Birthdays On The Tube

The first in a new series that celebrates musicians born this week:

31 October 1896: Ethel Waters sings "Am I Blue" from the 1929 film On with the Show, actually the first sound film with colour, although only black and white copies have survived (click below, and then click on the link to YouTube).

26 October 1951: Bootsy Colllins, the funkiest man alive, gives a brief lesson on how to play funk bass.

25 October 1825: Johann Strauss's Blue Danube Waltz has been used for multiple purposes, including as an aid to the perfect golf swing, but never more beautifully than in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, even if with the passage of time, the space sets seem a bit Airfix.

31 October 1965: Annabella Lwin, the lead singer of Bow Wow Wow, in a response to an earlier panic about music piracy, when record companies - in a more innocent time - thought that cassettes were "killing music". This 1980 song with Burundi beat rhythms was a provocation by their then manager Malcolm McLaren.

29 October 1956: Stephen Luscombe was half of the wonderful synth duo Blancmange (and later of the groundbreaking West India Company). Their version of "The Day Before You Came" is the best Abba cover ever recorded.

26 October 1965: Aaron Kwok is one of Hong Kong's biggest stars. The media there talk of him and Jacky Cheung, Andy Lau and Leon Lai as the Cantopop Four Heavenly Kings (四大天王). Here he sings and acts in the kung fu fantasy Storm Riders - a movie whose sequel is due shortly: