Who remembers Michael Flanders and Donald Swann? They wrote and sang comic songs and appeared as guests on TV shows in the 1960s. Flanders sat in a wheelchair due to Poliomyelitis, and Swann sat at the piano.
Their best remembered song has to be “The Hippopotamus”, with its chorus “Mud, mud, glorious mud”. They had great fun with words. The lengthened ‘a’ in “the Hippopotamus” to rhyme with “was no ignoramus” still amuses me. Another song I remember is “The Gnu” (with a hard ‘g’), “spelt G-N-U-”.
Michael Flanders wrote and sang most of the words and delivered comic monologues, and Donald Swann wrote the music and played piano. You could easily assume that Flanders, a large, impressive, bearded man with a rich voice, was the act, and the slighter and quieter Swann was merely the accompanist, but the music was every bit as important as the words. Donald Swann wrote catchy tunes and was an accomplished musician.
I especially like “The Slow Train” about the 1963 Beeching cuts, and its litany of quirky station names: Blandford Forum, Mortehoe, Littleton Badsey, Dog Dyke, .... The way the halting rhythm of the music captures the halting rhythm of a labouring steam locomotive is delightful. Not only that, the song mentions a certain Yorkshire town.
https://youtu.be/U6OHD2uCpfU
Kirby Muxloe ...
Mow Cop and Scholar Green ...
No more will I go to Blandford Forum and Mortehoe
On the slow train from Midsomer Norton and Mumby Road
No churns, no porter, no cat on a seat
At Chorlton-cum-Hardy or Chester-le-Street
We won't be meeting again
On the Slow Train.
I'll travel no more from Littleton Badsey to Openshaw
At Long Stanton I'll stand well clear of the doors no more
No whitewashed pebbles, no up and no down
From Formby Four Crosses to Dunstable Town
I won't be going again
On the Slow Train.
On the Main Line and the goods′ siding
The grass grows high
At High Dog Dyke, Tumby Woodside
And Trouble House Halt, the sleepers sleep.
On Chittening platform or Cheslyn Hay
No one departs, no one arrives
From Selby to Goole, from St Erth to St Ives
They′ve all passed out of our lives
On the Slow Train, on the Slow Train.
Cockermouth for Buttermere ...
On the Slow Train, Armley Moor Arram ...
Pye Hill and Somercotes ...
On the Slow Train
Windmill End.
I loved Flanders and Swann. We went to see Donald Swann but he had died just before the performance, so it was a strangely sober experience.
ReplyDeleteAs YP mentions, below, neither had a particularly long life, especially Michael Flanders.
DeleteMy father used to sing Flanders & Swan songs to amuse us as kids. The Slow Train never made it to this side of the planet. THhe place names would have amused us. I'm surprised how many I recognize now.
ReplyDeleteThey have picked out some of the most memorable station names. The slow train is not a best-known song, but it is a gem.
DeleteI saw them in the first show they presenter, in s small theater. They were wonderfully funny. Swann was a comic as well as an accomplished musician.
ReplyDeleteThat was quite a special event to see.
DeleteIt won't surprise you to read that I don't know Flanders & Swann, or any of their songs. In Germany, we had our own comic musicians / actors / comedians who were not only good singers but had great fun with words. You have probably never heard of Heinz Erhard - he was a true gem, very clever and very witty, often underestimated because he was chubby and not at all meeting the ideal of a good-looking man of his time.
ReplyDeleteYou would have to be a bit younger too, under about 70. My wife knows some of the songs, such as the hippopotamus, but not the writers.
DeleteI well remember Flanders and Swann, all of those tracks, and the one about the big six-wheeler diesel-engined bus...
ReplyDeleteVery much of an era, along with Tom Lerher (The Periodic Table, Poisoning Pigeons in the Park) and Bob Newhart (The Driving Instructor, Walter Raleigh and Tobacco from the New World).
Tom Lehrer came for me a little later. He died aged 97 on Saturday, the very day you posted your comment.
DeleteThat is quite a list. Lost to follow up and remember.
Deletei know the names of Flanders and Swann but i couldn't have told you what they did.... bit i DO know the Gnu and the Hippo songs...... the train journey song instantly evoked memories of two other songs for me.....
ReplyDeleteJohn Shuttleworth - You're like Manchester (in which he weaves all the local placenames, cleverly into lyrics...... "you're like manchester, you've got strange ways!")
The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu - It's Grim up North (Part 1) - basically it's a list of northern towns..... I. personally love this tune but it's not for everyone ("harrogate, huddersfield, oldhams, lancs - grimsby, glossop, hebden bridge")
I recommend googling either of those for some fun
Shuttleworth is hilarious, although I find that many don't get it.
