Golden oldies are the new top-of-the-pub pops

Press, 10 January 1987, Page 17

Golden oldies are the new top-of-the-pub pops

You have to look pretty hard these days to find a traditional pub sing-song, writes LAURENCE MARKS. But a new anthology of songs may go some way to take people back to what used to be a way of life.

These days in London pubs, Saturday night entertainment is likely to consist of a trio of rockers yammering into an amplifier or a troupe of goosepimpled go-go dancers. But once in a while, strollingfrom the theatre late in the evening, you catch the muffled words of “Are We To Part Like This, Bill?” Pushing open the saloon-bar door, peering across the phalanxes of dimpled pint beer-mugs, you receive a full

blast of the 50-year old chorus Are we to part this way? Who’s it to be, her or me? Don’t be afraid to say! The sing-song is still alive, and now the novelist, Kingsley Amis, and the publisher, James Cochrane, have compiled an anthology of 200 old favourites, “The Great British Songbook,” as a prompt to failing memory. T. S. Eliot said of Marie Lloyd, the best-loved of Edwardian

music hall artists, that she had the capacity to express the soul of the people. Humming along with Amis and Cochrane, one is reminded how often the commercial songs are, more than ‘‘Greensleeves” or “Blow the Wind Southerly,” the real British folk music. In this respect, the’collection is a little old-fashioned. Although some of us can still give a good account of “Widdicombe Fair” and “John PeeL” our bathtub repertoire is more likely to include “You’re The Tops” and “Old Man River,” neither included here. The average Englishman over 40 has acquired his stock of remembered songs- from four principal sources: church, school, military service, and radio and television. The book contains a

splendid selection of the great self-confident anthems of the Victorian middle class — “Praise My Soul the King of Heaven,” “We Plough the Fields and Scatter,” “Eternal Father, Strong to Save,” “Onward, Christian Soldiers” — to whose martial strains you could march an infantry battalion into battle: At the sign of triumph Satan’s legion flee; On then, Christian Soldiers, On to victory! This section features several distinguished lyricists: Christina Rossetti’s “In The Bleak Midwinter,” William Blake’s “Jerusalem” (Amis’s old school song), and John Bunyan’s “To Be A Pilgrim,” which has one of the loveliest tunes of any song in the book — second only, perhaps, to Handel’s setting of Alexander

Pope’s “Where’er You Walk.” School is where most learn the traditional secular songs, nowadays labelled “Folk.” Indeed, the first few bars of “The Ash Grove” or “Cockles and Mussels” bring an instant whiff of macaroni cheese and bread-and-butter pudding. Are they still sanctioned by progressive schoolmasters? They are full of heresies from the benighted past: Militaristic: Wider still and wider shall thy bounds be set (“Land of Hope and Glory”); Ethnocentric: And Spaniards and Dutchmen, And Frenchmen and such men. As foemen did curse them, The bowmen of England! (“The Yeomen of England”);

Shamelessly sexist So I rolled her into bed and I covered up her head Just to keep her from the foggy, foggy dew. Army songs, more often then not, are about women rather than war, which is why barrack-room ballads are unprintable. "Eskimo Nell” and “Mademoiselle From Armentieres” have been decently excluded. So has “I Don’t Want To Be a Soldier’ ... I don’t want to go to war. Fd rather hang around Piccadilly Underground, Living on the earnings of a high-born lady! Fathers — and, as time passes, grandfathers — are the transmitters of military songs in their cieaned-up versions. “Tipperary” and “Pack Up Your Troubles” are here from the

First World War, and “The White Cliffs of Dover,” “Lili Marlene” (which the British Eighth Army “captured” from Rommel’s Afrika Corps), and “Bless ’Em All” from the Second World War. (The last of these is inseparable from the memory of Blanco, Brasso metal-polish, and the unforgettable, plangent, honkeytonk notes of a canteen piano. Indeed, some purists argue that to play it on anything else is as “inauthentic” as performing a baroque concerto on modem orchestral instruments.) Finally, there are the music hall songs. These come in three forms: character-sketches such as “Champagne Charlie” and “My Dear Old Dutch;” sentimental morality talks like “She Was Poor But She Was Honest” and “A Bird In A Gilded Cage” L

But happiness cannot be bought with gold Although she’s a rich man’s bride. Comic vignettes of social disaster include “Hello, Hello, Who’s Your Lady Friend?”, “Don’t Dilly-Dally On The Way,” “Walting At The Church,” and "Two Lovely Black Eyes” ... Oh, what a surprise! Only for telling a man he was wrong, Two lovely black eyes. This last, wonderfully rich, category reminds us of what we have been missing during the last two decades of whimpering self-pity since the Beatles came and went Cheerful songs whose words you can actually hear — perhaps somebody will start writing them again. Copyright — London Observer Service £' 4