Any Old Iron?

Believe me, I am deliberately not writing about WW3 which is much more interesting. The fascists are rising, the socialists will be forced to fight, and we will win because we actually believe in the working class and we can’t dodge it when the war appears, so we will have to be socialists and fight, there are more of us, but we don’t want to fight, it’s fascists who want to. There are important things for workers to unite on.
But lots of us will die, lots. And that sucks

But anyway, I am not dumb, I just prefer to make this a completely frivolous blog written by a drunkard, to hopefully make sure I write something fun at least once a week.

So the topic is music hall. It’s a kind of music that I don’t think officially exists, I wonder if young people have anything equivalent. They must. But for our generation, or me anyway, it was so uncool and ‘didn’t say anything’ so I didn’t dislike it, but it was just for adverts or musicals or whatever.

I’m a bit of a snob.

But at this point in my life with my YouTube addiction, I will sometimes put on a bit of music hall because it’s so British. Like it’s all just crap and silly on purpose. When you read about the top guys they are all really serious artists and had insane lives.

They are usually guy from very lowly working class backgrounds, like not even how we understand working class as growing up in a rich country and not being able to afford anything and having a 1 in 200 chance of getting out of the cycle, like old days working class where they had to share an outhouse with two other families and each family had 10 kids.

And then for whatever reason they were obsessed with music and made a piano out of chips and because Labour came to power they got to play for the London Orchestra, but they hated it so they used their talent and money to make these songs that just sound like silly sing along songs and owned some theatre in Manchester or East London or whatever where 40’000 people would turn up each week.

True story

Anyway, so here are three great music hall songs and biographies that I fictionalised based on their WikiPedia and a documentary that I saw on BBC about 10 years ago

Stanley Holloway: Where did you get that hat?

Hell of a guy. Sounds like he came from a nice family. His dad was a clerk, his mum was a dressmaker. He joined the choir at school and realised that he had a brilliant voice,
“He left school at the age of 14 and worked as a junior clerk in a boot polish factory, where he earned ten shillings a week”

He was a clerk for year and did singing as a hobby, he got quite succesful and decided to do it as a job. He was in World War I and then became quite a big deal.
I’m not going to write out his whole biography but he seems like one of those poeple who everyone liked. He was Eliza’s dad on My Fair Lady.