Happy Boxing Day to our Commonwealth listeners. Happy St Stephen's Day to our European listeners. And, to our American listeners, Happy First Friday After Thursday.
I think that about covers it. No matter the contrasting designations of officialdom, it is the second day of Christmastide. No doubt we will be back to the glum stuff from the hell of the headlines soon enough, but today we are still in semi-festive mode.
For our On the Town specials each holiday season, we offer extended editions of some of the show's regular features. You can hear our special Café Continental Christmas edition here - and tomorrow we'll have a seasonally extended Sinatra Sextet. Today we're offering a sampler from our Café Imperial, where the patrons prefer songs from our great Commonwealth family. So herewith a cavalcade of classics starting in Nova Scotia before moving to the warmer redoubts of Empire - from Jamaica to Malaya, Australia to Zanzibar, and concluding with what I call "Nigeria's biggest hit" - although that may have been superceded by this morning's USAF strike.
Along the way we'll hear bigtime stars from Roger Whittaker to Sade - and maybe a few you haven't heard of. Click above to enjoy.
While weekly listeners to On the Town might recall a couple of segments, if you're not a Mark Steyn Club member and you like what you hear, well, you can enjoy it every week simply by signing up here.
We hope you had a good Christmas. There's still time to catch up with our seasonal offerings at SteynOnline, including an all too topical airing of my Tale for Our Time, Plum Duff, and our friend Siân Phillips reading a more traditional favourite. Our Christmas Day cornucopia can be found here, and as always our marquee presentation was our annual Christmas Eve Lessons and Carols, with ancient scripture and brand new musical performances by members of the Steyn Show musical family. Thank you for all your kind comments. Rush's peerless parodist (and an honoured colleague of mine through the glory days of EIB) Paul Shanklin was among the listeners:
This was a great complement to our Christmas. Thank you Mark for the song selection and scripture.
Fantastic arrangements to songs we love very much.
Paul and Angie
Thank you, Paul and Angie, on behalf of all the musicians and especially Kevin Amos, who did a big bunch of those arrangements.
~Café Imperial is a special production for The Mark Steyn Club. For more on the Steyn Club, see here.
There's a whole cavalcade of musical delights over on our Netflix-style music home page, where you'll find easy-to-access live performances by everyone from Randy Bachman to Liza Minnelli; Mark's interviews with Chuck Berry, Leonard Bernstein and Bananarama (just to riffle through the Bs); and audio documentaries on P G Wodehouse's songs, Simon after Garfunkel, and much more. We'll be adding to the archive in the months ahead, but, even as it is, we hope you'll find the SteynOnline music home page a welcome respite from the woes of the world.
