It was the dawn of the Swinging Sixties. Cliff and the Beatles were topping the charts, John Profumo was cavorting with Christine Keeler, and miniskirts were regulation issue for the dolly birds of London. Small wonder Frank Sinatra wanted to spend some time here, especially as his career in the US was on the skids.
The musical guard was changing and Ol’ Blue Eyes wasn’t sure which way to turn. He’d toured the UK in 1953, playing Tooting Granada and the Kilburn Gaumont, among other hotspots, so he knew the Brits were on his side. The decision to return in 1962 and record an album, Great Songs for Great Britain, may have seemed a little desperate with hindsight but Frank, the consummate professional, threw himself into it body and soul.
True it is not among his bestselling albums, and listening to his soporific versions of We’ll Gather Lilacs and We’ll Meet Again in Ol’ Blue Eyes of Bayswater, you could appreciate why. Nobody could deny his versatility, but Sinatra was inclined to switch on to automatic pilot without arrangements that kick-started the old swinger.
Our own Tony Hatch, who produced the Brit album, recalled how hand-picked guests were invited to the Bayswater recording sessions because Frank loved an audience to play to. There were memories of his jolly banter with the session musicians, and how appreciative he always was of his songwriters and fellow musicians.
Veteran DJ David Jacobs, who got to know Sinatra on his many visits to London, recalled visiting him in his dressing room before a live show, only to find the great man in his underpants. Things became even weirder when Frank climbed up onto a table while his valet held out his perfectly pressed trousers, ready for the singer to step into. Quizzing him later about this odd procedure, Jacobs was informed: “When I get out on that stage, I don’t want to be seen in a crumpled suit like yours, David.”
A different kind of American hero, Davy Crockett, was the main focus of Phil Collins - King of the Wild Frontier, in which Patrick Humphries visited the former Genesis drummer’s basement in Geneva, which is given over to a mini-museum of artefacts from the Alamo - maps, muskets, sabres, knives (the original Bowie knife) - and a letter handwritten by Crockett himself.
To those of us who grew up in the 1950s, when Davy Crockett was best known as a character in an American TV show, it was quite hard to get your head round the fact that he was a real-life Congressman and a champion of native Americans, as well as the guy who killed bears and wore a raccoon fur hat, complete with tail.
Collins has carried his childhood obsession into adulthood, accumulating the largest private collection of Alamo memorabilia in the world. “I earned my money and this is what I do with it,” the self-confessed anorak told Humphries, adding, rather wistfully, that the more he looked into the Battle of the Alamo and its mythical status in US history, “the more disappointed I am”. That’s childhood illusions for you, Phil.
Roy Plomley’s first ever castaway on Desert Island Discs in 1942, the Austrian-born comic, actor and musician Vic Oliver, was the subject of Vic Oliver - The First Castaway Remembered. Though virtually forgotten today, Oliver was a hugely popular UK radio star in the 1940s, when he appeared with Ben Lyon and Bebe Daniels in a longrunning show called Hi Gang!
Oliver’s other claim to fame was that he married Winston Churchill’s daughter Sarah, an impressionable showgirl at the time, and incurred the wrath of the great man who once referred to his son-in-law in public as “an itinerant vagabond”.
The marriage lasted nine years and evidently Churchill warmed to the Austrian charmer, partly no doubt because Oliver’s name appeared on a Nazi blacklist of people to be arrested as soon as Hitler conquered Britain.
Ol’ Blue Eyes of Bayswater
R2, Monday, January 23
Phil Collins - King of the Wild Frontier
R4, Saturday, January 28
Vic Oliver - The First Castaway Remembered
R4, Thursday, January 26
Nick Smurthwaite
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