest film projects to date, The Lord of the Rings Trilogy. He has decided to cast beloved actor, John Astin, of The Addams Family fame, as Gandalf the Grey.

Inspired by this singular casting decision, Peter Jackson and the film's producers have decided to cast The Lord of the Rings films entirely with other vintage television actors. They've entrusted the process of casting for the film to whom they believe will make the perfect decisions: the tumblr userbase.

Each actor will be taken from places in the prime of their television career (as pictured). A common practice in this strange alternate dimension.

You are now the new casting director for The Lord of The Rings. Who will you choose?

LOTR Polls Masterlist / What rolls are being cast / Who has already been cast

[cumberbatchcom]

[GALLERY UPDATE] Benedict Cumberbatch attending the 'Aston Martin Vanquish' launch event last night in Venice. LINK

[applestitches]

Little South Park emoticons I made

○(((8c) stan

| | |8c) kyle

0((>8c)) cartman

((ʘʘ)) kenny

☆(8c) butters

( (|8c)8= pip

0( |8c) -○ craig

| (8c) |— tolkien

Z(z8c) tweek

Z(z<80) scared tweek

(|18c) wendy

○(((X(== barfing stan

(c8)))○ ♥︎ (c8↾|) stendy

(c8| )0 ♥︎ (c8z)Z creek

((z>8c) damien

( z8c))= scarf kid

( ((8c) brimmy

( ((z8c) douglas

( 8 | ><> mr mackey (help me)

Z z8D) dogpoo

z( : | ) t&p/canadian

z( : | |) t&p/canadian mouth open

[blackramhall]

[...] one of those crumbling old relics will start talking about the war. And they'll ask us both [...] how we should be gung-ho to do our duty in the next. Not that there's going to be a next one.

There's always a next one.

[vintagewarhol]

[nostalgicmiscellaneous]

Graham Norton with the beautiful Nicola Coughlan, Daniel Craig, Jesse Eisenberg, Kieran Culkin and Stella Quaresma, Jorja Douglas, and Renee Downer of British band Flo during the filming for the Graham Norton Show at BBC Studioworks 6 Television Centre, Wood Lane, London, to be aired on BBC One on Friday evening. Picture date: Wednesday December 12, 2024.

[libdeminomenon]

Tributes to John Prescott (source: POLITICO)

[royalty-nobility]

Mary, Queen of Scots Escaping from Lochleven Castle

Artist: William Craig Shirreff (Scottish, 1786 - 1805)

Date: 1805

Medium: Oil on canvas

Collection: National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh, Scotland

Description

In 1805, this painting won a student prize for Shirreff while he was at the Trustees’ Academy. He chose an episode from the life of Mary, Queen of Scots which had been related by Gilbert Stuart in his influential History of Scotland (1783). In a letter to his father the young artist wrote: 'I have taken the point of time when Lord Seaton is receiving Mary from the boat, and young George Douglas handing her on and one of the attendants holding the horse that the Queen is to ride on. I am very pleased with it myself.' By the early nineteenth century, Mary was a popular romantic heroine. William Lizars, one of Sherriff's friends, engraved this painting after the young artist’s premature death.

READ MORE: MARY, QUEEN OF SCOTS' GREAT ESCAPE

[allthemusic]

Week ending: 25th April

Twee. I think that's how I'd describe this week's music. Nothing wrong with that, but still. There's very little going on this week that you could actually describe as "cool" - or if there is, it's quite tangentially related to the songs themselves. Instead, what we get is just cheese, pure and simple. And like I said, nothing wrong with that.

Theme from Z Cars - Johnny Keating and the Z Men (peaked at Number 9)

Gosh, this one's a weird ride. I knew what I expected going in. Z Cars, as the name suggests, was a TV show. In this case, it was a TV drama, all about a squad of mobile police officers, based out of a town that's based on Kirkby, near Liverpool. It was notable for being a procedural, not some glam detective drama, and for injecting a grit and realism, with its focus on the working class north of England. It ran for a whopping 800 episodes and is remembered for pushing the envelope of what the BBC could do, offering a harder-edged show than rival, cosier police dramas like Dixon of Dock Green. All this considered, I went in expecting something action-packed, edgy, cool and modern-sounding. Which is... well, you'll see.

We start with snare drums, very military, and then what sound like fifes, or possibly tin whistles playing something that honestly sounds like something you might skip round a maypole to. Which is possibly not too far off the mark. Johnny Keating, it turns out, was a Scottish orchestral composer, and based the tune on a folk song and nursey rhyme, "Johnny Todd", which he found in a book of folk songs from 1891. It was apparently popular around Liverpool, hence its inclusion, but it does feel like rather an obscure pull, and also, somehow, quite old-fashioned and rural, like something you'd associate with a little, sleepy village, not the mean streets of suburban Liverpool.

And then, halfway through, the action does arrive, with a messy crash of drums, some rather off-tune-sounding piano and some horns. It creates a jazzy, slightly swung version of the tune that's not quite rock and roll, but does sound enough like, say, Johnny and the Hurricanes to seem cool, if you squint at it a bit. It's not the most polished performance, but it does feel realistically chaotic, which I guess fits the bill, if you're trying to show the realities of policing. I still think you'd struggle to have such a rough-sounding TV theme today, but there you go. Sadly, the tin whistles return for the end of the track. But the crashing, galumphing middle section is pretty good fun, at least.

