Who Do You Think You Are Kidding?

Everyone knows Arthur Lowe, be it for the bumbling, bumptious bank manager George Mainwaring, captain of the Home Guard in the classic sitcom Dad’s Army, for being the original narrator of the BBC’s beloved Mr Men animated TV series, or as the decapitated head on a bottle of milk outside Ian Hendry’s penthouse flat in the cult classic Theatre of Blood.

 

But what you might not know is that he also had a recording career.

 

Born on 22 September 1915, former barrow boy and office clerk Lowe’s acting career spanned almost 40 years: he was nominated for seven BAFTAs, and is – 40 years after his death – still one of the most recognisable faces on UK television.

 

He began acting professionally in 1945, after serving in the army during the Second World War. He worked in theatre, film and television throughout the 1950s, appearing in a number of serial dramas an several sitcoms, but it was not until he landed the part of lay preacher Leonard Swindley in the soap opera Coronation Street in 1960 that he became a star. He played the character until 1967, including appearances in two spin-off series, but in 1968 he was approached to appear in a new sitcom for the BBC about a home guard unit.

 

Originally called The Fighting Tigers, Lowe was not the first actor considered for the role; others included Jon Pertwee, Leonard Rossiter, and even John Le Mesurier, who would go on to define the role of Sgt Wilson. The production team originally wanted Lowe for the role of Wilson, but by the time The Fighting Tigers had become Dad’s Army the classic cast, known and loved to this day, was in place.

 

Lowe would play Mainwaring on TV until the show ended, after more than 80 episodes and one feature film. Radio and live stage adaptations would follow, and Dad’s Army has proved so popular that it is still being shown on TV today. Following the portrayal of Mainwaring, Lowe went on to star in other sitcoms, including Bless Me Father and Potter. As he aged he began a battle with narcolepsy, and his habit of falling asleep was often dismissed by others around him as drunkenness, as he had a fondness for a glass or three. He died, after suffering a stroke in his dressing room in a theatre in Birmingham, on 15 April 1982.

 

Luckily for us, alongside his stellar career in film and television, Arthur Lowe also made a series of recordings. The first came in 1952, when he recorded songs from the soundtrack of the stage show Call Me Madam. During the 1970s there was a series of albums and singles featuring his narrations of the Mr Men stories, but there were also a number of releases inspired by his portrayal of Captain Mainwaring, including the 1969 album Bless ‘Em All: Arthur Lowe Sings the Songs of WWII, 1971 45 Dad’s Army March, released to promote the film, and the disc I present for you today, the 1972 release How I Won The War (not related to the John Lennon/Michael Crawford film of the same name) backed with My Little Girl, My Little Boy. His final single was the 1980 RCA release And Yet, And Yet.

 

A brief aside: one of co-writers credited on both sides of How I Won The War is ‘Ridley’. This is not Arnold Ridley, the actor and playwright who appeared in Dad’s Army as the gentle medic Mr Godfrey, but Walter ‘Wally’ Ridley, A&R man at HMV, who also produced Ernie (The Fastest Milkman in the West), a Number One for Benny Hill, gave Morecambe and Wise their signature song Bring Me Sunshine and produced the 1975 Number One Whispering Grass for Windsor Davies and Don Estelle.

 

Enjoy!

 

Download War HERE

Download Little HERE

Wham Zam, Thank You Man

In the last post, I mentioned Harold Spiro, a songwriter whose career I have touched upon occasionally on the blog, but without going into too much detail. Let me correct that now.

 

Harold Jacob Spiro was born in 1925. Spiro’s family ran a confectionery business in London, but young Harold wanted to be a songwriter. He found a way into the world of showbiz through writing verses for greetings cards, but his first big break came in 1962, when he wrote There’s Never Been Another Girl, which was recorded by Kenny Lynch. Over the next couple of years he wrote for acts as diverse as Andee Silver, one of the singers with the Joe Loss Orchestra, ‘comedians’ Mike and Bernie Winters, and even the Yardbirds: Spiro co-wrote Little Games with Phil Wainman, who would go on to have huge success as a producer for The Sweet, the Bay City Rollers, Generation X and even my beloved XTC.

 

Later successes would include songs for Cliff Richard, the Troggs and Freddie Starr. Then came Nice One, Cyril, a song with a tagline purloined from a TV advert for sliced bread, repurposed to celebrate the on-pitch exploits of Tottenham Hotspur player Cyril Knowles.

 

Nice One, Cyril was a huge hit, and quickly adopted by fans on the terraces, much to the chagrin of Tottenham Hotspur’s management team, who had commissioned their own song, Hot Spurs Boogie that, although performed by the team and given official backing, sank without a trace. Nice One, Cyril won an Ivor Novello Award for Best Novel or Unusual Song.

 

In 1974, Spiro and then-writing partner Valerie Avon (of hit vocal trio the Avons; real name Valerie Murtagh) hit paydirt again, with Long Live Love, their third attempt at Eurovision gold. The song, performed by Olivia Newton-John, was chosen as the British entry that year. Long Live Love was the pair’s third attempt at penning the Song For Europe: they began in 1969 writing Can I Believe, which was shortlisted and performed by Mary Hopkin on the BBC, but lost out in viewers’ votes to Knock Knock, Who’s There? Cliff Richard revisited the song for the 1970 contest, and Clodagh Rogers recorded a second song, My World of Beautiful Things the following year, which lost out to Jack In The Box.

 

In 1975 he wrote a song for a nine-year-old singer from Liverpool called Malandra Burrows. Burrows would not hit the charts, although a decade later she would join the cast of hit soap opera Emmerdale Farm and, in 1990, enjoy a number 11 hit with Just This Side of Love. Many more hits and misses would follow over the next 20 years, including more football songs and even a record written for the mechanics of his local garage. He died in Cyprus in 1996, but six years after his death his song We’re On The Ball was picked as England’s official World Cup song for 2002: recorded by Ant and Dec, the song went to number three in the UK singles charts. A fitting tribute to a man who loved music and football equally.

