Obituary: Donald Swann | The Independent Obituary: Donald Swann Friday 25 March 1994 00:02 BST Click to follow The Independent Online Donald Ibrahim Swann, composer and entertainer: born Llanelli 30 September 1923; married 1955 Janet Oxborrow (two daughters; marriage dissolved 1983), 1993 Alison Smith; died London 23 March 1994. DONALD SWANN, composer of Youth of the Heart, a bestiary of ditties about armadilloes, gnus, rhinos and hippos as well as songs about gasmen, London buses, even honeysuckle and bindweed, will no longer be seen, bespectacled and touchingly manic, at the keyboard as he was before, after and during the world-wide fame of the various Drop of a Hat revues, with his bearded, wheelchair partner Michael Flanders.

Swann was born in 1923 at Llanelli in Wales, of a father who spoke English always with a strong Russian accent and a mother who came from Transcaspia, speaking very little English at all. Donald's great- grandfather was a draper rejoicing in the name of Alfred Trout Swan (the second 'n' comes and goes in the family like a Cheshire cat). He left Lincolnshire to settle in St Petersburg in 1840 and it was not until the Revolution that Donald's father decided to return to the land of his ancestors. Herbert was a doctor who had married a Muslim nurse called Naguime and brought her to England; he qualified again in the UK and by the time Donald's sister Marion was two Herbert was a glorified locum tenens in Wales. When Donald was three Herbert Swann bought a practice in the Walworth Road, Elephant and Castle, and there the two children grew up, Donald at first going to Dulwich College Preparatory School and then to Westminster School as a King's Scholar. The family was hard up and it was some time before a good upright piano was installed above the surgery at No 92.

Herbert and his brothers were all keen one-piano-four-hands duettists (a Russian speciality) and they had a large collection of the classics and the Russian repertoire which Donald and his family used to play; and myself, too, for I had become friends with Donald at the Prep during our last year there, 1935. By this time Naguime had died and English became the language of the household. Although Donald never spoke to me about his mother, I think he felt her loss very deeply; his sister was at school, his father was busy with his patients, and Ada, the wall-eyed daily, was handy with the macaroni but not motherly. Donald Swann was assiduous in the classroom but wild in the playground, pitting himself in the 'break' against a line of boys before collapsing into protracted fits of giggling. His table manners were grotesquely awful. At the annual hobbies exhibition he showed manuscripts of little piano pieces penned in his spidery, almost unreadable writing - alas, it got worse over the years. A letter from him took longer to read than it took him to write.

At this time Swann's musical interests were entirely classical with strong leanings towards Rachmaninov - he could give a nifty reading of the fearsome E flat minor Etude Tableau, opus 39, also of pieces by Scriabin (Donald's uncle Alfred had written the first biography of this composer in the English language) and Nicolai Medtner (with whom the family was on visiting terms in his Golders Green exile). Swann would occasionally regale me with details of life at Westminster: how the Scholars had been punished because at a rehearsal for the Coronation they had spoonerised the cry of 'Vivat Regina'; of playing tennis with a certain Ustinov; of a politically minded Tony Benn already distributing socialist leaflets; of the young Von Ribbentrop putting the weight; of beach games with Peter Brook, and of his lessons as an external student at the Royal College of Music, studying piano with Angus Morrison and composition with Hugo Anson. During his later years at school he had come into contact with a boy 18 months his senior, a budding actor called Michael Flanders.

After the Second World War started the boys were evacuated first to Lancing, in Sussex, and then to Exeter University, where Michael and Donald wrote a few funny songs together. The war took over before long. After a year at Oxford Swann had a tribunal, where he was registered as a conscientious objector; he joined the Friends Ambulance Unit (FAU) and slogged away with the Quakers, whose thinking he found congenial even though his duties included operating a mortuary trolley, digging latrines, cleaning out operating theatres and even shaving the pubic hairs of high-ranking military personnel. Then came service in Egypt, Palestine and Greece. Swann fell in love with Greece, the people, the language and, above all, the music, which entered his soul and left there for the rest of his life those quirky rhythms and exotic turns of decoration and melody.

One day, near the Albanian border, he flung his arms wide 'embracing the countryside around me which had been home to so many different races - Albanians, Greeks, Turks, Bulgars, Romanians, Vlachs - and exclaimed: 'What a beautiful thing it would be if this were all one country] Surely we are all one]' ' His remarks were taken down by a Greek soldier, he was branded as a corrupting influence and relieved of his post. He came home in 1946. Back at Oxford Swann added modern Greek to his Russian studies. Musically he had gone 'light' by now. He still listened, nostalgically perhaps, to pieces like Rachmaninov's Third Symphony, but a disastrous school performance of a Beethoven concerto, the early numbers with Flanders, and revues in the FAU had shown him the way his life was to go.

'Dreaming spires, my foot] I played the piano for Sandy Wilson's revues.' But for his songs he needed a writer, and fate saw to it that he met Michael Flanders again, the budding young actor now crippled by polio, stuck in a chair for life, denied his livelihood and even refused re-entry into his old college. At this stage both of them had several small irons in the fire; Flanders was working in radio, Swann was discovering and setting Betjeman and dishing up some numbers inspired by Greece. The impresario Laurier Lister accepted some of these for his revue Oranges and Lemons. This type of sophisticated revue was popular at the time and others followed: Penny Plain and The Lyric Revue in 1951 (the latter included one of Swann's best-known songs 'The Youth of the Heart', lyric by Sydney Carter), Airs on a Shoestring, Pay the Piper and Fresh Airs (1956). The stars of these shows were the likes of Joyce Grenfell (some of whose lyrics Swann set), Max Adrian, Elizabeth Welch and Ian Wallace.

Wallace had such a success with Flanders and Swann's 'The Hippopotamus' ('Mud, Mud, Glorious Mud . . .') that a bestiary evolved around him and his fruity bass-baritone voice: 'Elephant', 'Warthog', 'Whale' and 'Rhinoceros'. Recordings, song-publishing and performing rights began to provide a living. Up to this point the general public heard only others performing the Flanders-Swann material; but in private the pair had built up a performing technique, either demonstrating to the stage performers or doing turns at parties. Hitting the West End gave Swann ideas of expansion: 'I was going to write the next Oklahoma.' Maybe because Flanders had no taste for writing musicals, this never happened. But Swann tried, with various other writers. The centenary of the 1851 Exhibition gave birth to The Bright Arcade, but no backers were found for this delightful and ambitious score that included a massive multi-faceted aria sung by Jennifer Vyvyan at parties to great effect.

'Angels' were found, in the shape and bank balance of Joyce and Reggie Grenfell no less, for a fantasy called Wild Thyme, but it came and went during a summer heatwave in 1955. Similarly, a charming dream-piece written with Sydney Carter called Lucy and the Hunter also bit the dust. A romance that lasted longer than either was licensed in 1955, during the run of Thyme, when Swann married one of his favourite English roses, Janet Oxborrow, whom he had met at the Dartington Music Summer Schools. Swann came to help me run the Dartington summer sessions and one year Flanders came too and they performed a little cabaret one night to their largest audience yet. Their rapturous reception, plus the loan of our mailing list, led the pair to chance their arm at a little theatre in Notting Hill Gate, west London. They called their 'after-dinner farrago' At the Drop of a Hat. More rapture; and full houses. From the New Lindsey the show moved into the Fortune Theatre in the West End and stayed there for two years and a bit.

