Acoustic oboe and English horn, acoustic baroque pop!

Today the town looks like a graveyard In 1969 Kevin Ayers sang through this town feeling, a love song he made thanks to this beautiful oboe introduction. The oboe has been associated with nature for centuries and it was this imagination that the English group The Kinks had invoked a year earlier in 1968 with their title Village Green.

Roy Davies sings in the middle of a truly false baroque pastoral, juxtaposing city and countryside, urban noises and the silence of a village. There’s everything you need to be cliché: a sequence of chords that Vivaldi wouldn’t have refused, a harpsichord and a basso continuo interpreted by bassoon and, of course, a beautiful section for the oboe.

Another instrument also evokes shepherds’ music, the cor anglaise, an instrument closer to the oboe, with a less intense sound, a little more subdued, and accompanied by a verse from the American group’s hit Happy Together. Turtles, 8th best seller of 1967.

Happy Together was one of the best-selling singles of 1967, far ahead of The Left Bank and The Beatles’ Benny Lane, which called for a trumpet soloist, a genius idea by producer George Martin. of training. Anyway, Happy Together might remember 1966’s most depressing song, an amorous apocalypse: Sagittarius’s My World Fell Down and its heartbreaking countermelody, which could be a distant English horn.

Looks like the Gary Usher-signed arrangement of My World Fell Down required 37 hours of studio time! It’s long, very long but probably much shorter than the day after Bill Murray is stuck. Remember every awakening the actor has in Harold Ramis’s Groundhog Day. Every morning he wakes up to the sound of oboe.

No doubt you recognize Sonny and Cher’s 1965 hit I Got You Babe.