Drury Lane To Broadway/Rose Marie/One Alone/Make Believe/One Kiss/You Are My Heart’s Delight/Don’t Say Goodbye/A Girl Like Nina/I Won’t Dance/Glamorous Night/Between The Acts/Music In May/Rose Of England/My Love Is Like The River/People Will Say We’re In Love/Some Enchanted Evening/Getting To Know You/Fanny/I Could Have Danced All Night
The 101 Strings delivered the first double LP, and first wholly instrumental album, to top the UK album chart. Down Drury Lane To Memory Lane consists of orchestral cover versions of both older and contemporary hits. In answer to the final comment below, a combination of the glamorous couple on the cover, the classy associations implicit in the title and nostalgia for the music of their youth, would have appealed to the aspirant yet conformist middle classes with their new radiograms. (UK:1)
“I felt that I was listening to the ashen footsteps of ghosts. Out of all the albums to have topped the chart this seems to me the most singularly neglected and erased, perhaps the most sheerly deserted, of them all. Despite the florid sleeve note’s repeated rhetorical use of the word 'unforgettable' this music did not survive into the CD era.”
“What was the audience? Listening to the seeping sanitisation of Down Drury Lane it is hard to establish who those people were, the ones who kept the album at number one for five weeks and in the chart for 21 weeks in total. By some distance this is the first number one album which feels as though it belongs to a totally alien era; its neutralisation defies any attempt at track-by-track analysis.”