Tag: Kendal

Ear, ear, what’s all this then?

I’ve had an ear-worm for the last three days and, “no”, you won’t find it on any online list of the 100 or more most difficult songs to get out of your head.

It’s a song that I first heard as a pupil at Kendal Grammar School a long time ago. My first year class was 1T. The ‘T’ stood for Talbot as Bob Talbot was its registration teacher. He was better know to the pupils as ‘Greb’ (no, I don’t know why either) and, in that first year, our music lessons comprised us caterwauling to the words of a school songbook.

Now, Bob was a young teacher and a nice bloke, but, in a sign of the times, he had us sing along to songs such as Jamaica Farewell and Mango Walk in a pseudo-Caribbean accent. That wouldn’t be acceptable now, quite rightly, but I’d take issue with folk that said it wasn’t acceptable even then. Greb and his pupils were complete innocents in those days and the pernicious and unintended consequences of that kind of thing were wholly unknown to us.

Anyway, my current ear-worm is neither of those tunes, but it was in the same book as them and is a song adapted from Jacques Offenbach’s operetta Geneviève de Brabant by Henry Farnie (thank you, Wikipedia, for that info). I’m not sure that younger folk would know it these days, but the song is The Gendarmes Duet.

It came back into mind earlier this week as I was watching the 1991 film Hear My Song, a comedy about the Irish tenor Josef Locke. I googled Locke while watching the film (as one does these days) and came across a recording of his version of The Gendarmes Duet.

In remembrance of my less-than-musical youth I then rather foolishly listened through every other recording of the song that I could find; hence the ear-worm. IMHO Locke’s version is by far and away the best. It is sung with Rose Tynan which is unusual as it is scripted as a duet for two men.

So, I guess I’ve only myself to blame for my 3-days-and-continuing ear-worm! Still, it has inspired this…

There once was a fellow who said
“I’ve a song on repeat in my head!
That ear-worm seems,
To have messed with my dreams
Becoming a nightmare instead!”

Postscript: I have tried to  reinterpret the lyrics of The Gendarmes’ Duet from the perspective of my dog, Callie Bordeaux. Here is Callie Bordeaux’s “Chanson de Deux Chiots Chien de Berger”

On opening your vowels…

The British side of my family hails from Newcastle-upon-Tyne in the northeast of England, Walkergate to be precise, so I was interested to read this week that, along with Liverpool, it is one of the larger, urban northern English regions that has retained its regional accent in what researchers have described as a developing ‘pan-regional “general northern English” accent among middle-class northerners’.

As a middle-class northerner of the semi-rural Cumbrian type, I too recognise that I now speak in ‘generic northern’ rather than the Kendalian of my youth, and that is due to ‘University-isation’ and living north of Fife for the last 40 years. I do have an audio recording of the 11 year old ‘me’ speaking in my pre-adolescent high-pitched, native tones and, although I try not to, I am told that I sometimes revert to type when visiting my childhood home, albeit in a deeper register.

All of which brought to mind a memory as a first-year pupil at Kendal Grammar School in the early 1970s, of our ‘old-school’ English language teacher (Stan ‘Whacker’ Wilkins) asking each of us in class, sequentially, to pronounce a letter of the alphabet. I can’t remember the letter that I had to utter, but I do recall that it was Peter Stainton that started us of with ‘a’.

When we had finished, Whacker took great delight in chiding us for our poor speech; in particular those for whom it fell to say ‘a’, ‘j’, ‘k’ and ‘o’ were demonised. Their sin was in not closing the vowels or consonants with, to a Cumbrian, a vowel-like ending. I don’t mean open or closed in the truly linguistic sense, I mean simply in their pronunciation. So, for example, we didn’t close ‘o’ with a ‘w’ sound, we just truncated it and could have carried on making the same sound until our breath ran out.

Whacker’s resonse struck me as unfair at the time, but it did lead to a few post-dinner, lavatorial comments about not opening our vowels in class, all of which brings me to today’s limerick…

Amidst some cacophonous howls
A northerner with unstable bowels
Soundtracked a farce
As he spoke through his a***e
When told not to open his vowels

Postscript: The recently-disgraced academic and TV historian, David Starkey, attended both the same primary and secondary schools as me, albeit it many years before. His recollection of Kendal Grammar School from the 1950s, below, would contrast strongly with my recollections of it in the 1970s!

“Kendal Grammar in Cumbria was a school of ancient foundations, dating back to 1526. It is now Kirkbie Kendal School. Most of our schoolmasters when I was there tended to err on the side of severity. It was not a savage school, there were hardly any beatings (I remember only two), but the atmosphere was masculine and fairly aggressive.” See TES, 2007 for more.