 

But it is Harold’s performing career we’re most interested in today. For along with his success as a songwriter, he also attempted to break into the charts as a singer, utilising the pseudonym Hoagy Pogey, a tribute of sorts to Hoagy Carmichael, of whom Spiro was a big fan. As Hoagy, Spiro ‘dresses up like a ten-year-old boy in shirt, bow tie and plus fours, and to complete the image paints on a false moustache. This dumpy creature looking like “Tweedle Dum” does not walk on stage, he runs in on tiptoe,’ according to an article on the Harrow Observer. They obviously had strange pre-teens in Harrow in the 1970s. The writer of the article seemed to think that Hoagy was trying to market himself as Britain’s answer to Tiny Tim, although Spiro’s vocal style owes more to Peter Skellern… an atonal Peter Skellern at that.

 

Harold/Hoagy issued a number of 45s in Britain and in Europe, beginning in 1972 with Don’t Ya Know/Why Don’t You Go Away on Decca’s progressive imprint Deram. Both sides were written by Harold Spiro, Valerie Avon and Tony Hiller, and the single was even given a US release.

 

The team followed that with another football song, this time credited to Northeast featuring Hoagy Pogey, A Ticket For The Game. Two more singles from the trio would follow, Falling In Love With You-Hoo-Hoo-Hoo/Nothing Better and Wedding of the Year – a song inspired by the wedding of Princess Anne to Captain Mark Phillips - backed with the truly awful Wham Zam, on which Spiro attempts to affect a Jamaican accent.

 

In 1974 Valerie left the act and Hoagy moved to Pye for the final two singles. First came the ragtime jazz-flavoured Cincinnati Sammy backed with Oh Was It Love, two Tony Hiller/Harold Spiro penned songs, and, in November 1974 – and this time credited as Hoagy Poagy – the final 45 appeared, One Step Behind The Music and Lies, again with both sides by Hiller and Spiro. In 1984 Hoagy would make a brief reappearance, this time without Hiller on board, for a one-off single credited to Hoagy and the Terrace Choir, The Last Football Song backed with Here We Go.

 

Here are a couple of cuts from Hoagy/Harold’s impressive career, Wham Zam and Wedding of the Year.

 

Enjoy!

 

Download Wham HERE

Download Wedding HERE

Football Fiasco

Note: I've just realised that I wrote about this album six years ago, but as the links on that post (which were for different songs) are now dead, and some of the information was incorrect, you may as well have this anyway! 

The British record buyer has had a soft spot for football-related records for a long time: the earliest football-related record I’m aware of is 1934 8” by the Band of the Arsenal Football Club, and I dare say there were dozens of others between then and the two unofficial England World Cup songs from 1966, Lonnie Donegan’s World Cup Willie, and the Alexander Silver-penned England Football Song.

 

However, in February 1973 a group supposedly made up of Tottenham Hotspur supporters – but actually featuring studio musicians including a pre-Iron Maiden Nicko McBrain on drums - scored a Top 20 hit with the Harold Spiro and Helen Clark song Nice One Cyril. Calling themselves the Cockerel Chorus after the Spurs emblem, history tells us that the title of the song was a reference to Cyril Knowles, a member of the Spurs team, but the phrase had been coined a year or so earlier, and was used in a television advert for Wonderloaf bread before the Tottenham crowd adopted the song.

 

Spiro, a fan of the club, was a jobbing songwriter whose credits include writing for WWR alumni Mike and Bernie Winters, David Hamilton and Frank ‘Foo Foo’ Lamarr, as well as the Yardbirds, the Troggs, Cliff Richard, Olivia Newton-John, and even Agnetha Faltskog. He also wrote other football-themed songs, including The Boys in White (for Fulham) released by Cottage Pie in 1975 (Fulham’s home ground was/is Craven Cottage, the oldest football stadium in London), and worked closely with hit songwriter Tony Hiller. Hiller, the man who gave the world the Brotherhood of Man, was another football fan and the pair wrote, amongst others, the official Everton team record from 1985, Here We Go. As well as writing together, the pair had a musical act, Hoagy Poagy, that issued several remarkably bad singles on Pye and Deram in the mid-70s. Hoagy was ‘played’ by Harold Spiro, and marketed as Britain’s answer to Tiny Tim (the ukulele-wielding singer, not the Dickens’ character). He wasn’t, but that’s a back catalogue that I shall examine in a WWR blog post soon!

 

Nice One Cyril, with a lead vocal from Spiro, was released a few months before the 1973 Football League Cup Final, where Tottenham played Norwich City, and not only was it a hit, reaching Number 14 in the UK singles chart, but it spawned a follow-up, Only A Thousand A Day, and an album, Nice One Cyril: Cockerel Chorus Have a Party. Issued through songwriter/producer Miki Dallon’s Young Blood International (distributed at that time through CBS), the album was later reissued by budget specialist Hallmark Records as Party Sing-A-Long.

 

And what an album it is! The single may be a dismissible novelty, but the album is a full-on monstrosity, coming over like a cross between one of those awful, pseudo-ribald rugby songs albums that were so beloved of a certain type of British male, and audio verité of a bunch of football hooligans out on the lash. It is absolutely appalling, hence its inclusion here. Don’t believe me? have a listen to a couple of tracks and tell me I’m wrong. Here is the Cockerel Chorus with their dreadful cover of the Tony Orlando and Dawn hit Tie A Yellow Ribbon and French singer Danyel Gérard’s Butterfly.

 

Enjoy!

 

Download Ribbon HERE

Download Butterfly HERE