The tiny island nation of Curaçao hit the headlines on the sports pages last week when it became smallest country by population ever to qualify for the football World Cup finals.
I thought this was the ideal opportunity to share some of the highlights of my extensive collection of Curaçaoan music, and perhaps entice one of the country's roughly 158,000 residents to visit the blog so my flag counter can add Curaçao to the list of countries from which we've had a visitor.
First up is the great Rignald Recordino, better known as Doble R who with his Super Special Stars bestrode the Curaçaoan music scene like a colossus for many years. This particular track is from their 1978 album "Di Paranda!?".
We are then joined by Anselmus 'Boy' Dap, multiple winner of the 'Rei di Tumba' title at the annual carnival (tumba is a local musical style that is loosely based on merengue). His album "Mi T'ei" originally came out in 1989 to the best of my knowledge and was reissued last year.
You can find both albums along with many other delights at the Groove Fusion Records Bandcamp page.
Of course the Curaçao team were not the only plucky underdogs that qualified for the finals with a famous victory last week. Congratulations to them both. All together now: "Ring a ding a ding there goes Willie on the wing".
Ladies and gentlemen, we have a winner! Topping the inaugural Pun Fun chart is...
KHAYEM with 'The Boy With Willie Thorne In His Side'.
Khayem professed to be over the moon when informed of the result. Asked to describe the secret of his success, he said: "I just closed my eyes, hit send, and the next thing I knew it was in the back of the net".
Khayem is being too modest. By choosing a pun about a 1980s snooker player he cleverly targeted a key demographic here at 27 Leggies, as is shown in this detailed breakdown of where his votes came from:
British men old enough to remember the 1980s - 88%
Absolutely everybody else in the whole world - 12%
Here is the top five. I'm not sharing the full results as we're not here to name and shame, but I can reveal that everyone avoided the dreaded 'nul points'.
'The Boy With Willie Thorne In His Side' - The Smiths (Khayem)
'Sgt Pepper's Lonely Darts Club Band' - The Beatles (Alyson)
'Can't Stand Luge-ing You' - The Police (John M)
'Satan Rejected My Goal' - Morrissey (Rol)
'Croquet Fred' - Errol Dunkley (Ernie)
We have had a request from one competitor to be given the opportunity to share some of the other puns they thought of but did not submit due to being limited to one entry. If it spares long-suffering loved ones from having to smile politely while listening to them all that is fine by me, so feel free to fill up the comments section with as many as you want. I'll get the ball rolling: 'Karate Fears Two' by The Associates.
Many thanks to everyone who sent in an entry, and thanks also to those of you who did not but found time to vote. Hopefully some of the latter group will be sufficiently enthused to enter in future.
There will be another opportunity soon. We'll be back with a new theme this time next week so we can get one in before we are hit by the full force of the festive season. If that goes well we will resume in January.
Until then, we'll hand over to Khayem and the rest of LT United for their victory celebrations. He's the one second from right. And let's also hear it for the song and sportsman that combined to deliver him his victory. For those of you not familiar with him, Willie is the bald one.
Public Service Announcement: If you wish to vote on the best sporting pun in a song title but have not yet done so, the deadline is tomorrow (Saturday November 22). Details of who you can vote for and how to do it can be found here.
We now return to our scheduled broadcast.
Earlier in the week I went to an exhibition called 'Children Of Albion' by Ben Edge at the Fitzrovia Chapel, which as the name suggests is located in London's fashionable Fitzrovia. It runs until 26 November and if you get a chance to visit I would heartily recommend doing so. I have loads more photos on Flickr which I hope might tempt you to go.
Actually it is worth popping in to the chapel if you are in the area even when there aren't any exhibitions on. Apparently inspired by Byzantine architecture its charms could not be described as understated. Here's a bit of the ceiling:
The exhibition itself draws on the traditional stories and rituals of the British Isles and William Blake's vision of Albion, the ancient spirit of Britain that is currently asleep but can be reawakened through AI the power of art and imagination.
The centrepiece is the painting that gives the exhibition its name which brilliantly weaves together all sorts of references ancient, modern and in between, but I enjoyed all the paintings. A particular favourite was 'The Dorset Ooser' which features artefacts and activities from the part of Dorset in which I used to live - the eponymous mask from Melbury Osmond, the Cerne Abbas Giant and the now banned tradition of Teddy Rowe's Band from Sherborne.
The painting in the final photo is called 'John Barleycorn Must Die', which prompted me to dig out Traffic's excellent album of the same name when I got home. Here's a couple of tracks from that and two other decent versions of the song.
