Almost at the other end of its decade, this number has begun to sound horribly relevant again. The Cuban Boys – who were they, really, or ever, and did it matter? Peel loved them and they came within a corporate ace of getting the century’s last number one with a knowledgeable novelty hit which predated and bettered Crazy Frog. And then they released one unsatisfactory album with the unsatisfactory title of Eastwood – unsatisfactory for De La Soul Is Dead-type sample copyright clearance reasons – and vanished into the first webspace they could find in which to poke their toes.
Perhaps because of their temporary EMI connection I had it in my mind that they were really the Pet Shop Boys – I thank the reader who voiced my unspoken suspicion that the PSBs were behind “Whispering Your Name” – and “Theme For Prim & Proper,” with its melancholically aggressive harmonic reminders of “Opportunities,” appeared to confirm this, albeit very briefly. It only appeared as a seven-inch, on yellowing vinyl, in a run of a thousand so you had to be quick to pick it up; it is absent from Eastwood and the version on their MySpace page is a revised one.
Yet it seems to me their masterpiece; essentially a series of cut-ups of dialogue from the 1960 film School for Scoundrels, an adaptation from Stephen Potter’s Oneupmanship series of books - an extended parody which came dangerously close to celebrating that which it intended to debunk – set to bubbling and climactically key changing electropop, it contrasts the spent politesse of Ian Carmichael’s stock innocent patsy (his “I say, I’m terribly sorry” is the record’s leitmotif) with Terry-Thomas’ equally stock cad (how many different flavours of vile can make up the withering damnation of a term that is “hard cheese”?) and sundry voices off (“Lovely day, Henry!”). It sounds, frankly, like the Cameron and Johnson club in postgraduate conference, all sinisterly centred by Alastair Sim (as Potter)’s doomy pronouncements of the meaning and purpose of oneupmanship (“somewhere, somehow…he has become less than you”). Interspersed are a dirty sod’s “he-LLO!” (probably Terry-Thomas again) and a cry of “All his dirty rotten tricks!” from what sounds like Charles Hawtrey, but the record’s climax comes in its serial closing key ascensions where Carmichael howls “Don’t just stand there, Mr Potter, do something!” as he realises that the real shit is coming to the boil. Substitute “Mr Brown” for “Mr Potter” and we can invoke that most dated of clichés, the one about this track being recorded last week.
Perhaps because of their temporary EMI connection I had it in my mind that they were really the Pet Shop Boys – I thank the reader who voiced my unspoken suspicion that the PSBs were behind “Whispering Your Name” – and “Theme For Prim & Proper,” with its melancholically aggressive harmonic reminders of “Opportunities,” appeared to confirm this, albeit very briefly. It only appeared as a seven-inch, on yellowing vinyl, in a run of a thousand so you had to be quick to pick it up; it is absent from Eastwood and the version on their MySpace page is a revised one.
Yet it seems to me their masterpiece; essentially a series of cut-ups of dialogue from the 1960 film School for Scoundrels, an adaptation from Stephen Potter’s Oneupmanship series of books - an extended parody which came dangerously close to celebrating that which it intended to debunk – set to bubbling and climactically key changing electropop, it contrasts the spent politesse of Ian Carmichael’s stock innocent patsy (his “I say, I’m terribly sorry” is the record’s leitmotif) with Terry-Thomas’ equally stock cad (how many different flavours of vile can make up the withering damnation of a term that is “hard cheese”?) and sundry voices off (“Lovely day, Henry!”). It sounds, frankly, like the Cameron and Johnson club in postgraduate conference, all sinisterly centred by Alastair Sim (as Potter)’s doomy pronouncements of the meaning and purpose of oneupmanship (“somewhere, somehow…he has become less than you”). Interspersed are a dirty sod’s “he-LLO!” (probably Terry-Thomas again) and a cry of “All his dirty rotten tricks!” from what sounds like Charles Hawtrey, but the record’s climax comes in its serial closing key ascensions where Carmichael howls “Don’t just stand there, Mr Potter, do something!” as he realises that the real shit is coming to the boil. Substitute “Mr Brown” for “Mr Potter” and we can invoke that most dated of clichés, the one about this track being recorded last week.
