I know there's a lot of Tom Lehrer fans on the Mudcat and many of his songs in the DT. This from today's London Times.

Tom Lehrer At A Record Store Near You: The Remains of Tom Lehrer, long-awaited boxed set of the entire known oeuvre of this seminal but evasive American satirist, including previously unheard tracks, interview, photos and sleeve notes by co-producer Dr Demento. Rhino Records, £31.99.

The Verdict: Depraved, madcap, offensive, tasteless, brilliant, amazingly funny, the best and blackest - according to his fans.

Style: Insinuating light tenor with cackling piano.

The Music: Pastiches of classic styles - Irish folk song, cowboy ballad, Dixie melody, rah-rah school anthem, patriotic marching song, waltz, tango, rag, plus Sir Arthur Sullivan's major-general melody applied to The Elements (sic).

The Words: Clever, outrageous and ruthlessly rhymed lyrics broadly classifiable under three themes - all-American iconoclasm (boy scouts, cowboys, the army, aficionados of the NRA); 20th-century liberal angst (Freudian theory, nuclear holocaust, academic plagiarism); and surrealism (Poisoning Pigeons in the Park, I Hold Your Hand In Mine). Plus the periodic table of chemical elements employed in The Elements.

The Sub-Text: Abundant in-jokes and erudite allusions which are most accessible to those well up in nuclear physics.

First Waxing: Songs by Tom Lehrer, a 22-minute 10in record cut for $15 in 1953 by a recording studio. The artist, then a postgraduate student in Harvard's doctoral programme who performed his songs mostly at private functions, picked the studio out of the Yellow Pages. Initial pressing of 300 copies sold out from campus shops and local record stores. Re-recorded as a 12in, and the rest is history.

Followed By: An Evening Wasted with Tom Lehrer followed in 1959, after two years of clubs and concert appearances in America and the artist's National Service in the army. Lehrer then officially retired from live performance.

Influences: The Marx Brothers, particularly evident in Lydia the Tattooed Lady; Michael Flanders and Donald Swann; Stephen Sondheim, fellow New Yorker who Lehrer met at summer camp when he was 10 and Sondheim merely 8.

Stage Revival: Tomfoolery, stage show produced by Cameron Mackintosh in London in 1980, toured the world before transferring to Broadway.

The Day Job: Professor of Mathematics who also taught Musical Theatre at Harvard, Wellesley, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Now 72, still teaching at the University of California at Santa Cruz. "I hope to use the subjunctive until the end."

Media-Phobic: "I don't do television - it's an invasion of privacy."

Check Out: Too Many Songs, the collected lyrics of Tom Lehrer illustrated by Ronald Searle, Methuen, £12.99.

CELIA BRAYFIELD

RtS