1965 pop hits sixties

188. ‘I’ll Never Find Another You’, by The Seekers

/ UK #1s blog / 13 Comments

For the first time in a good nine months – since The Four Pennies’ bland ode to ‘Juliet’ – do we arrive at a #1 single that I have never heard before. This is how it used to be, of course, in the pre-rock days – before rock ‘n’ roll came along, with all those famous songs in tow. Almost every post was a step into the unknown…

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I’ll Never Find Another You, by The Seekers (their 1st of two #1s)

2 weeks, from 25th February – 11th March 1965

Speaking of rock ‘n’ roll, and the fifties and all that… The opening chords of this latest chart-topper sound a lot like ‘La Bamba’. A mellower, more folksy version of the Ritchie Valens hit to be sure, but they’re there. It’s a promising opening… that lasts until the singers open their mouths…

There’s a new world somewhere, They call the promised land, And I’ll be there someday, If you could hold my hand… Several earnest, fresh-faced voices chime together. I’m getting strong Christians-round-a-campfire vibes… I still need you there beside me, No matter what I do, For I know I’ll never find another you… Or maybe proto-hippies, the first feelers of a movement that will go full-on mainstream in a couple of years? The lyrics sure do sound like they could be about joining a commune (‘The promised land’?)

Not quite. This record is, though, our first slice of sixties folk-rock. The gentle guitars, the clear vocals, the tambourine that gets a good shaking in the background… It’s a genre that I don’t think was ever quite as popular in the UK as in America, where Peter, Paul and Mary, The Byrds, The Mamas and the Papas, Simon & Garfunkel and, of course, Bob Dylan were big, big stars. But we’d had fair warning of it – remember back in 1961, when the collegiate folk band The Highwaymen scored a surprise #1 with their version of ‘Michael’ (Row Your Boat etc. etc.)? They were from across the pond, too.

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I’m not convinced by this song, to be honest… There’s something a bit cloying about it, a bit happy-clappy. And the lead singer – Judith Durham – sounds kind of like a Sunday school teacher gone rogue. Plus the lyrics don’t really go anywhere – it’s just a long list of what she can do with her man by her side… When I walk through the storm you’ll be my guide… and I could lose it all tomorrow, And never mind at all… etcetera and so on. It’s not terrible; but it’s the worst number one for a while. Probably since ‘Juliet’, the last chart-topper that I’d never heard of… And in its defence, we’ve just enjoyed the highest-quality run of #1 singles in British chart-history, and it would be unfair to completely write a record off just because it doesn’t hit the heights of ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ or ‘You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’.

I am, for example, a sucker for those yearning chords that pop up time and time again in folk-rock. See lines like You’ll be my someone, Forever and a day… Or If I should lose your love dear, I don’t know what I’ll do… The first song I ever loved – I’m reliably informed, as I was too young to remember – was ‘Puff the Magic Dragon’, which I would sing anywhere and everywhere as a toddler, driving everyone around me to the edge of insanity. And ‘Puff’’s got plenty of those yearning, minor-key chords in it. Who knows – maybe I’m a folky at heart?

Of course, all that stuff I just spouted about ‘I’ll Never Find Another You’ being an all-American slice of hippyish folk is undone by the fact that The Seekers were Australian, and that the song was composed by British songwriter Tom Springfield (brother of Dusty – who keeps cropping up via other people’s songs – when will she appear on her own merits?) But hey. It sounds American, and was definitely influenced by American folk-rock artists of the day, so we’re claiming it for the Yanks.

To finish, I’ll return to the pre-rock days that I mentioned at the start of the post. Back then, as Vera Lynn, Dickie Valentine, Winifred Atwell et al were jostling for attention at the top of the charts, the word I reached for more often than most was ‘twee’. And that’s what this is: the twee-est number one single we’ve had in a long time. Altogether then, grab the marshmallows and back round the campfire for another singalong!

Catch up with this handily compiled playlist!

187. ‘Tired of Waiting for You’, by The Kinks

/ UK #1s blog / 4 Comments

The 4th chart-topping single of 1965 is a bit of a Ctrl-Alt-Del moment. The first three #1s have felt like a mini revolution in all their Latin-soul, jazzy, glossy-pop glory. You could have been forgiven for asking: Is the Beat movement dead already?

