The Book of Lists

21 EARLY NAMES OF FAMOUS BANDS

In the music business, you have to hit not only the right chords but also the right name. Here’s a quiz to test your knowledge.

1. Angel and the Snakes a. Bangles

2. Composition of Sound b. Beach Boys

3. Big Thing c. Beatles

4. Artistics d. Bill Haley and His Comets

5. Carl and the Passions e. Black Sabbath

6. Primettes f. Blondie

7. Tom and Jerry g. Byrds

8. Johnny and the Moondog h. Chicago

9. Caesar and Cleo i. Creedence Clearwater Revival

10. Paramours j. Depeche Mode

11. Polka Tulk k. Led Zeppelin

12. Bangs l. Lynyrd Skynyrd

13. Beefeaters m. Mamas and the Papas

14. Falling Spikes n. Righteous Brothers

15. Sparrow o. Simon and Garfunkel

16. My Backyard p. Sonny and Cher

17. The New Journeymen q. Steppenwolf

18. The Elgins r. Supremes

19. The Four Aces of Western Swing s. Talking Heads

20. The Golliwogs t. Temptations

21. The New Yardbirds u. Velvet Underground

_{Answers: 1 (f), 2 (j), 3 (h), 4 (s), 5 (b), 6 (r), 7 (o), 8 (c), 9 (p), 10 (n), 11 (e), 12 (a), 13 (g), 14 (u), 15 (q), 16 (l), 17 (m), 18 (t), 19 (d), 20 (i), 21 (k)}

STIRRING OPENING LINES OF 11 NATIONAL ANTHEMS

DR DEMENTO’S 10 WORST SONG TITLES OF ALL TIME

Radio personality Dr Demento’s private collection of more than 200,000 records is said to be one of the world’s largest. He puts his library of discs to use on ‘The Dr Demento Show’, which is heard on 200 radio stations in the US and on the Armed Forces Radio Network.

What’s a really bad song title? One that’s offensive or inarticulate, I’d say, or one that doesn’t readily identify the song it’s attached to (Bob Dylan did that for kicks in the Sixties). I think we can leave those alone for now.

Then there are the sort of song titles (often from country music) that are often rather clever, to be truthful, but induce the same sort of groans that often greet a really good pun when heard for the first time.

Some of those are included on this list, along with others that induce groans for altogether different reasons. Qualifiers: 1) This list does not duplicate my two earlier Book of Lists contributions. 2) All these songs have been heard at least once on ‘The Dr Demento Show’ (I actually like most of these songs).

After each song title the composer credits are shown first (in parentheses) followed by the artist on the recording played on the show.

• BOOGER ON MY BEER MUG (Dr Peter Rizzo) — Sneaky Pete

• GROPE ME GENTLY, AIRPORT SECURITY GUARD (Larry Weaver) — Larry Weaver

• WHO PUT THE BENZEDRINE IN MRS MURPHY’S OVALTINE (Harry Gibson) — Harry the Hipster. (Inspired by the Bing Crosby hit ‘Who Put The Overalls In Mrs Murphy’s Chowder’.)

• THE FIVE CONSTIPATED MEN OF THE BIBLE (Scott Hendricks) — Axel the Sot

• THE DAY TED NUGENT KILLED ALL THE ANIMALS (Wally Pleasant) — Wally Pleasant

• I’M SELLING MOM’S URINE ON eBAY (Tommy Womack) — Tommy Womack

• HE WENT TO SLEEP — THE HOGS ATE HIM (Ray Starr, N. Nath, G.C. Redd) — The Stanley Brothers

• FLUSHED YOU FROM THE TOILETS OF MY HEART (J.D. Blackfoot, Johnny Durzo) — J.D. Blackfoot. (Pronounced ‘hort’. Not to be confused with the marginally less groan-inducing ‘Flushed From The Bathroom Of Your Heart’, a different song, written by Jack Clement and popularised by Johnny Cash.)

• HE PUT IN A BAR IN THE BACK OF HIS CAR (And He’s Driving Himself To Drink) (Sheldon Schwartz, Fred Wolfe, Jules Volk) — Georgie’s Tavern Band

• I STILL WRITE YOUR NAME IN THE SNOW (Chet Atkins, Billy Edd Wheeler) — Chet Atkins. (Wheeler is also known for his eulogy to an outhouse, ‘Ode To The Little Brown Shack Out Back’.)

9 ARTISTS WHOSE WORKS WERE PAINTED OVER

In 1953, officials of the esteemed Nelson Gallery of Art in Kansas City received a valuable twelfth-century Chinese wall painting that had been damaged during shipping. The horror of the officials was to be short-lived, for as restorer James Roth worked on the mural, he discovered a trace of blue paint underneath a layer of mud and rice husks. After careful, detailed work, a gracious goddess was exposed and identified as an outstanding example of tenth-century painting. It was hailed as one of the greatest Oriental art discoveries in recent years.

It had long been known that the renowned Renaissance painter Titian altered Feast of the Gods, a painting by his teacher,Giovanni Bellini. When the painting was X-rayed in the 1950s, it was discovered that Titian had also painted over several principal figures, altered the composition, and in essence changed the very content of the masterpiece. Art historians now view the two masters’ artistry as enhancing the value of the canvas and consider the painting as two original works in one.

