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Tonight's the night for something sophisticated, | 0:00:04 | 0:00:07 | |
something suggestive, not explicit. | 0:00:07 | 0:00:11 | |
Something relaxing, not demanding. | 0:00:11 | 0:00:15 | |
Something that won't divert your attention away from more pressing matters. | 0:00:15 | 0:00:21 | |
You need something that doesn't make trouble | 0:00:23 | 0:00:27 | |
that complements the furnishings and doesn't have too much to say for itself. | 0:00:27 | 0:00:32 | |
You don't need troublesome lyrics or choppy guitar chords. | 0:00:32 | 0:00:36 | |
So just lean back, banish the blues, | 0:00:41 | 0:00:44 | |
relinquish rock and roll and give disco the heave-ho. | 0:00:44 | 0:00:49 | |
Tonight, you need something that has all of that... | 0:00:49 | 0:00:54 | |
and none of it. | 0:00:54 | 0:00:57 | |
What you need tonight is easy. | 0:00:57 | 0:01:01 | |
# Time to get ready... # | 0:01:03 | 0:01:06 | |
CORK POPS # Time to get ready for... # | 0:01:06 | 0:01:11 | |
If rock and roll was born out of the greyness, stuffiness and ration book mentality | 0:01:24 | 0:01:30 | |
that followed the Second World War, so too was a music that became known as easy listening. | 0:01:30 | 0:01:36 | |
Its architects, and they looked just like that, | 0:01:41 | 0:01:44 | |
were a group of men who were trapped between two worlds - | 0:01:44 | 0:01:48 | |
just a little too old and square for the teenage revolution of the late '50s, | 0:01:48 | 0:01:53 | |
but too modern and groovy for the old world. | 0:01:53 | 0:01:57 | |
They were supreme melodicists on the run from jazz and big bands | 0:01:58 | 0:02:03 | |
in search of a music to call their own, | 0:02:03 | 0:02:06 | |
a music for the new consumer age. | 0:02:06 | 0:02:09 | |
An age of reconstruction, | 0:02:10 | 0:02:12 | |
of gliding along freeways and autobahns in sleek cars. | 0:02:12 | 0:02:16 | |
A modern, comfortable age full of hope | 0:02:20 | 0:02:24 | |
and most importantly, love, in what had been a very cold climate. | 0:02:24 | 0:02:29 | |
These men were not looking for the heartbreak hotel. | 0:02:31 | 0:02:35 | |
They wanted to be kings of the road with their own brand of can-do music. | 0:02:35 | 0:02:40 | |
Composers and arrangers like Percy Faith, Ray Conniff and Bert Kaempfert were a quiet band of men | 0:02:45 | 0:02:51 | |
who didn't stand out in the crowd, but they were dedicated | 0:02:51 | 0:02:54 | |
to decorating the air with a soundtrack for what they thought should be the good life. | 0:02:54 | 0:03:00 | |
You can really trace | 0:03:06 | 0:03:08 | |
this popular, light orchestral, at least in America, | 0:03:08 | 0:03:11 | |
to a gentleman named Paul Weston who came out of the big band era. | 0:03:11 | 0:03:15 | |
And in the mid-'40s, he was coming out with what initially he called "mood music". | 0:03:15 | 0:03:21 | |
It was a euphemism for being in the mood for love | 0:03:21 | 0:03:24 | |
because most of the music was very slow and sleek. | 0:03:24 | 0:03:28 | |
And so he came out with albums like Music For Dreaming, | 0:03:29 | 0:03:34 | |
Music For Romancing, Music For Two People Alone. | 0:03:34 | 0:03:38 | |
And he claimed that one of his fans said, "This music is very easy listening." | 0:03:38 | 0:03:43 | |
The man who first took this new kind of music | 0:03:48 | 0:03:50 | |
to international acclaim in the late '50s and early '60s | 0:03:50 | 0:03:54 | |
was ex-swing musician Percy Faith. | 0:03:54 | 0:03:57 | |
He championed the "sweet strings" approach | 0:03:59 | 0:04:01 | |
and used instruments to replace any troublesome lyrics. | 0:04:01 | 0:04:06 | |
He once said, "I want to satisfy the millions of devotees of that pleasant American institution | 0:04:10 | 0:04:16 | |
"known as the quiet evening at home, | 0:04:16 | 0:04:19 | |
"whose idea of perfect relaxation is the easy chair, slippers and good music." | 0:04:19 | 0:04:25 | |
In adapting popular songs and film themes, | 0:04:28 | 0:04:31 | |
Faith proved that the most important element of easy listening was the arrangement. | 0:04:31 | 0:04:37 | |
Arrangers are the unsung heroes of the business. | 0:04:39 | 0:04:43 | |
Percy Faith, I mean... | 0:04:43 | 0:04:46 | |
Just about all my life, he was terrific. | 0:04:46 | 0:04:49 | |
In 1963, Percy Faith came out with this pioneering album called Music For Young Lovers. | 0:04:55 | 0:05:02 | |
Instead of somebody singing the lyrics, you would have pizzicato strings. You might have some horns. | 0:05:02 | 0:05:08 | |
Each arranger had a different system | 0:05:08 | 0:05:10 | |
of making it so that it wasn't too overwhelming or obtrusive, | 0:05:10 | 0:05:15 | |
but at the same time if you listen to the arrangements, there was an art to them. | 0:05:15 | 0:05:20 | |
What a lot of the great arrangers do in easy listening | 0:05:20 | 0:05:25 | |
is they get to the truth of what a pop song is and the pop song is this bit, | 0:05:25 | 0:05:30 | |
so let's keep putting this bit in again and again and again. | 0:05:30 | 0:05:33 | |
Classical snobs and jazz snobs would say, "Melody, that's for little kids, that's sing-songy." | 0:05:33 | 0:05:40 | |
No-one understood the importance of a good tune better than Ray Conniff, | 0:05:44 | 0:05:48 | |
the easy listening maestro of the American Cold War landscape. | 0:05:48 | 0:05:53 | |
He played with Artie Shaw in the '40s, but tired of being a struggling, penniless jazzer, | 0:05:55 | 0:06:00 | |
he began studying popular music. | 0:06:00 | 0:06:02 | |
He really was focusing on what are the biggest songs of the day | 0:06:04 | 0:06:08 | |
and how can I arrange them | 0:06:08 | 0:06:10 | |
to have them have an even broader impact. | 0:06:10 | 0:06:13 | |
And he included in that research air play, sheet music sales, you know, everything, | 0:06:15 | 0:06:22 | |
and would go to the Billboard offices once a week and read the charts. | 0:06:22 | 0:06:27 | |
One of the things he discovered about songs at that point was the value of a hook | 0:06:27 | 0:06:32 | |
and how a hook can transform a song into a hit. | 0:06:32 | 0:06:37 | |
Meanwhile, in Germany, easy listening music was bound to fall on keen ears. | 0:06:41 | 0:06:47 | |
The influx of American big band and jazz music, suppressed during the war, | 0:06:47 | 0:06:52 | |
was the soundtrack that became synonymous with the country's reconstruction. | 0:06:52 | 0:06:58 | |
A young musician called Bert Kaempfert was already working | 0:06:59 | 0:07:03 | |
on his own European blueprint for easy listening, | 0:07:03 | 0:07:06 | |
a music that could combine traditional German folk tunes and modern American style arrangements | 0:07:06 | 0:07:12 | |
with more exotic world music rhythms | 0:07:12 | 0:07:14 | |
and perhaps even the beats and instrumentation of something called rock and roll. | 0:07:14 | 0:07:21 | |
We had a lot of visitors at the house. In the evening, | 0:07:21 | 0:07:24 | |
there was a group of people who always came and brought records along and played music for each other. | 0:07:24 | 0:07:30 | |
I think he got inspired by all that. | 0:07:37 | 0:07:39 | |
He loved these sounds from other countries | 0:07:39 | 0:07:42 | |
and I think he sort of incorporated it in his own music. | 0:07:42 | 0:07:47 | |
Then Ray Conniff was of course very famous | 0:07:47 | 0:07:50 | |
and who my father really admired and studied was Henry Mancini. | 0:07:50 | 0:07:55 | |
CLARINET MUSIC | 0:07:55 | 0:08:00 | |
I remember that we would listen to records | 0:08:00 | 0:08:02 | |
and we would stop the record and listen again and listen again | 0:08:02 | 0:08:06 | |
and we would talk about how he did it. | 0:08:06 | 0:08:08 | |
Many years later, my father was told that Henry Mancini actually made a note in one of his own scores, | 0:08:08 | 0:08:14 | |
with the drummer, the drum part says, "Brushes a la Kaempfert." | 0:08:14 | 0:08:19 | |
MUSIC: "Afrikaan Beat" - Bert Kaempfert | 0:08:19 | 0:08:24 | |
And when he was told that, he was so pleased. | 0:08:24 | 0:08:26 | |
He was actually proud. | 0:08:26 | 0:08:28 | |
Easy listening arrangers were an important asset to record companies as in-house orchestrators. | 0:08:33 | 0:08:39 | |
With the development of high fidelity and stereophonic sound in the late '50s, | 0:08:49 | 0:08:53 | |
part of the job of the in-house arranger was to record the kind of music | 0:08:53 | 0:08:57 | |
that would best showcase these new technologies. | 0:08:57 | 0:09:03 | |
Stu Phillips was resident arranger at Capitol Records. | 0:09:03 | 0:09:08 | |
That was the whole point | 0:09:08 | 0:09:10 | |
of this orchestral setting of all these pop songs | 0:09:10 | 0:09:13 | |
because it was a good way of showing off stereo. | 0:09:13 | 0:09:17 | |
It gave a broader, a much bigger palette for sound | 0:09:20 | 0:09:23 | |
than a couple of guitars and a bass and a drum. | 0:09:23 | 0:09:28 | |
Rock music was intended to be played on a Dansette or to come out of a transistor radio. | 0:09:28 | 0:09:34 | |
It's mixed in a way to sound punchy and vibrant for those mediums... | 0:09:34 | 0:09:40 | |
..whereas there's something about light music, | 0:09:40 | 0:09:42 | |
I guess because it's appealing to an older demographic who have got slightly more money, | 0:09:42 | 0:09:48 | |
they might invest in the latest amazing stereo equipment rather than a Dansette. | 0:09:48 | 0:09:54 | |
It says something about the way the music was intended | 0:09:54 | 0:09:58 | |
to be played or listened to. | 0:09:58 | 0:10:01 | |
Yeah, here we've got the Super Stereo Sensation. | 0:10:01 | 0:10:06 | |
You know, the "Super Stereo" emphasising the sort of dynamic range of the... | 0:10:07 | 0:10:15 | |
I suppose some of them were almost done just to demonstrate hi-fis | 0:10:15 | 0:10:18 | |
and while you were in the shop buying your stereo, you might buy an album or two to go with it. | 0:10:18 | 0:10:23 | |
You've got the technology. You'd better use it. | 0:10:23 | 0:10:27 | |
But it didn't stop there. | 0:10:29 | 0:10:31 | |
High fidelity sound needed its own furniture. | 0:10:31 | 0:10:34 | |
The stereophonic radiogram was far too big for the average teenage bedroom. | 0:10:34 | 0:10:39 | |
