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34 1959
1959
35
himself. He was very frightened”,
har Jane Birkin berättat (Ironiskt
nog döpte Serge 1986 en son till just
Lucien). Namnet hintade mot ideal
av konstnärlig kosmopolism och det
rollspel som skulle komma att prägla
Serge Gainsbourgs musik.
Låten ”La Nuit d’Octobre” finns
med på Serge Gainsbourg andra
album N° 2, från 1959. En skiva
som säkert kunde uppfattas som
omodern när det begav sig, eftersom
den var mer jazz/latin/exotica/chanson
än rock, men som låter så fräsch
att den i själva verket överskrider sin
tid. ”La Nuit d’Octobre” var ingen
singel och är inte särskilt känd, men
det är min favorit från den rika,
tidiga Gainsbourg-eran.
Texten till ”La Nuit d’Octobre”
(titeln betyder ”natten i oktober”)
inspirerades av en dikt av 1800- tals -
poeten Alfred de Musset. Enligt
Gainsbourg en av Mussets sämsta
dikter och därmed en anledning
till att våga sig på att adaptera den.
Jag förstår knappt ett ord franska,
men det gör inget i det här fallet.
Det som lockar med ”La Nuit
d’Octobre” är till stor del det som
lockar med Serge Gainbourg över
huvud taget: det är inte text utan en
musikalisk detalj i form av en catchy
blåsslinga som stannar i ens huvud i
dagar, och det är dess patos och lekfullhet.
Tillsammans är det kvaliteter
som tillhör essensen av riktigt
bra popmusik, då som nu.
Stefan Zachrisson
LONNIE DONEGAN
The battle of New Orleans
Singel, Pye, 1959.
In 1959 both the American John
Gale ”Johnny” Horton and the
English Anthony James ”Lonnie”
Donegan charted in the United
Kingdom with recordings of
the quasi-folk song ”The Battle
of New Orleans”, composed by
James Corbitt Morris, or Johnny
Driftwood as he was known as
a songwriter. He composed the
song as an educational aid for the
high school students he taught.
Driftwood used an older, wordless
folk melody, ”The 8th of January”,
the 1815 date of the Battle of
New Orleans itself, when a British
invasion of that city was quashed by
American forces.
These two recordings of the
song differ slightly in their lyrics
( Donegan was forced to omit the
only mildly shocking word ”bloody”
and substitute it with ”bloomin’”),
but also in Donegan’s nationally
self-deprecating introduction, in
which he concedes that ”the British
came off rather ignominiously”.
Whilst Horton had made a career
out of performing ”historical song”,
Donegan’s relationship to any sort
of historical authenticity was looser
still. He became famous after departing
from the English Trad Jazz
scene of the ’fifties so as to perform
a thrilling sort of proto-rock’n’roll,
in which he and his band played
simplified and at times hysterical
renditions of thoroughly decontextualised
American songs. He sung
about ”picking bales of cotton”,
about working the Rock Island
Line, and indeed about fighting the
British 150 years before.
The American names and places
in Donegan’s recordings are like
abstract incantations or chants, as
”Mighty Mississippi” or ”Wabush
Cannonball” become dextrous,
driving codes for youthful release.
His own musical background, in
fact, came from a decontexualization
of New Orleans itself, playing the
banjo in Chris Barber’s Jazz Band.
But in his shift to skiffle music (the
name of the style itself was derived
from an earlier African-American
party blues music combining homemade
instruments with banjos and
guitars) he taught a generation of
British people to play, listen and
dance to a music released from its
narrative meanings and vivified by
intensity and vigour. Some of these
listeners, like the youthful Liverpudlian
members of The Quarrymen,
would stage their own British Invasion
with an irresistible success that
had eluded the soldiers aboard the
fleet of Sir Alexander Cochrane in
1815.
The ”skiffle craze” of the late
’fifties remains floating in historical
isolation between the music
that inspired it and the music it
itself inspired, and seems now like
a strange and exciting trans-Atlantic
musicological curiosity – music
that rebounded freely and naively
from its origins in order to be contemporary,
and which is now so
thoroughly planted in historical
time.
David Edward Price
BERNARD HERRMANN
The 7th voyage of Sinbad
Från filmen The 7th voyage of
Sinbad, 1958, Colpix Records, 1964.
Ovanstånde Herrmann-verk är välbekant
för de flesta som har lite koll
på musik eller för vem som helst
som sett en Hitchcock-film. Ibland
kan jag vara lite allergisk mot personer
som är hyllade bortom alla
proportioner och ofta är ju inte de
mest hyllade de som nödvändigtvis
har mest substans heller.
Imitation of life, Douglas Sirk (1959)
The Caretaker, Harold Pinter (1959)