A Ferry jaunt to Avalon!
QUESTION Who did the sweeping, wordless vocals on the Roxy Music song Avalon? THE distinctive performer was Yanick Etienne. Born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, in 1962, she went to the U.S. in 1970 and began singing professionally in 1979.
The song Avalon was recorded in 1982 at The Power Station in New York City. Sunday was officially a day off at the studio, but local Haitian bands were allowed to do demos.
At one session, Yanick was present with her future husband, producer and musician Dernst Emile.
Bryan Ferry and Avalon producer Rhett Davies heard her performing backing vocals for Haitian crooner Jose Tavernier on the French language song Toi. They were so impressed they asked her to perform on the song Avalon. She later claimed she’d never heard of Roxy Music.
Davies said: ‘Bryan and I could hear this girl from the Haitian band next door singing and we thought: “Wow! What a voice! We’ve got to get her singing some backing vocals on Avalon.” ’
Once she’d performed the stock backing, Davies and Ferry asked her to ‘sing totally free’ and she created the soaring ending. ‘Bryan then re-sang his vocal because he was so inspired by Yanick’s singing,’ said Davies.
Avalon was Roxy Music’s final LP, but Yanick later performed on Ferry’s solo albums, Boys And Girls, Bete Noire, Mamouna and 39 Steps. She joined him on his 1988 Bete Noire world tour and can be seen in the concert film.
Yanick has produced two solo albums, Love Songs For You in 2004 and Dernst Emile Presents: Yanick Etienne in 1990.
Her son Dernst Emile II is a rapper and producer who has worked with Rihanna, Janet Jackson, Ariana Grande and Mary J. Blige. Glenn Butler, York.
QUESTION Are there any legal systems outside Scotland with ‘not proven’ as a third option to guilty and not guilty?
MOST criminal justice systems provide the jury with two options: guilty or not guilty. As well as factually innocent defendants, the not guilty verdict covers those in the legal grey area between believed innocence and proven guilt.
This grey area is accounted for by Scotland’s famous not proven verdict. A jury can express the fact it is suspicious of the accused, but feels the prosecution has not met the burden of proof.
Not proven functions as an acquittal of the charges. The accused is safe from double jeopardy, so can’t be tried again on the same charge. About one-fifth of acquittals in Scotland are not proven.
The verdict has been part of the Scottish legal system for more than 250 years. The practice originated in the 17th century when rebellious juries began to refuse to convict under unpopular statutes.
To combat this, general verdicts of guilty and not guilty were replaced by special verdicts of proven and not proven, with the jury’s job to determine which facts had been proven. Based upon that determination, the judge would determine guilt.
This practice continued until the 1728 trial of Carnegie of Finhaven, where the jury’s right to deliver a not guilty verdict was re-established.
During a drunken altercation, James Carnegie of Finhaven had pushed Charles Lyon, 6th Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne, into a ditch, killing him.
The killing being indisputable, Carnegie would have been condemned to death by hanging had the jury merely given a verdict on the point of fact, so they broke with tradition and gave a not guilty verdict.
The Scottish three-verdict system is unique. However, Italy has introduced a system of alternative verdicts. The 1989 Code of Criminal Procedure shifted the criminal justice system from an inquisitorial to an adversarial system. It created five acquittal verdicts (from strongest to weakest):
1) No crime was committed; 2) There was a crime, but the defendant did not commit it; 3) The defendant is innocent of the crime because evidence was insufficient to convict him; 4) There was no crime, because the defendant had a justification for his action; or 5) It was not possible to decide the case due to procedural fault.
Louise Westwood, Birmingham.
QUESTION What was the first biscuit with a creamy filling?
IT WAS probably the Bourbon biscuit. Peek Freans was the pioneer of the modern British biscuit, with the Garibaldi introduced in 1861.
The firm followed up with the soft Pearl biscuit, which made its reputation, in 1865. The shortbread Pat-A-Cake biscuit was launched in 1902. It was so popular that 400 million were sold in 1906.
Peek Freans introduced the Bourbon, a cocoa-flavoured cream sandwich biscuit, in 1910 followed by the custard cream in 1913.
It has been claimed the custard cream was a late 19th- century invention by Huntley & Palmers of Reading, created to capitalise on the new popularity of custard powder, but there is no evidence for this claim.
G. Wells, Weston-super-Mare, Somerset.
QUESTION In the German city of Lubeck, there is a marzipan museum. What other obscure museums are there?
FURTHER to the earlier answer, I have a collection of 238 post boxes, ranging from early Victorian to modern day.
I have examples from the biggest double London boxes through to countryside lamp-post boxes and small wooden ones used in private residences and hotels.
I have a few overseas boxes, from France, Ireland, Poland, Russia and the U.S., but my primary interest is in British designs.
You can see some of them at my Isle of Wight Postal Museum.
Arthur Reeder, Newport, Isle of Wight.
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