Two Faces of Virginia

Virginia Anne McKenna, OBE, is an English stage and screen actress, author, and wildlife campaigner, who this month celebrated her 90^th birthday.

 

Best known for films including A Town Like Alice (1956), Born Free (1966), and Ring of Bright Water (1969), as well as her work with animal charity The Born Free Foundation, she landed her first film role in 1952. In 1954 she married the actor Denholm Elliot. The marriage was a disaster: Elliott was a closeted homosexual and the marriage failed after a few months, although they did not divorce until 1957. Soon after she married actor and decorated war hero Bill Travers: the couple went on to have four children and would remain together until Travers’ death in 1994.

 

Virginia had taken singing lessons while at drama school, and had appeared in a number of musicals, from the raging success of The King and I  with Yul Brynner through to the dismal flop Winnie… a musical about Winston Churchill starring Robert Hardy. As she admitted herself (in her autobiography The Life in My Years) ‘Although I was never a particularly talented singer, I don’t think I was ever happier as a performer than when I was in a musical atmosphere.’ Luckily for us, this sense of self-awareness did not prevent her from recording her own album of love songs.

 

McKenna has been involved with several film and stage soundtracks, but to date, Two Faces of Love remains her only pop music outing. First issued in 1975 through Rediffusion’s Gold Star imprint, with a cover illustration from her sister-in-law Linden Travers, the album was reissued four years later in a different sleeve by RIM, aka Rediffusion International Music Ltd.

 

‘I fear I am not wildly “pop”,’ she confided in the Daily Mirror’s Paul Callan. ‘I’m a bit too old for that.’ Revealing that she had composed two of the album’s dozen tracks herself, she told him that ‘One does get so terribly tabbed as an actress.’ Two Faces of Love was relatively well-received in some quarters, with acting trade newspaper The Stage stating that ‘Though she has no pretentions at being a great singer, Virginia McKenna has made a highly effective and sensitive album… Reciting some lyrics, singing others and sometimes combining the two, she steers away from sentimentality and in the process delivers as affecting a version of “Send in the Clowns” as one is likely to hear.’ Well, there’s no question that Ginny’s reading of the Sondheim classic is far superior to that from fellow Thespian Elizabeth Taylor.

 

Here are a couple of tracks from the album for you: The Love That I Have (Violette) which was also issued as the album’s sole single, and The Windmills of Your Mind.

 

Enjoy!

 

Download Love HERE  

Download Windmills HERE  

Du Bist Die Beat-Oma

No one seems to know the name of the real woman behind the name Die Beat Oma (the Beat Granny), the aged Austrian chanteuse who released just one 45... The very disc that I present for you today.

 

Issued in Germany in 1966, in the same year that both Mrs Miller and Mme St Onge were unleashed on an unsuspecting world, Ich Bin Die Beat Oma (I Am the Beat Grandmother), was a ‘cover’ of the Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night, with new lyrics by Andy Wölfel. Her solitary release, Ich Bin Die Beat Oma was backed by Balla Balla, a song written by bass player Horst Lippok and originally recorded by the German beat group The Rainbows, of which Lippok was a member, in 1965.

 

On the A-side of the single Die Beat Oma is accompanied by a group called Jerry & The G-Men. According to the Discogs listing, she toured with the band in the mid-60s, and a little ferreting around leads me to believe that she did indeed play dates during 1965 and 1966. Andy Wölfel - the man who liberally adapted the words of Messers Lennon and McCartney - acted as her manager (and, presumably, as manager of Jerry and co too), and on at least one occasion Die Beat Oma and Jerry & The G-Men played Wölfel’s hometown, Klosterneuburg in Austria.

 

No band is credited on the flip side, but The Rainbows' version of Balla Balla had also been issued by CBS, and to my ears both recordings seem to utilise the same basic backing track, not unlike how Tony Roman used backing tracks by his band Les Baronets for the Mme. St. Onge project. I understand that Wölfel, who also had a role in the 1967 German film Heubodengeflüster (a.k.a. Whispering In The Hayloft), and who was Austria’s first notable beat group manager, died of an overdose.  

That's all I have: any further information on this incredible disc and its perpetrators would be most welcome.

Enjoy!

Download Beat HERE

 

 Download Balla HERE

You Are the GoZoo Band

1966 was a great year for musical oddities: Mrs. Miller was ruling the roost internationally; in Canada musician and producer Tony Roman unveiled the wonderful Madame St Onge, those silly savages Teddy and Darrell were doing their thing, and around the world, the novelty album was big business. Every country – almost every label – had a left-field act that was doing decent business, charming TV audiences and selling enough copies of their latest opus to keep the men at the top happy.

 

It was into this heady age that the GoZoo Band suddenly appeared. ‘Sounding like a semi-melodic swarm of bees’, according to one contemporary reviewer, their gimmick was playing pop music using kazoos, a dozen years before Rhino founders Richard Foos and Harold Bronson formed the Temple City Kazoo Orchestra.

 

Originally released via their own Go Go Records label (distributed through Epic; reissued in the UK in 1968 on the President Records imprint Joy), the GoZoo Band’s solitary album, Sounds That Are Happening!, is just 25 minutes long. Featuring a mix of kazooed-up versions of recent pop hits (including Mellow Yellow and Winchester Cathedral) as well as old-timey vaudeville songs and a couple of originals, the album was produced by Tony Marer, who would go on to work with Norman Greenbaum, and featured musical arrangements from Jimmie Haskell (born Sheridan Pearlman), a prolific composer and arranger who specialised in movie soundtracks but who had worked with Ricky Nelson, Rosemary Clooney, Bobby Darin, the Lettermen, Pat Boone, Richard Chamberlain and dozens, if not hundreds, more. Haskell composed two of the tunes that appear on the album, including the 45 Sid’s Lid.

 

Unsurprisingly there is zero information on the jacket or on the disc itself about the individual members of the GoZoo Band. It’s safe to assume though that the kazoo-toting hipsters in the back of the Woodie on the front cover of the album were models and not one of them had the skill to blow through a plastic tube. My best guess would be that the album was recorded by a mix of session musicians and members of Dr. West's Medicine Show and Junk Band, the Norman Greenbaum-led psychedelic rock band who had a minor hit with The Eggplant That Ate Chicago... which was also issued by Go Go Records, also produced by Tony Marer and, crucially, also featured kazoos.

 

Anyway, here, for your enjoyment, are a couple of tracks from Sounds That Are Happening!, their covers of the Hollies’ Stop Stop Stop, and of Donovan’s Mellow Yellow.

 

Enjoy!

 

Download Stop HERE

Download Mellow HERE