During the cleaning of this fifteenth-century masterpiece, restorers at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art noted that a central portion of the painting had been painted over. Technicians using X-rays to examine the area discovered an image of two preserved skeletons lying in a coffin. As the painting had previously been owned by Sir William Abdy of London, it is believed that he had the skeletons painted over in deference to Victorian tastes.

In this painting of a nude woman nursing her child, puritanical sentiment triumphed over the artist’s intentions when a restorer painted a complete set of clothes on the woman. Later the clothing was removed, leaving the painting in its original state.

The world’s only group of mural sketches by the great Renaissance painter, sculptor and architect was found in late 1975 while chapel director Paolo Dal Poggetto was trying to devise an alternative route for moving tourist traffic through Florence’s Medici Chapel. Before opening up a storeroom as an exit to the street, restorer Sabino Giovannoni performed tests on the walls. Under several layers of whitewash and grime, he discovered more than 50 large drawings of the human form and one of a horse’s head, evidently Michelangelo’s record of past works and preliminary sketches of future projects. Art historians believe that Michelangelo, an outspoken Republican, may have rendered the sketches while hiding out from an assassin hired by the Medicis, who were purging Florence of any political opposition.

After recovering a stolen Cézanne, The Artist’s Sister, in 1962, the St Louis City Art Museum decided to have the painting cleaned and relined. Art conservator James Roth discovered another portrait on the back of the canvas. Painted while Cézanne was in his early 20s, the new portrait of a peasant raised the value of the original by $75,000. The canvas is mounted so that both portraits may be viewed.

The painting, an atypical work for Utrillo, provides a dispassionate view of two figures facing a firing squad during the 1871 Paris Commune uprising. The work was bought in Paris in April of 1994 for $87,400 and sold in June at Christie’s in London for $109,000. During the two intervening months, the rifles of the firing squad were painted over, apparently to eliminate the reference to an execution. Although Christie’s claimed that Utrillo experts Gilbert Petrides and Jean Fabris had authenticated La Caserne, both denied having been consulted before the London sale. Fabis added, ‘In my opinion, it’s a fake, as it was tampered with.’

Two murals of an original 10 painted by Armenian-born artist Arshile Gorki were recovered in 1973 due to the efforts of Mrs Ruth Bowman, a Newark, New Jersey, art historian. Five years after the completion of the 10 murals — commissioned by the Works Progress Administration in 1937 — the Army Air Corps took over Newark Airport, which housed the murals, and put the first of 14 coats of whitewash over them. Every major art text published since 1948 claimed the murals had been lost, but Mrs Bowman decided to investigate the walls further and found two murals intact. The other eight paintings were destroyed when walls were torn down to expedite the installation of new radiators.

In September 1980, the artists David Salle and Julian Schnabel traded paintings. The painting that Salle gave Schnabel, Jump, consists of two canvases mounted side by side. The right side portrayed a woman and a baby in a bedroom, the left side featured birds. Schnabel decided that the work was incomplete, so he painted Salle’s face in orange on the left panel. Salle was not initially pleased with Schnabel’s handiwork. When Schnabel first showed him the painting, Salle jumped up and wrestled him to the floor. They later reconciled and sold Jump as a joint work to collector Eugene Schwartz.

8 VALUABLE ART WORKS FOUND UNEXPECTEDLY

In 1820, a Greek peasant named Yorgos was digging in his field on the island of Milos when he unearthed several carved blocks of stone. He burrowed deeper and found four statues — three figures of Hermes and one of Aphrodite, the goddess of love. Three weeks later, the Choiseul archaeological expedition arrived by ship, purchased the Aphrodite, and took it to France. Louis XVIII gave it the name Venus de Milo and presented it to the Louvre in Paris, where it became one of the most famous works of art in the world.

On February 21, 1978, electrical workers were putting down lines on a busy street corner in Mexico City when they discovered a 20-ton stone bas-relief of the Aztec night goddess, Coyolxauhqui. It is believed to have been sculpted in the early fifteenth century and buried prior to the destruction of the Aztec civilisation by the Spanish conquistadors in 1521. The stone was moved 200 yards from the site to the Museum of the Great Temple.

In 1978 more than 500 movies dating from 1903 to 1929 were dug out of a hole in the ground in Dawson City, Yukon. Under normal circumstances, the 35-mm nitrate films would have been destroyed, but the permafrost preserved them perfectly.

Joanne Perez, the widow of vaudeville performer Pepito the Spanish Clown, cleaned out the area underneath her bed and discovered the only existing copy of the pilot for the TV series I Love Lucy. Pepito had coached Lucille Ball and had guest-starred in the pilot. Ball and her husband, Desi Arnaz, had given the copy to Pepito as a gift in 1951 and it had remained under the bed for 30 years.

A middle-aged couple in a suburb of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, asked an art prospector to appraise a painting in their home. While he was there he examined another painting that the couple had thought was a reproduction of a work by Vincent van Gogh. It turned out to be an 1886 original. On March 10, 1991, the painting Still Life with Flowers sold at auction for $1,400,000.

In 1961 Barbara Testa, a Hollywood librarian, inherited six steamer trunks that had belonged to her grandfather James Fraser Gluck, a Buffalo, New York, lawyer who died in 1895. Over the next three decades she gradually sifted through the contents of the trunks, until one day in the autumn of 1990 she came upon 665 pages that turned out to be the original handwritten manuscript of the first half of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. The two halves of the great American novel were finally reunited at the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library.