It was designed for the new middle-class living rooms of the parents relaxing downstairs. | 0:10:39 | 0:10:46 | |
With emerging technologies and dedicated furniture at their disposal, | 0:10:49 | 0:10:53 | |
easy listening masters set about creating sophisticated textures and soundscapes | 0:10:53 | 0:11:00 | |
for the new connoisseur of the 33rpm long-playing record. | 0:11:00 | 0:11:04 | |
I think easy listening is a pursuit of sound itself | 0:11:04 | 0:11:08 | |
without worrying about its greater meaning. | 0:11:08 | 0:11:11 | |
When you're a kid, you don't know what instruments are on a record. | 0:11:11 | 0:11:14 | |
You just hear a noise. | 0:11:14 | 0:11:16 | |
EASY LISTENING ORCHESTRAL MUSIC | 0:11:16 | 0:11:21 | |
When I was a kid, I was obsessed with the music on the test card. | 0:11:21 | 0:11:24 | |
I used to like having BBC Two on in the background | 0:11:24 | 0:11:27 | |
when children's programmes were on the other side, which drove my sister nuts. | 0:11:27 | 0:11:32 | |
It sounded otherworldly because there were no vocals. | 0:11:34 | 0:11:39 | |
There were no signposts as to what it was meant to be. | 0:11:39 | 0:11:42 | |
A lot of it would have been easy listening. | 0:11:42 | 0:11:45 | |
I used to record these things off the TV. I had to think of titles. I didn't know what they were called. | 0:11:45 | 0:11:52 | |
You'd find that once you start arranging something for larger forces, | 0:11:52 | 0:11:58 | |
it takes the edges off sonically. | 0:11:58 | 0:12:01 | |
It softens things with all those multiple voices. You can play the exact same harmonic material, | 0:12:01 | 0:12:07 | |
but the different timbre will make it sound "easy". | 0:12:07 | 0:12:12 | |
In 1961, Billboard announced the official arrival of something called easy listening music | 0:12:15 | 0:12:20 | |
by giving it its own chart. | 0:12:20 | 0:12:22 | |
This was made up of anything that wasn't rock and roll, | 0:12:22 | 0:12:26 | |
but many artists who found themselves on the chart were distinctly UNEASY with the term. | 0:12:26 | 0:12:32 | |
Billboard needed to know which chart to put it in. | 0:12:32 | 0:12:35 | |
Radio needed to know which format to put it in, so they can attract a certain kind of advertiser. | 0:12:35 | 0:12:41 | |
And easy listening was probably... It always kind of... | 0:12:42 | 0:12:46 | |
You know, it wasn't my father's favourite term. | 0:12:48 | 0:12:51 | |
I don't think it says much to be honest. | 0:12:51 | 0:12:55 | |
What it says is it is not disturbing. | 0:12:56 | 0:12:59 | |
It is music that is pleasant to hear, pleasant to listen to, | 0:12:59 | 0:13:05 | |
but it's by no means easy music, not at all. | 0:13:05 | 0:13:08 | |
I mean, the skills you have to have to write that kind of music | 0:13:08 | 0:13:12 | |
and also to perform it are significant. | 0:13:12 | 0:13:16 | |
I think the problem with the moniker "easy listening" is that it implies sterility. | 0:13:23 | 0:13:27 | |
But I think when you listen to my father's arrangements, there's nothing sterile about them. | 0:13:27 | 0:13:33 | |
In the early '60s, | 0:13:40 | 0:13:41 | |
Bert Kaempfert, now also a talent scout for Polydor Records, | 0:13:41 | 0:13:45 | |
was prowling Hamburg, looking for interesting musicians to sign. | 0:13:45 | 0:13:49 | |
The Top Ten and Star Clubs were now the home of rock and roll | 0:13:49 | 0:13:53 | |
and Kaempfert was impressed by a British band who called themselves The Beat Brothers... | 0:13:53 | 0:13:59 | |
in those days. | 0:13:59 | 0:14:01 | |
Yes, my father signed The Beatles. | 0:14:01 | 0:14:03 | |
As a producer. It was a personal contract. | 0:14:03 | 0:14:07 | |
He was very modern | 0:14:09 | 0:14:11 | |
and he could feel the music and the drive and the passion that was in there. | 0:14:11 | 0:14:17 | |
He was too much of a music lover himself. | 0:14:17 | 0:14:20 | |
Kaempfert recorded four singles with The Beat Brothers backing the singer Tony Sheridan. | 0:14:22 | 0:14:26 | |
But Polydor weren't interested and the group returned to the UK where they met Brian Epstein. | 0:14:26 | 0:14:32 | |
Paul or John rang my father and said, "Look, there's someone here who can do something with us. | 0:14:34 | 0:14:40 | |
"Would you let us go?" And my father said, "Of course." | 0:14:40 | 0:14:44 | |
Kaempfert released The Beatles from their contract and Epstein moved in. | 0:14:45 | 0:14:49 | |
Later, an executive from Polydor was sacked | 0:14:49 | 0:14:52 | |
and Brian Epstein declared, allegedly, that he had never heard of Bert Kaempfert. | 0:14:52 | 0:14:58 | |
If early easy listening had provided a refuge for older audiences | 0:15:02 | 0:15:06 | |
wishing to avoid the jungle drums and harsh sounds of rock and roll, | 0:15:06 | 0:15:10 | |
it was faced with a new challenge in 1963. | 0:15:10 | 0:15:14 | |
# Ooh | 0:15:14 | 0:15:15 | |
# She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah | 0:15:15 | 0:15:18 | |
# She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah With a love like that... # | 0:15:18 | 0:15:22 | |
What would it do when The Beat Brothers became The Beatles | 0:15:22 | 0:15:27 | |
and a new kind of popular teenage music was born? | 0:15:27 | 0:15:30 | |
Big band member James Last had been in Hamburg when they first performed and was inspired | 0:15:34 | 0:15:39 | |
by the early recordings of what was about to become a worldwide phenomenon. | 0:15:39 | 0:15:44 | |
INSTRUMENTAL ARRANGEMENT: "Hey Jude" - The Beatles | 0:16:24 | 0:16:28 | |
Most instrumental arrangements of British and American pop music, | 0:16:55 | 0:16:59 | |
often performed in nonstop medleys with an emphasis on dancing and having a good time, | 0:16:59 | 0:17:05 | |
would become hugely popular with older audiences not comfortable with the originals. | 0:17:05 | 0:17:11 | |
This was the beginning of a strange, shadow world | 0:17:11 | 0:17:14 | |
in which easy listening would deliver an alternative, more middle-aged pop culture. | 0:17:14 | 0:17:20 | |
There was a kind of truth to it. It was like they were the avant-garde. | 0:17:20 | 0:17:24 | |
When we look back on this peculiar history of popular music between 1950 and 2000, | 0:17:24 | 0:17:29 | |
you'll probably learn more about it by listening to some James Last compilations than in any other way | 0:17:29 | 0:17:35 | |
because you're getting to the technical essence of why it pleases people. | 0:17:35 | 0:17:41 | |
Unlike a lot of American rock and roll, | 0:17:41 | 0:17:44 | |
The Beatles seemed ready-made for easy listening treatment. | 0:17:44 | 0:17:47 | |
Capitol Records arranger Stu Phillips was formulating a plan for a Beatles song book | 0:17:47 | 0:17:52 | |
with the company's orchestra The Hollyridge Strings. | 0:17:52 | 0:17:56 | |
We had very smart, sophisticated melodies on some of these songs. | 0:17:59 | 0:18:03 | |
And I played around with them and I said, | 0:18:03 | 0:18:06 | |
"If I do them a little different, they really are pleasant music." | 0:18:06 | 0:18:11 | |
I said, "OK, what I need to know now is what songs are going to be in their first album." | 0:18:11 | 0:18:17 | |
So we wired George Martin in England | 0:18:18 | 0:18:22 | |
and asked him if he could help us out and tell us what he figured the first Beatle album was going to be. | 0:18:22 | 0:18:29 | |
Phillips' easy listening versions of The Beatles' songs were an instant hit. | 0:18:30 | 0:18:35 | |
Stripped of their vocals, incessant drumbeats and jangling guitars, | 0:18:35 | 0:18:39 | |
Lennon and McCartney's melodies were given full rein with his lush string arrangements. | 0:18:39 | 0:18:45 | |
Some people say it takes the soul out. | 0:18:45 | 0:18:48 | |
It just is a different aspect of the same soul. | 0:18:48 | 0:18:51 | |
I feel inspired when I listen to it. I feel invigorated. It cleanses the musical palette in a lot of ways. | 0:18:53 | 0:19:00 | |
INSTRUMENTAL ARRANGEMENT: "A Hard Day's Night" - The Beatles | 0:19:00 | 0:19:04 | |
This alternative shadow version of pop music was tailored for an older audience | 0:19:07 | 0:19:12 | |
that in 1963 thought that The Beatles just made an unpleasant racket. | 0:19:12 | 0:19:17 | |
We have in recent years raised them to such a totemic status that it's almost impossible for us to imagine | 0:19:20 | 0:19:26 | |
that people didn't like them in the '60s. We think everybody liked them. | 0:19:26 | 0:19:30 | |
It brings the song | 0:19:36 | 0:19:37 | |
to an older audience. You hear it on the elevator. | 0:19:37 | 0:19:42 | |
You hear it in the shopping centres. | 0:19:42 | 0:19:45 | |
And you realise that the melodies were timeless | 0:19:45 | 0:19:51 | |
and not just pop records of the time. | 0:19:51 | 0:19:54 | |
Easy listening was now being played everywhere without offending anyone | 0:20:00 | 0:20:06 | |
or demanding their attention. | 0:20:06 | 0:20:08 | |
It was music to be heard, but not listened to while at work or at play. | 0:20:08 | 0:20:14 | |
Some called it elevator music. | 0:20:15 | 0:20:17 | |
Oddly enough, for something that was inoffensive, it became incredibly offensive, didn't it? | 0:20:20 | 0:20:25 | |
It was for your parents, it was square, it was unthreatening. | 0:20:27 | 0:20:32 | |
It was too soft, it was too sweet. | 0:20:32 | 0:20:35 | |
It seemed to be a complete betrayal of the energy that was creating rock, you know. | 0:20:35 | 0:20:42 | |
EASY LISTENING, MELODIC MUSIC | 0:20:42 | 0:20:45 | |
I call all of it elevator music because it's going by the same principles. | 0:21:07 | 0:21:12 | |
It's using certain instruments, | 0:21:12 | 0:21:14 | |
under-arranging it in a certain manner to make you listen actively if you want, | 0:21:14 | 0:21:19 | |
but also facilitating what you might call peripheral listening. | 0:21:19 | 0:21:23 | |
American FM radio would come to be dominated by easy listening stations, | 0:21:26 | 0:21:30 | |
all playing an easily digested diet of music that many music lovers regarded as inauthentic. | 0:21:30 | 0:21:37 | |
But if it wasn't the real thing, what was it? | 0:21:37 | 0:21:40 | |
MUSIC: "Magic Moments" | 0:21:40 | 0:21:43 | |
There'd be an easy listening, beautiful music channel I would listen to, | 0:21:43 | 0:21:48 | |
so in the daytime on Top 40 AM radio I would hear Neil Sedaka sing Laughter In The Rain, | 0:21:48 | 0:21:55 | |
