1960 Cliff Richard & The Shadows: I Love You

After the vim of 'Apache', it would be easy to imagine The Shadows grumbling into their beer at having to keep the noise down and indulge Cliff in his latest bit of whimsy, but as 'I Love You' was actually written by guitarist Bruce Welch then they've only got themselves to blame for their great leap backwards. In fact, if anybody sounds like their doing any favours here it's Cliff himself, delivering Welch's play school lyric ("Your love means more to me than all the fishes swimming in the sea") with the bored disinterest of a man who really would rather be fishing than singing this guff. The hobnail shuffle of the beat sparks no fires either, and with the double beat hiccup before the verse closing payoff of "I Love You" lifted straight from 'Lolipop', then Cliff's got every reason to stay in first gear. As a half decent song three of an EP it would just about pass muster, but as a number one hit it only serves to keep British pop dumbed down to Anthony Newleyesque levels of the trite.

1960 Elvis Presely: It's Now Or Never

In terms of music, Wikipedia defines a 'mash-up 'as "a song or composition created by blending two or more pre-recorded songs, usually by overlaying the vocal track of one song seamlessly over the instrumental track of another". With the increasing popularity of MP3s and the rise of bedroom programming, mash-ups gained prominence in the early 2000's. While it's fair to say that most were awful, there were some belters to be found; the overlay of The Strokes' 'Hard To Explain' and Christina Aguilera's 'Genie In A Bottle' on Freelance Hellraiser's 'A Stroke Of Genie-Us' created a hybrid that crackled and fizzed with a verve and energy totally absent in it's source material. Many caused mischief through overlaying the unlikely with the unlikelier with a personal favourite being the oil and water mix of Public Enemy spitting the bullets from 'Rebel Without A Pause' over the loungecore swing of Herb Albert's 'Bean Bag' (here).

I doubt there were too many mash ups doing the rounds in 1960, though in saying that 'It's Now Or Never' plays as an early prototype of the genre. The tune comes directly from Capua and Capurro's operatic warhorse 'O Sole Mio', though the combining of it with English pop lyrics didn't originate with Elvis - Tony Martin had already done as much on his 1949 hit 'There's No Tomorrow', a song that the G.I. Elvis heard while on duty in Germany and liked so much that after discharge he asked for a fresh set of lyrics be written. Martin's song presents the same sawn off Italiano opera lite affair that us Brits had 'enjoyed' via David Whitfield's 'Cara Mia' and Martin gets stuck in to the greasy swirl of overcooked strings like an Italian mama at a pasta bake-off.

Presley too lays on the Caruso as thickly as he dares yet even though he emotes like a man interacting with the same arrangement as Martin, the finished single sounds like the product of RCA Top Brass deciding that an operatic Elvis wasn't something the world was waiting for after his spell in the Army and switching the orchestration for a rinky dink bossa nova bop that sounds as incongruous up against Presley's grandstanding as Chuck D rapping over Herb Albert.

True, Presley bounces off the flat backing like a gymnast with a vocal dripping sincerity in spades, but it's difficult to maintain the passion he generates when that following beat eats it up like Pacman, leaving nothing but a trail of cheese in it's wake that peaks with a salt rubbing 'cha cha cha' flourish at the end. It's the sort of cheese I can't say I much care for, and though 'It's Now Or Never' is solid and - well, different from anything he'd recorded previously, it's not a song I reach for whenever I need a fix of Elvis - surely a Presley/Martin mash-up is just crying out for someone to take it on.

1960 Roy Orbison: Only The Lonely

Never comfortable in the rocking role of his early career, Orbison's latter day reputation lies in a brace of sixties ballads bathed in the magic hour half light of a waking dream where endings are rarely happy and, for the most part, Roy is usually facing the wrong end of something good closing the door in his face on its way out. True to form, 'Only The Lonely' finds him in a paralysis of hurting at the end of one relationship with only the vague hope of a better tomorrow, tempered with the risk that the same thing could happen again - "Maybe tomorrow, a new romance. No more sorrow, but that’s the chance you gotta take if your lonely heart breaks".

Oh yes, self pity can be a cheap and ugly emotion to project, but the angle that elevates 'Only The Lonely' above this common herd is that Orbison isn't particularly looking for our sympathy: instead of identifying with the observational "all the lonely people" of 'Eleanor Rigby', Orbison's concern is with himself and a select subset of individuals with antenna crippled enough to tune into his crackling wavelength with empathy rather than sympathy. It makes 'Only The Lonely' an experience not to be shared - a song like 'One For My Baby' can trump it in the morose stakes, but the latter can be listened to whilst drowning your sorrows with a mate whereas Orbison presents much more of an insular canvas for an individual to project onto.

