fifties music

Remembering Connie Francis

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Earlier this week the sad news of Connie Francis’ death was announced, aged eighty-seven, closing the door on yet another chapter from the earliest chart years. There can’t be many, if any, older chart-toppers than Francis still around… And there were precious few women, either, who were scoring rock ‘n’ roll hits and competing with the big male stars of the late fifties.

Francis scored two huge, six-weeks-apiece #1s in 1958, the sassy ‘Who’s Sorry Now’ and the whipcracking ‘Stupid Cupid’ (twinned with ‘Carolina Moon’). I also covered her 1960 hits ‘Mama’ and ‘Robot Man’ as a Random Runner-Up. Follow those links to hear those tunes, and to read my original posts. But since writing those posts – and this has been one of the best things about doing this blog, discovering artists’ non-chart topping back catalogues – I’ve fallen in love with many of Connie’s other hits. So let’s share some here, in her memory.

‘Lipstick on Your Collar’ – #3 in 1959

I love the camp melodrama of this bop, about a cheating boy given away by lipstick smudges. How does Connie know the lipstick isn’t hers? Well, eagle-eyed, she notices his is red, while hers is baby pink. Coleen Rooney eat your heart out. Turns out that floozy Mary Jane had been smooching her man right outside the juke joint. But, as with so many of her early records, Connie does not wallow in heartbreak. In fact, she seems almost thrilled to have rumbled him…

‘Plenty Good Lovin” – #18 in 1959

A similarly uptempo, more swinging, hit from the same year. And this one is positively raunchy by 1959 standards. In fact, I’m not sure Connie isn’t simulating orgasm during the break in the middle… She sings the praises of a man who doesn’t have a nice car, can’t play guitar, is neither intelligent nor particularly good-looking, but who’s got somethin’ that’s better by far… I mean, gurrrrlllll… Plenty of things that he don’t know, But this boy shines when the lights are low…

‘Everybody’s Somebody’s Fool’ – #3 in 1960

Her first US #1, and in fact the first Billboard Hot 100 number one by a female singer (the chart having launched well over a year earlier). Which just goes to prove how impressive Francis’s hit making was, stacked against the likes of Elvis, Pat Boone, Ricky Nelson and co. I love the honky-tonk feel to this, with the rolling organ and the rickety, country beat, and her voice drenched in echo.

‘Where the Boys Are’ – #5 in 1961

Francis made her acting debut in 1961, in the movie ‘Where the Boys Are’. And the title track gave her another big hit, proving that she could sing something a little more traditional to go along with all the rock ‘n’ roll. In 1978, as she was attempting a career comeback, Connie recorded a disco version. If that doesn’t grab you, how about a Japanese version? Today’s female stars could only dream of such versatility.

‘Vacation’ – #10 in 1962

Despite not having an original bone in its body, and already sounding dated in 1962, I love this throwaway tune. ‘Vacation’ was Francis’s last Top 10 hit in both the US and the UK, as the Merseybeat acts prepared to render so many stars obsolete. But it’s hard not to get carried along with this record’s exuberance. Maybe because I’m an English teacher in my day job, I’m instinctively drawn to songs that spell words out in the lyrics. Similarly, it’s probably why I’m drawn to songs about the summer holidays. So this one works for me on many levels.

‘Pretty Little Baby’

It would be wrong to finish without mentioning her final ‘hit’. ‘Pretty Little Baby’ was a B-side back in 1962, but in recent months you’ll surely have heard it if you’ve spent any amount of time scrolling on Instagram or TikTok. In one of her final interviews, Francis claimed to have forgotten of the song’s existence, but that she was touched by its resurgence, and how even kindergartners now know her music. Back to teaching for a moment, I can attest to this as I have a student who has been singing this to himself for several months now… Musically this is cute, and I love whatever early electronic device the solo was recorded on.

From the mid-sixties onwards the hits dried up, and Connie Francis’s personal life took several dark turns. The Guardian published a good article on her many highs and lows yesterday, and she became an advocate for mental health following various traumatic experiences. Having read that, it feels impressive that she lived such a long life and fulfilled life. She returned to music, and only officially retired a few years ago.

Connie Francis, December 12th 1937 – July 16th 2025

Remembering Johnnie Ray and Del Shannon

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It’s been a while since I did a ‘Remembering’ post, so here’s two for the price of one. Two big stars of the pre-Beatles age, both of whom died within a couple of weeks in February 1990.

Before starting this blog, I knew Johnnie Ray by name and not much else. He after all is referenced in the opening line of ‘Come On Eileen’ (Poor old Johnnie Ray…) But I will now be forever grateful to him, for making the earliest years of the charts bearable, when it sometimes felt like one po-faced ballad after another, after another. His first #1 was the incredibly steamy (by 1954 standards) ‘Such a Night’, and he had a seven-week run with the whistle-tastic ‘Just Walkin’ in the Rain’ before ending things with the zippy ‘Yes Tonight, Josephine’. All three are well worth a listen if you’ve not heard them before, and proof that pop music could be fun in the prehistoric era. Below I’ll highlight a few of my other favourites of his.

Released in 1951, before Britain even had a singles chart, we can assume that ‘Cry’ would have been a multi-week number one. The missing link between Sinatra and Elvis, Ray’s wonderfully histrionic performance shows why he was known as the ‘Nabob of Sob’ and the ‘Prince of Wails’, surely two of pop music’s best nicknames. His exaggerated, stagey way of singing may have been linked to the fact that he was partially deaf.

‘Ain’t Misbehavin’ is a standard, recorded by everyone from Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald, to Robson & Jerome. And while I’ll admit to not having heard every version, I’d suggest that you’d struggle to find a performance more committed than Johnnie Ray’s. The man was the epitome of the phrase ‘sing it for the back row’.

Fond of a whistle, Ray made #10 with ‘You Don’t Owe Me A Thing’ in early 1958, a perfect example of how rock ‘n’ roll was making its presence felt in records that weren’t actually rock songs.

By the early 1960s, like so many fifties stars, Ray’s career had tailed off. It’s surprising that he managed to have a career in the first place, after he was arrested for soliciting an undercover policeman in a public toilet in 1951. Rumours about Ray’s sexuality continued, but didn’t seem to harm his sales until another arrest in 1959. He was openly bisexual to many in the music industry, and married a woman named Marilyn Morrison in 1952, who claimed she would ‘straighten him out’. They separated after a year.

Ray also had problems with alcohol, which worsened in the sixties. He would sporadically tour small venues and appear on television in the States, while commanding much larger audiences in the UK and Australia (where he remained most popular) right up until his death from liver failure on February 24th 1990. He was sixty-three.

Del Shannon scored his sole chart-topper a few years after Ray’s time at the top. And what a chart-topper it was. ‘Runaway’ is possibly the most inventive, most exciting, most propulsive #1 of that supposedly fallow period between Elvis and The Beatles. It made top spot in the summer of 1961, and features an innovative Musitron solo, making it arguably the first electronic hit. But even if that solo was played on a clapped out old piano it would take nothing from the record’s innate quality. Anyway, I discussed all this in more detail in my post on ‘Runaway’ here.

‘Runaway’ is so good that it tends to completely overshadow anything Del Shannon released afterwards. But ‘Little Town Flirt’ is another great slice of malt shop pop, making #4 in early 1963. He had a good line in heartbreak, and woman shaming, usually singing about runaways and flirts, and in ‘Hats Off to Larry’ he indulges in a bit of schadenfreude as his ex is dumped and left as heartbroken as he had been.

Shannon had a style, and came pretty close to shamelessly ripping himself off on some records (check out how close ‘Two Kinds of Teardrops’ is to ‘Little Town Flirt!) But on ‘So Long Baby’ he managed to recycle the energy of ‘Runaway’ into a deranged oompah beat and create a #10 hit that sounds both frivolous and terrifying.

Like Johnnie Ray, Del Shannon’s career slowed down towards the end of the sixties and into the seventies as he battled alcoholism. He worked with Tom Petty and Dave Edmunds, and by the ’80s he had sobered up and started something of a comeback. He worked with Jeff Lynne, and was touted as a replacement for Roy Orbison in The Travelling Wilburys. Sadly, though, he shot himself on February 8th 1990, apparently after having a negative reaction to the Prozac he was taking for depression. He was just fifty-five.

Never Had a #1… Nat King Cole

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This week, we’re celebrating the ‘unluckiest’ chart acts of all time. The four bands/artists with the most Top 10 hits, but without a number one…

Next up… We’re going way back in time, to a man who was present on the very first chart back in 1952.

Nat King Cole – 15 Top 10 hits between 1952 and 1987

‘Pretend’ – #2 in 1953

Pretend you’re happy when you’re blue… Nat’s silky tones wrap themselves around this self-help guide of a song. Not sure many modern-day mental health professionals would recommend simply pretending yourself happy and in love. But folks were made of sterner stuff back in the fifties, and apparently they could just sing themselves happy on demand. Cole may not have a number one single to his name, but chart-toppers like Marvin Gaye, Johnny Preston and Alvin Stardust have recorded versions of ‘Pretend’.

‘Smile’ – #2 in 1954

A year later, Nat was at it again. One word title, reaching #2, insisiting that You’ll find that life is still worthwhile, If you just smile… This one is much better known, to me at least. In fact, if someone asks you to name a ‘classic’, or a ‘standard’, then there’s a chance you might name ‘Smile’. The tune was written by none other than Charlie Chaplin, in 1936, before words were added in the fifties. It’s been covered by everyone from Michael Jackson (his favourite song, apparently), Judy Garland, Michael Buble (obviously) and Lady Gaga.

‘When I Fall in Love’ – reached #2 in 1957, and #4 in 1987

Completing his hattrick of #2s, another classy ballad. Nat King Cole did release uptempo tunes (I love ‘Those Lazy Hazy Crazy Days of Summer‘), but the British public loved him best when he was crooning his heart out. This one, from the movie ‘Istanbul’, tips over into ‘boring’ territory, I’m afraid. But I’m in a minority, it seems, as it also made #4 on rerelease thirty years later. By that time Cole had been dead for two decades – he passed away aged just forty-five, from lung cancer. If he’d lived longer, who knows, he may have been even higher up on this list, or may even have featured in the main countdown…

Nat King Cole might have recorded a version of Michael Jackson’s favourite song, but up next we’ll feature a lady with a slightly more concrete link to the King of Pop…

640. ‘Tears on My Pillow’, by Kylie Minogue

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Kylie does Grease!

Tears on My Pillow, by Kylie Minogue (her 4th of seven #1s)

1 week, from 21st – 28th January 1990

Well, no. Kylie’s never done ‘Grease’ – though she’d have made a good Sandy – and ‘Tears on My Pillow’ only ever features in the background of the original movie. But this record certainly has that feel about it…

It’s the final UK #1 to be produced by Stock Aitken and Waterman… pause for a moment to cheer/sigh (delete as appropriate)… though you wouldn’t particularly know it. It’s a shame that they don’t bow out with a Hi-NRG banger, but the chart Gods can be cruel. Like Jason Donovan’s stab at the sixties on ‘Sealed With a Kiss’, this is nothing more than karaoke. At least the trio bow out with a big hit for their chief muse, the lovely Ms Minogue. And in the big ‘Jason Vs Kylie Retro Covers Contest’ there can be only one winner: this one, because it’s Kylie.

There has been a bit of a retro wave sweeping the charts over the final year of the ‘80s. There was Jive Bunny, of course, but also those sixties covers from Jason, and Marc Almond with Gene Pitney. ‘Tears on My Pillow’ had originally been a 1958 hit for Little Anthony & The Imperials – one which failed to chart in the UK but had made #4 in the US. (There has of course been a completely unrelated ‘Tears on My Pillow’ at #1 in the UK, for Johnny Nash in 1975. Off the top of my head, I think this is the second time two different songs with the same name have made #1, after ‘The Power of Love’…)

This was from the soundtrack to Kylie’s big-screen debut ‘The Delinquents’, a Romeo and Juliet-ish tale of teenage love in ‘50s Australia. Apparently the movie isn’t great, but it continues a trend of forgettable films accompanied by number one singles (‘Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now’, ‘When the Going Gets Tough’…) And it scored Kylie her fourth chart-topper in just under two years. Amazingly, this will be her sole nineties #1. A decade of fading chart fortunes, duets with Nick Cave, and a stab at something more alternative will keep her busy until a spectacular comeback in the early ‘00s. Still, she sneaks in, and in due course will join a select band of artists with #1s in three different decades.

