In The City
A Celebration Of London Music
Extract
Here are two brief extracts, the first about some stars of Victorian music hall, the second a final thought on life in London.
If a time machine dropped us off in London’s past, the biggest surprise might not be top-hats, horse-drawn milk carts or public gallows, but the mysterious catch-phrases that could draw knowing grins all round. In the 1970s people said ‘Nice one, Cyril!’ several times an hour, heedless of its links to Tottenham Hotspur (whose player Cyril Knowles it lionised). At the height of Gilbert & Sullivan’s fame, the HMS Pinafore line ‘What never? Hardly ever!’ was inescapable. In the Swinging Sixties you would hear ‘What’s it all about, Alfie?’
The music hall was naturally a fecund source of such flourishes, from George Robey’s ‘Archibald, certainly not!’ to Harry Champion’s ‘Ginger, you’re barmy!’
Harry Champion, whose name would generally have been pronounced ‘Erry Chempion’, was really William Henry Crump of Shoreditch, a great star of late nineteenth-century music hall, and one of that generation who lived long enough to encounter early recording technology. Thus we have fragmentary evidence of his genius, transferred from crackling wax cylinders to CD and MP3. Even so, Champion is distinctively of the pre-microphone era – hollering stoutly like the coster street vendor he purports to be in ‘Any Old Iron’. It’s to Champion that we owe ‘I’m Henry the Eighth I Am’ and ‘Boiled Beef and Carrots’. His vast popularity was well-deserved, for his wit and delivery were much subtler than you might guess from the many and cruder impersonations of his songs. ‘Ginger, You’re Barmy’ is a peculiar thing to modern ears, a stricture on the folly of bare-headed men. It’s some indication of London’s dominance in music hall that Harry sings blithely of his ‘cady’ (archaic slang for a hat) and ‘Derby Kell’ (or belly), as if the whole world spoke Cockney.
 |
Download pdf |
[91k] to continue reading this extract. |
|