And this is why I think Springsteen was wide of the mark when he namechecks the song on his 'Thunder Road' - "The screen door slams, Mary's dress sways. Like a vision she dances across the porch as the radio plays. Roy Orbison singing for the lonely, hey that's me and I want you only". As beautifully understated a piece of writing as that is (and a rather neat switch-around of the rhyme), Bruce's loneliness can be cured by the attentions of a convenient Mary. Roy doesn't acknowledge such an option; he's too fragile and uncertain for such a simple solution. All he can do is howl into the void, unreachable by anybody who might want to howl back and as befits such egotism, Orbison's voice is the focal point here, a resigned pleading that's strident in its anguish with a muted backing vocal keeping a respectful distance (though I've always heard its 'dum dum dummy' refrain as mocking rather than comforting. Not that it matters, Roy isn't listening to them anyway).

All of which makes its success inexplicable - hearing 'Only The Lonely' is like coming across a stranger sitting alone on a park bench holding their head in their hands. Some might pause to offer comfort, but most of us simply hurry by, keen not to get involved and giving thanks that they aren't the ones brought down to such a level. I may be reading far too much in this of course, and Bruce may be bang on the button, but this is what I hear in 'Only The Lonely'. And as I can be as egotistical and self centred as the best of them, it's why I think it's such a unique and tremendous achievement.

1960 Ricky Valance: Tell Laura I Love Her

I like a good death song or murder ballad me. Always have done. The worlds of folk and blues run red with spurned lovers, jealous spouses and plain nasty bastard killers and I embrace them to my breast with the gleeful affection one normally reserves for kittens or babies. It's a tradition that doesn't translate to the popular all that well though; death will always be a 'popular' as long as people keep getting born, but there's a time and a place neither of which are generally at number one in the charts.

Of course, we've already had one example with the dual demise of the Indian lovers in 'Running Bear', but that was an attempt to marry an old world tale with new world music with less than satisfactory results. Better by far to update the story itself to a contemporary setting and teens driving motor vehicles in a cavalier manner; the late fifties/early sixties saw a raft of artists only too happy to oblige.

In that sense, 'Tell Laura I Love Her' is a prime example of this new breed of misery tune and one that sets out its agenda with absolute clarity from the word go; "Tommy and Laura were lovers, he wanted to give here everything. Flowers, presents and most of all a wedding ring". Well fair enough I suppose, no harm in that except if you're as broke as Tommy is. So what does he do - get a job, sell some of his stuff, get a loan? Nope, none of the above - he enters his car in a stock car race to try and win the $1000 first prize. Say what?

Naturally, things don't go according to plan; after "He drove his car to the racing ground" ("he was the youngest driver there" by the way) and driving 'around the track....at a deadly pace", disaster strikes; "No one knows what happened that day how his car overturned in flames". Again, say what? A public race with presumably no end of spectators and not one of them witnessed the accident? And, come on, is it really any surprise that Tommy came a cropper when he, an obviously inexperienced racing driver enters his own unmodified private vehicle in a stock car race? That was never a recipe for a happy ending and I'm only surprised that the organisers let him do it - they're the ones with blood on their hands in all this.

Ah yes, it's easy to take the piss......but that's because it is easy to take the piss. The song opens up the door and practically invites the piss over its threshold with the promise of a warm fire and a hot meal. Valance's quivering lip delivery is that of one taking this way too seriously, a straight man blissfully unaware that he's part of a comedy duet with the song itself as his partner providing him with the feed lines. And that's not to heap all the blame on Valance's shoulder - Ray Peterson's original is no better in the misplaced solemnity stakes and the flaw lies in the raw material they have to work with. There's a brevity about the song that makes The Brotherhood Of Man's 'Angelo' play out like Proust in comparison, and with such briefly sketched lead characters it's impossible to invest the emotional involvement in the song that it seeks to rely on and it's why I'd rather beat the song with my stick than the rube lined up to sing it.

The chorus of 'Tell Laura' has a melancholic lilt that's effective enough, but it comes sandwiched in-between thick slices of schlock that kill the maudlin tone deader than Tommy. By the time it ends with Laura praying for Tommy's immortal soul in the chapel while his disembodied voice echoes around the stonework the listener is weighed down with the burden of trying to keep a straight face at a funeral while the officiating priest's toupee is slowly sliding down the side of his head with great comic effect. Which I don't think is exactly what the writers were aiming for. As I said, I love a good death song but this isn't one of them. There will be better to come.

1960 The Shadows: Apache

After being hobbled by an increasingly anodyne Cliff Richard, no one could have begrudged The Shadows overegging their pudding by cutting loose with a good blast out on this guitar led instrumental written by Jerry Lordan. To their credit they keep the lid firmly on to trap the heat until 'Apache' fair shimmers with the Mid West prairie haze of the of the eponymous film that inspired it. With none of the cartoon Indian overtures of 'Running Bear' (apart from that godawful sleeve), the Western patina would have been unmistakeable even if the track had come packaged with a picture of a spaceship on the cover - the menace of the incessant drum beat and cantering rhythm coupled with the shriek of Hank Marvin's groundbreaking twang would re-surface in some of Ennio Morricone's memorable spaghetti Western scores. High praise indeed. Without a note ever forced, rushed or out of place 'Apache' could be accused of being too polite for its own good (which may be down to its 100% British pedigree), but by not trying too hard it neatly sidesteps any attempts at carbon dating, ensuring it remains a hardwired source of inspiration for anyone who ever bought a guitar.

