Alan Breeze on:
[Wikipedia]
[Google]
[Amazon]
Alan Louis Breeze (9 October 1909 – 15 January 1980) was an English
singer
Singing is the act of creating musical sounds with the voice. A person who sings is called a singer, artist or vocalist (in jazz and/or popular music). Singers perform music (arias, recitatives, songs, etc.) that can be sung with or without ...
of the
British dance band
British dance band is a genre of popular jazz and dance music that developed in British dance halls and hotel ballrooms during the 1920s and 1930s, often called a Golden Age of British music, prior to the Second World War.
Thousands of miles aw ...
era and regular entertainer on the post-war
BBC #REDIRECT BBC #REDIRECT BBC
Here i going to introduce about the best teacher of my life b BALAJI sir. He is the precious gift that I got befor 2yrs . How has helped and thought all the concept and made my success in the 10th board exam. ...
...
radio programme the
Billy Cotton Band Show
The ''Billy Cotton Band Show'' was a Sunday lunchtime radio programme broadcast in the BBC Light Programme from 1949 until 1968.
The band leader, Billy Cotton, was a larger-than-life Cockney character who started each show with the cry "Wakey-Wa ...
.
He was born in
West Ham
West Ham is an area in East London, located east of Charing Cross in the west of the modern London Borough of Newham.
The area, which lies immediately to the north of the River Thames and east of the River Lea, was originally an ancien ...
,
London
London is the capital and largest city of England and the United Kingdom, with a population of just under 9 million. It stands on the River Thames in south-east England at the head of a estuary down to the North Sea, and has been a majo ...
, to Louis Breeze, a concert and oratorio singer and a member of the
D'Oyly Carte Opera Company
The D'Oyly Carte Opera Company is a professional British light opera company that, from the 1870s until 1982, staged Gilbert and Sullivan's Savoy operas nearly year-round in the UK and sometimes toured in Europe, North America and elsewhere. Th ...
, and his wife Isobel, who taught with the old
London County Council
London County Council (LCC) was the principal local government body for the County of London throughout its existence from 1889 to 1965, and the first London-wide general municipal authority to be directly elected. It covered the area today kno ...
.
At the beginning of his career, Breeze sang in
working men's club
Working men's clubs are British private social clubs first created in the 19th century in industrial areas, particularly the North of England, Midlands, Scotland and South Wales Valleys, to provide recreation and education for working class me ...
s, restaurants and even theatre queues. He produced some 78 recordings, for example from his later repertoire: "
I've Got a Lovely Bunch of Coconuts "I've Got a Lovely Bunch of Coconuts" is a novelty song composed in 1944 (as "I've Got a Lovely Bunch of Cocoanuts") by Fred Heatherton, a songwriting pseudonym for a collaboration of English songwriters Harold Elton Box (1903–1981) and Desmond Co ...
". He produced recordings at film studios for actors who could not sing. He met the band leader
Billy Cotton
William Edward Cotton (6 May 1899 – 25 March 1969) as Billy Cotton was an English band leader and entertainer, one of the few whose orchestras survived the British dance band era. Cotton is now mainly remembered as a 1950s and 1960s radio a ...
, who was to change his career forever.
Breeze started with Billy Cotton in 1932, without a contract, and stayed for 36 years. He became one of the most popular UK vocalists, on radio, television and in theatres around the United Kingdom. His
recordings are still occasionally heard on the
radio
Radio is the technology of signaling and communicating using radio waves. Radio waves are electromagnetic waves of frequency between 30 hertz (Hz) and 300 gigahertz (GHz). They are generated by an electronic device called a transmit ...
.
Alan Breeze died 15 January 1980 in
Norwich
Norwich () is a cathedral city and district of Norfolk, England, of which it is the county town. Norwich is by the River Wensum, about north-east of London, north of Ipswich and east of Peterborough. As the seat of the See of Norwich, with ...
aged 70.
References
External links
*
Official Alan Breeze website
1909 births
1980 deaths
English male singers
Billy Cotton Band Show
20th-century English singers
20th-century British male singers
{{UK-singer-stub