The Royal Family came en masse, the Cabinet portfolio by portfolio; the pair were applauded, recorded and, eventually, transferred to New York, where the show took so well that the years lengthened and the tours spread throughout the United States and Canada. At the Drop of Another Hat was equally popular and long-running at the Haymarket in London, in Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, London again and the US again. The last Hat was dropped in New York on New Year's Day 1967, having begun to drop on the same day of 1956. Since 1991, anybody too young to have enjoyed the show has had a chance to catch up with the experience, since the Hats are available on three CDs and a video. Flanders resisted television until the show's very last night. The video was lost until recently, but one can now see as well as hear replays of this enchanting show. What made that enchantment? To talk about good lyrics and tunes, wit and imagination is to scratch the surface. Flanders was one of the great lyric writers of the century, Swann a genius of a tune-smith with the rare gift of writing memorable, warm melodies arranged with elegance and consummate craftsmanship.

There is no suspicion of cliche except in conscious parody. Nothing in Swann is contrived; the music flows naturally, spontaneously. After much deliberation, Swann broke up the partnership. Long stays on long tours did not suit him or his way of life, and he felt that there were other things he wanted to write. Post-Hat he never enjoyed the same success but he composed a lot of music and performed it, alone or with partners, sometimes with a religious group, sometimes secular. He enjoyed performing and audiences. He turned to opera with Perelandra (CS Lewis), The Visitors (Tolstoy) and The Man With a Thousand Faces (Colin Wilson); there is a 'Te Deum' and a 'Requiem for the Living'; for the old Third Programme he had collaborated with Henry Reed in some delightful features about Hilda Tablet, a butch atonal composer. Except for the last named there is nothing in the music that would have frightened Mendelssohn or Sullivan; the Russian heritage is there but discernible more in the cut of the melodies than in the harmony. That is, until the last five years or so.

I remember him ringing me up one day to say: 'My dear chap, I've written some dissonances, may I come round and play some new settings of Clare and Blake?' Sometimes I couldn't help reflecting that Swann's passionate and expert piano-playing - what a tenor thumb he had - seemed an integral part, not to mention his clear and telling non-singing voice, of the success of these non-Flanders compositions. Scoring was not one of his gifts and too often, it seemed to me, dramatic situations relied on pianistic tremolando effects (what Grainger called 'woggle-notes'). But there is much to explore and once the so-called 'classical' performers dare to sing Swann's music we shall see that he was a great deal more than 'the chap at the piano' in Drop of a Hat that Flanders, some of us felt, somewhat denigrated; although it must be admitted that Swann went along with this, giving the impression of a manic curate. I have never met anybody who knew Donald Swann who did not like him; his friends positively adored him. And he seemed to inspire love because love was what he was about; it came out in his life and his music.

Like any (other) saint he could mildly infuriate from time to time with his absent-mindedness and with his seeming inability to see things, sometimes literally, sometimes metaphorically. But one came to realise that these minor failings came through his single- mindedness or loyalty or the depressions that he suffered from. So were they failings? By the time that his daughters Rachel and Natasha were grown- ups he and his wife separated. Latterly he found deep happiness with Alison Smith, an art historian, who had beautifully illustrated his autobiography Swann's Way (1991), and it was a fearful blow to them that cancer interrupted their lives and put an end to one of the great melodists of our time. They were married at St Thomas's Hospital in August last year. Fortunately Swann latterly recorded nearly a hundred of his songs at home on his own Bluthner.

Included are religious songs like the touching setting of Quoist's 'Lord, Why did you tell me to love all men, my brothers?'; settings of Tennyson, Hesse and Rossetti; a Tchaikovsky-like winner called 'Long Lonely Year' and 'Hat'; favourites like the tender 'Armadillo' and 'The Honeysuckle and the Bindweed (Misalliance)', 'Gnu' and many others, including some of the Tolkien settings. Swann singled out 'Bilbo's Last Song' as one of his own favourites: Day is ended, dim my eyes, but journey long before me lies . . . Shadows long before me lie, beneath the ever-bending sky, But islands lie behind the sun that I shall raise ere all is done; Lands there are to west of West, where night is quiet and sleep is rest.

JOHN AMIS FTX- 146 - SONGS OF OUR TIME & PLACE - Sydney Carter & Donald Swann FTX- 146 - SONGS OF OUR TIME & PLACE - Sydney Carter & Donald Swann An evening concert of songs, poems and tunes composed and performed by Sydney Carter and Donald Swann in 1961. For Sydney this was before "Lord of the Dance" fame and before he found himself being described as a hymn-writer. Donald had just lost his performing partner, Michael Flanders, and the two of them agreed to work together for a number of informal evenings in the London area. Each item is prefaced by an explanation and background to their compositions. 1. THERE'S A BIRD ON MY HEAD (SC & DS with piano) - 3'22" 2. DOWN BELOW (SC unaccompanied) - 3'31" 3. THE BRITISH MUSEUM WALTZ (DS with piano) - 1'51" 4. PUTTING OUT THE DUSTBINS IN THE GRAYS INN ROAD (SC unaccomp with piano links) - 3'39" 5.

MARCH: COMING DOWN FROM ALDERMASTON (SC with piano)- 4'21" 6. THE DEVIL (SC & DS with piano) (preceded by further talk about #5) - 4'09" 7. CRUCIFIXION BALLAD: FRIDAY MORNING (DS with piano)- 2'45" 8. THREE SONGS WITHOUT WORDS (DS piano solo) - (a) Turn away those cruel eyes or Cruel swallow now - (b) Waltz from a French film - (c) Untitled - 4'57" 9. POEM TO MY HEART (SC recitation) - 1'29" 10. WILL SOMEBODY TELL ME HOW? Or THE RAT RACE (SC & DS with piano)- 2'34" 11. A MIXED UP OLD MAN (SC unacc with DS chorus & piano)- 2'21" 12. THE GIRL AT THE BRITISH COUNCIL or WHY YOU COME NO MORE? (SC with DS piano)- 3'57" 13.

WICKED LADY CHATTERLEY (SC & DS) - 2'40" 14. GIRL IN A BIG HOTEL (DS with piano)- 1'51" 15. SOCIALISM IN OUR TIME (SC with DS piano) - 1'47" 16. I MET MY LOVE THE OTHER DAY (SC with DS piano)- 1'11" 17. THE CROW ON THE CRADLE (SC and DS with piano) - 1'55" 18. AN INTERPLANETARY CAROL: (SC & DS with piano) - 3'02" Recorded and edited by Peter Kennedy, London 6th June 1961. Sydney Carter was born in Camden Town, London, 6th May 1915. Educated at Montern Street LCC School, Islington, Christ's Hospital and Baliol Colllege, Oxford. A sometime schoolmaster during the second World War he served in the Friends Ambulance Unit in Greece and the Middle East .

After the war he worked for the National Book League and then as editor of "English Dance and Song", for the annual festival of the English Folk Dance and Song Societyat the Royal Albert Hall, in a few minutes, wrote some words to the hymn, "Simple Gifts" as a sung-dance for massed voices and dancers. It was the song he is now best known, "The Lord of the Dance". Donald Swann was born in Llanelli, South Wales, 30 Sept 1923 into a family of refugees from the Russian revolutionand died 23rd March 1994. His studies at Christ Church Oxford were interrupted by the War and, like Sydney, he was a conscientious objector and served with the Friends Aambulance Unit. After the war he was best known for his musical partnership with Michael Flanders 1956-1967. A full biography can be found on the Website.

