This week, a chart which really does feel as though it stems from an era completely separate and distinct from any I might recognise, the Top 20 for the week ending 12 October 1961. One year to go until “Love Me Do” and it sounds like a list from 1951; despite the presence of Elvis, it is as if Elvis had never happened. Nor does it fit comfortably into any pre-rock/interregnum scenario; few of these records have survived in the public imagination, and most have never been revived at all, absent even from the Radio 2 of the ‘70s. You would be entirely within your rights to scratch your head in bafflement; but there was clearly a crisis afoot. Movement-wise the chart was slow and creaky; the presence of two entries apiece for John Leyton and Helen Shapiro demonstrates the stultifying pace of “change.”
20. Tony Orlando – Bless You
A decade before Dawn, but this does at least sound vaguely 1961; Orlando’s gruff, loveless voice sweeps through this “Halfway To Paradise” wannabe with at least a simulacrum of gusto.
19. Mr Acker Bilk and his Paramount Jazz Band – That’s My Home
The one before “Stranger On The Shore,” with Bilk’s typical, reluctant “Your Father’s Moustache” bandboy vocal style alternating with some sub-George Lewis clarinet trilling. Lively only in the sense that Irish theme pubs contain “life.”
18. Charlie Drake – My Boomerang Won’t Come Back
Give him his due, he was a very fine Krook in the BBC’s ‘80s adaptation of Bleak House, but as a comedian – and remember that he was one of Britain’s biggest comedy stars until well into the ‘70s – I found him insufferable, and his novelty hits torture. Bemusing to consider that he had the British hit version of “Splish Splash.”
17. Frank Sinatra – Granada
Ol’ Blue Eyes pays tribute to the pioneering Manchester-based ITV company which had just given us Coronation Street, except he doesn’t; it’s that “Granada,” jazzed up rather horribly, and I note its absence from Sinatra’s 81-track 4CD The Reprise Collection anthology.
16. Lonnie Donegan – Michael Row The Boat
The complete antithesis of the Highwaymen’s version (see below) as Lonnie treats death the New Orleans way; celebratory and jubilant, or at least it would have been had he done it four years previously. Here you have to blink to remind yourself that it’s not Kenny Ball.
15. Don Gibson – Sea Of Heartbreak
“A bit of country rock” said Dale. Perhaps not – an unduly chirpy study of loss, complete with chirping backing singers, and a very strained lyrical metaphor throughout.
14. Shirley Bassey – Reach For The Stars
Despite getting to number one (as a double A-side with “Climb Ev’ry Mountain,” which my mum says got the lion’s share of airplay) this has scarcely been aired in the subsequent 45 years, and you can maybe see why; this definitely belongs to the genteel pre-rock age of Joan Regan and Ruby Murray, and the song is rather contrivedly set up as a showcase for Bassey’s vocal range, starting with quiet contralto and hushed strings before making its inevitable climb to screeching Wagnerian finish. Note how Orbison’s “In Dreams” tackles the same template two years later with far more subtlety and emotional truthfulness; you don’t notice the song’s four-octave range until you try to sing it.
13. The Laurie Johnson Orchestra – Sucu Sucu
Now this was a TV theme, but it’s before my time and I can’t place it, unlike the rather more famous Johnson-penned themes for The Avengers, This Is Your Life, etc. – does anyone else know? In total, a spirited but rather stifled attempt at big band calypso jauntiness. However, if you do see a second-hand copy of his 1969 big band/classical concept album Synthesis, get it; the London Jazz Orchestra and the London Philharmonic Orchestra combine and don’t clash, lots of inventive arrangements and fine solo work from Hayes, Harriott, Wheeler, Coe, Tracey et al. The second movement “Con Moto,” is a theme tune waiting for Tarantino to come and use it (indeed Radio 2 did use it as the theme to Peter Clayton’s Sounds Of Jazz for many years).
12. John Leyton – Wild Wind
At last, some madness; the follow-up to “Johnny” and noticeably faster. Meek uses his trademark backing sopranos almost as a surrogate guitar; their ghostly howl (they sound like Bassey at the end of “Reach For The Stars” played backwards) pursues the hapless Leyton up and down the whistling moors. Note the glorious, out-of-pitch 78 rpm pub piano solo cut and paste into the record’s middle.
11. Eden Kane – Get Lost
As in “Get lost in my arms”…get it? Richard Sarstedt with his trademark and rather unpleasant leering growl, and nowhere near as big a hit as “Well I Ask You,” which this followed up; it peaked at #10, just like “Frozen Orange Juice” did at the opposite (in so many ways!) end of the decade.
10. Helen Shapiro – You Don’t Know
A very carefully paced ballad performance, with one of the most authoritative lead vocals you’re ever likely to hear from a 14-year-old; deep and beyond its years. Pity that the song itself is so crappy.