A Philadelphia financial analyst was browsing at a flea market in Adamstown, Pennsylvania, when he was attracted by a wooden picture frame. He paid four dollars for it. Back at his home, he removed the old torn painting in the frame and found a folded document between the canvas and the wood backing. It turned out to be a 1776 copy of the Declaration of Independence — one of 24 known to remain. On June 13, 1991, Sotheby’s auction house in New York sold the copy for $2,420,000.

For years, employees of the God’s House Tower Archaeology Museum in Southampton, England, propped their bikes against a 27-inch black rock in the basement. In 2000, two Egyptologists investigating the museum’s holdings identified the bike rack as a seventh-century BC Egyptian statue portraying King Taharqa, a Kushite monarch from the region that is modern Sudan. Karen Wordley, the Southampton city council’s curator of archaeological collections, said it was a ‘mystery’ how the sculpture ended up in the museum basement.

DIZZY GILLESPIE’S 10 GREATEST JAZZ MUSICIANS

Jazz legend John Birks ‘Dizzy’ Gillespie was born in Cheraw, South Carolina, October 21, 1917. After learning to play piano at the age of four he taught himself to play the trombone, but had switched to the trumpet by the time he was twelve. The leading exponent of ‘bebop’ jazz, Gillespie was famous for conducting big bands, playing trumpet (many consider him the greatest trumpeter in history), and for his work with Earl ‘Fatha’ Hines and Charlie Parker, among others. Gillespie’s energy was so great that his career never stopped, and at least 10 biographies of the world-famous, beloved revolutionary of jazz have been published. Among his most famous compositions are ‘Salt Peanuts’, ‘Bebop’, ‘Guachi Guararo (Soul Sauce)’, ‘Night In Tunisia’ and ‘Manteca’, a pioneering piece in Afro-Cuban style. Gillespie had a stable private life and disdained the addictive drugs favoured by so many jazz heroes. He remained humorous and charming until the end of his life. He died on January 6, 1993, at the age of 75 and the world mourned the loss of a true jazz giant. In 1980, he prepared this list for The Book of Lists.

• Charlie Parker

• Art Tatum

• Coleman Hawkins

• Benny Carter

• Lester Young

• Roy Eldridge

• J.J. Johnson

• Kenny Clarke

• Oscar Pettiford

• Miles Davis

JOHNNY CASH’S 10 GREATEST COUNTRY SONGS OF ALL TIME

Johnny Cash, widely considered to be the greatest country music singer and composer in history, died in September of 2003 at the age of 71. Known as ‘The Man in Black’ (he always wore black), Cash was born the son of a poor sharecropper in Arkansas in 1932, and he sang to himself while picking cotton for 10 hours a day. Cash recorded more than 1,500 songs. He toured worldwide and played for free in prisons throughout America. Among his greatest hits are ‘Ring of Fire’ and ‘I Walk the Line’. His 1975 autobiography, Man In Black, has sold well over 1.5 million copies. Cash’s death was long and painful, and his last four albums are considered by many to be his greatest work, as they all examine a hard-working man coming to terms with the end of his life. Said Merle Kilgore, one of the co-authors of Ring of Fire, ‘It’s a sad day in Tennessee, but a great day in Heaven. “The Man in Black” is now wearing white as he joins his wife June in the angel band.’ June and Johnny were married for 35 years, and her death preceded his by four months. Cash contributed this list to The Book of Lists in 1977.

• ‘I Walk the Line’, Johnny Cash

• ‘I Can’t Stop Loving You’, Don Gibson

• ‘Wildwood Flower’, Carter Family

• ‘Folsom Prison Blues’, Johnny Cash

• ‘Candy Kisses’, George Morgan

• ‘I’m Movin’ On’, Hank Snow

• ‘Walking the Floor over You’, Ernest Tubb

• ‘He’ll Have to Go’, Joe Allison and Audrey Allison

• ‘Great Speckle Bird’, Carter Family

• ‘Cold, Cold Heart’, Hank Williams

ANDREW MOTION’S TOP 12 DYLAN LYRICS

Andrew Motion is a poet and biographer. His latest collection of poems, Public Property, was published in 2003, and he has written lives of Philip Larkin, John Keats and the nineteenth-century artist and criminal Thomas Wainewright. He is Professor of Creative Writing at Royal Holloway College, University of London, and was appointed Poet Laureate in 1999.

For my money, songs accumulate an even larger baggage of associations than poems. The time I first heard them, the situations — intense or otherwise — in which I have listened to them, the people who introduced them to me, or who I know also like them: all these things become attached to the lyrics as well as the melody, at once broadening the experience of listening and making it more intimate.

Turning over the pages of Bob Dylan’s Lyrics 1962–85 is like opening a Pandora’s Box crammed with my life’s delights, winces, blushes, broodings, geographies. Which in turn means that reducing his titles to any kind of list is seriously difficult. One song counted in means one (at least one) left out — and the choice is likely to change from day to day.