BBC NEWS | UK | Magazine | Re-discovering my father Re-discovering my father Flanders, left, with partner Donald Swann at the piano When Newsnight's economic editor Stephanie Flanders set out to discover more about her late father Michael Flanders, she knew much about his role as one half of a celebrated comic act, but not that he'd been an embryonic voice in Britain's disability rights campaign. My father died when I was just six years old - so there was a huge amount I didn't know about him. While making a radio documentary, I've been on a voyage of discovery, and along the way I've uncovered some amazing and entertaining archive recordings which have been lost for decades. What I did know was that in the late 1950s and early 1960s he was world-famous. In partnership with pianist Donald Swann he performed witty and elegant comic monologues and songs, which were wildly popular. Half a century on, some of them are indelibly engraved on the nation's collective memory, especially the chorus of The Hippopotamus Song: Mud, Mud, Glorious Mud. I discovered that my father developed his flair for performance early.

As a student at Westminster School, he organised a show in a West End theatre during the early days of World War II. Tony Benn, then a young squit, told me how he was roped in as a stagehand. "All the other theatres had been closed at that particular time so that made it a very attractive opportunity and people came in large numbers" he recalled. While making the programme, I learned that later in his life he campaigned on behalf of the rights of the disabled Stephanie Flanders My dad did a comic turn as the Great Marvello - a joke strongman. As an imposing athletic figure, it was a role he could pull off. He continued to perform at Oxford University and was looking forward to a promising career as an actor when he was called up to the Navy. His ship, the HMS Marne was later torpedoed, but his greatest challenge came later in the war. Here's how he told the story on a newly re-discovered Desert Island Discs, which had been lost by the BBC.

"I was lying off Yarmouth, listening for e-boats - fortunately I never heard one - when I started to feel something that was like a very bad dose of flu, which was eventually diagnosed as polio." His commanding officer refused to let him take immediate rest and as a result the polio became far more damaging. He spent several months being treated in an iron lung - which had to be specially constructed to fit his 6ft 4ins frame. Eventually he was discharged - but his polio meant that he could only walk with great difficulty. For the rest of his life he used a wheelchair. Wheelchair "It was a pleasure to get into the wheelchair after about a year I had in an iron lung and in bed," he told Roy Plomley. "But of course you only see the people that have got the wheelchairs licked, those who didn't get the wheelchair licked are mouldering away somewhere." Flanders as a schoolboy in 1937 He hoped to resume his degree at Oxford, but he was disappointed. Family history has it that the college told him "This isn't a home for cripples" - although we've never been able to find the original letter. Then my father had a rough few years.

He directed amateur dramatics and auditioned as a radio actor for the BBC. He was considered for the part of the dashing crimefighter Dick Barton - but the Beeb said he "didn't sound like the voice of an active man". In the end he got work as a presenter with BBC Schools Radio - and from then on was hardly ever out of a radio studio. As he started to make an independent living, he hooked up with an old schoolfriend, Donald Swann. They found work writing songs for London revues, Swann writing the tunes and my father the lyrics. Over time, the duo started performing their songs themselves at parties and cabarets. It went down so well that they decided to take the plunge, hiring a small theatre in West London for a three-week run. They opened on New Year's Eve, 1956, with a show called At the Drop of a Hat. The duo received rave reviews and they soon transferred to the West End for a run that lasted 2 and a half years. Their shows produced two best-selling albums - produced by George Martin of Beatles fame - and then toured around Britain, the US and Canada for 11 years.

Pioneer "I think the fact you've got Michael Flanders in a wheelchair sitting up on stage is pretty pioneering," his biographer and archivist, Leon Berger told me. "I can't think of a single example, certainly not in the UK, of a public figure who's been disabled." A young Tony Benn, who at school had been a stagehand for Flanders During his years touring with Donald Swann, my father was keen to be judged on his own merits - as a performer who happened to be disabled, rather than as a disabled performer. Yet while making the programme, I learned that later in his life he campaigned on behalf of the rights of the disabled. Lord Morris of Manchester, a family friend, was a Labour MP when he got to know my father. In 1969 he introduced a private member's bill to counter discrimination against the disabled. "I remember very vividly now returning from the House of Commons after speaking on my Chronically Sick and Disabled Persons Bill," Alf Morris told me.

"I turned on the as it would be now Radio 4 and heard your father explaining to people what the bill was all about and I thought he did it so expertly and so well and so persuasively he ought to have taken part in the debate earlier that day. And I could take things a little easier." Lord Morris said this campaigning - along with efforts by mother - were instrumental in getting the bill passed, despite a lack of government support. The act, which forced local authorities to help disabled people, was the first piece of legislation in the area since the war. Fois gras After ending his double act with Donald Swann, my father continued to broadcast - narrating the first documentary series to show the royal family at close quarters - and to write. He scored another hit late in life with the cantata Captain Noah and His Floating Zoo, which remains one of the most popular pieces for amateur choirs. And for those who thought his wit was always gentle, there was the savage song Foie Gras, a biting attack on the cruelty and greed involved in producing the delicacy. We have recorded a special version of the song which is available on the Radio 4 website.

My father died suddenly, of a brain aneurysm, in 1975. But whenever anyone thinks of mud - or gnus - I think he will be remembered. Flanders on Flanders is broadcast at 2000 BST on Saturday 30 June on BBC Radio 4, after which it can be heard on Radio 4's listen again page, under the Archive Hour. Biography Biography The following brief biography is designed to guide you through Donald Swann's catalogue of recordings and publications with a few illustrative links. It will be updated regularly. For fuller details of Donald's life see his autobiography Swann's Way: A Life in Song (now out of print) Early Years (1923-1941) Donald Swann will forever be popularly known as the musical half of the comic song writing duo Flanders & Swann ; but the quintessential Englishness of that satiric output belies his exotic roots – Donald's middle name, Ibrahím, is a clue. Donald was born in Llanelli on 30 Sept 1923 into a family of amateur musicians, both parents refugees from the Russian Revolution.

His upbringing was one of Russian folk song and four-hand piano reductions of the Russian and European Romantics. He remained largely self-taught in spite of being an external student at the RCM while still at Westminster School. A contemporary, Michael Flanders, then a budding schoolboy actor, penned a school revue GO TO IT! to which Swann contributed music, enjoying a brief run at the Everyman Theatre, Hampstead during the Blitz. Oxford and the War Years (1941-1948) In 1941 Donald was awarded an exhibition to Christ Church, Oxford, to read modern languages but, after a year, the war intervened. As a convinced pacifist with a life-long quest of religious faith and doubt, he switched from his earlier Anglicanism and found a spiritual home under the tolerant umbrella of the Quakers. Donald registered as a conscientious objector and served with the FAU (Friends' Ambulance Unit) in Egypt, Palestine and, more importantly, in Greece whose music and culture became a life-long passion and influence. On his return to Oxford Donald switched his studies to Russian and Modern Greek.

As a student he wrote serious settings of poets such as Pushkin, Froissart and Ronsard (primarily love songs). A number of these early compositions can be found in two recent volumes of The Songs Of Donald Swann . Donald's comic sense came to the fore in his versions of 'Senex' and 'Joan Hunter Dunn' by John Betjeman (A Collection of Songs) , which were aired, in the undergraduate revues he was extemporizing for Sandy Wilson. A meeting with Michael Flanders , now wheelchair-bound with polio and working in radio, led to a continuation of their schoolboy writing partnership. Revues (1948-1956) The first song Michael Flanders and Donald Swann wrote, 'In the D'Oyly Cart' , was accepted by the impresario Laurier Lister for inclusion in his intimate revue ORANGES AND LEMONS (1948) .

