PLEDGE WEEK: “I’m Henry VIII I Am” by Herman’s Hermits

Hello, this episode is part of Pledge Week 2022.

Every day this week, I'll be posting old Patreon bonus episodes of the podcast, which will have this short intro.

These are short, 10-20 minute bonus podcasts, which get posted to Patreon for my paying backers every time I post a new main episode.

There are well over a hundred of these in the archive now.

If you like the sound of these episodes, then go to patreon.com slash Andrew Hickey and subscribe for as little as a dollar a month or $10 a year to get access to all those bonus episodes, plus new ones as they appear.

Today's backer-only episode is an extra long one.

It runs runs about as long as some of the shorter main episodes, but it also might end up containing material that gets repeated in the main podcast at some point, because a lot of British rock and pop music gets called, often very incorrectly, music hall, and so the subject of the music halls is one that may well have to be explained in a future episode.

But today we're going to look at one of the very few pop hits of the 60s that is incontrovertibly based in the music hall tradition.

Herman's Hermits singing, I'm Henry VIII, I am.

I'm Henry VIII, I am, Henry VIII, I am.

I am.

I got married to the widow next door.

She's been married seven times before, and everyone was an Enerine.

She wouldn't have a willy or a Sam.

Second verse, same as The term music hall is one that has been widely misused over the years.

People talk about it as being a genre of music, when it's anything but.

Rather, the music hall, which is the British equivalent of the American vaudeville, was the most popular form of entertainment, first under that name and then under the name variety, for more than a century, only losing its popularity when TV and rock'n'roll between them destroyed the market for it.

Even then, TV variety shows rooted in the music hall continued, explicitly until the 1980s with the good old days, and implicitly until the mid-1990s.

As you might imagine, for a form of entertainment that lasted over a hundred years, there's no such thing as music hall music as a singular thing, any more than there exists a radio music over a television music.

Many music hall acts were non-musical performers, comedians, magicians, acrobats, and so forth.

But among those who did perform music, there were all sorts of different styles included, from folk song to light opera, to ragtime, and especially minstrel songs.

The songs of Stephen Foster were among the very first transatlantic hits.

We obviously don't have any records from the first few decades of the music hall, but we do have sheet music, and we know that the first big British hit song was Champagne Charlie, originally performed by George Leighbourne, and here performed by Derek B.

Scott, a professor of critical musicology at the University of Leeds.

Good for any game at night, boys who'll come and join me in a scream.

If you've ever heard the phrase, the devil has all the best tunes, that song is why.

William Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army, set new lyrics to it and made it into a hymn.

And when asked why, he replied, why should the devil have all the good tunes?

The phrase had been used earlier.

but it was Booth who popularised it.

Champagne Charlie also has rather morbid associations, because it was sung by the crowd at the last public execution in Britain, so it often gets used in horror and mystery films set in Victorian London.

So chances are if you recognise the song, it's because you've heard it in a film about Jack the Ripper or Jekyll and Hyde.

But the Music Hall, like all popular entertainment, demanded a whole stream of new material.

The British Timpan Alley publishers and songwriters who wrote much of the early British rock and roll we've looked at started out in Music Hall, and almost every British popular song up until the rise of jazz, and most after that until the fifties, was performed in the music halls.

We do have recordings from the later part of the music hall era, of course, and they show what a wide variety of music was performed there, from pitch-black comedy songs like murders by George Grossmith, the son of the co-writer of Diaria Vanobody.

The first about my laundress, who has left this world a sprite,

if you'll listen, I will tell you how she came to lose her life.

I murdered her last Tuesday, for I thought it would be best.

And never, never more will she tear buttons from my vest.

And now I'll get my Sunday shirt and collars in one piece.

For I murdered her last few days

to a passable relief

to sing-along numbers like Waiting at the Church by Vesta Victoria.

There was I waiting at the church,

waiting at the church, waiting at the church.

When I found that he left me in the lurch, Lord always did upset me.

All at once, he sent me round a note.

Here's the very note.

This is what he wrote.

Can't get away to marry you today.

My wife won't let me

and one of the most recorded music hall performers, Harry Champion, a London performer who sang very wordy songs at a fast tempo, usually with a hornpipe rhythm and often about food, like a little bit of cucumber, or his most famous song, Boiled Beef and carrots

that they put you they thought of right they thought of safer a little bit of old got row i take the brand of the old soft and i tell you what to make me grow

boiled beef and carrots boiled beef and carrots that's the stuff we'd all be dealt with

well don't live like this dairy and from them they did the ferret no words you can't for more relying on boiled

But one that wasn't about food and was taken a bit slower than his normal patter style was I'm Henry VIII I am.

I am

I got married to the widow next door

She'd been married seven times

Everyone was a Henery.

She wouldn't ever win the or a sam.

I'm ace old man, name's Henery.

Henery, the ace sire.

Incidentally, the song as written on the sheet music has Henery rather than Henry, and most people sing it Henery.

But the actual record by Champion uses Henry on the label, as does the Hermit's version, so that's what I'm going with.

Fifty years after Champion, the song was recorded by Joe Brown.

We've talked about Brown before in the main podcast, but for those of you who don't remember, he's one of the best British rock and roll musicians of the 50s and still performing today, and he has a real love of pre-war pop songs, and he would perform them regularly with his band, The Brothers.

Those of you who've heard the Beatles performing Sheikah Veraby on their Deco audition, they're copying Brown's version of that song.

George Harrison was a big fan of Brown.

Brown's version of I'm Henry VIII, I Am gave it a rock and roll beat and dropped the verse, leaving only the refrain.

She wouldn't have a willy of a slam.

