Big Bad Monkeys

As children, my brother and myself would dare each other to go upstairs in the dark. Going upstairs in the dark was scary. We would say to each other ‘there’s a wolf and a monkey upstairs’. These were the two scariest things we could think of. The wolf is easily explained. As the bad guys from fairytales, wolves were familiar from stories like Little Red Riding Hood and The Three Little Pigs. I owned a ‘Little Golden Book’ of childrens’ stories illustrated by the legendary Garth Williams, whose depiction of the Big Bad Wolf still gives me goosebumps. As to the monkey, I think I know the answer…

It was, I think 1964 or 65. At this time, ITV tended to show movies on Sunday afternoons, many of them receiving their British TV premieres. None was particularly recent: most hailed from the late 40s or early 50s. In one of these movies, an outsized gorilla was perched atop a rocky bluff, taking swings at a bunch of cowboys who were trying to lasso him. Someone told me the monkey was called King Kong. As it turned out, they were wrong – but to my parents’ and grandparents’ generation, any big animated ape was by default King Kong. Either way, it didn’t really matter. I was now equipped with the knowledge that King Kong was a giant monkey, and that monkeys were, by extension, scary. From there it took but a short leap of the imagination to have them lurking upstairs in the dark...

The monkey I’d seen on that Sunday afternoon in the mid 60s was really a good guy. Mighty Joe Young (1949) was essentially a reminagining of Kong, by his creators Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Shoedsack. The story was slicker, more modern and more logical than the original, and whilst it retained the same basic premise of an oversized ape on the rampage (in this case, he wrecks a Hollywood night club), it was less of a horror movie and more of a heartwarming family film. Mighty Joe Young turned up again a couple of years later, on a Saturday evening, a broadcast of which I have clearer recollections. At the climax, the big monkey climbed up a tree to rescue a child trapped at the top of a burning orphanage, earning himself a reprieve after the nightclub escapade. As David Attenborough would later take pains to point out, gorillas aren’t really scary. They just look that way. And they’re handy to have around if you’re trapped in a burning building.

Creator Merian C. Cooper reputedly came up with the idea of King Kong after dreaming about a giant gorilla terrorising New York, a piece of blatant symbolism that any Freudian would relish. It was such a potent image and a memorable name that the movie became an instant hit. Mighty Joe Young, by contrast, was a box office flop, and plans for a sequel in which he was to have starred alongside Tarzan were quickly dropped.

The original King Kong didn’t get many outings on TV in my childhood. It wasn’t shown on British television at all until Boxing Day 1965. It turned up again as the big movie on a Sunday evening in 1971, but by an unfortunate coincidence, we were away on holiday that weekend, in a different ITV region. That same summer, however, saw the first piece of Kong memorabilia enter our household, in the shape of a plastic model kit. Created by the Aurora Plastics Corporation – based, appropriately enough in New York – the Kong kit was one of a series of models of iconic horror film monsters, featuring components which glowed in the dark. The kits weren’t very easy to come by, but it happened that, on our summer holiday that year, we stayed in a flat on Brixham high street, a few doors up from a model shop whose window was chock-full of them. As well as the hollywood monsters, there were several based on TV shows like Lost in Space and Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea.

The Kong kit was bought for my brother, while I chose a cool new monster that I’d never heard of before: Godzilla. None of the adults with us on that holiday had heard of Godzilla, which seems interesting in retrospect. Today, he’s as well known as Kong, if not more so, but back in 1971, in Britain at any rate, he had yet to acquire iconic status. Clearly, the stage was set for a face-off between my Godzilla kit and my brother’s Kong – if we’d only known at the time that there had been such a movie. Ironically, it would be Godzilla rather than Kong whom I first encountered on celluloid. The occasion was also my one and only experience of a Saturday morning picture show. It was forty years ago this week, in fact, that I prevailed upon our dad to take my brother and myself to see Son of Godzilla at the Odeon New Street, where it was presented in a decidedly juvenile programme of cartoons and sundry nonsense which all felt a bit childish to me (then aged thirteen). By this time, I was fully clued up as to the origins of Godzilla, courtesy of Denis Gifford’s essential coffee table book A Pictorial History of Horror Movies. Gifford’s book also included a fair few images of King Kong, and its lesser-known sequel Son of Kong, but had nothing to say about Mighty Joe Young.