If it feels like I’ve been padding this post out, blethering on about everything but the actual, largely forgettable, music then you’d be right. Let me pad it out a little more before finishing, then. Though I don’t remember this particular record, Kylie (and Jason) are pop ground zero for my generation: the first singers we remember from TV, from the playground, the first CDs we bought (more on that later…) The music may not have always been great, but this is nostalgic stuff for us older millennials. This rundown is suddenly getting quite real!

Remembering Burt Bacharach

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Legendary songwriter Burt Bacharach sadly died a couple of days ago, and to mark his passing I thought I’d run through the UK number ones that he (and his partner Hal David) were responsible for. There are seven in total, by acts ranging from Perry Como, to Cilla Black, to Bobbie Gentry, among his fifty-two Top 40 hits.

And, because the charts never play fair, we can only give such timeless classics as (deep breath)… ‘Walk on By’, ‘Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head’, ‘(They Long to Be) Close to You’, ‘The Look of Love’, ‘I Just Don’t Know What to Do With Myself’, ‘Twenty Four Hours from Tulsa’, ‘What the World Needs Now Is Love’ and ‘I Say a Little Prayer’… a shout-out now, because they never made the top spot. Still, we have a fair few good ones to be working with, and there’s a link to my original posts in the song titles.

‘The Story of My Life’ – #1 in 1958 for Michael Holliday

Bacharach’s first big hit, originally written for Marty Robbins. Quite jaunty, very whistle-heavy, and not too much of an indication of what was to come… No matter, for a monster hit was just around the corner.

‘Magic Moments’ – #1 in 1958 for Perry Como

Very few songwriters manage to replace themselves at number one, but Bacharach and David managed it with their first two hits. Crooner Perry Como knocked Holliday off the top, and stayed there for eight weeks. More whistling, but still it’s a song that has seeped into our collective conscience. Anyway, these were just the warm-up for a run of all-time classics in the 1960s.

‘Tower of Strength’ – #1 in 1961 for Frankie Vaughan

I’d put ‘Tower of Strength’ in my Top 5 songs I’ve discovered since starting this blog. It’s a real barnstormer, in which Frankie Vaughan spends two minutes just letting rip. He’s the star here, but he needed good source material. In the US it was hit for Gene McDaniels, in a much more laidback version.

‘Anyone Who Had a Heart’ – #1 in 1964 for Cilla Black

Cilla’s version of Dionne Warwick’s original gave her the biggest female hit of the entire decade in the UK. I’m not one to indulge in idle gossip, but… Apparently Warwick hated the fact that Cilla Black got the bigger hit out of this song, claiming that had she so much as coughed on the original then Cilla would have done the same on her cover version. Bacharach was a big fan, however, personally arguing for Cilla to record it ahead of Shirley Bassey.

‘(There’s) Always Something There to Remind Me‘ – #1 in 1964 for Sandie Shaw

Another song originally recorded by Dionne Warwick – Bacharach and David’s muse throughout their long careers – though her version wasn’t released until 1968. Instead it was a bare-footed seventeen-year-old who took it to #1 in late-1964, launching the career of one of the biggest British singers of the decade. It wasn’t a hit in the US until Naked Eyes’ new-wave version in 1983.

‘Make It Easy on Yourself’ – #1 in 1965 for The Walker Brothers

The classiest #1 single ever? Never has Bacharach and David’s effortlessly slick songwriting had a cooler delivery. This was another one first recorded by Dionne Warwick, before being shelved. Along came The Walker Brothers a few years later, to give the songwriting duo their 6th UK chart-topper.

‘I’ll Never Fall in Love Again’ – #1 in 1969 for Bobbie Gentry

The last #1 hit for Bacharach and David (in the UK, at least) was also one of the 1960’s final chart-toppers. After the first two, fluffier songs on this list, the duo settled into a run of songs detailing exquisite heartbreak. Towers of strength, things being there to remind you, people not having hearts… And then this, a classic anti-love song dressed up in trademark B&D gloss. Plus, one of the best ryhming couplets in pop music history…

Burt Bacharach, May 28th 1928 – February 8th 2023

Remembering Jerry Lee Lewis

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Last time I did a ‘Remembering’ post, it was on the universally loved and cherished Olivia Newton-John, about whom nobody had a bad word to say. Jerry Lee Lewis, though…

We’ve met some wrong ‘uns in our journey through the chart-toppers of yore. Bad types with equally bad music (Rolf Harris), bad types with music that I couldn’t help but enjoy (Gary Glitter). Jerry Lee Lewis was possibly that baddest of them all. ‘The Killer’, so named because he had allegedly tried to strangle a teacher at his high school – or so he said – lived a life that would make your average, run-of-the-mill criminal blush. Drug arrests, assault arrests, two wives dead in suspicious circumstances and – the one that effectively ended his mainstream chart career before it had truly started – a marriage to his thirteen year-old cousin.