then there'd be a ghostly version of it by Lenny Dee and his organ. | 0:21:55 | 0:22:00 | |
# Oh, I hear laughter in the rain... # | 0:22:00 | 0:22:04 | |
I see no problem. | 0:22:04 | 0:22:07 | |
A song can take different directions, different styles, done beautifully with strings. | 0:22:07 | 0:22:13 | |
When you heard the elevator version of the song, | 0:22:31 | 0:22:35 | |
you're listening to the original at the same time in your head, | 0:22:35 | 0:22:39 | |
so there's this kind of what you would call a depth of field, | 0:22:39 | 0:22:43 | |
an aural depth of field going on. | 0:22:43 | 0:22:45 | |
We know the original songs, but yet... "Oh, my God, there's a version of Mellow Yellow, | 0:22:45 | 0:22:51 | |
"but I can hear Donovan singing it while I'm hearing this orchestral group playing it." | 0:22:51 | 0:22:56 | |
But these were times when ideological battle lines in music were being drawn. | 0:22:59 | 0:23:04 | |
Rock and roll and pop had come to stand for something hard, uncompromising and young. | 0:23:04 | 0:23:10 | |
Stu Phillips' easy listening versions attempted in vain to heal a generational rift | 0:23:13 | 0:23:18 | |
that had already happened. | 0:23:18 | 0:23:20 | |
The kids didn't buy 'em. The kids didn't buy that. | 0:23:23 | 0:23:28 | |
That was sacrilege, what I was doing to their songs. No, they didn't buy 'em. | 0:23:28 | 0:23:33 | |
I just admired what they were doing and felt I could do something with what they had, | 0:23:33 | 0:23:38 | |
so that the parents of the kids that love it might find it interesting. And they did. | 0:23:38 | 0:23:44 | |
I really felt that by the time people like Stu Phillips | 0:23:44 | 0:23:48 | |
and The Hollywood Strings were doing covers of The Beatles | 0:23:48 | 0:23:52 | |
and Elvis Presley and The Four Seasons and Simon And Garfunkel, that was a peaceful co-existence. | 0:23:52 | 0:23:58 | |
It wasn't anti-pop. It was appreciation of the melodies. | 0:23:58 | 0:24:02 | |
SHOUTS OF "Ole!" | 0:24:02 | 0:24:04 | |
Easy listening found a much needed ambassador | 0:24:08 | 0:24:12 | |
when in 1965, an attractive young man took the scene by storm. | 0:24:12 | 0:24:16 | |
Herb Alpert, a classically trained trumpet player with a liking for jazz, | 0:24:19 | 0:24:24 | |
had originally been inspired by the sights and sounds of the Tijuana bullfight | 0:24:24 | 0:24:29 | |
to create an entirely new sound. | 0:24:29 | 0:24:31 | |
The trumpet section in the stands | 0:24:31 | 0:24:33 | |
would do this series of... # Da-da, ba-da-ba-da-bay... # | 0:24:33 | 0:24:37 | |
Between that, | 0:24:39 | 0:24:42 | |
you know, drinking some wine from a bota bag, it was a great experience | 0:24:42 | 0:24:46 | |
and I translated that into a sound. | 0:24:46 | 0:24:49 | |
LATIN-STYLE MUSIC | 0:24:49 | 0:24:52 | |
I'm thinking, "This easy listening is not like something you have to sit down and hash out | 0:24:55 | 0:25:01 | |
"and what the heck they're trying to do..." | 0:25:01 | 0:25:05 | |
It had that commercial ring to it and it was not threatening, so it was easy to listen to. | 0:25:05 | 0:25:12 | |
Herb's music ignored the angst, frustration and heartache | 0:25:15 | 0:25:19 | |
associated with chart-topping rock and roll and pop. | 0:25:19 | 0:25:23 | |
It was light, happy and easy to listen to and to make. | 0:25:23 | 0:25:27 | |
I think it was easy because I had nothing in my head. | 0:25:28 | 0:25:32 | |
I'd go into the studio with musicians that I liked, in the studio that I liked | 0:25:32 | 0:25:36 | |
and I would just form this sound that was real easy for me to make. | 0:25:36 | 0:25:42 | |
I recorded some songs in 20 minutes. | 0:25:43 | 0:25:46 | |
So there was a humanness to it. | 0:25:48 | 0:25:51 | |
And it...worked. | 0:25:51 | 0:25:54 | |
Herb was the acceptable pop face of easy listening - | 0:25:58 | 0:26:02 | |
the handsome front man of The Tijuana Brass. | 0:26:02 | 0:26:05 | |
But easy listening music was usually created by shadowy arrangers, | 0:26:06 | 0:26:11 | |
waving their batons, and anonymous session musicians. | 0:26:11 | 0:26:16 | |
In Hollywood, Capitol Records agonised about what to put on the album covers | 0:26:19 | 0:26:25 | |
for Stu Phillips and The Hollyridge Strings to help sell the music. | 0:26:25 | 0:26:29 | |
They came up with all these crazy ideas for an album cover | 0:26:29 | 0:26:34 | |
and one of them was myself and a bunch of little children ages four to seven. | 0:26:34 | 0:26:40 | |
That was The Hollyridge Strings because we couldn't just photograph the musicians. It meant nothing. | 0:26:40 | 0:26:46 | |
So the other idea is they went and got a whole bunch of secretaries | 0:26:46 | 0:26:50 | |
and boy runners and everything else under the sun | 0:26:50 | 0:26:54 | |
and they dressed them all up and we shot that. | 0:26:54 | 0:26:59 | |
And then they had the lettering version. | 0:26:59 | 0:27:02 | |
And by the time they got done, everyone decided they liked the lettering version. | 0:27:02 | 0:27:08 | |
I guess they felt the names of the songs were going to sell that more than any crazy little picture. | 0:27:08 | 0:27:14 | |
If audiences were familiar with the music of the famous easy listening arrangers, | 0:27:16 | 0:27:21 | |
they could be forgiven for not knowing what they actually looked like. | 0:27:21 | 0:27:26 | |
These were modest older men who often avoided the limelight. | 0:27:26 | 0:27:31 | |
Despite writing easy listening classics like Spanish Eyes and Strangers In The Night, | 0:27:31 | 0:27:35 | |
Bert Kaempfert didn't appear on stage until the early '70s. | 0:27:35 | 0:27:40 | |
My father was not really interested in appearing in public. | 0:27:41 | 0:27:45 | |
He was not very good at presenting the orchestra, fronting the band, | 0:27:45 | 0:27:50 | |
going out to be the band leader, seen and filmed. | 0:27:50 | 0:27:53 | |
He was interested in studio work. He loved his work at home. | 0:27:53 | 0:27:58 | |
He did his arrangements, went to the studio and recorded his LPs. | 0:27:58 | 0:28:03 | |
Then when they became famous and he was asked, "Would you mind coming and promoting the record," | 0:28:03 | 0:28:09 | |
he normally shied away from that. | 0:28:09 | 0:28:12 | |
Kaempfert wasn't alone. | 0:28:14 | 0:28:17 | |
The kings of easy listening were often eerily absent | 0:28:17 | 0:28:20 | |
both from public life and from the sleeves of their albums. | 0:28:20 | 0:28:25 | |
This was because they tended to look more like bank managers than pop stars, | 0:28:25 | 0:28:29 | |
men who weren't pretty boys born to pout or strike a pose for the camera. | 0:28:29 | 0:28:33 | |
This is a fairly early Ray Conniff, | 0:28:36 | 0:28:39 | |
very sort of Mad Man look... or Mad Men, isn't it, look. | 0:28:39 | 0:28:43 | |
There's an awful lot of girls on easy listening covers. | 0:28:44 | 0:28:48 | |
The band leaders don't look great. | 0:28:48 | 0:28:51 | |
The composers look even worse and the lyricists... Don't go there. | 0:28:52 | 0:28:58 | |
Sammy Cahn said that Burt Bacharach was the only composer who didn't look like a dentist. | 0:28:59 | 0:29:05 | |
So I suppose if you're going to have someone who isn't the band leader on the cover, have a pretty girl. | 0:29:05 | 0:29:11 | |
Here's another Ray Conniff. | 0:29:13 | 0:29:15 | |
This is slightly later, I think. | 0:29:15 | 0:29:17 | |
Oh, there's Ray. You don't want him on the front, really, do you, in full colour? | 0:29:19 | 0:29:24 | |
There's another one. A bit later, I think. | 0:29:25 | 0:29:28 | |
A bit more sultry. | 0:29:28 | 0:29:29 | |
Actually, this might be a bit earlier. | 0:29:33 | 0:29:35 | |
Lots of beautiful girls. | 0:29:37 | 0:29:39 | |
He was usually on the back. | 0:29:40 | 0:29:42 | |
But he liked the mood that the covers set | 0:29:42 | 0:29:47 | |
because they were usually quirky and stylised. | 0:29:47 | 0:29:50 | |
Remember, they're band leaders and in the performances because it's kind of faceless musicians, | 0:29:51 | 0:29:56 | |
it removes the emphasis on the individual and the individual artist | 0:29:56 | 0:30:01 | |
who is expressing their angst or something that happened to them. | 0:30:01 | 0:30:06 | |
It's not like someone there nagging, telling you about themselves all the time, | 0:30:06 | 0:30:12 | |
like a Joni Mitchell album. | 0:30:12 | 0:30:14 | |
Once you've removed the lead singer singing his own songs about himself or herself, | 0:30:16 | 0:30:22 | |
then once you've got that out of the way, | 0:30:22 | 0:30:25 | |
you can concentrate on the timbre and the different textures | 0:30:25 | 0:30:28 | |
and the more interesting subtleties within the music and the sound. | 0:30:28 | 0:30:33 | |
Musically, the big news of the early '60s was the rapid spread of British and American pop music. | 0:30:38 | 0:30:45 | |
But as it developed and became more ambitious, | 0:30:46 | 0:30:49 | |
pop would occasionally fuse with an easy listening aesthetic | 0:30:49 | 0:30:53 | |
to produce a new kind of hybrid composition and sound. | 0:30:53 | 0:30:57 | |
In the household of Henry Mancini, | 0:30:58 | 0:31:00 | |
you could hear everything. | 0:31:00 | 0:31:03 | |
MUSIC: "The Pink Panther Theme" - Henry Mancini | 0:31:03 | 0:31:06 | |
The British invasion had descended upon my home. | 0:31:10 | 0:31:14 | |
# I'm in pieces, bits and pieces... # | 0:31:15 | 0:31:19 | |
I was a Dave Clark Five crazy person. Beatles, forget about it. All of it I was listening to. | 0:31:19 | 0:31:25 | |
# All I do is sit and cry... # | 0:31:25 | 0:31:29 | |
We played music and we played it loud and we played it all day. | 0:31:29 | 0:31:33 | |
You know, my dad was a real huge Beach Boys fan. | 0:31:38 | 0:31:41 | |
When we played Beach Boys records, he would really love it. | 0:31:41 | 0:31:45 | |
I think it had to do with the harmonies and the melodies. They had such a unique sound. | 0:31:45 | 0:31:50 | |
It wasn't his music that was playing. It was ours, so he was forced to listen to it. | 0:31:54 | 0:31:59 | |
The Beach Boys, Brian Wilson is another easy listening master. | 0:31:59 | 0:32:04 | |
I'm using "easy listening" here as a complement | 0:32:04 | 0:32:07 | |
because what easy listening at its very best involves... | 0:32:07 | 0:32:11 | |
