13th June 2020 - Statues, Shut-Downs and Salford

Thought for the day :"Fell off a 30ft ladder today..... good thing I was on the bottom step."

LINK JOHNS HOPKINS
Office of National Statistics

I am just staggered by this ... Love it ... One Voice Children's Choir..

We’ll raise a glass tonight to David Spencer from Ynysddu, better known as Ricky Valance.

Valance, who was born David Spencer, became the first Welshman to have a solo UK Number One hit with the song Tell Laura I Love Her in 1960.

The singer was born in Ynysddu, now in Caerphilly county, and joined the RAF aged 17 before going into the music business.

His agent said he had been in ill health for several months before his death.

Valance was lead soprano in his local church choir as a child, before joining the air force, where he saw active service in north Africa before returning three years later.

It was then he started performing in clubs in the north of England, before being signed and recording Tell Laura I Love Her.

The song tells the tragic story of a boy called Tommy and his love for a girl called Laura.

It was controversial at the time and reportedly banned from airplay by the BBC, but went on to be a number one single, selling more than a million copies.

It spend 16 weeks in the chart, three of those at number one, but only two future singles reached the UK top 50.

In 2015, he was given an award at a St David's Day concert at the Wales Millennium Centre for being the first Welshman to have a UK Number One hit.

In 2017, he released a final single, called Welcome Home, to raise money for the Royal Air Force Museum and RAF Association.

In other news

And that is my politics for the day ... except for protecting statues of course..
I enjoyed these...

And so we come around to music once again ....

But from the Shut-Down we get to number 52 - Dirty Old Town...

Enjoyed the arrangement for this ...
This song was written about Salford, an industrial center in the heart of Lancashire, England that predates the Industrial Revolution. Today it is a metropolitan borough within Greater Manchester.

Songwriter Ewan MacColl was born in Salford and wrote this song in 1949 about his impressions of the city while growing up. Industrial cities are by and large very dirty places, with factories spewing smoke into the skies and production waste into the rivers. They also invite trains and other modes of transportation to ship goods around the world, each bringing its own brands of pollution into an already choking place.

Cheers !