HELEN SHAPIRO – “You Don’t Know”
Polished as a pebble in a pocket, but there’s something about this I can’t warm to, a pall of drabness around it. Maybe it’s the arrangement, stately with prissy chirrups of strings. Maybe it’s Helen’s mopey sultriness: unrequited love songs can be heartbreaking, but they can also be unpleasantly inert and passive. Shapiro’s prematurely smoky voice is quality, but her delivery is distanced and distracted – where’s the motivation for the mystery boy to notice her? Love isn’t a right.
4
Helen Shapiro’s ‘You Don’t Know’ is the perfect teenage angst song, and beautifully delivered by a deceptively young new singer. The lyrics are poignant (so a secret it must stay . . .) All teenagers have sad secrets, and Helen expresses this sadness eloquently. Beautifully, yet unobtrusively orchestrated by Martin Slavin, this deservedly reached no one in the uk.
I have to say, I’m a little surprised this wasn’t deemed to invite an enriching “gay reading”, as Doris Day – Secret Love was, earlier in the list!
Intriguing, I’d never thought of it that way. Helen’s baritone (or “truly foghorn voice” as Nik Cohn described it) certainly adds to the adolescent sexual confusion. Heck, she was all of 14.
Trying to locate early gay records is a Jon Savage parlour game; a 1957 British single on Melodisc called Queer Things by Rosita Rosano is the earliest UK one I’ve heard. Melodisc was 90% calypso and mento, but this is very after hours 50s Soho, you can imagine Lita Roza singing it. I’m not sure if it’s well known or not.