On the day I’m writing this, 24 May, 2004, my top 12, in album order, is:

• Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues — for the comedy in the anger and the wit in the satire

• Tomorrow Is a Long Time — for the tenderness and simplicity

• The Times They are A-Changin’ — for saying all the right (but still surprising) things at the right time and every time

• All I Really Want to Do — for the freedom it offers, and for knowing that freedom is difficult to give in fact

• Love Minus Zero/No Limit — for being so damn beautiful

• It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue — for ‘Leave your stepping stones behind, something calls for you’

• Desolation Row — for getting its arm round so much, with such a strange mixture of ease and effort

• All Along the Watchtower — for the economy of its mystery

• Idiot Wind — for its tender outrage

• Hurricane — for the accuracy of its anger

• Man Gave Names to All the Animals — for its jokes

O, and (out of order) Visions of Johanna — for all of the above reasons, and more besides

GEOFF DYER’S ‘10 SCHOLARLY BOOKS I WOULD LIKE TO WRITE, USING BOB DYLAN LINES AS THEIR TITLES’

Geoff Dyer is one of the most versatile and least classifiable British writers of his generation. His works include But Beautiful, a book about jazz, several novels and Out of Sheer Rage, in which Dyer records his journey in search of D.H. Lawrence. Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It, an idiosyncratic collection of writings about his travels in places as diverse as Cambodia and New Orleans, was published in 2003.

• And Your Mother’s Drugs: Addiction in the Suffragette Movement

• Fighting in the Captain’s Tower: Eliot, Pound and the Making of ‘The Waste Land’

• Alive as You or Me: A Life of St Augustine

• It’s Much Cheaper Down in the South American Town: Globalisation and the Export of Labour

• Painting the Passports Brown: A History of the American Circus

• Going Through All These Things Twice: Nietzsche and the Eternal Recurrence

• Hands in Her Back Pockets: Bette Davis: The Movies and the Myth

• Who Really Cares?: A History of Obscenity

• Nearly Any Task: Masculinity and the New Feminism

• I Shall Be Released: The Bob Dylan Bootleg Industry

ALLEN GINSBERG’S 11 GREATEST BLUES SONGS

Born in New Jersey in 1926, Allen Ginsberg was educated at Columbia University in New York City, where he met fellow writers Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs, with whom he formed a creative triad that gave birth to the Beat Movement of the 1950s. Ginsberg’s most famous work, Howl and Other Poems, was published in 1955, and its graphic, excoriating vision of the failure of the American Dream resulted in both literary acclaim and obscenity charges. Other books by Ginsberg include Kaddish (1961), Reality Sandwiches (1965), and First Blues: Songs (1982). Allen Ginsberg died in 1997. He contributed this list to The Book of Lists in 1993.

• ‘James Alley Blues’, Richard ‘Rabbit’ Brown

• ‘Washington DC Hospital Centre Blues’, Skip James

• ‘Jelly Bean Blues’, Ma Rainey

• ‘See See Rider Blues’, Ma Rainey

• ‘Young Woman’s Blues’, Bessie Smith

• ‘Poor Me’, Charles Patton

• ‘Black Girl’, Leadbelly

• ‘Levee Camp Moan Blues’, Texas Alexander

• ‘Last Fair Deal Gone Down’, Robert Johnson

• ‘I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry’, Hank Williams, Sr

• ‘Idiot Wind’, Bob Dylan

RICHARD EYRE’S 9 FAVOURITE THEATRE PRODUCTIONS

One of the world’s most respected directors for both stage and screen, Richard Eyre has had a long and distinguished career in the British theatre. For nine years he was artistic director of the National Theatre, with overall responsibility for a succession of award-winning productions of shows as different as Guys and Dolls and The Oedipus Trilogy. Richard Eyre, who was knighted in 1997, is also a film director whose 2001 movie Iris, about the novelist Iris Murdoch, was much acclaimed.

At the time I saw these productions I thought that they were inspirational and exemplary — perfect syntheses of writing, acting and design. They were truly theatrical, in the sense of exploiting the theatreness of theatre.

• WEST SIDE STORY (1959) by William Shakespeare, Arthur Laurents, Stephen Sondheim and Leonard Bernstein; directed by Jerome Robbins

Hit me like a thunderbolt — the music, choreography, the energy and the beauty. I had no idea theatre was capable of such things.

• THE WARS OF THE ROSES (1963) by William Shakespeare; directed by Peter Hall

Made me see that Shakespeare could be contemporary and historical, funny and humane, entertaining and educational.

• CORIOLANUS (1965) by William Shakespeare, adapted by Brecht; directed by Bertolt Brecht and the Berliner Ensemble

Brilliantly lucid and distilled — everything to the point and the point was political but not polemical.

• SAVED (1965) by Edward Bond; directed by Bill Gaskill

Like a knife thrust: violent, painful, ascetic, spare — and beautiful.

• THE CHANGING ROOM (1971) by David Storey; directed by Lindsay Anderson

Ensemble detail and harmony: a celebration of beauty, sport, manual labour which now seems as remote as the pre-Raphaelite movement.

• SUMMERFOLK (1975) by Maxim Gorki; directed by Peter Stein Exquisite, poetic.

• THE MAHABHARATA (1985) by Anon; directed by Peter Brook

The elements of the production were the elements of life — earth, fire, air and water; it had the brilliance and bravura that could have been attention-seeking were it not obviously the consequence of trying to find the most expressive way of telling the story.

• THE DRAGON’S TRILOGY (1987) written and directed by Robert Lepage

A perfect blend of art and architecture, music, dance, light, dialogue and movement; the writing — and the meaning — was in the whole event.

• FUENTE OVEJUNA (1989) by Lope de Vega; directed by Declan Donellan

A sinuous energy, truth and freshness that defined what every production of every classic should aim for.

