Cuddles - Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On/ Good Golly Miss Molly

Street cleaner invades London Palladium stage, gets one-single deal with Pye

Label: Pye

Year of Release: 1972

There's been a lot of talk in the press lately about the disgraceful behaviour of people at theatre musicals   - getting rat-arsed, singing over the top of the performers, cheering, hitting security staff and generally treating the West End stage as a pub karaoke session. We're not quite in "slash the seats" territory here, but it's close enough. Who knew "Mamma Mia" could get people so hot under the collar?

Jerry Lee Lewis, according to various sources (and my mother) had an even harder time of it in the fifties when he married his thirteen year old cousin. His shows became punctuated with cries of "Dirty old man" and heavy one penny coins being thrown. You have to wonder if he got off lightly - modern day audiences would probably have held a public lynching on the theatre steps. 

Despite his "misdemeanours", British audiences eventually forgave Lewis, and he remained a popular live draw here until his health made continued performances impossible. His earlier hostile reception might explain his unlikely tolerance of over-enthusiastic audience members getting rather too involved, such as the time a street cleaner from St Albans rushed the London Palladium stage in 1972 and started singing along with him. Security guards initially made attempts to control the situation, but Lewis waved them away and allowed the gentleman to continue duetting with him. 

That man eventually became known to the public as "Cuddles" Osborn and was promptly signed to a one-single Pye Records deal. This, I have to say, sounds so bizarrely convenient that a small part of me wonders if it was a fix. Was Cuddles' stage-rushing a very elaborate stunt to bring attention to him ahead of a rock and roll revival single being put out? For all my cynicism, it seems unlikely - I can see no proof that Cuddles was already active on the circuit at the time, and this does appear on the surface to have been a genuinely spontaneous event with a happy outcome.

The enthusiasm contained on the disc is a give-away in itself. Cuddles' voice on this record is a keen, energetic bark, the sound of a man who can't quite believe his luck and is blown away to even be in a recording studio. It sounds exactly like what it is; an excitable man being given his fifteen minutes of fame. Precisely because of that, it contains a lot of proto-pub rock charm, and the session musicians behind Cuddles are clearly very up to the job (I'd be interested to know if any of those involved were big names in their own right). A photo of Cuddles on Discogs shows a long-haired bespectacled man cheering at the sight of his own record in a local store, enjoying every minute of his public moment. 

Sadly, despite being released in the Netherlands and Spain as well as the UK, this wasn't a hit and Cuddles was never heard from again. That feels only natural, though, hit or otherwise - the public goodwill for a project of this nature surely couldn't be sustained for too long. You can get excited on behalf of a lucky chancer once, but it's hard for the goodwill to be prolonged enough to allow for a full-blown career. 

As for you drunken dolts bellowing your socks off at "Edison Lighthouse - The Musical!", don't expect a call from a music mogul any day soon. 

Oh, and if the previews below aren't working properly, please go right to the source.