And for the next eight years they contributed witty and topical songs to Lister's revues including PENNY PLAIN (1951) , AIRS ON A SHOESTRING (1953) , PAY THE PIPER (1954) , and FRESH AIRS (1956) Lister's stable of performers included Max Adrian, Charlotte Mitchell, Elisabeth Welch and Ian Wallace who had such a success singing 'The Hippopotamus' ("Mud, Mud, Glorious Mud") that he was provided with a whole bestiary of anthropomorphic animal songs including 'The Warthog' and 'The Elephant'. For soprano Rose Hill they wrote 'A Word on My Ear' , a comic song about a tone-deaf singer. Joyce Grenfell (with whom Donald wrote 'Joyful Noise' ) appeared in those early revues before touring her own show JOYCE GRENFELL REQUESTS THE PLEASURE where she sang Flanders & Swann's 'The Song of the Weather'.

For H.M.Tennant management Donald and Michael contributed songs to the LYRIC REVUE (1951) and the GLOBE REVUE (1952) – the latter featuring 'The Youth of the Heart' with lyrics by Sydney Carter, a wartime friend, who would remain one of Donald's continuing collaborators. Early Musicals (1948-1956) Donald's first musical, THE BRIGHT ARCADE , a Victorian story written with actor-writer Maurice Browning, found enthusiasts but no backers – however it re-emerged, 25 years later, in a televised version as THE GREAT GLASS HIVE . Then, with Sydney Carter, Donald wrote LUCY AND THE HUNTER , a children's dream-musical, which found a showing at a fringe venue. Donald's next piece WILD THYME achieved a West End run of only 52 performances in the hot summer of 1955, but nevertheless obtained a cult following, some fans returning dozens of time. At this time Donald's name was better known to the radio public for his collaborations on the Third Programme with Henry Reed, providing spoof atonal music for the fictitious composeress Hilda Tablet.

He was also beginning to be associated with a generation of musical humorists led by the irrepressible Gerard Hoffnung for whom he also composed a serious work, TWO MOODS FOR TUBA , which has also achieved its third commercial recording on the CD KELLY THOMAS APPETIZERS . The Hat Years: Flanders & Swann (1956-1967) Donald Swann and Michael Flanders had been performing their own songs at cast read-throughs and private parties for some years often, as they would say "at the drop of a hat"; they gradually honed their material as a double-act. Donald's prep-school chum, John Amis , invited them to make a couple of appearances at the Summer School of Music he ran at Dartington (where Donald met his first wife, Janet). Encouraged by that success Flanders and Swann hired, as an experiment, a small 150-seater theatre, the New Lindsey in Notting Hill, for a three-week run. Their show, titled AT THE DROP OF A HAT , opened on 31st December 1956 and was an overnight success.

They quickly acquired an agent and transferred to the Fortune Theatre where they were the toast of the West End and ran for nearly two and half years. An LP of highlights was issued, as well as several EPs , which found their way across the Atlantic and a fan base quickly grew in America. On 8th Oct 1959 they opened on Broadway with equal success and subsequently toured the US, Canada, the UK provinces and Switzerland. A sequel, AT THE DROP OF ANOTHER HAT , opened at Theatre Royal, Haymarket in London October 1963 for a long run before reverting to its previous title for performances in Australia, New Zealand and Hong Kong. There followed yet another tour of the UK, to London again at the Globe Theatre (now the Gielgud) and, in 1966, a return to the US and Toronto and finishing up on back on Broadway at the Booth Theatre. The last HAT was dropped on 9th April 1967. Ten days later, they moved into a studio and recorded the show for TV. In 11 years Flanders & Swann had clocked up nearly 2,000 performances.

The two remained friends, collaborating occasionally, until Michael Flanders' death in 1975. Claudia Flanders, his widow, and Donald embarked on a long-awaited publication of THE SONGS OF MICHAEL FLANDERS & DONALD SWANN and commercial releases include a 3 CD set THE COMPLETE FLANDERS & SWANN (1991) and recently a 4 CD set HAT-TRICK: FLANDERS & SWANN COLLECTOR'S EDITION (2007). There are also two video releases, THE ONLY FLANDERS & SWANN VIDEO (PMI) in the UK and FLANDERS & SWANN (PBS) in the US.

The Hat Years: Other Music (1956-1967) In spite of gruelling touring schedules Donald nevertheless managed find time write a modern setting of the TE DEUM ( FESTIVAL MATINS ) ; a three act opera PERELANDRA adapted from the C.S.Lewis novel by his old Oxford friend David Marsh; a one act operetta THE MAN WITH A 1,000 FACES with a libretto by 'angry young man' Colin Wilson and a set of musical melodramas with Sebastian Shaw entitled LONDON SKETCHES . To the delight of Tolkien fans everywhere, Donald set to music lyrics derived from the LORD OF THE RINGS trilogy; THE ROAD GOES EVER ON song-cycle met with the approval and admiration of the author himself. During the last American HAT tour, Donald began to feel that other aspects of his music were being neglected. Some of these thoughts he expressed in his first book of memoirs THE SPACE BETWEEN THE BARS . After The Hats (1967-1980) Over the next few years Donald compiled and performed hundreds of concerts; sometimes solo or often with different performers picked to explore the variety of his output.

SET BY SWANN anthologized his love songs and used classical singers like Marion Studholme, Andrew Downie and occasionally Ian Wallace. It also gave him the opportunity to publish some of his most Russianate and passionate love songs: THREE SONGS SET BY SWANN . AN EVENING IN CRETE , with soprano Lilli Malandraki, combined his Greek-inspired compositions with traditional Hellenic music. SOUNDINGS BY SWANN saw actor Barry Wilsher and Donald link up with a local children's choirs and an organist in churches and cathedrals all over the country. With Barry as narrator Donald also gave many performances of his children's staged drama THIS IS THE STORY OF BONTZYE SHWEIG written with Leslie Paul. EXPLORATIONS ONE , with Sydney Carter, concentrated on words and music in a folk idiom. The show was later expanded, with the addition of Jeremy Taylor, into AN EVENING WITH CARTER, TAYLOR & SWANN which took folk music into mainstream theatres.

For BETWEEN THE BARS Donald gathered together a versatile group of performers who were at home in all his musical styles; the original line-up was Catherine Martin, Heather Kay, Ginny Broadbent, Brian Kay and Alistair Thompson. Brian and Alistair left to join the King's Singers and were successfully replaced by Richard Day-Lewis, Roger Cleverdon. The Swann Singers were to perform most of Donald's major vocal writing for the rest of his life; including his REQUIEM FOR THE LIVING (written with C. Day Lewis), his Jewish cantata THE FIVE SCROLLS (with Rabbi Albert Friedlander) and SOLILOQUY FOR AUTUMN – a meditative anthology. They also recorded a version of his book of carols for all the year round THE ROPE OF LOVE . Donald and the Swann Singers toured America and the Middle East, taking their peace programme A CRACK IN TIME to troubled world spots including Belfast in 1973. The following year Donald performed his solo show of peace and protest songs in South Africa where even the Flanders and Swann material took on political overtones.

