![]() ![]() ![]() The original, included on Bowie’s self-titled ’67 debut, features a fairly stripped-down arrangement with marimba and acoustic guitar. Like a good film composer, his contributions succeed when they disappear into the song, when the music sounds less like the product of a hit-making committee and more like an extension of the artist credited on the 45 label.įor a concrete example of what he could do with an arrangement, compare the album version of David Bowie’s “Love You Till Tuesday” and the single version included here. On the other end of the spectrum, his arrangement lends Helen Shapiro’s “He Knows How to Love Me” a soulful gravity that makes her transformation from independent woman to infatuated lover sound all the more persuasive and profound. Raymonde gives the ridiculous story an epic quality, as well as real emotional heft, by adding cinematic strings and insistent backing vocals. Credited to Burr Bailey (an alias for Meek’s studio assistant Dave Adams), “Chahawki” is a frantic story-song about a Native American and his beloved dog-a B Western set to music. Paradise portrays Raymonde as a composer with remarkable range, one who treated the stars and the nobodies, the cheeky novelties and the heartfelt ballads, with equal insight and consideration. When Ian “Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll” Dury wanted to evoke that heyday on 1980’s “Superman’s Big Sister,” he hired Raymonde to write the string arrangements, creating a song that mashes pop, punk, and novelty into three strident minutes. Taken together, his catalog forms an eccentric, not exactly representative but still incredibly enjoyable, history of a sophisticated era in British pop. During that time, he worked with major artists at the height of their careers (Billy Fury, the Walker Brothers), future stars ( David Bowie, Tom Jones), and many musicians who never achieved celebrity. A product of big bands in the ’40s and jazz combos in the ’50s, Raymonde started working with eccentric producer Joe Meek in the early ’60s, signing on as an in-house producer for Decca Records later in the decade. Ivor Raymonde was a figure of no small significance in the 1960s UK pop scene, but because he worked mostly behind the scenes, his name is not especially well known. Simon isn’t inflating his father’s importance with Paradise. “In those days it seemed from all the documentation he was the sort of guy who’d turn his hand to anything, he was happy to get paid, happy to be a session musician, happy to do an arrangement if asked and didn’t turn down work,” Simon recently told the Yorkshire Post. He even sings on one track, the dusky pop number “Mylene,” which appeared on the soundtrack to the forgotten 1959 sex romp Upstairs and Downstairs. The task was complicated by the fact that Ivor was a hired gun, working any number of jobs: writing songs, scouting talent, producing sessions, devising and conducting string and orchestra arrangements. Simon has described the project as a labor of love: It’s taken him years of diligent research to reconstruct his father’s sprawling catalog, which starts in the late 1940s and ends in the 1980s. But hopefully the release of Paradise: The Sound of Ivor Raymonde-by Bella Union, a label run by Ivor’s son Simon Raymonde, of Cocteau Twins-will change that. Springfield is likely the only name many readers will recognize in that story (although some Brits may remember Vaughan). ![]()
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