1977 The Manhattan Transfer: Chanson D'Amour

Nowadays, I can't hear the name 'Manhattan Transfer' without hearing Ronnie Corbett prefixing it with a "Ladies and gentleman, please welcome...". Always a staple guest on 'The Two Ronnies' during the seventies, the middle class, middle of the road setting of the show seems somehow fitting for the middle class, middle of the road music they purveyed. Not that 'Chanson D'Amour' is all that typical of their output, but it's a good enough illustration of the light jazz/art deco retro music they were all about.*

It's fair to say that 'Chanson D'Amour' has never been one of my favourite songs. The hokiness of that repeating 'Ra ta ta ta ta' refrain fair makes my skin crawl but Manhattan Transfer at least rein it in considerably, making it a bit part player in the tune in comparison with (for example) the 1958 Art and Dotty Todd version that positively revels in it. What this version does do is push its 'Frenchness' to the fore, but with a lacklustre result that's more pastiche than passion.

Lead Laurel Massé is a fine jazz vocalist in her own right, but the affected French accent she adopts on this is more ''Allo 'Allo' than amour amour and it makes the interpretation a little too kitsch and a little too fake. No doubt it was convenient and de rigueur sophistication to have burbling away on the music centre at seventies dinner parties, along with hostess trolleys and bottles of Blue Nun. But just like that budget Liebfraumilch, it doesn't too travel well and now sounds a creaky artefact of a different age entirely. Sadly for Laurel and the band, that age is not the aspired to sound of Paris in the twenties but the forced domestic hell of 'Abigail's Party'.

* As an aside, having this at number one in the year of 'The Punk Wars' (TM) seems almost like an act of spite, of the respectable majority of the UK giving their own two finger gesture at the urchins in ripped jeans and safety pins cheering on the Sex Pistols signing with A&M outside Buckingham Palace that same month. Maybe that sounds a touch fantastic and paranoid, but as we'll see, the levels of spite would go much deeper than this scenario.