THE STARGAZERS – "I See The Moon"

Tom: you may find this ‘irritating and embarrassing’ in 2003 but something must have attracted (say) 250,000 people to shell out their hard-earned back in the winter of 1954. For me it is the product of a gentler, more innocent age and I actually find it quite charming. The production’s not bad either.

Much more significantly, the great Dennis Potter saw fit to choreograph this as a backdrop to Colonel Bernwood’s struggle with dementia in ‘Lipstick on your Collar’. But I don’t suppose you’ve much time for Connie Francis either?

Still, we’re all a lot wiser and more sophisticated now, aren’t we?…

If you let the singles chart be your guide then the early 50s seemed a desperate time to be around. Rationing still in force and truly hideous records like this around (another reason to never let the Stargazers cross my path again).

When this record was released I was just an infant. I remember my old man playing it a lot. My dad was a de-mobbed sailor that escaped WW2 with enough skill to become a pretty capable electronics repair man in civvy street.
This stuff pre-dates all of the material we fondly remember as ‘anarchic’ comedy, like Goons and Python.
I consider myself very lucky to be able to still listen to it. It’s timeless and priceless.
Jeff

Another thoughts on this one it sort of got certain things in common with The Beatles ‘You Know My Name Look Up the Number’ I suppose its the Goons type feel. And I suppose it’s got a slight feel of vaguely university type/50s BBC executives’ ideas of humour to it (from a time when probably about 5% of the population went anywhere near higher education) a completely different humour to that of the “masses” (eg all those Wartime radio programmes you hear about/George Formby/Wilfred Pickles etc)although in case as with the Goons it obviously crossed over to bigtime.

Talking about the pre-rock No 1’s in general (AND DEFINITELY NOT THE STARGAZERS!)if you’re in your late 30s or older and like me left school at 16 to work in a factory/on a building site etc back in the early-mid 80’s you would have worked with a lot of working-class men who were then in their early 50s and upwards (my dad’s generation-roughly those born before the early 1940s,this allowing for the idea that the age of a musical styles audience is invariably younger than the artists who produce it) who still whistled these pre-rock songs/turned then up on Radio 2 and sung along if they were played which in that period they still regularly were.

This was their music and for the younger people on Popular it might seem quite strange at in the period when some of us were starting to go to the first big Acid parties half of our workforce were still singing along to Jo Stafford and Guy Mitchell.

An example of a part of English life that disappeared without anyone really noticing it.

Incidentally I doubt this would have been so apparent if I’d had a professional job back then and as I later did (eventually in my early 30s I went to university)as I should imagine a large proportion of those of a similar age to my Frankie Laine whistling colleagues from more middle class backgrounds would have tended to have been into classical music or maybe a bit of trad jazz or folk and pretty unmoved by the pop charts).

Re 11: It’s occured to me, via Popular and current work colleagues, that there is a cut-off point for both Pre-Rock knowledge (snap – I know a lot of these songs – but again not the Stargazers – from late 70s/early 80s Radio 2) and tolerance of straight-ahead guitar bands. Ergo, I feel a generation removed from 37-yr olds.

Son Of My Father intrigued and confused me, sounded important and futuristic when I was 7. If I was seven years younger and electronically-treated pop was the norm (see We Don’t Talk Anymore thread) I’m fairly sure my tolerance for Oasis/Verve/View/Wombats would be way lower than it already is.

And, if I was seven years younger, I would never have been able to hum She Wears Red Feathers through osmosis (nobody in my family owned any pre-rock, bar Mantovani). Somewhere in the early/mid eighties, this music must have disappeared from national broadcasting. Can any BBC watchers put a finger on something more specific?

One more thing about I See The Moon – isn’t the humour rather close in its surreal puerility to the laureled Bonzos? I don’t get it with them too often, but I like I See The Moon as much as The Intro And The Outro.

Jimmy Savile’s Old Record Club was a key part of my musical education on this type of material (not that it’s expansive) – you’d always get a 50s chart interspersed with the 60s/early 70s oldies. And it was on Radio 1. I don’t think Dale ever goes back that far – but then when I first heard the 50s songs they were only 20 years old.

well the surrealists all adored alice, and some of them said that it was better than anything they ever did — which suggests there wasn’t so much to hand on the continent that filled that niche (tho some of this response is probably grass-is-greener-ism, i think)

the sitwells were consciously responding to surrealism and dada, and tend to get looked down on by hardcore devotees as timid upperclass copyists

anyone who likes belloc should check out struwwelpeter, which is a german illustrated book for kids of strikingly alarming content — though i guess it fits into the Gothic territory pretty straightforwardly

Re The Lord at No12 – point taken that it wasn’t well described as particularly university humour but more correctly the product of the juxtaposition of different walks of life – but what I was clumsily trying to say was it was a whole lot different than this “Can you hear me mother?”/ITMA/Arthur Askey etc type of 40’s/50’s humour (that I’ve heard people of my parents generation and older go on about).The kind of stuff that masses of working people in munitions factories/or regular infantry squaddies on active service would have all “got” but which many of the more highly educated would have thought below them. Of course The Goons-type humour was appreciated by a mass audience too but would have bewildered many others (or been enjoyed solely on a far simpler “silly voices” level) whilst a high proportion of those in higher education would surely have been its staunchest fans.

