Super jingle

I came upon the following US toothpaste ad from the 1960s.

What a fabbo music track! I really love that style, which reminds me a bit of PAMS radio station jingles of that era. What a pity today's commercials don't have the same schwung.

Worst lyp-synch in history?

Perry Como on US television in 1954. He looks to be drunk. I suppose they got away with it because the picture is so fuzzy anyway. Or maybe that's just a function of ancient videotape.

Nice latin orchestra though. I wonder who it is.

Happy birthday to Edmundo Ros

I am delighted to learn from Russell Davies's excellent Radio 2 programme that Edmundo Ros is still with us, and celebrating his 98th birthday this week.

Those of us who grew up in the 1950s remember when he and his Orchestra, with its very good band arrangements, seemed to be hardly ever off the wireless (BBC Light Programme), except when it was Victor Silvester or Sandy McPherson.

Edmundo Ros surely did more than anyone else to bring Latin American popular music to Britain. I honour him by presenting here his signature tune, Cuban Love Song:

A new national anthem?

I have always loathed God Save the Queen, partly because I feel no loyalty to either God or the monarchy, but also because it is such a dreary, depressing dirge.

Now Peter Tatchell has launched an appeal for a new national anthem on the grounds that the existing one is "all about slavish deference and idolatry -- the veneration of aristocratic privilege, inherited status and monarchical rule. It promotes jingoism, war, imperial conquest and the British people's subservience to god and royalty."

He is right, of course, but what to put in its place? Blake's Jerusalem has a splendid uplifting tune by Hubert Parry, and can be read as a call for a better society, which is no doubt why it was the Labour Party's theme song in the 1945 Attlee landslide election. But the words are pretty weird and mystical ("And was the holy Lamb of God On England’s pleasant pastures seen?") and, according to Wikipedia, nobody can really decide what Blake meant by them.

Then there is I Vow to Thee, My Country, which has the advantage of not referring to any specific country by name, which at least gets over the England/Britain problem. Gustav Holst's tune is kind of OK, though it doesn't come to a lump-in-the-throat climax at the end, which I feel a national anthem ought to do. The words (by Cecil Spring-Rice) are more or less all right if you leave out the jingoistic middle verse, as people usually do. But they don't seem to be saying anything much of value.

Far and away the best from a purely musical point of view, surely, is Land of Hope and Glory. You could not hope for a better or more inspiring tune than Edward Elgar's masterpiece. A.C. Benson's lyrics are a bit unsuitable, especially the imperialistic line about "wider still and wider". Why not adapt the words for modern use, replacing the God-and-Empire stuff with something that better fits a secular and multicultural society?

While almost anything would be better than God Save the Queen, I am not at all sure I want somebody to write a new song altogether. It would almost certainly be dreadful. They'd probably get talent-free "celebrities" like Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice to write some nasty, banal, tuneless horror. Let us stick with Elgar!

Sing While You Sell

This is one of my favourite musical numbers. It's from The Big Store (1941, Charles Reisner), the last film with several Marx Bros in it, and regarded by Marx Bros aficionados as far from their best. It's always said that the Bros hated being made by MGM to do big musical numbers like this, but as far as I'm concerned it's easily the best thing in the movie, with a great song by Hal Borne, superbly orchestrated in early-1940s big-band swing style. The close-harmony singers are Six Hits And A Miss, and the extraordinary deadpan solo is by Virginia O'Brien. Fantabulosa!