Songs For A Central Park Picnic

Outside of his recently retired band, Saint Etienne founder Bob Stanley is a pop historian, crate digger and curator of encyclopedic knowledge (a must read, his 2013 book Yeah Yeah Yeah is an exhaustive biography of popular music crammed with wonderfully obscure cultural minutiae).

As such, Stanley and bandmate Pete Wiggs’ Songs For… series of compilations present impeccably curated playlists for a variety of settings, from rainy afternoons to 1950s teahouses, and fuggy, pre-smoking ban pubs. Songs For A Central Park Picnic lays out a suitably tasteful spread of New York-centred, pre-Beatles pop. From eerie, early Phil Spector composition “Yes I Love You” by The Paris Sisters to Art Garfunkel’s (then trading as Arty Garr) plaintive “Private World,” to jazzy cuts from the likes of Sammy Davis Jr. and Vince Guaraldi, along with some long-forgotten Brill Building gems, it’s a wonderfully evocative world of effortless sophistication and mid-town glamour. With Stanley’s scene-setting sleevenotes adding to the period ambience, all that’s missing is a hamper stocked with deli-fresh sandwiches and a bottle of soda pop.