About the song "These Foolish Things" :
An article by Neil Armstrong DECEMBER 6 2021 from “Financial Times”
" Are there any more evocative lyrics in the popular songbook?
A cigarette that bears a lipstick’s traces, an airline ticket to romantic places, and still my heart has wings, these foolish things, remind me of you.
It’s clear we’re not talking here about a crumpled roll-up or an easyJet to Magaluf. In “These Foolish Things”, the singer is surrounded by reminders of a lost lover - “Oh how the ghost of you clings” - and enumerates them in a long list of vivid images such as “the sigh of midnight trains in empty stations” and “the waiters whistling as the last bar closes”. These are, insists the singer, “foolish” things - he is trying to make light of the enormity of his loss. But he’s not fooling anyone.
The lyrics were written in 1935 by BBC executive Eric Maschwitz, a fascinating figure who was, among other things, an Oscar-nominated screenwriter (for Goodbye, Mr Chips), editor of the Radio Times, and, during the second world war, a British intelligence operative.
In his 1957 memoir No Chip On My Shoulder, he recalled how one Sunday morning in his flat just off the Strand, still in his pyjamas and fuelled by coffee and vodka, he jotted down the words for a number intended for a young singer on the monthly revue he was in charge of as director of the BBC’s newly created “Variety” department. He used as the template Cole Porter’s “catalogue song” “You’re the Top” and quickly came up with a series of lines capturing “fleeting memories of young love”.
He phoned composer Jack Strachey and dictated the verses to him. By the evening, Strachey had come up with the wistful melody and they had a song. However, it attracted little attention until the following year when the singer-pianist Leslie “Hutch” Hutchinson found a copy of the manuscript in Maschwitz’s office and recorded the song. With his precise clipped diction, Hutch - who was a favourite among the aristocracy - sounds like an aristocrat himself. It was a huge hit, quickly became a standard and Maschwitz, who also wrote the lyrics to “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square”, was still making £1,000 a year from it in 1957.
However, he does not record whose lipstick traces were to be found on the cigarette. When he wrote those words, he was separated from his first wife, actress Hermione Gingold, but she lived in a flat in the same street as he did. Was she the owner of “A tinkling piano in the next apartment”? Certainly, she later suggested that she was the inspiration for the number.
But another claim came from journalist and actress Jean Ross. A friend of Christopher Isherwood’s and the basis for his character Sally Bowles in Goodbye to Berlin, played by Liza Minnelli in the film of Cabaret, Ross said the song commemorated an affair she’d had with Maschwitz. The lyricist’s memoir does not mention Ross at all - but perhaps that’s not surprising.
Singers of the song have often moved lines around or altered them. In 21-year-old Billie Holiday’s wonderfully rueful interpretation, recorded a few months after Hutch’s, she sings just a pained single verse while pianist Teddy Wilson and his orchestra provide an accompaniment so exquisitely insouciant it seems to melt into the air. It was one of poet Philip Larkin’s picks on the BBC’s Desert Island Discs. “I have always thought the words were a little pseudo-poetic but Billie here sings them with such passionate conviction that I think they really become poetry,” Larkin told the host, Roy Plomley.
Frank Sinatra had a version on his debut album in 1946. He sings of “the smile of Turner” - presumably Lana - rather than, as Maschwitz has it, “the smile of Garbo”. Sinatra recorded it again - sounding sadder and wiser - for his 1962 album Point of No Return. Bing Crosby’s 1955 rendering modestly leaves out the line from the original: “the song that Crosby sings”.
Nat “King” Cole, Ella Fitzgerald, Etta James, Sam Cooke - all the greats have sung it (even, but rather more forgettably, Bob Dylan), though perhaps the version people now are most familiar with is Bryan Ferry’s, on his 1973 debut solo LP. It’s the last song on the record and reportedly his favourite. His eccentric articulation makes it particularly memorable. Critic Robert Cushman in an essay in The Lives of the Great Songs suggests that “Ferry seems simultaneously to be commenting on traditional pop style and re-enacting it.”
Sarah Gabriel, a singer with an interest in early 20th-century music, regularly performs the song - last summer she sang it at Dartington Festival in Devon. She says: “It piques: these little pinpricks of nostalgia and pain and loss. It’s not mawkish or grandiose, even though it makes grand declarations. It’s the perfect balance of simplicity and sophistication.”