fifties music

91. ‘Mack the Knife’, by Bobby Darin

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We kick off the next thirty #1s in the October of ’59 – four chart-toppers away from the 1960s! And this… This is a real palate cleanser after the cheesy numbers, the Cliffs and the Jerry Kellers, that immediately preceded it. This is something different.

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Mack the Knife, by Bobby Darin (his 2nd of two #1s)

2 weeks, from 16th – 30th October 1959

It begins with the softest of intros – a tickle of drum, a pluck of bass. Oh the shark, babe, Has such teeth, dear, And it shows them, Pearly white… Bobby Darin is holding back, almost sneaking the lyrics out when we’re not looking. Just a jack-knife, Has ol’ MacHeath, babe, And he keeps it, Out of sight…

The best thing about this song – and there are many great things about this song – is that the lyrics slowly unfold. You are not quite sure what it is that you are listening to, what on earth this record is about, on first listen. The title doesn’t give anything away for a start. Then the first verse alludes to ‘scarlet billows’ and ‘traces of red’. All very mysterious…

Just to make sure, then, that we’re all on the same page – this is a song, a number one selling hit no less, about a hitman. A man, MacHeath, who does murders and stuff. A proper wrong ‘un. The following verses – and this record is nothing but verses, each one ramping up the tempo both in terms of the sound and the sinister lyrics – make it clearer.

Now on the sidewalk, Sunny morning, Uh-huh, Lies a body, Just a-oozin’ life… And: There’s a tugboat, Down by the river don’t ya know, Where a cement bag’s, Just droopin’ down… We’ve got stabbings, and guys swimmin’ with the fishes. A chap that disappears not long after ‘drawin’ out all his hard-earned cash.’ And then there’s the ladies: Jenny Diver, Miss Lotte Lenya and ol’ Lucy Brown. Whether they’re MacHeath’s lovers, or his victims, is left ambiguous.

And ambiguous is a good word with which to describe this latest #1. Superficially, it’s a perky swing number with a quiet start and a loud finish. In recent years, thanks to Robbie Williams and ‘Big Band Week’ on X-Factor, ‘Mack the Knife’ has been somewhat bland-ified. Yet if you sit down and actually listen to the lyrics… They’re dark, man. How great is it, after ‘Here Comes Summer’s saccharine mulch about ‘drive-in movies’ and ‘Joe’s Café’, and Craig Douglas’s paean to puppy love, to have a chart-topper that’s about a vicious murderer. I wonder how it got past the censors of the day? If the opacity of the lyrics, or the old-fashioned big-band swing, helped Darin get away with it.

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It’s a brilliant number one; but also a bizarre one. A song that begs the age-old question: How did this end up on top of the charts? If the success of Darin’s earlier #1 ‘Dream Lover’ led to this, then that’s yet another feather in the earlier song’s cap. Both songs showcase how good a singer Bobby Darin was – one a traditional pop song, the other a brassy swing number. I mean it as a compliment when I say it sounds as if it were recorded live.

‘Mack the Knife’ had a circuitous route to the top of the UK charts. It was written, in German, in 1928, for a musical called ‘Die Dreigroschenoper’. Catchy title. The show was then translated into English and performed as ‘The Threepenny Opera’ in 1933, then resurrected in 1954, and ‘Mack the Knife’ cherry-picked from it for a single by Louis Armstrong in ’56, before Bobby Darin recorded this definitive version two years later.

It ends with a bang, and probably the song’s most famous line: Look out ol’ Macky is back! Which not only draws this swingin’ little record to an end; but also the chart-topping career of Bobby Darin. Which is a shame, as he really was great. I’ve been digging into his back-catalogue since writing the post on ‘Dream Lover’, and would recommend that you give the frothy ‘Splish-Splash’, the cheeky ‘Multiplication’, and the karaoke-classic ‘Beyond the Sea’ a listen. In fact, just delve in and check it all out. That he topped the charts with two such different, but equally brilliant, records -when a lot of his contemporaries were treading the same path again and again – speaks volumes.

Recap: #61 – #90

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And so we embark on our 3rd recap. Ninety number ones gone; lots and lots more to come, don’t you worry. We’re about to reach the 1960s and, as you might have heard, things get pretty interesting during that particular decade. But wait, we get ahead of ourselves. Let’s rewind: the past thirty #1s have taken us from June 1957 through to October 1959, keeping up our run of roughly two and a half years between recaps.

