1955 hits

32. ‘Stranger in Paradise’, by Tony Bennett

/ UK #1s blog / 11 Comments

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Stranger in Paradise, by Tony Bennett (his 1st and only #1)

2 weeks, from 13th to 27th May 1955

I don’t know this song, or do I?

The opening melody sounds very familiar – familiar in a film score-ish, symphonic way. The sort of music you might here in a lift, or on a held call. Then the lyrics kick in and I’m not so sure I do know this song after all. But that melody… Are we listening to the first ever sample to top the charts? I didn’t think that was a thing until the late ’80s.

Take my hand, Tony croons. I’m a stranger in paradise… Lost in a wonderland… Starry eyed… The lyrics are all standard-issue mid-fifties. At first. Then things take an interesting turn. The singer is in love, unrequited, and can but stare from afar at his love. He is a mortal, and his love is an angel. He saw her face and ascended out of the common place, into the rare, somewhere in space… He hangs suspended, until he knows his love cares, and that she will answer his fervent prayer. It’s all quite cerebral. Probably the most complex song, lyrically, to have topped the charts so far.

It’s a well-constructed, immaculately sung, beautifully polished record. It’s no throwaway flash in the pan, yet to me it lacks something. Perhaps it just can’t step out from the shadow of the raunchy mambo that preceded it. File it under ‘Pleasant, But Dull’ – a record that I can understand others enjoying, but that I fail to really get myself. But boy, did others enjoy this record back in the spring of 1955! In the week that Mr. Bennett ‘ascended’ to the top, there were no fewer than five other versions of ‘Stranger in Paradise’ in the singles chart (by now a Top 20). The Four Aces, Bing Crosby, Tony Martin and Don Cornell all had a go. Eddie Calvert even parped a version out on his trumpet.

This is something that I fail to grasp about these early charts… While multiple hits by the same artist clogging up the charts (Sheeran! Bieber!) can be frustrating, it is ultimately an indicator of their popularity. But who needs six versions of the same bloody song? It’s not as if one version was ska, one version death metal – I’m confident that the Don Cornell version sounds pretty much like all the others. Anyway, Tony Bennett won the ‘Stranger in Paradise’ race, and it at least meant that a musical legend ticked a UK #1 off his bucket list. A still active legend too. He recently hit ninety, and released his most recent studio album in 2015. The year before that he released a duets album with Lady Gaga. And so, though we are wading through the mists of time (chart-history wise), we have a direct link here to the modern day. That’s quite cool.

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I was about to leave it there, but I still had a nagging feeling that there was more to this song than I had realised. I know that melody – doo doo doo dooby dooby doo – and the lyrics are a little bit too weird to exist only for the benefit of this one hit record. And so it emerges… ‘Stranger in Paradise’ is from the musical ‘Kismet’, which is in turn adapted from the music of 19th Century Russian composer Alexander Borodin. Hence the outré lyrics, hence the familiar melody…

I want to like this song: it’s music for grown-ups. But I also want to read all seven volumes of ‘A la Recherche du Temps Perdu’ and learn Italian. Some things just aren’t going to happen.

31. ‘Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White’, by Perez ‘Prez’ Prado & His Orchestra

/ UK #1s blog / 13 Comments

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Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White, by Perez ‘Prez’ Prado & His Orchestra (his 1st and only #1)

2 weeks, from 29th April to 13th May 1955

What a way to kick off the next thirty!

I’ve given instrumentals a hard time so far in this rundown. The lack of any lyrics creates a barrier, for me, between the song and the listener. You can listen to a Mantovani record and think “Isn’t that a nice melody”, but the fact that there are no words to tie it to a particular feeling or experience in your life means that the record is that step further removed from you. Like a film beautifully acted but in a language you cannot understand.

Having said all that… I’m going to prove myself massively wrong with this post. The fourth instrumental to top the UK Singles chart is also, by far, the sexiest record to top said singles charts. And there are no words. Well – there are no words aside from ‘Huh!’, ‘Hah!’ and ‘Oooh’. Which is a large part of this track’s said sexiness.

Following on from ‘Mambo Italiano’ (which wasn’t really a mambo, but hey), the UK was clearly in some sort of Latin fever in early 1955. Though perhaps not, as a quick glance at the chart for the week Perez ‘Prez’ hit the top shows only one other record that sounds vaguely Latino… A different version of ‘Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White’ (which we’ll meet very soon at the top of the charts). But, for the purposes of this narrative, let’s say that the UK – finally casting off the shackles of rationing and wartime rubble – wanted to shake some booty and, while perhaps not quite ready for straight up rock ‘n’ roll, turned to some equally raunchy mambo. Further evidence towards my idea that rock ‘n’ roll didn’t just arrive with ‘Rock Around the Clock’ – it was slowly filtering in through Rosemary Clooney’s giggle, Winifred Atwell’s boogie and Johnnie Ray’s yelps. And Perez ‘Prez’ Prado’s trumpet.

