Vera Lynn Classic or Dud

I was amazed to find out she's still alive - she cropped up in the news just recently to comment on something or other.

we'll meet again

Some sunny day

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http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/dc/Something_About_the_Way_You_Look_Tonight_%26_Candle_in_the_Wind_1997.jpg

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she is immortal

Apropos, sort of, just saw Noises Off and there is funny joke about someone being like Myra Hess playing through an air raid.

Happy 100th birthday, Vera. Can we find at least one actual classic she's made? My grandfather, a traveling entertainer who was conscripted, suffered from shell shock and was an itinerant worker who suffered flashbacks for the rest of his life - he used to say that "everyone hated her" but clearly he wasn't really speaking for "everyone" really.

My grandmother hated her as well. I can remember her saying "sweet-heart of the forces? more like a common old knocker!".

I can confirm, from my grandparents via my mother, that no-one rated her.

*illusions shattered*

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/564x/05/a5/e6/05a5e69c4c7fdcec0f3bd5aba64acb4c.jpg

there will never be another Dame quite like Vera Lynn!

(who is still very much alive and well at age 100.5 😎)

DAME Vera Lynn [...] has been accused of “dancing on the graves” of war heroes.

gutted

Ray Vonn
1st March 6:31 am

Vera didn't entertain the troops, keeping their spirits up in testing times just so developers and smarmy Estate agents will come along years later and buy her old gaff up to flatten it and line their own sticky pockets, she will be 101 this month too, she won't be happy.

just

fyi

she's

still

alive

(and mad as hell that she can no longer watch the BBC for free)

I really hope I didn't alarm anyone with this revive, as I know she has a substantial following on this board

hers is the best version of A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square.

B-b-but what about Jane Birkin's mom?

stiff upper lip and chive on, advises great-grand-dame Vera Lynn amidst pandemic panic

someday I'm gonna properly listen to her music and it's gonna be mindblowing and I'm gonna regret all these pointless revives

She's inescapable today. Anyone would think that she was the only entertainer during WWII, and We'll Meet Again was her only song.

How did this come to be?

Mike Hanley mentioned "Shine on harvest moon?" when he started this thread, but that was 19 years ago.

omg she's 103, she'll outlive us all won't she

only the purest of evil could live so long imo. I like the Ben Webster/Coleman Hawkins version of harvest moon which is a Bayes/Norworth joint and I think there would be many more famous versions of it than hers in the mid 20th century.

Blimey, she's still alive?

Very much so and you've done a better job of avoiding mainstream media today than me, Matt. There can be only one older living famous person in the Anglosphere and that's Olivia de Havilland.

going on the doorstep at 9 tonight to shout "ANYBODY GOT ANY VERAS?"

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My grandad always said everyone hated Vera Lynn.

This seems to have been something of a open secret that I only learned through ILX.

what about everybody hating Vera Lynn?

My partner's mum was from that era and used to say scornfully "sweetheart of the forces? silly old knocker!"

I can't remember what context it was said in, it might have been because she was on Songs Of Praise or something!

she strikes me as somebody who looked like an establishment shill even at the time

this was in an era when people clearly despised the Conservative party. Maissky said in his dairies when he made an ad hoc address to some working class Londoners sheltering in a tube station they belted out a rendition of The Internationale to pay tribute to him. Communism was still respectable to many of the chattering classes as well. I don't think the lumpen masses liked establishment shills back then.

not in the same lame manner they seem to absolutely fucking love them now, anyways!

too beered up to research now but no real showbiz career outside of that song, just an empty propaganda puppet basically

My grandad always said everyone hated Vera Lynn.

My mum wasn't a teenager until after the war, but her generation had zero interest in any UK entertainers or entertainment, it had to be American or nothing. Vera Lynn? Forget it.

I'm just remembering another reason I hate that song. It was mockingly sung by a load of bluenose bastards last day of the season '01 when Trevor Francis managed them and they relegated Town

cunt team, cunt manager

Vera Lynn is why skiffle had to happen

For a time I was in the backing band for a Vera Lynn tribute act who played at the Canadian Legions on Rememberance Day etc. We'll Meet Again is a drag - her worst song- but her broader repertoire had good songs in it imo. Or at least they were fun to play. During her career the song she was most associated with was not WMA, but "Yours" btw. I don't much like her voice though.

Good pub quiz trivia is she was first British act to reach #1 in the US.

The only other Vera track I know is her only UK #1 "My Son My Son" - it is about as bad as We'll Meet Again, not unpleasant to listen to, but infested with a malignant 1950s UK torpor.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8BTeKk36-Ys

Of all the surprisingly good LPs I own, "Vera Lynn In Nashville" is perhaps not the most good but is perhaps the most surprisingly good.

BREAKING: Entertainer Dame Vera Lynn, who lived in Ditchling, has died at the age of 103, her family have said.

— BBC Radio Sussex (@BBCSussex) June 18, 2020

Will maintain my position that she was generally a dreary presence in the audio world, however I'm currently listening to recordings from the mid 30s and it turns out she could be a pretty decent guest singer with British dance bands before she went solo.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOFH0FdIsoA

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Back in the news! Dame #VeraLynn up for 2 Classic @BRITAwards & Dave Brock of @HawkwindHQ - playing Camden @RoundhouseLDN as part of @DesertFest this Sunday - together here at an anti-heroin concert in Crystal Palace, 1985. @thetimes pic.twitter.com/OKGJR3AGxg

— News UK Archives (@NewsUKArchives) May 2, 2018

haha Ditchling!