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Tired of Waiting for You, by The Kinks (their 2nd of three #1s)

1 week, from 18th – 25th February 1965

Of course it isn’t. The Kinks are swooping in to save the day for all the boys with guitars out there. A wonky, woozy intro – it feels kind of like you’re floating on a swing on a hot summer’s day – then in comes Ray Davies… So tired, Tired of waiting, Tired of waiting for you… (On a side note, I’ve always thought that Davies sings with a strange accent – as if English wasn’t his first language. Kind of Indian sounding. It’s really noticeable here…)

Anyway, he’s being kept waiting by a girl. And not ‘waiting’ as in she’s late for a movie. Waiting as in waiting. I was a lonely soul, I had nobody till I met you, But you keep-a me waiting, All of the time, What can I do? He might be waiting for a declaration of love; or waiting for you-know-what, like a horny teenager. Who knows?

I mentioned in my post on ‘You Really Got Me’ that that song, while being one of The Kink’s biggest and best known hits, isn’t really indicative of their sound. ‘Tired of Waiting for You’ is much more Kinks-y to me, especially when the band harmonise on the bridge: It’s your life, And you can do what you want… There are hints of ‘Waterloo Sunset’ there – and I can mention/link to that song now as it – unbelievably – won’t be featuring in this countdown. One of the great chart-travesties, that. I’m also getting a Searchers-vibe in the song’s chiming melancholy, too.

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The edge is still there, though. The crunchy guitars that blasted their way through ‘You Really Got Me’ are barking in the background, especially in the build-up to the final chorus, as Davies pleads Please don’t keep me waiting… It’s a song about frustration, albeit politely voiced frustration. It’s like the polite cousin of ‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction’… (Now there’s a song which we will be meeting on this countdown – hurrah!)

The Kinks will have one more number one, and several more famous songs that don’t make the chart summit. But I’ve enjoyed re-hearing this one. I had a Kinks’ Greatest Hits on CD as a kid, and while I knew this song I’ve never really listened to it in much detail. It’s a nicely forgotten chart-topper from an ever so slightly under-rated band. And coming as it does, in early 1965, as pop music races to evolve and improve at a staggering pace, it already sounds like a bit of a throwback.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QkBvsBpgGbo

186. ‘You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin”, by The Righteous Brothers

/ UK #1s blog / 12 Comments

Oh baby, baby… For our next chart-topper, we take a step into the realm of the super-cool. An empty stage… A sole spotlight shining its beam through the dusty air… A mic on a stand… Thick curtains part, and on step two men…

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You’ve Lost that Lovin’ Feelin’, by The Righteous Brothers (their 1st of two #1s)

2 weeks, from 4th – 18th February 1965

And then that voice. Sonorous. Rich. Velvety and comforting, but authoritative too. You never close your eyes, Anymore when I kiss, Your li-ips… It’s a voice that is somehow both low and high within the same line – sometimes within the same word. And there’s no tenderness like before, In your fingerti-ips… A voice that goes from velvety soft to a gravelly rasp in seconds (see that Baby! Something beautiful’s dying! line.) Said voice is Bill Medley’s, and it’s unlike anything we’ve heard before in this countdown. Apparently, at the time, it was so deep and treacly that people thought they were listening to the record on the wrong speed. I’d rate it instantly alongside Roy Orbison and Shirley Bassey as the best voice to have topped the charts, up to now. It’s a voice that it’s almost impossible to mimic… Anyone can pretend to be Elvis, or Mick Jagger, and just about get away with it. Not this voice.

The backing music is way off in the background, too – a softly shaken out drum and some ethereal strings. This record, to start with anyway, is all about the voice. Apparently Bobby Hatfield, the other Righteous Brother (they weren’t biological brothers – something I just found out…) was pissed off that they weren’t starting the song by singing together. But you’d have to say the producer got it right on that front. That producer, by the way…? One Phil Spector.

Hatfield soon gets his moment, though. Come the chorus, the two voices ring out: You’ve lost that lovin’ feelin, Now it’s gone, gone, gone, Woah-woah-oh… Then they intertwine for the superb crescendo that leads to the final chorus. You know, the bit that starts with an angelic Baby, baby, I’ll get down on my knees for you… and soars into call-and-response Babys! and Pleases! and I need your loves! It is pop perfection… as trite as that phrase sounds. Time-capsule pop, as I coined it in an earlier post. Two voices that are as good as The Everly Brothers; but that are completely different too.

