JAMES LAST
THE ARRANGERS PART 6 - JAMES LAST
Broadcasted by BBC RADIO 2 on 12.09.2000
Hi, I'm Richard Niles, welcoming you to The Arrangers, the last in this series which has fearlessly unearthed the stark, naked truth about those obsessively cool masters of lounge, easy listening, and mood music. In previous shows, we've heard Mantovani's cascading strings, Bert Kaempfert's cute flutes and trumpets, Ray Conniff's doobie-doo voices, well, tonight, there's all that and more. Classical, rock, pop, jazz, folk, funk, and goodness gracious, even rap.
Last but certainly not least, the life of the party, that musical magpie, that truly unique German barrel of monkeys we call James Last. Although his legions of fanatical, devoted, and did I say fanatical fans call him Hansi. James Last is a production factory beyond compare, and he seems to record just about everything.
He's got countless albums of classical pieces that are kind of popularized, he's got countless albums of romantic pop pieces, ballads, upbeat dance numbers. Last is kind of all things to all audiences performer in my opinion. He has a way of making all kinds of music accessible to the audience that want to listen to James Last.
It's a strange phenomenon really, and it isn't really that he particularly waters it down. It still has the essence of what it originally was, but for some reason, the audience will accept it from him where they wouldn't really go out and look for that music in the record shop. I have to like a piece of music, because if you don't have fun, you can't do this.
I can't do this. People do it for money, they will do everything. I do really what I like to do.
Be true to yourself and believe what you're doing, and if you're lucky, you have success. Hans Last, as he was then, was born in Bremen in 1929. His parents wanted him to be a classical musician, and at 10, he started taking piano lessons, although like any 10-year-old, he'd rather have been playing football.
Apparently, his piano teacher was also less than impressed, claiming that he was totally unmusical. Good heavens, how could anyone have said such a thing about James Last? Nevertheless, he went on to study music at an army school and discovered a talent for the double bass. A party animal from the start, he was more interested in playing bass in the Radio Bremen Dance Orchestra than the classical world.
Indeed, he was voted best jazz bassist for three consecutive years by Germany's jazz critics. You can hear how he mixes both influences in his version of Mozart's Einer Kleine Nachtmusik. In 1955, Hans Last joined the staff of Polydor Records as an arranger, and in 64 became a recording artist in his own right, an association which is still going strong after 36 years.
Did I say strong? Well, what would you call a guy who continues to record and release records at the rate of one every 11 days? Brad Bigelow, author of the Space Age Pop website, explains that at the time, the influence of the German big band was very obvious in his music, like in this track, American Patrol. When he first hit the airwaves, he was somewhat in the mold of Bert Kampfert, which was kind of the adaptation of the big band orchestration. He also was briefly packaged as what I call a Tijuana Bee, and that's the many, many bands that were released by labels that tried to capitalize and mimic the Tijuana Brass sound that was so hugely successful for Herb Alpert.
The Germans loved medleys. You know, those records where just when you're getting fed up with one annoying tune, they segue into another tune, and another, and before you know it, you may be reaching for a brown paper bag. But somewhere, cash registers are ringing.
Well, R. Hansi was an expert at these medleys, and he and Polydor set out to conquer the international market. The record company changed the name in the beginning from Hans to James, but one day in another tour, I was saying to the people, friends call me Hansi. And since then, all the English people say Hansi.
Most of the Germans say James. And so, with a good marketing plan behind him, James Last was born. But it's not just his name that varies from country to country.
There are also other differences. Simon Bell, who's been a singer with the James Last Orchestra for the last 20 years, notices this when they go on tour. The audience does vary from place to place.
In Britain, it does tend to be an older audience, more the audience one would associate with James Last. But when we play concerts in Europe, particularly in Germany and Holland, young kids are coming, and they seem to be open to go out to a concert just to enjoy themselves. They know that a James Last concert is a great night out, and that's what they want.
So they buy their ticket, and they come along, and they have a great time. But over here, I can't imagine that audience doing that, that age group. There is a kind of a snobbery about music in this country, and it's very hard to make people accept that they can have a good time with something like James Last.
On this series, we've heard a lot of people talk about the resurgence of interest from the younger generation in easy-listening music. But does James Last really fit into this wave of lounge music surfacing in clubs? Latin tracks like Bombaleo here might appeal to the flowery-shirted, rayon-flared, cocktail-swilling set. However, the man himself is skeptical.
The king of easy-listening, James Last, show me a place where to play easy-listening from James Last. I could find a place, just make it up. It's good for me, you know, no problem.
Even if he does accept that easy-listening crown like Julius Caesar thrice refusing on the looper call, James Last has never had any shortage of admirers. In fact, that's putting it mildly. The guy sold 70 million albums, 208 gold, and 14 platinum.
He's never done too well in the USA, but with that kind of success, who cares? The undeniable fact is that if you took all of James Last's fans and put them end-to-end, you'd never have time to brush your teeth. And as singer Simon Bell says, it's amazing the lengths to which his rabid fans will go to hear him play, often following the band as they tour. I find it amazing too because, you know, I've been a fan of many people over the years and gone to see them, but I've never followed anyone's tour.
