Sinatra at the Sands

This deluxe production has excellence right through it: Sinatra near his peak; Basie and his band; Quincy Jones conducting & arranging. The recording quality is first-rate too, and puts the listener right in the room that "has that peculiar air about it that only successful clubs have: a combination of cigarette smoke, overheated air, smouldering dust, Lysol Clorox cleaned linen, even the silverware smells different from home silverware" to quote Stan Cornyn's notes in the gatefold.

As well as instantly-recognisable songs like 'Come Fly With Me' and 'It Was a Very Good Year', there are also a few brief, but thrilling Basie instrumentals, and a pair of Sinatra's monologues - one longer ('The Tea Break'); one shorter ('A Few Last Words'). Collectively these do heighten the sense of a single evening's entertainment, but would it have been any less of a record had the monologues been omitted? Nat 'King' Cole's At The Sands a contemporaneous release (but recorded some years earlier), has very little in the way of stage patter, and is hardly any less effective an album than this.

This double LP, a late-'60s German re-issue in great condition, was among those I bought in the first few years of the century during my time in Sweden. I think I may have already had the Classic Sinatra CD compilation at that point, but this was my first taste on Sinatra on vinyl.

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All Wrapped Up

Here's another of the compilation cassettes I bought this summer, having taken home a Denon twin-deck hi-fi cassette player from the local charity shop. All Wrapped Up is a 1983 compilation of singles by The Undertones, with Side One filled with A-sides, and B-sides on Side Two. A cassette must be the least desirable medium for such an arrangement, with a long rewind required if one just wants to hear the hits repeatedly. The Undertones were unapologetically provincial and anti-fashionable, with their songs sharply-written slices of life that pointedly avoided any mention of politics, or of the then-continuing violence in their native Derry. My favourite tracks are the obvious choices: 'Teenage Kicks', 'Jimmy Jimmy', 'Here Comes the Summer', 'My Perfect Cousin' & 'Wednesday Week'. Their later singles showed increased sophistication but lack the some of the straightforward charm of their earlier work. The B-sides, not unexpectedly, are mo...

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Onslow

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