You think of people like Jimmy Webb. | 0:32:11 | 0:32:14 | |
It involves something that ultimately is deeply strange and mysterious. | 0:32:14 | 0:32:19 | |
Well, I loved the rock palette mixed in with strings | 0:32:19 | 0:32:24 | |
and I loved crashing those disparate elements together. | 0:32:24 | 0:32:29 | |
I just used instruments. | 0:32:30 | 0:32:32 | |
I used all kinds of instruments in different ways. | 0:32:32 | 0:32:36 | |
# Would you like to ride in my beautiful balloon...? # | 0:32:36 | 0:32:41 | |
Jimmy Webb's compositions sometimes provide the perfect ground for rock and easy listening to do battle. | 0:32:41 | 0:32:48 | |
# We could float among the stars together, you and I... # | 0:32:48 | 0:32:52 | |
Despite being part of the generation that was preparing to turn on, tune in and drop out, | 0:32:52 | 0:32:58 | |
Webb's songs were massively popular with the parents of his generation, | 0:32:58 | 0:33:02 | |
as performed by artists from Frank Sinatra to Glen Campbell. | 0:33:02 | 0:33:06 | |
His composition Up, Up And Away, originally sung by The Fifth Dimension, | 0:33:08 | 0:33:13 | |
became an instant easy listening hit. | 0:33:13 | 0:33:16 | |
He's not an easy listening composer. | 0:33:16 | 0:33:19 | |
When he's composing, he's not writing for the easy listening market, | 0:33:19 | 0:33:23 | |
but his songs were performed by other people, | 0:33:23 | 0:33:26 | |
so Up, Up And Away was performed many, many times facelessly, so it became easy listening. | 0:33:26 | 0:33:31 | |
# Up, up and away | 0:33:31 | 0:33:34 | |
# In my beautiful, my beautiful balloon... # | 0:33:34 | 0:33:39 | |
It's kind of a "whistle while you work" song. | 0:33:44 | 0:33:47 | |
It's the only one I ever wrote like that. | 0:33:47 | 0:33:50 | |
It was completely mindless and today, when I do Up, Up And Away, | 0:33:50 | 0:33:55 | |
I'm very sentimental about it. | 0:33:55 | 0:33:57 | |
It's like, "Were we ever that... | 0:33:57 | 0:34:00 | |
"..you know, goosebump crazy that we loved life so much, | 0:34:01 | 0:34:06 | |
"that we just wanted to get in a balloon and float away and that was OK?" | 0:34:06 | 0:34:11 | |
Because that song's not about drugs. It's about balloons. | 0:34:11 | 0:34:15 | |
You would see Up, Up And Away as a title much more on an album that wasn't Jimmy Webb's | 0:34:16 | 0:34:21 | |
than was Jimmy Webb's. | 0:34:21 | 0:34:24 | |
This album is The Billy Vaughn Singers, | 0:34:24 | 0:34:27 | |
the title Up, Up And Away, again a very popular piece, | 0:34:27 | 0:34:31 | |
one of the most popular pieces in terms of being covered. | 0:34:31 | 0:34:35 | |
So the arrangers and producers of these kinds of albums, Jimmy Webb's material is very musical, | 0:34:35 | 0:34:42 | |
so there's a lot of interesting musicality within the piece, | 0:34:42 | 0:34:46 | |
so probably the arranger thought, "I'll do that one, rather than Louie Louie." | 0:34:46 | 0:34:52 | |
And then... This is great, actually. This is a great record. | 0:34:52 | 0:34:56 | |
"The Bright, Bouncy, Beaty Sound of Ray Martin, His Orchestra And Chorus." | 0:34:56 | 0:35:02 | |
"Up, Up And Away". I don't know how many albums there were with hot air balloons on, but there was a lot. | 0:35:02 | 0:35:09 | |
The fact that it has no meaning says everything about us and who we were and what we thought about | 0:35:09 | 0:35:15 | |
and what we did and where we went with our lives | 0:35:15 | 0:35:19 | |
because we really didn't care. | 0:35:19 | 0:35:22 | |
Webb proved that easy listening didn't have to be easy, happy or wishy-washy. | 0:35:24 | 0:35:30 | |
It could be melancholic, even existential. | 0:35:30 | 0:35:33 | |
I like this one. # I am a lineman for the county... # | 0:35:33 | 0:35:38 | |
APPLAUSE | 0:35:38 | 0:35:41 | |
# And I drive the mainroad | 0:35:41 | 0:35:45 | |
# I'm searching in the sun | 0:35:45 | 0:35:48 | |
# For another overload | 0:35:48 | 0:35:54 | |
# And I hear you singing in the wire... # | 0:35:55 | 0:35:59 | |
A lot of the best easy listening music is really quite specific. | 0:35:59 | 0:36:03 | |
Wichita Lineman is about a subject that nobody else has written about. | 0:36:03 | 0:36:07 | |
# And the Wichita Lineman | 0:36:07 | 0:36:12 | |
# Oh, he's still on the line... # | 0:36:14 | 0:36:18 | |
I don't think to write a really good easy listening song, it has to be an easy subject. | 0:36:18 | 0:36:23 | |
But they almost always tend to be love songs. | 0:36:23 | 0:36:27 | |
Music journalists were confused by Webb's use of string arrangements and classic songwriting, | 0:36:27 | 0:36:33 | |
by the audiences he attracted and by the old guard artists who clambered to perform his songs. | 0:36:33 | 0:36:39 | |
They took a few swings at me | 0:36:39 | 0:36:42 | |
for being a middle-of-the-road guy. | 0:36:42 | 0:36:45 | |
"Jimmy Webb and His Orchestra or whatever you call it, they're in town tonight!" | 0:36:45 | 0:36:51 | |
They'd prep my picture in a white suit in People Magazine | 0:36:51 | 0:36:57 | |
and they'd say, "Who is this guy? Who cares?" | 0:36:57 | 0:37:01 | |
INAUDIBLE | 0:37:07 | 0:37:09 | |
As the '60s progressed, easy listening came to be more and more associated | 0:37:09 | 0:37:15 | |
with a certain kind of sophisticated lifestyle - | 0:37:15 | 0:37:18 | |
an aspiring, moneyed, adult existence | 0:37:18 | 0:37:21 | |
in which music was merely the add-on, | 0:37:21 | 0:37:24 | |
something that played in the background while you got on with more important things, | 0:37:24 | 0:37:30 | |
something that didn't get in the way. | 0:37:30 | 0:37:34 | |
You're creating a mood for people's lives, how they live, where they live, | 0:37:34 | 0:37:38 | |
the furniture that they have, the cars that they drive... | 0:37:38 | 0:37:42 | |
..the roads that they drive along, | 0:37:44 | 0:37:46 | |
the sea in the middle distance. | 0:37:46 | 0:37:49 | |
It's basically creating a soundtrack to a wonderful lifestyle. | 0:37:51 | 0:37:55 | |
CAR APPROACHES | 0:37:55 | 0:37:58 | |
We see it linked to this kind of groovy '60s notion of futurism | 0:37:58 | 0:38:04 | |
or '50s notion of futurism | 0:38:04 | 0:38:07 | |
and that notion of Space Age bachelor pad music. | 0:38:07 | 0:38:11 | |
And there's something kitschily appealing about the circumstances | 0:38:11 | 0:38:15 | |
in which it was supposed to be listened to. | 0:38:15 | 0:38:18 | |
It would have been either for a romantic dinner | 0:38:20 | 0:38:24 | |
or a seduction scene. | 0:38:24 | 0:38:26 | |
Whether that was going to happen or not, it made you feel that that was a possibility in your life. | 0:38:28 | 0:38:33 | |
It would've been a lifestyle thing and it wouldn't have just been about the music. | 0:38:33 | 0:38:38 | |
It's made a lot of the time as a means of showing off your stereo equipment possibly to a young lady, | 0:38:38 | 0:38:44 | |
possibly as a prelude to getting your leg over. | 0:38:44 | 0:38:47 | |
The theory that these records can be used for seduction is implied, I think, by this cover here. | 0:38:47 | 0:38:54 | |
I don't know who's on this, actually. They might be brother and sister. | 0:38:54 | 0:38:58 | |
It could be The White Stripes of their time. Who knows their relationship? | 0:38:58 | 0:39:03 | |
He looks a bit bookish. He's not really interested. | 0:39:03 | 0:39:06 | |
He's showing off his hi-fi. She's wishing he had other things on his mind | 0:39:06 | 0:39:12 | |
and wasn't just into showing off his super-stereo sound. | 0:39:12 | 0:39:16 | |
Here... | 0:39:17 | 0:39:19 | |
It's got further developed. | 0:39:19 | 0:39:21 | |
It's getting a bit more intimate. This could be later in the evening. | 0:39:21 | 0:39:25 | |
Another Pepe Jaramillo. Quite racy for a Pepe cover. | 0:39:25 | 0:39:29 | |
He's usually more "sun and cactuses". | 0:39:30 | 0:39:33 | |
And then here, this is a kind of voyeuristic thing going on here as well | 0:39:34 | 0:39:39 | |
because this is Only Love by The Brass Ring. | 0:39:39 | 0:39:42 | |
You've got a little peephole to see that this is... | 0:39:43 | 0:39:47 | |
It suggests that's what listening to this... | 0:39:48 | 0:39:52 | |
This is where it could get you. | 0:39:52 | 0:39:54 | |
With a sore lip. | 0:39:54 | 0:39:57 | |
Excruciating. | 0:39:57 | 0:40:00 | |
Here we've got Aimi MacDonald here and Ronnie Carroll. | 0:40:01 | 0:40:05 | |
This is a musical that Bacharach and David wrote - Promises, Promises, | 0:40:05 | 0:40:11 | |
from the film The Apartment, I think it was. It was based on that. | 0:40:11 | 0:40:16 | |
Great stuff. | 0:40:16 | 0:40:19 | |
Fantastic kinky boots here. Nice slip-ons and white socks. | 0:40:19 | 0:40:23 | |
Some Sta-Prest trousers. | 0:40:23 | 0:40:27 | |
So it's kind of about swinging, those mid-'60s... | 0:40:27 | 0:40:30 | |
Well, not swinging. | 0:40:30 | 0:40:32 | |
It was about, um... | 0:40:32 | 0:40:34 | |
Extra-marital sex. That's right(!) | 0:40:34 | 0:40:37 | |
There's a difference! | 0:40:40 | 0:40:42 | |
So, yes, I like this record, particularly the recording because it's very British. | 0:40:44 | 0:40:48 | |
It's a very British version of a very American product. | 0:40:48 | 0:40:52 | |
Despite the social unrest and political upheavals of the '60s | 0:40:56 | 0:41:00 | |
or perhaps because of them, | 0:41:00 | 0:41:02 | |
easy listening music resolutely avoided politics of any kind. | 0:41:02 | 0:41:07 | |
It seemed disengaged | 0:41:09 | 0:41:11 | |
with the world in which it was being made. | 0:41:11 | 0:41:14 | |
Like the Strings of Mantovani playing in a world shocked to the core by a recent war, | 0:41:14 | 0:41:20 | |
it seemed convinced that all was well. | 0:41:20 | 0:41:23 | |
It doesn't appear to have any context, it doesn't appear to have any content. | 0:41:25 | 0:41:30 | |
Lyrically, it's un-hip. | 0:41:30 | 0:41:32 | |
It's always quite positive, quite cheery. It's not necessarily going to be dark. | 0:41:32 | 0:41:39 | |
Those people that followed easy listening, whatever kind of easy listening it was, | 0:41:39 | 0:41:43 | |
they didn't get Bob Dylan. | 0:41:43 | 0:41:45 | |
And so, therefore, if you aligned yourself with those people, that was a naff thing to do. | 0:41:46 | 0:41:52 | |
It's the mentality that you have to be either one thing or another thing. | 0:41:52 | 0:41:57 | |