Kong himself turned up in the form of a statue, inexplicably erected in the Birmingham Bull Ring in 1972, an apparition which we were taken to see and which sticks in the mind to this day, but the original 1933 movie remained elusive. The TV broadcast rights were held by ITV up to 1976, but screenings were rare. ITV gave us King Kong Vs Godzilla as the Sunday Star Movie on 19 January 1975, a piece of scheduling which seems laughable in retrospect, but I would have to wait another sixteen months to see the original.

Despite not having seen the movie, Kong continued to exercise a hold on my imagination. At my birthday in 1976, I was bought a book, The Making of King Kong, which went into the movie’s production in detail, including working drawings and rare photographs. The same year saw the character’s return to the cinema in Dino De Laurentis’ remake, but I gave this one the cold shoulder. Fortunately, the original was waiting just around the corner.

It was, in fact, forty-eight years ago today, Friday 14 May 1976, that I finally got to see Kong in all his 1933, black and white, censor-edited glory, courtesy of ATV’s regular Friday night horror slot, Appointment With Fear. But the big monkey proved to be like the proverbial double decker bus: after waiting so long to see the film, it was broadcast again, a mere seven months later on BBC1, who chose to place it in an early evening slot of 6.50 pm. Needless to say I sat through it all a second time (this time without commercial breaks), but it made less of a splash in my diary, where the May broadcast had been accompanied by a cartoon Kong and ludicrous graphics.

Despite being Kong’s poor relation, Mighty Joe Young kept pace with his more illustrious predecessor via screenings on BBC television, who owned the broadcast rights from 1981 onwards. Between 10 December 1981 and 31 August 1994, Joe was rolled out on no fewer than six occasions, two of them on BBC1. Kong, meantime, scored seven BBC hits between his debut on the network in 1976 and August 1995. A restored version, reinstating the 1933 censors’ cuts, was presented for the first time on 8 December 1992. Rarer by far was Son of Kong, which managed a mere three broadcasts in the same time frame.

One final oddity as a coda to this piece: while watching the blu-ray release of Mighty Joe Young, I was surprised to see the climatic orphanage scene presented in tinted red. This, apparently, is how the film was seen by audiences on release in 1949. Those big monkeys may have been with us for almost a century, but they can still spring the occasional surprise. Now, dare I venture upstairs…?

Fifty Years With the Beatles

 

The album that started it all...

Saturday May 4, 1974. The record department of WH Smith, Birmingham. I’d been angling to get a Beatles record for some time and our dad had finally caved in. The Beatles had been history for almost four years, but their records were still readily available: they had a whole section to themselves in Smiths’ record department. If WH Smith sounds like an odd choice to go shopping for records, it’s probably worth mentioning that, at the time, theirs was the best stocked record department in any Birmingham store. HMV’s shop was tiny and still specialised in classical music. I’m not sure that Virgin had even got going, and if they had, it was still a very minor player. In 1970s Birmingham, when you went shopping for LPs, WH Smith was the place to go.

Faced with a choice of Beatle product, I had to decide which album to get. We already owned A Hard Day’s Night, but this belonged to my brother. Now, as I flipped through the empty sleeves, it was my turn to take the plunge. The obvious place to start would have been the classic ‘red’ album, compiling the band’s key songs from the period 1962-66, but being a double this was beyond our budget. What I wanted was a collection of hit singles, focusing on the early years which I preferred. The obvious candidate was 1966’s compilation LP A Collection of Beatles Oldies. 

The sleeve wasn’t exactly an enticement to purchase, with its generic Carnaby Street graphics, all the rage in December 1966 when the album came out, but now really showing its age in a way the other album sleeves did not. The Beatles reportedly hated it, and I can see why. The back cover photograph saw them surrounded by oriental objets d’art, and framed in a haze of cigarette smoke. Pot? I was too young to spot the significance. Either way, it would have made a better cover.

There wasn’t a lot on TV that evening. Jon Pertwee’s Doctor was just setting out on his final adventure, while Mike Yarwood offered forty minutes of impressions and a special guest in the form of Cliff Richard at 8.20. Between them, we got The Wonderful World of Disney, which I always avoided, and a romantic adventure film, Saadia, starring Cornel Wilde. Time to leave the TV set and turn on the record player. It was sometime during that interregnum that I got to play my very first Beatles LP.

