Marina - Willy Alberti
A couple of weeks ago, in one of those twilight zone moments when I was channel fishing with the tv remote as my rod, I came up with André Rieu Live in Concert in Bahrain. Having lived the first eleven years of my life in Bahrain, I paused, fuelled by the same sentimental curiosity that makes me tune in to the Bahrain Grand Prix, the thought that I might see somewhere that I recognised from my youth. I continued to watch with a mixture of horror and pleasure as Rieu's orchestra - or should I say classical music circus -flamboyantly cavorted through number after number, horrified because the level of crass commercialisation in the musical presentation and delivery would have put the presenters of the naffist Eurovision Song Contest final to shame, pleasure because there before me were loads of examples of the friendly, smiling Bahrainis that I once knew and lived among. In my life I have met and got to know Arabs from most if not all of the Arab nations, my family later lived in Kuwait for a number of years, but none had that peculiar homely friendliness of the Bahrainis, a sort of shy yet outgoing warmth and innocence that made you welcome and set you at your ease.
And there it was. It is in the nature of films of Rieu's concerts with his Johan Strauss Orchestra, that there is much coverage of the audience enjoying the concerts, close-up after close-up of members of the audience having a good time. The smiles of the men and women in the packed amphitheatre were familiar to me, could have been the sons and daughters of people from my childhood, their enjoyment of the musical spectacle was infectious. I was mesmerised.
They played Puccini, the Strauss waltzes with dancers, "You'll Never Walk Alone" (clever that, as Mohamed Saleh played for Liverpool), the Radetzky March, the Macarena (!), two songs in Arabic by Faisal Al Ansari, a Bahraini popular singer, and lots else besides. Every time I moved to switch off, revolted by the crassness and tastelessness of the whole exercise, I was arrested by the sheer enjoyment of those Bahrainis. Finally, as it seemed to be finally winding up, as I was just about to switch it off, a middle-aged woman in blue started blowing on what I can only describe as a raucous salsa football whistle, and they launched into my father's favourite pop song "Marina". My mind, already in a confused emotional state, was well and truly blown.
Willy Alberti was the recording name of a very successful Dutch singer in the 1950's. Although he started by recording Dutch songs in Dutch, he eschewed his original name, Carel Verbrugge, for the Latinate Willy Alberti, and switched to Italian, in order to give the impression he was one of the many Italian singers such as Renato Carosone, Fred Buscaglione and Marino Marini that dominated European dance music in the early fifties. One of these singers was Rocco Granata who had a string of European hits, the biggest of which was the self-penned "Marina" of 1959 which reached number one in five countries (Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, West Germany and Norway). Upon hearing it, Willy Alberti immediately recorded his own version which also was a big hit across Europe, duplicating Granata's achievement in both the Netherlands and Belgian by reaching number one. The two versions are markedly different Granata's being in the languid and laconic Italianate style made famous in English by Dean Martin, while Alberti's is much more up-tempo and hard to resist tapping your foot to.
A KLM pilot on an Amsterdam / New York flight brought a copy of the Willy Alberti version thinking it would make him a hit in his US stayover parties (in those days breaks between flights were longer as the flight journeys themselves were longer) and a deejay at one of the parties was so impressed he bought it off him on the spot. The deejay played it on the radio, and such was the demand that both versions were released in the US within weeks, both making the Hot 100 Granata's reaching number 31, Alberti 42, in late 1959.
When I meet a woman whose name is featured in a hit song, and who looks the appropriate age for having been born around about the time of the hit in question, I always ask them "the question". For example: of women in their fifties called Claire, I ask them if their parents liked that awful piece of slop (the hit song "Claire") by Gilbert O'Sullivan, or of Lara's, if their folks had been in love with the movie Dr Zhivago. It may seem an obvious question, but usually the answer is "yes" and, more often than not, I'm the only person who has ever asked them this. It's a kind of "Mr Smoke-too-Much" scenario.
Whenever I've met a Marina, I've always drawn a blank when I've suggested their parents were fans of the Gerry Andresen tv puppet series "Sting Ray", but this snippet from Wikipedia suggests that perhaps I should have gone down a different route:
"The song "Marina" was so popular in Belgium and the Netherlands that many parents named their baby daughters Marina. In the Netherlands, the number of born Marina's rose from 156 in 1958 (before the hit song), to 190 and 250 in 1959 and 1960: an increase of 22% in 1959 and again 32% the next year.[5] In Italy, the number of born Marina's goes from 2984 in 1959 to 8294 in 1960, becoming the fifth most popular name in the country in that year."
My father and I did not see eye to eye on many things, and one of these was music. He didn't like the Elvis or the Beatles. He loathed the Rolling Stones, and was indifferent to Motown. The only "modern" track he ever enthused about, bizarrely, was "(If Paradise Is) Half as Nice" by the Amen Corner. I've no idea why, but he loved singing along with it. Apart from that, nothing post 1960 appealed to him. So Willy Alberti's "Marina" was as hot as he got. It was also the only "modern" single that he ever bought that I'm aware of, and I inherited his record collection.
The records were all from the twenty plus years when my father worked in Bahrain, where I was born and grew up until I was sent away to boarding school in the UK. Willy Alberti's "Marina" was played when my father was in a happy mood, perhaps after a can of Tuborg lager (only one mind - he never got drunk) when he'd make a footling attempt to dance with my mother, and would wiggle his ears for me and my friends' delight.
So my mixed feelings while watching the upper class Bahrainis dancing to the pop classics as rendered by André Rieu, my more recent, adult concerns about the political and social injustices of the tiny island state and my awareness of the very colonial style reality of my childhood existence there were undercut by this sudden, unexpected serendipitous moment of fun, and suddenly I was a little boy again, in our front room watching my parents dance, or singing along with my father as he drove us for a day at the beach at Zallaq. But why, why, why would Rieu be playing this tune, THIS PARTICULAR TUNE. sixty years later. Why? It has nothing to do with Bahrain, to my knowledge. It's as if it was just for me. Which it obviously wasn't.
Innocence is innocence, moments of happiness are just that, free from guilt, for that moment at least.
For reference, here's André Rieu and co: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pmGrefxccyI
and here's Rocco Granata's version: Rocco Granata - Marina (1959) - YouTube
Which one is best? (a) Willy Alberti (b) Rocco Granata or (c) André Rieu ?
(a) all the way. Surely. Answers on a postcard.......
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