Listen up, Humphries is in the groove

AN unlikely convergence of circumstances saw a young Barry Humphries encounter an extraordinary range of music.

Barry Humphries

AN unlikely convergence of circumstances saw a young Barry Humphries encounter an extraordinary range of music, large tracts of it quickly hard-wired in to his remarkable brain.

As a child he would listen to popular music broadcasts on the radio -- "the wireless", he calls it to this day -- echoing an era when sounds came from an elegant box on the mantelpiece to which, magically, not a single cable ran.

"Most of the people of my generation spent their youth listening to the wireless," he said, explaining that often it was for long periods.

"Every time you were sick -- and that was measles, whooping cough, German measles, mumps, the whole lot, scarlet fever -- you'd be at home listening to the radio."

He would also play the family's shellac 78s.

"I had a cousin, John Gatliff . . . his father provided him with a very good gramophone, as we called it, and he used to play his records, and I would listen to a wide range of music," Humphries said.

"And even when we had a house in Healesville, in the bush, in the early years of the second war, we would play music, often on a portable gramophone. To hear the sound of Richard Tauber echoing amongst the gum trees was a strange experience."

The Austrian tenor was a star back then and for Humphries -- who was born in 1934 -- it is the music of that time that so often busies his 79-year-old neurons to this day.

Although Humphries' interest in, and vast knowledge of, music ranges well beyond that oddly optimistic decade between the wars, the commonly light-hearted, sometimes quirky hits of those days draw him back regularly to mine them for songs to take their place on his So Rare collections.

These are compiled with legendary music producer Bill Armstrong on CDs so cleverly restored and engineered that experts are often astounded the original source was a 78, the age of which was about that, too. Volume Four of the series is out now.

Songs on it include I'm in the Mood For Love, a very early version of the later doo wop hit Blue Moon, and now forgotten interpretations of Deep Purple, Red Sails in the Sunset and Stardust.

Among the singers are a 17-year-old Vera Lynn, whom Humphries has met ("And she's still with us!"), a young Dinah Shore ("a serious craftswoman"), the legendary Hildegarde ("I rather like them, the people who play and sing") and the exotic bisexual philanderer Hutch (Leslie Hutchinson, who "led a colourful, sometimes reprehensible life. He could sing, and he travelled with his own Steinway piano").

Armstrong explained the So Rare project began in the late 1990s after he sent a copy to Humphries of an album he had compiled, Pete Smith Specialties, a set of British dance band numbers from the 1930s.

"Knowing Barry loved that sort of music, I sent a copy over to him in America," Armstrong said.

"The fact that you could achieve such a cleaned-up sound like that was the genesis of it."

This followed a breakthrough by researchers at Cambridge University.

Their Cedar system revolutionised the restoration of old sound recordings. The digital clean-up is a relatively straightforward process. A 78 is placed on a turntable and a needle lowered on to it.

Before any music starts there is surface noise -- sometimes quite a lot. That is recorded and the program then seeks to eliminate precisely those sounds.

These days Humphries plays CDs, but "there's a point in the music where I arise from my seat, and that was when I walked across the room to turn over the record".