Pop

89. ‘Only Sixteen’, by Craig Douglas

/ UK #1s blog / 4 Comments

Following on from Cliff, it’s another British rock ‘n’ roll disc taking up a considerable residency at the top of the UK Singles chart. Unlike Sir Cliff, the singer is completely unknown to me…

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Only Sixteen, by Craig Douglas (his 1st and only #1)

4 weeks, from 11th September – 9th October 1959

But first, a question. Why, oh why, couldn’t British rock ‘n’ roll acts of the 1950s take themselves seriously? Why does every rock ‘n’ roll chart topper from a British artist have the whiff – nay, the stench – of the Victorian music hall, of Skegness pier about it? Why weren’t we cool?

I make Craig Douglas the 5th UK-born rock ‘n’ roll chart topper, and the four previous – Tommy Steele, Lonnie Donegan, Lord Rockingham’s XI and Cliff – have made the top by blending simple rock melodies with a lot of silliness. OK, ‘Hoots Mon’ was a novelty record so we can perhaps let Lord Rockingham’s XI off. Lonnie Donegan was a pioneer in terms of his sound but old-fashioned when coming out with lyrics like ‘two old ladies sitting in the sand, each on wishing that the other was a man’. Tommy Steele camped ‘Singing the Blues’ right up, while ‘Living Doll’ was barely more than a nursery rhyme. (A very creepy nursery rhyme, but still). And you can trace this theme – this current of candyfloss that runs through our British hit singles – way back into the pre-rock days. The US was giving us ‘I Believe’; while the UK was replying with ‘I See the Moon’.

I suppose the big question is… (and I’m deliberately excluding women like Ruby Murray and Shirley Bassey as, while British and while quite classy, they definitely weren’t rock) what will be the first truly cool, suave and sophisticated British recorded rock ‘n’ roll record? Well, I can reveal… It’s not ‘Only Sixteen.’

This is more jauntiness, more end-of-the-pier winking and gurning. There’s whistling, and a guitar plucked so precisely that I think it might be a banjo. She was only sixteen, Only sixteen, I loved her so… Douglas’s voice is slightly shrill, quite posh and, to be honest, fairly average. It doesn’t quite fit the song. It sounds a bit like the dreaded David Whitfield, but a David Whitfield who’s debasing himself in an attempt to sing rock ‘n’ roll…

We’d laugh and we’d sing, And do the little things, That made my heart glow… Craig had a fling with a lass; but it didn’t last. She was too young to fall in love, I was too young to know… So far, so ‘Jackie Magazine’. Then comes the punchline: Why did I give my heart so fast, It never will happen again, I was a mere lad of sixteen, I’ve aged a year since then… Oh! Hahaha – he thinks he’s all grown up. At seventeen! The folly of youth.

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Yeah, it’s a cute line and all, but I don’t think it’s quite enough to build a whole song around. Plus, with that voice, I’m having trouble imagining that Craig Douglas was seventeen when he recorded this. *Plot twist* He was! But come on – look at that picture. That lad of sixteen must have had one hell of a paper round. And while we’re at it – Craig Douglas just isn’t the name of a chart-topping star. Craig Douglas lives next door to you, and is someone you avoid making conversation with on your way to the car in the morning.

I think we should just file this under ‘Of It’s Time’ and be done with it. ‘Only Sixteen’ isn’t a terrible record – it’s quite pleasant, really – but it won’t live with you long after hearing it. Craig Douglas is still with us, however – aged seventy-seven – and still tours, though his recording career didn’t last the Beatles-led cull of ’63.

To finish, and to illustrate my point about US singers being that much cooler than their British counterparts, just listen to Sam Cooke’s version of this song. It’s technically the original, though they were released around the same time, and has exactly the same melody and lyrics… But, you see what I mean? I think I may have finally put my finger on just what the difference is, though: the huge gulf in coolness between British and American stars. The Sam Cooke version, you see, doesn’t have Any. Bloody. Whistling!

88. ‘Living Doll’, by Cliff Richard & The Drifters

/ UK #1s blog / 13 Comments

In which we meet the pre-eminent British popular singer of the day. And the next day. And the next. Next. Next. Basically, there will be no escaping Cliff for the following forty years…

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Living Doll, by Cliff Richard & The Drifters (Cliff’s 1st of fourteen #1s / The Drifters – AKA The Shadows – 1st of twelve #1s)

6 weeks, from 31st July – 11th September 1959

In the intro to my post on Shirley Bassey’s debut #1 I gave it the big fanfare about living legends and national treasures and so on. And let’s be honest, the same applies ten times over for Sir Clifford of Richard. He will go on to utterly dominate UK pop music, remaining a genuine chart presence well into the 2000s, even if he is probably more famous today for singing during the rain at Wimbledon and for suing the BBC over the way they covered allegations of… (REDACTED).

