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    My Old Man: A Personal History of Music Hall
    My Old Man: A Personal History of Music Hall
    My Old Man: A Personal History of Music Hall
    Audiobook13 hours

    My Old Man: A Personal History of Music Hall

    Written by John Major

    Narrated by Sir John Major and Roy Hudd OBE

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    About this audiobook

    Former prime minister John Major takes a remarkable journey into his own unconventional family past to tell the richly colourful story of the British music hall

    Music hall was one of the glories of Victorian England. Sentimental, vulgar, class-conscious, but always patriotic and on the side of the underdog, it held a mirror to the audiences’ hopes and fears, and sometimes the general absurdity of life.

    Vast, smoke-filled auditoriums were packed night after night in nearly every town and city in Britain. The most popular performers, such as Marie Lloyd, Vesta Tilley and George Robey, were among the highest paid and most celebrated figures in the land.

    This was the world that John Major’s father Tom entered at the age of 21 as a comedian and singer. In My Old Man, the former prime minister uses his father’s story as a springboard for telling the entertaining history of the music hall, from its origins in Elizabethan times through to its heyday in the nineteenth century and eventual decline with the rise of radio and cinema in the twentieth century.

    Packed with colourful anecdotes about the great performers of the day, this warm-hearted history conjures up a lost age.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins Publishers
    Release dateOct 18, 2012
    ISBN9780007467679
    Author

    John Major

    Born in 1943, John Major was a member of Lambeth Borough Council 1968–71, then entered Parliament in 1979; he was PPS to Ministers of State at the Home Office 1981–83, an assistant Govt Whip 1983–4, a Govt Whip 1984–5, Minister for Social Security 1986–7, Chief Sec. to HM Treasury 1987–9; Foreign Secretary 1989, Chancellor 1989–90, and Prime Minister 1990–97.

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    Reviews for My Old Man

    4/5

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    • 2/5
      Audio quality is very bad. Very uncomfortable to listen to. Stroy sounds intersting though.
    • 4/5
      The subtitle of this book gives a very clear indication of the approach taken by John Major in this history. Major's parents were music hall stars (albeit in the twilight of that genre) who spent their whole working lives travelling the circuits. In an interesting and entertaining history of music hall Major revels in the stars and gives them all the same respect he feels for and believes is due to his own parents. He shows how big the big stars really were in Victorian times, how they conquered the world and how they appealed to and were loved by the lower layers of society (although not exclusively so). Music hall was live entertainment, driven by the immediacy and intimacy between the artiste and the audience. This makes it difficult to get a flavour of the top acts as even those few that were recorded sound stale and flat in the isolation of the recording studio. Not necessarily a rigorously academic history, this is nevertheless an entertaining tale and the heartfelt enthusiasm of the author comes through very strongly.