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In keeping with more recent #1s, ‘You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling’ is a very sophisticated song. It’s pop for adults. A world away from the teeny-bopping Mersey sound that encapsulated 1963-’64. It’s perhaps the first example of the American response to the British invasion – a record, like The Supremes from a few weeks earlier, which has that US gloss. You just know that the Righteous Brothers had perfectly white teeth…

Some of this is to do with the lyrics. With lines like And now your starting to, Criticise little things that I do… it’s looking at love in a way that Herman’s Hermits, or Billy J. Kramer, or even The Beatles, weren’t. But it’s more to do with Spector’s soaring, crashing, grandiose Wall of Sound production. The strings. The drums. The stereo sound that fills the room. I wrote a post recently on how it was a crime that ‘Be My Baby’ didn’t make #1. But, while that is a peerless pop disc; I hadn’t noticed that this record was coming up. I knew that this was a good song – a classic – but I had forgotten (or perhaps had never realised) just how good it was. Listening to it now… Oh boy. Phil Spector may be many things (most of them awful), but nobody – nobody I say! – knew their way around a pop record like him back in his heyday.

Like most eighties kids, my first exposure to ‘You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling’ was in, ahem, ‘Top Gun’. Maverick and Goose, all in white, serenading Kelly McGillis… And this is just one of the ways in which this song has grown its own legend. It’s been covered by everyone: Cilla Black, Dionne Warwick, Hall & Oates… It caused Brian Wilson to tell the writers – Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil – that he had been “ready to quit the music business, but this has inspired me to write again”… We are in Rolling Stone Top 10, BMI most-played songs of all time territory here. We won’t meet many bigger songs than this one as we move on. Finally, and perhaps most excitingly of all, mixed in amongst the backing singers on the disc, was an up-and-coming young woman by the name of Cher.

We will hear from The Righteous Brothers again. But not for a long time, and in somewhat specific circumstances. It’s a lifetime away – one of the biggest gaps between #1 singles in history. This was, then, to all intents and purposes, their only chart-topping hit in their ‘lifetime’. Relish it, appreciate it… Just be grateful that it exists…

Catch up with the previous #1 singles here:

185. ‘Go Now!’, by The Moody Blues

/ UK #1s blog / 16 Comments

Hot on the heels of Georgie Fame & The Blue Flames’ snazzy ‘Yeh Yeh’, an equally quirky record pops up for a week at the top of the UK charts.

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Go Now!, by The Moody Blues (their 1st and only #1)

1 week, from 28th January – 4th February 1965

We’ve already sa-id… I like records that just get on with it – no drawn out intro, no nothing – and this is one such disc. Goodbye… Voice, then piano. A thumpingly, clumpingly unsubtle piano. I mean this with no disrespect, but the piano here sounds like it’s being played by an elephant. I’d bet they overlaid several tracks one on top of the other to get the rich, heavy sound. I love it. Since you gotta go, Oh you better go now…!

It’s a song about a break up. The singer doesn’t want to break up, but if it has to be done then he’d rather his S.O. just got on with it. Cos darlin, darlin’, Can’t you see I want you stay, yeah-ah-yeah-ah… The singer – Denny Laine – has a voice every bit as soulful as Georgie Fame before him, and he holds nothing back. The way he sings/spits out lines like I don’t want you to tell me just what you intend to do now…, for example, is great, and deceptively hard to recreate.

The production too is thick and soulful, with hints of Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound and the baroque minor keys that were about to become a big thing in sixties pop. (It’s actually a cover of an American R&B hit from earlier in the decade.) It’s also a very rough-and-ready recording – not perfect – with lots of crackly patches, as if the tape were struggling to contain the volume and the power of this band. I love the piano solo, one that rolls and cascades – a cross between a ship being tossed on stormy seas and Dante’s descent into hell. The ending is also a lot of fun, with a huge finish – the whole band appearing to shout out the title of the song before a very quick, slightly wonky fade.

‘Go Now!’ is another grown-up pop record – make that two in a row – and one that perfectly encapsulates the way pop music is now fragmenting and moving away from the Beat sound that has dominated for most of the past two years. New year, new sound etc. etc. It’s also a record that I’ve loved for many years – The Moody Blues being a staple of long family car journeys as a child. But, here’s the ironic bit… I really, really can’t stand any of The Moody Blues’ other songs…

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You see, after this – their one and only chart-topper – they started getting all experimental. Denny Laine left the band and a bloke called Justin Hayward came in, they ditched the pop/R&B and they went… (shudder)… progressive. Now, I love rock music. To me ‘rock’ is the foundation upon which all great music is made. Stick ‘garage’, or ‘hard’, or ‘glam’, or ‘electronic’, or ‘punk’, or ‘surf’, or even ‘yacht’, in front of ‘rock’, and I’m usually in. ‘Prog-rock’, though? I run a mile. Jethro Tull, Marillion, Pink Floyd, Yes!… No, no, no! Lock me in and call it ‘Room 101’. You can be experimental, and forward-thinking, as avant-garde as you like… but ‘Prog’? The minute you call yourself prog then your head’s gone too far up your arse. And The Moody Blues are the worst culprits for me because A) They started it and B) I had to sit through their ‘Best Of’ on many a long car journey, aged eleven.