And I don't have it. I don't have that mentality. | 0:41:57 | 0:42:02 | |
But I know that I've run into it and people have said, "Are you with us or against us?" | 0:42:02 | 0:42:08 | |
And I said, "Well, I'm with you!" | 0:42:10 | 0:42:12 | |
"Well, you know, but you can't play in Las Vegas. If you play in Las Vegas, you're against us." | 0:42:13 | 0:42:19 | |
"Well, why is that? What does that have to do with it? That's just a venue where people go to hear..." | 0:42:19 | 0:42:26 | |
"Yeah, but you can't play Las Vegas because that's 'the man'. That's working for 'the man', you know?" | 0:42:26 | 0:42:32 | |
And this was real. This was real. | 0:42:32 | 0:42:35 | |
It's not written anywhere that pop music, rock music, any kind of music, has to engage with current events. | 0:42:35 | 0:42:43 | |
And I don't think it's necessarily a flaw in light music that it doesn't engage with the times | 0:42:43 | 0:42:49 | |
because that's clearly the exact opposite of what it's intended to do. | 0:42:49 | 0:42:53 | |
Its purpose is to disengage you from the times. | 0:42:53 | 0:42:57 | |
Perhaps part of easy listening's apparent indifference to what was happening in the real world | 0:43:00 | 0:43:05 | |
was the temperament and attitudes of its creators, | 0:43:05 | 0:43:09 | |
men who thought that music and politics should be kept apart. | 0:43:09 | 0:43:12 | |
My father was not a very political person, | 0:43:13 | 0:43:17 | |
but he was a person with a strong desire for peace, you know. | 0:43:17 | 0:43:21 | |
He had lived through the war and they were... | 0:43:21 | 0:43:25 | |
They wanted things to be good and to become better. | 0:43:26 | 0:43:31 | |
He wanted to make music to make people happy | 0:43:31 | 0:43:33 | |
and he kept his own political views, which he had many, out of his music... | 0:43:33 | 0:43:38 | |
"You know it's going on" was kind of my dad's attitude, | 0:43:39 | 0:43:43 | |
especially when I kind of was saying how the Everyman listened to my dad's music. | 0:43:43 | 0:43:49 | |
Everyman probably had a son dying in Vietnam. | 0:43:49 | 0:43:52 | |
Does he then want to go home and listen to music about dying in Vietnam? | 0:43:52 | 0:43:57 | |
No, maybe he just wants to listen to something that makes him happy and want to dance with his wife. | 0:43:57 | 0:44:03 | |
You know, my dad, he was not a tumultuous kind of guy. He was very easy-going. | 0:44:07 | 0:44:12 | |
He would much sooner write something pleasing than something erratic and crazy, | 0:44:12 | 0:44:18 | |
but if he had to, if someone did a film on the Vietnam War and wanted his music, | 0:44:18 | 0:44:24 | |
he'd be right there. | 0:44:24 | 0:44:26 | |
But in terms of his own style and how he liked to project himself, | 0:44:26 | 0:44:30 | |
he was an easygoing, peaceful guy. | 0:44:30 | 0:44:33 | |
MUSIC: "Windmills of your Mind" | 0:44:35 | 0:44:38 | |
Since Apocalypse Now, it's been assumed that the soundtrack to the Vietnam War was provided | 0:44:42 | 0:44:47 | |
by the likes of The Doors, Jefferson Airplane, Jimi Hendrix and even Wagner. | 0:44:47 | 0:44:53 | |
But easy listening was there, too. | 0:44:55 | 0:44:57 | |
I have one wonderful thing somebody sent me of a soldier | 0:45:02 | 0:45:07 | |
in Vietnam | 0:45:07 | 0:45:09 | |
and he's in his little cubby-hole thing there and he's got a little table. | 0:45:09 | 0:45:15 | |
And on that table is the Hollywood Strings. | 0:45:15 | 0:45:20 | |
He actually carried that whole thing with him | 0:45:24 | 0:45:28 | |
through from America to Vietnam and it was something that he played. | 0:45:28 | 0:45:33 | |
MUSIC: "Good Vibrations" | 0:45:34 | 0:45:37 | |
The second half of the '60s was the heyday of easy listening | 0:45:43 | 0:45:48 | |
since it offered a pleasant refuge from many other musical forms | 0:45:48 | 0:45:53 | |
that were straying into the danger zone of "difficult" music. | 0:45:53 | 0:45:57 | |
Pop music develops in this insane way between the end of 1964 and the end of 1967. | 0:45:57 | 0:46:03 | |
It's never changed as much since. | 0:46:03 | 0:46:06 | |
Fuelled largely by drugs, it moves in this completely different direction. | 0:46:13 | 0:46:18 | |
But at the same time classical music had changed and become a rather austere | 0:46:20 | 0:46:26 | |
and foreboding place. | 0:46:26 | 0:46:28 | |
Jazz had changed and become a lot more experimental. | 0:46:30 | 0:46:35 | |
So unless you were prepared to put the work in, there isn't a lot for you other than light music. | 0:46:37 | 0:46:45 | |
Ironically, it was also the heyday of easy listening because it WAS the late '60s | 0:46:48 | 0:46:53 | |
when all musics were beginning to co-exist in an atmosphere of shared sonic experimentation. | 0:46:53 | 0:46:59 | |
There was no exclusion. It wasn't like, "We're not gonna play this." | 0:46:59 | 0:47:05 | |
There was this melange on the radio | 0:47:05 | 0:47:08 | |
that created social progress. | 0:47:08 | 0:47:11 | |
It created... "Oh, these people are OK because listen to this song. | 0:47:11 | 0:47:17 | |
"I dig it." | 0:47:17 | 0:47:19 | |
The fact that Jimi Hendrix might put on a Mantovani record just to get away from that damn acid rock | 0:47:19 | 0:47:25 | |
that everybody was playing around him. | 0:47:25 | 0:47:28 | |
MUSIC: "Smoke Gets In Your Eyes" | 0:47:28 | 0:47:32 | |
Jimi Hendrix gave a great interview in a London paper about one day all music would be | 0:47:32 | 0:47:37 | |
coalesced, all the different musics would be coalesced into one thing. | 0:47:37 | 0:47:44 | |
And I was reading this interview and crying because I said, "This guy, he's a messenger. | 0:47:44 | 0:47:50 | |
"He's telling us about the future of music." | 0:47:50 | 0:47:55 | |
The only thing is that he was wrong! | 0:47:55 | 0:47:57 | |
MUSIC: "A Swinging Safari" BY BERT KAEMPFERT | 0:47:57 | 0:48:01 | |
as part of the Swinging Sixties, easy listening jumped on the same bandwagon as rock | 0:48:05 | 0:48:10 | |
when it came to the imagery of the sexual revolution. | 0:48:10 | 0:48:14 | |
Album covers were increasingly colonised by pseudo-psychedelic imagery and scantily-clad chicks. | 0:48:14 | 0:48:21 | |
Apparently, easy now also meant available. | 0:48:27 | 0:48:31 | |
But if it played its own part in the hippy project to unite all musics, | 0:48:32 | 0:48:38 | |
the easy listening solution was very different from the result envisaged by the lofty quest | 0:48:38 | 0:48:45 | |
that now dominated the experiments of progressive rock. | 0:48:45 | 0:48:49 | |
It is indeed pre-rock, | 0:48:50 | 0:48:53 | |
but it feels the pull of rock and the pull of all music. | 0:48:53 | 0:48:57 | |
Easy listening has a lot of sources. | 0:48:57 | 0:48:59 | |
So it will be aware of Latin rhythms, be aware of big bands, | 0:48:59 | 0:49:05 | |
it'll be aware of country music, if you like. | 0:49:05 | 0:49:07 | |
It picks and chooses from wherever, with no great respect from where. | 0:49:07 | 0:49:13 | |
MUSIC: "I Am The Walrus" BY THE BEATLES | 0:49:13 | 0:49:18 | |
Respectful or not, easy listening was now benefiting from a middle-aged backlash | 0:49:18 | 0:49:24 | |
against the seemingly drug-obsessed youth culture and from rock's slide into the obscure. | 0:49:24 | 0:49:30 | |
# I am he as you are he As you are me | 0:49:30 | 0:49:33 | |
# And we are all together... # | 0:49:33 | 0:49:37 | |
A lot of people are turned off by that, baffled by it. Older people in particular. | 0:49:37 | 0:49:42 | |
Even if they were into The Beatles a little bit to start off with. | 0:49:42 | 0:49:47 | |
And that's because if you were 40 in 1965, they were in their 20s. | 0:49:47 | 0:49:52 | |
Of course you don't want to listen to I Am The Walrus. | 0:49:52 | 0:49:57 | |
If you look at the charts in 1967... Again, you think 1967, the Summer of Love, Jimi Hendrix. | 0:49:57 | 0:50:03 | |
The most prevalent trend in the singles chart in Britain in 1967 is | 0:50:04 | 0:50:09 | |
sort of very mawkish easy listening. | 0:50:09 | 0:50:12 | |
The bestselling records were Ken Dodd or Engelbert Humperdinck, Val Doonican. | 0:50:12 | 0:50:18 | |
They sold huge amounts of records. | 0:50:18 | 0:50:21 | |
# Tears for souvenirs | 0:50:21 | 0:50:25 | |
# Are all you left me... # | 0:50:25 | 0:50:30 | |
If you look at the bestselling lists in the '60s, most of the Top Tens are people like that, | 0:50:30 | 0:50:36 | |
not The Who or The Kinks. | 0:50:36 | 0:50:39 | |
People talk about Engelbert Humperdinck keeping The Beatles off the top of the charts | 0:50:39 | 0:50:44 | |
as though that's an anomaly. That's a trend. | 0:50:44 | 0:50:47 | |
# Please release me | 0:50:47 | 0:50:52 | |
# Let me go... # | 0:50:52 | 0:50:55 | |
I didn't go for, "Ah don't love you any mowah!" You know, all that. | 0:50:55 | 0:51:00 | |
# I don't love you any more... # | 0:51:00 | 0:51:06 | |
His version of Please Release Me was a slower, lusher, more romantic version of a country song | 0:51:06 | 0:51:12 | |
that had already been a hit for Dolly Parton in the States. | 0:51:12 | 0:51:17 | |
She's two very good friends of mine. | 0:51:17 | 0:51:19 | |
Dolly Parton. She's a lovely lady. You just got it, didn't you? | 0:51:21 | 0:51:26 | |
-Just got it. -A bit slow! | 0:51:26 | 0:51:28 | |
# That I will always | 0:51:30 | 0:51:34 | |
# Want her near... # | 0:51:34 | 0:51:38 | |
It seemed shocking that the record prevented The Beatles from having their 13th number one hit | 0:51:38 | 0:51:44 | |
with a double A side of Penny Lane and Strawberry Fields. | 0:51:44 | 0:51:49 | |
-It was shocking, yeah. -Was it a bit like, "Yes!"? | 0:51:50 | 0:51:54 | |
I said, "Yes!" | 0:51:56 | 0:51:58 | |
But I just went, "Yeah. | 0:51:58 | 0:52:01 | |
"I hope they're not mad at me." | 0:52:01 | 0:52:04 | |
# Let me go! # | 0:52:05 | 0:52:11 | |
There had been a period without many singers like that, but only briefly. | 0:52:12 | 0:52:16 | |
It wasn't really a throwback. It was more a continuation of what had gone before. | 0:52:19 | 0:52:24 | |
Country Joe and the Fish didn't mean as much in 1967 as Tom Jones did. | 0:52:24 | 0:52:29 | |
Listening to the chart, you get a good idea of what it was like to live in Worcester in 1967, | 0:52:29 | 0:52:35 | |
