Lloyd Shakespeare, a trumpet virtuoso, was born on 6 June 1895 in Leytonstone, London. He led his own bands during the twenties, recording for the Edison Bell Winner, Parlophone and Piccadilly labels and became a top session and side man with many of the great bands of the 30's, under amongst others, Lew Stone, Arthur Lally, Jack Harris, Sydney Lipton, Ronnie Munro, and Cecil Norman. He died in 1963.
Irish bagpipes, fiddle, flute, and cello. Beltona label. The lineup here is William Andrews, pipes, James Cawley, flute, and Frank O'Higgins, fiddle, backed by the cello (name unknown), which along with Andrews's chugging on his regulators gives a quite unique sound. Cawley and O'Higgins also recorded with piper James Ennis in the Fingal Trio, one recording of which is on this site. A 78 of Andrews is featured here as well. Andrews and Ennis both learned from the same old piper, Nicholas Markey, but developed somewhat different styles.
Controversially, he supported the German occupation in France during the Second World War (he played in Nazi-sponsored concerts, for example), serving as High Commissioner of the Fine Arts for the Vichy regime[1], and befriending Hitler's friend, architect, and (after 1942) Minister of Armaments and War Production Albert Speer[citation needed]. His Vichy connections, in particular, led to him being declared persona non grata after the Liberation. The motives for his wartime activities have been disputed; they may have arisen from nothing more than his lifelong championship of Teutonic musical culture. Moreover his wife, Clothilde Breal, daughter of the linguist, Michel Breal, was of Jewish origin and Clothilde Breal's cousin, Lise Bloch, was married to Léon Blum, the first Jew to become President du Conseil or Prime Minister in France. Cortot and the Blums maintained a close friendship. At any rate, he was banned from performing publicly for a year and his public image in France suffered greatly (though he continued to be well received as a recitalist in other countries, notably Italy and England).
For more than 30 years the Shortwave radio spectrum has been used by the worlds intelligence agencies to transmit secret messages. These messages are transmitted by hundreds of Numbers Stations.
Shortwave Numbers Stations are a perfect method of anonymous, one way communication. Spies located anywhere in the world can be communicated to by their masters via small, locally available, and unmodified Shortwave receivers. The encryption system used by Numbers Stations, known as a one time pad is unbreakable. Combine this with the fact that it is almost impossible to track down the message recipients once they are inserted into the enemy country, it becomes clear just how powerful the Numbers Station system is.
These stations use very rigid schedules, and transmit in many different languages, employing male and female voices repeating strings of numbers or phonetic letters day and night, all year round.
The voices are of varying pitches and intonation; there is even a German station (The Swedish Rhapsody) that transmits a female child's voice!
One might think that these espionage activities should have wound down considerably since the official end of the cold war, but nothing could be further from the truth. Numbers Stations (and by inference, spies) are as busy as ever, with many new and bizarre stations appearing since the fall of the Berlin wall.
Why is it that in over 30 years, the phenomenon of Numbers Stations has gone almost totally unreported? What are the agencies behind the Numbers Stations, and why are the eastern European stations still on the air? Why does the Czech republic operate a Numbers Station 24 hours a day? How is it that Numbers Stations are allowed to interfere with essential radio services like air traffic control and shipping without having to answer to anybody? Why does the Swedish Rhapsody Numbers Station use a small girls voice?
These are just some of the questions that remain unanswered.
Budapest police have branded the song "Gloomy Sunday" public menace No. 1 and have asked all musicians and orchestras to cooperate in supressing it, dispatches said today.
To its gloomy strains, the police attribute 18 suicides. It was the 18th suicide -- which moved police to action -- when Joseph Keller, a shoemaker, killed himself and in a note to police asked them to put on his grave 100 of the roses mentioned in the song.
Men, women and children are among the victims. Two people shot themselves while gypsies played the melancholy notes on violins. Some killed themselves while listeninig to it on gramophone records in their homes. Two housemaids cut their employers' linens and paintings and then killed themselves after hearing the song drifting up into the servant's hall from dinner parties.
At a time when sale or possession of records with the f-word and other indiscretions could get you arrested, I made records that were just risque enough to be slightly scandalous to Middle Americans, yet discreet enough to be acceptable to at least some mainstream record stores.
I did have some regional success as a pop crooner in the 1920s. In the late 1930s I collaborated with several established Tin Pan Alley songwriters. With Henry Tobias and Moe Jaffe I turned out one song that eventually became a semi-standard, "If I Had My Life To Live Over."
"It wasn't long before Squee Gee and his idiotic theme song solidly possessed all the chambers of my fragile, unblemished coconut. Allegedly flitting about like a careless ne'er do-well, the enigmatic Squee Gee was ascribed the ability to make each day a holiday and I wasn't the doubting type. Squee Gee had his line of jive down tight and who was I to question his upside-down pinwheeled logic? They were starting early--these messianic Manson wannabes in their clown whites and ice cream cone hats. I inspected the grooves of the record and spun it incessantly. That's when I knew that I would either have to kill Squee Gee or be Squee Gee."
