WHO IS RANDY NEWMAN?
The name of Randy Newman kept cropping up in the interviews I wrote for Beat Instrumental. First of all it was Keith Reid who claimed that he was the best lyricist around and then it was Marc Bolan who was raving about a performance he’d seen at the Troubadour in Los Angeles. I thought I’d already got a pretty extensive knowledge of Mr. Newman so I didn’t really need to go to all the trouble of listening through his albums, I mean I knew where he was at. Hadn’t I, after all, listened to Simon Smith And The Amazing Dancing Bear? Didn’t I know that he was the man behind the creation of Mama Told Me Not To Come. Oh yes, I knew all about Randy Newman. It was when Randy Newman Live appeared for me to review that I began to sit up and realise just how much foresight Reid and Bolan had. Here was one guy with his piano who was captivating an audience and holding them there with the powers of communication usually restricted to the musical heavies. I suddenly found myself listening to the lyric
