MacArthur Park - Richard Harris

'Someone left the cake out in the rain' warbles dead Irish actor and karaoke King Arthur Richard Harris; holding a finger to his ear as he attempts to reach the right notes, but sounding like he's still being tortured by those Native American Red Indians in 'a Man Called Horse'.

Don't worry Richard, the cake in question was left out by cake diarist and pastry magnate Mr Kipling. He's testing the new water-resistant glaze on his improved recipe Cherry Bakewells.

Apart from being a fine film actor, Richard Harris also had a considerable tabloid reputation as a 'hellraiser', due to his manly drinking and 'bonding' sessions with contemporaries Peter O'Toole, Richard Burton, Oliver Reed, Reg Varney and Paul Gazza Gascoigne.

Donna Summer recorded a superior disco cover of Jimmy Webb's MacArthur Park, but it's a bit 'Fondant Fancy' when compared to Harris's more manly, more 'Bramley Apple Pie' version.

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Jack Palance - The Mighty Sparrow

You have to admire calypso singer the Mighty Sparrow. You have to admire someone who refers to himself in the third person as 'the Mighty Sparrow' and you have to admire this song in which the Sparrow observes that every woman in the nightclub is over 60 and looks like Jack Palance, the craggy-faced, suprisingly-not-dead star of film classics like Shane and City Slickers 2: the Legend of Curly's Gold.

Palance also starred in Cocaine Cowboys, one of my favourite bad rock movies, as a manager of a rock band who gets into a bad drug deal with mobsters or something.

Cocaine Cowboys also features Andy Warhol in a cameo every bit as stupifying as his appearence in Curiousity Killed the Cat's 'Misfit' video; a cameo that started a trend for collaborations between artists and lame white soul groups...

David Hockney's 1987 watercolour 'Portrait of Johnny Hates Jazz on a lawn' recently sold for $130,000 at Sotheby's.

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Manifesto & Book News

If it's ever been on K-Tel or Ronco, it's in. If it features hand claps, cow bells, syrupy orchestration, walls of sound, wrecking crews, sha-la-las, toothy teen idols, candy-based metaphors for carnal acts or lyrics about hugging, squeezing and rocking all night long, it's in.

Not exactly 'all that'



> Martin Lampen (latest book news, contact details and other stuff)

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