BillF

Norma Jean Marilyn Manson Charles Manson

Piano duo by David Newton and Rob Van Bavel at Malcolm Frazer's house this evening.

Foxy Lady Roxy Music Doxy

Ginny Brown-Waite Lady Heavy Bottom Arsène Wenger

Brothers and Other Mothers Frère Jacques Hattie Jacques

Argonauts Cosmonauts Naughty Lady of Shady Lane

Ivan Earring Georges Hearing Ronnies Cott

Sonny Cox Otto Dix Katy Wix

Gary Powers U2

http://web.archive.org/web/20070313031809/http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=298513

It was well know that the eccentric and penny-pinching Christina Foyle severely restricted the number of staff who had access to cash. Hence the queueing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foyles

Dr Watson Dr Watsisname Dr Oojah

Jim Morrison Morrisey

Muddy Waters Creedence Clearwater Revival Brian Spring

Know what you mean. My trips to visit students on work placements in London always ended up in Tower Records!

Yes, I used to go to Wellard's when my wife-to-be was a student at nearby Goldsmith's College. I remember buying a used copy of Quincy Jones's "This Is How I Feel About Jazz" in dreadful condition. "Just put a shilling in the blind box," came the instruction when I presented it for purchase.

Re Cold War thriller: Le Carré's Circus was of course located above Cambridge Circus, though I never heard of any of the spooks dropping out for a couple of Blue Notes.

Dobell's didn't have an upstairs. Must have been somewhere else. The main store (new discs) was at street level, with Doug Dobell's office at the back of the shop. John Kendal's used record section was downstairs in the basement. Dobell's was in an elderly block (now demolished and replaced) on the west side of Charing Cross Road south of Cambridge Circus known as "The Buildings". The ultimate in cool was to have a cold water pad in the Buildings (a horn the only possession) "within the sound of Dobell's". (The true mark of a Londoner (Cockney) was that s/he was born "within the sound of Bow Bells", Bow Church being in London's East End.) Charing Cross Road below the Circus. Yes, that's it in BBS's photo.

Tony Wilson Wilson Pickett Harold Wislon

Sean Penn The Ink Spots Blott

The picture in the blog is of Dobell's in its short-lived final resting place in Covent Garden which, as I've reported above, I visited only once. A misleading and unrepresentative picture for a blog about Dobell's, I'd say. The picture you've posted is of the Dobell's I knew from the fifties till the eighties. Certainly looked like that in its heyday in the jazz boom of the late fifties and early sixties.

Lydia Box Brian Close Eddie Locke

Lord Copper Fred Iron Milt Gold

I first shopped in Dobell's in 1957 when I was a 17-year-old schoolboy. 78s were still prominent in the stock at that time and I was chased out of the listening booth for taking too long to decide between half a dozen piano boogie 78s. I came out with Meade Lux Lewis's "Honky Tonk Train Blues" and Pinetop Smith's "Pinetop's Boogie Woogie", so I must have made a good choice! My last visit was about 30 years later to their final premises in Covent Garden - I could never find it again on subsequent intended visits! - and I came out with a Japanese LP re-issue of Herb Ellis's Nothing But the Blues. I still have many vinyl albums with Dobell's price tags - some of them in £sd! I knew Johnny Kendal quite well. He was always an agreeable bloke - he wouldn't have chased me out of the booth as a kid, as the hatchet men upstairs had done. His basement was very damp though. Second-hand albums bought there are nowadays even pongier than my other old LPs! I never managed to catch any of the jazz greats in the shop, though I once heard that in the previous week Roland Kirk had blocked the (very small) store by gathering an audience as he leaned on the counter and demanded to hear record after record by Fats Waller.

Yes, I guess there's some resemblance between those two tunes. Never noticed it before. Although your CD also includes "DJD", it's from 1958, 12 years later than the original, by which time the bop fire had cooled greatly. Fierce soloing by Phil Woods helps keep the date alive though and Gerry's arranging is always a joy to hear, at least to my ears.