IAN RANKIN’S 7 GREAT GIGS

Leading exponent of a new sub-genre of crime fiction, dubbed ‘tartan noir’ by some critics, Ian Rankin is one of Scotland’s most successful writers, both critically and commercially. He has published more than a dozen novels set in the parts of Edinburgh the tourists don’t see and featuring the maverick and likeable Inspector Rebus. His fiction has won many awards including, most recently, the Edgar Award for Best Novel presented by the Mystery Writers of America. His latest Rebus novel is Fleshmarket Close (2004).

I was just the right age for punk — 17 in 1977. Of course, growing up in a traditional coal-mining community, it didn’t do to stand out, so we punks tended to congregate in each other’s bedrooms, listening to records and the John Peel show on Radio 1. Then a club opened at the Station Hotel in nearby Kirkcaldy. It happened every Sunday night and was called the Pogo-A-Gogo. Basically, it was the hotel’s upstairs ballroom, with a bar serving fizzy lager. But there were also occasional live gigs. By this time, Fife had a punk band of its own — The Skids. The guitarist, Stuart Adamson, had been to the same school as me. There was no stage, band and audience becoming one, writhing on the floor or bouncing to the music. I’d sneak my punk clothes (a boiler-suit spattered with bleach) out of the house and change at a friend’s, then his dad would drive us to Kirkcaldy. Great nights, and my first really great gig.

It had taken some persuading, but my parents finally agreed that I could accompany a friend to Edinburgh at the age of 16 to see Barclay James Harvest. I’d then have to stay the night at his house, as there was no way to get home. A huge adventure. I’d never heard any BJH albums (and, indeed, have never owned any since). It was also my first visit to the Usher Hall, a posh cavern of a place. Were Barclay James Harvest any good? Frankly, no, but that didn’t matter. They had dry ice and a light-show and amps turned up to the requisite 11. Tom Robinson was in the support band and I came home with a programme, poster and badge. They say you never forget the first time…

Though BJH was my first gig, I’d been lying to pals at school. As far as they were concerned, I’d previously trekked alone to the wilds of Dundee’s Caird Hall to see Hawkwind. I made the whole thing up, of course, wanting to impress with my solo efforts. I duly scrawled some signatures on a Hawkwind album sleeve, then crushed and tore it a bit to make it look like there’d been a fracas of sorts. And around this fake artefact I spun the story of my trip. I explained the light show, the nude female dancers, the sonic wondrousness of it all, until I almost began to believe that I really had been there. All in all, a brilliant night, which only exists in my imagination.

While a student in Edinburgh, I saw many great gigs (Pere Ubu, Iggy Pop, The Kinks, Ramones, Bauhaus…) I also missed a few. A mate tried to get me to go see The Buzzcocks, all because of the support act, a new band called Joy Division. I stayed home and wrote an essay instead, and have regretted it ever since. I also missed out on the Stones at the Playhouse because I had an exam the next day. But one concert that stays with me is U2. They were playing in a disco in Tollcross. I think their first album had just been released. A few hundred sweaty fans, dancing for a solid 90 minutes, and a gang of young men on stage, playing for their professional lives. They were brilliant. And to think, I only went because my mate’s girlfriend let him down and he had a ticket going spare.

After uni, I moved to London. I’d pretty much stopped going to gigs by that time, apart from jazz nights in Hoxton. But I did make the trip to a pub in Finsbury Park to see a new outfit called The Proclaimers. Until that night, I’d never realised how many Scots had made the move south. The place was awash with familiar accents and football scarves — everything from Partick to Aberdeen. The twins won me over that night — they were electrifying. It was a pretty rough and drunken crowd, but they had them eating out of their hands. After the gig, I decided to walk home rather than take the tube: that way, I’d have more time to reflect on what I’d just seen and sing a few of the numbers to myself. That’s how good a gig it was: it made me want to walk through the rummer parts of night-time London.

I had to wait a while for my next outstanding London gig. It happened in 2003, in another fairly small venue, the Astoria on Charing Cross Road. I’d managed to miss having dinner with two-thirds of REM (which is another story in itself), and was gutted. Taking pity, my publisher found me a ticket to a secret Rolling Stones gig. This was supposed to be for fan-club members, and took place in the sweltering confines of the Astoria night-club. The audience had come from the four corners of the globe to see the Stones on home ground, playing a set much like the ones they’d have played when they first started. The stage was only about six feet off the ground, with no props or gimmicks. Just a band playing out of their skins. At last I could discern that Keith really is a good guitarist, and that Jagger has the stamina of a man half his age.

Back home in Edinburgh, one of my favourite venues is the Queen’s Hall, not so much for the acoustics (iffy) or the views of the stage (even iffier), but for the quality of music it seems to attract. I’ve seen bands as different as The Residents and the Art Ensemble of Chicago… musicians as different as Dick Gaughan and Lloyd Cole, The Durutti Column and Plainsong. But the gig that stands out for me was another recent one — Mogwai. Young men with attitudinal guitars and no need to keep the noise in perspective, as there’s no singer to drown out. Their show there in 2003 was colossal, and for the first time I really felt my age. As the volume increased, I found myself at the very back of the hall, plaster falling around me. This was a really, really loud gig. Loud and great. It felt as though the whole hall might elevate, rise from its pinnings into the sky, propelled like a rocket. Which is what the best gigs should do — transport you.

