WORDS: Jonny Trunk

The reason why actors generally feature in movies and not on records is because they act better than they sing. Sadly, this truism hasn’t dissuaded a long line of screen stars – from Joe Pesci and Oliver Reed to Sydney Poitier and Dr. Spock – from really letting everything go in the recording studio, not least their pride.

There’s something fabulous about being an actor; all those people around you telling you how fabulous you are. And as your fabulous career starts to peak, there comes the time when you realise your acting talent is just one of your many, many fabulous talents. One day, the simple, humble thought of making an album pops into your head and before you know it there’s a studio full of fabulous musicians ready for you to come in and share your talents with a world that definitely wants to have a fabulous listen.

Unfortunately this kind of thing has been going on for decades, since film began in fact. Even silent film stars such as Betty Balfour cut 78s for HMV back in the 1920s. Charlie Chaplin’s own instrumentals were pressed up. Even the Marx Brothers cut discs; Harpo the harpist and Groucho the talented vocalist left behind several sought-after recordings. But, for me, the vinyl action really begins in the late 1950s. And it carries on relentlessly from then. And it’s still going…

It begins for me when I stumbled across the sublime Calypso Is Like So album by Robert Mitchum in the soundtrack section of a record shop many years ago. I’ve been a soundtrack collector for as long as I can remember, and every now and then a ‘celebrity sings’ album will appear in amongst the usual LPs. The Mitchum album has great artwork, there’s old Bob getting drunk on the cover, possibly stoned, and ready to cough up some classic Afro-Caribbean filth. I say filth, for much of the classic Caribbean songbook is crammed with sexual innuendo – ‘The Big Bamboo’, ‘Wonderful Parakeets’, ‘I Left Her Behind For You’ are all classic examples of lively songs about rude things. And Mitchum makes a fine job of it all, singing as he does in his mock Tobago lilt.

Mitchum actually delivered more than one album. A decade after the Calypso masterpiece, he was back in the studio hammering out a bluesy country-based album, with songs of Thunder Road and the rugged Wild West. The Mitchum albums got me hooked. Trouble is he set the musical bar pretty high, and most have failed to get anywhere near his reasonably competent musical standards. But that’s actually what makes actors’ albums so attractive to me.

A great example is the Joe Pesci album, weirdly recorded under the pseudonym of Joe Ritchie. The album is called Little Joe Sure Can Sing – and of course he really can’t at all. He sings like so many of these actor types, just as he talks, in a singy-talking kinda way – imagine the Italian-American gangster character Pesci nearly always plays singing ‘Fixing A Hole’ from the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper album and the unpleasant musical picture will begin to unfold before you.

Read on in SHOOK 008…