I’m struggling to remember which ‘wave’ of rock ‘n’ roll we’re on. I think we’re on the 3rd wave… Or is it the 4th? At the end of the last recap we’d had Bill Haley kicking things off and then a bunch of older, established stars like Guy Mitchell and Kay Starr jumping on the bandwagon. During the last two years, then, we’ve entered the ‘Golden Age of Rock ‘N’ Roll’ and met icons such as Elvis! Buddy Holly! Jerry Lee Lewis! Connie Francis! The Everlys! Cliff! But we’ve also, more recently, seen rock ‘n’ roll become more and more diluted, more pop-ified. For every ‘Great Balls of Fire’ there’s been a ‘Diana’, for every ‘That’ll Be the Day’ there’s been an ‘Only Sixteen’. You can track this change just by using Elvis as a barometer – we’ve gone from the unmistakeable ‘Jailhouse Rock’ to the slightly cabaret-ish ‘A Fool Such as I’ in a little over a year.

On that note, there have been an abundance of decent, perfectly acceptable pop-rock #1s that I’m going to pass over completely when talking about the best and worst of the last thirty. The likes of The Kalin Twins’ ‘When’, Jerry Keller’s ‘Here Comes Summer’ and The Everly Brothers’ ‘All I Have to Do Is Dream’… You’re safe. But safe don’t win no awards! I’m also – perhaps controversially – going to resign all four of Elvis’s #1s so far to similar status. None of them have been bad – ‘One Night’ / ‘I Got Stung’ has probably been the pick of the bunch – but there have been much better (and much, much worse) records hitting the top these past couple of years.

An honourable mention too, to the handful of #1s that have felt slightly out of place during this past thirty. We had ‘The Winter of the Ballad’ – the run that started with Conway Twitty, through Jane Morgan’s ‘The Day the Rains Came’, Shirley Bassey, and finished with The Platters ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’. All decent enough – very decent in the case of The Platters – but all slight outliers when compared to the prevailing style of the time.

Speaking of ‘the style of the time’… compared to the previous thirty chart-toppers, this lot have been a much more homogenous bunch. We’ve been short on instrumentals, short on film soundtracks, there’s been very little C & W, no mamboes or tangoes… just a lot of mid-range, common or garden rock ‘n’ roll. Which means it’s been hard to choose the weirdest disc because, well, very few recent hits have been terribly, or even mildly, crazy. I thought about giving it to Marvin Rainwater’s ‘Whole Lotta Woman’, because it was a song about lovin’ larger ladies and that was mildly more diverting than the ‘I love you, Yes I do…’ kind of lyrics we’ve been inundated with. But, truth be told, it’s still a pretty bog-standard rock-pop number. Not worthy of award status. Praise be, then, to Lord Rockingham’s XI for giving us the madcap ‘Hoots Mon’ in November 1958 – a moment of Caledonian craziness that is the winner of this recap’s ‘WTAF’ Award.

It has not, however, been hard to pick out any number of bland #1s. In fact, so many of them started to blend into one another that it’s been tough to narrow it down to just one. Michael Holliday’s ‘The Story of My Life’? Pretty dull. Perry Como’s ‘Magic Moments’? A ‘classic’ for sure; but pretty darn twee. Craig Douglas? Kinda cute, I guess. Jerry Keller’s ‘Here Comes Summer’… No – I’m going to give the ‘Meh’ Award, for the most forgettable chart-topper of the past thirty to… Vic Damone’s ‘On the Street Where You Live’. Just for the fact that it has been done many, many times before: an overwrought, old-fashioned relic from the pre-rock days that had no place hitting the top of the UK charts in June of 1958.

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Vic Damone in publicity portrait, 1951. (Photo by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer/Getty Images)

Before we get on to the best and the worst, I want to touch once more on something I mentioned a couple of posts back. The issue of ‘sexiness’… I said in the previous recap that British stars had loosened up a little and were starting to shake and shimmy like the Americans. But I kind of feel as if we’ve regressed over the past couple of years. It hit me when the Great British Rock ‘n’ Roll Hope, Cliff Richard, scored his first number one… with the cheesy, and slightly creepy ‘Living Doll’. Then Craig Douglas’s corny ‘Only Sixteen’ furrowed my brow further. I cast my eye back to Lonnie Donegan, Michael Holliday and Lord Rockingham’s XI and really started to wonder why, even though Brits were recording rock ‘n’ roll hits, they all sounded silly, a bit nudge-nudge wink-wink, slight leftovers from the Victorian music hall. I know that British pop stars will one day be cool, cooler even than the Americans, but I’m still wondering when this transformation will occur.