Let’s get to the music shall we? ‘Living Doll’ begins with a natty little bass intro, and then… Well it’s rock ‘n’ roll; but not as we know it. I’ve mentioned many a time the idea of ‘US’ Vs ‘UK’ rock ‘n’ roll: British singers taking on the Yanks at their own game and slowly getting better at it. Let’s be honest, the odds were stacked against the Brits with Elvis, Buddy Holly, The Everly Brothers, Johnnie Ray et al against Lonnie Donegan and, um, Tommy Steele. And with the arrival of ‘The British Elvis’ AKA Cool Cliff, you might think that this is the moment for Britain to really grab the rock ‘n’ roll flag for herself!

Except, no. ‘Living Doll’ is an extremely lightweight record. A couple of acoustic guitars. Cliff’s simpering vocals. And that’s about it. Got myself a cryin’, walkin’, sleepin’, talkin’, living doll… Got to do my best to please her, Just cos she’s a living doll… This is a song that I could have sung a few lines from – most Brits could, no? – without ever having listened to it properly. And it’s a song that doesn’t do well under more intense scrutiny.

Yes it sounds cheesy and flimsy with a whiff of George Formby in the background. But beyond all that there’s the problem of the lyrics… In the previous chart-topper, Bobby Darin was giving us a ‘girl as dream’ narrative. Here Cliff is giving us ‘girl as doll’, and taking it very literally: Well take a look at her hair, It’s real and if you don’t believe what I say just feel… Pretty creepy… Gonna lock her up in a trunk, So no big hunk, Can steal her away from me… Eww. That’s taking a metaphor way too far and then some. She’s either literally a doll with which Cliff is romancing… Or an extremely submissive young lady over whom Cliff is aggressively over-protective. Either way…

The best bit of the song, by far, is the dreamy guitar solo which by the standards of the time is pretty long, loose and groovy. That, of course, is provided courtesy of Cliff’s long time backing band The Sha… No, wait. The Drifters. It’s actually quite simple: The Drifters were The Shadows until the US Vocal group of the same name (Ben E. King and co.) threatened legal action. They appeared as The Drifters on Cliff’s first five or so hit singles; this was their sole chart-topper before the name change.

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It’s pretty easy, almost a cliché, to get stuck into Cliff as an uncool, God-bothering, 2nd rate Elvis impersonator. And I’d try to avoid doing so at all costs… If his debut #1 record didn’t kind of prove all the accusations correct. He was clearly trying to sound like Elvis. He was clearly trying to look like Elvis (just look at that quiff!). And this record is him selling out just like Elvis did. Except Elvis got a good few years of genuine rocking ‘n’ rolling in before the movie studios, the army and the burgers came a-calling. Cliff got one album. (Do give ‘Rock on With Cliff Richard’ a listen, though – it’s got some decent tracks on it.)

Anyway, that’s one down for Cliff; just thirteen more UK #1 Singles to go…

87. ‘Dream Lover’, by Bobby Darin

/ UK #1s blog / 7 Comments

Now this is more like it. This is a chart-topping single!

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Dream Lover, by Bobby Darin (his 1st of two  #1s)

4 weeks, from 3rd – 31st July 1959

It’s been a while since I listened to this song, or to any Bobby Darin songs, but slipping the needle to hear ‘Dream Lover’ is like slipping into a silk dressing gown and settling down by the fire: Every night I hope and pray, A dream lover will come my way, A girl to hold in my arms, And know the magic of her charms…

We get not one but two groups of backing singers: girls for the ‘oohs’ and boys for the ‘wadda waddas’. We get strings and we get some oh-so-fifties staccato guitars. In fact, I’d put this up there with ‘Diana’ and ‘When’ as the most fifties, most rock ‘n’ rolly, doo-woppy #1 yet. But ‘Dream Lover’ is a much better song than either of those.

And that’s down to Bobby Darin. His voice is as crisp and as clear as a bell, and he lends the song a sort of… gravitas, that places it a cut above pure teeny-bopper fluff. He sounds older than his twenty-three years, and sounds suave where Paul Anka and the Kalin Twins sounded puppyish. Does this then represent the pinnacle of late fifties rock ‘n’ roll-as-pop? Maybe something to consider in our upcoming re-cap.

For all that, it’s a simple song. The singer wants a dream lover, so he doesn’t have to dream alone. Someday, I don’t know how, I hope she’ll hear my plea, Some way, I don’t know, She’ll bring her love to me… The listener knows where the song is going, but is more than happy to be taken along for the ride.

I don’t want to really write any more about this record. I want to leave it there. Minimalist. This is where easy-listening and pop collide to create a seriously classy song. And we’ll be hearing from Bobby D again very soon, so we can delve into his backstory then. For now, just sit back, relax, and enjoy.

