A Midsummer Night’s Dream: The Gamblers - 21 Pipe Salute/Lord Kitchener & the Fitzroy Coleman Band - City & United 1956 (6 December 1992)

Buy this at Discogs

Buy this at Discogs

Two Carribbean inflected tracks, recorded 20 years apart respectively but both deserving the label of “vintage” even in 1992.

The Gamblers appear to have been an offshoot from Observer AllStars when they put out a 1977 7-inch disc called 21 Gun Salute, which sounded like it should have been soundtracking a dirt-cheap TV cop show.  Peel refers to the track as 21 Gun Salute in the video, but my notes referred to it as a dub reggae instrumental, which if you click on the above link, 21 Gun Salute doesn’t sound like. With the help of my benefactor, Webbie, we have been able to determine that Peel actually played the dub side, 21 Pipe Salute on 6/12/92.  As ever the differences are slight: a series of vocalisations, some balance drop outs, a little echo here and there and hypnotic percussion work on rim shots. But it all helps to create a chilled and lightly beguiling vibe which makes the track worthier of our time than the A-side is. The producer was George Boswell, here working under the alias of Richard Holness, but best known as Niney the Observer.

On the daytime shows which Peel stood in on in April 1993, he treated the lunchtime crowd to some examples of football songs, most likely culled from the Bend It! series of albums of football music curios. Unfortunately, so far from what I’ve heard he’s gone with stodgy, dull fare such as this.  Hopefully, by the time I reach the end of his stint, he’ll have serenaded the canteens and builders tucking into their packed lunches with something as charming as the calypso recorded by Lord Kitchener which immortalised the achievements of both Manchester City (FA Cup winners) and Manchester United (League champions) in the 1955/56 season.  City’s victory over Birmingham became infamous for City goalkeeper Bert Trautmann playing out the last 17 minutes of the match with a broken bone in his neck. Trautmann isn’t name checked in the song, possibly due to his former association with the Nazi party during a war which was only just a decade finished when the track was recorded.  I can’t imagine Kitchener and his associates wanted to praise a man who fought for a doctrine that would have seen them enslaved or exterminated had it been triumphant.  They had no such problems in singing about his team-mate Bobby Johnstone, who is so memorably paired up with United’s Tommy Taylor in the chorus.

United romped to the league title in 1956, winning it by 11 points.  A year later, they retained the title.  By this point, the Busby Babes had flourished into the finest team in the country.  Who knows what else they may have gone on to achieve but for a snowy night in Munich.

Although Kitchener made his reputation in Britain with tracks like London is the Place for Me or Victory Calypso - Cricket, Lovely Cricket which he wrote for Lord Beginner, he was a perfect choice to perform the track, given that he lived and owned a club in Manchester, before returning to Trinidad in 1962.

Videos courtesy of Webbie (Gamblers) and Madchester89 (Kitchener)