Strange, half-forgotten music memory of the day: I just remembered an email I read five or six years ago on the exotica list. Unfortunately the archives are not searchable, so I can’t trace the mail. Or maybe I imagined it. Anyway, it concerns a version of Grieg’s ‘In the hall of the mountain king’ by Jerry Murad’s Harmonicats. This was apparently called ‘In the hall of the Mountain cha cha cha’, and intrigued me at the time. It has since dropped back into my head, and I’ll be looking out for it. That said, it’s not completely clear what album it’s on. It *could* be on ‘Harmonicha-Cha-Cha’ (Mercury MG 20391), but there’s no track listing anywhere. That sounds like a fun album anyway, so I’ll look out for it.

The whole thought of a cha cha version of ‘mountain king’ (which I first heard via ELO’s version when my elder brother played it to me aged 7 or so) is very cool to me. Kind of like what Caterina Valente and Edmundo Ros did to Miserlou.