Friday 25 April 2008

Bailey's Mum


There is no doubt that one of the best things ever to come along for us Music Obsessives is YouTube. If you ignore the junk and the wannabes, it rekindles musical memories, allows re-appraisal of half forgotten acts, serves as a vast store of knowledge and is an invaluable aid to finding new undiscovered strands of the rock ‘n’ roll tapestry. But every now and again it gets up and bites you and shows you who is really in control and it ain’t anyone over 40.

Which leads me to Bailey’s Mum. Who? Well, exactly. It is an inevitably sad fact of life that the older you get the more you lose your own identity and become an appendage to someone else’s. This is one entry that I was presented with when I searched for Judie Tzuke on YouTube: Judie Tzuke (Bailey’s Mum).

Who or what is Bailey? I’m ashamed to say that my first thought was that it was a song title. It just shows you how wrong you can be when you don’t keep up. So, after a bit of research it transpires that she is Bailey Tzuke, Judie’s twenty-year-old daughter and she is currently following in her mother’s footsteps and launching her own career. To her followers she is, no doubt, the latest big thing and poor old Judie who has a 30 year career behind her and twenty-odd albums, is no longer an artist in her own right apparently, but merely her mum. Which just goes to show that YouTube, like most things in life, is in the frenzied grip of the young who, whilst having an encyclopaedic knowledge of technology and how to use it, have no knowledge of anything else. How long before Madonna is relegated to ‘Lourdes’ Mum’ or Ozzy Osbourne to ‘Kelly’s Dad’? This is the danger of pandering to the very young; they have no perspective and have a blinkered propensity to live for the day.

So just to set the record straight, Judie Tzuke (born Myers, but reclaimed her original Polish family name in the 1970s) is the possessor of a fine soprano voice and bothered the charts a bit in the early 1980s with the sublime ‘Stay With Me Till Dawn’ and produced a raft of excellent albums on a variety of labels. I own the first half dozen of them and would direct you to her debut ‘Welcome to the Cruise’ and number 4, ‘Shoot the Moon’ as the best of the crop.

Let’s hear it for mums!

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