Sing Song Girl of Old Shanghai

Before reading this post – a warning – if you listen to this song I’ll bet you can’t get it out of your head for the rest of the week.

Arsing around aimlessly on You Tube the other day I came across this marvellous old 78 of the popular ‘Oriental Foxtrot’ Sing Song Girl of Old Shanghai from 1928 recorded in London by the (at the time) much respected Herman Darewski and His Covent Garden Dance Band. Cavan O’Connor is the vocalist;  Darewski (1883-1947) was a White Russian who made his way to England, became well known in, of all places, the seaside resort of Bridlington and then moved to London and became a bandleader.

Cavan O’Connor (below), by the way, was a bit of a Robbie Williams of his day – a smooth heart-breaker the ladies loved. A hero in World War One, he always wore a smart white suit and would wander onto the stage to sing his numbers and then wander back of again. He often sang with an Irish lilt that just drove the ladies to even greater heights of adoration. Even though he started out singing in the pubs he managed to get accepted to the Royal Academy of Music to study musical notation. There’s a full obituary of O’ Connor’s ‘Wandering Vagabond’ life here.

Sing Song Girl of Old Shanghai was a very popular tune in the late 1920s when the vogue for Oriental Foxtrots was running high in London (and in Shanghai too for that matter – nowhere loves a bit of Orientalism more than the Orient after all). Here is a slightly posher version from Jack Payne and the BBC Orchestra. Like Darewski, Payne (below) was a popular bandleader in London having started out touring around the fronts of the First World War to entertain the troops. After the war he had a longstanding engagement at London’s Hotel Cecil before becoming the BBC’s Director of Dance Music (rather alarmingly this job would now presumably be filled by someone with a large collection of hip-hop records!).

It’s rather marvellous to think that people all over Britain sat down for a cup of tea and a scone on a cold evening in 1928, turned on the wireless to Jack Payne and the BBC band, and tapped their stockinged feet to Sing Song Girl of Old Shanghai.

It’s also worth thinking about the fact that in 1928 the term ‘old Shanghai’ was already being used – more on that another time I think.