Apart from anything else, it must be an incredibly expensive exercise, you know. It's hard to know really why the fans are so fanatic, but I think it's got a lot to do with the fact that James Last actually gives so much to them. I don't know any other artist who allows his fans to be at the theatre before we arrive and they're invited into the soundcheck.
We actually almost end up giving a performance at the soundcheck because we get applauded when we finish, whether we make mistakes or not. And I think largely because of the fan club, which is Lombard Peter Boozy, the Appreciation Society, it's like an extended family for many of them. They all support each other, they see each other socially, even when there are no concerts going on.
They meet up and hug James Last weekends and so on, and even go on holiday in the winter months to maybe Tenerife or Cyprus or Madeira or wherever. And I've even been known on occasion to go along on those holidays and sing for them. So I think that they're actually very lucky.
They've got a group of friends and they have the shared interest of the music. It might look crazy to some people from the outside, but that sounds like a really nice way to live. As Simon was saying, this fan base is fueled in a kind of unleaded way by the various international clubs and appreciation societies around the world.
Peter Boozy and Kenneth Olson, who run the British and Swedish clubs, were both hooked by the James Last magic back in the 60s, and it's been true love ever since. In 1966, Polydor issued an album for twelve shillings and sixpence called This Is James Last. There's a photograph of James Last on the sleeve, but there's no information to say if he was a singer, an instrumentalist or whatever.
But for twelve and six, I thought, well, I'll give this one a try. You can't really go wrong. And if I didn't like it, it would have probably been a birthday present for the father-in-law.
The first time I heard James Last music was on radio. I heard a track of Nonstop Dancing 65, and when I heard it, I thought, that's the music for me. That's the perfect music to dance to and to enjoy.
As soon as I heard that track, I talked to a friend, then we travelled down to Denmark and tried to find the record there. Sorry to say, we didn't. But after hearing the sampler, which was a selection of James Last classics, I had an immediate liking for that type of music, mainly because there was a strong rhythm section in an orchestra, which you didn't usually get with the bands of the day that was either playing Nostalgia, Glenn Miller or Strict Tempo Ballroom.
To me, it was almost a pop group with brass rather than an orchestra. My friend and I split in Germany. I stayed in Lübeck, tried to find the record, and my friend went down to Hamburg.
And the day after, we arrived back with this record, Nonstop Dancing 65. So that's the start for me, listening to James Last music. Then I bought every record I could find about James Last.
Fortunately for James Last fans, their hero has kept them well supplied. The volume of his output is incredible, with more chart albums in the UK than any other living artist. And as well as his distinctive arrangements of other people's music, fans can also enjoy his own compositions, like this, Games That Lovers Play.
Duke Ellington and Juan Tizol's Caravan, given a Brazilian arrangement by R. Hansi. That funny sound you hear was not Duke rolling in his grave. It's a funny Brazilian percussion instrument called the cuica, which in Portuguese means sounds like a duck with the hiccups being goosed by an A&R man.
Like most of the arrangers we've been looking at in the series, James Last has worked with a wide variety of different artists over the years, from pianist Richard Kleiderman to people who should know better, like Bossa Nova songstress Astrid Gilberto, with whom he recorded this song. He also treats his musicians very well, taking the whole band out to dinner every night on tour, taking the band on holiday, and he once gave each of the musicians and singers a gold bar as a Christmas present. Hansi certainly knows the way to a musician's heart is through his wallet.
He's also a great believer in allowing musicians the freedom to improvise. So am I. It means I not only have to write less, but I can rely on someone else's creativity. This, and a vehemently non-purist attitude, explains the wide variety of styles within his music.
Simon Bell. At the time when I joined Hansi, as we called James Last, he wanted to make a conscious change and make the sound a bit more modern and a bit more funky. We started doing material that had been done by Quincy Jones and the Jacksons and so on.
So the stuff we sang, most of the time, it's actually been very soulful. People are surprised. They expect us to be doing really middle-of-the-road stuff, and that's not at all what we do.
At the moment on stage, we're even doing rap numbers. There's a whole breadth of music that gets covered, you know. One of the things that's always surprised me when we've been introducing new material into the shows is that even when we're doing a new song that's been a huge hit, the fans have not always heard it because they really do, a lot of them, listen to only James Last.
I remember when we did the Dionne Warwick and Friends hit, That's What Friends Are For, that most of them hadn't been familiar with that, and yet it had been a worldwide hit. And that's one of the areas where I say that he exposes them to things that they actually like, but they're not aware of because they don't really expose themselves to the music that's going on on the radio. They really do like to listen to their James Last.
