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Andy Williams — King of Easy Listening

The Baby Boomer generation is fond of re-inventing its history and self-mythologising itself to the extent that you’d think they were all at Woodstock or burning down the Bastille and that the music of the Beatles was thought far too ‘square’. In reality, although my parents were thankfully a bit older than the typical boomers, I remember that the soundtrack to the late 60s and early 70s was not so much Hendrix and company but Neil Diamond and Andy Williams whose records are indelibly imprinted on my brain. In ‘cool’ retrospect Neil Diamond is now so trendy that he even played Glastonbury. BBC4 just showed a documentary about Andy Williams’ duets on his NBC TV show which featured all kinds of luminaries such as Judy Garland, Aretha Franklin, Johnny Cash and many others.

It was good to see the man himself introducing the clips. The one I enjoyed most was his collaboration with Simon and Garfunkel. I can’t help but imagine that these two are a couple of the most unlikeable, dysfunctional individuals ever to come to public recognition — at least their public personas anyway. However, there’s no disputing that they made some fantastic records and Williams joined them in a threesome to perform perhaps my favourite — ‘Scarborough Fair/Canticle’. Simon’s guitar accompaniment was beautifully simple and Williams’ voice perfectly complemented Garfunkel’s pitch. It was quite lovely and showed how adaptable Williams was as he was soon shown doing a bit of R&B with Ray Charles.

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Electric Dreams — Why Spreading Jam on CDs Was Such A Bold Step Forward

I watched the second in the series of ‘Electric Dreams’ on BBC4  — on the 80s. The programme on the 70s last week was quite shocking in its accurate depiction of the spartan lifestyle people in this country led at the start of the 1970s — twin tub washing machines being quite a novelty and teasmades being at the cutting edge. One point the series seems to be making is that change is quite discontinuous: in retrospect there seem to be periods of relative stability and then a few years when huge changes happen. One of these times seems to be the late 70s until the mid-80s — co-incidentally when some great music came out.

The 70s seemed to be way back in history whereas by the end of the 80s they’d got computers, CDs, videos and so on which means most of the entertainment and music options were pretty similar to what people use today (if not the actual technology). It’s only mobile phones and the Internet that would seem to be the big innovations to come. Everything seems to have changed with Thatcher coming in which, whatever one’s opinion of her, certainly was quite disruptive. 

There were some classic pieces of footage — Cliff Richard looking very creepy in the ‘Wired for Sound’ video (perhaps he’s just not confident at roller skating?) and the totally absurd Sinclair C5 (I remember when BBC Nationwide built up to its launch describing it as a car). Particularly pleasing was the demonstration of the amazing properties of the compact disc which were shown by spreading honey and pouring coffee  over the disc — before cleaning it off and putting it in the machine. (Not sure it was the great Michael Rodd though.) Great selling point should you be the sort of person who wants to plaster your breakfast all over your music collection before playing it! Anyone under about 30 must be completely mystified why this test was carried out. (For any youngsters watching this, it’s because spreading jam on a vinyl record would irreparably break it — though it still doesn’t explain why someone would want to do it.)  

They picked some fantastic tunes for the soundtrack — more unusual ones than in ‘Ashes to Ashes’ — and it’s listed on the iPlayer page. I’d not heard ‘Kings of the Wild Frontier’ by Adam and the Ants for a while. ‘Quiet Life’ by Japan always sounds so reminiscent of the era. Not heard much either is ‘Somebody’s Watching Me’ by Rockwell (surprising as it has Michael Jackson singing). From later in the decade music included ‘System Addict’ by Five Star, ‘Good Life’ by Inner City (which I think is fantastic), ‘True Faith’ by New Order and ‘Pacific State’ by 808 State which, oddly, is also on a Ministry of Sound Chilled compilation of music for modern youngsters that takes in tracks up to 2008. It goes to show how maybe things have changed less than the intervening period than they did in the few years before and what a fascinating time the late 70s and early 80s were to grow up in.