Some of you may occasionally have wondered about the identity the handsome gentleman at the top right of the page. Some of you may have not. I'm going to tell you anyway. Its Penny Penny.
When I started this blog way back in 2009 I had a mission to bring Tsonga Disco music to the masses. Tsonga Disco was a contemporary take on the traditional music of the Tsonga or Shangaan people who can be found mostly in the Limpopo Province in the north east of South Africa and in southern Mozambique.
Between the mid 1990s and mid 2000s Penny Penny (Papa Penny to his many fans) was the undisputed king of Tsonga Disco but by the time I started featuring his music here he had largely given up on recording and was spending most of his time in local politics, helping to improve living conditions and infrastructure in his home town of Giyani.
In the mid 2010s my old pal Mr. Awesome Tapes From Africa reissued a couple of his albums from the 1990s to moderate acclaim. This seemed to prompt Papa Penny to revive his showbiz career. He turned up as a celebrity judge on a TV talent show, launched his own reality series and in 2019 started releasing new albums after a gap of ten years. His most recent album is "Sesi Va Rosie" which came out in 2023 and we have a couple of selections for you.
He hasn't given up the politics though. Quite the opposite. Last year he became an MP representing the main opposition party in the national parliament. His performance as a politician has not received the same universal praise given to his musical performances. But I say no to the naysayers and all power to Papa Polymath!
We finish off with a couple of videos featuring Papa Penny's hit "Milandu Bhe" - first the original from 1994 and then a remake from a couple of years ago with current pop sensation and follow Tsonga star Makhadzi. Her brand new album is the similarly titled "Sesi Ka Rose". Coincidence? I think not.
Ladies and gentlemen, its the moment that you've all been waiting for. Voting is now open in the inaugural Pun Fun competition.
Readers were challenged to come up with a sports related pun in a song title. Ten brave souls did so, to whom many thanks. I added in one of my own to turn it up to 11 in Spinal Tap style.
Voting is open to anyone not just those of you who entered (but if you did enter please don't vote for yourself - you won't be given any points if you do). Even the bots from Singapore are free to join in as long as they don't spoil their ballots by demanding puns about dragon boat racing.
Let me know your top three in order of preference. I will then award 5 points for your first choice, 3 for second and 1 for third and we will see where we end up.
You can either submit your votes in the comments section or email them to leggies27@hotmail.co.uk if you prefer to preserve the sanctity of the secret ballot. The deadline is next Saturday (22 November) and we'll announce the results a week today.
Here are the contenders, listed alphabetically by artist.
'Walk Like A Wrestling Man' - The Bangles
'Maiden Heaven' - Be Bop Deluxe
'Lacrosse The Universe' - The Beatles
'Sgt Pepper's Lonely Darts Club Band' - The Beatles
'Scrum Love' - Bob Marler & The Wailers
'Clubthumping' - Chumbawumba
'Croquet Fred' - Errol Dunkley
'Satan Rejected My Goal' - Morrissey
'Can't Stand Luge-ing You' - The Police
'The Boy With Willie Thorne In His Side' - The Smiths
'I Kabaddi Anything But My Love' - The Stylistics
Good luck everyone. Dillinger, the disguised Duran Duran and I all have our fingers crossed that you will do well.
Public Service Announcement: If any of you are thinking of entering the exciting competition to come up with the best sporting pun in a song title but have not yet done so, the deadline is tomorrow. Details of what to do and how to do it can be found here.
We now return to our scheduled broadcast.
Its stop #9 on our tour of the Americas and the start of what might be a tricky stretch. No disrespect intended to the many fine musicians in the E-H countries of Latin America but I have struggled to accumulate the same quantity of music that I did on previous tours and earlier and later stops on this one. That said, there are still lots of goodies as this visit to Ecuador will hopefully demonstrate.
Ecuador is one of those countries that I know less about than I probably should - the Galapagos, the Andes, Quito, Cuenca, the fact that Panama stole the credit for the straw hat that originated in Ecuador, and that is about it. But after reading about it for this post I have added it to my list of places to try to visit. It sounds interesting and varied, to use the travel guide cliche.
Interesting and varied can also be used to describe the music of Polibio Mayorga who with his trusty moog bestrode the local music scene like a colossus back in the 1960s and 1970s. As Wikipedia notes: "at one point Mayorga was so dominant in the Ecuadorian music charts that he started releasing music under pseudonyms, to give the illusion of variety".
