It was one of the largest pieces of furniture in our living room. Huge, wood veneered and standing on four squat legs, the radiogram was, next to the television, our sole source of home entertainment. Manufactured by long forgotten company Kolster Brandes, the KB Junior was a valve-driven radiogram comprising a radio receiver (Long Wave, Short Wave and VHF) and a record autochanger capable of handling all the commercially available disc speeds from 16 through to 78rpm. It was bought by my parents in 1957, shortly after their wedding, and I still have the Credit Sale agreement and paperwork dated 27 May of that year. The purchase price was £61/19/0, rising to £70/1/0 after purchase tax, a not inconsiderable sum. The credit agreement was finally paid off on 14 September of that year.
The radiogram was, of course, monaural. Stereo equipment for home audio was still in the experimental stages in 1957, and stereo records would not become commonplace for almost a decade, mono being the preferred format as late as the Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper.
To access the record player, one folded down the front panel of the cabinet, revealing a small Garrard autochanger within. Discs could be stacked on the tall centre spindle and held in place with a metal arm and a clip. As each disc finished playing, the next one in the stack dropped down on top of it, an ideal arrangement for parties, allowing for uninterrupted music. It was, in a sense, a simplified form of jukebox for the living room. We used this facility quite a lot in the early days.
Above the record player was a storage area in which discs could be kept. In here resided the first records I ever saw or heard, mostly belonging to our mum, and the majority hailing from the late 1950s. When I first became aware of it, this stash of discs (mostly 45rpm singles but with occasional 78rpm 10” discs) comprised the following releases:
Harry Belafonte: Cocoanut Woman/ Island in the Sun/ RCA Victor 78 rpm 1957
Frank Sinatra: Witchcraft/ Tell Her You Love Her/ Capitol 1957
Pat Boone: There’s a Gold Mine in the Sky/ Remember You’re Mine/ London 1957
Dave Brubeck Quartet: History of a Boy Scout/ Sounds of the Loop/ Fontana 1957
Cozy Cole: Topsy Part 1/ Topsy Part 2/ London 1958
Miles Davis: More Miles ep/ Fontana 1958
Vic Damone: On the Street Where You Live/ Arrivederci Roma/ Phillips 1958
Pat Boone: Sugar Moon/ Cherie I Love You/ London 1958
Harry Belafonte: The Son of Mary/ I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day/ RCA Victor 1958
Chris Barber’s Jazz Band: Whistlin’ Rufus/ Hushabye/ Pye Nixa 1959
Dave Brubeck Quartet: Take Five/ Blue Rondo a la Turk/ Fontana 1959
Stan Getz: Jazz Theme from Dr. Kildare/ Desafinado/ Verve 1962
Dave Brubeck Quartet: Bossa Nova U.S.A./ This Can’t Be Love/ CBS 1962
Rolf Harris: Sun Arise/ Columbia 1962
These were all singles. There were no 12” LPs, although I know our dad owned various jazz albums which he kept safely stored away somewhere. Aside from these singles, there was a sole 10” LP, Frank Sinatra’s Swing Easy, released in 1954 on the Capitol label, which would still have been on catalogue when the radiogram was purchased. Looking at that list, just 12 singles in five years, it’s clear that our parents were not avid record buyers. Clearly, there had been a spate of purchases coincident with the gramophone’s arrival, but this soon dwindled to a trickle of releases reflecting our dad’s interest in jazz, and his career as a semi-pro musician.
Whilst dad’s jazz albums remained out of sight, anything that lived in the radiogram was fair game, and we played some of those singles a lot. Both my brother (two years younger) and myself were soon able to operate the autochanger ourselves. It was quite simple: you loaded the disc onto the spindle, then pushed the start button around until the mechanism clicked in. When the disc had finished, the tonearm automatically returned to its holder.
Top of the playlist was Cocoanut Woman, a noisy and exuberant calypso written and performed by the singer, actor and civil rights activist Harry Belafonte:
‘Coconut woman is calling out/ And every day you can hear her shout/
Get your coconut water (four for five)
Man it’s good for your daughter (four for five)”
The melody was simple and easy to remember, although until Googling the lyrics, I’d always assumed the call and respone chorus was singing ‘coconut’ rather than ‘four for five’. On the B-side was the theme to the 1957 film Island in the Sun, a more sedate track which got played rather less often. The disc was a 78rpm record, pressed heavy and brittle shellac: the gramophone needle could be flipped to play such discs with a heavyweight stylus, but I’m not sure if we bothered with this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifIqn85gsio
Of the other discs, we didn’t much care for Pat Boone, whose songs were as saccharine as their titles, but we would listen quite often to Vic Damone’s single of Lerner & Loewe’s On the Street Where You Live. Originally written for the Broadway musical My Fair Lady, Damone’s recording had reached No.4 on the Billboard chart on release in 1956, and did even better in the UK where it made number one two years later.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_dTgg3fyQ4k
Our mum evidently liked crooners, and they were a popular fixture of the charts in the late 50s, none more so than Frank Sinatra, whose Witchcraft single was another one we played a lot. Our sole Sinatra LP, Swing Easy, got played even more: my brother and I knew most of the tracks by heart and could sing them in our own childish manner. Our dad observed that we would even sing the bridging sections of Nelson Riddle’s arrangements in between the vocals.
