MUSINGS FROM THE BOWER 42
When I was a teen – many moons ago – the pop music of the time was mainly the beat groups, such as The Beatles. However, immediately before that, there was a time when solo artists dominated the charts. This was the music that I loved when I was at primary school and in the first couple of years of secondary school, when artists such as Elvis, Bobby Vee, Cliff Richard, Mark Wynter, Marty Wilde, Roy Orbison, Eden Kane and many others were producing songs with catchy tunes and lyrics. Nowadays, this music is the backbone of all those sixties compilations that you hear played in the shops.
It’s easy to make fun of that kind of music today, and many people do but at least all those artists could sing without resorting to voice enhancers, and the musicians would perform on stage with just basic equipment, playing live, not miming. When the groups came along, it was a different kind of music. The Beatles changed the whole scenario – here was a group, not just one solo singer, and the music scene altered dramatically. Within months, the solo singers were finding the going tough. Many changed track, moving into acting, song writing or record production, while a few managed to stay the course by altering their style.
Over the last few years there has been a huge nostalgia revival, with ‘retro’ being the in-word, and people of all ages seeking out 1960s’ fabrics, furniture, clothing, pop art – and rediscovering the music. A series of cds appeared, called ‘Dreamboats and Petticoats’, containing music from the era, sung by the original artists, and these proved so popular that a musical was written, based on the early sixties. Set ‘in a youth club somewhere in Essex’ the musical Dreamboats and Petticoats is a story of young love, told in a clever way using the music of the time. Laura, a gawky schoolgirl, is a talented musician and she loves Bobby, but he thinks of her just as his friend’s kid sister. The youth club form a group and need a lead singer. Bobby wants the job, but then along comes Norman with his quiff and curled lip, and many of the girls fall for him. One of the girls, Sue, ultra glam in low cut frocks and a seductive wriggle, tries to make Norman interested but he ignores her so she flirts with Bobby to make Norman jealous. Naturally, this also upsets Laura, who has been attempting to write a song with Bobby for a talent contest. The show is funny, laced with sixties references from Wagon Wheel biscuits to ‘O’il Give it Five’, and the songs are woven, often humorously, around the events, including an anguished Bobby who mistakenly pushes Sue out of his bedroom window and promptly sings in horror, ‘There goes my Baby’! (Part of a Roy Orbison song).
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| Mark Wynter in the 1960s |
One of the best things about the show, apart from the feel-good factor, is that all the singing and all the music is played live at every performance – which takes some doing when the performers are also dancing frantically. In fact a couple of girls somehow manage to play the saxophones while dancing, rocking and twisting! I’ve seen the show twice so far – I saw it just before Christmas in the West End, and it is now touring, so I caught up with it in Cambridge. The youth club leader is played by Mark Wynter, who was a huge star in the early 1960s with songs such as Venus in Blue Jeans, Go Away Little Girl, It’s Almost Tomorrow and many others. Cannily, when he saw how the groups were taking over the music scene, he switched to acting, over the years getting to play roles in musicals such as Cats, Barnum and Phantom as well as serious dramas. I’ve known Mark since the early sixties, and was so pleased when, at the end of the show, they announced that they had a real pop singer in their midst, and he came on – as himself – to sing some of his hits. I was rushed back through time! After the show we chatted for a long time.
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| Mark and I after the show |
A couple of weeks previously, I had been at another concert. This one was by someone who continued his singing career, bouncing back time and again after people said he was ‘finished’. Today, he’s a national treasure, an icon with thousands upon thousands of fans across the globe – through strangely, still hasn’t managed to crack America. Of course, I’m talking about Cliff Richard – or Sir Cliff as he is often referred to nowadays – and he was holding a concert at an open air venue at Hatfield House, Hertfordshire. The concert was entitled ‘Still Reelin` and A-Rockin`’.
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| The Military Wives Choir |
The show began with the Military Wives choir who performed several songs, including a wartime medley. This choir is formed by wives, partners and service women of British Military personnel, located around Britain. They were excellent, and they ended with the Jubilee song, ‘Sing’ written by Gary Barlow and Andrew Lloyd Weber.
A short break – you could feel the tension and the rising anticipation. Suddenly – there he was. Cliff bounded on stage resplendent in a scarlet jacket and denim jeans. For the next hour and a half he worked his way through his hits – Move It, Livin’ Doll, Devil Woman, In the Country, The Young Ones, Miss You Night, We Don’t Talk Anymore, Please Don’t Tease, and my personal favourite, Wired For Sound. The hits just kept on coming.
He danced, spun, jumped – I was exhausted watching him! At the end – standing ovations –of course, he came back again, and again, and again. It was as though he didn’t want to go, and naturally, we didn’t want him to go either. It was a magical evening, quite warm and amazingly not raining, and sitting there amidst thousands of happy people, all thrilled to have seen Cliff in action, was better than any tonic a doctor could have prescribed. Anyone who thinks that Cliff is ‘past it’ would have changed their mind had they been there that night!