rather than hanging round Soho. | 0:52:35 | 0:52:37 | |
It was a release valve for all that stuff that was going on at the time. | 0:52:37 | 0:52:42 | |
And when this ballad came along, people went, "Wow!" | 0:52:44 | 0:52:47 | |
They listened to all the rock and roll stuff going on, which I loved. | 0:52:47 | 0:52:52 | |
Then all of a sudden this ballad surprised people. It took them by surprise, more than anything else. | 0:52:52 | 0:52:58 | |
Jimmy Webb's MacArthur Park, composed as part of an intended cantata, was a more surprising hit. | 0:53:00 | 0:53:07 | |
Originally sung by the actor Richard Harris, it was elaborately orchestrated, lasted over 7 minutes | 0:53:07 | 0:53:13 | |
and had a weird lyric about a melting cake. | 0:53:13 | 0:53:17 | |
It's totally eccentric, | 0:53:17 | 0:53:19 | |
but yet contains elements | 0:53:19 | 0:53:22 | |
of mass appeal. That, to me, is another trick of easy listening. | 0:53:22 | 0:53:27 | |
# Someone left the cake out in the rain | 0:53:27 | 0:53:31 | |
# I don't think that I can take it | 0:53:32 | 0:53:36 | |
# Cos it took so long to make it | 0:53:36 | 0:53:39 | |
# And I'll never have that recipe again... # | 0:53:40 | 0:53:46 | |
Superficially, a lot of that extreme '60s LA pop easy listening | 0:53:46 | 0:53:51 | |
seemed to, you know, avoid some of the rules of making it palatable to the mass audience, | 0:53:51 | 0:53:58 | |
yet still made it palatable to them. | 0:53:58 | 0:54:00 | |
MUSIC: "This Guy's In Love With You" | 0:54:00 | 0:54:03 | |
Herb Alpert didn't have any mass appeal problems. | 0:54:05 | 0:54:08 | |
Even when he turned his hand to singing in 1968, it was, as ever, | 0:54:08 | 0:54:13 | |
all very easy and very successful. | 0:54:13 | 0:54:16 | |
This Guy's In Love was very easy because I have a friend by the name of Burt Bacharach! | 0:54:17 | 0:54:23 | |
Who writes a good song with Hal David. | 0:54:23 | 0:54:26 | |
# Yes, I'm in love... # | 0:54:26 | 0:54:30 | |
"Who looks at you the way I do?" Hello. | 0:54:31 | 0:54:35 | |
That's heavy. | 0:54:35 | 0:54:37 | |
# If not I'll just die... # | 0:54:37 | 0:54:43 | |
As the '60s closed out with guitars in overdrive, | 0:54:57 | 0:55:01 | |
The Carpenters appeared, like an aberration. | 0:55:01 | 0:55:04 | |
A smiling, clean-cut, brother and sister act that was soft, smooth and easy on the ear. | 0:55:04 | 0:55:11 | |
They seemed to come from another time, or another history, | 0:55:11 | 0:55:16 | |
but Herb Alpert signed them to his own easy listening star label, A&M Records. | 0:55:16 | 0:55:22 | |
They were thought of as old-fashioned and a little corny. | 0:55:22 | 0:55:25 | |
It wasn't music I normally listen to, but I recognised something in her voice. | 0:55:25 | 0:55:32 | |
# I think I'm gonna be sad | 0:55:32 | 0:55:34 | |
# I think it's today Yeah... # | 0:55:34 | 0:55:39 | |
I was born a throwback | 0:55:39 | 0:55:42 | |
with a love not only for music, different types, but for records | 0:55:43 | 0:55:48 | |
as well and sound. And radio. | 0:55:48 | 0:55:53 | |
So my arrangements, my songs and all, have a little bit of this and a little bit of that, | 0:55:53 | 0:55:59 | |
and have their own sound to them. | 0:55:59 | 0:56:03 | |
There was a year there that records did not sell. | 0:56:03 | 0:56:09 | |
It was like they tanked and the feedback I was getting from my own company was, | 0:56:09 | 0:56:14 | |
"Why did you sign these turkeys?" | 0:56:14 | 0:56:17 | |
Herb decided to give them one more chance and handed Richard Carpenter | 0:56:20 | 0:56:25 | |
a little-known Burt Bacharach composition previously recorded by Dionne Warwick. | 0:56:25 | 0:56:31 | |
PIANO INTRO TO "Close To You" | 0:56:31 | 0:56:33 | |
I looked at the song and the melody. | 0:56:40 | 0:56:42 | |
And I came up with my arrangement, which is a slow shuffle. | 0:56:47 | 0:56:51 | |
Chunk-a, chunk-a, chunk-a. | 0:56:51 | 0:56:54 | |
# Why do birds... suddenly appear...chunk-a... # | 0:56:56 | 0:57:01 | |
# Every time you are near | 0:57:01 | 0:57:06 | |
# Just like me | 0:57:06 | 0:57:09 | |
# They long to be | 0:57:09 | 0:57:11 | |
# Close to you... # | 0:57:11 | 0:57:15 | |
The version that Burt had done with Dionne, it's straight eight. | 0:57:15 | 0:57:20 | |
# ..suddenly appear... # | 0:57:21 | 0:57:23 | |
It's the bom ka-dunk... | 0:57:23 | 0:57:25 | |
# Every time... # For me, it just needed that little bit. | 0:57:25 | 0:57:31 | |
# Just like me | 0:57:31 | 0:57:34 | |
# They long to be | 0:57:34 | 0:57:37 | |
# Close to you | 0:57:37 | 0:57:41 | |
# On the day that you were born the angels got together | 0:57:42 | 0:57:47 | |
# And decided to create a dream come true... # | 0:57:47 | 0:57:52 | |
And, uh... | 0:57:53 | 0:57:55 | |
..it made... it just made a hell of a difference. It made a hell of a difference. | 0:57:55 | 0:58:01 | |
# Waa-aa-aah Close to you... # | 0:58:02 | 0:58:09 | |
The Carpenters had breathed new life into the art of vocal easy listening | 0:58:09 | 0:58:13 | |
but by the early '70s the orchestral music of arrangers like Ray Conniff, Percy Faith and Bert Kaempfert | 0:58:13 | 0:58:20 | |
had quietly slipped from view. | 0:58:20 | 0:58:22 | |
Virtually overnight. | 0:58:24 | 0:58:26 | |
# Close to you... # | 0:58:28 | 0:58:31 | |
One theory I have is that certain people took over management of record companies | 0:58:31 | 0:58:38 | |
and they didn't want to hear it any more. It was baby boomers taking power | 0:58:38 | 0:58:43 | |
and wanting new stuff. | 0:58:43 | 0:58:46 | |
My father was massively popular in the United States until about the early '70s. | 0:58:46 | 0:58:52 | |
The '60s were really his heyday. | 0:58:52 | 0:58:54 | |
The charts were Ray Conniff, Elvis Presley and The Beatles. They were the three biggest artists. | 0:58:54 | 0:59:00 | |
There are a lot of, you know, pop and rock music... | 0:59:00 | 0:59:05 | |
..zealots out there | 0:59:05 | 0:59:07 | |
who really think that all of that other music was...ugh. | 0:59:07 | 0:59:12 | |
Despite the fall from grace of its orchestral originators, | 0:59:23 | 0:59:27 | |
easy listening was gliding through the century, taking many different, sometimes surprising forms. | 0:59:27 | 0:59:33 | |
It would even enjoy a revival. | 0:59:33 | 0:59:36 | |
The good life still needed a soundtrack. | 0:59:36 | 0:59:39 | |
# Not a cloud in the sky Got the sun in my eyes | 0:59:39 | 0:59:44 | |
# And I won't be surprised if it's a dream... # | 0:59:44 | 0:59:50 | |
Easy listening would also provide a safety net for some pioneering rock and roll and pop artists | 0:59:50 | 0:59:57 | |
who were, inevitably, getting older. | 0:59:57 | 0:59:59 | |
-# Down dooby-doo down down... # -In 1975, Neil Sedaka showed how a maturing rock and roll performer | 0:59:59 | 1:00:06 | |
could drift into the world of easy listening with exactly the same material. | 1:00:06 | 1:00:12 | |
# Breaking up is hard to do... # | 1:00:12 | 1:00:15 | |
Breaking Up Is Hard To Do, I wrote it in 1962 as a rock and roll song. | 1:00:15 | 1:00:20 | |
The tune originally was a sad lyric with a happy tune. | 1:00:20 | 1:00:25 | |
# Down dooby-doo down down... | 1:00:25 | 1:00:28 | |
# Breaking up is hard to do | 1:00:28 | 1:00:32 | |
# Don't take your love... # | 1:00:32 | 1:00:34 | |
A sad...sentiment with a happy tune. | 1:00:34 | 1:00:39 | |
But yet... | 1:00:40 | 1:00:41 | |
it again was a number one song 15 years later | 1:00:41 | 1:00:45 | |
as a slow, romantic ballad. | 1:00:45 | 1:00:47 | |
# Don't take your love | 1:00:47 | 1:00:55 | |
# Away from me | 1:00:58 | 1:01:01 | |
# Don't you leave my heart | 1:01:02 | 1:01:06 | |
# In misery... # | 1:01:06 | 1:01:10 | |
My songs are right in the middle of the pop, of the rock... | 1:01:11 | 1:01:18 | |
# Breaking up is hard to do... # | 1:01:18 | 1:01:24 | |
They kind of span in-between those | 1:01:24 | 1:01:27 | |
and the easy listening. | 1:01:27 | 1:01:30 | |
The easy listening stations started playing maybe James Taylor, certainly us. | 1:01:30 | 1:01:36 | |
And all of a sudden we kind of created a whole new... | 1:01:38 | 1:01:43 | |
..category, which was adult contemporary. | 1:01:45 | 1:01:49 | |
-Which... -What does that mean? | 1:01:49 | 1:01:52 | |
It means it's a different name for easy listening! | 1:01:52 | 1:01:56 | |
# My love must be a kind of blind love... # | 1:01:58 | 1:02:04 | |
Baby boomers were getting older and started wanting to relax. | 1:02:04 | 1:02:07 | |
They found music with vocalists that... The Eagles could very easily segue into easy listening. | 1:02:10 | 1:02:16 | |
And I think some of those performers did do some easy listening stuff. | 1:02:16 | 1:02:21 | |
# Take it easy | 1:02:21 | 1:02:25 | |
# Take it easy | 1:02:25 | 1:02:28 | |
# Don't let the sound of your own wheels drive you crazy... # | 1:02:28 | 1:02:35 | |
The charts now throbbed with the biorhythms of middle-aged America, | 1:02:35 | 1:02:40 | |
mixing country and western stars with ageing folk hipsters. | 1:02:40 | 1:02:44 | |
Having recovered from a period of career success overload, Herb Alpert was back, | 1:02:52 | 1:02:58 | |
minus the Tijuana Brass, with his own smooth, easy jazz. | 1:02:58 | 1:03:03 | |
But through it all there was always Richard and Karen Carpenter, | 1:03:06 | 1:03:10 | |
working their way towards worldwide album sales of over 100 million. | 1:03:10 | 1:03:15 | |
Their global success now guaranteed the survival of Herb's record label, | 1:03:18 | 1:03:22 | |
but to some executives at A&M, easy listening music was still a middle-aged embarrassment. | 1:03:22 | 1:03:28 | |
That kills me. I... | 1:03:30 | 1:03:32 | |
There were a whole lot of people at the label | 1:03:32 | 1:03:36 | |
who really... begrudged us our success, which in turn was THEIR success! | 1:03:36 | 1:03:44 | |
# Long ago | 1:03:44 | 1:03:46 | |
# And oh so far away... # | 1:03:46 | 1:03:50 | |
They got to keep their jobs! | 1:03:50 | 1:03:53 | |
I suppose they're aimed at... | 1:03:54 | 1:03:57 | |
Yeah, a kind of audience | 1:03:57 | 1:03:59 | |
that had grown out of pop music. | 1:03:59 | 1:04:02 | |
I imagine the Carpenters were for people who grew up with Herman's Hermits rather than The Who. | 1:04:04 | 1:04:10 | |