Donald charted his extremes of moods and emotional turmoil in a curious 'posthumous adventure' SWANN'S WAY OUT (1975), often written in the third person. Donald's Russian-style music gained expression through a series of concerts with percussionist Heather Corbett whose skill on the cimbalom in particular gave just the right eastern feel to A GLANCING BLOW . Donald's last major composition of the 1970s was an agit-prop musical for children THE YEAST FACTORY written with Alec Davison and staged at the Cockpit Theatre in 1979 with a young Tim Roth in the cast. The 1980s (1980-1987) In 1979 Donald teamed up with the Reverend Frank Topping, a radio producer and raconteur. The result was SWANN WITH TOPPING – a two-man revue in a religious vein. They played several provincial venues, ending up at the Ambassadors Theatre in the West End in October 1980 for a short run.

Although Donald was primarily a vocal writer (there are nearly 2,000 songs listed in his archives), his occasional essay in instrumental music displays the same, instantly recognizable, melodic gifts. For Carl Dolmetsch he wrote a concerto for recorder (or flute) and piano in 1981: RHAPSODY FROM WITHIN . The 1994 recording by Piers Adams on the CD SUN & SHADE has made this a very popular work among music students. Donald's most prolific collaborator for the last twenty-five years of his life has been Arthur Scholey with whom he wrote a significant body of songs and stage works. For children: two shows based on the lives of saints ( THE SONG OF CAEDMON and BRENDAN AHOY! ), BABOUSHKA , a Russian Christmas folk story, and WACKY & HIS FUDDLEJIG in which one of Santa's workers refuses to make military toys. For adults they wrote CANDLETREE a Christmas opera, and THE VISITORS a contemporary retelling of a Tolstoy short story. Donald has published, with Arthur Scholey, a volume of children's songs SINGALIVE!

– 12 SONGS & A CAKEWALK . For many years Donald spent long retreats with the Quaker community at Pendle Hill, Philadelphia – a place for study and meditation where he also lectured and composed. In a similar environment in Oberlin, Ohio he conceived the musical MAMAHUHU . In 1986 Donald moved into a new musical field and collaborated with Jazz trumpeter Digby Fairweather and singer Liz Lincoln in several very popular SWANN IN JAZZ shows. One of these concerts from 1986 was recorded and Donald oversaw its remaster and transfer onto CD along with some additional tracks in the same idiom. The Last Years (1987 -1994) Donald developed a deep love for Victorian poets in his last years and, with a new musical voice, began to set the poems of Tennyson, Christina Rossetti, John Clare and Oscar Wilde which he performed with soprano Lucinda Broadbridge. He also teamed up with art historian Alison Smith, who was to become his second wife, to produce a illustrated volume of these songs THE POETIC IMAGE .

He embarked on a massive retrospective recording – three hours of his solo material on three cassettes – the ALPHABETAPHON . At a time of great change and reflection his autobiography was commissioned and SWANN'S WAY , written with Lyn Smith, appeared in 1991. Shortly after publication Donald was diagnosed with terminal cancer and given three months to live. The three months turned into two years and Donald celebrated his exit in a very public way. He rallied enough to commit himself to new concert tours and recordings and, above all, new compositions. He set to music song-cycles by William Blake, Edna St Vincent Millay and Emily Dickinson, which are some of his finest works – these have now been published as LAST SONGS . His final project was to take him back to his first love – a theatrical presentation of his Greek music, produced by the Cherub Theatre Company, and entitled SWANN AMONG THE SIRENS . Donald was never to see it for he died at Trinity Hospice in South London on 23rd March 1994. However the show was mounted at the Tricycle Theatre in his honour six months later.

The cast, under the musical director and arranger John Jansson, recorded the music under the title THE ISLES OF GREECE . Donald Swann » Nine Kinds of Pie Nine Kinds of Pie We’ve had a lot of luck with records. Some of the songs that have made our names a household word — like “slop-bucket” — are the little series of animal songs that we’ve been writing. — Michael Flanders, introduction to “The Gnu,” At the Drop of a Hat (1960) As Michael Flanders says, the animal songs made him and his partner Donald Swann famous. The duo’s best-known such number may be “The Hippopotamus,” with its cheerful, waltzing chorus of Mud, mud, glorious mud! Nothing quite like it for cooling the blood. So follow me, follow And there let us wallow In glorious mud! Indeed, I suspect that even a few Americans know this one. I say that because, if you are English, you’re very likely to at least have heard of Flanders and Swann. If you are American, well, that’s much less likely.

(In terms of Flanders-and-Swann awareness, Canadians seem somewhere in between — more than Americans, but less than Britons.) So, to acquaint or re-acquaint yourself with Flanders and Swann, let’s listen to “The Hippopotamus.” There’s even a children’s-book version of this, The Hippopotamus Song: A Muddy Love Story (1991), illustrated by Nadine Bernard Westcott. (I haven’t seen the book, and so can’t vouch for how well or poorly the song has been adapted.) If you’re unfamiliar with this duo, you might think of Flanders (1922-1975) and Swann (1923-1994) as something of a British Tom Lehrer (b. 1928), but without the cynicism.

As Flanders himself observes in At the Drop of Another Hat (1964), “The purpose of satire, it has been rightly said, is to strip off the veneer of comforting illusion and cosy half-truth — and our job, as I see it, is to put it back again.” They are satirists, but (usually) lack the aggression of Lehrer, favoring instead satire’s sense of play and a kind of wry, bemused judgment — or, in the case of songs like “The Hippopotamus,” more whimsy than judgment. Though Lehrer famously set his “The Elements” to Gilbert and Sullivan’s “Major-General’s Song,” the librettist and composer of The Pirates of Penzance had a much stronger influence on Flanders and Swann. Flanders was the Gilbert , writing nearly all of the lyrics, and Swann the Sullivan , writing all of the music (and the occasional lyric).

With wit, wordplay, and complex rhyme schemes, the duo wrote over a hundred songs, and between 1956 and 1967 gave hundreds of performances in the UK, Canada, and the US — plus, in 1964, a few in Australia and New Zealand. George Martin (yes, the Beatles’ producer) produced their best-known albums. David Hyde-Pierce and John Lithgow are probably the duo’s best-known contemporary fans. Never heard of Flanders and Swann? Or care to be reacquainted? Well, here’s my (admittedly subjective) list of essential songs, complete with audio, commentary, and (when available) video. The first was “The Hippopotamus Song” (above); so, moving to the second…. 2) “A Transport of Delight” A paean to the “monarch of the road,” that “Scarlet-painted London Transport, Diesel-engined, Ninety-seven horsepower Omnibus!” Swann takes on the role of driver, Flanders the conductor, and they sing heartily, with a mix of affection and mockery. A few allusions of note.

“Earth has not anything to show more fair” is from Wordsworth’s “Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802.” “Army lorry” puns on the Scots song “Annie Laurie,” which includes the line “And for bonnie Annie Laurie, / I’d lay me down and dee” (“dee” being a Scots pronunciation of “die”). 3) “The Gas-Man Cometh” The GALMI method has its flaws, as this song points out. (No, the song doesn’t use the expression “GALMI,” but that’s an acronym for “Get A Little Man In.” I’ve heard it on British sitcoms.) 4) “First and Second Law” Showing their range, Swann and Flanders explain thermodynamics via a jazzy scat number. This is still the reason I know anything about thermodynamics. You see, Flanders and Swann are the music of my childhood. Though I grew up north of Boston Massachusetts, my parents lived in London during the latter half of the 1960s. They even saw Flanders and Swann perform there.