9. Del Shannon – Hats Off To Larry
He persisted with the “Runaway” template for some while; this of course remains a second-string staple of oldies radio but is no match for “Runaway,” largely because of its unpleasant undertow of misogyny. “I want you back, I think you’ll change,” he smirks, which reminds me of the remark a reader makes in today’s Observer Music Monthly about the true unpleasantness of “Just The Way You Are” – “I don’t want clever conversation,” i.e. keep your mouth shut b*tch – it is a pretty horrid song when you think about it.
8. Elvis Presley – Wild In The Country
As I said, Elvis is present, but as a ghost; a sombre “Love Me Tender”-style campfire strum bearing another stilted metaphor about the “country” equalling “the country I love.” I have never knowingly seen the film from which it was taken.
7. Cleo Laine – You’ll Answer To Me
Something of a surprise to see Cleo in this company, since she has never made a habit of Doing Pop (though I have ghastly teenage memories of her crooning “Sometimes When We Touch” in duet with James Galway’s flute). A stilted, Patti Page-style rolling ballad, and Cleo never quite shakes off the audible impression that she’s above this kind of rubbish. Which, in truth, she is.
6. Connie Francis – Together
Poor Connie; stranded in that no (wo)man’s land between Jeanette McDonald and Wanda Jackson, and she could have been a great rocker(ess) but MGM wanted the “Mama”-pleasing ballads, thus this tedious slop-country waltz of loss and memory which she sings with an air of lobotomised ice; the robotic spoken part is quite terrifying in its total numbness – it’s like listening to HAL’s mother.
5. John Leyton – Johnny Remember Me
If we’re talking about memory and loss…it is of course Carlin’s Law that even the worst of charts is likely to contain, near or at its top, one of the greatest records ever made, and “JRM” is it…Frankie Laine on Wuthering Heights remixed by Poe, and she’s lost, she is gone but he can’t face it, is doomed to wander those moors and be killed by those winds of soprano, weighing down his grief. “Another little gi-HIRL!/To take the place of my true love” – he leaves no doubt that his life is at an end, and meanwhile Meek and Goddard are at their ouija board of pop, summoning spirits, killing themselves.
4. Billy Fury – Jealousy
Speaking of Frankie Laine, this gargoyle of a chestbeater was, unaccountably, Fury’s biggest hit single, peaking at #2 – “Halfway To Paradise” made number one on every other chart, but the Guinness/Record Retailer lists had it at #3 – and while Fury gives a characteristically spirited and gutsy performance, there’s still the residual feeling that he is, or was, wasted on this kind of London Palladium tripe.
3. Shadows – Kon-Tiki
“The sound of the Tilbury surf,” as someone else (I can’t remember who) put it; their horizons are wide even if they can’t get the surfboards out of the bathtub. There was always a great inexactitude and spontaneity about the Shadows at their best; Hank audibly fluffs a note in his solo midway through, but the spirit remains irresistible. Also one of the more democratic of Shadows hits, as Marvin cheerfully shares the main riff with Jet Harris’ bass.
2. Helen Shapiro – Walkin’ Back To Happiness
While typing this, “Rehab,” the new Amy Winehouse single, has come on the radio, and the similarities in vocal approach and timbre are inescapable. “Rehab” is in fact one of the singles of the year; as with “Crazy” it alchemises the past with subtle futurist undertones with deft and brilliance. And I wish that the Britain of 1961 had been such that Shapiro – whom we now know as one of the country’s finest jazz singers, more than capable of belting out songs of the calibre of “Rehab” – had been given material of that calibre in her pop days. As it is, “Walkin’” is jaunty in an annoying way that only ‘60s pop jauntiness could be; her vocal is assured, teasing and…yes, in its own way sexy…but again it’s down to, please the mums and dads, don’t get above your station, and it’s a conundrum which, as demonstrated by the career of Rachel Stevens, the British music industry remains a long way from solving or resolving.
1. Highwaymen – Michael
The vocal delivery here is extremely stilted, and the picture of three cardigans in a primary school music class is never removed from one’s mind (particularly as my primary school years, as with many others’, was blighted by having to sing this bloody song and on occasion play it on recorders). It’s the stolid Presbyterian approach to passing from life to afterlife – even when ascending to heaven, the scowl is immovable, the head eternally bowed and you wonder whether non-existence was the better option. I realise that out of here stemmed (in part) the likes of the Byrds and the Mamas and Papas, but…yes, it’s the spectre of Pete Seeger and his uniquely dull worthiness (no Kapitalist fun allowed! no electricity!) which conveys not a picture of admirable Amish restraint but the exact reason why Dylan had to plug in at Newport.
― Marcello Carlin (nostudium), Monday, 16 October 2006 08:47 (eighteen years ago) link