PAINTING THE CLOUDS WITH SUNSHINE { 0:00 }
TIP-TOE THRO’ THE TULIPS { 3:22 }
- Al Benny’s Broadway Boys (Harry Bidgood) – unnamed vocalised and siffleur
Broadcast Twelve Super-Dance 2528 (30 October 1929, issued December 1929)
On 30 October 1929, Bidgood’s augmented band cut four Broadcast Twelve Super-Dance sides. The tunes were from Warner Brothers’ 1929 two-colour-Technicolor film ‘Gold Diggers of Broadway’. Its UK debut was at the Regal, Marble Arch on 29 December 1929.
First and fourth in the session (If I Had A Talking Picture Of You + The Sun Is At My Window) have already been uploaded. Hear them at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JXpelFniSWM . (‘If I had a Talking Picture’ also includes ‘Turn on the Heat’ which was from the film ‘Sunny Side Up’ also made in 1929.)
Rust identified the vocalist in the above as Tom Barrett, but does not name the vocalist on these two sides who lacks Barrett’s confident-sounding delivery.
Clearly, there was a professional siffleur at this session, who featured whistling casually in ‘The Sun is at my Window’, and is more complex and bird-call-like on these two.
As before, the augmented band produces a sumptuous sound (a bit let down by the condition of the record), with Gerry McQuillan’s harp the glistening feature as ever.
PAINTING THE CLOUDS is the more successful side, I think. TIP-TOE THRO' THE TULIPS is more like sprinting through the tulips: the vocalist can barely keep up.
Although Rust merely gives ‘London’, the venue has to have been the King George’s Hall in the old YMCA building on Tottenham Court Road, the acoustic is too open to have been Vocalion’s boxy studio just off Gray’s Inn Road.
