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Songs for City Squares
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Songs for City Squares Topic Records TOP77 (7" EP, UK, 1962) |
Recorded at Cambridge by Bill Leader;
Sleeve design: Fred Shapur
Musicians
Leon Rosselson: vocals, guitar
Tracks
Side 1
- Down the Drain
“… is there not a lot for which all of us ca be truly thankful?” (Mr Macmillan) - Dear John Profumo
“If the bomb drops organised help will be available.” (Civil Defense Lecture)
Side 2
- To Mr Butler, Sir
“Why not have a corps of public punishers?” (Sir Thomas Moore) - Battle Hymn of the New Socialist Party
“Brothers! What are we arguing about?” (George Brown)
Sleeve Notes
Let us now praise famous men …
These songs celebrate the heroes of the 1960s. Not the lonesome boys and little girls of the pop-song world nor the outlaws and bandits of the folk-song world, but the galaxy of brilliant public figures who illuminate the dull, bed & breakfast twilight of our private worlds: Sir Hugh Gaitskell, for instance, chairman of L.C.I.; Lord Home, acclaimed, through his television appearances, as the human deterrent; Sir Frederick Bowman, the gentle criminal reformer, whose suggestion that murderers should be whipped before they are hung, to teach them, as it were, not to do it again, must rank as the most enlightened piece of penology since the invention of the guillotine; Dr. R. Beecing, whose hobby is trains, whose motto is “Good Sound Business” and whose revolutionary transformation of Britain’s outdated lavatory system, closing down all W.C.’s running at a loss of more than 1,313 pennies a year and converting the rest into Fall-Out Shelters, ushered in the gay era when the Twist was danced in the streets of Britain’s Cities.
It is such men, surely, who will one day take their place among the giants (and fairies) of folk mythology. Meanwhile, these songs are dedicated to them, or, to put it more accurately, “them”.