Back in the March of 2003, I bought a copy of Record Collector. I put it away with all my million other objects of musical passion and obsession. I have books, articles, magazines, thousands of vinyl LPs, EPs and singles, and boxes and bagfuls of audio cassettes containing my favourite songs and artists. I have a lot of other ‘stuff’ as well. Books, papers, notebooks, manuscripts, posters, keyrings, magnets, plates, pictures, all with a musical connection. Every nook and cranny is filled back here. I’ve been at home looking after my dad for years now. He took ill and died just before Christmas. So I have been looking at the house, deciding whether to stay or to go, scrutinizing every treasured object in an attempt to distinguish between what I can just about bear to lose and what I can never imagine being without. It was in this search-order-and-organize operation that I discovered this old copy of Record Collector. I remember it well. I bought it specifically for the fine review of the Françoise Hardy 3-CD box set Messages Personnels, which accented Françoise’s ‘gentle charm and inherent sophistication,’ and extolled the virtues of ‘her unique and quite irresistible confidential style.’ The review ends by praising Françoise’s ‘timeless tunes,’ concluding that ‘the addition of a fourth CD would probably have made this collection perfect.’ Possibly. I just avoid any potential disputes over selection by being a completist. My Françoise collection is complete. I am a completist by nature. I have a house packed with ‘stuff.’
Which brings me back to the point of this ramble. That March edition of Record Collector contained a tribute to a singer and vocal arranger whose recent passing in 2003 – and the last years of his life – had gone without much recognition – Mike Sammes. And there doesn't seem to have been much appreciation and recognition in the intervening years, either. Which I find sad. It's another era, and popular tastes are notoriously transitory and changeable. I think there is something of permanent value here, though. A life spent in music and song, for one. And this is the subject of my own little tribute to Mike Sammes and his singers.
The Record Collector article was entitled ‘Play it Again, Sammes’ and was written by Jonny Trunk. The article is so beautifully written I had thought merely to reproduce it. It deserves to be read as written. You can’t find it on the Internet, so the only chance you have of reading it is to have the March 2003 copy of Record Collector. I have a few things of my own to add, given the extent to which Trunk’s telling of the Mike Sammes story resonates with my own life and the way I live it. I love music and the house is packed with music. My own expertise, however, is in the world of words and ideas, and I have boxes – rooms – full of papers, notes, manuscripts, just as Mike Sammes’ house was full of scores and arrangements and such like. What becomes of all the work we do? We seem to build empires with our art, effort, and ingenuity, but time continues in relentless pursuit, tracking us down, and threatening to render all our life's concerns and cares meaningless. Trunk tells the story of the sad end of Mike Sammes’ career and life, and how the record of his life work came so close to being disposed of as rubbish as a result of ‘house clearance.’ In the end, life clears us all out. Or so it can seem.
I shall quote extensively from Trunk’s article, and add some musings of my own as I go.
I like all kinds of music. I have a decent heavy rock collection, all the classics like Deep Purple and Black Sabbath. I love Iron Maiden. I like it loud, hard, and fast. I also like it soft and slow. I love what is mistakenly called ‘easy listening.’ There is a real skill and art in making music sound so effortless, walking that tightrope of taste in which you are forever at risk of falling off into the bland and the boring. It happens, and some of my tastes may well be considered sedate by many - Burt Bacharach, Matt Monro, The Carpenters, Roger Whittaker and a million more in that style. Although my favourite singer is Elvis, I like to sing at a nice and easy pace, with the lightest of touches on the pedal. Mike Sammes was a king of easy listening, and his passing was felt as a very sad occasion by me. The thing that most people who know Sammes will know is that he headed a group of backing singers. They were not the main stars, but the group who added their voices to back up the stars. It was a good job his group carried his name, because he could easily have fallen into anonymity, like the members of the Sammes Singers – faceless, nameless artists whose vocal harmonies and arrangements brightened up many a dull day with sweet sounds evoking images of a better world.
