ome Scouse kid called Raymond Jones walks into a provincial record shop. He asks after a record on import, a 7” that was recorded in a Hamburg school hall by some ex-pat youngsters. The story ends with the making of musical history and ‘the world’—as far as ‘the world’ ever can—shaking in its wake. This story is one of those pat tragedies to which we’ve become so attracted.

A few generations later, some Merseyside kid called Jim Cassius walks into a provincial charity shop and finds “A Swingin’ Safari”. This is the record that contains the music on that insurance advert, the whistling and bouncing album title track. But the kid doesn’t know that at the time. He’s aware that he’d heard of it before and he’s aware that the front cover features a woman dressed in khaki in an all white studio, with tiger skins and assorted Afro ephemera scattered about the place. The guy who made this record was called Bert Kaempfert. He’d also produced that 7” Raymond Jones was after. He put it out in Germany when he was a staff producer and A&R man at Polydor. The 7” featured Tony Sheridan and The Beat Brothers. The Beat Brothers featured John, Paul, George and Pete. John and Paul gave a couple of their own songs for the recording. This was the first record they put out.

Kaempfert’s ashes were thrown into the water where the Everglades met the sea sometime after his death of a stroke in 1980. If he’d done nothing in his career other than record The Beatles’ first release, it’d do.

But it’s not. Sinatra covered his “Strangers In The Night” and Elvis got another hit with “Wooden Heart”. With “Spanish Eyes”, Bert resurrected Al Martino’s career, the guy who had the honour of making the first UK number one. It’s Bert’s own records that fascinate me, though. He swings with the best of them, stretching the big band sound into the sixties. But—partly because it was the sixties, partly because he’s German, partly because he’s a mind-blowing producer—he twists it and pulls out three minute pop songs full of that ‘modern beat’. The noise he gets from his guitars crackles and fizzes and sounds like Louis Armstrong singing through his trumpet. The songs jaunt along as if they didn’t realise they were forty years old and mimicking the styles of people born in the century before last. His clipped, taut basslines on, say “Livin’ It Up” are both 1940s and techno. Isaac Hayes was reputed to have phoned Bert after he covered “Shaft”. Like all falsely modest superstars, he said he liked the cover better than the original. Early seventies songs, like “Children of Peace”, are—no lie—David Axelrod. Some of his orchestral gushing has the common decency to be just plain bad.

Like something from a Vonnegut re-reading of Hamlet, Kaempfert formed his first band as a prisoner of war in Denmark. He’d been able to play piano since, at the age of six, his mother bought him one with the compensation she received after he was run over by a taxi. Ladi Geisler—aforementioned clipped, taut, bass player—was another prisoner of war. He was training to be a Messerschmidt pilot when the British captured and imprisoned him, not giving him the chance to kill or be killed. They say the mortality rate of young Messerschmidt pilots was almost 100% but Ladi spent his time in prison being taught the guitar by a fellow POW, years and miles away from Bert and Hamburg. It happened to have been Ladi’s amp that Tony Sheridan borrowed for those aged recordings.

After the war, again with accidental post-modern irony, Bert released things under the pseudonym Mark Bones and toured American airbases. Indeed, he contributed some of his tunes to Elvis’ G.I. Blues and moved to success and the USA soon after. The rest wasn’t history. Bert was an “…and His Orchestra” man. Despite playing up their ‘light entertainment’ credentials, Paul McCartney and the other Beat Brothers did away with his kind, erasing him from history and condemning him to a shallow irony and something called “exotica”. Surf around enough and you’ll find this quote of Kaempfert’s: “I want to make music for everyone. It must be enjoyed by all. Otherwise it is pointless.” Get cynical enough, and The Beatles seem to have killed popular music just as they invented it. With this article as almost conclusive proof, musical, canonical, journalistic fashion does no justice to Bert and his ilk.

But, whatever historical tragedy you see in his story, Bert himself seemed to realise it’s this disposable and enduring “youthfulness” that might be pop’s greatest legacy. Parping away, he’s using tricks that were old hat even when he did them. Yet they come across as if they knew that they were records based in a time before pop (a.k.a. Then), made in and for a time of pop (a.ka. Later On) to be limply ‘discovered’ in a time when whatever pop means is coyly redundant (a.k.a. Now). He seems to realise that he can turn people on to his sound with just a black and white photo of himself, leaning over a mixing desk, all suave and average. He seems to realise the benefits of finding him in every high street in every town, kindly asking for donations to some faceless charity doing sterling work with the disadvantaged. This is music orchestrating some other history of music, with a baton and a whistle and some antique, state of the art recording equipment. With a stroke of genius borrowed from The Beatles and the inevitable passing of time, Kaempfert has made the supremely droll, the supremely cutting edge. That is his legacy now.