Nostalgia, as the joke goes, is not what it was. I spent most of Sunday morning listening to old time Music Hall records - not the first time some of these would have been heard in London E2 I’ll warrant. And needing to go to the shops anyway, I strolled up to where I was led to believe Bethnal Green’s Foresters Music Hall had been, but there wasn’t really much to see there anymore. Of course not.

For some reason I struggle to understand that previous eras could be nostalgic for their pasts in the same way as we are, but that’s stupid - in the 1950s the Music Halls would be packed with people singing along to the very same songs I was listening to preserved on scratchy 78’s from the twenties and thirties, almost equally disconnected from their life and times. And what songs they are! To name but two I particularly enjoyed - Leslie Sarony’s ‘Ain’t It Grand To Be Bloomin’ Well Dead’ is a curious concoction; the narrator cheerfully imagines his funeral, obviously without any aitches : “Look at the flowers, bloomin’ great orchids, look at the corfin, bloomin’ great ‘andles - ain’t it grand, to be bloomin’ well dead!” The way Sarony sings “grand” with a distinct emphasis on the “a” seems to crystallise an entire era in one syllable. And sounding very contemporary today is Lily Morris’ ‘Don’t Have Any More, Missis Moore’ - warning against binge drinking and unprotected sex no less, with the prescient advice “Double gins give the ladies double chins”. Great fun.

I suppose this stuff has a resonance for me as my parents used to sing some of these songs around the old joanna when I was a child, though I’m not actually in my seventies, despite the impression this might give. Amongst many, I remember ‘Loves Old Sweet Song’ - a genuine Victorian ballad as opposed to some of these later songs and in particular, the awesomely lachrymose ‘Ticket To Heaven’ - I can’t find the lyrics on the interwebs, sadly but can try and sum this masterpiece up: man is knocked over while working on the railway and thought dead. His child (perhaps bringing him lunch) arrives on the scene to hear that poor Bill (I think it was Bill) has gone to heaven and proceeds to the ticket office and the tremendous chorus arrives:

Give me a ticket to Heaven, please.
That’s where Dad’s gone, they say.
He’ll be so lonely without me
Travelling all that way.
My mother died when I was born, Sir.
And left Dad and me all alone.
So give me a ticket to Heaven, please,
Before the last train has gone.

Amazing. And before you can barely read on through your tears, I can point out that in the final verse it is revealed that “though injured, he has not been killed” and father and child are reunited. The Victorians and Edwardians just loved this kind of sentimental stuff, bless ‘em.

There are also a couple of recordings by comedian George Robey on the record I was listening to - the so called Prime Minister of Mirth. And waxing nostalgic, the Sir George Robey (named after him) was a horrible pub in Finsbury Park which held dub nights when I was a teenager (the Proustian aroma of these events is not similar to the smell of Madelines) and years later - when the place was briefly run by the folks who owned Hoxton Square’s the Blue Note club - I remember playing records there and literally emptying a room full of people with the Art Ensemble of Chicago’s ‘Theme De Yo Yo’. Should have stuck to the man himself.

Anyway… I know that there is another popularity contest going on in the US at the moment (I write this on ‘Super Tuesday’) but the return of American Idol is obviously good news, even though it’ll struggle to beat some of last year’s contestants: beatboxing pixie-boy Blake, no necked and strangely sex-less belter Melinda Doolittle and of course, pony-hawked Sanjaya - should have put when he made that girl cry as one of my highlights of the year. It’s only once they go to Hollywood (”baby!”) that it gets interesting so I still have a few weeks to persuade my colleague Nik Dowlet to write an American Idol blog for the site. Here’s looking forward to that, dawg.

More next week.