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There are two little things of note, though, that we should point out here. I mentioned in my post on ‘Hoots Mon’, back in November ’58, that the production on these chart-topping singles was getting more substantial, beefier. And I have to admit that on ‘Dream Lover’, and to a lesser extent on ‘When’, I’m getting a hint of the ‘Wall of Sound’ technique – Phil Spector and all that – which will be all the rage in three or four years. Listen to the crashing symbols that precede the final verse and chorus here, and you’ll see what I mean. Interestingly, this song was engineered by Tom Dowd, a pioneer of multi-track recording. So there could be something in that…

And finally, while this is a wonderful record more than worthy of a month atop the UK Singles Charts… something has been nagging at me for a while now. Are our #1 singles growing more and more lyrically banal? Let’s explore. Drag your minds back to the dark and smoggy days of pre-rock and yes, song lyrics were probably pondering weightier issues: I believe for every drop of rain that falls, A flower grows… Or Three coins in the fountain, Which one will the fountain bless…? Or I saw her face and ascended out of the common place, into the rare, somewhere in space… from ‘Brainiest #1 Yet’ ‘Stranger in Paradise’. Or they at least talked of love in slightly flowerier, more abstract terms. And there haven’t been any out-of-place, soundtrack songs like ‘Hernando’s Hideaway’ or ‘The Man from Laramie’ with lyrics about sharp-shooters and speakeasies hitting the stop spot recently.

In 1958-9, while there are anomalies like ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’ and ‘The Day the Rains Came’, it’s mainly all Dream lover, where are you…? All I have to do is dream… And Goodness gracious great balls of fire…! Simple, immediate stuff. Is this a bad thing? Rock ‘n’ roll may have dumbed things down a bit, but its brought an immediacy to our chart-topping hits. Everyone can relate to someone sitting at home wishing for a dream lover. Not everyone can relate to She wears red feathers and a huly-huly skirt… I’m all for it really. And that’s probably a good thing, as our next #1 takes simple to the next level.

85. ‘A Fool Such As I’ / ‘I Need Your Love Tonight’, by Elvis Presley

/ UK #1s blog / 4 Comments

The King is back in the building. Buddy Holly replaced at the top by Elvis himself. What halcyon days!

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A Fool Such as I / I Need Your Love Tonight, by Elvis Presley (his 4th of twenty-one #1s)

5 weeks, from 15th May – 19th June 1959

One of these songs I’ve known for a very long time – since I got my first Elvis ‘Best Of’ way back when –so let’s start there. Now and then, There’s a fool, Such as I… I used to think that the scarily deep baritone that opens and closes this record was Elvis himself. It wasn’t, unfortunately. A chap called Ray Walker provided the voice, and it makes this whole track.

I really like this song. At least… I thought I did. I had it marked as one of my favourite ‘fifties-Elvis’ numbers, better than the silliness of ‘Teddy Bear’ or the mumbling verses of ‘King Creole’. Listening back to it now, though, I’m not so sure. The way Elvis sings it – he’s slightly restrained, slightly clipped… The vocals are weirdly ‘posh’, if you can imagine what I mean. There’s none of the growl he was giving us on ‘Jailhouse Rock’, and none of the saucy wink from ‘One Night’. It seems to me, listening to the song fresh after such a long absence, that Elvis might have been phoning it in here.

‘A Fool Such as I’ had been recorded before – back in the depths of the pre-rock era (AKA 1952), so perhaps Elvis had the original in the back of his mind as he enunciated, giving birth to the previously undiscovered Plummy Elvis. And while obviously everyone knows that Elvis phoned in pretty much everything he did between 1961 and ’68, it’s distressing to think that Elvis’s ‘phoning it in’ period might have started as early as 1959!

Still, the solo swings like I remember. And, to be fair, Elvis does let loose a little in the final verse. I’m a fool, But I love you dear, Until the day I die… And he just about redeems the whole thing by belting these lines out towards the end. He should, though, have been very grateful to Mr. Walker for his deep voice and to whoever was playing the guitar. They definitely helped paper over the cracks.

This record, and in fact all of Elvis’s early chart-toppers, are sometimes co-credited to The Jordanaires, AKA his backing singers. They also pick up some of the slack here (though I can’t remember even noticing them on songs like ‘All Shook Up’.) The Official Charts company don’t recognise them, however, so I won’t. But they’re there on the vinyl above, if you squint hard enough. I suppose it’s a case similar to the days when every record was ‘accompanied’ by an orchestra. I mentioned in a post a while back how the conductors of these orchestras had been airbrushed out of history, and it seems to be happening with backing groups now too.

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On then to the song I don’t know so well. Tell the truth I’d never heard this before and, when I saw that it was called ‘I Need Your Love Tonight’, I feared the worst. Maudlin ballad ahoy! But no…

The piano comes blasting in, rolling like a runaway train. And Elvis? Well, he needs your love tonight. And not in a mopey, crooning-in-the-window-at-the-moon kind of way (as we recently heard in Connie Francis’s flip-side ‘Carolina Moon’). No siree. I’ve been waiting just for tonight, To do some lovin’ and hold you tight, Don’t tell me baby you needa go, I got the Hi-Fi high and the lights down low…

This is fun stuff. This is rock ‘n’ roll. This possibly should have been the lead track. And Elvis does sound like he’s having a little more fun here. I count an ‘Oh-oh’, an ‘Uh-uh’, an ‘Ooh-ooh’, an ‘Oh Gee’, a ‘Wowee’, a ‘Wow’, and a ‘Pow-Pow’ among the lyrics. There’s even a bit of a rhumba during the bridge. But it really is the flip-side of ‘A Fool Such as I’ – they were well-placed together – as in the former he is lamenting the woman he loved while in this he’s pulled himself together and is promising her a night she won’t forget. G’wan yourself Elvis!

