The Andrews Sisters, in Hi-fi

Yep, another one to conjure up lots more histories. This was my de-facto baby song which my mother’s school orchestra played for years and years in a variety of arrangements. It’s also the song that Chris and I did at Marlow’s in Bristol, which made them offer us a gig which then got pulled at the last minute amid managers shouting at each other, locks being changed, and on our part; frantic efforts to rehouse the gig at the last minute, Hayley quickly scribbling new directions on the posters we’d cleverly left all over the city. And ok course we rocked. E minor. I also played it with Therese at the Old Duke on king Street when she arrived once to Bristol with Chris’s trumpet to send it via Hayley to Japan as Hayley was going there to live with Chris forever and ever and ever…

As well as those stories, when I moved into my first Edinburgh flat (with the purple kitchen and black and white tiled floor), we found a tape of Andrews Sisters songs in one of the drawers. I remember everyone was round one evening, sitting around the kitchen table and on the weird natty white sofa which we sometimes covered with a drape thing (and sometimes didn’t). I put this tape on and Adam said “I feel like we should all be in black and white”. That’s one of my last pleasant memories of the York people so I’m grateful for it.

I love the barbershop harmonies here, whether or not they’re technically barbershop; I don’t know, but unless you know the song it’s hard to put your finger exactly on where the melody is…it’s kind of cushioned on both sides by supporting harmonies rather than putting the melody on top all the time.

There’s such a rainbow inherent in this kind of music, all the excitement of the orchestration, the layers, the playful um-ching (trochaic?) bass-line and piano jumping around with each other. OK, that was a vinyl jump but I know the rest of it’s intended. I really should be reading about globalisation and the retrenchment of the welfare state but frankly the fact that I’m still conscious with my bizarre jet-lag sleeping pattern is admirable. This is my mid=day slump and I’ve a long way to go before anything bangin’ can wake me up…jazz piano in the style of Snoopy will have to do (Drinkin’ rum and coca cola…)

Don’t sit under the apple tree…their voices are amazing, really strident, totally in control of each note as it appears no matter how unexpected (and some of the notes in these harmonies and melodies are rather unexpected), but without any of that horrible training I spent my academic years as a musician railing against which makes women (particularly sopranos) sound like hens with a particularly tremulous grievance. Altos are exempt. They just sound like tenors who look in the mirror slightly less often.