Donald Swann, Michael Flanders - Complete Flanders & Swann
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CD Details
Artist: Donald Swann, Michael FlandersEdition: Music CD
Format: Box set, Import
CD Release Date: 2010-02-16
Music Label: EMI Europe Generic
Music reviews of Complete Flanders & Swann
Music Review: End of the 1950s.... conventional sophisticated humour
Rating: 4 Stars
Nicely packaged 3 CD set with a multi-levelled nostalgic feel. Michael Flanders was a promising actor, who however had the misfortune to contract polio. Swann was a pianist/ composer, partly of Russian extraction - or something like that. They worked together for about ten years, after which period the Beatles and other rock performers must have made them seem rather obsolete. Apart from a certain staged malice at Swann's expense, their image was of sophisticated commentary on then-modern life. There are references to such things as: air travel - then a novelty; hi-fi, as it then was - pre-digital; railway stations being closed; thermodynamics - influenced here by C P Snow; fashionable London addresses and fashions in interior design; status symbols (Vance Packard's 'Status Seekers' was published in 1959); modern buildings as criticised by supposedly outdated people; rubbish (or 'garbage') dumped in the countryside; and satire, of course another early 1960s thing. Flanders skill, or perhaps weakness, was perhaps over-elaborate verbiage; Swann's skill, or weakness, was appreciation of obscure linguistic things. This works well enough (especially as air travel was becoming cheap, so previously out-of-the-way cultures became better known), but isn't everyone's taste. This collection includes several anti-war songs, including 'The War of 14-18' and an anti-nuclear-war song, 'Twenty Tons of TNT', recorded originally on small tape recorders. The digitised CD quality seems to me much better than what I remember of the LPs - all the words are distinct. They made two LPs, with cover designs possibly influenced by Tom Lehrer's. However they seem to have run out of material; the third CD, the 'Bestiary', is largely whimsical songs on animal themes - prompted I'm sure by the success of 'The Hippopotamus Song'. If you're in the mood, listen to some of these songs, in a group, with intermissions for sherry, and try to mimic Oscar Wilde amongst yourselves as you visualise the atmosphere of post-war theatres in London and in other places which they doubtless would have called 'the provinces'. There's a small format sleeve-notes booklet with fairly erudite commentary which should help with all this.
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