He was, in his own words, an unrepentant hillbilly. Unpleasant and aggressive towards his fans, his family, journalists, and other musicians. (When he met John Lennon, he did so after berating the Beatles and their peers as ‘shit’ from the stage. Lennon, legend has it, still kneeled down to kiss Lewis’s feet.) Why then, does he seem to have gotten away with it? Any current artist who did a quarter of the things Jerry Lee allegedly did would have been cancelled into the dust. Is it because it was all so long ago? Is it because people were more able to seperate art from artist? Or is it because he was just so good?

For, no matter how terrible a person he was, he is rock and roll royalty. One of the five deities: Chuck, Elvis, Buddy, Little Richard, and Jerry Lee. Elvis used his voice (and his body), Buddy Holly and Chuck Berry their guitars. Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard had their pianos, which put them at an immediate disadvantage, as pianos are not hugely conducive to rocking and rolling. Pianos are for classical music, for Beethoven and Mozart, for respectable ladies’ front rooms. You have to sit down to play them, and sitting down is the antithesis of rock ‘n’ roll.

So you have to do what Jerry Lee, and Little Richard did. Pound the keys, assault the keys, stamp on them, jump on them… Set the goddamn piano on fire if you have to. (Which Lewis allegedly did when angry at being lower down a bill than Chuck Berry. ‘Follow that, boy’, he said as he left the stage.) Which leads to Jerry Lee’s one and only British chart-topper: ‘Great Balls of Fire’.

Quite often, as with many genres, by the time rock ‘n’ roll made it to the top of the charts it had been diluted. Elvis’s first #1 was the smooth ‘All Shook Up’. Buddy Holly had one chart-topping rocker: ‘That’ll Be the Day’. Berry had to wait until the nonsense that is ‘My Ding-A-Ling’. Little Richard never had one. Which means that ‘Great Balls of Fire’ is probably the purest rock ‘n’ roll chart-topper. It’s unadulteratedly dangerous, and sexy. It has a title that is at once biblical, yet also sexual. Watch the live performance below, probably quite restrained by his standards, and listen to the shrieks form the audience every time he pauses, when he stands, and when he leers at them. The sweat on his brow, the glint in his eye. Anybody capable of that sort of performance was going to have a few skeletons in the closet. He was complicated, unpleasant, the ‘killer’, but he was rock and roll.

Jerry Lee Lewis

September 29th 1935 – October 28th 2022

Random Runners-Up: ‘Move It’, by Cliff Richard & The Drifters

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Our final #2 of the week, and it’s back to the fifties. To a man we’ve met plenty of times before on these very pages…

‘Move It’, by Cliff Richard & The Drifters

#2 for 1 week, from 24th-31st Oct 1958, behind ‘Stupid Cupid’ / ‘Carolina Moon’

Cliff Richard, in 1958, was Britain’s answer to Elvis. That’s both true, and unfair. True, because he was young, good-looking, and extravagantly quiffed. And unfair, because nobody comes out well from a comparison with Elvis.

This was Cliff’s debut single, his first of sixty-eight (68!) Top 10 hits in the UK, over the course of fifty years. And if you are of a slightly snide disposition – and aren’t we all, sometimes – one could argue that this was the only true rock ‘n’ roll record from Britain’s great rock ‘n’ roll hope.

And it does rock. The opening refrain is great, reminiscent of Buddy Holly, and the purring, driving riff that succeeds it sounds genuinely exciting, almost punk-ish in its simplicity. In the autumn of 1958, it must have been thrilling to hear this growling out of some jukebox speakers, and knowing that the singer was from a London suburb, rather than Memphis.

The lyrics are pretty nonsensical, as all the best rock ‘n’ roll lyrics are… C’mon pretty baby let’s a-move it and a-groove it… while The Drifters sound the equal of any American group. (They wouldn’t become The Shadows until 1959, by which point they had accompanied Cliff on his first of many easy-listening #1s, ‘Living Doll’.)