It would start off well enough. Track 1 was ‘Go Now!’. Three minutes of pop bliss. But then there were nineteen other songs to sit through before it was over – none of which sounded anything like ‘Go Now!’. And prog-rock songs are never, ever as short as they should be… ‘Give me ABBA’, I would cry, ‘The Eagles or The Stones. Even Fleetwood Mac if you must. Anything but this.’ But my dad would stand firm, and we’d listen to the bitter end… I have especially painful memories of ‘Nights in White Satin’… And ‘Tuesday Afternoon‘…

Having studied The Moody Blues history ahead of this post, it seems that the blame can be laid squarely at this Justin Hayward fellow’s feet. Once he was in and Laine was out (Laine later joined Wings), ‘Go Now!’ seems to have been written out of the band’s history. They rarely performed it live, and it didn’t appear on any of their ‘Greatest Hits’ until the mid-1990s. (Which was precisely when my dad bought said CD for the car… Just think – there might easily have been no good songs on that album…)

Yes, let’s end this post on a positive note. Nineteen of the twenty tracks on The Moody Blues ‘Greatest Hits’ album may well be terrible songs. But the one good song on that album also happens to be their only #1 single. We won’t hear from them again on this countdown! We can just pretend that they were one-hit wonders! Pretend that the glorious ‘Go Now!’ was the only piece of music that the band ever offered to the world. Isn’t that a comforting thought…

184. ‘Yeh Yeh’, by Georgie Fame & The Blue Flames

/ UK #1s blog / 11 Comments

No sooner have I mentioned that 1965 might be a more eclectic year in terms of its chart-topping singles, when along comes one Georgie Fame with a swaying slice of Latin soul.

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Yeh Yeh, by Georgie Fame (his 1st of three #1s) & The Blue Flames (their 1st of two #1s)

2 weeks, from 14th – 28th January 1965

Wham and then Bam. In the space of three #1s we’ve gone Blues–Beat rock-Latin. I might even go so far as to describe this as a Bossanova, if I was at all certain what exactly a ‘Bossanova’ was… Whatever it is, it’s not a sound that we’ve heard very often at the top of the UK charts. After months of Merseybeat things are really starting to splinter in different directions.

The song is about a guy who, after finishing work every evening, calls up his baby and asks her what she wants to do… I mention movies, But she don’t seem to dig that, And then she asks me, Why don’t I come to her flat… ‘Yeh Yeh’ is his response. The words are spat out at a rapid pace, half-rapped (this might be the hardest number one yet in terms of making out the lyrics). But it still becomes clear just what his baby’s game is. She suggests supper and listening to some records, and soon the kissing starts: And when she kisses, I feel the fire get hot, She never misses, She gives it all that she’s got…

I love the break in the middle, when one long tongue twister line – We’ll play a melody and turn the lights down low so that none can see… – ascends to a natty drum fill and lots of We gotta do that’s! and Yeh Yehs! Then there’s a full-blown sax solo for all you hip cats out there.

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It’s a cool record, there’s no doubting that. I can imagine it as the soundtrack to a lot of groovy, hipster parties during the winter of ’64 – ’65. And Georgie Fame – before googling him I pictured him in a turtle neck and a pork pie hat, and after googling him I was slightly disappointed to find that he favoured suits and sharp ties. (He did like a cigarette, dangling all loose and louche, from the corner of his mouth, however.) Plus, finding out that he was born Clive Powell, in Lancashire, rather than Georgie Fame, New York City, took the shine off even further.

Still, despite being Clive from Lancashire, Fame has a real soulful voice. He goes fast then slow, loud then quiet, and – while the band are really tight – his voice is the most impressive instrument in the record. The way it blends together with the organ and the sax to draw out the final note is particularly cool. The Blue Flames had been the backing band for British rock ‘n’ roller Billy Fury, and Georgie Fame their piano player, but when they parted ways Clive AKA Georgie Fame became their leader and they went off down the path of R&B-slash-soul.

‘Yeh Yeh’ is nice, and funky; but it’s a hard record to classify. The best way I can describe is that it would sit perfectly next to ‘Green Onions’ by Booker T. & The MGs on a compilation called ‘Sexy Sixties’, or something. Plus, both Fame and The Flames will pop up sporadically as the sixties progress, so we’ll save any further bios for another day. In the meantime, sit back, grab a glass, and enjoy the sound of the swinging, sexy sixties floating through your earholes. Yeh Yeh!

Never miss a number one single with this playlist…