Ray Charles: What'd I Say

It's impossible now to listen to this without thinking of the film. I didn't mind the film, though in any biopic you can hear the creak of the timbers as the messy awkwardness of an individual life is remodelled to make it fit some Hollywood universal story. The other thing I mistrusted was how the 1950s and early '60s always look so clean and shiny in the movies, the same way they did in Who Framed Roger Rabbit — they weren't really, were they?

I originally got this in January 2003, a fiver from Fopp, inevitably. I expect I was thinking of Van singing "And then go home and listen to Ray sing I Believe to my Soul after school", as he did on Got to Go Back from No Guru… (for many years I thought that line meant that Van believed Ray was singing to his soul — and me with my expensive education, eh?). Anyway, I Believe to my Soul isn't on this album, just ten brisk songs in under 31 minutes, and then it's over.

Wikipedia says this is a live album. That can't be true, can it? Or were audiences and venues in the '50s cleaner, shinier and massively quieter?

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