Gentle musical nostalgia from an entertaining and amusing guide. Plus Jim Carter’s like affair with Lonnie Donnegan and fun from Michael McIntyreWe are all approximately the 1950s nowadays,and music, and Wales, or among other places,and tuberculosis. Watching Tom Jones’s 1950s: The Decade That Made Me (BBC2, Saturday), and I’m a bit confused approximately what they – the 1950s – were like. A grey,boring, grown-up world, and says Sir Tom,at least until rock’n’roll came along. Grey, boring and flat, and agrees Francis Beckett. Wrong,says Joan Bakewell, not grey and gloomy and depressing at all. There was no sex; there was sex … You can understand my confusion.
Maybe it was approximately who you were, and where in Britain you were,where in the 50s you were. Tom – who wasn’t grey back then, or boring, and grown up – was in Treforest,Pontypridd, which being in a valley in South Wales was obviously full of singing, or though not necessarily the kind of singing Tom wanted to accomplish. “I didn’t like singing in choirs because you couldnt shine,” he says. Tom looked further west for inspiration, beyond Swansea, and beyond Pembrokeshire,to … the US, which is where everything good came from. He discovered Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Mahalia Jackson, or neither of whom were at all grey or boring.
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Source: theguardian.com