SHIRLEY BASSEY – "I Reach For The Stars"

Also listed as a double A in Guinness and my mum confirms that “Mountain” got virtually all the airplay.

Another of the very rare #1’s that I can’t find any trace of on YouTube… neither it nor “Mountain”. Clearly it wasn’t anybody’s idea of very good.

Hell, yes. That shot of her around 0.45 is quite something. Bad girl Shirl.

This was number one when my folks got married. I think they’d rather have had Blue Moon as their tune. The Baby Jump of the 60s?

I had Where Are You Now on a big-selling Arcade comp, 20 Number Ones Of The 60s or some such, which kept its pop culture memory on life support for another generation. Baby Jump I knew from K-Tel’s 40 Number One Hits which came out in ’77 I think, and, in spite of this colourful ad, didn’t really sell. BJ was always the track to shock friends with – even at that early stage no one, but no one, remembered it.

Like Andy, Reach For The Stars was a mystery to me til I discovered Popular, the only 60s no.1 I’d never heard. I don’t think I’ve ever heard it on the radio and I don’t remember it appearing on any various artists comps. The title always made me think of Douglas Bader, so I had it subconsciously down as a Lay Down Your Arms-alike. In that context it’s only dull, not gratingly chipper.

By the way Tom, the title on the 45 and in the Guinness book is Reach For The Stars – there’s no first person.

I can only confirm that Ich greife nach den Sternen was no kind of hit in Germany, so it’s unlikely that Reach For The Stars (co-written by Jurgens and ‘West’) was a cover cashing in on Euro success. And if it was connected to the film you’d have thought that would’ve made for a hit theme in Germany. Clear as mud. Anyway, these are the number one hits rocking West Germany in 1961:

Ivo Robic – Mit 17 fangt das Lebenerst an
Bill Ramsey – Pigalle
Ralf Bendix – Baby Sitter Boogie
Billy Vaughn – Wheels
Freddy – La Paloma
Gus Backus – Der Mann im Mond
Nana Mouskouri – The White Rose Of Athens
Gerhard Wendland – Tanze mit mir in den Morgen

14 weeks at the top for Wheels (cha cha cha!) and 10 for lovely Nana.

Indeed, Mutley – Komm gibt mir deine Hand, or was that seine Hand?

Are we going to get a comment and score on the actual A side of this record?

There was an item on the radio last week, on Today I think, about how French rock’n’rollers prefer to sing in English despite regulations to protect French language broadcasting content. Simply because rock’n’roll is built on the cadences of the English language with its short words and strong stresses. The same cadences in fact which inform that backbone of English poetry, unrhymed iambic pentameter. (Some uninformed people like to insist that ‘proper’ poetry ought to rhyme, but rhyme is distinctly un-English being a trope of Italian, a language rich in rhymes. These pesky Europeans!)

And quite coincidentally there was a discussion in Another Place of Terry Jacks’s mawkish interpretation of a Jacques Brel song (qv) in which the view was aired that Chanson was a distinct form rooted in the cadences of French, and translations seldom work well.

I saw that, Wichita, and I was going to pop over there.

it’s a committed performance from Shirley Bassey and a reasonable arrangement but the pace is plodding and the lyrics like a poor photocopy of ‘Climb every mountain’

I listened to “RFTS” recently on my Shirley Bassey: A Life In Music 4CD Reader’s Digest collection – pretty definitive from a late eighties perspective, overcoming record label difficulties by including everything from “As I Love You” to “The Rhythm Divine” – and I forgot how it went while it was playing. Caught in a no-man’s land between early Eurovision and later John Barry. “Walk Away” by Matt Monro has a similar topline at its end.

Walk Away would have made a much better number one – a noble Don Black lyric, with Monro sounding stoical but broken; “mmmmm… goodbye my love” gives me proper shivers.

I’ve never heard the Eurovision original. It’s a shame he fell short of Popular-dom, because I’d very much like to read a Matt Monro thread somewhere beyond youtube comments.

Yes, just picked up on the passing of Udo at 80, an icon in the German-speaking world. No doubt when Eurovision returns next year to the magnificence which is Vienna there will be a fitting tribute to him. The last time the contest was held in the city, of course, some shoe-less bird from Dagenham won. There’s cheesy!

RIP Udo.

Don’t mind this from Shirl. 6/10 imo.