I still, though, get the faintest tang of him phoning it in here, even on this little rocker. I may be wrong – I may be listening for something that just isn’t there – but I can’t help but feel like I’m getting a whiff. He still isn’t quite going for it in the same way he did just a few months ago on ‘I Got Stung.’

As a little aside, ‘I Need Your Love Tonight’ is listed several times on Spotify as being ‘Live’, though there is nothing in the recording to suggest that it was performed in front of an audience. The link below is, to the very best of my knowledge, the version that topped the UK charts in the spring of ’59.

This #1 pulls Mr. Presley level with Guy Mitchell and Frankie Laine as the acts with the most UK chart-toppers. They all have four, though Frankie Laine is still well out in front in terms of weeks-at-number-one (Elvis has eighteen weeks from four #1s; Frankie Laine got that many just from ‘I Believe’). And if you think that this means Elvis will be boosting ahead any time soon you’d be wrong – we won’t be seeing him again for well over a year.

Thus, we bid farewell to rock ‘n’ roll Elvis. It’s been nice meeting him, or rather rediscovering him. He’s off into the army now; and when we hear from him next it will be with something rather different.

84. ‘It Doesn’t Matter Anymore’, by Buddy Holly

/ UK #1s blog / 26 Comments

First, a bit of history… On February 2nd 1959, a group of popular rock ‘n’ roll stars played a show in Clear Lake, Iowa, as part of ‘The Winter Dance Party’ tour. In order to avoid a long, cold bus journey to their next concert in Moorhead, Minnesota, some of the musicians chartered a plane. Though the weather that night was poor, the visibility terrible and the pilot unqualified to fly using only instruments, they took off regardless and minutes after take-off, just gone 1am on the morning of the 3rd, the plane slammed into a cornfield. All four aboard were killed instantly. They were the pilot Roger Peterson, J.P. Richardson (AKA The Big Bopper), Ritchie Valens, and Buddy Holly.

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It Doesn’t Matter Anymore, by Buddy Holly (his 1st and only solo #1)

3 weeks, from 24th April – 15th May 1959

All of which means that the eighty-fourth UK #1 single is the first ever to do so posthumously. Released a couple of weeks after Holly’s death, and hitting the top a full two months later, ‘It Doesn’t Matter Anymore’ gives The Father of Modern Pop Music (I know, I know, I’ve literally just made this title up; but I dare you to challenge me on it!) one final hurrah. Would it have topped the listings anyway – given that Holly was only twenty-two when he died and at the peak of his powers? Maybe… The manner in which it meandered up the charts suggests that this wasn’t some flash in the pan reaction to his death, while the peak positions of his previous two singles (#17 and #30) beg to suggest otherwise.

To the song… Some people make a lot of the rather nihilistic title as being somehow appropriate in the wake of his death. But it wasn’t suicide; so that’s always seemed a slightly strange angle to view this record from. No, this is a song about a break up: There you go and baby, Here am I, Well you’ve left me here, So I could sit and cry, We-ell golly-gee, What have you done to me, Well I guess it doesn’t matter anymore… His girl’s up and left him, but Buddy’s putting on a brave face: There’s no use in me a-cryin’, I’ve done everything and now I’m sick of tryin’, I’ve thrown away my nights, And wasted all my days over you…

The lines come thick and fast, the song rattles to a conclusion in a mere two minutes, and in the end BH has decided to shrug it off and move on: You go your way and, I’ll go mine, Now and forever till the end of time, I’ll find, Somebody new and baby, We’ll say we’re through, And you won’t matter anymore…

And it’s not what you would immediately imagine a Buddy Holly record to sound like. The only instruments here are violins and a lightly-tickled guitar – far removed from his more recognisable rock ‘n’ roll hits like ‘Oh Boy!’ and ‘Rave On’. Plus, despite all his fame as a songwriter and composer, this record was actually written by our friend Paul Anka.

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Despite the minimalist instrumental accompaniment and the fact that he didn’t write it, Holly still makes this record his own. Because? That voice. In the space of two minutes he finds room for all the tricks in his repertoire. Hiccups (…over you-ou-ou-ou-Ah-hoo…), snarls, times when his voice has a deep, gloopy quality and times when it is light as a feather. For all his talents as a guitarist and composer, Mr. Holly was a pretty decent singer too. And in the context of Buddy Holly’s solo songs, away from The Crickets, this slips in nicely along with other non-guitar led tracks such as ‘Everyday’, ‘Raining in My Heart’, and ‘True Love Ways’ (I know I’m going a bit link-heavy, but really everyone should take a moment out of their days to appreciate What Buddy Did For Us. Not for nothing did acts like The Beatles and The Rolling Stones start out by playing covers of his songs…)

You could also argue that this is, as well as being the first posthumous #1, the first ‘popular band member gone solo’ chart-topper. OK, ok, this was nowhere near Buddy Holly’s first single release as a solo-act but still… The fact that he did it paved the way for, let me see… Diana Ross, Michael Jackson, George Michael, Sting, Robbie, Geri, Zayn and many, many more.