Enter Herman's Hermits four years later.

In 1964, Herman's Hermits, a beat group from Manchester led by singer Peter Noon, had signed on with Mickey Most and had a UK number one with I'm Into Something Good, a Goffin and King song originally written for Earl Jean of the Cookies.

Tells me I'm into something She's the kind of girl who's not too shy,

That would be their only UK number one, though they'd have several more top 10 hits over here.

It only made number 13 in the US, but their second US single, not released as a single over here, Can't You Hear My Heartbeat, went to number two in the States.

From that point on, the group's career would diverge enormously between the US and the UK.

Half their US hits were never released as singles in the UK, and vice versa.

Several records, like their cover version of Sam Cook's Wonderful World, were released in both countries, but in general, they went in two very different directions.

In the UK, they tended to release fairly normal beat group records like No Milk Today, written by Graham Gouldman, who was also writing hits for the Yardbirds and the Hollies.

That only charted in the US when it was later released as a B-side.

Meanwhile, in the US, they pursued a very different strategy.

Since the British invasion was a thing, and so many British bands were doing well in the States, partly because of the sheer novelty of them being British, Hermann's Hermits based their career on appealing to American anglophiles.

This next statement might be a little controversial, even offensive to some listeners, so I apologise, but it's the truth.

There is a large contingent of people in America who genuinely believe that they love Britain and British things, but who have no actual idea what British culture is actually like.

They like a version of Britain that has been constructed entirely from pop culture aimed at an American market, and have a staggeringly skewed version of what Britain is actually like.

One that is at best misguided and at worst made up of extremely offensive stereotypes.

People who think they know all about the UK because they've spent a week going round a handful of tourist traps in central London and they've watched every David Tennant episode of Doctor Who.

Please note that I am not here engaging in reflex anti-Americanism, as so many British people do on this topic, because I know very well that there is an equally wrong kind of British person who worships a fictional America which has nothing to do with the real country, as any American who has come over to the UK and seen cans of hot dog sausages in brown with American style and an American flag on the label will shudderingly attest.

Fetishising of a country not one's own exists in every culture and about every culture, whether it's American weebs who think they know about Japan or British communists who were insistent that the Soviet Union under Stalin was a utopia.

For their US-only singles, most of which were massive hits, Hermann's Hermits played directly to that audience.

The group's first single single in this style was Mrs.

Brown, You've Got a Lovely Daughter, written by the actor Trevor Peacock, now best known for playing Jim in the Vicar of Dibley, but at the time best known as a songwriter for groups like the Vernon's Girls and for writing linking material for 6'5 Special and Oh Boy.

That song was written for a TV play and originally performed by the actor Tom Courtney.

got a lovely daughter

Girls as sharp as her are something rare

But it's sad

she doesn't love me now

She's mighty clear enough, oh now it's rough but there

She wants to return the things I've over

The Hermits copied Courtney's record closely, down to noon imitating Courtney's vocals.

Mrs.

Brown, you've got a lovely daughter.

Girls as sharp as her or something rare.

But it's sad,

she doesn't love me now.

She's made it clear enough,

That became their first US number one, and the group went all in on appealing to that particular market.

Noon started singing, not in the pseudo-American style that, say, Mick Jagger sings in, and Early 60s Jagger is a perfect example of the British equivalent of those American anglophiles, loving but not understanding black America.

and not in his own Manchester accent, but in a faked Cockney accent, doing what is essentially a bad impersonation of Anthony Newley.

Davy Jones, who, like Noon, was a Mancunian who had started his career in the Manchester set soap opera Coronation Street, was also doing the same thing at the same time, in his performances as the artful Dodger in the Broadway version of Oliver.

We'll talk more about Jones in future episodes of the main podcast, but he, like Noon, was someone who was taking aim at this market.

Noon's faked accent varied a lot, sometimes from syllable to syllable, and on records like Mrs.

Brown You've Got a Lovely Daughter, and the Hermit's version of the old George Formby song Leaning on a Lamppost, he sounds far more northern than on other songs, fitting into a continuum of Lancashire novelty performers that stretched at least from Thornby's father, George Formby Sr., all the way to Frank Sidebottom.

But on the Hermit's version of I'm Henry VIII I Am, Noon is definitely trying to sound as London as he can, and he and the group copy Joe Brown's arrangement.

She wouldn't have a willy or a sound.

I'm Anna Reen, Henri the Eighth, I am.

That also became an American number one, and Hermann's Hermits had truly found their niche.

They spent the next three years making an odd mixture of catchy pop songs by writers like Graeme Goldman or P.F.

Sloan, which became UK hits, and the very different type of music typified by I'm Henry VIII I Am.

Eventually though, musical styles changed, and the group stopped having hits in either country.

Peter Noon left the group in 1971, and they made some unsuccessful records without him before going on to the nostalgia circuit.

Noon's solo career started relatively successfully, with a version of David Bowie's Oh You Pretty Things, backed by Bowie and the Spiders from Mars.

That made the top twenty in the UK, but Noon had no further solo success.

These days there are two touring versions of Herman's Hermits.

In the US, Noon has toured as Herman's Hermits featuring Peter Noon, with no other original members, since the 1980s.

Drummer Barry Whitwam and lead guitarist Derek Leckenby kept the group going in the rest of the world until Leckenby's death in 1994.

Since then, Whitwam has toured as Herman's Hermits, without any other original members.

Herman's Hermits may not have the respect that some of their peers had, but they had incredible commercial success at their height, made some catchy pop records, and became the first English group to realise there was a specific audience of Anglophiles in the US that they could market to.

Without that, much of the subsequent history of music might have been very different.