Alma Cogan Read Online Free Page B

glasses on a plastic-linked chain, tusky Streisand-length nails) had said. The next thing I heard was the click of technologyengaging, a half-second of tape-slip, then over-loud muzak which it took me less than a bar to identify as the Bert Kaempfert version of ‘Bye Bye Blues’.
    Virtually the only way I could shift records by the mid-sixties was at personal appearances in those big stores which retained the same older department heads who were in charge in the days when I could be depended on to pull the crowds in for them.
    I suppose they went along with the charade out of sympathy and nostalgia and, in a few cases, out of the delight that most of us have taken at one time or another in seeing somebody heading for a fall. This particular form of schadenfreude showed itself in a manic eagerness to prise people away from whatever purchase they were considering and force them to witness the spectacle of a career in unpretty decline.
    Only two records ever seemed to provide the background to these desultory, progressively unedifying side-shows: ‘A Walk in the Black Forest’ by Horst Jankowski, and Bert Kaempfert’s ‘Bye Bye Blues’. The push was on then to sell stereo equipment and the paraphernalia of home music-centres; and the Kaempfert especially was perfect for demonstrating the bass-to-treble range and fidelity of reproduction of the new audio technology.
    In point of fact, I never found it a faithful reproduction at all. It bore the same relationship to music as the heavy wax fruit I associate with my childhood – was there a home that didn’t have its heaped bowl of untouchable, vaguely sinister wax pears and bananas? – bore to the real thing.
    The glissando strings, thunking bass and muted trumpets of the Kaempfert orchestra, all existing in their own channels, all separated out in the hyper-real way that they never could be in reality, seemed to point up the dreaminess and sad separateness of the shoppers as they drifted from homely cabinet model to perspex-and-iridium Bang & Olufsen, from spotlit display to spotlit display.
    I still find watching people going about their everyday business to a soundtrack that I can hear but they can’t – because I’msitting in a car or coach, for example, or standing at a window the way I am now – inexplicably touching, and once or twice – stopping to let an austerely beautiful but unselfconscious (which was the point) mulatto schoolgirl cross at a pedestrian crossing in New Street in Birmingham, while the Ronettes’ ‘Be My Baby’ played on the radio and drops of rain shuddered diagonally upwards across the windscreen – physically wrenching.
    ‘Bye Bye Blues’ has segued (not seamlessly; again there was a couple of inches of tape-slip) into the Carpenters’ ‘Close to You’, a song that smooches along at the same clippety-clop, subliminal blood-pulse tempo. And the man in waders is still making his way towards The Terri-Marie in time with the beat, stepping over, occasionally ducking under, the mooring ropes of boats as he goes.
    The psychology behind telephone muzak, of course, is so elementary as to be barely worth stating. It’s supposed to divert your attention from the fact that your time is being wasted and you’re being putzed about.
    There was no muzak in the factories I visited for shows like Workers’ Playtime for a long time; then suddenly it was there as an airy rinse in all of them, all the time, ‘psychologically programmed’, round every corner you turned. The only refuge were the boardrooms where we were given lunch after the broadcasts and presented with examples of the factories’ output – spectacle frames, nylon lingerie, brush-and-pan sets, glass tumblers, continental sausages – as a token of their appreciation.
    Personally I find all kinds of wallpaper music about as relaxing as the yammerings of the happy snappers who used to turn up to take my picture in those days. ‘You know me. This isn’t going to hurt. I’m not