Deletei love him - i've seen him perform a few times..... still drink my morning coffee out of a shuttleworth mug :)
DeleteThank you sharing "On The Slow Train". Very evocative. The station that means the most to me is Miller's Dale for Tideswell. As for Flanders and Swann, they boarded their last trains in 1975 and 1994 respectively.
ReplyDeleteYou can see in videos that Flanders breathed abnormally and with some difficulty, I guess because of polio.
DeleteI do remember 'Mud, mud. Glorious mud', but not the performers.
ReplyDeleteI wonder if Midsomer Norton was near the murder town Midsomer?
The fictitious murder "town" Midsomer is not a town, but a county, where "Midsomer Murders" take place, with Causton as its county capital... some great fictitious place names there as well, such as Badger's Drift and many, many more.
DeleteI think you have to be over about 70 and from the UK to have seen them on TV.
DeleteI'm sorry to have missed them as their lyrics are a hoot.
DeleteThey were from another era. Every time I or my friend get a central heating service, we always refer to the Flanders and Swan song The Gas Man Cometh
ReplyDeleteI wonder what other of their sayings people still use.
DeleteDelightful and heartfelt. We have the train at Cheslyn Hay once more, though the station buildings were demolished. The line stayed open for coal trains, then we got new platforms, a rain shelter and passenger trains, and recently it was electrified.
ReplyDeleteThere are a lot that should have been kept, and now cannot be re-opened because they have been build over. Some of the likes around York would make an enormous improvement to the traffic, and some in the South West would be in demand for tourism.
DeleteI just about remember them. Mud, mud , glorious mud we sang as children happily. As I type I can hear the train going through, Halifax or Huddersfield, Rochdale to Manchester.
ReplyDeleteI think that the Halifax-Huddersfield trains ceased for a time.
DeleteI encountered F&S at an impressionable age - probably 10 or 11. We had English friends (Cambridge graduates; the father came to Australia to escape the English winter on account of his "weak lungs" and academically to study the southern hemisphere sky as a radio-astronomer) who had the records and I obtained reel-to-reel copies of them which I listened to obsessively.
ReplyDeleteI picked up a lot about the tail end of the MacMillan era in England from the topical references ("the friendship of models is precious and rare/Though the friendship of models...is not."; "I've been asked to screen Lord Denning - for security you know" ). Other references passed me by until many years later when the texts appeared online ("for a friend of Charlie Clore's").
I was old enough to realise that "Have some Madeira m'dear" was not about cake, and also to get the joke when Donald Swann piped up (in the role of "junior" in "Eating people is wrong" (which also inspired the title of a Malcolm Bradbury novel) "I won't let another man pass my lips!"
The punch line for that song (Dad: "You might as well say 'don't fight people" Both: "Ridiculous!") was probably inspired by Swann's pacifism. That song also has one of my favourite lines, given to Flanders as the "dad:"
"Look, son, I admire your sincerity. Always be sincere, whether you mean it not."
And I even learnt about Gerard de Nerval. They were an education to me.
We were very close to that family - living out of each other's houses, shared Christmas-day rituals, etc etc. A final to-me-poignant moment of this was when I was visiting the mother, I think for the last time (as it turned out) by then somewhat distressed/bewildered in a nursing home (she just wanted to take a taxi home). I was able to feed her the line, "All my laundry's flown to Cairo" and she beamed triumphantly back at me: "Where they don't use so much starch."
Goodness, that got you going. You clearly know them better that me. The song references were topical and very clever.
DeleteI tried to insert links to the relevant songs. It didn't work, but they are all available via google/youtube.
DeleteThey are:
1. friendship of models (should begin "such models of friendship") - Friendly Duet
2. Denning, Clore and laundry to Cairo - Sounding Brass
3. Madeira - Madeira M'dear? (an extra joke after the song was sung is that Flanders' 8-year-old nephew thought the song was about cake and (whispered) "so does Swann.")
4. Gerard de Nerval - Je suis le Tenebreux.
Believe me, I could go on....
Thank you. I do believe you. I think there is some code in my blog to remove links, because I was getting massive amounts of advertising.
DeleteI omitted (originally in the linked version):
Delete3A: "Eating people is wrong" - actually The Reluctant Cannibal.
St Erth to St Ives happily still going strong
ReplyDeleteThey were referring to the proposals, and a few did survive - the Settle-Carlisle line most notably.
Delete