Listen No. 18 - The Versatile Martin Denny

Record Number 18: The Versatile Martin Denny

Genre: Exotica, lounge music

Context:  A 1963 album by the ‘maestro of Tiki sound’

Notable facts: Denny’s music is most of the soundtrack to Breakfast of Champions (a film set in Hawaii).

 My favourite track: Sukiyaki aka I Look Up As I Walk

What critics made of it: Denny’s sound was very successful until rock ‘n’ roll came along. Later audiences enjoyed his albums as kitsch. He influenced many musicians, including the Yellow Magic Orchestra - a hugely popular electro band I’d never heard of - who reworked one of Denny’s songs -Firecracker. Although Firecracker isn’t on this album, comments in 2008 from the band’s bassist, Hossono, are worth including here -

“The thing was to take these Western ideas of the exotic, but to subvert them. With Martin Denny, the exotica is kind of fake. But I am real! I am the target of that Western exotica. So what I wanted to make was exotica from an oriental perspective.

And the industrial/punk band Throbbing Gristle dedicated one of their albums to Denny.

Listening to this inspired me to: lounge around. And investigate the Yellow Magic Orchestra