#53, 4th January 1957 / #54, 11th January 1957
“Singing The Blues” is an obvious smash – immediately memorable, modern enough to grab the rock’n'rollers, catchy and polite enough to hook everyone else too. The arrangements of these versions are very close (Mitchell’s is a bit brisker and busier), but the treatments are still worlds apart.
Guy Mitchell brings the tune the assurance of an old pop hand – even heartbreak is a bit of a chuckle for good old Guy, so in his hands it’s a stagey swoon to win over a coy could-be. And of course we fall for it – he’s so charismatic, his voice so sparkly, how could we not?
Tommy Steele gives us the fresher, more rockin’ treatment, but his record is hardly more authentic – in fact it’s bare-facedly, outrageously, preposterously mannered, and the manners in question belong entirely to one Presley, E.
Here’s how Mitchell sings the first verse of “Singing The Blues”:
Well I never felt more like sing’n’ the blues
Cos I never thought that I’d ever lose
Your love, dear
Why’d you do me this way?
And here’s how Steele sings it:
Weh-hell uhne’eh’el’orlike sinnuh blues
Cos I ne’eh’ought a’Ide’uhlose
Your love, dear
Why’cha do me this way?
Steele’s singing is not his natural voice, no, it is a very specific style he is attempting, and that style is ‘rock and roll’, as incarnated in the larynx and lips of Elvis. No consonant is safe with Steele around, words pool into one another in a shrugged gush of pre-meditated moodiness. Next to him, Guy Mitchell’s enunciations have the sharp edges and neat corners of, well, a square.
So if you wanted you could read Mitchell’s one week at the top and Steele’s two as a changing of the guard. But it’s not quite like that. Listen again to Steele’s first verse and you hear the rocker make up cracking – “your love, dear” sounds cockney; “do me this way” trails off in an arch near-falsetto. Tribute act he may have been but you can hear the Britishness creep through. Their records are very different but Mitchell and Steele have a lot in common – they’re both showbusiness lads, trying their best to make a fist of it in changing times and guess which way the wind is blowing. Tommy Steele’s guess sounds better at first, but he never had another No.1.
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#52, 16th November 1956
Ray’s sodden grief is so public it draws spectators to their windows to gawp at a walking portrait of misery. A shame then – perhaps – that the song starts with a jaunty whistle and Johnnie wolfishly confessing that he’s “getting soakin’ wet”. The whistle persists, meaning that “Just Walking” is never as wracked as it might have been. But maybe that’s the point – if you take your broken heart onto the streets it’s because you want somebody to take notice of it. (Especially if you bring your mates along to sing smooth backing vocals – Ray might have been sad but they make sure his audience has a pretty fine time.)
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#51, 19th October 1956
“A Woman In Love” boasts gale force orchestration, as if to prove that the days of the Big Number weren’t over yet. Laine meets it head on – if he was any more hammy he?d have a curly pink tail. “Your EYES! Are the EYES! Of a WUMMAN! In LOVE!” Or one in mortal fear of her life – Laine and Anne Shelton should have teamed up. Or married. The orchestra unleashes a tsunami of swing – Frankie responds by spraying emphases like bullets – the listener cowers and counts the two-and-a-half minutes down.
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#50, 21st September 1956
Straight-backed and strident march ordering a returning soldier back to his lovin’ duties with Anne. A shoo-in for No.1 in 1946 I’d have thought, but ten years later it sticks out like a teddy boy in a bearskin hat. (More anachronism fun with the lyrics too – “A girl who loves a soldier is either sad or gay”! Hur hur.) Shelton sounds bossily prim on the verses and downright scary on the chorus – rarely has demob seemed so unappealing. For all that “Lay Down Your Arms” has a brash charm – if there were any more songs like this on the list I’d probably despise it; as it is curio value wins out.
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#49, 10th August 1956
“Que Sera, Sera” is a slippery little song – its fresh optimism seems to conceal something a shade darker (the sentiment could as easily front a glum shrug as a carefree grin), but in the lyric only good things do seem to happen, so any fatalism you find is of the chirpy variety. It’ll all work out in the long run! In the real world such homilies might be dangerous, or at least an excuse to sit on one’s arse all day (as if I needed one). But pop music, thankfully, is not the real world.
Doris Day treats “Que Sera, Sera” as quite the happiest song ever written – a “Favourite Things” of predestiny and human impotence. She carries the arrangement along with her – the music-box tinkling behind the “Now I have children of my own’” verse just an extra tier in a wedding-cake production. And of course the chorus is indelible. The result is that rare thing, a pop song trying to sound less deep than it is.
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#48, 20th July 1956
I like the vim and sharpness of this song. I like the vocal tricks the record uses – the “dum-ba-ba-dum” doo-wop intro is an instant hit; Lymon’s long high “why” is heart-melting. I love the way Lymon rushes the verses. But I just don’t like the song as much as it seems to like itself: it’s charming and precocious and a shot of energy after a couple of torpid chart-toppers, but when he isn’t doing tricks Lymon’s voice sounds harsh and unformed. That’s apt, of course, for a record about sticky teenage lust. If I’d been a teenager in ’56 maybe it would have blown my world apart (more likely I’d have been a bit nervous of Frankie’s rawness) – but there’s no point in my pretending to be something I’m not. “Why Do Fools?” is a record I can appreciate but I can’t adore.
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#47, 15th June 1956
It’s my belief that no pop song with a ‘spoken bit’ can be all bad, though Pat Boone does his best to test my resolve with a lifeless, dreary epistolary ballad, good in 1956 for a grope and a smooch perhaps, but good in 2003 for nothing. Only point of interest – why isn’t Pat home? The army, you’d think – and talk of returning so he can start “serving you” hints he’s serving something else right now. But he also sings how “once more our love can be free” – can clean-livin’ Pat be in prison?! On the evidence of this inert offering, wherever he is it’s somewhere they censor the letters.
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#46, 4th May 1956
My MP3 copy of this is all glitched up, but this is a bit of a trial to listen to in any case. Journeyman Brit crooner Hilton brings little in terms of character to this ballad, so the arranger tries to add a smidgen of interest via drum crashes and sudden orchestral surges. All that happens is that Hilton?s calm romantic seas become choppy and the listener feels a little sick.
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#45, 13th April 1956
Winifred attacks the piano with her usual demented glee, this time with a bit of quasi-operatic humming to liven things up further (or is it a Theremin? I’d put nothing past her.) A bit of research tells me that this is an instrumental version of a big ’56 musical hit, fair enough though a little disappointing, I had a vision of Winifred hammering out another one of her party tunes and dedicating it to the French homeless. Because it’s just one song this wears out faster than Attwell’s medley hits, too, but it’s hard to be harsh on tireless jollity like this. This sounds far older than its 47 years – rickety and treblesome, you half suspect it lacks lyrics because talkies haven’t been invented yet.
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#44, 30th March 1956
‘There in the night was a wonderful scene / Mom was dancing with Dad to my record machine / And while they danced only one thing was wrong / They were trying to waltz to a rock and roll song!’ The chorus premise tells you everything you need to know about this cute little number: the ‘generation gap’ both crystallised and smoothed over. The tune is a hybrid itself, naturally, swing attempting a d’tente with the new music, and ‘Rock And Roll Waltz’ amuses for a few listens. Twenty-odd years later Cheap Trick came home and found their parents doing a lot more than waltzing to rock music: thematic mixtape makers should find a use for Kay Starr as she opens the loop they close.
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