And this is their adult music. | 1:04:11 | 1:04:14 | |
# Talking to myself and feeling old | 1:04:14 | 1:04:20 | |
# Sometimes I'd like to quit | 1:04:21 | 1:04:24 | |
# Nothing ever seems to fit | 1:04:24 | 1:04:26 | |
# Hanging around | 1:04:26 | 1:04:30 | |
# Nothing to do but frown... # | 1:04:30 | 1:04:33 | |
If you listen to Rainy Days and Mondays, that's like a record | 1:04:33 | 1:04:38 | |
that sounds like it's really delving into the soul of a woman doing the ironing while on Valium. | 1:04:38 | 1:04:45 | |
# Rainy days and Mondays | 1:04:45 | 1:04:47 | |
# Always get me down... # | 1:04:47 | 1:04:53 | |
A song like Goodbye To Love is about as emotionally intense a four minutes of music | 1:04:54 | 1:05:00 | |
as has ever been recorded. | 1:05:00 | 1:05:02 | |
# No-one ever cared if I should live or die | 1:05:02 | 1:05:08 | |
# Time and time again the chance for love has passed me by | 1:05:08 | 1:05:14 | |
# And all I know of love... # | 1:05:14 | 1:05:16 | |
There's something not quite right. It is quite unsettling. | 1:05:16 | 1:05:20 | |
It always felt a little bit like that. It was too good to be true. | 1:05:20 | 1:05:25 | |
Obviously, with hindsight, we know there were problems. | 1:05:25 | 1:05:29 | |
They shouldn't have toured nearly, nearly as much | 1:05:29 | 1:05:34 | |
and I should have spent... Well, taking everything into consideration, | 1:05:34 | 1:05:38 | |
Karen passing on at 32 years of age and everything else, | 1:05:38 | 1:05:44 | |
but... just shouldn't have done all that. | 1:05:45 | 1:05:48 | |
We should have concentrated more on...just making records. | 1:05:48 | 1:05:53 | |
And... | 1:05:53 | 1:05:55 | |
And me writing some more songs. | 1:05:56 | 1:05:59 | |
We get so obsessed with the idea of how things turned out and it became Woodstock and Altamont | 1:06:00 | 1:06:06 | |
that the idea that many millions didn't agree with that or like that | 1:06:06 | 1:06:11 | |
and found rock music extraordinarily repetitive and rough and peculiar, | 1:06:11 | 1:06:15 | |
in their heads something like The Carpenters was natural. | 1:06:15 | 1:06:19 | |
It wasn't just... once Heartbreak Hotel came out, | 1:06:19 | 1:06:25 | |
that that was it and everything was rock and roll and pink and black. | 1:06:25 | 1:06:29 | |
It wasn't like that at all. | 1:06:29 | 1:06:32 | |
It was a mixture. | 1:06:33 | 1:06:36 | |
And all one has to do is look at the pop charts | 1:06:36 | 1:06:39 | |
and see that...at the same time that Heartbreak Hotel was a number one record, | 1:06:39 | 1:06:46 | |
so was Hot Diggity by Perry Como. | 1:06:46 | 1:06:50 | |
And the same thing is happening in the '60s on satellite radio. | 1:06:50 | 1:06:54 | |
To them, the '60s doesn't start until The Beatles hit. | 1:06:54 | 1:06:59 | |
In late '63 or early '64. | 1:06:59 | 1:07:01 | |
So forget nineteen-sixty-one, two and three! | 1:07:01 | 1:07:05 | |
And it's starting to happen now to the '70s. | 1:07:07 | 1:07:11 | |
If they're doing the '70s, | 1:07:11 | 1:07:14 | |
you bet your bottom dollar it's going to be disco. | 1:07:14 | 1:07:17 | |
Period. Like nothing else existed in the '70s. | 1:07:18 | 1:07:22 | |
Rock historians weren't very interested in telling the story of Nelson Riddle, | 1:07:22 | 1:07:28 | |
but more Frank Sinatra. | 1:07:28 | 1:07:31 | |
They weren't interested in telling the story of Burt Bacharach, but Bob Dylan | 1:07:31 | 1:07:36 | |
because, you know, this story over here is more ethereal in a way. | 1:07:36 | 1:07:40 | |
It's doing interesting things, but not leaving great cultural traces like Dylan and Hendrix. | 1:07:40 | 1:07:48 | |
# So many nights | 1:07:48 | 1:07:52 | |
# I'd sit by my window... # | 1:07:52 | 1:07:57 | |
You Light Up My Life was number one for umpteen weeks. | 1:07:57 | 1:08:02 | |
It was inspirational. | 1:08:03 | 1:08:05 | |
You had to stop your car... | 1:08:06 | 1:08:10 | |
and, and weep when you heard that. | 1:08:10 | 1:08:14 | |
MacArthur Park was another... | 1:08:14 | 1:08:18 | |
It was a magnificent, innovative Jimmy Webb piece | 1:08:18 | 1:08:23 | |
that was so above the throng, you had to stop your car. | 1:08:23 | 1:08:28 | |
People say, "I don't listen to that kind of music." | 1:08:28 | 1:08:33 | |
What is that? | 1:08:34 | 1:08:36 | |
We never even thought about that. | 1:08:36 | 1:08:40 | |
It was like, "Oh, yeah, did you hear that crazy Three Dog Night song about Jeremiah was a bullfrog?" | 1:08:41 | 1:08:46 | |
Anything goes. Flo and Eddie, Frank Zappa, whatever. Let's play some music here. | 1:08:46 | 1:08:53 | |
# I'll find the place to rest my spirit if I can | 1:08:53 | 1:08:58 | |
# Perhaps I may become a highwayman again | 1:09:00 | 1:09:05 | |
# Or I may simply be a single drop of rain | 1:09:07 | 1:09:14 | |
# But something will remain... # | 1:09:15 | 1:09:18 | |
Now we do know that our music... that we are what we hear. | 1:09:18 | 1:09:23 | |
We're not what we eat. We are what we hear. | 1:09:23 | 1:09:27 | |
# Nobody does it better... # | 1:09:27 | 1:09:32 | |
In 1979, Billboard's Easy Listening chart was officially rechristened the Adult Contemporary chart, | 1:09:32 | 1:09:38 | |
where '60s acts grow old gracefully alongside new easy listening and middle of the road performers. | 1:09:38 | 1:09:45 | |
# ..half as good as you | 1:09:45 | 1:09:51 | |
# Baby, you're the best... # | 1:09:51 | 1:09:54 | |
I was a ghost from the '50s. | 1:09:54 | 1:09:56 | |
People asked, "Didn't you used to be Neil Sedaka?" I was favoured on the Adult Contemporary | 1:09:56 | 1:10:03 | |
because of my age. Things that went to number 15 on the Pop went to number one in Adult Contemporary. | 1:10:03 | 1:10:10 | |
Adult Contemporary, I thought, was an attempt for the baby boomers | 1:10:10 | 1:10:15 | |
to have their own version of easy listening music. | 1:10:15 | 1:10:18 | |
You listen to stars that were cutting edge. | 1:10:18 | 1:10:22 | |
The ones that survived went on to do very middle of the road stuff. Imagine if Jim Morrison was alive. | 1:10:22 | 1:10:28 | |
He'd be crooning Sinatra songs. It would be very frightening. | 1:10:28 | 1:10:33 | |
Not at all frightening was a young, good-looking Frenchman called Philippe Pages, | 1:10:33 | 1:10:39 | |
who had trained as a concert pianist but was attracted to the melodies of British and American pop music. | 1:10:39 | 1:10:45 | |
In 1976, he changed his name to Richard Clayderman | 1:10:45 | 1:10:50 | |
and became the reigning champion and pretty face of instrumental easy listening and light music. | 1:10:50 | 1:10:56 | |
TRANSLATED FROM FRENCH: | 1:10:58 | 1:11:01 | |
It was the music that I liked to interpret. | 1:11:01 | 1:11:05 | |
Everything I listened to by The Beatles or other groups I wanted to transcribe for piano. | 1:11:05 | 1:11:11 | |
I really enjoyed them more than classical music. Was I gifted enough to be a classical pianist? | 1:11:11 | 1:11:18 | |
I don't think so. | 1:11:18 | 1:11:20 | |
It's the melodies that I try to feel the most when I play them. | 1:11:22 | 1:11:26 | |
It's a music that is half-classical because of the arrangements and half popular music | 1:11:26 | 1:11:32 | |
because it is much simpler than classical music. | 1:11:32 | 1:11:36 | |
When I met him he was 23. He was OK, good-looking, but not exceptionally good-looking. | 1:11:39 | 1:11:45 | |
But he was good-looking. | 1:11:45 | 1:11:48 | |
But every month after I have met him, he was looking better. | 1:11:48 | 1:11:54 | |
He was looking at people while playing. This is one of the keys of his super, super success. | 1:11:56 | 1:12:04 | |
He was not a piano player watching his keyboard. | 1:12:04 | 1:12:08 | |
He was a piano player watching the audience. | 1:12:08 | 1:12:11 | |
Songwriter, producer and manager Olivier Toussaint chose Clayderman | 1:12:13 | 1:12:17 | |
to perform his song Ballad for Adeline, which became an instant easy listening classic. | 1:12:17 | 1:12:23 | |
In fact, Ballade pour Adeline seems to be simple, but it's not so simple, you know. | 1:12:44 | 1:12:49 | |
But it's not complicated. It's a combination of something not complicated, but sophisticated, | 1:12:49 | 1:12:56 | |
simple, but without being... | 1:12:56 | 1:13:00 | |
-Oh! -LAUGHTER | 1:13:00 | 1:13:04 | |
You've got to add something with the orchestra to make it pleasant, to make it easy to listen | 1:13:07 | 1:13:14 | |
while making the piano sounding like a star. | 1:13:14 | 1:13:19 | |
Always...not always, but most of the time, bring drums. | 1:13:22 | 1:13:28 | |
Drums, bass, guitars. Like a pop recording, you know? | 1:13:28 | 1:13:32 | |
But if you listen to it, it's not disturbing. And that's the key. | 1:13:35 | 1:13:40 | |
As for easy listening music, it's a music we can listen to in different situations. | 1:13:50 | 1:13:57 | |
At home, in the car, at a restaurant. | 1:13:58 | 1:14:01 | |
It's a music we can listen to with pleasure everywhere. | 1:14:03 | 1:14:07 | |
So I think that easy listening fits me well. | 1:14:08 | 1:14:12 | |
It's grand. It's good. | 1:14:12 | 1:14:14 | |
# I'm easy like Sunday morning | 1:14:19 | 1:14:23 | |
# That's why I'm easy | 1:14:25 | 1:14:30 | |
# I'm easy like Sunday mo-o-orning... # | 1:14:32 | 1:14:39 | |
Easy listening is fine, it's fine | 1:14:39 | 1:14:41 | |
because there are times when you want to sit back and just, you know, | 1:14:41 | 1:14:46 | |
just relax and listen to music that is going to be soothing to the mind and to the heart. | 1:14:46 | 1:14:52 | |
And...I got into that category. | 1:14:52 | 1:14:56 | |
MUSIC: "Casino Royale" | 1:14:56 | 1:14:58 | |
For a '60s easy listening singer like Engelbert Humperdinck, you could do a lot worse | 1:15:05 | 1:15:11 | |
than take that well-trodden trail to where the old kings of easy, like Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin, | 1:15:11 | 1:15:17 | |
and the odd rock and roll legend like Elvis Presley, found a home. | 1:15:17 | 1:15:22 | |
The city of inauthenticity, where the crap tables jumped and the easy cabaret went on forever. | 1:15:22 | 1:15:28 | |
Las Vegas. | 1:15:28 | 1:15:30 | |
Actually, it was very exciting in the early days of Las Vegas. | 1:15:32 | 1:15:37 | |
The first hotel I ever played at, the Riviera Hotel, Dean had a piece of it. | 1:15:37 | 1:15:43 | |
