The Temperance Seven Music for Metro-Land / Music for Monitor (2-CD)

Formed in the mid-fifties, The Temperance Seven were at first part of the "trad jazz" scene that had flourished in post-war Britain. As the movement matured into the early 1960s, the group took a highly entertaining and for a time hugely successful left hand turn to have fun with the music of the ''20s and ''30''s, applying light-hearted art school attitudes involving period costumes and whimsical names; sending up the whole era with impeccable style and tremendous irony. Arguably the most singular group in the history of popular music, the Temperance Seven signed to Parlophone soon after their Argo debut and achieved the seemingly impossible when in 1961, their George Martin produced single disc ''You're Driving Me Crazy'' soared to No.1 on the UK chart. The edition is adorned by sensuous music from the Elgar programme and from Ken Russell's subsequent features for Monitor and Omnibus on the troubled Pre-Raphelite poet and painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the irrepressible dancer Isadora Duncan, The Debussy Film, with Oliver Reed a cauldron of brooding intensity as the French composer, and the spellbinding Song of Summer, a film about the the last years of Frederick Delius, a remarkable and moving story told from the perspective of his amanuensis, Eric Fenby.