My Flame Is Just A Match . . + All By Yourself in the . . (1928) Debroy Somers with Bobby Sanders

MY FLAME IS JUST A MATCH FOR ME [0:00] ALL BY YOURSELF IN THE MOONLIGHT [2:53] Debroy Somers Band: Vocalist – Bobby Sanders (My Flame) – un-named duo (All By Yourself) Columbia 5144 (21 November 1928) An old Columbia at 78 rpm; I’ve yet to spot the logic behind some being at 80 and others at 78; and as ever there’s much vertical noise in the Columbia’s grooves, which the lateral movement of the stylus ignores when a mono-mix is made. The sound that one associates with the Debroy Somers Band is from records such as this, and I reckon the Columbia studio acoustic plays a large part. One 1929 newspaper reporter described the inside of one of Columbia’s studios in Petty France, Westminster, as ‘like a barn without hay’ with ‘two massive pillars’, a ‘thick grey carpet’ under the microphone, and ‘grey draped’ walls ‘decorated with mattresses’. The latter would account for the less than lively high frequency acoustic, giving the characteristic beefy sound to Somers’ recordings there. Just listen to how the cymbal sound dies at the end of ALL BY YOURSELF IN THE MOONLIGHT: it’s not a quick fade by me. Between the two labels in the image above is the Petty France building which Columbia vacated in 1932 in the move to HMV’s new studios behind 3 and 5 Abbey Road in St John’s Wood a year after the companies merged under their jointly-formed new holding-company EMI. (EMI did not ‘acquire’ them. It did not exist until they created it. See my article in Memory Lane, November 2016.) Vocalist Bobby Sanders appeared often in BBC radio listings in the 1920s and 30s as a ‘singer of light songs’; but such mentions end in 1938. Otherwise there’s little information available about him. Whilst not named, at least he got ‘Vocal Chorus’ and not the derisory ‘with incidental singing’ that Columbia also used on its labels. Rust credits Arthur Lange and Ray Noble as arrangers for this (and other) sessions. The brief use of the Tyneside folk tune ‘The Keel Row’ towards the end of ALL BY YOURSELF [5:34] possibly suggests Lange, who arranged many traditional tunes for modern bands (at that time). (An example is ‘Echoes of Ireland’ by the Savoy Orpheans on this channel.) It was Lange’s own band that banker Otto Hermann Kahn purchased in 1923 for his teenage son, Roger Wolfe Kahn.