The one thing that doesn’t quite sell this for me is Cliff himself… He just sounds a bit too nice. And I don’t know if that’s because I can’t seperate the goody-goody, God-bothering, Centre Court-serenading Cliff Richard from the eighteen-year-old version. Still, imagine Elvis mumbling and grunting his way through this…

As I referred to above, Cliff would go on to enjoy some reasonable success over the ensuing decades… I wonder if anyone who bought ‘Move It’ in October 1958 imagined that this hot young rocker would still be touring and recording in 2022, well into his ninth decade… As uncool as he is, I can’t bring myself to dislike Sir Clifford of Richard: he’s a bona-fide pop legend. I can’t say I’m looking forward to reviewing any of his three remaining #1s, though, but that’s a story for another day…

I hope you’ve enjoyed random runners-up week. The regular countdown will resume over the weekend, picking up in the summer of ’86…

Remembering Lonnie Donegan

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Today we remember Britain’s very first rock star. Cliff? Tommy Steele? Marty Wilde? They were but cabaret entertainers giving rock ‘n’ roll a go. Lonnie Donegan? He rocked, well and truly.

I remember listening to his first number one single, and thinking woah. ‘Cumberland Gap’ came in in the spring of 1957, between Tab Hunter’s schmaltzy ‘Young Love’ and Guy Mitchell’s goofy ‘Rock-A-Billy’. It was a short, sharp slap round the face and you can read my original post here. (The live version below is even more ferocious). It’s a traditional American folk song, given the British skiffle treatment, and to my ears it is punk come twenty years early. It was also the first of many times that a Scot has topped the UK charts.

‘Cumberland Gap’ wasn’t Donegan’s breakthrough hit: he’d been scoring Top 10s since 1955, and would amass sixteen of them before his chart career was cut short by the Merseybeat explosion. (Ironically, many of those bands had been hugely influenced by Lonnie and his Skiffle Group. The Beatles began when Paul McCartney joined John Lennon’s skiffle band a few months after ‘Cumberland Gap’ had been at #1.) Here is his first hit: ‘Rock Island Line’, a #8 in the UK and, significantly, a Top 10 in America too.

Born in Glasgow, but raised in the east-end of London, Lonnie Donegan had a background in trad-jazz before moving into the new skiffle movement. His subsequent hits included his 2nd number one, a double-‘A’ side of ‘Gamblin’ Man’ and ‘Putting on the Style’, and the brilliantly named ‘Does Your Chewing Gum Lose Its Flavour (On the Bedpost Overnight)?’. That hit veered towards the music hall, and it was the same style of hit that gave Donegan his third and final chart-topper, ‘My Old Man’s a Dustman’. I don’t think I was as impressed by that record in my original review, as humour is a hard thing to get right in a record, and it doesn’t necessarily age well.

It’s tempting to blame Donegan’s shrinking chart fortunes on the song he released for the 1966 World Cup: ‘World Cup Willie’. (Willie was a lion, and the official mascot for the tournament.) It didn’t chart, but it perhaps spurred England on to their win. (Yes, England won the World Cup in 1966. They still mention it from time to time…) I had never heard it, and was ready to hate it, but it’s actually a bit of a trad-jazz foot-stomper. You can see, though, why skiffle hard-liners felt betrayed by Donegan’s move away from the genre in the sixties.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TA3btKkbZpU

Despite the hits drying up, Donegan and his band continued to tour throughout the seventies and eighties. This was despite him suffering several heart attacks, one of which killed him on this day in 2002. The Beatles aside, his legacy also lives on through artists like Roger Daltrey, Mark Knopfler and Jack White.

Lonnie Donegan, 29th April 1931 – 3rd November 2002

Random Runners-Up: ‘Cloud Lucky Seven’, by Guy Mitchell

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My third randomly selected #2 for the week brings us all the way back to the early weeks of 1954. Before Elvis, before the Beatles, before colour TV and motorways, there was Guy Mitchell…

‘Cloud Lucky Seven’, by Guy Mitchell

#2 for 1 week – 12th – 19th February 1954, behind ‘Oh Mein Papa’

I have a huge soft-spot for Guy Mitchell. Not only did he have a hunky, all-American boy next door vibe going on – see the pic above! – but during the early months of this blog, as I trawled through many overwrought and overblown, and often quite dull, pre-rock #1s, Mr. Mitchell would regularly pop up with something a bit more sprightly.