In the U.S., borrowing the records from friends, my dad taped, on a reel-to-reel (the bulkier predecessor of the cassette recorder), At the Drop of a Hat and At the Drop of Another Hat — though I later learned that he only taped the pieces that he liked. Fortunately, that was the majority of each record. 5) “The Gnu” In the introduction (which I’ve omitted), Michael Flanders talks about the song’s inspiration, which involves being unable to park (or get out of his car) on the street where he lives: The road itself is a bit of a snag. That road has got the steepest camber on it — you know, the old slope — of any road in London. It’s about one in three. If you try to park your car by the pavement, as people do from time to time, the car’s tilted, like that. Well now, that means you can only get this near-side door open a little bit, then the pavement stops it. If you want to use this door you can make a jump for it.

Bad enough all up and down the road, but just outside where I happen to live, 1a (of course it would be), it’s just like the great North face of Everest. The thing’s right over on its side. You can’t get this door open at all, you’ve got to keep it full of petrol or it shows empty. I can’t use this door, I’ve got to get into this thing [Flanders’ wheelchair], you see, on the pavement. He asks his local council about it, and they send a man round to take a chunk out of the road so that it’s level in front of Flanders’ house, thus allowing him to navigate from his car to his wheelchair and vice versa. However, ever time he arrives at his space, someone else is parked there — always the same car. “The number of this car,” he says, “I’ll never forget this number as long as I live. I’ve sat gazing at it for hours on end sometimes, thinking of nothing else. The number is 346-GNU.” In case you are doubtful, a gnu is a real animal.

The Oxford English Dictionary describes it as a “South African quadruped (Catoblepas gnu), belonging to the antelope family, but resembling an ox or buffalo in shape; also known by its Dutch name wildebeest.” 6) “Misalliance” In which two plants become star-crossed lovers, a silly premise with a plaintive melody that makes it curiously affecting. 7) “Madeira M’Dear” A bit more risqué than the other songs here, “Madeira M’Dear” contains excellent zeugma, when one word gets used to refer to more than one word in the same sentence. These particular lyrics often use the first word (the multi-referential one) in more than one sense. So, for example, “She lowered her standards by raising her glass, / Her courage, her eyes — and his hopes.” Here are Flanders and Swann performing the song for American television in 1967.

Flanders glosses “flat” as “apartment” for American viewers and — presumably to appease censors — changes “prowess” to “finesse.” Incidentally, if he looks a little breathless, that may be because he has only one working lung. The polio that put him in the wheelchair also took away one of his lungs. UPDATE, 7 Aug. 2014, 1:30 pm: In retrospect, this song might better be classified among those that have not aged well (described in my caveat below ). I direct readers to my conversation with Jonathan Dresner (in the comments) for precisely why. 8) “A Happy Song” This represents the absurdist side of the duo — also on display in such numbers as “Kokoraki.” If you enjoy Spike Jones or Mel Blanc , then “A Happy Song” is for you. It’s one of three “Songs for Our Time” on At the Drop of a Hat, each of which, Flanders explains, is his and Swann’s attempt to write a pop hit.

Of this particular one, Flanders tells the audience, “We felt that really, on the whole, in this time of crisis and political conflict, what the world needed most was another simple happy chorus song, something which expressed the feelings of all the ordinary people all over the world, and in which everyone could join.” He then pronounces the song’s nearly unpronounceable refrain, and invites people to “join in, if you wish.” 9) “The Rhinoceros” Another reason that Flanders and Swann’s songs are great for children and adults: they expand your vocabulary, as in this song’s refrain, “the bodger on the bonce.” As a noun, “bodger” is “one who bodges; a botcher”; as an adjective, “bodger” is (in Australian slang) a term for “Inferior, worthless.” “Bonce” is a slang term for “head.” So, then, according to the lyric, the rhino has something botched on its head. (All definitions courtesy of the OED.) 10) “The Armadillo” Who knew that Armadillos had love songs? And with such plaintive melodies, too!

(The track begins, however, with an elephant joke — the previous song on the record is “The Elephant.”) 11) “Slow Train” An elegy for closed railway stations, this one is surprisingly poignant. As Flanders says in his introduction , Unusual song this for us, perhaps, because it’s really quite a serious song, and it was suggested by all those marvelous old local railway stations with their wonderful evocative names, all due to be, you know, axed and done away with one by one, and these are stations that we shall no longer be seeing when we aren’t able to travel anymore on the slow train. TheGawain provides more detail in this great post on Flanders and Swann . As he tells us, in 1963 Dr. Richard Beeching wrote a lengthy report on the profitability of British Railways (or lack thereof) and concluded that most of the rail network made no net contribution towards any profits that could potentially be made. He duly recommended removing about half of the route mileage and rather more than half the stations.

The Tories implemented the report with unusual haste for any Government; Labour largely opposed it up until the moment when they saw the overall profit/ loss account of the nation and duly decided to continue. This cross-party enthusiasm for Beeching left very little opportunity for the pro-rail remnants of the population to express any form of opposition except by attempting to prove “undue hardship” at closure inquiries. An examination of the railways which survived on this basis (prime examples include Middlesborough to Whitby, Inverness to Wick & Thurso and Kyle of Lochalsh, Glasgow to Mallaig and Plymouth to Gunnislake) show that in order to demonstrate that closing the local railway would cause undue hardship it was necessary to show that the area was devoid of alternative roads. As a result the minor rural dead loss railways going nowhere which deserved to be axed all survived, while the middling routes serving notable market towns found that the market towns were also served by roads, enabling easy closure of the railways. The Government then proceeded to spend vast amounts of public money building roads to replace these railways which needed closing down because the Government didn’t have any public money available to spend on keeping them running. That’s the context for this song.

For more, see TheGawain’s piece or this very thorough Wikipedia essay on the song . 12) “The Sloth” A comic ode to laziness. Yes, there are many other songs I could have included. Fans of Flanders and Swann will no doubt be asking: What about “Design for Living”? Where’s “A Song of the Weather”? And what about “A Song of Patriotic Prejudice”? Fair questions. I decided to limit myself to a dozen, but I concede that there may be a better twelve songs to introduce people to Flanders and Swann. A few songs have not aged as well — either because they’re topical, or because casual sexism or imperialism is (happily) no longer culturally acceptable. Remarkably, there are very few such songs. So, on the one hand, “The Reluctant Cannibal” suggests that people everywhere face the same problems, such rebellious children (who, in this case, “won’t eat people”) and parents baffled by their offspring. To their credit, Flanders and Swann also avoid pseudo-primitive dialect, singing in their usual accents.

On the other hand, the humor of this piece depends upon the difference between “civilized” society and the more primitive “Tropics” (they don’t provide a specific location where these cannibals reside). The song is not in the realm of, say, the first line of Cole Porter’s “Let’s Do It” (“Chinks do it, / Japs do it. / Up in Lapland, / Even little Laps do it”), but the piece hasn’t endured quite as well as their animal songs. Interested in learning more? I don’t think there’s an ideal Flanders and Swann “hits” collection. In any case, the live records include amusing spoken-word performances (mostly from Flanders), which would need to be either included or excised — in assembling this, I’ve mostly done the latter. You could use iTunes to create your own “hits” collection, and then (depending on your fondness for Flanders’ monologues) either retain or cut the spoken-word parts. In iTunes, you can do that under the “Options” setting of a song, by changing the start time and/or stop time.

