Byas’d Opinion

There’s little I can say about the life of Humphrey Lyttleton which hasn’t already been said better elsewhere. All I can add is that my father owned several Humph EPs from the British trad boom of the late 50s and early 60s, and these were some of the first jazz I ever heard. Even as a small child I liked the noise they made, so Humph was probably at least partly responsible for me becoming interested in this music. Thank you, Mr Lyttleton!

And how exactly did he get away with some of the “Samantha” double entendres on “I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue”?

As ever, Samantha spent some hours down in the gramophone archive selecting the team’s discs. You know, she puts in a lot of hard work on this round and she gets a bit fed up with silly comments about the way she ‘checks the teams’ 7 inchers’ or ‘pulls out my reproduction equipment and twists my knob’. Samantha tells me she tries to take no notice of these pathetic, puerile critics, but it isn’t always easy to ignore her knockers.

More of the same at http://www.ivorysky.com/isihac/index.php

Here are some proper obituaries of him:

• Alison Kerr in the Herald
• George Melly in the Guardian. Hang on, isn’t he dead himself?
• Jim Denham’s Shiraz Socialist blog
• Steve Voce in the Independent

And here’s the man in action on YouTube: Bad Penny Blues