9 DRUMMERS OF NOTE — SELECTED BY BEN SCHOTT

Ben Schott is the bestselling author of Schott’s Original Miscellany, and subsequent miscellanies on Food & Drink, and Sporting, Gaming, & Idling.

His drumming is mediocre at best, and he harbours ambitions to play the Hammond organ to the same standard. Below, in no particular order, are some of Schott’s drummers of note.

Stubblefield was James Brown’s ‘Funky Drummer’, and as such can claim to be the most sampled drummer in the world. Alongside fellow drummers Jabo Starks and Clayton Fillyau, Stubblefield pioneered the tight, crisp and heavily syncopated snare and hi-hat riffs that defined the James Brown sound, and funk itself.

More a percussionist than a drummer, Blades deserves mention as the man who recorded the Morse code ‘V for Victory’ signal for the BBC during WWII. The ‘dot-dot-dot-dash’ rhythm was played on an African membrane drum with a timpani mallet and was broadcast up to 150 times a day to encourage the Resistance in Continental Europe. As if this was not enough, James Blades also recorded the famous J. Arthur Rank gong (on small Chinese tam-tam) that was mimed by the boxer Bombardier Billy Wells.

Without doubt the most dapper of drummers, Watts merits a place in any drumming line-up for his bespoke suits alone. Like (the much underestimated) Ringo Starr, the essence of Watt’s skill lies in playing just enough for the song and no more. When asked what 25 years of rock’n’roll with the Rolling Stones was like, Watts apparently replied: ‘It’s been one year drumming, and 24 years hanging around.’

One of the most recorded drummers in history, Gadd has played with a stellar line-up of musicians from Stanley Clark to Eric Clapton. His work with Paul Simon has justly received high praise: the groove on ‘Late In The Evening’ and his fiendishly complex riff on ‘Fifty Ways To Leave Your Lover’ typify his fluid and effortless style.

Tall, geeky and bespectacled, Pepys was the first of six drummers for the band Spinal Tap. His formal technique might seem unsophisticated to modern ears, but he pioneered the simple pop sound of the early 1960s — this is best illustrated in his drumming on the 1965 ‘Thamesmen’ track ‘Gimme Some Money’. In 1969 Pepys died in a bizarre gardening accident that to this day remains a mystery.

Setting aside Moon’s antics (both real and apocryphal) his drumming for The Who was as stylish and clever as it was violent and anarchic. Almost any Who track demonstrates the genius of Moon’s drumming — from the simple power of ‘Substitute’ to the flamboyance of ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’.

The drummer for American band Little Feat, Haywood has two apt nicknames: ‘the beat behind the Feat’ and ‘Mr Sophistifunk’. On tracks like ‘Dixie Chicken’ and ‘Sailin’ Shoes’ Haywood sits just behind the groove, seamlessly melding the styles of rock, zydeco, folk and blues.

Verrell was a stylish swing drummer who played with some of the great names of jazz, including Ted Heath, Syd Lawrence, David Lund, and Buddie Rich. More important than this, of course, is that he played Animal’s drum solo on the theme tune to The Muppet Show.

Bonham was the typhonic drummer for ’70s rock band Led Zeppelin (a band name suggested by Keith Moon, q. v.). Alongside bass-player John Paul Jones, Bonham provided driving, relentless, and (for rock music) astonishingly complex riffs — perhaps best illustrated in ‘Fool In The Rain’. The less said about the half-hour drum solo during ‘Moby Dick’ the better.

THAT’S ENTERTAINMENT? — 7 PERFECTLY WRETCHED PERFORMERS

Billed as ‘the Amazing Regurgitator’, Hadji Ali enjoyed an improbably widespread popularity at the beginning of the twentieth century as a vaudeville drawing card. His act consisted of swallowing a series of unlikely objects — watermelon seeds, imitation jewels, coins, peach pits — and then regurgitating specific items as requested by his audience. It was impressive, if tasteless, stuff — but his grand finale brought down the house every night. His assistant would set up a tiny metal castle on stage while Ali drank a gallon of water, chased down by a pint of kerosene. To the accompaniment of a protracted drumroll, he would eject the kerosene across the stage in a 6-ft arc and set the castle afire. Then, as flames shot high into the air, he would upchuck the gallon of water and extinguish the blaze.

When impresario Oscar Hammerstein found himself in a financial hole, he decided to try a new approach. ‘I’ve been putting on the best talent and it hasn’t gone over,’ he told reporters. ‘I’m going to try the worst.’ On November 16, 1896, he introduced Elizabeth, Effie, Jessie and Addie Cherry to New York audiences at his Olympic Theatre. A sister act that had been treading the vaudeville boards in the Midwest for a few years, the girls strutted out onto the Olympia’s stage garbed in flaming red dresses, hats and woollen mittens. Jessie kept time on a bass drum, while her three partners did their opening number:

New York audiences sat transfixed, staring goggle-eyed in disbelief, but they proved more merciful than audiences in the Midwest. They refrained from pelting the girls with rubbish and overripe tomatoes at first. Eventually, the Cherry sisters had to put up a wire screen to protect themselves from the inevitable hail of missiles showered on them by their outraged audiences. In later years they denied that anything had ever been thrown at them. Said a writer in the New York Times: ‘It is sincerely hoped that nothing like them will ever be seen again.’ Another critic wrote: ‘A locksmith with a strong rasping file could earn steady wages taking the kinks out of Lizzie’s voice.’ Despite their reputation as the world’s worst act, they played consistently to standing-room-only crowds, wowing their fans with such numbers as ‘The Modern Young Man’ (a recitation), ‘I’m Out Upon the Mash, Boys’, ‘Curfew Must Not Ring Tonight’ and ‘Don’t You Remember Sweet Alice, Ben Bolt?’

