Max Bygraves - SingalongamaXmas

Ah, a good old fashioned sing-a-long album full of medleys of all your favourite Christmas carols. Over the course of eight songs, Max accompanied by a full orchestra conducted by Frank Barber, would tackle and wrestle to the ground twenty-eight songs, and one reprise.

Max was a British comedian, singer, and impressionist whose career started in the mid '40s and he kept going for over sixty years. He passed away at the age of 89 in 2012. It was his singalong series that apparently sold in the millions on Pye Records, and he wasn't targeting the youth market - he was aiming for an older demographic and was hearkening to a bygone era. The bottom right corner on this one has Vol. 8, which at first confused me. Were there seven more in this series? Well, yes ... and no. There weren't seven Christmas albums, but this was his eighth. Don't worry, I'm still confused too.

I have to admit that I had prejudged the album based solely on the cover. It looked like a children's record and I figured the singalong songs would be a sort of generic gang vocal chorus of kids and Max cranking out Christmas classics.

The first track, which was a medley, started with "We Wish You a Merry Christmas" where Max messes about with the words, "We wish you a lot of presents..." and eventually segues into "O' Come All Ye Faithful" where things took on a more reverent tone. Max may have been a comedian but he was also a hell of a singer, and his ability to casually move between songs with his rich voice is actually a lot of fun.

The medleys themselves aren't a hodgepodge of songs mixed in a blender, the sequencing and order have been carefully structured and there's a reason things are braided together. When he sings "Away in a Manger" he weaves it together with "Silent Night" and interestingly "The 23rd Psalm" which I thought was really cool.

Max slips in and out of the sacred with ease, and probably my favourite is the medley that opens side two that starts out with "Come Landlord Fill the Flowing Bowl" and from there goes on a bender adding in "Little Brown Jug," "Just a Wee Doch An' Doris," "Here's to the Good Old Beer to Wash it Down," "Let's Have Another One" and "Rolling Home" it is literally a medley filled with good cheer. As Max sings "Tomorrow we'll be sober."

I was genuinely caught off guard when he launched into Slade's 1973 classic "Merry Christmas Everybody" as it was actually pretty good - oh, it pales to the original, but he makes it his own and he pairs it with "I Wish It Could Be Christmas Everyday" another 1973 classic, this time by Wizzard (Roy Wood, baby) and to be honest, it isn't a medley as he does both songs pretty much in their entirety. Gotta hand it to Max, he may have been aiming at the old folks but he was stuck in the past.

By the time we get to the closing medley Max has gone through the season and closes out with what reads like an odd combination of "Silver Bells" and "Mary's Boy Child" that closes out with "Auld Lang Syne."

I gotta hand it to Max, this was far more enjoyable than I had expected, and considering how much Christmas music I have it's always fun, really fun to discover new stuff I've not heard before.

Ho Ho Ho.

Billy Rankin - Growin' Up Too Fast

Growin' Up Too Fast was never widely released on CD (if at all), and it was one of the albums I really wanted to get back after a basement flood wiped out my vinyl collection in the '90s (when no one really gave a shit about records, and my insurance gave me a couple hundred bucks for an appraised $10,000 collection). Way back in 1984, my (dearly departed and greatly missed) buddy Dave let me borrow his cassette copy, which included a bonus track of "Get It On (Bang A Gong)." When I eventually bought the album, I didn't know it was a bonus track, or even what a bonus track was. If that sentence was hard to read, just go back and skim it. I'm sure you'll get the gist. I'd find out later Billy was an off-and-on-again member of Nazareth and wrote some absolutely killer songs for them. At the time, though, all I knew was this guy laid it out cold with the opening cut, "Baby Come Back," then proceeded to lay down one killer tune after another bef...

Styx - Paradise Theater

Styx was hands down one of my favourite bands as a kid. They were a strange band, even back then. They were a hard rock band, almost progressive at times, who had a penchant for sucky ballads. I know there's a tendency for people to zero in on "Babe" as the song that killed the band's credibility. The roots go way back to almost the beginning when Styx released "Lady" on their second album. It showed a side to the band that needed to be kept in check, and for the most part the band kept things on a pretty tight leash. The band had been setting a gruelling pace, releasing an album a year (two in 1972) and by the time they released Paradise Theater (if I end up writing theatre later it's because that's how we spell it here) in 1981 they'd dropped ten albums in less than a decade. I snapped this up as soon as I saw it, and it became a fixture on my turntable. Like the band had announced on "Borrowed Time" from 1979's Cornerstone , ...

Gary Numan - The Pleasure Principle

"Cars" was really the only song I knew by Gary Numan. I knew the name of the album the song came from. Over the years bits and pieces of trivia are accumulated, but in terms of his music it was still distilled down to one song ... It would be too easy to write Mr. Numan off as a one hit wonder, and I suppose in terms of actual chart hits this was his defining moment as a solo artist. Of course this really means nothing, as Gary Numan would drop an album a year pretty much through to the end of the '80s. He'd then slow down a little but continues to make music. While The Pleasure Principle was Gary Numan's debut solo release in '79, he actually cut his teeth on a couple of albums in a band called Tubeway Army, first with the band's self titled release in 1978, and then on Replicas that came out in April of '79. By the end of Tubeway Army's run most of the band would follow Gary into his solo career. Paul Gardiner who had been with Gary from the beg...

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