101 RU New York, Russia
Country: Russia
Genres: Oldies, 60s
Find it on Reciva here
Website: www.101.ru/?an=channel_eng&channel=34179
- (Courtesy of Bobz’s flickrstream)
“Little glow worm turn the key on / You’re equipped with tail light neon.”
There’s something very reassuring about the lyrics to ‘Glow Worm’. A cursory listen and you think Johnny Mercer – and Lysistrata, the 1908 German operetta he’s borrowing from – is taking a nice simple metaphor (that girl I fancy is attracting me like a glow worm!) and he’s stretching it as far as it will humanly go. Via primeval forests and automobiles he goes, effortlessly, like a man in a zoot suit swooping across an ice rink in a black and white movie. But there is no metaphor. He really is singing about glow worms, adult laviform females of the species lampyris noctiluca, glowing away through a process called bioluminescence. Our protagonist likes this “little ol’ bug of lightnin’” cos it’s really amazing, a little flying thing that makes a little light for us all. It’s sweet and uncynical in the way that only showbusiness can seem to be.
This station offers nothing whatsoever except a big, gushing, star-spangled river of this kind of music, and only stuff recorded between 1950 and 1990: crooning, strings, brass, The Pink Panther, Sinatra, Manilow, Disney and stretched Limos containing billionares’ children, who insist on listening to Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer in the middle of July. It’s music from a more innocent time, one that probably never existed. It’s really quite enchanting.