Today's track is attributed to one such pseudonym, Ángel Y Su Banda, and comes from 'their' only album, "Te Invito A Mi Casa". That album isn't on Bandcamp but lots of his records are. The Analog Africa compilation "Ecuatoriana - El Universo Paralelo de Polibio Mayorga" would be a good place to start.
Another compilation you might want to check out is "Juyungo" which puts the spotlight on the Afro-Indigenous culture of the province of Esmeraldas. I was going to make a clever remark contrasting the beauty of Esmeraldas with the Quasimodo that is Quito, but it would be neither fair nor funny so I won't. Instead I'll just direct you to Papá Roncón.
If those two compilations whet your appetite then why not head over to Musicoteca Ecuador's page and admire their back catalogue. There are one minute extracts from 7" singles there which cost US $45 to post to the UK - I declined - but there some albums available for download as well. One such is "El Diablo Ocioso" by Diabluma's Brass Band. I kept it simple and went with the title track.
Bandcamp won't help you with Boddega, an ever so slightly psychedelic ensemble that came ambling out of Guayaquil in 1971 and hung around until the end of the decade. The selected track comes from an EP they released in 1974. I have no idea how it got to me from there.
Also mildly psychedelic but much more modern is the track by H.O. & Los Bicivoladores, who was extremely prodigious between 2012 and 2020 - putting out nearly 40 releases in eight years - before seemingly finding something better to do with his time. This is a cover version of a song by Chilean folk singer Pedro Messone and you can find it on his self-explanatory album "Covers".
Next up we have Maria Usbeck, a singer-songwriter who is originally from Quito but is now living in Brooklyn. She started her career as the lead singer of the goth-lite Selebrities before going solo in 2014. This track is from her debut album "Amparo", her latest came out in April.
We're mixing old and new next with Paramo Cumbie who in 2019 gave us their dubbed up take on popular local music styles like bomba on the their EP "Magic Runa", and who can lead us seamlessly into this episode's MAR selection. That comes from Yuhuarsonicos and its taken from their 2011 album "Real".
Now on to the videos. In case Rol or any of his cancel culture crusaders read this I would like to make it clear that the first video is included despite not because of all the ladies wearing T-shirts with 'Sexy' written on the front. I felt that the presence of a hooded shirtless executioner in the TV studio justified its inclusion in the public interest.
So I went to a couple of gigs last week, one in a church and one on a boat. That's just the way it is these days.
The church is St. John on Bethnal Green, which is literally down the end of my road here in swinging London. I've seen some memorable gigs over the years by the likes of Lonnie Holley, Gwynifer Raymond and a large man in a little black dress intoning the words to "Boys" by Sabrina while accompanying himself on the cello.
This one was pretty memorable too. We were there to see RÓIS, an Irish musician who caused a bit of a stir last year with their album "MO LÉAN" which combined traditional keening songs with electronics and a helping hand from Lankum producer John 'Spud' Murphy.
RÓIS arrived in their trademark black veil and matching outfit and performed some songs from the hit album and its predecessor "UISCE AGUS BEAN" (its all capitals I'm afraid), which I quite enjoyed.
After a while they left the stage while the support act Harry Hennessy and the drummer (both also veiled) filled in for a bit until RÓIS returned resplendent in red to express the fervent hope that we liked their new direction. I didn't. It consisted of some disco bangers, a couple of drippy MOR duets with Harry and a proggy power ballad. Despite that it was a fun night.
Not as much fun as Saturday though which was when I paid my first visit to Theatreship, a converted cargo ship moored near Canary Wharf. Its an excellent little venue and I will definitely be returning in the future.
The occasion was one of a series of shows billed as the 'Legendary Folk Instrument Series' in which living folkies prise instruments from the cold hands of dead folkies and play tunes on them. The instrument on this occasion was one of John Renbourn's guitars, built by Martin to his own specification.
We were treated to some fine finger-picking by Dariush Kanani, Daniel Burne and Jules Smith but that wasn't really why I was there. The main attraction for me was the chance to see the excellent Angeline Morrison live. She didn't disappoint.
Accompanied by Mr Kanani on the famed guitar, Ms Morrison treated us to a set of songs taken from the two mid 1960s albums by the African-American folk singer Dorris Henderson on which she was accompanied by John Renbourn. The two of them did Dorris and John justice.
Here's a track from RÓIS back when she was still clad in black not red, an original by Angeline Morrison that gives me a lump in the throat ever time I listen to it and a song from "Watch The Stars" that was probably the highlight of the set on Saturday.
Links stay up for a month or so. If you are an artist or copyright holder and want me to remove the link, or if you want to get in touch for any other reason, e-mail me on leggies27@hotmail.co.uk.