But to finish, let’s go back to the night of February 2nd, 1959. The Day the Music Died. Some of the tales are semi (or perhaps completely) legendary. The fact that Holly only commissioned the plane because his drummer had caught frostbite on the freezing tour bus. That the Big Bopper only took a seat on the plane because he had the flu and wanted to get a good night’s sleep. (Let me include a link here to his biggest hit ‘Chantilly Lace’, featuring the filthiest laugh ever captured on record). Ritchie Valens won his seat on the plane in a coin toss with Holly’s guitarist Tommy Allsop. Allegedly – and I so hope that this is all true – Valens claimed it was the first thing he’d ever won, while Allsop went on to open a restaurant called ‘Heads Up’ (he’d called tails…) It was all immortalised in song by Don McLean some twelve years later. We won’t be meeting his version of ‘American Pie’ in this countdown, unfortunately, but we will be meeting the Madonna version. Which will be fun.

Anyway, let me leave you with one final link. Proof, perhaps, of Buddy Holly’s magic. Not only did he write gorgeous, timeless and immeasurably influential songs, but thirty five years after his death all Weezer had to do was stick his name on a song and they were blessed with a classic of their own.

80. ‘One Night’ / ‘I Got Stung’, by Elvis Presley

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Elvis would like a night with you. One night, with you, Is what I’m now prayin’ for, The things that we two can plan, Would make my dreams come true… How could you resist?

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One Night / I Got Stung, by Elvis Presley (his 3rd of twenty-one #1s)

3 weeks, from 30th January – 20th February 1959

I bemoaned the fact that our last #1 promised raunch but failed to deliver. Here, though… Well, Elvis doesn’t let us down. We’re calling out names, demanding helping hands, and worrying about a love that’s ‘too strong to hide’ (Oo-er. Does he mean he can’t hide his feelings; or a more physical manifestation of his amour…?) Lyrically, this is a cousin of Johnnie Ray’s barnstorming ‘Such a Night’, with the listener left in no doubt about what the singer intends to do all night. Except Johnnie had had his night and was wallowing in the memory; Elvis is still waiting and praying.

The highlight of this song is the bridge, where Elvis really lets loose: Always lived, A very quiet life, I ain’t never, Did no wrong… Now I know, That a life without you, Has been too lonely too long… It’s such an accepted fact – that Elvis Presley had a great voice – that you take it for granted. And if you picture him in his later years, when his throat was all clogged up with junk food and prescription drugs, you might wonder if he really did have that wonderful a voice. But listening to those lines, the way he snarls and howls, you realise that he was indeed a very fine singer. Listening to him like this, amongst his 1950s contemporaries, he really does stand out. He sounds like a modern rock star, while his peers often still sound clipped and plummy. His only true rival in the voice stakes, from the eighty numbers ones we’re covered so far, is the aforementioned Mr. Johnnie Ray.

Beyond the voice, however, this is a pretty simple record. A guitar, a bass and some drums. I haven’t really listened to it in years, and had misremembered it as being rockier, somewhat heavier. It’s something I’ve mentioned already, how these ancient records sound much more lightweight than you expect – probably thanks to bass heavy, headphone filling modern pop.

And ‘One Night’ brings to an end our mini-run of ‘one’-hit wonders topping the charts. Because, frankly, Elvis Presley is the polar opposite of a one-hit wonder. He’s the most-hits wonder, this being his 3rd of twenty-odd number ones. Actually, ‘One Night’ was also his 20th number one single, what with it hitting the top on re-release in 2005. It’s nice to think – lazy sod that I am – that I can just copy/paste this whole post when we arrive at January 2005. Which should be sometime in 2027, if I keep up my current pace… I’ll be in my forties… That’s not a daunting thought at all…

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To the other song, then, on this double ‘A’ disc: ‘I Got Stung’. I complained when covering Connie Francis’s recent double ‘A’-side that the insipid flip side (‘Carolina Moon’) failed to in any way live up to the corking ‘Stupid Cupid’. No such worries here, though. Elvis ain’t takin’ it easy…It begins with an exclamation: Holy smokes and snakes alive I never thought this could happen to me! Hello! Yes! We’re awake!

I know my Elvis, but I wasn’t so familiar with this little rocker. It’s simple enough: girl as honey bee; guy gets stung. There’s a rollicking piano, a chugging rhythm (the bass here being really deep and pretty scuzzy), lots of uh-huh-huhs and oh yeahs. This is what you might imagine an Elvis record sounding like if you had never really listened to him before.

Well now don’t think I’m complainin’, I’m mighty pleased we met, But you gimme, One little peck on the back o’ my neck, And I break out in a cold, cold sweat… There’s a great balance in these words – they’re down-home American enough without ever sounding corny. I’d transcribe more of them if I could, but El is mumbling away here. They’re possibly the most difficult-to-make-out lyrics we’ve met so far on this countdown. And it’s also the shortest record we’ve encountered: he races through several verses, bridges and choruses in a little under one minute fifty.

