(NOTE: CLICK ABOVE TO WATCH TODAY’S LINK ON YOUTUBE).

Yesterday’s clip featured the lovely 1934 recording of ‘The Very Thought Of You’ by the Ray Noble orchestra with vocal by Al Bowly. I gave you a little info on Bowly but didn’t expect to find any actual film of him. Well, imagine my grateful surprise when YouTube intervened this AM and steered me toward the above fascinating and incredibly obscure clip from 1933. It features Noble’s orchestra with Bowly singing a chorus of ‘Goodbye Sweetheart’ in what appears to be some sort of newsreel clip of the band, shot in Holland. I say this because Noble begins by thanking the people of Holland for hosting him and his band. Was it a newsreel for audiences in Holland? Or perhaps England, given that’s where the Noble orchestra was based? The film appears in neither Noble nor Bowly’s brief IMDB listings and is a real curio, worth three minutes of your time. Noble is terribly, terribly British. Bowly is the tall guy playing the guitar at center, behind Noble. He unexpectedly rises and sings, towering over the band. One can see the force and grandeur of his personality and why he became a true hero to the popular music crowds of pre-war England. By the way, the voice at the very end of the clip belongs to Oliver Hardy and is from ‘Sons Of The Desert’. It’s in the scene where Hardy lies to his wife about where he and Stan have been while the wives were out of town…(