Jonny Trunk describes how he had been attempting to track Mike Sammes down in the months before the great man passed away. A fan of Sammes’ work, he wanted to know more about some of his more obscure work from the 60s. His researches brought him to Sammes’ neighbour in Reigate, Surrey, a man called Gordon. Gordon proceeded to paint a gloomy picture of the sad events which accompanied Mike Sammes’ last years. Mike had no close family, had serious health issues, and, without close family, had been admitted to an old people’s home. Mike’s passing came as no great surprise. That left the issue of what was to become of his home and its contents. And the question of who, if anyone, cares. Gordon made it clear to Trunk's that the house had already been stripped of anything of commercial value, with everything left destined to be thrown into a skip. How sad.
The house was a three-bedroomed 60s semi, which Mike Sammes had owned since it was built. His mother had lived there, with her cat by the name of Sooty. Mike moved into the house when his mother became too elderly to cope on her own. (Already, I’m drawing analogies with my father here). Mike had had a fine apartment in Elstree, near Borehamwood back in the 60s, and therefore lived close by the major recording studios. He’d spent much of his time in Elstree with Enid Heard, his great love of many years. She was one of the Sammes Singers, but they never married, since Enid wanted to keep her name and independence. Mike’s mother passed away in the late 80s, followed by Enid in 1993, and Mike was pretty much on his own from that time on. A couple of years before he died, Mike had a bad fall, collapsing onto his drive outside the back door, breaking his leg. He spent hours in freezing conditions before he was discovered. He never really recovered from the fall, and his health deteriorated rapidly until his death in 2003.
To that sad tale was added the sad sight of Sammes’ home at Orchard End, which had been callously stripped in classic ‘house clearance’ style. Everything that was deemed to be of commercial value had been taken away, the rest deemed worthless and left behind to be thrown away without a second thought. The sight was bleak: no furniture, no light fittings, no pictures, nothing. Everything that was left was to be thrown away in two days’ time. If you found anything you wanted, you could have it. What wasn’t taken was to be put on a skip and trashed. I'm looking at my own treasures, spread all over the house, living testimony to many years of accumulated love, devotion, and fanaticism.
Trunk's describes the weirdness of walking through a dead man’s home and rummaging through it looking for something of value. Try doing it from the inside, when you are still very much alive, and can see how everything that has been retained over the years has something of value, even if it is often only memories, of times both happy and sad. Memories are personal, and can be shared only in limited circles, ever-thinning in the course of time. Much that we value is destined for the skip. Life goes on and history cares less. Everything ‘worthless’ that we leave is to be destroyed or discarded, the fate of our persons. Who wants any of it? People have their own possessions, meanings, and memories – how much of our lives is shareable? It seems that no-one in the entire world wanted what was left of Mike Sammes’ life’s work.
It seems redundant to ask what would Mike Sammes think? He was no longer around. How much of our work and our concerns which we invest in a life of memories survives us? What about my own ‘clutter’ back home? The notebooks and manuscripts of ideas and dreams that are intangible, but no less real for all that? I think we can safely conclude that Mike Sammes would not have liked to see the artifacts of his life and legacy being thrown onto a skip to be dumped in short order. He kept all this supposedly worthless ‘clutter’ and ‘rubbish,’ after all. Precisely because it wasn’t clutter and rubbish at all. I believe he would have been pleased that fans of the music with which he filled his days would come along and rescue the objects which constitute the physical record of its creation.
Examining the ground floor stripped of commercial value, Trunk's was led upstairs. Here, he found three rooms in various states of disarray. There was a ‘groovy piano’ in Mike’s tiny music room, left behind simply because those doing the house clearance couldn’t get it out, begging the question of how he got it in. It’s a question I’m asking myself as I look at the enormous wardrobe upstairs at the house. I do actually remember bringing this into the house. Not only was that an immense physical feat in carrying it upstairs, we defied the laws of physics in getting it over and round the tiny stairs and landing. I remember the cursing as we were trapped on the stairs, unable to go either forwards or backwards. But we made it. Somehow.
