Comments on: BOBBY DARIN – ‘Dream Lover’

By: Dispela Pusi

Dispela Pusi — Mon, 27 Dec 2010 21:43:08 +0000

For all the similarity to (and interchangeability with) other records in the same vein, “Dream Lover” seems to have had more staying power than most. Take any movie set in the late 1950s that uses hits from the time to evoke the atmosphere and “feel” – and chances are overwhelmingly that this’ll be one of them. The David Essex/Ringo Starr vehicle “That’ll Be The Day” is the one I remember most vividly, and there’ve been several others since.

(Btw, poor old Bobby’s become a permanent joke in our family, ever since my sister misread his name after glimpsing it upside-down in a music paper I was reading. “Bobby Drain” he’s been to us ever since.)

By: Billy Smart

Billy Smart — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 11:59:50 +0000

Light Entertainment Watch: Bobby Darin appeared at least twice on UK TV, but neither show survives;

ENGELBERT WITH THE YOUNG GENERATION: with Bobby Darin, Nancy Wilson, Marlene Charell (1972)

READY STEADY GO!: with Manfred Mann, Bobby Darin (1966)

By: wichita lineman

wichita lineman — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 10:31:50 +0000

Darin’s one of those characters who never seemed to know what he wanted to be, hence his two (consecutive) no.1s hardly sound like the work of the same man. He just wanted to be bigger than Sinatra before he pegged out, which he expected to at any moment (as did Billy Fury, but he threw himself into saving as many sick animals as possible before he died rather than trying to be The Best. A neat summary of the Anglo American split, I think). Quite how you try and become that fidgety, rootless person ENTIRELY, as K Spacey did, I’ve no idea. But I think I’ll pop along to the video shop and find out.

There was a strike that stopped the publication of Record Mirror between June 27th (when DL climbed from 5 to 3) and August 8th 1959 (when it was at 2 and falling). The NME chart no.2 watch has two weeks of Marty Wilde’s Teenager In Love (with Dion’s original hovering in the 20s) and one of Lonnie Donegan’s Battle Of New Orleans.

By: Pete

Pete — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 00:16:34 +0000

To cap the oddness is the whole Kevin Spacey IS Bobby Darin thing, which is a very, very strag=nge idea, film, execution.

By: wichita lineman

wichita lineman — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 11:23:19 +0000

Could be slightly odd, more likely it’s intentional. I like the way Dream Lover takes the Italianite pizzicato percussive feel of Paul Anka’s Diana and Neil Sedaka’s Oh Carol – too slick and smarmy, Dino and Perry for teens – and grafts on a song about, well, just what Pete said it is, with Bobby hoping and praying every night, wishing he wasn’t dreaming alone.

Ace have put a bunch of cds called Teenage Crush covering this post R&R teendream stuff. Too much can get pretty cloying, but things like I’ve Come Of Age by Billy Storm are astonishingly vivid, unreal, overblown, beautiful and hideous all at once, just like the most volcanic moments of teendom.

I miss sexual subtexts in pop. Bloody Rolling Stones and their Cocksucker Blues.

By: Pete Baran

Pete Baran — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 14:42:56 +0000

This is a satchel song for me, one of the few vinyl seven inches left in a mouldy old satchel along with my parent old dansette that they let me and my sister “play” with. It was a lovely old machine, old stacker arm and I remember at a very young age loving the mechanical clunk click of the record arm and the automatic repeat.

Dream Lover was a middling favourite in the satchel batch (the Beatles B-Sides seemed to win out) but I always loved the build of the chorus,
I want – (yeah yeah yeah)
A girl – (yeah yeah yeah)
to call – (yeah yeah yeah)
my own…

Looking at it now, there is a slightly odd wet dream subtext in here as well.