This nineteenth-century British eccentric may well have been the worst actor in the history of the legitimate theatre. A Shakespearean by inclination, Coates saw no objection to rewriting the Bard’s great tragedies to suit his own tastes. In one unforgettable reworking of Romeo and Juliet, in which he played the male lead, he tried to jimmy open his bride’s casket with a crowbar. Costumed in a feathered hat, spangled cloak and billowing pantaloons — an outfit he wore in public as well — he looked singularly absurd. Coates was frequently hooted and jeered offstage for his inept, overblown performances. Quite often he had to bribe theatre managers to get a role in their productions, and his fellow thespians, fearing violence from the audience, demanded that he provide police protection before they would consent to appear onstage with him. He was slandered and laughed at throughout the British Isles and often threatened with lynching, but he persisted in his efforts to act. During one dramatic performance, several members of the audience were so violently convulsed with laughter that they had to be treated by a physician. Coates was struck and killed by a carriage — but not until 1848, when he was 74.

It seemed like a good idea at the time. Billing himself as a Japanese–German inventor, Hartmann was, briefly, a fixture in the New York theatre in the early 1900s as he offered soon-to-bejaded audiences what he called ‘perfume concerts’. Using a battery of electric fans, Hartmann blew great billowing clouds of scented smoke towards his audience, meanwhile explaining in thickly-accented English that each aroma represented a different nation. Hartmann, who frequently had trouble with hecklers, rarely made it beyond England (roses) or Germany (violets) before being hooted from the stage.

A taxi collision in 1943 left would-be diva Florence Foster Jenkins capable of warbling a higher F than she’d ever managed before. So delighted was she that she waived legal action against the taxi company, presenting the driver with a box of imported cigars instead — an appropriately grand gesture for the woman universally hailed as the world’s worst opera singer. The remarkable career of this Pennsylvania heiress was for many years an in-joke among cognoscenti and music critics — the latter writing intentionally ambiguous reviews of the performances she gave regularly in salons from Philadelphia to Newport. ‘Her singing at its finest suggests the untrammelled swoop of some great bird’, Robert Lawrence wrote in the Saturday Review. Edward Tatnall Canby spoke of a ‘subtle ghastliness that defies description’. But Newsweek was the most graphic, noting: ‘In high notes, Mrs Jenkins sounds as if she was afflicted with low, nagging backache.’ On October 25, 1944, Mrs Jenkins engineered the most daring coup of her career — a recital before a packed Carnegie Hall. That concert, like her others, saw the well-padded matron, then in her 70s, change costume numerous times. She appeared variously as the tinsel-winged ‘Angel of Inspiration’; the Queen of the Night from Mozart’s Magic Flute, and a Spanish coquette, draped in a colourful shawl, with a jewelled comb and a red rose in her hair. Inevitably she seasoned her ‘coquette’ rendition by tossing rose petals plucked from a wicker basket to the audience. On at least one occasion she inadvertently tossed the basket as well. But she always made certain to retrieve the petals for the next performance.

While growing up in Kansas, Elva figured that with practice and training she might have a shot at a career in singing. Her friends and family thought otherwise. However, she made the high school glee club and the church choir and even studied voice at Pomona College in Claremont, California. But with it all, her voice was reminiscent of cockroaches rustling at dawn in a rubbish bin. In the 1960s, still convinced she could sing, Mrs Miller — by now a 50-ish California housewife — recorded on her own a few favourite melodies ‘just for the ducks of it’. She persuaded a local disc jockey to give her an airing and finally cut a nightmarish 45” single of the hit song ‘Downtown’. It sold 250,000 copies in barely three weeks and made ‘The Kansas Rocking Bird’, as she was dubbed, the darling of TV variety shows. ‘Her tempos, to put it charitably, are freeform’, said Time magazine. ‘She has an uncanny knack for landing squarely between the beat, producing a new ricochet effect that, if nothing else, defies imitation… [She] also tosses in a few choruses of whistling for a change of pace.’

Hung, a 21-year-old engineering student from the University of California at Berkeley, auditioned for the 2004 season of the American Idol television show. After Hung sang a tuneless, but enthusiastic, rendition of Ricky Martin’s song ‘She Bangs’, judge Simon Cowell observed, ‘You can’t sing, you can’t dance, so what do you want me to say?’ Despite the rejection, repeated showings of the Idol clip turned Hung into a cult star. Soon, ‘The Real American Idol’ was giving off-key performances on talk shows ranging from the Today Show to the Tonight Show, singing at a nationally televised NBA game, and sharing the stage with the likes of Janet Jackson, Outkast, and Lenny Kravitz at the Wango Tango Music Festival at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California. He signed a contract with Koch Entertainment and recorded an album, Inspiration, that sold more than 200,000 copies — outselling the debut album by Idol’s season one runner-up, Justin Guarini.

