This album reminds me of how much I miss Mark Lamarr's radio programme. I used to get a weekly hit of music like this, mixed in with some old reggae, country and soul, but now I have to reply on my own resources — like these two CDs — to hear it.
And these CDs themselves mark the end of a phase of my music buying, the insufficiently discriminating purchase of oldies-sold-in-bulk. The record label is currently offering For One Night Only for £5.99 as a download, but I'm confident that, on New Year's Day 2005, I paid less than that for the 46 tracks and two and a quarter hours of music on CD. I've picked up some turkeys that way.
Happily For One Night Only isn't one of those. It's a decent Lamarr-substitute in fact. Even down to the neat little conceit of having one CD of men and one of women. In the first half of the 20th century, female blues singers "easily matched the men in popularity", the sleeve notes claim — though not in numbers, evidently, as several of the women are represented by two tracks, whereas the men get only one.
| Completely misleading metadata about this album at Last.fm |
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