This all proved to be an intriguing education in not merely music, but the English language. I learned numerous words from listening to these records, and would always notice any that were unfamiliar. ‘Taboo’ was a word I had never encountered prior to hearing it in the lyric of Witchcraft, and it would be a good while before I learned what it meant or how to pronounce it properly (Sinatra stressed the first syllable to fit the rhythm).
And speaking of taboo, there was that Rolf Harris single, Sun Arise, a kind of Aboriginal anthem featuring the digeridoo, and produced by George Martin. I really can’t explain why or how we came to own this: I was too young to have asked for it myself, so that means either our mum (most likely) or our dad heard it on the radio and liked it enough to buy a copy. It’s still hard to credit. On the B-side was the comedy ditty Somebody’s Pinched My Winkles, a source of some hilarity in our household where ‘winkle’ was employed as a particular euphemism. Unknowingly, we’d uncovered a dark secret...
The rest of the records were jazz instrumentals, mostly in the laid-back small group style that was still popular in the late 50s. The one oddity was trombonist Chris Barber’s Whistlin’ Rufus, a Dixieland-style composition that had been released during the era’s Trad Jazz boom: but our dad didn’t listen to Trad Jazz. I can only assume that he’d bought it in order to learn the piece for a gig:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNAAfLOoanI
The Stan Getz single was the sole release we owned by the prolific jazz saxophonist, but we made up for it by the amount of times it got played. If anything, the B-side, Desafinado, saw more action on the turntable, but I still have a soft spot for his jazzed-up version of the theme from the medical drama series Dr. Kildare:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2NSGZ8NOMc
Cozy Cole’s Topsy is the only single I’ve ever heard where the artist introduces the song at the beginning of the disc. This was another stylistic oddity, released in 1957 yet reflecting the sounds of the previous decade. It always sounded vaguely sinister to me, conjuring up dark alleyways with its walking pace rhythm and electric organ – the first time I’d ever heard such an instrument.
William Randolph ‘Cozy’ Cole had come to prominence in the 30s and 40s, playing for the likes of Jelly Roll Morton and Cab Calloway during the swing era. His drumming is a big feature of the record, which presented two different arrangements of the same bluesy theme performed by Alan Hartwell’s Big Band. Listening to it today, you can detect the beginnings of rock drumming in his style. Cole was a great timekeeper but not the subtlest of performers: to use an expression of our dad’s, he fairly knocks seven bells out of his kit on both sides of the record. He sounds like he was having a good time: you can hear his enthusiastic shouts as he batters his snare drum to death during his solo in Part 2. It may not have been the ‘in vogue’ sound of 1958, but Topsy went on to sell over a million copies, earning a gold disc for Cole:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Sn0gmkLdBc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1bkzLH0D1s
My favourite of those jazz instrumentals by a long way was The Dave Brubeck Quartet’s Take Five, a record which inspired me to take up a pair of our dad’s drumsticks and begin battering away on the arms of our sofa – which soon needed recovering. By the time of a relative’s wedding in August 1964, I was confident enough to ask to sit up to the drum kit at the reception and give a short rendition of the track. Its odd 5/4 meter could faze a lot of instrumentalists but sounded the most natural thing in the world to me.
On the B-side of this 1959 Fontana release was Blue Rondo a la Turk, a frenetic workout in the even more unorthodox time signature 9/8, derived from a curious rhythm Brubeck had heard being played by Turkish street musicians. To have been exposed to such radical musical ideas at such a young age was unusual, and to this day I prefer the unexpected and the unconventional in music.
This, then was the state of play when I first peered inside that old radiogram some time in the very early sixties. An eclectic selection of material mostly reflecting the disappearing styles of earlier eras. Soon, they would be joined by records bought for my brother and myself, most of them children’s stories (such as the Reverend W. Awdry’s railway series, narrated by Johnny Morris), but including the very first pop single I had bought for me, Herman’s Hermits’ I’m Into Something Good, which entered the collection in September of 1964.
In the next piece, I’ll be considering the other half of the old KB Junior: the radio.
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