Abandoned luncheonette

A great title for an album, even if it is a Hall and Oates one. Talking of great names, I drove by a dry cleaners today called Tuxedo Junction, which really should be a name for a Stutzbear Cats/Manhattan Transfer type band who do jazzed up covers of tunes from the Thirties and Forties and appear on variety shows. But we don't really have variety shows anymore of the sort where groups like this could appear.

So today, there are no Mike Sammes Singers, no Swingle Singers, no Glad Mills, no Brian Rogers Connection, and I think that's a great loss to TV.

I recently downloaded some Swingle Singers tunes after hearing Little Organ Fugue (IIRC) in the film Thank You For Smoking. They're kind of eerie really, all that ba-ba-ba-ba-ba, doodle-oodle-doodle-ah-ah stuff. Imagine you're sitting alone in a harshly lit kitchen, eating something plain, while someone in a clown mask who intends to murder you is creeping around outside. Suddenly you see their twisted, evil face at the window. That's what Swingles do for me.

Like the song To Know Him Is To Love Him by the Teddy Bears from 1959 - it's not meant to be sinister, but give it a listen and I defy you not to think the song is being sung by a deranged stalker. It's very Blue Velvet.

There's a great CD which was recommended to me called Fuzzy Felt Folk. It's a silly name which has been coined for a style of music that is slightly scary children's songs. Things like Christopher Casson doing My Mother Said I Never Should, which is the creepiest children's song ever. I sang it to my niece, who's two, and she immediately burst into tears. I think it must have been all that talk about gypsies, dark woods, blind horses, and telling mother I shall never come back.

There are some other creepy things, like the theme tune to the rarely-glimpsed (and sadly not on DVD) Jenny Agutter chiller I Start Counting. It's set in a New Town, and I'm a sucker for anything set in a New Town. The Offence, A Clockwork Orange, Late Call by Angus Wilson. The 1960s bleakness is most appealing.

Anyway, there's also a song called Tiffany Glass, can't remember who it's by, but some fragile woman wails in a reedy voice about seeing the world through Tiffany glass. There's also Merry Ocarina, which those in the know will remember as the music they played over the tortoise segments of Vision On, which was a strange show and unique to the time.

So If you enjoy finding the dark side of everything like I do, then this is for you.