‘Cloud Lucky Seven’ came right in the middle of Mitchell’s four chart-topping singles, and is a pre-rock hit by-numbers. It’s almost unbearably jaunty, the backing singers sound like drunken relatives at a wedding, and there are horns. Boy, are there horns… It’s a bit jazz, a bit swing, very music-hall, and with no hint at the rock ‘n’ roll revolution that’s just around the corner.

What saves it from sounding ridiculous to modern ears is Guy himself. He isn’t, to be honest, the best technical singer. He’s no Al Martino, or Eddie Fisher, but his voice has a throaty, homely charm. He sounds like he’s having fun, as if he’s well-aware that he’s singing a load of tosh (see also ‘She Wears Red Feathers’) and being paid handsomely to do so.

Lyrically, the song is about love as clouds (that’s another pre-rock trick: love as birds chirping, fluffy clouds, twinkly stars…) Cloud one is where you land when you meet that special someone, while cloud lucky seven is the cloud nearest heaven… Which means… This is actually a song about getting laid?? Those pre-rockers were just as horny as those that came later, they just had to hide it behind bizarre metaphors involving clouds. Which means, as he belts out that there’s one more cloud to go…! it’s not only the best bit of the song; but you can almost hear the knowing wink. Guy, you sly dog, you!

Two more #2s to come…

Remembering The Everly Brothers

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I wasn’t going to mark the sad death of Don Everly on Saturday… because I was under the mistaken impression that his brother Phil was still with us. When I realised that Phil had died in 2014 it became clear that they needed a ‘Remembering’.

When you can count The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Beach Boys and Simon & Garfunkel among the many acts you’ve influenced, then you must have had something special going on. (Keith Richards called Don one of the finest ever rhythm guitarists, while John Lennon and Paul McCartney used to pull girls as teenagers by claiming that they were the ‘British Everly Brothers’.) Their country-ish harmonies were a huge part of the rock ‘n’ roll years – go on, listen to them combine on ‘Cathy’s Clown’ below! Being brothers was a blessing – those harmonies – and a curse – they spend decades not recording, or touring, or even talking to one another…

The duo scored four UK number ones between 1958-’61, and I won’t repeat myself by talking about them again. You can read the original posts here:

‘All I Have to Do Is Dream’

‘Cathy’s Clown’

‘Walk Right Back’ / ‘Ebony Eyes’

‘Temptation’

Here are some great, non-chart toppers from the brothers… (Because I’m hastily throwing this together, I won’t follow my usual rules of the songs having to have charted in the UK. Let’s be crazy for an evening!)

‘Bye Bye Love’, 1957

Chosen for self-indulgent reasons… This was one of the very first – and very few – songs I mastered on the keyboard as a child. A simple tune (that’s probably why it was book one, song one of ‘Keyboards for Dummies’) beautifully rendered.

‘Bird Dog’, 1958

The tale of Johnny: who is the funniest, cheekiest, coolest dude in school – making him a bird – but who is also hitting on the singer’s girl – thus a dog. I picked this over the pair’s other, more-famous tale of high school woe, ‘Wake Up Little Susie’ (which is also great) because this one rocks just that bit more.

‘When Will I Be Loved’, 1960

Some good ol’ fashioned rockabilly. I love the heavy, deliberate guitars, and the insistent, almost tribal drums. They re-recorded it when they moved labels, to RCA, but the original was the one released. The newer version is bluesier – here’s a link.

‘Don’t Blame Me’, 1961

The Everlys loved a ballad… ‘Love Hurts’, ‘Let It Be Me’, ‘Crying in the Rain’… But I picked this cover of a ’30s standard for some of their greatest harmonies, the guitar work (not actually from Don or Phil, but Hank Garland), and the bridge where Don really lets loose…

‘I’m Not Angry’, 1962

Not a hit, I don’t think, coming at the end of their glory days. But how filthy and scratchy is the guitar here, in this tale of pettiness? The boys hope that the girl who just dumped them doesn’t get letters, or phone-calls, that her dress rips and her car won’t start, but they’re not angry… just sad. Whatever…