Or, if you seek the full experience, then I recommend The Complete Flanders and Swann, which includes At the Drop of a Hat, At the Drop of Another Hat, The Bestiary of Flanders and Swann plus some bonus tracks, and a great booklet featuring illuminating notes and commentary by Charles Fox. I’ve just discovered there’s another collection with more music I’ve never heard — including many performances not in The Complete Flanders and Swann. Sadly, Hat-Trick: Flanders and Swann Collector’s Edition is out of print. Fortunately, Flanders and Swann’s many admirers have gathered lots more information for you to peruse: Donald Swann - Australian recordings, performances Search Donald Swann Donald Ibrahím Swann (30 September 1923 – 23 March 1994) was a British composer, musician and entertainer. He is best known to the general public for his partnership of writing and performing comic songs with Michael Flanders (a.k.a. Flanders and Swann).

Donald Swann is featured on the following titles At the Drop of a Hat: A Dozen Essential Songs by Flanders and Swann At the Drop of a Hat: A Dozen Essential Songs by Flanders and Swann We’ve had a lot of luck with records. Some of the songs that have made our names a household word — like “slop-bucket” — are the little series of animal songs that we’ve been writing. — Michael Flanders, introduction to “The Gnu,” At the Drop of a Hat (1960) As Michael Flanders says, the animal songs made him and his partner Donald Swann famous. The duo’s best-known such number may be “The Hippopotamus,” with its cheerful, waltzing chorus of Mud, mud, glorious mud! Nothing quite like it for cooling the blood. So follow me, follow And there let us wallow In glorious mud! Indeed, I suspect that even a few Americans know this one. I say that because, if you are English, you’re very likely to at least have heard of Flanders and Swann. If you are American, well, that’s much less likely.

(In terms of Flanders-and-Swann awareness, Canadians seem somewhere in between — more than Americans, but less than Britons.) So, to acquaint or re-acquaint yourself with Flanders and Swann, let’s listen to “The Hippopotamus.” There’s even a children’s-book version of this, The Hippopotamus Song: A Muddy Love Story (1991), illustrated by Nadine Bernard Westcott. (I haven’t seen the book, and so can’t vouch for how well or poorly the song has been adapted.) If you’re unfamiliar with this duo, you might think of Flanders (1922-1975) and Swann (1923-1994) as something of a British Tom Lehrer (b. 1928), but without the cynicism.

As Flanders himself observes in At the Drop of Another Hat (1964), “The purpose of satire, it has been rightly said, is to strip off the veneer of comforting illusion and cosy half-truth — and our job, as I see it, is to put it back again.” They are satirists, but (usually) lack the aggression of Lehrer, favoring instead satire’s sense of play and a kind of wry, bemused judgment — or, in the case of songs like “The Hippopotamus,” more whimsy than judgment. Though Lehrer famously set his “The Elements” to Gilbert and Sullivan’s “Major-General’s Song,” the librettist and composer of The Pirates of Penzance had a much stronger influence on Flanders and Swann. Flanders was the Gilbert , writing nearly all of the lyrics, and Swann the Sullivan , writing all of the music (and the occasional lyric).

With wit, wordplay, and complex rhyme schemes, the duo wrote over a hundred songs, and between 1956 and 1967 gave hundreds of performances in the UK, Canada, and the US — plus, in 1964, a few in Australia and New Zealand. George Martin (yes, the Beatles’ producer) produced their best-known albums. David Hyde-Pierce and John Lithgow are probably the duo’s best-known contemporary fans. Never heard of Flanders and Swann? Or care to be reacquainted? Well, here’s my (admittedly subjective) list of essential songs, complete with audio, commentary, and (when available) video. The first was “The Hippopotamus Song” (above); so, moving to the second…. 2) “A Transport of Delight” A paean to the “monarch of the road,” that “Scarlet-painted London Transport, Diesel-engined, Ninety-seven horsepower Omnibus!” Swann takes on the role of driver, Flanders the conductor, and they sing heartily, with a mix of affection and mockery. A few allusions of note.

“Earth has not anything to show more fair” is from Wordsworth’s “Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802.” “Army lorry” puns on the Scots song “Annie Laurie,” which includes the line “And for bonnie Annie Laurie, / I’d lay me down and dee” (“dee” being a Scots pronunciation of “die”). 3) “The Gas-Man Cometh” The GALMI method has its flaws, as this song points out. (No, the song doesn’t use the expression “GALMI,” but that’s an acronym for “Get A Little Man In.” I’ve heard it on British sitcoms.) 4) “First and Second Law” Showing their range, Swann and Flanders explain thermodynamics via a jazzy scat number. This is still the reason I know anything about thermodynamics. You see, Flanders and Swann are the music of my childhood. Though I grew up north of Boston Massachusetts, my parents lived in London during the latter half of the 1960s. They even saw Flanders and Swann perform there.

In the U.S., borrowing the records from friends, my dad taped, on a reel-to-reel (the bulkier predecessor of the cassette recorder), At the Drop of a Hat and At the Drop of Another Hat — though I later learned that he only taped the pieces that he liked. Fortunately, that was the majority of each record. 5) “The Gnu” In the introduction (which I’ve omitted), Michael Flanders talks about the song’s inspiration, which involves being unable to park (or get out of his car) on the street where he lives: The road itself is a bit of a snag. That road has got the steepest camber on it — you know, the old slope — of any road in London. It’s about one in three. If you try to park your car by the pavement, as people do from time to time, the car’s tilted, like that. Well now, that means you can only get this near-side door open a little bit, then the pavement stops it. If you want to use this door you can make a jump for it.

Bad enough all up and down the road, but just outside where I happen to live, 1a (of course it would be), it’s just like the great North face of Everest. The thing’s right over on its side. You can’t get this door open at all, you’ve got to keep it full of petrol or it shows empty. I can’t use this door, I’ve got to get into this thing [Flanders’ wheelchair], you see, on the pavement. He asks his local council about it, and they send a man round to take a chunk out of the road so that it’s level in front of Flanders’ house, thus allowing him to navigate from his car to his wheelchair and vice versa. However, ever time he arrives at his space, someone else is parked there — always the same car. “The number of this car,” he says, “I’ll never forget this number as long as I live. I’ve sat gazing at it for hours on end sometimes, thinking of nothing else. The number is 346-GNU.” In case you are doubtful, a gnu is a real animal.

The Oxford English Dictionary describes it as a “South African quadruped (Catoblepas gnu), belonging to the antelope family, but resembling an ox or buffalo in shape; also known by its Dutch name wildebeest.” 6) “Misalliance” In which two plants become star-crossed lovers, a silly premise with a plaintive melody that makes it curiously affecting. 7) “Madeira M’Dear” A bit more risqué than the other songs here, “Madeira M’Dear” contains excellent zeugma, when one word gets used to refer to more than one word in the same sentence. These particular lyrics often use the first word (the multi-referential one) in more than one sense. So, for example, “She lowered her standards by raising her glass, / Her courage, her eyes — and his hopes.” Here are Flanders and Swann performing the song for American television in 1967.