The only reference that I could find of Starkey’s time at Castle Street primary school is here from the Westmorland Gazette and, believe it or not, yours truly is pictured in the artcle along with my brother, Sally Collett, Christopher Nelson, Nigel Duffin, Julie Park, Paul Bateman, Margaret Robbins (my bête noir) and others.

Thea-trics at the Brewery

Despite the madness that is the UK’s franchised rail chaos, I travelled successfully from Aberdeen to Kendal for a pre-Christmas visit to see the Matriarch; a trip that coincided with Thea Gilmore’s concert at the town’s Brewery Arts Centre.

Gilmore has been described by the Guardian as popular music’s “best-kept-secret” and by Mojo as “the most coherent, literate and charged British singer-songwriter of her generation“. I’d go along with that…

I first came across her on BBC 4’s The Christmas Session in 2009 when she performed That’ll be Christmas, now one of my favourite seasonal songs. You can find it here.

Her show at the Brewery started with a cheery “Hello Kendal”, a greeting that was met with a low-murmured reply and an exchange that made me laugh…

Thea: Hello Kendal!
Audience: Murmur, murmur.
Thea: Oh dear! You sound grumpy!
Voice from the back: You’re in Kendal, luv!

Kendal – plus ça change! The concert was terrific with a small string section filling-out the sound beautifully. The evening’s only disappoint was the lack of a slide guitar accompaniment to That’ll be Christmas and its replacement by a whistling violinist. How to spoil a classic, but the only hiccup in an otherwise memorable gig.

Here’s this week’s limerick…

As a long-standing fan, my idea
Was to travel to Kendal to see a
Songstress in action
(The headline attraction).
So I did, and was spellbound by Thea! 

Postscript: Firstborn, look away now!

If you listen to That’ll be Christmas on the link above and let it play through to the song that follows it, you’ll find another seasonal favourite of mine, Bellowhead’s rendition of the gothic tragedy surrounding ‘Lovell’s bride’, The Mistletoe Bough.

For those unfamiliar with the story of Lovell’s bride, Genevra, you can read all about it here – or just re-visit it if you know the tale. Please do, it’s a Christmas classic and is followed by one of my favourite self-penned limericks!

Happy birthday, Georgy Girl!

Being a sickly child I spent a fair amount of time off school. As my Grandma lived with us, she looked after me on a number of occasions so I got to hear a lot of her favourite music. She liked musicals (South Pacific was played a lot), Frank Ifield (still touring; he even appeared at the Castle Green Hotel in Kendal, my childhood home town, as recently as the 3rd of June this year, aged 80!), The Bachelors (I wasn’t a fan) and The Seekers (who I liked a lot).

Judith Durham who fronted The Seekers has been described by Elton John, as possessing “the purest voice in popular music”. She celebrated her 75th birthday on the 3rd of July this year by releasing a new album although she will not be touring it (I suspect it comprises old, but previously unreleased recordings).

I Googled her for old times’ sake and YouTubed The Seekers and revisited their songs. It was interesting to read the BTL comments of the YouTube videos. A number of young folk had chanced upon the recordings and expressed wonderment at never having heard of Durham (or The Seekers) given the power, timbre and clarity of her voice.

Google also held a surprise for me. ‘Durham’ was not Judith’s original surname; it was her mother’s maiden name. The enchanting songstress with a spellbinding voice was christened Judith Cock! No surprise, then, that she changed it. I wish I could have penned a more respectful limerick-as-tribute, but I’m afraid I couldn’t overlook that!

Judith, a singer, became
A Seeker of stardom and fame
But her surname was ‘Cock’
So it wasn’t a shock
When she changed to her mum’s maiden name!

I knew I must be getting on a few years ago when a very much younger colleague told me she had never heard of Telex, but that was not really surprising unlike when a friend, then in her late thirties, told me she had never heard of The Seekers (it’s not the grey hairs that make me feel old, but revelations like that!).

Postscript #1: For the young or ill-informed, ‘Georgy Girl’ was a 1960s film starring James Mason, Lyn Redgrave, Alan Bates and Charlotte Rampling for which The Seekers performed the titular theme song.

Little-known fact #1: The lyrics of the theme song were written by Jim Dale, a Carry On star, whilst the music was penned by Tom Springfield, brother of Dusty, another powerful voice from the sixties.

Little-known fact #2: The film was based on the book ‘Georgy Girl’ written by Margaret Forster which just happens to be my mum’s maiden name.

Postscript #2: When The Seekers disbanded, their manager put together another group, The New Seekers, one of whom’s leads was Eve Graham, a Scottish singer who also turned 75 this year. Management and I saw her perform in Aberdeen in the mid-1980s in her solo show and, although The New Seekers was a successful  group, Graham as a solo artist was a revelation. Shamefully, due to a contractual dispute, Graham has never received any royalties from The New Seekers’ hits since 1973 despite sales of 25 million records!