He had a piece of the hotel and he'd make cracks onstage. | 1:15:43 | 1:15:47 | |
"You know, I got a piece of this hotel. I've been here two weeks now | 1:15:47 | 1:15:52 | |
"and I've checked every room. I can't find her." | 1:15:52 | 1:15:57 | |
# When the moon hits your eye Like a big pizza pie That's amore... # | 1:15:57 | 1:16:03 | |
He took a shine to me, so he put his name up on the marquee. | 1:16:03 | 1:16:08 | |
"Dean Martin presents Engelbert Humperdinck." | 1:16:10 | 1:16:13 | |
He never called me Engelbert or Enge. | 1:16:15 | 1:16:19 | |
"Humpy Bumpy Lumpy Dumpy, sit over here, pal." He'd do that. | 1:16:19 | 1:16:23 | |
And I had great times with that magnificent person. | 1:16:23 | 1:16:28 | |
# That's amore. # | 1:16:28 | 1:16:33 | |
Las Vegas could have witnessed the end of the easy listening story. | 1:16:38 | 1:16:43 | |
The music might have withered and died there in the desert heat, but that didn't happen. | 1:16:43 | 1:16:49 | |
By the late '80s, its emphasis on the delights of simply absorbing some pleasant sounds | 1:16:51 | 1:16:57 | |
found contemporary expression in some of the most unlikely situations. | 1:16:57 | 1:17:03 | |
Easy listening was alive and well. It was just chilled out on Ecstasy. | 1:17:03 | 1:17:09 | |
At the time, | 1:17:09 | 1:17:11 | |
both of us were in clubs in Newcastle that were like the Hacienda. | 1:17:11 | 1:17:15 | |
When you came home, you listened to another kind of music, which didn't really have a name. | 1:17:17 | 1:17:23 | |
You'd put on something to relax to. | 1:17:23 | 1:17:26 | |
It might be Penguin Cafe Orchestra or William Orbit or a bit A Man Called Adam, | 1:17:26 | 1:17:32 | |
those kinds of things. That later became what people called chill out, | 1:17:32 | 1:17:37 | |
which is not really something I'd... | 1:17:37 | 1:17:40 | |
I don't really like the word. I don't like the word. | 1:17:40 | 1:17:44 | |
But it was a very... There was a lot of different kinds of sort of down tempo music. | 1:17:44 | 1:17:50 | |
If you were looking for the happy impulses of a kind of easy listening music in the pop charts of the '90s, | 1:17:55 | 1:18:02 | |
Lighthouse Family had it all - | 1:18:02 | 1:18:04 | |
a posy-Ecstasy journey to the heart of a music designed to celebrate the good life. | 1:18:04 | 1:18:10 | |
# Lifted | 1:18:10 | 1:18:13 | |
# Lifted, lifted | 1:18:13 | 1:18:18 | |
# We could be lifted from the shadows | 1:18:20 | 1:18:24 | |
# Lifted... # | 1:18:25 | 1:18:30 | |
I think we did actually have our roots in happy, uplifting house music | 1:18:30 | 1:18:37 | |
of the late '80s, early '90s. | 1:18:37 | 1:18:41 | |
We just created the sort of sounds that made us feel good. | 1:18:41 | 1:18:45 | |
And that was what we set out to do, | 1:18:45 | 1:18:48 | |
to create those sort of songs that did that, for us. | 1:18:48 | 1:18:52 | |
-# We could be -Lifted... -# | 1:18:52 | 1:18:55 | |
It's like you create this little world, this mood. | 1:18:55 | 1:18:59 | |
And I think... Ocean Drive is a blueprint of that. | 1:18:59 | 1:19:04 | |
I think it is that. It's this kind of...blue sky, | 1:19:04 | 1:19:08 | |
feel good sunshine coming out of the speakers. | 1:19:08 | 1:19:12 | |
Cos we hear what people say about Lighthouse Family. | 1:19:17 | 1:19:22 | |
It's like they're saying it doesn't mean anything. Well, it does. | 1:19:22 | 1:19:27 | |
You might not like it, or get it, | 1:19:27 | 1:19:31 | |
but it does actually mean something. | 1:19:31 | 1:19:34 | |
And it isn't just there to make the room look pretty. | 1:19:34 | 1:19:38 | |
# So blue | 1:19:38 | 1:19:41 | |
# The sun's gonna shine on everything you do... # | 1:19:41 | 1:19:47 | |
Only somebody who doesn't understand the whole purpose of what it's about would say, | 1:19:47 | 1:19:53 | |
"This type of music makes you feel good so it is not music." | 1:19:53 | 1:19:57 | |
Ultimately, it's about trying to get the best out of life. | 1:19:57 | 1:20:02 | |
That's the fundamental of it. Trying to get the best out of life. | 1:20:02 | 1:20:07 | |
# The boys watch the girls while the girls watch the boys who watch the girls go by | 1:20:10 | 1:20:16 | |
# Eye to eye, they solemnly convene to make the scene | 1:20:16 | 1:20:21 | |
# Making music to watch girls by. # | 1:20:21 | 1:20:25 | |
Maybe the best of life had already happened. Who could tell | 1:20:25 | 1:20:29 | |
in a culture now dominated by post-modernism, post-feminism and post-everything? | 1:20:29 | 1:20:35 | |
In a world in which recycling, appropriation and nostalgia were everywhere, | 1:20:35 | 1:20:41 | |
that old enemy of everything that was supposed to be authentic in music enjoyed a revival. | 1:20:41 | 1:20:48 | |
Austin Powers was unfrozen and Burt Bacharach was rediscovered. | 1:20:48 | 1:20:53 | |
Easy listening was back, relaxing us into the 21st century. | 1:20:55 | 1:21:00 | |
MUSIC: "Soul Bossa Nova" | 1:21:02 | 1:21:05 | |
This was obscure music. This was music that no-one really knew and people still crave that. | 1:21:05 | 1:21:11 | |
The paradox was they were craving music dismissed originally as unhip. | 1:21:11 | 1:21:17 | |
They were finding that to be hip. | 1:21:17 | 1:21:19 | |
All this cool and uncool business. I... You know, really. | 1:21:21 | 1:21:26 | |
I'm just sick to death of hearing it. | 1:21:29 | 1:21:31 | |
It's...poppycock! | 1:21:31 | 1:21:34 | |
These sounds that suddenly, freed of the rift that there was in the '60s between one and the other, | 1:21:34 | 1:21:41 | |
were liberated. | 1:21:41 | 1:21:43 | |
I think the young generation now likes that music. They chill out with that kind of music. | 1:21:43 | 1:21:49 | |
They say it's great to chill out to. | 1:21:49 | 1:21:52 | |
Music that is exciting enough not to be boring. | 1:21:52 | 1:21:56 | |
You have enough to listen for, but you can also just have it play on the side while you do something. | 1:21:56 | 1:22:02 | |
Easy listening might have become interesting as a retro experience, | 1:22:04 | 1:22:09 | |
but we rarely heard about its life as a hugely successful music that was still happening. | 1:22:09 | 1:22:14 | |
Contemporary easy listening was, as ever, | 1:22:19 | 1:22:22 | |
ignored by music journalists or dismissed as totally unhip. | 1:22:22 | 1:22:26 | |
Press people do not like that kind of music and they do not like people having such a big success | 1:22:29 | 1:22:36 | |
with that kind of music. What can I do? Imagine, for example, Richard Clayderman is beloved | 1:22:36 | 1:22:42 | |
by two critics in the world, but hated by millions of people. | 1:22:42 | 1:22:46 | |
I really would prefer the opposite side of my story. | 1:22:46 | 1:22:50 | |
PLAYS "Ebony and Ivory" | 1:22:50 | 1:22:55 | |
Richard Clayderman now has 350 gold and platinum albums to his name | 1:22:55 | 1:22:59 | |
and has recorded more than 1,200 songs. | 1:22:59 | 1:23:03 | |
He's performed 2,000 concerts and has received more than 50,000 bouquets of flowers from his fans. | 1:23:03 | 1:23:11 | |
According to the Guinness Book of Records, he is the most successful pianist in the world | 1:23:11 | 1:23:16 | |
and has spent 20 of the last 30 years away from home, playing his music across the globe. | 1:23:16 | 1:23:22 | |
When I'm in China, I interpret some Chinese melodies and the public is really touched. | 1:23:27 | 1:23:33 | |
When I'm in South America, I'll interpret some melodies that are well-known there. | 1:23:33 | 1:23:39 | |
My repertoire is different, but the way I interpret things is the same. | 1:23:39 | 1:23:43 | |
Very often, I play pieces by Billy Joel, Elton John or Stevie Wonder. | 1:23:48 | 1:23:53 | |
Onstage I do a medley of Stevie Wonder songs, | 1:23:53 | 1:23:56 | |
but again I do it in my own style with my piano. I try to bring something different to them. | 1:23:56 | 1:24:02 | |
When I think of easy listening, I think of an alternate history of pop | 1:24:05 | 1:24:10 | |
where the blues and jazz sort of only happened in a white way, if you like. | 1:24:10 | 1:24:16 | |
I think of the sting of rock and roll not happening in easy listening. | 1:24:20 | 1:24:26 | |
Incredibly tuneful, so it's deeply, deeply enjoyable, to an extent. | 1:24:26 | 1:24:33 | |
In America, when they evoke Richard's music, | 1:24:33 | 1:24:37 | |
they say elevator music | 1:24:37 | 1:24:40 | |
because they try to find a way to do something which would be like... | 1:24:40 | 1:24:46 | |
..to hurt you. | 1:24:46 | 1:24:48 | |
But, em, | 1:24:48 | 1:24:50 | |
I said easy listening because we don't know how to... how to describe this music. | 1:24:50 | 1:24:57 | |
Easy listening can always be new because it always has someone else's new music, | 1:25:00 | 1:25:05 | |
however spiky, sexy or subversive, to inspire it to new heights of mildness, joyousness | 1:25:05 | 1:25:12 | |
and mass acceptability. | 1:25:12 | 1:25:14 | |
James Last, who in the '70s was pumping out two albums every month, | 1:25:16 | 1:25:21 | |
refuses to grow old and intolerant of pop music. | 1:25:21 | 1:25:25 | |
He's still determined to elevate the latest thing. | 1:25:25 | 1:25:29 | |
# Can't read my, can't read my No, he can't read my poker face | 1:25:40 | 1:25:46 | |
-# -She's got to love nobody | 1:25:46 | 1:25:49 | |
# Can't read my, can't read my No, he can't read my poker face | 1:25:49 | 1:25:54 | |
-# -She's got to love nobody... -# | 1:25:54 | 1:25:56 | |
If it's done well, | 1:26:17 | 1:26:20 | |
certain people just make whatever it is look easy. | 1:26:20 | 1:26:24 | |
So Bing Crosby... | 1:26:25 | 1:26:27 | |
There are more men, I guarantee you, in the shower especially, | 1:26:28 | 1:26:33 | |
thinking, "I sound just like him! He's just a lucky stiff!" | 1:26:33 | 1:26:37 | |
We think it lacks all the fibre and the dirt and the rebellion, | 1:26:39 | 1:26:43 | |
but in another sort of way it's got its own mystery and its own quality | 1:26:43 | 1:26:49 | |
as the production of musicians who didn't follow the party line of what was important to follow. | 1:26:49 | 1:26:55 | |
Quite a brave, radical decision! | 1:26:55 | 1:26:57 | |
MUSIC: "A Swinging Safari" BY BERT KAEMPFERT | 1:26:57 | 1:27:01 | |
Hello? Can someone let me out the booth? | 1:27:24 | 1:27:26 |