Yes I also should have included Modern Jazz, having said that though isn’t “sophisticated” in the phrase “sophisticated college kid” the operative word here – ie the cutting edge avant garde tendency at college. And yes they’d also be the ones who were starting to investigate folk music but as Trad Jazz’s later revival in the late50s/early 60s showed there still remained quite a substantial educated following for it too.

yes fair enough andy — i was thinking a bit more about this after i posted and and remembered the entire larkin-amis tendency in re trad jazz, though this was a self-consciously “anti-sophistication” movement; what i actually had in mind was a free cinema documentary about jazzclubs in working class london in the early 50s (if i remember rightly, they were dance clubs — ie the music was played on records — rather than by live bands featuring humphrey lyttelton et al…) (so a kind of precursor of the mod ethic, i guess?)

my rule-of-thumb is in the UK, for ANY genre, current or revived, the fanbase* has a working class wing, a middleclass wing, and a bohemian faction uneasily or playfully somewhere between and somewhat distanced from the others — and what’s often interesting is how differently the genre plays out, as symbol and in social use, among these various constituencies

*eg folk was also popular with communist party members, and the CPGB still had a reasonably strong workerbase in the early 50s, and etc

having taken the trouble to actually listen to the thing (courtesy of youtube) I gotta say I like it – although it does seem weird to think of it at number 1.
It reminds me of Spike Jones and his City Slickers as well as ‘I’m sorry I haven’t a clue’. There’s a clip of it used in Lipstick on your collar here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0eaRM4OIyU4&feature=related
Potter was losing it a bit by then wasn’t he?

And there was me thinking it was the musical equivalent of The Trouble With Tribbles.

apologies for any offence – maybe watching the Potter clip increased my levels of intolerance/paranoia as I’m not usually one to see racist subtexts everywhere – I doubt it was a marching song for the Blackshirts – but it could be/could have been interpreted that way – there was/is a casual racism among that generation (and later ones) which was almost unconscious and breathtaking in its assumed innocuousness.
Sung earlier in America it could still have had/been given a racist subtext – and Star Trek was not immune to sending coded messages – although I can’t speak for Tribbles as I’ve not finished scrutinising it for backwards messages and hidden symbols.

“I See The Moon” is a bit of fun, innit? A laugh. And you’ve got to laugh. I didn’t find it offensive at all.

“Close The Door”, which I’d never heard before, is terrifying if you listen to it in a BNP frame of mind. Whether or not it was intentional, all it would take is one person saying “you do know it’s about darkies?” for it to become an unstoppably plausible urban legend.

re # 30 the clip @#23 is basically a live action Muppet sketch

Hmm. I’m intrigued by this one. As a 20-something all that starting the line at the wrong time stuff etc actually seems more the stuff of “modern” comedy records than the previous “novelty” no.1s we’ve had. You could almost imagine parts of it on an 80s Comic Relief single.

Norman Wisdom’s Don’t Laugh At Me peaked at no.3, stuck behind I See The Moon and the Obenkirchen Children’s Choir’s equally slapstick The Happy Wanderer. Is that ironic? Presumably it was a no.1 in Albania. RIP, Pitkin.

I spent a happy afternoon yesterday, chatting to my Mum about the music she listened to before the Rock&Roll invasion, and “I See The Moon” cropped up among reminiscences about Alma Cogan and Kitty Kallen singing live on the Light Programme with various big-bands. Surprisingly, she could sing the tune quite happily but the lyrics descended into “dum de dum” after “the moon sees me”. I was baffled, but then she observed that HM Forces overseas would have sung this ditty as if it were an End-Of-Empire “Lily Marlene”, which kind of explains its popularity.

I heard “Close the door (They’re coming in the window)” about 30 years ago, a friend played it to me as a suggestion for a cover version we could do.

(I said “no way” and “urgh?” and “wmf?”)

Anyways, I do remember it having a vague ska feel, then again maybe that was my subconscious trying to remix it…

I really like the song i am singing it all the time it funny and i give it a 100 plus i also like nancy sinatra version also sorry people i see the moon in a neww light David

Hello. I’m back. Sorry I’ve been away for some time. I can share my opinion on this novelty from November 1953. (That’s when the 78 was released, according to 45worlds. Here’s the link:
http://www.45worlds.com/78rpm/record/f10213)

I especially agree with comment #1: this was a good song in its day. People’s senses of humour and musical tastes were different then, so their money (A LOT) would certainly have been worth it.

I like to balance perspectives of past and present to make my opinion fair. This song may be hideous now, but if I’d been around in 1954 (I wasn’t), I would’ve thought it was far better.

Here’s my own opinion, rating each area out of 10:

Presentation: 7.5
Instrumentation: 8.5
Vocals: 6.5
Originality: 6.5
Lasting appeal: 5

Overall: 6.8

It doesn’t make people laugh any more (like it would’ve done in 1954), but it still puts a smile on my face at times.

Yay, I’m not the only person from 2020 posting in comments! Also, both Struwwelpeter (in a similar vein, Max und Moritz is great too: my mother is German, so I grew up on those books) and The Trouble with Tribbles were great. That song? Not so much, IMO.

Nah, I’m sorry but this is flip-side of Eddie Calvert’s dull trumpeting. Yes, it’s dated – it could be from 1914, let alone 1954 – but at least it’s interesting. It feels to me like peeking into a lost world of music halls, and pub singalongs. ‘Roll out the barrel…’, ‘Knees up Muvva Brown…’ and all that. I wouldn’t want it to feature in any of my regular playlists, but I’d still give it a 4/10. Altogether now…