There's a copy of Michael Berkeley's Private Passions by my bedside. It helps with insomnia and, given that Amazon is currently flogging copies for 1p, it's a bargain. The book is a digest of Berkeley's BBC Radio 3 series, only drier and without the actual music on which the series is predicated. It's a kind of posh Desert Island Discs and Michael Berkeley (the son of composer Lennox Berkeley) is the classical music world's answer to Jeremy Clarkson.
I was flicking through the book wondering if every one of Berkeley's guests really do love the works of Britten as much as they claim, when I came across across Stephen Fry's choices: Nina Simone, Alkan, Britten (of course), Mozart, the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band, Beethoven, Wagner and... Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass playing A Walk in the Black Forest. What a delightful addition to any iPod and how typical of Mr Fry. I was instantly transported back to the late 60s, to a world of grown-ups sipping gin and tonic on the patio while I ate cheese balls that smelled of sick (but seemed sophisticated) and listened to A Walk in the Black Forest perkily broadcasting from the sarcophagus-like speaker in the hall. So, off I dashed to iTunes to take a trip back to old Mexico.
I tried several tracks on for size - Herb's version of The Third Man theme that relocates Harry Lime from Vienna to Guadalajara, Spanish Flea and, of course, A Walk in the Black Forest. But something was wrong. It wasn't that Herb and the boys were bad - far from it - but they were simply not right. Somehow the marimbas just didn't have the life in them that I had remembered. Herb Alpert was faking it. Or was he? As far as I could tell these were the definitive versions, the discs that spun at 33 1/3 rpm on turntables across the civilized world before they were replaced by Demis Roussos in 1973. Then the truth hit me: it wasn't Herb faking it - we owned a fake.
Indeed, we owned many fakes. My soundtrack album of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang wasn't voiced by Dick Van Dyke, Sally Ann Howes and the children who sounded as if their toes were clamped in a vice, no, we had (probably) the Mike Sammes Singers delivering what we now call 'a cover' for MFP. Remember MFP? Music for Pleasure. Light music cheaply priced. Not authentic, but not bad, either. The late 60s sounded of MFP in our house. It was the label of 1001 Beatles' tributes. And, as a little googling proved, we had the no. 1 Herb Alpert tribute: The Tijuana Sound of Brass. Easy to think you were getting the 'Tijuana Brass' when in fact the proceedings were performed by the (equally good in my opinion) Torero Band which you wouldn't know unless you sought out the small type.
I am now reunited with The Tijuana Sound of Brass. I suspect that it's a charity shop staple. The sound could not be bettered. The 'parp' of the car horn at the start of Tijuana Taxi is perfect (unlike Herb's etiolated take) and even on a first re-listening I could anticipate every trumpet entry and each plink of the marimba. I was 6 years old once again and happier than I could imagine.
