Good old Herb Alpert. This is one of a number of his Tijuana Brass albums that I own, and sports what I think is a marvellous cover. What better when you’re out for a flight in your shoddily-personalised plane, flying scarf fluttering behind you (despite not actually moving), than to have a 1960s lovely perched on your wing (metaphorical and literal, I’ll warrant) serving you a drink so mysterious that the photographer has had to block it out with some aeroplane architecture?
‘Spanish Flea’ is on this album; the quintessential Alpert number. When I bought this record, along with other Alpert releases, it was in the midst of a widespread mid-1990s reawakening of interest in Easy Listening. This was caused, in part, by a weird Britpop side effect that happened at the time. I’m not sure how it came about, but Pulp’s music (and Denim, perhaps, in a smaller way) begat a whole mini-scene involving clubs like Smashing and Blow Up, contributed to a charity clothing fashion boom summed up by any night in Camden’s Good Mixer on the star-spot, and finally broke into the mainstream with Mike Flowers Pops’ cover of ‘Wonderwall’, if you remember that. Odd times.
Strange to think that this album is over forty years old. I often think such things these days with 1960s records that still sound fresh, invigorating and inventive. In fact I often think two things: (1) Cor, the people involved with this are over 40 years older than they were when they created it, and (2) if nowadays I cast my mind back to ten years ago, the music of that era seems very recent. Was that the same in 1975-1980, with the excesses of psychedelia and beat/garage music a very clear memory for what, to me, seems like a completely separate generation?