We love this clip! Filmed on 7th March 1931, this Fox Movietone News Story shows scenes from a French amateur dance competition (“championat de France de danse moderne amateur”). We especially love the guys dancing solo from minute 4:00 onwards–I wonder what your great-grandparents would have made of this!
I’m always fascinated at the way that songs can seem to take on a life of their own, sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse, as they pass from generation to generation. P.J. Proby’s 1964 recording of Hold Me, for example, a 1930s hit for Al Bowlly with the Ray Noble Orchestra, brilliantly […]
Many orchestras recorded Limehouse Blues but none, in our opinion, ever matched that of Bert Ambrose.
I guess the place we have to start this week is with a 1932 cartoon. I’ve been an ardent fan of Betty Boop and Popeye cartoons since I discovered them as a schoolboy in the 1960s (there’d been a Popeye cartoon on the television at around 5:50pm each weekday in the mid-60s, if my memory […]
First recorded in October 1932 by Jack Hylton and his Orchestra with Phyllis Robins on vocals (though first performed in the theatre in August 1932 revue Words and Music by Joyce Barbour, Steffi Duna, Norah Howard and Doris Hare), Mad About The Boy has always been one of our favourite Noel Coward compositions. This interpretation […]
Britain’s heartthrob of the 1930s, Al Bowlly, sings ‘Melancholy Baby’.