twentysongs: The Top 20 Best Hit Songs Of 1956! No.3!

Tuesday, January 10, 2012

The Top 20 Best Hit Songs Of 1956! No.3!

The Number Three song in The OzHitztory Blog’s Top 20 Best Hit Songs Of 1956 is…

Les Baxter and “The Poor People Of Paris!”

I think it’s time to get a bit cultural, don’t you?

As mentioned for our No.18 song, “The 1950s were a dreamy instrumental kind of decade. Dreamy instrumentals that pretended to be travel brochures from exotic lands across the sea… Europe. Asia. Africa.”

And Les Baxter was the undisputed king of this stuff. His albums – given such exciting B-grade movie titles as “Ritual Of The Savage”, “Tamboo!” and the rather sexual “Ports Of Pleasure” - traversed those corners of the Earth where you wouldn’t be surprised to find that you are drinking out of Dr Livingstone’s skull.

On two of his albums, he even travelled through space!

But nothing he did ever was ever quite as delightful, or managed to cram in so many ideas into far less than 3.20 seconds, than this tribute to the city of love. Whether whistling Casanovas, or mademoiselles skipping along the Seine with a baguette under their arm, there’s always something happening in “The People Of Paris”. Even a choir of ghosts turn up at one stage to sing “la la la”.

All of which makes “The Poor People Of Paris” the most delightfully quirky Number One of 1956.

Meanwhile in Britain, bless their cotton socks, they decided that they preferred this version, and sent this to Number One instead. Which just goes to show just how addictive that little tune is!