Ivor Raymonde, musician and producer, worked with Dusty Springfield and loads of other legendary musicians. His son, Simon Raymonde, was a member of the Cocteau Twins, and founder of the Bella Union label. The label has released a second collection of Ivor Raymonde's best work, and Odyssey: The Sound of Ivor Raymonde, Vol. II, serves up a few dozen pop songs from an era when a well-produced and arranged single could be like a mini-symphony.
"Little by Little", the Dusty Springfield classic, has real heft to it, enough that it's one of the singer's better standalone singles from the era, while Alan Price (of The Animals) renders Randy Newman's "Simon Smith and His Amazing Dancing Bear" with far more charm than the composer could have envisioned. Elsewhere, "Loo-De-Loo" featuring Ivor Raymonde on vocals this time, is a perfect example of the kind of pre-Beatles fluff that once filled up the pop charts. That's not to say that it's not delightful, but that it is thoroughly a product of its era, as is "Tower of Strength" by Frankie Vaughan. The vocalist's delivery is a bit bombastic, but the tune is expertly arranged, brash and still remarkably precise even as strings and drums crash all through it.
The best tracks on Odyssey: The Sound of Ivor Raymonde, Vol. II are the ones which stray farthest from the mainstream. "Thursday Morning" from Giles, Giles and Fripp is elegant and lovely, a precursor of the kind of material Fripp would end up making in King Crimson, while "Where's the Girl", a 1966 number from The Walker Brothers, is pop, but it's also the kind of symphonic balladry that Scott Walker would wind up releasing on his own as a solo artist. The strings here are divine, and the entire arrangement is complex, lovely, and hypnotic. Still, for all the cool stuff here, I'm partial to "Michael Hannah" by Twinkle. The 1971 single, unreleased for years, is out there in the best possible way, a holdover from the Swingin' Sixties, and the kind of thing that's uniquely British in its pop sense.
Ivor Raymonde's style as a producer and arranger was strong enough that these 25 tunes don't really sound like one another, though one could say that a unifying style is the reliance on strings, or brass arrangements. Alternately lush and brash, all of these cuts are marvelous reminders of just how spectacularly diverse and odd the pop charts could be in earlier eras. Odyssey: The Sound of Ivor Raymonde, Vol. II is not so much a time capsule of a decade or so in pop, but a set of diverse singles put together to further illustrate the talents of Ivor Raymonde as a producer and arranger.
Odyssey: The Sound of Ivor Raymonde, Vol. II is out now via Bella Union.