On to the main awards then. The Best can wait; let’s cast our eye over the Worst. In truth, there haven’t been very many terrible #1s this time round. I thought about ‘Mary’s Boy Child’, but that would have been pretty harsh on a heartfelt Christmas number. So I looked further, and saw lots of average ones, as I mentioned earlier, but nothing too excruciating. And then I remembered… Russ Conway and his piano stinkers! Do I plump for ‘Roulette’? Or ‘Side Saddle’? Decisions, decisions… By dint of it being his second #1, thus inflicting a second dose of piano-led blandness on the charts, let’s crown ‘Roulette’ as the worst, most plinky-plonky, most in need of an actual melody #1! If it had come in, say, 1954 I might not have noticed it in amongst the OTT balladry and jolly instrumentals of the pre-rock age. Coming as it did in June 1959, it stood out like a sore thumb. Sorry Russ.

And the best. The very best. Not just of this period but perhaps some of the best pop music ever recorded. These are the heights that we have, at times, scaled in recent months. I’ve whittled it down to four. ‘That’ll Be the Day’ could get it just for that intro alone, before you mention the sexy arrogance of Buddy Holly’s lyrics. ‘Who’s Sorry Now’ would be a worthy winner for bringing GRRL POWER to the top of the charts for the very first time. Bobby Darin’s ‘Dream Lover’ could get it simply for being a supremely classy record – the perfect point of contact on the rock and pop Venn diagram. But the award goes to… Goodness!… Gracious!… ‘Great Balls of Fire’! An explosive record encapsulating all that is great and good about the music we call rock ‘n’ roll, a record that speaks to the heart (and other parts further down the body) rather than the head, and the best two minutes a piano has ever had.

To recap the recap, then:

The ‘Meh’ Award for Forgetability: 1. ‘Hold My Hand’, by Don Cornell. 2. ‘It’s Almost Tomorrow’, by The Dream Weavers. 3. ‘On the Street Where You Live’, by Vic Damone.

The ‘WTAF’ Award for Being Interesting if Nothing Else: 1. ‘I See the Moon’, by The Stargazers. 2. ‘Lay Down Your Arms’, by Anne Shelton. 3. ‘Hoots Mon’, by Lord Rockingham’s XI

The Very Worst Chart-Toppers: 1. ‘Cara Mia’, by David Whitfield with Mantovani & His Orchestra. 2. ‘The Man From Laramie’, by Jimmy Young. 3. ‘Roulette’, by Russ Conway.

The Very Best Chart-Toppers: 1. ‘Such a Night’, by Johnnie Ray. 2. ‘Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White’, by Perez ‘Prez’ Prado & His Orchestra. 3. ‘Great Balls of Fire’, by Jerry Lee Lewis.

OK? Very good. On then, as they say, with the show …

90. ‘Here Comes Summer’, by Jerry Keller

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Number ninety! If this was Bingo we’d be top of the shop. And to celebrate this milestone – a record I’d never ever heard before.

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Here Comes Summer, by Jerry Keller (his 1st and only #1)

1 week, from 9th – 16th October 1959

I’ve mentioned this a couple of times now, but what was quite common back when I started this blog is now pretty rare. I know more and more of these songs as we push on through the first flushes of rock ‘n’ roll and into the canon of pop and rock. So it’s quite nice to come across a disc that I have truly never heard of. ‘Here Comes Summer’? Nope. Jerry Keller? Who’s he?

Well, I think he may be related to Cliff. Cliff’s long lost American cousin, perhaps? I take it all back – what I said in my last post, and before, about US singers being intrinsically cooler than their British counterparts. Because this is a twee little number.

First things first – I quite like the riff that underpins this song. Though I’m not sure it counts as a riff, more of a chug. It’s kind of a proto-Beach Boys, gentle surf-rock lilt. If that makes any sense. And towards the end an organ comes in for emphasis, which is pretty nice. The backing singers are very ‘pre-rock’, but Jerry Keller himself is very clean-cut rock ‘n’ roll. And beyond all that… we have the lyrics.

Here comes summer… do-do-do-do… School is out, Oh happy day… It’s the summer holidays, and Jerry couldn’t be happier. He’s got lots of plans: hanging out with his girl, hanging out with his buddies… We’ll go swimming every day, Oh let the sun shine bright, On my happy summer home…

What follows are lyrics about his flat-top (which I always thought was a type of open-top car – turns out it’s a short back and sides!), drive-in movies, (double features – more time to hold her tight!), sittin’ by the lake and meetin’ the gang at Joe’s Café. It is a song that drips images of milkshakes, preppy sweaters, ball-games and sock-hops on to the floor of the juke-joint until we are ready to drown in all the cuteness.