A proper piano man was on his way. There was nothing else left in Mike’s humble little music studio. That tiny little room, though, contained a universe that is as vast as music itself. The room next to it was piled high with just about every scored arrangement of every popular tune Mike Sammes had ever recorded in his long and productive career. The question as to what Mike Sammes would have done and would have wanted is answered in this room: these arrangements had been kept meticulously and neatly filed for decades. Now, however, they were abandoned to the floor under piles of scrap paper and boxes, all deemed rubbish to be disposed of in the near future. The next bedroom contained a corner full of master tapes of varying size and speeds, again all to be disposed of, all begging for rescue by those who knew, remembered, and cared. The music lovers. Love, and you will know.
This part of the story really struck a chord with me - books. Of course, I have music all over the house – thousands of vinyl records, tapes, CDs, music books and biographies and magazines. I also have thousands of books, as well as boxes and drawers of my own papers and manuscripts. Trunk found lots of books all over the floor, most with a 50s musical flavour – works on vocal harmonies, the art of arranging, and a songwriters’ dictionary of rhyming words. ‘The more I looked,’ writes Trunk, ‘the more I began to think of how sad it would be if this was reduced to ash.’ Such is life, such is fate: ashes to ashes, dust to dust. It is said that when a person dies, a library dies with them, all those tales and stories that irreducibly personal and incapable of rendering perfectly interpersonal. But life’s themes and experiences are universal, shared, and communicable, and that is one source of hope – the music of earth and life is never dead.
Trunk's describes neighbour Gordon’s insistence that he take anything he wanted, with a huge pile being built by the front door. This is my feeling looking at the house. They say that you can’t take it with you: naked you came into the world and naked you leave it. But we always seem to be wanting to escape such fate, or others’ fate, by taking as much as we can with us, until we ourselves are no longer capable of carrying on carrying on.
Trunk carried on making new discoveries, of things he needed to carry home, and ensure carried on in the world. He found master tapes of classic Mike Sammes albums, like Love is a Happy Thing and Sammes Session, he found the entire vocal harmony notation for Sammes’ arrangement of Noel Harrison’s ‘The Windmills of Your Mind’ and other numbers. Such discoveries of music which lies close to our hearts cannot but bring a lump to the throat and cause an ache in the heart. But I'll confess to being an old sentimentalist.
Trunk next found a box packed with even more Mike Sammes ephemera, a phenomenal list of all those artists whom Sammes had worked with. Sammes and his singers had backed anyone who was anyone in the 50s, 60s and 70s. They weren’t under contract to any studio or label, but were simply known for being incredibly good at what they did. Mike Sammes and his Singers were in constant by the greatest artists of the day - Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Barbara Streisand, Judy Garland, Shirley Bassey, Petula Clark, The Beatles, Tom Jones, Cliff Richard, Vera Lynn. There was also Des O’Connor, Morecombe and Wise, Ronnie Corbett … Pinky and Perky, The Wombles, and Ken Dodd’s Diddymen! Mike Sammes and his singers were everywhere! And yet Trunk describes being in the great man’s home and ‘getting a strong feeling of loneliness and wishing I’d gone there a year earlier just to say thanks to him personally for making listening so easy.’
I love the next story. Trunk describes how he carried on wading through cases and cases of neatly filed paper, only to discover ‘a box full of empty bags dating back to the 30s. It seemed as if Mike had never thrown anything away.’ I don't throw much away, either. In exploring our house, I’ve just discovered a box of empty plastic bags recording different aspects of my life as it unfolded – University of Keele, Hairy Records, Proble Records, Ames, Woolworths …
‘And now nobody really cared.’ ‘It’s all got to go,’ said Gordon, ‘do you want them? Go on have them, take them.’ Who, really, wants anything of anyone else? What, if anything, do we hand on?
There are things of lasting value, all the same. Trunk discovered yet another cache of masters, huge sealed Ampex reels, film from various BBC shows of the 60s. Underneath these was another box, full of smaller, quarter-inch tapes, all neatly crammed together. Now how cool is that, Trunk thought, as a rush of ‘Wow! Lost advertising masters that simply must be heard’ went through his mind. I’m hoping that someone would have the same reaction to my papers … ‘Take them all,’ said Gordon. I explained to him my obsession with TV music from this golden era and, before I knew it, he had duly plonked them by the front door as well.
