Salad Days belongs to that strange post-war period in London when—despite the Festival of Britain and its view of the future, the threat of the Cold War and the Bomb and all the other innovations and problems—many of the streets of London were still lit by gas, gentlemen on their way to the Stock Exchange could be seen on the Underground in toppers, some milkmen still had horse-drawn carts and nice girls were advised, as in this musical, to look out for the right kind of husband. As for British musical theatre, in the wake of all the Broadway successes that arrived relentlessly—the works of Berlin, Rogers, Loewe and Loesser—even Noel Coward found that his audience was deserting him. (Salad Days opened its West End run in August 1954, and notched up over 2,000 performances, compared with Coward's After the Ball a few weeks before which only lasted 188 nights.) Like Sandy Wilson's The Boy Friend, which had started the winter before, this fresh, irreverent small-scale work by Julian Slade found a formula which appealed to modern audiences.
The original Oriole cast recording, now on Sony, has an almost heartbreaking far-away feel to it, the accents and unpretentiousness of the players giving each song just the right mixture of satire and simplicity. Of all the numbers, only ''We said we wouldn't look back'' caught on as a standard and has remained in the communal memory, but ''Oh, look at me'' and ''It's easy to sing'' are both winners. The new recording, based on the recent production in BBC Radio 2's ongoing series of musicals, has an all-star cast and is a much fuller version of the score, including a good deal of dialogue. The original Timothy, John Warner, takes the crucial role of the Tramp who gives the magic piano into the care of the two graduate students whose parents are nagging them, ''Find yourself something to do''.
The duet ''We don't understand our children'' is done in fine fashion by Valerie Masterson and Josephine Tewson—one of several songs not in the 1954 album. (The 1982 TER recording also included this duet, done by Elizabeth Seal and Sheila Staefel with somewhat more realistic feeling.) One of the other songs not recorded in 1954 is the cabaret turn by Asphynxia, ''Sand in my eyes'', a role taken on EMI by the inimitable Lynda Baron. Other familiar voices that crop up include Roy Hudd doing another night-club number, ''Cleopatra'', Willie Rushton as Uncle Zed joining the young couple in ''The Saucer Song'' and Tony Slattery as Lord Denvers, hailed by Sara Crow, as Fiona, as ''Without exception the most marvellous thing I've seen in my entire life''. Well, it's that sort of show. Clearly the new recording, being so well cast and much more complete, is the one to have, but the allure of the original cast and their more natural way with the period accents has an awful lot going for it.'