Peggy Lee - Live In London [3CD Box Set] (2015)

Universal Music presents Peggy Lee Live in London, a three-CD set containing Peggy’s complete recordings from 1977, including the original Polydor albums Peggy and Live in London, another complete concert recording, rehearsal outtakes, plus a bonus DVD featuring the 1981 BBC television special Peggy Lee Entertains.

The original 1977 recordings were produced by Ken Barnes, who provided detailed notes and served as producer for this carefully prepared set until his death in August 2015 at age 82. Holly Foster-Wells, granddaughter of Peggy Lee, served as associate producer and offers a tribute to Mr. Barnes following the track listings on this page.

As Ken Barnes’ obituaries in several newspapers noted, during the 1970s he was particularly effective in persuading some beloved American performers to visit London, return to the recording studio, re-record some of their earlier successes and try some new material as well. These veterans included Fred Astaire, Bing Crosby (Peggy’s partner on radio, records, film and television), and Johnny Mercer (Peggy’s songwriting mentor and a co-founder of Capitol Records, her longtime label).

For her 1977 studio and concert collaborations with Barnes, Peggy, who was then 56, revisited chart hits and signature songs such as Why Don’t You Do Right?, Lover, I Don’t Want to Play in Your Yard, Sing a Rainbow, Mr. Wonderful, The Folks Who Live on the Hill, Fever, Here’s to You, and Is That All There Is? She also recorded a generous variety of songs by contemporary songwriters, including Peter Allen, Marvin Hamlisch, Neil Sedaka, and Paul Simon, and covered recent hits like I’m Not in Love and Touch Me in the Morning. She included a few of her own co-compositions: Courage Madame, Dreams of Summer, and Here’s to You. Finally, she recorded some classic American songbook material she hadn’t previously interpreted, from Cole Porter’s Love for Sale, to Erroll Garner and Johnny Burke’s Misty, to a long concert medley of Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart ballads. In his 1977 review for Melody Maker of the latter performance, Ray Coleman wrote: “To see Peggy Lee, picked out in a single spotlight on the Palladium stage, whispering Very Glad to Be Unhappy or It Never Entered My Mind, was to be transported to a hopelessly romantic plateau, far from the aggressive or groovy Seventies, but totally valid and acceptable on its own terms. She exuded quality.”

The bonus DVD, a BBC special from 1981, includes several songs not recorded in 1977: Witchcraft, The Best Is Yet to Come, But Beautiful, Love Me or Leave Me, I’m a Woman, Everything Must Change, My Father, Don’t Cry Out Loud, Peggy’s own song I Love Being Here With You, and Mary Rodgers’ and Stephen Sondheim’s parody of The Girl From Ipanema, titled The Boy From….

The 48-page booklet includes over 20 photos of Peggy taken throughout her UK performing career, which began in 1961 with an engagement at the Pigalle nightclub and ended in 1990 with two concerts at Royal Albert Hall. In his notes, Barnes details his 1977 collaborations with Peggy and provides an overview of her full career, quotes about Peggy from famous admirers, and a chronology of her concert and television appearances in the UK.