Golden Oldies Rachel Johnson

John Manduell receives an RCM Fellowship from the Queen Mother, 1980

with the launch of its all-day classicalmusic service in 1964.

The young producer charged with overseeing that launch was John Manduell, a South African-born, English-educated composer and administrator, whose speciality was being in the right place at the right time and knowing what to do and how to conduct himself once he was there.

Manduell spent 12 years at the BBC, before – troubled by the essentially ephemeral nature of broadcasting – he moved into education and festival management. Who can forget his 26 years as director of the Cheltenham Festival and the 300 commissions of new music they generated; or his 23 years as the founding head of the reconfigured Royal Northern School of Music in Manchester?

Shortly before his death in 2017, Sir John published an absorbing memoir, No Bartók Before Breakfast, the title taken from a 1964 memo from the BBC’s then Head of Radio, Frank Gillard. It’s a marvellous evocation of a halcyon age of broadcasting and music-making from which some of our latter-day administrators might still usefully learn.

The book was based on conversations Manduell recorded with friends and former colleagues in 2005-06: conversations that can now be enjoyed thanks to Prima Facie (six CDs – £20), the distinguished small record label which devotes itself to the promotion of contemporary British music.

If I prefer the CDs, it’s because of Manduell’s immense charm as a conversationalist and the numerous stories that are not in the book.

I think of Stravinsky, post-concert in the BBC’s Maida Vale studio, demanding his £1,000 fee in cash, on the spot. A latenight raid on the safe of music publisher Boosey & Hawkes produced the readies.

Or of Ruth, Lady Fermoy, founder of the King’s Lynn Festival, conniving with the Queen Mother to drum up custom for a slow-selling concert of music by that engagingly off-the-wall composer Phyllis Tate.

‘So what should I come to this year?’ enquired the Queen Mother.

This was on an open telephone line in an age when rural exchanges continued to be manned by eavesdropping locals.

‘Oh, the Phyllis Tate should be fun.’

The concert sold out within the hour.

GOLDEN OLDIES RACHEL JOHNSON COVER MODELS

Live music is pretty much still dead.

Most of us have spent longer watching an ‘immersive’ Beatles documentary on Disney+ (Get Back) over the past two years than listening to rock and pop played ‘in person’ at concerts or festivals.

May that change in ’22. Until we can re-enter Joni’s lost garden, let us divert ourselves by peering into the deep well of dullness we find ourselves in to admire any gold coins glinting at the bottom.

There’s every chance that Glasto, Wilderness, Cornbury etc could again be cancelled by the medical-socialist state as an instrument of coercive control under the cover of COVID. So let us cling to something else, something good, which is the way some artists don’t try to dazzle us with their own originality but are content to thrill us with that much underrated genre the cover version.

Indeed, many of our best singers have brought out, without apology, entire albums of cover tracks. Hat tips to David Bowie’s Pinups (1973); John Lennon’s Rock ’n’ Roll (1975); and my own personal favourite coverer of choons, Johnny Cash with his American Recordings (1994).

Then you have the crooners and ivory-botherers such as Jamie Cullum and Michael Bublé, who you will agree have their place, especially over the festive period.

What draws me to this unsung genre – see what I did there – are the songs that are done better not by the composer but by AN Other. Here are my picks of versions that aren’t the originals but are the best.

Johnny Cash’s Personal Jesus and his take on Nine Inch Nails’ Hurt (go to Spotify or You Tube NOW – thank me later). Joe Cocker, of course, with his live sweaty and visceral version of the Beatles’ With a Little Help from My Friends. Elvis’s Bridge Over Troubled Water. Whitney Houston’s I Will Always Love You.

Most acts approach covers with awed respect for the original. The Depeche Mode lead singer Dave Gahan has just brought out an album of covers and called it, oh so humbly, Imposter. His version of Neil Young’s A Man Needs a Maid (and how I’ve always wanted to write a whole column about that song title) is, for my money, up there.

But I cleave to the cockier attitude of Nick Cave and his Lightning Seeds. He asserts that some of the songs reworked and reinterpreted on his album of covers ‘weren’t done particularly well in the first place’. Take that, Roy Orbison and co!

Indeed, Janis Joplin’s version of Kris Kristofferson’s Me and Bobby McGee blows the cotton socks off the beardie’s, and Jeff Buckley’s version of the Lenny Cohen dirge is the ne plus ultra of Hallelujah.

I will not be taking questions.