Touch 'Em With Love

About four years ago I was with my sister in the used record shop in Barry when she asked me who it was sang 'Ode to Billy Joe', was it Billie...? she couldn't recall. I felt fairly sure it wasn't sung by a Billie but nor could I bring the name Bobbie to mind. In due course it came back to me, and, that Christmas, I bought her a Very Best Of Bobbie Gentry LP. Not long after that I also found a copy of Way Down South, the budget UK re-issue of Gentry's second album The Delta Sweete, and gave that to my sister too.

Before passing it on I play-tested it, and was surprised and delighted by how much I enjoyed it. As luck would have it, I found another copy of Way Down South not long afterwards, picking that one up for myself. In January this year, while perusing the records at St. Mary's St. Collectables in Chepstow, I found a copy of Touch 'Em With Love, and thought I'd try that for size too. It's another very good album, an harmonious blend of country, easy listening & soul flavours.

The highlights for me include 'Where's the Playground, Johnny', 'I'll Never Fall in Love Again', and Gentry's own composition 'Seasons Come, Seasons Go'. There's also a version of 'Son of a Preacher Man' which is good too, if not quite up there with Dusty Springfield's. Speaking of Springfield, the album as a whole covers similar ground to 'Dusty in Memphis', albeit in a breezier, less highly-polished style. The cover image is another good choice, with Gentry captured barefoot & mid-twirl in a fringe-trim buckskin suit.

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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...

Complete String Quartets

While the string quartets of Nikolai Yakovievich Myaskovsky (1881-1950) were all published in the Soviet era, a few of them had pre-revolutionary origins. Two quartets he wrote in 1911 and '09 while a conservatory student re-surfaced some twenty years later designated as Quartets Nos. 3 and 4. An even earlier "schoolboy" piece was later re-worked more radically as Quartet No. 10, premiered in 1945. Myaskovsky partook of an ample share of the turmoil and tragedy of his times: he was wounded and shell-shocked after service on the front line in World War I, and his father, who had been a high-ranking military engineer, was brutally murdered by a revolutionary mob. Despite that, his music, even at its most sombre, hasn't the black bile or biting sarcasm of Shostakovich's, or of his friend Prokofiev's. Of the works collected here, in excellent early '80s performances by the Taneyev Quartet, only Quartet No. 1 has any significantly metallic tang of early S...

Onslow

George Onslow was an odd-man-out among 19th-century French composers. Born into wealth and privilege, the grandson of an English Earl, he had no need to follow the operatic gravy train, with string quartets (of which he wrote 36) and string quintets (there are another 32 of those) forming the bulk of his compositional output. The present disc contains his 28th, 29th and 30th quartets, in compelling performances by the Quatuor Diotima. These quartets were written toward the end of a prolifically-creative period for Onslow in the years 1829-35. Viviane Niaux, in her informative booklet notes, ascribes this to the composer's having heard performances of two of Beethoven's late quartets for the first time in 1828, at their Paris première. Like many of his contemporaries, Onslow was at once "fascinated and disconcerted", and, although he considered them "extravagant", they seem to have been powerfully inspirational. A further spur to creativity may have been his ...

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