A Collection of Beatles Oldies was a somewhat skewed introduction to the band’s output. Having been released for the Christmas market in 1966, it contained no material later than that year, and omitted the singles ‘Love Me Do’ and ‘Please Please Me’. It contained a few songs I’d never heard before, notably ‘Day Tripper’ and its double A-side ‘We Can Work it Out’ which had escaped my notice on release in 1965. Of the album’s other selections, I was hearing most of them for the first time since they’d been in the charts in the 1960s. It was a modest beginning, but I was on my way. Within a year I would own five more of the Beatles’ LPs, plus a selection of singles and EPs. But the Beatles and I go back further than that...

Growing up in Britain in the 1960s, one could hardly fail to be aware of The Beatles. Looking back, I’m fairly sure that the very first Beatle record I heard that left an impression was ‘Twist and Shout’. They were all over the airwaves by the time I was old enough to take any notice, and I can clearly recall hearing ‘She Loves You’, ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ and ‘All My Loving’ played on the BBC Light Programme around the tail end of 1963 and into early 1964. I was just two and a half years old at the time, but nevertheless well aware that all these songs hailed from the same artist. 

Moreover, I knew the band’s name well enough to understand our mum’s wisecrack when, one morning, aged around three, I came in from the garden and told her I’d seen a beetle: ‘Which one?’ she replied: ‘John, Paul, George or Ringo?’ They were public property already: everyone knew their names. Their image was epitomised for me by seeing them perform on TV sometime in 1964. I think it was the single 'I Feel Fine', performed on a Thank Your Lucky Stars special. The mop tops had now acquired the proportions of German army helmets, John's especially, and this image of them became etched into my imagination.

In spite of the Beatles’ all-conquering status and popularity, I didn’t have any of their records bought for me during their time in the charts. Even Beatle merchandising passed me by, with the sole exception of a Yellow Submarine picture card that came out of a packet of sweet cigarettes. When I was bought a toy electric guitar, at Christmas 1965, it was adorned with images of The Rolling Stones (but I was more interested in its array of plastic knobs and switches). 

By the end of the sixties, there were still huge gaps in my knowledge of The Beatles’ career. ‘Norwegian Wood’ I knew only as a jazzed-up cover by the Buddy Rich Big Band, whose albums our dad would regale us with on his swish new Bang & Olufsen hi-fi. ‘Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club’ band first came to my attention being covered by Petula Clarke on an early 70s TV special. I didn’t remember The Beatles doing a song like that! I’d missed out on the whole critical debacle that was ‘Magical Mystery Tour’, and had somehow got through 1967 without hearing either ‘I Am the Walrus’ or its double A-side ‘Hello Goodbye’. As for ‘All You Need is Love’, it might never have happened. My attentions were clearly elsewhere. 

Having started the ball rolling with A Collection of Beatles Oldies, I was ready for more. Christmas 1974 brought the albums Help! and Rubber Soul. Revolver I bought with a record token and some trepidation around my birthday in 1975 – I’d been warned that this was where the Beatles started getting ‘weird’. It was soon joined by With the Beatles (much more my kind of thing) and the Long Tall Sally EP, notable in that its four tracks were unavailable anywhere else (most Beatles EPs were still on catalogue well into the 1970s). With the addition of Sgt Pepper shortly afterwards, I now owned what I felt were the essential Beatle albums (for the record, my brother had nabbed Please Please Me and we didn’t need two copies of it in the house). In the space of a year, I’d fixed the Beatle-shaped hole in my record collection, and would spend the rest of the decade listening to their music in preference to anything else the contemporary scene had to offer.

To date, A Collection of Beatles Oldies is unique amongst the original EMI albums in never having been released on compact disc. At sixteen tracks, it was also, on release, the longest Beatles album, and the sound quality suffered somewhat from ‘groove cramming’. It contained one unique item in the form of ‘Bad Boy’, a leftover from the Help! album sessions that had previously been released in the USA but not here in Britain and would remain unavailable elsewhere until the 1988 CD compilation Past Masters. One other minor oddity concerned the song ‘From Me to You’ which had been remixed for stereo omitting John Lennon’s harmonica part; and a couple of the other tracks, originally released in mono, had been ‘electronically enhanced for stereo’ by George Martin.

These days, the album is largely superflous, all the material being available elsewhere, most notably the classic ‘red’ and ‘blue’ albums, reissued last year on CD. But I still own that original copy of Oldies... with its mid-70s black Parlophone label, and will give it a spin tonight, fifty years to the day if not the exact minute: because it’s where the Beatles story really got started for me.