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I guess, like so many of the cheesy sounding US-recorded hits that have topped the charts before this (I’m looking at you ‘Diana’, ‘When’, and ‘All I Have to Do Is Dream’) it appealed because it sounded really exotic to British schoolkids in, say, Scunthorpe, whose dads still had an Anderson shelter in the garden and whose mums were still darning tights.

The song finishes on a romantic note. Jerry has high hopes for him and his girl: If she’s willing, We’ll go steady right away… (Aww..) And then, with a Here comes summer time at last… we reach an abrupt end. Summer is over. And summer was truly over when this reached the top of the UK charts. On the 9th of October. When the schools had been back for well over a month…

This is a perfectly harmless, kind of cute little song that zips along nicely for a couple of minutes. Beyond that I’m not sure it has much of a wider significance. There are strong notes of earlier, preppy-rock (a new genre I’ve just invented) #1s such as The Dream Weavers ‘It’s Almost Tomorrow’ and Tab Hunter’s ‘Young Love’. Looming largest of all, though, is good old Pat Boone who, if Wiki is to be believed, was Keller’s friend from church and introduced him to his manager.

Jerry Keller is a one-hit wonder in the purest sense, in that he had had zero previous chart hits – in either the US or the UK – and would go on to have zero more. A 100% strike-rate for him, then. Well done! He’s still alive – aged eighty-one – and was apparently the go-to guy for TV jingles in the ‘70s and ‘80s! Well there ya go. Next up – a recap!

89. ‘Only Sixteen’, by Craig Douglas

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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

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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…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QK3uFgjCTeY

87. ‘Dream Lover’, by Bobby Darin

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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.

86. ‘Roulette’, by Russ Conway

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I think we’ve heard this record before… ‘Roulette’ may, in fact, be identical to Russ Conway’s first number one. Or it may sound completely different. Who knows? Who even cares?

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Roulette, by Russ Conway (his 2nd of two  #1s)

2 weeks, from 19th June – 3rd July 1959

Actually, they do sound the same. Same perky piano, same lightly strummed guitar as accompaniment. In fact, to illustrate my point, let me quote verbatim from my post on ‘Side Saddle’ (which was #1 barely two months before):

“Upon first listen of this latest chart-topping record, two questions spring immediately to mind: What is this? And why did it spend a whole month at the top of the charts? It’s an instrumental, Mr. Russ Conway tinkling away at his piano, and… that’s about it. It’s got a melody, which plods along pleasantly enough without going anywhere very far, and then it ends, in under two minutes.”

Swap ‘whole month’ for ‘two weeks’- and ‘pleasantly’ for ‘irritatingly’ because that’s the mood I’m in today – but you’re still pretty much there. This record is equally short, similarly jaunty, and is still searching for a tune that never quite seems to materialise. And why ‘Roulette’? Is it because the cascading notes that tumble at intervals throughout the song sound like a rolling roulette wheel? Or is that me putting way too much though in?

I think I hate this more than I did Conway’s first #1. It was bland; this is criminally perky and is played in an irritatingly high key. Plus those little flourishes at the end of every second note are starting to make me feel a little sick. Way, way back in one of my early posts I claimed the idea of the ‘shadow number one’ – the chart topping record that only gets there due to the reflected glow of a preceding hit. Frankie Laine had one when ‘Hey Joe’ followed the chart-humping ‘I Believe’. Rosemary Clooney had one with ‘Mambo Italiano’ hot on the heels of ‘This Ole House’ (though ‘Mambo…’ was probably the bigger record). Guy Mitchell had one in ‘Rock-A-Billy’ after his huge hit ‘Singing the Blues’. And now we have to suffer a second dose of Russ Conway because grannies across the land liked ‘Side Saddle’, and probably thought he looked like a nice boy.

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In fact, for a ‘nice boy’ Conway led a fairly troubled life. Let’s face it, anyone who records songs of such fake jollity and forced perkiness is going to be a little screwed-up inside… Alcoholism, crippling self-doubt, a reliance on anti-depressants, an eighty (80!) a day cigarette habit – all of which can probably be attributed to his being gay but having to keep it hidden for fear of losing everything (shades of Johnnie Ray there). Unlike Ray, however, Conway remained fairly popular throughout his career, and was still performing publicly just two weeks before he died in 2000. He had actually sliced the tip of a finger off during the war, so it’s pretty impressive that he could play the piano at all I suppose.