The tune was apparently popular at the time - enough that it had a chart run, obviously. But beyond that, the tune's had a surprisingly long afterlife. Most notably, it's been used as a football tune for both Everton and Watford. Everton kind of makes sense, there, since it's based in the same sort of area that Z Cars was set in. But Watford? A quick look into that tells me that Z Cars was simply the manager Bill McGarry's favourite TV show. Which is actually kind of sweet. Sunderland and Workington have also used it for a similar purpose, which again makes some sense - it's the wrong side of the north, but people would have associated the tune with northern daring and heroism, all the same. More surprisingly than that, though, it's also apparently been used as a tune for a hymn, Father, Hear the Prayer We Offer, though a glimpse at Hymnary - not a site I assumed I'd ever need for this project - tells me that it's not the standard tune. Still, what a weirdly British phenomenon, a folk tune turned into a northern police drama theme, turned into a football chant, used as a hymn tune. Quite something.

Never Goodbye - Karl Denver (9)

Well, we're straight into the yodelling, here. Right out the gate with a single guitar chord an impossibly high, unpleasantly loud yodel. I don't think there's a song out there that's been improved by adding yodelling, and Karl's tune here's no exception. Thankfully, there's not a whole lot of it, here. Mostly it's just a slightly mopey country-ish number. And then, out nowhere, Karl will come lunging at you with an absolutely insane run of notes, way too many notes for comfort. Most are sensibly pitched, though, with none of the bone-piercing intensity of the opening line. And like I said, they're infrequent enough to really be annoyed at them.

Lyrically, the song feels pretty standard, a sappy sentimental ballad about how he doesn't ever want to leave his love. Never goodbye, he sings, that means we're parting / That means the tears / Instead of a smile. Partings are sad, Karl says. So instead of goodbye, why not say au revoir, or arrivederci, or even auf Wiedersehen. I appreciate this, both because languages - yay! - but also because all three of those actually do mean "until I see you again", or some variation on that. Which feels like it fits with what Karl's saying. It's not just that he hates the word "goodbye", for some reason, it's really about the finality of it, the idea that you might part for good. With an au revoir or an arrivederci or an auf Wiedersehen, there's the promise, at least implicitly, that you intend to see the person you're talking to again, that it's just a temporary leave of absence. Which I guess does make parting feel easier, to state the obvious. It's a small thing, but I do like it. And you know me, I'm a sucker for all things linguistic :)

Musically, it does drag a bit, but it's pleasant enough to listen to, with some backing singers lurching slowly around and a simple but nice mix of guitar and drums to back it all up. The latter are all that stop this sound from sounding like a song you might have heard in 1952 - the backing singers, in particular, feel very stodgy and old-fashioned to me. Still, there's a richness to their harmonies and the way they back Karl up that's quite pleasing, so I'm not going to knock them too hard. The song does plod a bit, but it's a listenable tune, none the less.

When My Little Girl Is Smiling - Craig Douglas (9)

And then, from a Karl Denver Number 9 hit to a Craig Douglas Number 9 hit. Truly, I can't contain my excitement. That said, I think this one's got a bit more going for it - it's certainly got more going on, at least, which has to count for something. We start at a similarly slow, stodgy pace, sure. But it's pulling the Helen Shapiro trick where there's just a slow, slightly melancholy intro, before the pace picks up, pulling you in for the rest of the track. Every time my baby and I have a quarrel / I swear I won't give in, Craig sings. Then my baby starts to smile at me / And I know, I know I just can't win. They've started out quarrelling, sure, and he sounds pretty blue about it. But it's not going to last, Craig will be back in love by the time the track's done, never you fear!

There's something quite sweet about it. I mean, don't get me wrong, here, Craig is absolutely whipped, here, and comes off as more than a little spineless. And it doesn't sound like the healthiest thing for him and his girl's relationship, overall, either. But there's nevertheless something quite cute about Craig and his girl arguing, but then Craig just seeing how pretty and cute she is, and folding like a piece of wet cardboard. I see those big bright eyes, he sings, and then I realize / That girl is gonna get her way. Arguing just no longer seems worth the effort. Some things are more important than whatever you're at odds over. Why should I want to fight / When I can hold her tight? / I just don't care who's right or wrong.

And the giddy excitement of all this is underscored by a perky backing of strings and chimes, a bouncy sort of sound that mimics Craig's buoyant mood well. There are some cool glissandos (glissandi?) on the lower strings at points, creating a weird sort of sliding sound, and a double bass that hops around the place slinkily, and the whole thing just sounds well-balanced, catchy, kind of quirky. I like it a lot. Add in the pacing at the start, and the sweet if slightly unhealthy lyrics, and you've got something that's unmistakably better-made than Theme from Z Cars was, and a fair sight more interesting than Never Goodbye. Truly, the best of both worlds.

Given all this, and given my previous interactions with Craig, I'm not actually that surprised to learn that this was not a Craig Douglas original. Instead, we're looking at a Goffin/King number, originally recorded by the Drifters. Which is honestly making me want to listen to the Drifters' original, because I can absolutely imagine them killing it. As it stands, Craig does a good job, but there is a definite cheesiness to it all, and not much in the way of subtlety. I like a bit of cheese, so this is the opposite or a poblem, but still. Interesting to see what a more authentically R&B-tinged take on this would sound like.

Like I said, these are three pretty twee songs. They're good, home-grown British fare, but smooth or subtle they certainly ain't, especially compared to the coolness of Sam Cooke a few weeks, or the unexpected chillness of Bruce Channel. Still, there's something to be said for their sometimes rough-around-the-edges cheese. If nothing else, all three of these songs did make me smile. It was a confused smile, in the case of the Z Cars theme, granted. But a smile, never the less.

Favourite song: When My Little Girl Is Smiling

[countesspetofi]

Ghost Story (1981) dir. John Irvin

[clydeisafurry]

you think they got their jackets from the same store?

[weirdlookindog]

Ghost Story (1981) - VHS Cover