DAVID WHITFIELD - ‘Answer Me’
(6th November 2003)
Do you remember those rubber face puppets you could buy whereby you would put your fingers in and then make the face contort into all sorts of gurning shapes? David Whitfield’s singing is like that. I can barely think of anyone whose mannerisms are more upfront and more grotesque (for an anachronistic comparison, Whitfield makes Brian Ferry sound like he’s in the Stereophonics). After chewing each word 32 times, Whitfield ends the song with a mighty bellow and I have a terrible feeling that his whole schtick is meant to be ‘operatic’ somehow. Whitfield was a Brit apparently: oddly enough while listening to this I was reading this Dave Q thread on ABC, and though I love ABC it seemed apposite. 2
At this point you might be suspecting that Popular is an excuse for getting some cheap and lazy rises out of ‘golden oldies’ and I promise nothing was further from my mind when I started it, but 1953 I feel fairly secure in saying was not a vintage year for chart pop.* I will admit to a lack of empathy with a lot of this stuff, even though most of the basic tools of pop (ballads, mannered voices, instrumental novelty, lovin’, lyin’, cheatin’) are present. At some stage this pop will turn into a pop I recognise better, and at some stage after that it will become the pop we live with right now. There are meanwhile some wonderful records on the horizon (not neccessarily ‘rock’ ones either), there’s just a few more foothills to get through first.
*I’m trying to avoid historical trivia because I’m writing as an ignoramus but it could have been even worse! It was coronation year and dread-sounding records like ‘In A Golden Coach’ were sniffing around the charts until beaten back by Frankiemania, which is probably for the best.
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intothefireuk on November 8th, 2007
I’m familiar with this song and I suspect only from the Babs Dixon version in the 70s. Whitfield’s AM is somewhat overwrought and he relies far too much on his vibrato for my liking. I am not a fan of operatic covers of pop songs (hello Il Divo !) so I’m inclined to give this one a miss and move onto the original (US) version.
Marcello Carlin on November 8th, 2007
DW went to school in Leeds with Wally, one of my office colleagues in my first NHS job who is (a) the last person to see Jimi Hendrix alive and (b) the unknowing model for Wally Klemmer on ILx (apologies Wal if you’re still out there and accidentally come across this on Google). To my ears this type of belting canto has dated far more audibly than Al Martino but he did carry on for quite a while; he was also I think the first chart beneficiary of Opportunity Knocks (it might still have been on radio only at that time, on Luxembourg if I’m not mistaken) and certainly appeared on the programme as a guest in the seventies. Not long after that he emigrated to Australia but sadly a heart attack did for him in early 1980, aged fifty-four. He makes a couple of bizarre appearances in the Kenneth Williams Diaries; they were in the forces in Singapore together during t’war.
wichita lineman on August 1st, 2008
I was in Sounds Original in Ealing last week. The owner said he knows someone in the David Whitfield fan club. They meet once a year, so this chap and his (we can assume long-suffering) wife, not being that wealthy, have their one annual holiday in Hull. Best not tell them that DW sings like a rubber puppet.
I hope I’m not talking out of turn when I say DW apparently became a heavy drinker, as did Ruby Murray, when their careers started to slip. Just as much ‘victims of rock ‘n’ roll’ as the slightly more fabled 27 club.