So they rely on him to expose them to new music. Fast As I throw To the magic chance Of you Beside me Here beneath the blue Of this lonely truth Within a desert Perhaps James Last's most famous trademark was a new twisted kink on the medley formula, something which could be described as louder and longer. He added sounds of laughter, talking and clapping to suggest a real party going on, and stretched the five-minute medleys to 25-minute marathons of what they called non-stop dancing.
James Last was always a big party guy and renowned for having parties at his own home in Hamburg. And at the time, he felt that for the type of people he was inviting to his parties, there wasn't a lot of music that he could play for that particular age group. So he went into the studio in 1965, put down 26, 27 titles, linked them all together, and called it non-stop dancing, including Beatles hits, Rolling Stones hits, the hits of the day.
Although all the albums reached the British charts in the lower regions, virtually every one of the non-stop dancing albums went to number one in the German charts. That's certainly one of the more fun features of Last's albums, particularly the ones he recorded in the 60s. He had a whole series of Hammond-a-go-go, Humba-humba-a-go-go, accompanying the non-stop dancing were canned sounds of people clinking glasses and laughing and talking amongst themselves.
If you didn't have enough party spirit, there was a little artificial infusion that would help you. He coined the phrase non-stop dancing. Certainly part of that was intended for a dance audience, much like you see people targeting the same sort of thing for dance audiences today, longer tracks so that people can stay on the floor and dance.
When we do the non-stop dancing albums, we take about four or five days to record, and on the last day, when we've finished all the vocals, a group of fans are invited into the studio, and there's a big circle of microphones, and everyone stands around with the singers interspersed with the fans, and they play back all of the album as it would be when released, and everyone sings along to give it the party atmosphere. There, of course, is lots of free drink and food and so on, and really we have a party in the studio, and that gets mixed in to the original sessions, and there you have a James Last party album. Nice violin stabs! Penny Lane meets shower scene in Psycho.
I need a shower after that. I admit, James Last is not my cup of herbal coffee, but then I have to admire him for doing all his own arranging on all these interminable records. No matter how fast this guy writes, I don't know when he has time to party at all, much less do it non-stop.
James Last has always embraced whatever's popular in current pop. His own favorite group is Guns N' Roses. Of course, this makes a lot of commercial sense.
After all, it seems Last knows that the main appeal of his music is that it's for older people who still want to feel young and with it. They're too old to buy the latest Oasis record, but if there's a James Last record which includes a version of it, they can feel they're still getting something contemporary in a package as sophisticated and classy as they are. I always listen to top ten records, and you can find everything.
You can find positive things. I think that's why some people say you are still young. And I must say I'm very thankful for all the good music from young people coming.
It's better songs than 30 years ago. He knows exactly what music is going on. He's always been interested in every kind of music.
It's not just the melodic middle-of-the-road stuff that people preconceive as James Last. He's interested in funk and rap and rock, everything. Recently, Hansi did a recording with a rap group in Germany called Fetis Brot, and they've actually appeared on stage with us.
They've actually appeared on every tour we've done in the last couple of years. They're incredible. Hansi played on their hit record.
He played bass on their record and did all the pop shows with them. And I think that's one of the things that exposed him to that new audience. Probably the kids realized that this guy was really hip to what was going on.
Critics love to criticize, and James Last's music is easy to fulminate against. Is it because it's bland? Or annoyingly jolly? Or soulless? Or is there too much reverb? Or is it really because it's commercially successful beyond the wildest dreams of us hip musicians playing bebop in smoky clubs for 30 quid a night when we're lucky enough to get a gig? In any case, Simon Bell is definitely a hit. He's very defensive of his boss.
I think we're inclined to think that we own popular music because it's an English-language art form, really. There isn't really a market here for things that are not setting out to be hits. There just doesn't seem to be a place for it as far as critics are concerned.
And also, it's very easy to knock James Last because everyone's looking like they're having such a good time. I think they just don't like to accept that that's OK. James Last, a man and his music.
Easy listening may be ridiculed, but titter ye not, for as professional fan Peter Boozy says, the men responsible were laughing all the way to the bank. I have a book at home called They've Sold a Million, and in the list of facts and figures at the back, the most successful, with the exception of perhaps Elvis, The Beatles, Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra, are easy listening artists. James Last has now sold 70 million albums worldwide.
Ray Conniff, Herb Alpert, Burt Kempert have sold millions upon millions of albums. So it's not over yet for the arranging giants of easy listening who, while they may not be shifting the same volume of records as they did in the 50s, 60s and 70s, are still in the racks of record shops all around the world. But it is the end of the non-stop party we call The Arrangers.
OK, I know you're all miserable that this is the last of the series, but don't post yourself to Mars in a cardboard box, don't throw yourself in front of a high-speed martini, and don't try to swallow your radio, especially without a beverage. Instead, let's thank those party animals researcher Dominic Black, who I see manfully doing the boogaloo, with producer Lindsay Moyes, who looks fantastic doing the fruit. Maybe it's because of the kitten heels and hot pants.
You're right, I shouldn't be wearing hot pants, but hey, I am Richard Niles, and it's my way of saying thanks for listening to The Arrangers.