Speakers Push Air

There’s a bunch of songs I remember vividly from my early 70s childhood, mostly from that Ed Stewart kids show and then Jimmy Savile’s Old Record Club - the two blur for me, but certain songs always meant Sunday lunch was nearly ready. The late 60s / early 70s were blighted with dreadful novelty records, but some were really bizarre - Mouldy Old Dough by Lieutenant Pigeon comes to mind, surely the weirdest number one ever (I mean, what the fuck was that?) - and some perhaps weren’t novelty records at all, not really.

My favourite record when I was a kid was a scratched up copy of Simon Smith & His Amazing Dancing Bear by The Alan Price Set that my dad gave me. A big hit in 1967, it was originally a Randy Newman song, but as (almost) always, Newman wasn’t the best performer of his own songs. Price (who’d done some brilliant stuff as part of the Animals) exaggerated a kind of music hall element Newman had hinted at, and came up with a really beautiful, fairly odd song about the exploits of a boy and his bear. It honestly makes me well up sometimes when I listen to it, partly I’ll admit through sentimentality and nostalgia, but also because it’s just so bloody lovely.

Keeping to the pattern of 3 tracks at a time, first off here’s the Alan Price version (and I recommend the compilation it’s lifted from, Price was a brilliant and curious talent - especially his work with Lindsay Anderson on O Lucky Man).

The Alan Price Set - Simon Smith & His Amazing Dancing Bear
from any number of Price compilations

Next up is a stripped down, jauntyness-free version by Okkervil River, a patchy but sometimes impressive indie /country outfit from Austin. I like the way that slowing it down and taking out the sparkly piano (and adding a fairly wracked-sounding vocal) leaves you with a song that sounds so sad and weary, despite cheeriness of the lyrics.

Okkervil River - Simon Smith & His Amazing Dancing Bear
from the free ‘mixtape’ Golden Opportunities (available on the band’s website)

To be honest, though, this is all a preamble to my best Youtube find ever. Watching this (on repeat) made me unreasonably overexcited and happy, and maybe it’ll hit you like that too.