CD Shoppe Shock Purchase - Slipping Away With Johnny Dankworth

I went into a shoppe and bought a CD today. I did, honest. I don't know what came over me, other than to say it was a 'Oh, what the hell' moment, arrived at after a couple of minutes' consideration regarding all things concerned, those being a) money, of course, a whole £10, b) the potential for pleasure in a compilation of Johnny Dankworth tunes split into two discs, one called 'Big Screen Entertainment', the other, 'Home Entertainment', c) the question of whether I wanted to 'support' the shoppe, because every purchase of this kind today feels like an act of charity in the name of a virtually extinct breed, d) Fuck these record companies and their moaning about file sharing - yeah - fuck 'em, 'cause, you know what? I've spent a lot of money down the years...I've helped pay for record company fat cats' limos, yachts, homes, coke habits and so on - now they're moaning about me getting music for free, and fuck the FBI too. My gen should be given music. We should all have special passes, keys to the kingdom of all music in honour of all we've done to uphold the industry. I bet a lot of people were shocked to find out that Megaupload bosses were fat cats too, with millions stashed away, but what did we expect them to be, weedy geeks living on welfare whilst they provided  the means to get free stuff for everyone with a computer?

So I bought the CD. I even read the sleeve notes on the bus coming home, that's how much of a novelty it was. Or, how much I wanted to pass the time, during which, I might add, someone's cell phone notified it's owner of a call by playing the sax riff to a Sade tune, the name of which escapes me now although I recognised it at the time. For two minutes back in 1983 I've a terrible suspicion I thought she was all right, and how's that for a confession? You have to understand that we were swept away by Jazz and anything 'jazzy' that charted and Sade was just about 'jazzy', and looked good, and it didn't matter that she wasn't fit to wash Sarah Vaughan's knickers. If I were a Catholic I'd have been to confess about this by now, but as it is, I can't, except to you, so do you forgive me?

Johnny Dankworth was Jazzy, in case you didn't know. He was English, and would sometimes crop up on the telly with his missus, Cleo Laine, who sings. They were Jazz UK, performing that kind of Jazz that wouldn't upset the audience of a Les Dawson show. Johnny was knighted, and later, Cleo was made a dame, and as you know, there's ain't nothing like a dame in Jazz other than Cleo, as far as I know. She crops up a few times on this comp, most notably singing 'Let's Slip Away', 'Thieving Boy' and 'Life Is A Wheel'. All-in-all it's a good time selection of sounds that swing, mostly in a 60s fashion, when TV shows had themes that were just great and groovy. Any comp containing the theme to 'The Frost Report' is OK with me. Also (don't worry, this isn't shaping up to be anything like a track-by-track review) there's 'Two Piece Flower' and 'Off Duty', both of which are almost enough to convince me that Brits could match their US counterparts, almost, but I am biased, and take some convincing in that area. Still, if Joe Harriott had lived long enough, he should have been knighted too. On  the whole, as far as I can tell, it's far wiser to knight Jazz musicians than bankers because, after all, they're unlikely to cause a recession at a later date. I've made some small contribution towards sustaining the consumer industry now, and feel very smug for having done so even if it means giving money to Universal.