We are in the middle of the Atlantic, sailing from New York to England. Aboard the SS American is a mismatched microcosm of high and low society engaged in romantic complications that would fox Jeeves.
One woman, a nightclub singer named Reno Sweeney, sees a way out. She steps up on deck and starts to sing. “Times have changed/ And we’ve often rewound the clock/ Since the Puritans got a shock/ When they landed on Plymouth Rock.” The melody is portentous; if Puritans liked music, this is the sort they would like. Then the tempo turns sprightly. “In olden days a glimpse of stocking/ Was looked on as something shocking/ But now, God knows . . . ”
Sweeney is concluding the first act of the musical Anything Goes with its title song. In the middle of the Great Depression, Cole Porter had worked up the show with a book by PG Wodehouse and Guy Bolton that was then hastily and heavily reworked by Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse (who would go on to write the dialogue of, among others, The Sound of Music).
The 1934 musical, one of Porter’s best-loved, is stuffed with memorable songs (“I Get a Kick Out of You”, “You’re the Top”), but “Anything Goes” — first performed on stage by Ethel Merman as Sweeney — is particularly enduring.
Partly this is because of the way the words tumble around the melody as if teetering on chaos that can only be resolved by the title phrase; and partly because of the fun Porter has with rhyme schemes. There are the increasingly ambitious rhymes with “goes” — “God knows”, “writing prose”; “nudist parties in studios”. There are the ostinato repeats — the hammered ascending hexacolon of “today”s in “The world has gone mad today/ And good’s bad today/ And black’s white today/ And day’s night today/ And that gent today/ You gave a cent today” — culminating in the ingenious “once had several châteaux”. And there are the additional internal rhymes within the same lines: mad/bad, white/night, gent/cent and so on. The ostensible condemnation of moral laxity in the words is undermined by exuberant delight.
Porter’s own recording of the song is clipped, dispensing its delights with the precision of a watchmaker. Subsequent standalone readings have tended to drop the specific social digs in the later verses — who now really wants to hear about the incomprehensible actress Anna Sten, or the acrobatic socialite Lady Mendl, or even a minor corruption scandal involving Eleanor Roosevelt?
Frank Sinatra, on Songs for Swingin’ Lovers!, comes in at “In olden days” and emphasises the swing. “Although I’m not a great romancer,” he murmurs, as if sitting in a bar rather than commanding the promenade deck of a liner. When he sings “most guys today that women prize today” — again, the extra internal rhyme — “are just silly gigolos”, Nelson Riddle throws in some gigolo-friendly brass stabs.
Ella Fitzgerald returned to the song over and over again: down-tempo in 1956; with a louche instrumentation from Riddle in 1972. She caught Porter’s spirit best when performing it live with small groups, as with piano, bass and drums in Paris in the early 1960s.
The most conspicuous contemporary takes come from Tony Bennett and Lady Gaga, who trade the lines, and from Scottish-American actor John Barrowman, who performed in the show in London’s West End. His recorded take, like Sinatra’s, starts late and swings heavily. The perfect opening of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom is set in a Shanghai nightclub in 1935, just after Porter’s musical opened: in a riot of tap-dancing chorines and red-curtained mazes, like a collaboration between Busby Berkeley and Sigmund Freud, Kate Capshaw belts out the song in Mandarin.
Although most interpretations ditch the topical satire, some update it. Joe Keenan, in a commission for Public Radio International’s Studio 360 in 2013, dragged the song into the new century. “When dames as dim as Kim Kardashian/Triumph by acting trashy in tawdry shows . . . ”
Four years later, with more and worse follies to tackle, he updated it again: “When football stars of every colour/ Are praying for Robert Mueller to end their woes . . . When Harvey Weinstein’s not refuting/ That women have seen him shooting much more than shows/ Anything goes!” Delight and disgust, always so closely intertwined.
Whose version of ‘Anything Goes’ is the finest? Let us know in the comments below.
‘The Life of a Song Volume 2: The stories behind 50 more of the world’s best-loved songs’, edited by David Cheal and Jan Dalley, is published by Brewer’s on October 4.
Music credits: Burning Fire, Vanilla OMP, Regis Records, Decca (UMO), Streamline/Columbia/Interscope
Picture credit: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images