Except the trumpet that makes this record isn’t being played by the man on the credits. We’ll get to that in a second. First – this record has perhaps the most intense intro we’ve heard yet. Basically it’s BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM on a load of trumpets and cymbals, before the rhythm kicks in. The lead trumpet was played by a man called Billy Regis, who absolutely makes this record by drawing out one note in particular over and over again, by sliding it down then up in a manner that sounds a little bit drunk, a little bit woozy, and that, most importantly, would allow a couple in a Southend ballroom to draw that little bit closer for a second, before the main melody jumped back in.

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Prado was more of a conductor, I guess, and it is his ‘Huhs’ and ‘Hahs’ that can be heard as he exerts his charges to squeeze every drop of sexiness from their instruments (that sounded ruder than I intended – you know what I mean). There are also some other trumpets (I guess they are trumpets) playing notes so low that it’s almost obscene. I recognise them from Lou Bega’s classic cover of ‘Mambo No.5’, from another golden age of Latin music in the UK charts, which we won’t be getting to for a long, long time. Incidentally, Perez Prado recorded the original version of that song, too.

But the final word has to go to Billy Regis, whose trumpet ends the record. He reimagines the bombastic ending – from which so many earlier chart-toppers have suffered – and it works so much better without lyrics. THIS IS THE END OF THE SONG becomes DOOO DOOO (pause) DOOOOOOOOO, and it again allows Janet and John from Southend to draw close and to feel one another’s bodies, taught and trembling from two and a half minutes of intense mambo.

‘Huh!’ and, indeed, ‘Hah!’

28. ‘Mambo Italiano’, by Rosemary Clooney & The Mellomen

/ UK #1s blog / 18 Comments

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Mambo Italiano, by Rosemary Clooney (her 2nd of two #1s) & the Mellomen

1 week, from 14th to 21st Jan / 2 Weeks, from 4th to 18th Feb 1955 (3 weeks total)

Just like that, Rosemary Clooney’s pops up again. She had two number ones, within a couple of months, and then she was done. (I’m being a little disingenuous here – she was a chart force for several years – but we are only concerning ourselves with number ones hits here, no room for second best).

And good old Rosie – her time at the top may have been fleeting, but at least she had a bit of fun while she was there. This is an even more frenzied bop than ‘This Ole House’. We start out with a bit of nonsense about a girl going back to Napoli, because she misses the scenery. And then… Hey Mambo!

On first listen I thought she was really singing in Italian, but she is just listing food: Hey mambo… try an enchilada with the fish bacalla and other cod-Italian phrases. Something something mozzarella, something something Calabrese… I think there’s a Como se dice in there. To be honest, Miss Clooney doesn’t know como se dice very much at all. And anyway, that’s Spanish. But it’s OK – you can’t help but want to dance to this. For the solo, the bouncy piano from ‘This Ole House’ returns, and it ends with a brilliant That’s Nice! OOH! As for ‘The Mellomen’… who knows? They do little more than your average ’50s backing singers – a few ‘Hey Mambo’s here and there – so I’m not sure why they got a credit. But, just like that, they have a UK Number One single.

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If this were released today, people might pick up on the gibberish mix of English and Italian, and the picture it paints of Italian-Americans, and they may perhaps view it in an unfavourable light. Remember how Justin Bieber got in trouble for singing about Doritos to the tune of ‘Despacito’? But actually, this is a song about a girl returning to a native land where she now feels confused and out of touch. The lyrics are meant to be mumbo-jumbo. We’re not meant to understand them… Kinda clever when you think about it.

The song also features the line: If you gonna be a square, you ain’t a-gonna go nowhere, ‘Square’, as far as I’m concerned, is the archetypal ’50s slang word: Be there or be square… You’re so square, baby I don’t care… So, while this is a mambo record, sung by an easy-listening singer-slash-actress, this is rock ‘n’ roll. It may be fun and funky, but it just about manages to retain an air of cool around all the silliness. While we were waiting for Bill Haley to come along and kick-off things off, the ideals and attitudes, if not the actual sounds, of rock ‘n’ roll were being sneaked in right under our noses.

As with her previous chart topper, I knew this song already. Most people do. I have vague memories of a late-90s remix. Plus, Miss Clooney is remembered nowadays as the aunt of housewives’ heartthrob George Clooney. But – remixes and celebrity descendants aside – we should all take a minute to appreciate her for the few weeks, in late ’54/early ’55, when she slapped a good dollop of fun into an otherwise pretty staid and stuffy UK singles chart.