Bear Family Re (Bear Family Records) Round The Town-Music Hall

(4-CD LP-sized box set with deluxe 132-page hardcover book) Music Hall was Britpop circa 1900. It was the last great flowering of authentically and indigenously British popular music. It began with perhaps the greatest revelation from Britain's age of discovery: booze goes better with music, and vice versa. Pubs and drinking houses began to feature entertainers around 1850, and by the end of the century, some taverns had evolved into music halls. Roofed-in stable yards were superseded by purpose-built theatres, and by the end of the century, there were an estimated 14 million admissions to the London halls every year. Patriotic songs, street ballads, and bawdy songs had been standard fare, but they were quickly supplanted by newly-written numbers, most of them cameos or caricatures of everyday life. Many songs that began in the halls have now passed into the DNA of British popular music. The Old Bull And Bush, The Man Who Broke The Bank At Monte Carlo, Henry The Eighth, She Was Poor But She Was Honest, Lily Of Laguna, I Do Like To Be Beside The Seaside, The Laughing Policeman, Who Were You With Last Night, Two Lovely Black Eyes, My Old Dutch... they all began in the halls. The original versions by the original artists, which include Marie Lloyd, Charles Coborn, Harry Champion, Gus Elen, Dan Leno, and many others, are all here. Altogether, there are 106 songs that encapsulate the golden era of Music Hall, assembled and annotated by Britain's leading Music Hall expert, Tony Barker. In addition, the large format hardcover book contains rare lyric transcriptions, original sheet music covers, and full biographical notes. Music Hall effectively finished around 1918. It metamorphosed into Variety, but Variety was not Music Hall. Music Hall was essentially Victorian-Edwardian, British, and unapologetically predominantly working class. It was revived from the Twenties onward (BBC-TV's The Good Old Days ran for nearly 30 years), but the spirit of Music Hall survived not in revivalism but in Lonnie Donegan, Ray Davies, Ian Dury, Morrisey, and Squeeze, among others. The roll-call of acts at the beginning of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band comes straight out of Music Hall, which is hardly surprising when you remember that the Beatles' early tours featured jugglers, ventriloquists, and comedians, much like a night at the Empire some sixty years earlier. (George Harrison, incidentally, was an active member of the George Formby Appreciation Society, and probably knew that Formby's father was one of the biggest Music Hall stars of his day). The artists are all long gone. Even those that once attended a music hall are now few in number. The world depicted in the songs can be difficult to penetrate sometimes, but it's rich music that repays close attention. A chance detail opens a window onto the world as it existed at the dawn of the 1900s. Music Hall held up a distorting mirror to everyday life in a way that popular music rarely had to that point. The legacy of Music Hall is felt whenever pop is still in some small way uniquely and depictively British.