And so – Holy smokes and snakes alive! – our third meeting with The King careers to an abrupt end. Uh-huh-huh! Yeah! Done. Our night with Elvis is over. He might call you again; but he probably won’t…

76. ‘It’s All in the Game’, by Tommy Edwards

/ UK #1s blog / 10 Comments

If the previous two chart toppers have been ‘clickety-clacking’ and ‘rollicking’ respectively, then this next one is… not. Sorry. ‘It’s All in the Game’, by Tommy Edwards, is merely ‘sedate’ and ‘swaying’.

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It’s All in the Game, by Tommy Edwards (his 1st and only #1)

3 weeks, from 7th – 28th November 1958

Many a tear has to fall, But it’s all, In the game… All in the wonderful game, That we know, As love… This is a song about arguments, and how having them is part of being in love. About how a guy not calling you back is just a tactical move, a rook to bishop four. A song about not sweating it – ’cause it’ll all turn out right in the end. And you believe Tommy, you really do. He’s got a voice you’d trust.

You have words, With him, And your future’s looking dim… But these things, Your hearts can rise above… Pretty soon, according to Tommy, you’ll be back kissing and a-cuddling. In a way, it’s a very old fashioned song – counselling a woman to put up with a man’s vagaries and inconsistencies. Especially given that it’s a man singing it. You might get away with it in 2018 if it was a woman dishing out sage advice to her girlfriends; a sort of ‘Independent Woman’ type of song. (Though that was nearly twenty years ago and I think the underlying message of that song was that Beyoncé and co. weren’t taking no more shit).

Tommy Edwards, though, manages not to come across as patronising. He simply comes across as very, very smooth: a sort of omniscient father figure looking down at the trials and tribulations of couples in love. And it is, at least, an interesting angle to come from. We’ve had a few super-basic love songs topping the chart recently – ‘Diana’, ‘All I Have to Do Is Dream’, ‘When’ – and it’s good to get a little cerebral every once in a while.

Then he’ll kiss, Your lips… And caress your waiting finger tips… And your hearts, Will fly, Away… If pressed, I’d have to add one more adjective to those that I used at the start of this post: ‘classy’. This is a classy song; the sort of song that George Clooney puts on as he pours a glass of wine for his date. I’m not sure if it’s a rock ‘n’ roll record, or a swing record, or just a plain old easy-listening disc. Edwards certainly croons the arse off it. Maybe it’s another of those new, hybrid songs – the fusion of rock and pre-rock that I mentioned back in my post on the Everly Brothers.

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‘It’s All in the Game’ is one of the (slowly dwindling) number of #1 hits that I’d never heard before. Though perhaps I should have as alongside this there have been Top 5 charting version by Cliff and by The Four Tops, as well as a highly respected version by Van Morrison. But somehow these had all passed me by.

What also almost passed me by is the fact that Tommy Edwards was black. Which makes him *drum roll please* only the second black male soloist to top the UK Singles Chart. Edwards would only go on to have one more, minor hit on these shores before dying in 1979, aged but fifty-seven.

One other fascinating little tit-bit before I go… The lyrics to ‘It’s All in the Game’ were written in 1951 but the melody was composed way back in 1911 by a Mr. Charles G. Dawes, who would go on to serve as Vice-President of the United States of America. Thus, when you press play on the video link below, you will be listening to the only #1 single to have been co-written by a US Vice-President. That is some Grade A trivia right there, people. Over, and out.

75. ‘Stupid Cupid’ / ‘Carolina Moon’, by Connie Francis

/ UK #1s blog / 21 Comments

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Stupid Cupid / Carolina Moon, by Connie Francis (her 2nd of two #1s)

6 weeks, from 26th September – 7th November 1958

A double ‘A’-side, which again means double the songs to write about. I’d better get cracking.

Connie Francis is back at the top. Three months on from ‘Who’s Sorry Now’s six-week reign at #1, ‘Stupid Cupid’ arrives to spend – you guessed it – six weeks at #1. She may only have had two chart-toppers, but twelve weeks in total at the top is nothing to be sniffed at. It reminds me of Rosemary Clooney’s chart run from a couple of years ago: two quick-fire chart toppers by a sparky female lead…

In ‘Who’s Sorry Now’, Connie was enjoying a bit of schadenfreude at her ex’s expense. Now, in ‘Stupid Cupid’, she’s back in love. Except she doesn’t want to be…

We start with a staccato sax, chugging drums, and then: Stupid Cupid, you’re a real mean guy, I’d like to clip your wings so you can’t fly, I’m in love and it’s a cryin’ shame, And I know that you’re the one to blame, Hey, hey, set me free, Stupid Cupid… Stop pickin’ on me! There’s a twang in her voice to match the twang in the guitar, and the song bounces along nicely. It’s a very sax-heavy track – with a chunky little solo in the middle – and it seems that we might be having a bit of a ‘sax phase’ at the top of the UK charts with this following on from ‘When’. It’s nice, considering that we’ve already had plenty of guitar and piano – the three main rock ‘n’ roll instruments taking their turn to dominate.

As with ‘Who’s Sorry…’, the best bit of this record is the bridge. It seems to be the point in her songs where Ms Francis really lets loose, belting the lines out while losing none of her sparkle: You mixed me up but good right from the very start, Hey! Go play Robin Hood with somebody else’s hea-a-a-art… Cue handclaps and a shimmy.

