William Claude Dukenfield (January 29, 1880 – December 25, 1946), better known as W. C. Fields, was an American comedian, actor, juggler and writer. Fields was known for his comic persona as a misanthropic and hard-drinking egotist who remained a sympathetic character despite his snarling contempt for dogs, children and women... (Read more at Wikipedia)
Interest in Fields (and other artists of his era) revived in the late 1960s, when Hollywood, already suffering from declining cinema attendance due to the rise of television, was trying to come to terms with 1960s pop music and youth culture. While Hollywood studios, stars and glossy '60s films seemed increasingly irrelevant to young people, television screenings of older films, especially those made before the highly restrictive Hays Code of censorship was introduced in 1934, created a curiosity about this less inhibited era of cinema. There were retrospective seasons on TV; music venues like UFO and the Fillmores East and West showed old films between musicians' sets, and repertory cinemas (like the Electric Cinema, Notting Hill Gate) which appealed to a young, hippyish audience also featured them regularly.
WC Fields on Sgt Pepper cover
Thus, artists such as the Marx Brothers, James Cagney, Greta Garbo and W.C. Fields became cult favourites, and Busby Berkeley musicals were admired for their surreal, extravagant sets, which struck some viewers as "psychedelic". Fields, an on-screen non-conformist who "did his own thing" in his way, was seen as an anti-establishment figure, attracted numerous references in pop culture and even appeared among the faces on the cover of the Beatles' "Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" LP.
Links to Peel[]
The works of W.C. Fields played an important role in cementing the friendship between John Peel and producer John Walters. As Walters told John Tobler in Zigzag 24 (1972):
When I first got onto Top Gear, Peely disliked me intensely - because to him I represented a form of cynicism and commercialism from the [Jimmy] Savile era (in his early days at Radio 1, Walters had for a short period produced the show "Savile's Travels")....But eventually we broke it down, had a couple of lunches together, and found that we had a lot more in common than we thought, because we tended to laugh at the same things.
I think the turning point came when I noticed that there was a W.C. Fields festival on at somewhere like the Baker St. Times Cinema, and he wasn't keen to go until I told him what was on; he'd been an admirer of W.C. Fields for years, and so we went. We went back to his flat for coffee, and we suddenly realised that we were concerned in some ways about the quality of the rock scene.....
For the label that later became Strange Fruit Records, Peel suggested the name Bank Dick, inspired by one of W.C. Fields' better-known films, but his idea was rejected because of the risk of ambiguous or obscene misinterpretations.
Festive Fifty Entries[]
- None.
Other Shows Played[]
- 26 December 1970: The Chicanery Of WC Fields (LP - The Original Voice Tracks From His Greatest Movies) Decca DL 79164
See Also[]
- Portrait Of The Artist As A Consumer
- The Bank Dick
- My Little Chickadee
- Disc & Music Echo: Peel Columns
- Sounds