Plus, both The Sex Pistols AND The Muppets are in the top 100.Ĥ. David Soul had a huge hit album with singles up and down the UK’s top 100 that I’d never heard of before. Elvis Presley had a collection of singles in the top 100. Country & Western singers have a presence on this 1977 list ( Kenny Rogers’ “Lucille” ranked highly at #14). Though I’m not offering these lists with any intentional connections to the themes or plot of BETRAYAL, Abba’s “Knowing Me, Knowing You” does seem apt at #1 for this year in connection with the events of the first two scenes of the play. Now, I am in no way a music expert - let alone an expert of 1970s music - so the lists and musings below are just a sample of my tangent-filled explorations, and frivolous impressions. Included below is a sampling of what I found, including top 5 lists and lots of YouTube links so you can hear (and see) the songs for yourself. It was a fun night of music exploration, and although I quickly nixed my original notion to purchase most of the top (or favorite) songs from each year (it was too expensive for too many songs), I did bookmark the website where I’d found the best, most accessible data about the UK singles charts. There are nine scenes in all, and they occur in each of these years, listed as they appear in the show in reverse order: 1977, 1975, 1974, 1973, 1971, and 1968
Pinter’s play follows a unique structure, beginning at the “end” of the story in 1977, and then jumping successively backwards chronologically, a year or two at a time, with each new scene. First I went searching for the rankings themselves, and then bounced back and forth from iTunes to YouTube seeking audio samples of the song titles I didn’t recognize. There would certainly be some overlap between the UK and US charts with plenty of familiar music, but there were bound to be new discoveries, and different titles topping off each year’s list. I felt some discovery exercises were in order. Then I recalled that the Top 40 music charts of the time were not the same in Great Britain as they were in the United States, and since the play is about Londoners who spend most of their time in and around London. I like to include music in my preparation work whenever it is reasonably applicable, and as BETRAYAL is set during the 1970s and late 60s, it seemed like a good excuse to remind myself of all the great popular music of the era. Early during the rehearsal process for our Lantern Theater production of Harold Pinter’s BETRAYAL, I spent one particular night falling into a fun click-hole of internet research.
0 kommentar(er)