By the end of the song, however, it turns out that her reluctance in love has been a bit of front: Since I kissed his lovin’ lips of wine, The thing that bothers me is that I like it fine… The little minx! And the way she lingers over the final ‘I like it fine’ is perhaps the most playful, nudge-nudge, wink-wink moment of any chart-topper so far.

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Which makes the flip-side of this disc all the more disappointing… ‘Carolina Moon’, to be perfectly honest, is a bit dull. I get that you want to show off the different sides to a singer’s range – though in the previous double ‘A’ both Lonnie Donegan tracks were pretty similar. ‘Stupid Cupid’ is simply a really hard act to follow.

The sax is gone, replaced by a harmonica, a plinky piano and swaying guitars. Carolina moon, Keep shinin’, Shinin’ on the one who waits for me… Now Connie’s sitting at home pining for a guy. Make up your mind, love… How I’m hopin’ tonight, You’ll go, To the right, Window… Tell him that I’m blue and lonely… Dreamy Carolina moon…

I know Connie Francis’s music quite well, but somehow I’d never heard this before. And I wasn’t missing much. Lyrically, this pretty old-fashioned. There was a surfeit of songs back in 1953 / ’54 where people were waiting patiently for their distant loved ones. There was even one – ‘I See the Moon’ by The Stargazers – in which the singer implored the moon to ‘shine on the one they loved’. These days we’re used to something a bit more immediate, though, a bit less passive. Don’t just sit at home relying on the moon to tell the man of your dreams that you love him! Get out there and make him notice you!

Francis’s voice is still very nice on this record, but it lacks bite. She definitely sings better when there’s a bit of sass in the lyrics. This is just an average rock ‘n’ roll ballad… I had a sneaking suspicion that this might have been a pretty old song resurrected for the rock age, a la ‘Who’s Sorry Now’… And I was right. Wiki tells us that it was originally a hit way back in 1928.

And with this double whammy, Connie Francis’s short-lived time as a UK chart-topper comes to an end. Mopey songs about moons aside, her two lead singles have been highlights of the year so far. One a ballad with a spikey twist, the other a rollicking ride of a pop song. I’ll link here to some of her better non-chart toppers: songs such as ‘Where the Boys Are’, ‘Lipstick on Your Collar’, ‘Everybody’s Somebody’s Fool’, and hands-down the raunchiest song recorded in 1959: ‘Plenty Good Lovin’ (sample lyric: People say he’s not too smart, But he knows the way to a woman’s heart, Plenty of things that he don’t know, But this boy shines when the lights are low…) Oh, Connie. You are awful! I have a suspicion that we’ll be missing you before long.

74. ‘When’, by The Kalin Twins

/ UK #1s blog / 7 Comments

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When, by The Kalin Twins (their 1st and only #1)

5 weeks, from 22nd August – 26th September 1958

We’re really getting further into the realm of ‘Songs That I Know’, now. Out of all our 1958 #1s up to this point there has only been one song that I truly hadn’t heard before: Michael Holliday’s ‘The Story of My Life’.

And ‘When’ by The Kalin Twins was all set to become the second 1958 chart topper I had never heard before. But then I pressed play… And I know this. I think. I’ve heard it before. I think…

It begins with perhaps the most fifties intro ever. Clickety-clack-clack… and then… Sax-Sax-Sax-Woah-Woah-Woah. I’m possibly not doing the best job of describing it; just listen and you’ll hear what I mean. Images of boys in leather jackets and girls in polka dot skirts, spinning each other around at the juke joint while their friends sip milkshakes leap into your head. Play this intro to anyone on the street and ask what decade it comes from and they will say ‘Why, THE 1950s!’ with utmost, unshakeable confidence.

It almost, though, sounds too fifties. It sounds so fifties that it possibly couldn’t actually be from the 1950s. It sounds like fifties-by-computer-algorithm. Like filler on the ‘Grease’ soundtrack, like the background music in a Frankie & Benny’s. It’s kind of the same problem I had with Paul Anka’s ‘Diana’. And it’s a real chicken vs egg scenario: does it sound cheesy because it sounds so ubiquitous; or has it become ubiquitous because it always sounded cheesy and inoffensive?

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Anyway, enough of the philosophy. This truly has been the summer of the musical siblings, The Everlys followed by The Kalins. But whereas Don and Phil went on to become one of the most enduring and influential acts of the era; Herbie and Hal Kalin didn’t. They are complete and utter one hit wonders in the UK. And I love that. There’s nothing worse than a two hit wonder whose follow-up single limps to #38. Nope. Have your huge chart-topper, then leave it there. That way you can always claim that you could have been huge, had you been bothered… I’ve been less eagle-eyed when it comes to noticing UK chart firsts recently, but we have one here – the first ever twins to score a chart topping single. Bonus points if you can tell me the only other twins to do the same…

While I may have sounded slightly scathing when I described this record a moment ago; I am actually enjoying this track. It’s another sugar rush of a song – in the same vein as ‘Diana’ or ‘Rock-A-Billy’ – where you dive head first into a ball-pit filled with fruit pastilles, wine gums and the like, and come out buzzing but also feeling slightly grubby. Perhaps I should invent a new category of #1 for these posts: Songs It Is Impossible To Hate, No Matter How Much You’d Like To.