In case anyone is wondering, I am still brooding in
my bower but have been unable to post due to my browser suddenly becoming
incompatible with Blogger! Not being of technical mind, I had to wait till my
son could come and sort out my computer. However, at last, it is back on track,
and I can woffle again! The bower is still pretty, and although the clematis
has now ceased flowering, the honeysuckle is a mass of crimson berries and
there is a passion flower and a mock orange, though the latter, also, has no
blooms now. Nearby are some buddleia
bushes (which nowadays we are meant to refer to, for some scientific reason, as
‘buddleja’), one deep purple and another white. These are large bushes. There is also a tub containing two patio
buddleias, one white and the other pale mauve. The other day I noticed a
beautiful pale yellow buddleia in a garden – gosh, I’d love one of those. We
are certainly having a ‘Butterfly Summer’ – the garden has been full of
butterflies drinking their fill on the buddleias, especially peacocks, large
and small whites, commas and small tortoiseshells.
We visited Anglesey Abbey, near Cambridge recently,
just to walk around the grounds. They were beautiful as always. The dahlia
garden was a riot of colour, as was the herbaceous garden, and the
white-trunked birches in the winter garden bore pale green leaves, looking so
pretty when the sun shone through them. The mill stream was green with
duckweed, and there were plenty of yellow water lilies with their large,
butter-cup like flowers and thick oval leaves, perfect for moorhens to walk
across. Which they were – there was a family of moorhens and their babies
happily mooching about the greenery on the stream. Some of the dogwood seems to have been cleared
away in the grassy area by the river, making it easier to get to the small pond
nearby. The cyclamen will be out very soon; a few were already showing pink
along the paths, a reminder that autumn is on its way. We decided not to visit
the house this time, but it is an interesting place, well worth looking round
if you haven’t done so.
A couple of weeks ago we went to one of my ‘special
places’ – the British Wildlife Centre at Lingfield, Surrey. Red squirrels
climbed up my legs and over my arms, and I spent a long while watching a stoat
running in and out of a hole. A baby polecat slumbered in the sun, otters
chased each other in their lake and across the grass, an enormous marsh frog
grinned vacantly and the wildcat kittens were gorgeous – though, as their
keeper explained, they inherited the wildness and they could not be handled or
even touched. We bought sandwiches in the café, and then took them along to the
picnic tables near the roe deer enclosure, as it was such a lovely day. Later,
we walked through the wetlands trail, along the new boardwalk, seeing quite a
lot of butterflies and birds. 
I’ve seen quite a few butterflies and dragonflies
lately, with trips to Hatfield Forest and to Wicken Fen. On one of my tips to
Wicken, which is near Ely, Cambs, the boardwalk had a peacock butterfly every
couple of feet, and as I walked along, they would spiral up and settle behind
me. Dragonflies were abundant, many of them coupling or egg-laying, while some
enormous ones swooped, reminiscent of early fighter planes! At Hatfield Forest
a tiled roof was a suntrap for small tortoiseshell butterflies that flattened
their wings against the warm tiles so that their bodies absorbed the heat
trapped underneath them. The thistles had decided to seed, so there were swirls
of thistledown – very pretty, though it made me a bit sniffy as I suffer from
hay fever. Through the trees we glimpsed a group of fallow deer, the sun
illuminating the white spots on their backs and showing off the bold black and
white markings on their tails.
On the 17th August, my daughter and I
were up very early as we had to drive to Coventry and set up our Doll Showcase
stall (we produce a quarterly doll magazine) at a doll and toy fair. The fair
went off very well, and it was interesting to see the old toys. I bought a
small wooden piano, just like one I had as a child – I can still play ‘Pease
Pudding Hot’ on it! I also bought a toy washing machine and cooker. The
washing machine is made of a heavy type of metal, with a mangle attached with
sharp rivets while the cooker is made from tinplate. It always amuses me to
think of how we played with such ‘dangerous’ toys as children – no one worried
about sharp edges in those days – and we survived. I was reading the other day that German
kindergarten children climb trees at school – I can’t imagine ‘elf and safety’
allowing that here!
Over the bank holiday my husband was
demonstrating a railway layout at the model railway club near Hoddesdon, Herts,
of which he is a member. It was the club’s open day and was very well attended.
There were lots of model railways there as well as a ride-on train for
youngsters, a tombola and an excellent refreshments stall, which was doing a
roaring trade. There were model boats being sailed around the boating lake,
too. My daughter and I went to see how he was getting on, he had a queue of
children waiting for a go to operate his train. It struck me as a
quintessentially British affair – all it needed was a few Morris dancers and
the thwack of a cricket ball on willow!
