G'day Greg,

Quite a lot of Bert Lloyd's songs came out on LP in Australia as early as the later 1950s, with local pressings by Wattle Records, presumably from the Topic masters. Much of this was re-released on CD by Warren Fahey's Larrikin Records, before it was bought up by Festival.

Quite a lot of his material uses the correct tunes, because the originals were identified by the Australian collectors ... and because he remembered quite a lot of it from his stint out here as a young bloke. The only problems were the more obscure songs, many of which had their own peculiar tunes ... or had greatly modified some American or British model. Where Bert didn't know anything of the tune, he felt quite happy to use something familiar out of the British stock ... just as he was doing with old British songs.

In this case he would have immediately identified Killaloo because he knew the music hall stuff inside out ... and the published transcriptions of the (simplified) sung versions would have been in the EFDSS library, since we had a reciprocal swap deal on their Sing anmd our Singabout magazines.

I do notice a few textual oddities in the Ian Campbell versions above ... but Bert also did a bit of editing ... as did collector /arranger /publishers, such as John Manifold, in Australia. Nobody was being as fussy as the university trained folklorists of today would have liked them to be!

Regards,

Bob Bolton