Some recent donations of recorded music to TASS* have been in a genre that dare not speak its name. Terry Hyde risks derision from the cool dudes in order to check it out.


Unkool & The Gang By Terry Hyde


There’s a type of music that few admit to liking or buying; that musicologists do not write PhDs about; that rarely gets reviewed or mentioned in the music media. And yet this music sells by the container-load and its stars can fill the largest venues in the world any day of the week. Even the very name of this type of music has pejorative and patronising overtones, implying that it is “music for simpletons” or “music for people who don’t like music” etc. It is of course Easy Listening.


As a child of the fifties, raised on the BBC Light Programme, I can still remember with dread, the execrable easylistening music of shows like “Sing Something Simple”, “The Organist Entertains”, “The Black & White Minstrels”, “Semprini Serenade” and “MC Mantovani’s Mash-Up” (Are you sure about the last one? Ed.) Even back then, I could sense that this music was designed for listeners who didn’t allow music to affect them emotionally. Blessed was the day when I got my first


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radio and was able to tune into Radio Luxembourg. As Jed Bartlet was fond of saying: “give me numbers” and indeed the numbers are astonishing. The Greek chanteuse Nana Moussaka has record sales of over 200 million. This puts her in the same league as The Rolling Stones or Led Zeppelin. If we step down from the premier league, there are three easy listening


instrumentalists, each with sales in excess of 70m: James Last, Richard Clayderman and Herb Alpert. But of course,


popularity proves nothing: public executions used to be a popular and cheap day out for all the family. In stock at TASS at the moment we have a 3CD set by James Last entitled “Eighty Not Out”, although it’s not clear whether the ‘Eighty’ refers to his great age, the total number of tracks or the number of millions of records he has already sold. On LP we have the organist Reginald Dixon, the vocalist Donald Peers, the French accordionist Maurice Larcange, the trumpeter Herb Alpert and the guitarist/crooner Sacha Distel, to name just a few. We also have one of those crossover CDs where the total seems less than the sum of its parts; namely Kiri Te Kanawa singing Michel Legrand. It may be harsh, but whenever I hear a trained opera singer venturing into jazz or pop or show tunes I am inevitably reminded of Oscar Wilde’s comment on seeing a dog walking upright on its back legs: it’s not done well, but one is surprised to see it done at all. And so, inevitably, this list raises an obvious question.


Is there such a thing as good easy listening music?


Someone once said that there are only two types of music: good and bad. So that even if one does not care for brass-band music, there are undoubtedly good and bad brass bands (honest - they have competitions and everything). So is there such a thing as good easy listening music? Well I would have to say ‘yes’, if my recent long-haul flight was anything to go by. The huge


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