10 MOST UNUSUAL VARIETY ACTS OF ALL TIME, BY RICKY JAY

Ricky Jay is an author, actor, sleight-of-hand artist and scholar of the unusual. Most of the performers listed here are included in his histories of remarkable entertainers, Learned Pigs & Fireproof Women and Jay’s Journal of Anomalies.

(In no particular order)

Shortly before the end of the nineteenth century, this ‘human horse’, a subject able to withstand excruciating pain, was literally nailed to a cross in a Trenton, New Jersey, music hall. While he was crucified he regaled the audience with his rendition of the popular tune ‘After the Ball Is Over’.

This German schoolgirl wrote with both hands, both feet and her mouth, simultaneously; for a finale she wrote 10 different numerals at the same time with pieces of chalk extending from pointers on each of her fingers.

This eighteenth-century equestrian beekeeper rode around the circus ring on the back of a horse while swarms of bees surrounded his face then moved away to specific locations at his command.

Born in Germany in 1674, this remarkable man was one of the most well-known performers of his day. He played a dozen musical instruments, danced the hornpipe, and was an expert pistol shot, bowler, calligrapher and magician. His accomplishments seem even more remarkable when one realises he stood only 28 in. high and had no arms or legs.

Billed as the ‘Strongest Boy in the World’, he played the violin with an enormous bulldog suspended from the crook of his bowing arm. As an encore he lay on the ground and a piano was placed on his chest; a keyboardist stood on his thighs and pounded out the accompaniment as Orville sang ‘Ireland Must Be Heaven ’cause Mother Comes from There’.

Entertained audiences in the early nineteenth century by cooking eggs in boiling oil held in her palm, running a red-hot poker over her limbs, and attending to baked goods while inside a blazing oven.

Astounded vaudeville fans by producing from his capacious pockets any item printed on paper. Admission tickets to the White House, membership cards to the Communist Party, and ringside tickets to the Dempsey-Carpentier championship fight were among the 15,000 items he could instantly retrieve from his clothing.

A seventeenth-century native of Lyons, he swallowed an enormous quantity of water and then spewed it out in continuous graceful arcs for as long as it took to walk 200 paces or recite the 51st Psalm.

As ‘Willard, the Man Who Grows’, he had an act that consisted of his growing six inches in height while standing next to a volunteer from the audience. A master of manipulating his body, Willard used no trick apparatus of any kind.

‘Le Petomane’, as he was called, was the legendary French musical farter who issued sonorous but odourless notes from his body’s most secret orifice.

JEREMY BEADLE’S 20 BARMY QUIZ QUESTIONS

Writer and TV presenter Jeremy Beadle first came to major public attention in 1981 when he co-hosted Game for a Laugh. Among the other series he has presented are Beadle’s About, You’ve Been Framed and Win Beadle’s Money. But before all that, Beadle was the European editor of The Book of Lists. He has a personal library of 25,000 volumes. Here Beadle displays his passion for quizzes in typical style.

• What colour are the breasts of blue tits?

• To which planet do Abbott & Costello travel in Abbott & Costello Go To Mars?

• How long does morning last on the moon?

• The Caspian Sea is the world’s largest what?

• Built on the first level of the Eiffel Tower, where would you go to have a meal in Le Restaurant de la Tour Eiffel?

• In England, what day followed September 2 in 1752?

• How far down a flagpole should a flag be if it is flying at half-mast?

• Where does Juliet stand during the famous balcony scene of Romeo and Juliet?

• What religion was Britain’s only Jewish prime minister?

• What type of creature was Buffalo Bill famous for killing?

• Is the Upper Nile north, south, east or west of the Lower Nile?

• It was predicted Henry IV would die in Jerusalem and he did. In which town did he die?

• In the 1948 London Olympics, what stroke was used by the first seven finishers in the 200-m breaststroke final?

• At the time of writing, the world’s population is estimated at 6,222,336,610. Approximately how many of them live on the surface on the earth?

• Who wrote The Autobiography of Malcolm X?

• In which city were The Plymouth Brethren founded?

• What was the name of the character played by Clint Eastwood in the 1973 film The Man With No Name?

• On what side of the moon is the Eastern Sea?

• The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is a trilogy of how many parts?

• Including Queen Elizabeth II, how many Queen Elizabeths of England have there been?

ANSWERS

• Yellow

• Venus

• A week

• Lake

• New Orleans, Louisiana. The dismantled restaurant was originally on the first level of the Tower from 1937 to 1981.

• September 14 1752 — it adopted the Gregorian calendar

• Only the distance equal to its depth, i.e. the top edge is placed where the bottom edge should rest

• On a floor beside an upper window. There is no mention of a balcony.

• Christian, Benjamin Disraeli was baptised into the Church of England at the age of 12.

• Bison — buffalo are found in Africa and India.

• South (it’s higher — more elevated — hence its name)

• London. He died in the Jerusalem Chapel in Westminster Abbey 1413.

• Butterfly

• Exactly none. The actual surface of the earth, as defined by astronomers, is the outer edge of the atmosphere, about 100 miles above our heads.

• Alex Haley

• Dublin, about 1827, by the Reverend John Darby

• Joe

• West. Owing to a policy decision by the International Astronomical Union reversing lunar east and west, the Eastern Sea is now on the western limb of the moon.

• Five

• Five: Edward IV’s consort, Henry VII’s consort, Queen Elizabeth I, George VI’s consort and Queen Elizabeth II