God, I have been a little harsh on ole Russ here, haven’t I? I just had a quick listen to some of the other hits from his late fifties heyday – the likes of ‘China Tea’ and ‘Party Pops’ – in an attempt to redeem his chart career. But. I’m sorry to confirm that they ALL. SOUND. THE BLOODY. SAME! In desperation I tried to look for some clue as to the inspiration for ‘Roulette’, but the Wiki entry is one line long and there ain’t much else out there. What little I could find all seemed to prefer this disc to ‘Side Saddle’ (come on, people!) But then I found this, and I started with a quote so I’ll end with one too.

Thanks to the guy(s) at fiftiesnumberones.blogspot.com – which I will wholeheartedly recommend as long as you promise to still read my blog – for their brilliant description of ‘Roulette’ as an ice-cream van jingle… “albeit an ice cream van plying its trade around the dusk tinged streets of a council estate on a late October evening. In the rain.”

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End post

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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJ5LQb5PQsc

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.

82. ‘Smoke Gets In Your Eyes’, by The Platters

/ UK #1s blog / 5 Comments

I feel it is time to make one of my semi-regular proclamations about just where we are in popular music history. Remember back in March ’56 when I announced the beginning of the ‘The Post-Pre-Rock Age’ (i.e. after the pre-rock era but before the rock era had really got going)? Or when we killed off the first wave of rock ‘n’ roll in early ’57? Or when we passed through the ‘Age of Whistling’ a year or so ago? Well… What with The Platters’ stately ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’ now grabbing a week at the top, all but one of 1959’s four chart-toppers have been ballads.

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Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, by The Platters (their 1st and only #1)

1 week, from 20th – 27th March 1959

Elvis aside, we’ve had Jane Morgan’s ‘The Day the Rains Came’ (very jazzy, but still what I’d class as a ballad) and Shirley Bassey’s ‘As I Love You’, plus Conway Twitty’s ‘It’s Only Make Believe’ from the tail-end of last year further slowing things down at the top, and this record does nothing to change the tempo. I’m not sure that this four-month stretch qualifies as an ‘Age’ or an ‘Era’, but I feel confident enough in christening it ‘The Winter of the Ballad’.

I’ve been a bit harsh on ballads recently. I didn’t hate either the Jane Morgan or the Shirley Bassey efforts, but they did rather pass by without grabbing me. I think it’s because, while you can chuck a load of guitars and drums at a rock song and usually come out with something passable, ballads are a lot more delicate. They can be great, or they can go really, really wrong. Lay the strings on a bit thick, let the singer go a little too wild with the vocal gymnastics, or have the writers get too schmaltzy with the lyrics, and you’ve got a mess on your hands. But this… now this is a ballad that gets it RIGHT.

It starts slowly. No dramatic swirl of violins or crashing cymbals. Just a piano, and a voice. They… Ask me how I knew, My true love was true, Oh…. I of course replied, Something here inside, Cannot be denied… The singer is sure that his woman loves him; his friends are less convinced. The singer scoffs. But…

Yet today, My love has flown away, I am without… My… Love… His friends – who sound like dicks, by the way – laugh at him and his misplaced confidence. His reply? I smile and say, When a lovely flame dies, Smoke gets in your eyes…

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What’s the difference then, between this ballad and the one it replaced at #1: ‘As I Love You’? If pressed, I’d have to say the lyrics. While Shirley Bassey was singing – albeit very beautifully – some trite lines about the thrill of being in love; this song employs some great imagery. Your heart’s on fire – smoke gets in your eyes and stops you from seeing clearly. The flame is extinguished; smoke gets in your eyes and makes you cry…

Still, though, there is a big, bombastic ending – the title of the song belted out at the top of the singer’s voice – which spoils things slightly. I just have to accept that it was the style of the time. It’s a great song, however; a classy song. A classy classic. And a ‘classic’ it truly is, having first been recorded back in 1933. It seems to have been something of a tactic in the late fifties – getting modern singers to record updated versions of songs from the twenties and thirties (Connie Francis did it on ‘Who’s Sorry Now’ and ‘Carolina Moon’, while Tommy Edwards borrowed an old melody for ‘It’s All in the Game’) to lure in both the kids and their parents.

This is The Platters’ one and only appearance at the top of the UK charts, but that does their reputation something of an injustice. They had had several Top 10 hits before this, and were the foremost vocal group in the US – quite an achievement considering that they were five black guys and a girl, and that this is the 1950s we’re talking about. They are still rolling on to this day, albeit with enough line-up changes to make The Sugababes look steady (Wiki lists ten past members).

Unlike the earlier tear-jerkers that have made up this ‘Winter of the Ballad’, I had heard this one before. I’m sure most people will have. It’s one of those songs that have become part of life’s backing track. And to know a song without knowing how you know it – as I’ve said before – is a sure-fire sign that said song is a stone-cold classic.