Reupload - Medium Wave Band - Mellow Yellow/ Disney Girls

Bonzos styled take on a Donovan hit, backed with beautiful "Disney Girls" cover

Label: Spark

Year of Release: 1976

When the irony-coated easy listening revival arrived in Britain in the nineties, there was a tendency to behave as if it was something new. In truth, knowing and faintly mocking easy listening covers have been a comedic part of pop music since at least the fifties, when rock and roll found itself fair game for all manner of inappropriately intricate cover versions.

During the seventies, session musician Graham Preskett also formed the Medium Wave Band ensemble who set about producing two delightful little singles of this ilk. The first one "Radio" has already been featured on this blog, but their cover of Donovan's "Mellow Yellow" is probably better value for money. Where the original swells over with false bonhomie, especially during the irritating studio "party" towards the end (fake recording studio parties never fail to destroy the mood of a record for me) the Medium Wave Band tighten their ties and button up their jackets for this and deliver a much more considered version. Doubtlessly indebted to Vivian Stanshall and actually admirable in its detail, like all the best comedy records this is part-joke, part careful study.  To be honest, I get more plain and ordinary enjoyment out of it than I do giggles.

Medium Wave Band - Mellow Yellow/ Disney Girls

Label: Spark

Year of Release: 1976

When the easy listening revival arrived in Britain in the nineties, coated with irony as so much of the output of that decade often was, there was a tendency to behave as if it was something new. In truth, knowing and faintly mocking easy listening covers have been a comedic or novelty part of pop music since at least the fifties, when rock and roll found itself fair game for all manner of intricate cover versions (although in the case of some of the earliest ones, it's hard to tell whether rock music was the subject of the mocking parody, or easy listening was).

During the seventies, session musician Graham Preskett formed the Medium Wave Band ensemble who set about producing two delightful little singles of this ilk. The first one "Radio" has already been featured on this blog, but their cover of Donovan's "Mellow Yellow" is probably better value for money. Where the original swells over with false bonhomie, especially during the irritating studio "party" towards the end (fake recording studio parties never fail to destroy the mood of a record for me) the Medium Wave Band tighten their ties and button up their jackets for this and deliver a much more considered version. Doubtlessly indebted to Vivian Stanshall and actually admirable in its detail, like all the best comedy records this is part-joke, part careful study.  To be honest, I get more plain and ordinary enjoyment out of it than I do giggles.

The B-side "Disney Girls" is actually the second seventies easy listening version of the track to be featured on "Left and to the Back", the other being the King Singers attempt. It's not hard to understand why this might have been an appealing track for bands with middle-of-the-road leanings to cover at the time, and in both cases the attempt comes across as being quite pure and heart-felt.  

A lovely little 45, this one, which I'm surprised didn't sell in greater quantities. Had it been issued nearer the close of the sixties at the height of the fame of the Bonzos and The New Vaudeville Band, it would almost certainly have fared better.

Medium Wave Band - Radio

Label: Spark
Year of Release: 1974

The hiss and crackle of the BBC Light Programme through a Bakelite radio set, the treble-heavy brass and string sounds, the light-hearted, humorous lyrics about far-flung colonial outposts... the pop music of the early part of the twentieth century may seem to have been revived relatively infrequently, but there have been patches of activity here and there.  The Bonzo Dog Band are the most obvious example if we're naming revivalists, but the classic pre-45 rpm pop obsessions of Tiny Tim, the New Vaudeville Band, The Pasadena Roof Orchestra, and even odd rogue examples like Sting's "Spread a Little Happiness" have all echoed that era.  And if you really thought it was safe to avoid now, a new craze for Shellac Discos is sweeping London, where the DJs play only 78s.  The old music hall and showtime world is, for all its seeming irrelevance, fairly irrepressible.

The Medium Wave Band here demonstrate how to do it with a reasonable degree of faith, trying their hardest to recall the production values of those days where dogs stared down gramophone horns and after-dinner sherries were supped before cranking up the player.  It's not quite up to the Bonzo Dog Band standards, but it's still a charming oddity which sings the praises of radio.  Queen's rather more orthodox attempt at lionising that form of broadcasting was considerably more successful, however, and this novelty item failed to fly out of the shops.  Still, enough copies of it turn up to convince me that it can't be too rare, and therefore must have shifted some units at the time.

Who The Medium Wave band are or were is less clear, and my guess would be that they were session musicians pulled into Southern Studios with the aim of performing on a novelty record.  They are almost certainly not the sixties pop act Davey Payne and The Medium Wave.  As ever, if you know who they are, get in touch.  This tune has been cheering me up lately, as it's utterly impossible not to warm to a record that mentions "Housewife's Choice" and "Hancock's Half Hour" in a polite, chipper tone.