My attempts to de-clutter continually result in great big piles in corners. In fact, my efforts at de-cluttering tend to involve moving a pile of objects and artifacts from one room to another, or from one part of a room to another part. And after a few months I move everything back again in another effort to de-clutter. It's hard work, so I tell myself and the world that I am actually making deep inroads into my mounds of treasure/rubbish. I make new discoveries with each attempt, finding even more things to value and keep.
Trunk then went next door for a coffee and a chat with the neighbours. The more he heard about Mike Sammes, the sadder the story got. Trunk left swearing that everything he was taking away would not go to waste.
In his home, Trunk studied the listings of all those artists with whom Mike Sammes had collaborated over the course of his career. Everyone from The Beatles to Andy Williams had enlisted the harmonic help of Mike. The list looked like a ‘who’s who’ of the 60s – Dudley Moore, Johnny Harris, Marlene Dietrich, Burt Bacharach, Sid James, Andrew Oldham, Georgie Fame, soundtrack composer Krzysztov Komeda. Those Dudley Moore jazz vocal harmonies and all those beloved Burt Bacharach ‘ba-ba-daas’ all came from Mike Sammes. Sammes’ work went largely uncredited. Trunk writes: ‘It’s like he spent his entire life in the shadows, making all the right noises but never really wanting to reveal himself. What I find truly sad is the man who accompanied so many great artists died quite alone.’
The past is past, and the living can’t live there, only die there. What can we take from the past into the future, if anything? Isn’t it the case that those living in the present should do what those in the past did, and make their own memories, to be discarded and disposed of when the time comes, as it always does and always will? Mike Sammes’ music was of a different time, and tastes have changed. Many will say for the better, and will have no time for my nostalgia, least of when it is expressed extolling the virtues of vocal harmonies that, to modern ears, are not merely sedate but soporific. I like those sounds. I sing softly myself, and am very much of the here and now and not the past. That said, I am not expecting any great Mike Sammes revival or major artists lining up on a major label to record a Sammes tribute album. The times aren’t easy on easy anymore. It’s a tough time for dreamers, as the line in Amelie goes. The success of Amelie, though, suggests that it’s not all over and that there may well be an audience for those who like things a little softer, quieter, slower, and gentler. The power of quiet in a loud and noisy world. The success of singers from Norah Jones to Rumer would indicate the same thing.
It’s a sad tale that Jonny Trunk tells. I loved this article when I first read it in 2003, and it has always stayed with me as a humble tribute to a music man whose love, skill, and talent went into providing the background to the soundtrack of our lives. I’ve never heard anyone else referring to this tribute in Record Collector, and have never found any reference to it. If you do a Google search for “Jonny Trunk” and “Mike Sammes” in Record Collector, you will find nothing. So unless you have the March 2003 copy of RC, you will know nothing of this article. So my accumulated treasures continue to show their uses and merits. I doubt that many who have a copy have paid much attention to Trunk’s article, though. It’s got Beatles and Bowie and Richard Thompson in there. I bought it for Françoise Hardy. How many will even know how much the music of their lives will have been shaped in some way by Mike Sammes. I have some Mike Sammes’ CDs in my collection. I particularly love It Had to be You and play it often. It is very relaxing and reassuring. Most people, though, won't have a Mike Sammes record, and may even be horrified at the thought of having such easy listening in their collection. But whether people know it or not, the odds are that anyone who has a music collection of any size will most certainly have Mike Sammes in there somewhere. As Trunk writes:
‘You may not own a classic Mike Sammes LP, but the chances are you have his and his group’s voices all over your record collection. Next time you hear “oompah-oompah, stick it up your jumper” on “I am the Walrus,” a vocal harmony on that Nancy Sinatra LP, or behind Françoise Hardy, on Summer Holiday with Cliff or maybe your mum’s Shirley Bassey LP, just think of Mike Sammes singing his heart out in the background. He’d like that.’
I love Elvis and rock'n'roll, and have a great collection of rock and soul and R&B. I can't sing it, though. I like to go nice and slow. This is how I like to sing. Ta-Ra is the song with which Billy Maher ends his Saturday and Sunday night shows at 1.00am, a favourite show back home in the Critchley house.