Flanders glosses “flat” as “apartment” for American viewers and — presumably to appease censors — changes “prowess” to “finesse.” Incidentally, if he looks a little breathless, that may be because he has only one working lung. The polio that put him in the wheelchair also took away one of his lungs. UPDATE, 7 Aug. 2014, 1:30 pm: In retrospect, this song might better be classified among those that have not aged well (described in my caveat below ). I direct readers to my conversation with Jonathan Dresner (in the comments) for precisely why. 8) “A Happy Song” This represents the absurdist side of the duo — also on display in such numbers as “Kokoraki.” If you enjoy Spike Jones or Mel Blanc , then “A Happy Song” is for you. It’s one of three “Songs for Our Time” on At the Drop of a Hat, each of which, Flanders explains, is his and Swann’s attempt to write a pop hit.

Of this particular one, Flanders tells the audience, “We felt that really, on the whole, in this time of crisis and political conflict, what the world needed most was another simple happy chorus song, something which expressed the feelings of all the ordinary people all over the world, and in which everyone could join.” He then pronounces the song’s nearly unpronounceable refrain, and invites people to “join in, if you wish.” 9) “The Rhinoceros” Another reason that Flanders and Swann’s songs are great for children and adults: they expand your vocabulary, as in this song’s refrain, “the bodger on the bonce.” As a noun, “bodger” is “one who bodges; a botcher”; as an adjective, “bodger” is (in Australian slang) a term for “Inferior, worthless.” “Bonce” is a slang term for “head.” So, then, according to the lyric, the rhino has something botched on its head. (All definitions courtesy of the OED.) 10) “The Armadillo” Who knew that Armadillos had love songs? And with such plaintive melodies, too!

(The track begins, however, with an elephant joke — the previous song on the record is “The Elephant.”) 11) “Slow Train” An elegy for closed railway stations, this one is surprisingly poignant. As Flanders says in his introduction , Unusual song this for us, perhaps, because it’s really quite a serious song, and it was suggested by all those marvelous old local railway stations with their wonderful evocative names, all due to be, you know, axed and done away with one by one, and these are stations that we shall no longer be seeing when we aren’t able to travel anymore on the slow train. TheGawain provides more detail in this great post on Flanders and Swann . As he tells us, in 1963 Dr. Richard Beeching wrote a lengthy report on the profitability of British Railways (or lack thereof) and concluded that most of the rail network made no net contribution towards any profits that could potentially be made. He duly recommended removing about half of the route mileage and rather more than half the stations.

The Tories implemented the report with unusual haste for any Government; Labour largely opposed it up until the moment when they saw the overall profit/ loss account of the nation and duly decided to continue. This cross-party enthusiasm for Beeching left very little opportunity for the pro-rail remnants of the population to express any form of opposition except by attempting to prove “undue hardship” at closure inquiries. An examination of the railways which survived on this basis (prime examples include Middlesborough to Whitby, Inverness to Wick & Thurso and Kyle of Lochalsh, Glasgow to Mallaig and Plymouth to Gunnislake) show that in order to demonstrate that closing the local railway would cause undue hardship it was necessary to show that the area was devoid of alternative roads. As a result the minor rural dead loss railways going nowhere which deserved to be axed all survived, while the middling routes serving notable market towns found that the market towns were also served by roads, enabling easy closure of the railways. The Government then proceeded to spend vast amounts of public money building roads to replace these railways which needed closing down because the Government didn’t have any public money available to spend on keeping them running. That’s the context for this song.

For more, see TheGawain’s piece or this very thorough Wikipedia essay on the song . 12) “The Sloth” A comic ode to laziness. Yes, there are many other songs I could have included. Fans of Flanders and Swann will no doubt be asking: What about “Design for Living”? Where’s “A Song of the Weather”? And what about “A Song of Patriotic Prejudice”? Fair questions. I decided to limit myself to a dozen, but I concede that there may be a better twelve songs to introduce people to Flanders and Swann. A few songs have not aged as well — either because they’re topical, or because casual sexism or imperialism is (happily) no longer culturally acceptable. Remarkably, there are very few such songs. So, on the one hand, “The Reluctant Cannibal” suggests that people everywhere face the same problems, such rebellious children (who, in this case, “won’t eat people”) and parents baffled by their offspring. To their credit, Flanders and Swann also avoid pseudo-primitive dialect, singing in their usual accents.

On the other hand, the humor of this piece depends upon the difference between “civilized” society and the more primitive “Tropics” (they don’t provide a specific location where these cannibals reside). The song is not in the realm of, say, the first line of Cole Porter’s “Let’s Do It” (“Chinks do it, / Japs do it. / Up in Lapland, / Even little Laps do it”), but the piece hasn’t endured quite as well as their animal songs. Interested in learning more? I don’t think there’s an ideal Flanders and Swann “hits” collection. In any case, the live records include amusing spoken-word performances (mostly from Flanders), which would need to be either included or excised — in assembling this, I’ve mostly done the latter. You could use iTunes to create your own “hits” collection, and then (depending on your fondness for Flanders’ monologues) either retain or cut the spoken-word parts. In iTunes, you can do that under the “Options” setting of a song, by changing the start time and/or stop time.

Or, if you seek the full experience, then I recommend The Complete Flanders and Swann, which includes At the Drop of a Hat, At the Drop of Another Hat, The Bestiary of Flanders and Swann plus some bonus tracks, and a great booklet featuring illuminating notes and commentary by Charles Fox. I’ve just discovered there’s another collection with more music I’ve never heard — including many performances not in The Complete Flanders and Swann. Sadly, Hat-Trick: Flanders and Swann Collector’s Edition is out of print. Fortunately, Flanders and Swann’s many admirers have gathered lots more information for you to peruse: FTX 146 - SONGS OF OUR TIME & PLACE - Sydney Carter & Donald Swann FTX-146 - SONGS OF OUR TIME & PLACE - Sydney Carter & Donald Swann An evening concert of songs, poems and tunes composed and performed by Sydney Carter and Donald Swann in 1961. For Sydney this was before "Lord of the Dance" fame and before he found himself being described as a hymn-writer.

Donald had just lost his performing partner, Michael Flanders, and the two of them agreed to work together for a number of informal evenings in the London area. Each item is prefaced by an explanation and background to their compositions. THERE'S A BIRD ON MY HEAD - DOWN BELOW - THE BRITISH MUSEUM WALTZ (DS with piano) - PUTTING OUT THE DUSTBINS IN THE GRAYS INN ROAD - MARCH: COMING DOWN FROM ALDERMASTON - THE DEVIL - CRUCIFIXION BALLAD: FRIDAY MORNING - 3 SONGS WITHOUT WORDS - WILL SOMEBODY TELL ME HOW? Or THE RAT RACE - A MIXED UP OLD MAN - THE GIRL AT THE BRITISH COUNCIL or WHY YOU COME NO MORE? - WICKED LADY CHATTERLEY - GIRL IN A BIG HOTEL - SOCIALISM IN OUR TIME - I MET MY LOVE THE OTHER DAY - THE CROW ON THE CRADLE - AN INTERPLANETARY CAROL Donald Swann Discography at Discogs Donald Ibrahím Swann Profile: British composer, musician and entertainer (b.

30-Sept-1923 – d. 23-Mar-1994), best known for his partnership of writing and performing comic songs with Michael Flanders . For releases with Michael Flanders, please use Flanders & Swann . Only credit Flanders & Swann writing credits to this artist. Sites:

Question: Who was the performing partner of Donald Swann?
Answer: Michael Flanders