Oh go then… a couple more of Mr. West getting some amazing tone out of a Les Paul Junior.
And this one from a Beat Club session with the lovely Uschi Nerke doing the intro.
A big 
for Corky Laing’s drumming on that track.
Mrs. FMF has a formative youth that is not documented… she has a copy of West’s second solo album, The Great Fatsby, her musical tastes being one of the things that attracted me to her.
I discovered this band through trying to find out who was responsible for the brilliant theme music to the Sunday current affairs show Weekend World, on ITV in the 1980s!
My father thought I was developing an interest in current affairs but he didn’t know I only watched it for the theme tune. (Nantucket Sleigh Ride by Mountain).
The mid 80s opening titles and theme music, preceded by the LWT ident of the time:
The full track:
If you have been watching the BBC News Channel today, between the various new summaries, they have been running a special review of the people who are no longer with us, that has included most of those mentioned above. Watching Nobby Stiles now.
Not sure which is better “Ferry Cross the Mersey” or “You’ll Never Walk Alone” but sadly Gery Marsden of Gerry and the Pacemakers just died after going into hospital Boxing Day.
He seem such a character.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-55524795
Paul
I was born in the early 60s in Liverpool, so it was great as a child to see so many of the pop groups on the radio/telly were from Liverpool.
Now everyone from Liverpool in that period would tell you how they were related to or knew The Beatles etc. whether they did or not! However, in this case my mother knew Gerry Marsden’s mother, they came from the same part of Liverpool. My mother had me and my sister late, she was 42 when I was born so I’m in a generational slip, I should be in my late 70s like Gerry was not in my late 50s.
We did live about 15 mins walk from Paul McCartney’s family home when he had just become famous and my grandmother ended living only a couple of minutes or so from there too.
As for Gerry, well he did have his guitar up high when he was young! I think I have some original singles of his that were bought for me and my sister at the time along with Beatles and other “popular beat combos” of the time in a box of tat I cleared from my late mother’s house. I don’t really want them but like a box of toy motor cars from my childhood also recovered, I can’t quite bring myself to dump them.
Gerry’s B sides and upbeat R’n’B songs are rather good IMHO, more so than his ballads, but I quite like lots of those white British beat groups who borrowed from the black American artists of the time.
My wife’s aunt once brought Jimi Hendrix to a party in Gateshead, and one of her other’s aunts got a lift from John Lennon in his roller back to the hotel she was working at in Grasmere, and got him to open the door for her like a chauffer 
One of the potential gigs I had lined up for touring in 2021 was with “Gerry’s Pacemakers”. I suspected that with Covid it wouldn’t be happening. I think it’s somewhat more certain that it won’t be happening now.
My mum and her mate once got a lift from Jimmy Savile in pouring rain in Manchester. They were teenagers at the time. He was the perfect gentleman and dropped them both off at Piccadilly Station. That is a rather chilling memory for her now.
I’d already emigrated by the time his true personality became more widely known but I do remember the “Clunk,click, every trip” campaign and his voice.
Made me a safer BSM graduate.
Paul
www.nomadic.blog
This one is nearly 30 days late but it got lost in the Hogmanay events in GM and didn’t get that much publicity in the UK.
Dawn Wells who played Mary Ann in Gilligan’s Island died of COVID complications on Dec 30. Gilligan’s Island was a massive popular “nonsense” comedy in the US in mid 60s but was not a big success in the UK. I clearly remember it being shown early evening in the UK, 5.15-5.45pm before the early evening news programs. The intended audience would be older children / younger teenagers. This was probably 1970-73-ish and was long after it had been cancelled in the US. My memories are of it are a bunch of completely clueless buffoons who didn’t deserve to be rescued. And Ginger (actress Tina Louise).
In one episode the shipwrecks hear on their radio that Gemini mission astronauts can see lights of cities as they pass over so the shipwrecks spell out SOS on palm tree logs and set them on fire hoping the astronauts will see them message and start a rescue attempt. Of course, Gilligan trips over the burning logs, kicking one so it spells SOL which is the name of one of the astronauts. "Hey look they’re spelling my name " is what the shipwrecks hear from the astronauts. That lame plot device to keep them shipwrecked stuck in my mind really well. I could never remember where I’d seen it, I certainly didn’t remember Gilligans’s Island as a program. It used to bug me I could remember this scene but not what it was from. More so was the fact nobody, but nobody was called Sol, Solly or Solomon in the UK in 1970.
It was maybe 10+ years later when there was some nostalgia program on the TV that feature Gilligan’s Island that I was able match images of Gilligan’s Island to my memories of the SOL scene. Funny things memories and how they work.
So so long Dawn Wells as Mary Ann. You were part of my formative youth but I didn’t recall you as such till much later.
But I was always “Ginger” man from about age 10 or so.
The “Mary Ann or Ginger” debate lives on… Gilligan’s Island was broadcast here in the US when I was old enough to watch it, young enough to be oblivious to how bad it was, and too young to see Mary Ann and Ginger as anything more than members of the ensemble. A blessedly naive time.
Another late posting: Phil Spector, famed music producer, creator of the “wall of sound,” and convicted murderer, died on January 16. If you know nothing else of his work, you know his production of The Righteous Brothers’ You’ve Lost that Loving Feeling. The Beatles also brought him out of “retirement” to produce Let It Be. Paul McCartney reportedly hated the symphonic additions so much that he later had the album redone as Let It Be…Naked without Spector’s additions. So it goes.
I grew up hearing the songs Spector produced without knowing about him until many years later. The many obituaries remember him as a brilliant, eccentric, troubled, and ultimately self-destructive man.
You’re a few years older than me but would have watched Gilligan when it was 1st showed and I saw it later, we were both probably the same age when we saw it. I guess as kids you pick up on how other people react and what they do even if you don’t why. Ginger always provoked more reaction than Mary Ann in a way that a 10 year old didn’t understand until later.
It’s worth checking John Lennon’s story about a gun incident in the studio with Phil Spector.
Hilton Valentine
Creator of the ‘House of the Rising Sun’ rif for the Animals
Another actress: Cloris Leachman, known for many roles in a long, long career, but I was first introduced to her in Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein as Frau Blücher (neighhhh!)
Oh no. Young Frankenstein was so full of brilliant jokes. To this day the Frau Blücher joke is a staple joke where I work especially as one of my colleagues in the Munich office had the surname Bloecher.
The Grim Reaper strikes again! The jazz genius Chick Corea died this week at the age of 79. I remember practically wearing out his album “Bitches Brew”.
He’s not from my youth. Nor my later years. Talented man indeed… it’s a shame someone dropped the music he was playing and all the notes fell off the page because whoever put them back onto the paper seems to put them back in a rather random order. Amazing Chick could play them when there was no obvious tune coming out of the piano 
I guess its a matter of how you hear music. Now to me he was an intensely melodic pianist, just listen to how his lines intertwine with the vibes on “Crystal Silence”, no hammering of block chords!
