DES O'CONNOR – "I Pretend"

Ten years before this, Des worked as compere for Buddy Holly and the Crickets’ tour of the UK. They played the Woolwich Coronet, and songs like “Not Fade Away” made a big impression on a 15-year-old in the audience named Michael Jagger. I’ve often wondered what would have happened if young Michael had decided to follow in Des’s footsteps rather than Buddy’s.

No, it wasn’t my point to say that everyone was partaking in assassinations or riots–but, thanks to mass media, those events were certainly propelled into the cultural consciousness and were certainly reflected in a considerable portion of the music.

My point is that in deeply troubled times “a whole lot of people [seek] music that require[s] little or no thinking.” This is the rationale that has traditionally been used to explain the sort of Hollywood spectacles that gave cheap escapist fare to the public during the Great Depression.

Surely I didn’t claim this as a blanket statement–and I do have relatives (and I suspect a few friends) who are currently in retreat from the news and any form of stimulation that will force them to come to grips with what sort of badly managed nation (or world) we’re living in–but then my perspective is undoubtedly colored by the side of the Atlantic on which I dwell.

The current conflict in Lebanon hasn’t compelled me listen to Paris Hilton’s venture into the music arena. But it did inspire me to dig out a certain old Human League CD. I never thought that record could make me shed a tear or two. Santyana was right….

In the Britain of 1968 Enoch on blood in the Tiber was of more pressing concern than MLK or JFK or ‘Nam, all of which were, shall we say, distant.

The thing about Yarwood and his “and this is me” meme is that his actual singing voice sounded exactly like Perry Como, whereas his Perry Como impression sounded nothing like anyone.

But yes, All Round Entertainer was then still the ultimate goal for any ambitious Britpopster; Lulu or Cilla getting their own Saturday night TV series > getting to number one.

As for who bought it (ditto Solomon King, John Rowles and all the other would-be Engelberts flooding the charts of ’68); my mum, mainly. Italian, you see – we have a penchant for the big, bold but slightly vulnerable tenor.

And let us not forget that, in 1968, Scott Walker walked the selfsame corridors, albeit in deliberate half-light.

Back in ’63 she wanted to do “Love Of The Loved” in the way she’d done it in the Cavern, i.e. lots of thrashy, punky guitars, but George Martin demurred and said she’d have a longer career if she didn’t.

Also with the TV series she felt she owed it to Brian Epstein, who had been negotiating with the BBC about it; it was about the last thing he did before he died.

(additionally, it’s worth bearing in mind that Cilla had more or less disappeared off the charts by ’67 so it was probably the way to go in any case)

Des started as a comedian and then became a singer, amirite?

I should clarify here; Cilla had stopped having hits by ’67 but THEN after the TV series her popularity soared again and she got back on the charts with “Step Inside Love” et al.

Some belated but (hopefully) more structured thoughts from myself:

Should you have been wondering what happened to the divorce-initiating/Valium-popping MoR which so dominated the charts of 1967, it was still in (un)healthily plentiful supply throughout 1968. Engelbert sank steadily deeper into his formica chaise longue of despair with “Am I That Easy To Forget?” and “A Man Without Love”; whereas his Great Personal Friend Tom Jones truly ran the gamut, from the luxuriously-orchestrated tawdry murder waltz “Delilah” to the Shirley Valentine fortnight’s holiday tropicalia (ha!) of “Help Yourself” – Jones’ “yeah” in the first instrumental break must be the least sincere expression of joy ever recorded. “Love is like candy on the shelf” – thank you Tom Proust.

Their manager Gordon Mills attempted to introduce a third member into his would-be Rat Pack; a six foot-plus bearded bear of a Kentuckian named Solomon King (that name! such ambition!) who belted out “She Wears My Ring” with such little delicacy that one scours the background for evidence of a shotgun. From New Zealand there was John Rowles with his tremulous “If I Only Had Time,” which sounded like a neutered P J Proby crooning a de-weirded “Strawberry Fields Forever.” And, strangest of all, towards the end of the year, the sixtysomething former matinee idol Donald Peers unexpectedly had a smash hit with the Offenbach-derived “Please Don’t Go.”

MoR was so prevalent that it even sired its own avant garde; the epics “Macarthur Park” and “Eloise” crossed tortured post-Gordon Jenkins Sinatra crooning with post-Summer of Love disillusionment to brilliant effect. Scott Walker’s Scott 2, with its very radio-unfriendly “The Amorous Humphrey Plugg” and “Plastic Palace People,” topped the album chart. Even Sinatra “went weird” with the Gaudio/Crewe-written/produced Watertown album. Greatest of all was Herb Alpert’s “This Guy’s In Love With You,” but then that is one of the greatest and most vulnerable of all pop records.

All of these singles went top five in Britain and enjoyed lengthy chart runs. How bizarre, then, that the only one of them to go all the way (and also stay on the chart longest – 36 baffling weeks) was “I Pretend.” Des O’Connor was, then as now, a British institution; stand-up comic, talk show host and sometime crooner, much loved and much mocked, a relic of ‘5os mock-benign light entertainment which the Beatles had somehow neglected to sweep up and discard. But his crooning was a weedy bottle of milk indeed; he himself has gone on record, though in good humour, to say that his performance on “I Pretend” was “appalling – how did it stay on the chart for nine months? Was it pregnant?”*

(*he said this on Gloria Hunniford’s old Radio 2 show, sometime in the mid-nineties)

And “I Pretend” really belongs to a chart of, say, 1953; despite the curious reversal of “Whiter Shade Of Pale” (and “Silence Is Golden”) in the line “And though my eyes are closed I still can see,” despite the subsequent Saint Etienne lyrical overlap (“Listening for a footstep on the stairs”), even despite the curious paradox – or maybe it was just sloppy lyric-writing – of the line “The world is new and like it used to be,” the song is pallid and arcane, and O’Connor’s voice cannot give it the inadvertent strength that, say, an Orbison might have afforded it; indeed, though one suspects that he’s trying to do a Dean Martin, those ghastly Home Counties primary school vibrati bring him far closer to the likes of Jimmy Young. Perhaps, then, the success of “I Pretend” presages all of those reality show successes; a frightened public content with the sub-art of someone who is “just like us,” as opposed to “God.”

I can hear a little bit of Buddy Holly in Des’s phrasing and there’s a hint of Irish balladry in the chorus but the song is undermined by his weedy vocals. Dreary stuff.

I came here wondering if somebody had posted a goodbye already, found none and assumed (because I’m not old enough to remember) that nobody had done it because he never hit the top spot. Shame on me for not digging.