Bill & His Pop Guitar

I know nothing about Bill - or his guitar - other than they are almost certainly possibly maybe German (Willhelm und Sine Popguitaren?), the record is on the Telefunken label and a lot of this stuff came from Germany around this time: Klaus Wunderlich, James Last etc. The list goes on. I have a just invented theory that so much bland easy-listening music came out of Germany in the Sixties and Seventies as a result of the long-lasting Post-Nazi Guilt Complex that the Germans suffered after WW2. Germans were so scared of making anything that sounded imperialistic or threatening that they became the world's finest papsmiths, patting each other on the back with glee every time they made a record that didn't contain anything that sounded like the Horst Wessel Song.

The German Film industry made a lot of really badly-made, 'Schoolgirl Report', soft-corn porn movies around this time too. ("Lene Riefenstahl was a mistake! All we make is crap now, honest!")

Bill and His Pop Guitar is a particular favourite of my cheesepile. A veritable Limburger. Fourteen tracks of variable easy-listening slush enlivened by the tenacious twanging of 'Bill'.

Favourite tracks are Eloise (this is, in my feeble opinion, by far the best version ever - far better than The Damned's), Scarbourough (sic) Fair which, complete with some incredibly incompetent bongo playing and some cheapo knock-off Morricone strings, sounds like it fell off the soundtrack of a Spaghetti Western version of The Graduate (a theme continued in a lighter vein in the arrangement on The Sound of Silence), and Those Were The Days - a tune which I loath, having had to sing it (in Russian) for a show I was in far too many time for the good of my sanity - but there's something about those violins that makes me laugh every time I hear it.

Enjoy!

Side One:

1. Eloise
2. Those Were The Days
3. Hey Jude
4. I Started a Joke
5. Scarbourough Fair / Canticle
6. Manchester and Liverpool
7. The Last Waltz

Side Two:

1. Ob-la-di, ob-la-da
2. L'amour est blue (Love Is Blue)
3. Light My Fire
4. 13 jours en France
5. (Sittin' On) The Dock Of The Bay
6. The Sound of Silence