The Americanized hit version(s) of “Mack The Knife” have more to do with the stories of Damon Runyon, where criminals and lowlifes are made figures of fun, a sort of cultural memory of the widespread lawlessness of the Prohibition era, than with actual criminality or murder.

Anyway, the very similar spring ’56 versions by the Dick Hyman Trio (no.9) and Billy Vaughn (no.12) are something quite different. Both retain the Weimar atmosphere lost by Bobby D via their unlikely combination of harpsichord, brush drums, and whistling (echoes of Harry Lime, here); there’s just enough minor chordery thrown in to add a delicate menace. Either single is highly recommended.

I’m very fond of Ute Lempe’s vampish interpretation. But the most chillingly evocative version for me came from an itinerant theatrical troupe doing a life of Brecht at the terrible Open University Summer School in York in 1982 – the week in which the Great Open University Murder (of Dr Elizabeth Howe by a student called Robin Pask) took place.

See my short story Shark, which was inspired by this event.

In retrospect, it strikes me as just too, too manneristic (not to be confused with mannerly). Darin had a lot of talent, but here he tries the Sinatra wiseguy stuff and pushes it a bit too much. Anyone who wants to know what the song sounds like with all the false bravado–and understand it as it was meant to be understood–should check out Marianne Faithfull’s version on her Twentieth-Century Blues CD. The translated lyrics are much closer to the German original–brutally so. Or, better yet, listen to the original Lotte Lenya recording of the Weill/Brecht .