Soul Direction

I love a visual pun, and this Soul / Sole confusion has to be one of the most off-the-wall I've ever seen.

100 Sonovox Jingles

"100 Sonovox Jingles" from East Anglia Productions. What a great cover!

Sonovox was a method of superimposing speech onto other sound sources, invented in the 1940s. It involved attaching speakers to a performer's throat -- by silently voicing words, the performer could modulate the sounds coming from the speakers into a speech form.

Commonly used to create "electronic" sounding voices, this particular album was designed to give 1970s some cheesy voice cues, with sonovox saying things like "Funky", "Oh Yeah", and introducing travel news and chart countdowns. It reminds me of Kenny Everett for some reason...

Exciting Sounds Of Tomorrow

It's Pete Moore's "Exciting Sounds Of Tomorrow"! Wow... seems like tomorrow we will all have BIG HAIR. But what are the sounds of tomorrow like? Weird electronic robot choirs? Wah wah xylophone? Orchestrated grunting and hissing?

Nope. The future, as depicted here, consists of a lot of the more laid back side of easy listening (like covers of "Witchita Lineman" and "Fool On The Hill"). None of the Pete Moore albums I've heard could be described as raucous, and this has... no futuristic electronic weirdness.

Mostly soothing, then, but the outstanding feature of this album is the amazing soul strut of "Catwalk". Funky bass and drums topped with jazz flute, marimba, harp, brass, synth -- a real ten out of ten instrumental (it appeared on the Karminsky "In Flight" compilation some years ago).

Piano On The Rocks

Horst Jankowski had a huge instrumental hit with "A Walk In The Black Forest". But he continued to release album after album showcasing his jangly piano stylings, mostly with names like "Genius Of Jankowski", "More Genius Of Jankowski", "Even More Genius Of Jankowski", and you get the idea.

Here, he has backed off on the "genius" riff, and employed one of my favourite album cover visual concepts -- playing with scale. It's pretty cool when you have, say, small people dancing on a piano keyboard, but here you have a whole piano atop a drink. "Piano On The Rocks" -- brilliant!

Milligan Preserved

So, another album, and another set of crossed eyes -- Spike Milligan's "Milligan Preserved". I do think he was a comedy genius, and any time spent with a decent set of "Goon Show" recordings should demonstrate this to you.

This is of the Goon era, and is equally weird, wild and wonderful. Produced by George Martin, and the use of sound effects is hilarious, particularly in "I'm Going Out With A Mountain", where they are used in lieu of names, one of the funniest things I've ever heard. Uniquely Milligan are the bizarre auctioneer's lot recitations on "Another Lot" and the inventory of foodstuffs on "Fun, Fun, Fun" (which reminds me of Georges Perec's list "Attempt at an Inventory of the Liquid and Solid Foodstuffs Ingurgitated by Me in the Course of the Year Nineteen Hundred and Seventy-Four" -- a man with a similarly impish sense of humour).

Lots of little touches and big pokes underline Spike's sense of humour. Things like all the liner notes being in Arabic. Anyone have any clue what's going on with those?

The Al Capone Song Book

Check out this LP -- the Al Capone Song Book! The cover is magic -- that arched eyebow, the wonky tie and crossed eyes, the only partially blacked in clothing, and the classic Capone quote -- "Live fast, die young, and have a good looking corpse".

A very rock 'n' roll sentiment, although the music itself is fairly sedate, basically a selection of big band tunes from the 1920s in the style of the times. The album's theme is reinforced by some connecting narration in a cheesy Chicago gangster voice.

Arrangements by Stan Butcher.