One thing does jar, however, and that is the high-pitched backing singers. They are super-shrill, tuned to almost dog-whistle levels. And I knew it reminded me of something, but it took me a minute to get there. EDDIE FISHER! Go back and listen to his 1953 #1 ‘I’m Walking Behind You’ and you’ll hear them. I don’t know what it is, but this is the 3rd post in a row in which I’ve mentioned Eddie Fisher – the man who put the ‘pre’ in pre-rock. He is a shadow that looms large, even after rock ‘n’ roll has long since blown those cobwebs away. If you have a spare minute, follow this link and remind yourself of just how bad it got during those dark, prehistoric days of 1953.

I realise that I am about to wrap this post up without having made any mention of ‘When’s lyrics. To be honest, I haven’t been paying attention, despite listening to it around six times in short order. Let me try once more… When, When you smile at me… When, When you kiss me right… I need you blah blah blah… I love you blah blah blah… I work with Japanese people, and these lyrics remind me of the sort of English banalities that get crowbarred into J-Pop songs. I’m thinking specifically of girl band extraordinaire AKB48, who regularly pepper their songs with trite English phrases: ‘I want you…’ ‘I love you…’ ‘Hold my hand…’

That is a truly bizarre comparison to end on: fifties one-hit wonders The Kalin Twins and 21st Century Japanese poppettes AKB48; but that’s where my mind took me. And it just goes to show that pop music is pop music, no matter the time or place…

73. ‘All I Have to Do Is Dream’, by The Everly Brothers

/ UK #1s blog / 15 Comments

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All I Have to Do Is Dream, by The Everly Brothers (their 1st of four #1s)

7 weeks, from 4th July – 22nd August 1958 (including 1 week joint with Vic Damone from 4th – 11th July)

We have an opening chord, then a pause… And then those voices. Those harmonious voices. The Everly Brothers certainly could harmonise.

Dre-e-e-eam, Dream, Dream, Dream, Dream…. Dre-e-e-eam, Dream, Dream, Dre-eam….

This is undeniably a classic, and most people will at least be familiar with the dream dream dream refrain. It’s also a very simple song. A song in which a lover, starved of attention from the object of his desires, turns to dreaming about her. All he has to do is dream. When I want you, In my arms, When I want you, And all your charms, Whenever I want you, All I have to do, Is dre-e-e-eam… You know what this song is going to be about just by glancing at the title. Simple. As.

I can make you mine, Taste your lips of wine, Anytime… Night or day… The Everlys sing (Is it Phil? Or Don? Or Both? Those harmonies are so damn tight they sound like the same voice) before delivering the classic line: Only trouble is, Gee Whizz, I’m dreamin’ my life away… Can we have a shout out for that ‘Gee Whizz’! So dorky; yet so appropriate. So ‘All-American-Boy-Next-Door’.

I’m going to go out on a limb here, and make a bold statement. That this record, ‘All I Have to Do Is Dream’, is the perfect fusion of rock and pre-rock. I’ve been continually mentioning that all through 1958 we’ve had a couple of rock ‘n’ roll #1s here, a couple of easy-listening, croony #1s there. Never before, though, have we had both styles melded together in the one record. This is it. This is where the previous seventy chart-topping records have been leading us. We’ve arrived. Bear with me…

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Musically, this is rock ‘n’ roll (very gentle, very country-tinged rock ‘n’ roll, but still) sung by a couple of fresh-faced young things. Don Everly was twenty-one when this hit the top spot, Phil was nineteen. But lyrically this is the same kind of schmaltz guys like Al Martino and Eddie Fisher were churning out back in 1952. Take the line: I need you so, That I could die, I love you so, And that is why… Melodramatic or what? I get that it’s trying to convey the helpless passion of a teenage crush; but I much prefer the cocksure swagger that The Crickets brought to ‘That’ll Be the Day’, or the cynical shrug of the shoulders offered by The Teenagers on ‘Why Do Fools Fall in Love’.

How long have I known this song? I’ve no idea. Forever? It’s always been there; though it isn’t a song I’d ever rush to listen to. It’s just a little too much on the cheesy side for me, thanks. Structurally, it is an AABA song which I believe, though I’m no songwriter, is code for ‘a bit basic’. It will, though, always remind me of karaoke sessions from my days teaching in Thailand. Along with Andy Williams and The Carpenters, ‘All I Have to Do Is Dream’ was one of the few English songs that my Thai colleagues knew. That’s quite a good barometer of a song’s fame, isn’t it? ‘It’s popular, but do they sing it at karaoke in Thailand?’

Personally, I see this record as Everly Brothers MK I. They’ve yet to hit their stride. They will be back at the top of the UK charts on three more occasions, each time with a song better than this one. They will return with a slightly harder edge, and with huskier voices. There will be no disputing that they are a rock ‘n’ roll act by then. In fact, the next time we hear from them they will be topping the charts with – hands down – one of the best pop songs ever recorded…