1960 Johnny Kidd & The Pirates: Shakin' All Over

I'm conscious that I've been more than dismissive about British rock & roll on these pages to date, viewing it more as an oxymoron than a meaningful description of anything substantial. And I don't have to look further than one step behind for a classic illustration of the dilution us Brits applied to the concentrate of the source. That's not to single out Cliff Richard as a whipping boy: Marty Wilde, Billy Fury, Tommy Steele, Joe Brown et al make up a roll call of home-grown acts who sought to emulate but, lacking access to the historical evolution of the genre, generally only succeeded in creating a surface approximation that only imitated.

Of course, there were exceptions. Richard himself provided one with his 1958 debut 'Move It' (which is to 'Please Don't Tease' as Slayer are to Bon Jovi) but right up amongst the cream of the British crop sits 'Shakin' All Over', a song with the tension of a coiled spring. It's not truly innovative (I can hear more than a shade of the slowburn of Gene Vincent's 1956 'Be-Bop-A-Lula' in it), but there's no doubt that there's been nothing quite like this on these pages so far. The basic twin guitar/bass/drums line-up of The Pirates pays dividends in its sparseness, making 'Shakin' All Over' hunger lean with no surplus (Kidd and The Pirates re-recorded the song themselves in 1965 with Vox organ fills that lost far more than it added to the song).

Though both guitarists strike sparks off each other like a prototype version of Television, Joe Moretti's lead guitar runs are as sharply jarring as a crate of empty milkbottles being thrown one by one down a stone staircase, providing a glacial shimmer that's an apt cold shower to douse the ardour of Kidd's out of control libido. And I'm sorry, but I can't help comparing Cliff's earlier 'Please Don't Tease' with Kidd's bug eyed frustration on "When you move in right up close to me, that's when I get the shakes all over me".

The polar opposite of Cliff's polite request, 'Shakin' All Over' is red raw with the sexual frustrations of your average teenager: "Just the way that you say goodnight to me, brings that feelin' on inside of me" - it doesn't take much at that age* and by the time Kidd gets to "Yeah the tremors in my baaaaaack bonnnnnne" we can guess what bone he's most concerned with. This is a woman really teasing and content to leave him howling at the moon so that poor Johnny is left to take matters into his own hands, closing the song with "Well you make me shake it" to fade. A tremendous single and a milestone in British popular music that at a stroke made Cliff, Billy, Marty, Joe et al look very foolish indeed.

* Which reminds me of one of my favourite quotes from 'Buffy The Vampire Slayer' - "I'm seventeen. Looking at linoleum makes me wanna have sex."

1960 Cliff Richard & The Shadows: Please Don't Tease

The point where Cliff officially gave up the ghost on trying to compete with the rockers from across the Atlantic? Well I'm not student enough of his work to argue the case to any degree, but on face value it sounds like it - 'Please Don't Tease' is one of the most gutlessly anaemic two and a half minutes you're ever likely to have the displeasure of sitting through. Richard sings, but despite the lyric's mild theme of sexual frustration his flat and disinterested vocal conveys the aura of someone complaining that his wife has hidden the TV controller and won't tell him where it is. Hank and the boys try gamely to inject a little fire, but Cliff is calling all the shots here and he's firing blanks. Not awful, but instantly forgettable.

1960 Jimmy Jones: Good Timin'

An R&B singer from the old school, Jones had only just missed out on the number one spot with his keynote 'Handy Man' a few weeks earlier and so to avoid any similar shortfall he gets stuck into 'Good Timin'' with the gusto of a man who knows a good thing when he hears it and is determined to nail it down under his colours before any other singer gets wind and pinches it. So much so that his normally solid falsetto skitters like Bambi on ice - a source of irritation for some, but for me it adds to the charm and emphasises the wide eyed wonder at the serendipity of the lyric; "What would've happened if you and I hadn't just happened to meet? We might've spent the rest of our lives walkin' down Misery Street". But they didn't because they had "A tick, a tick, a tick, good timin'" - blunt maybe, just like the flat drumming and tuneless backing vocals; there's nothing particularly clever about 'Good Timin'' beyond its catchiness, but Jones injects good humour enough to sell the song all by himself.

1960 Eddie Cochran: Three Steps To Heaven

The second posthumous number one on these charts - Cochran had been killed barely weeks previously in Chippenham in a car accident involving him, Gene Vincent and Sharon Sheeley (making the title of this single either prophetic or ghoulish). He was 21. Although a long time fan, it's interesting for me to note in hindsight that my initial exposure to all of Cochran's signature tunes came via cover versions. I first heard 'C'mon Everybody' and 'Something Else' courtesy of the Sex Pistols, 'Summertime Blues' came via The Flying Lizards and T Rex while 'Three Steps To Heaven' first came to my attention via Showaddywaddy in 1975.

Interesting, or pointless trivia? Well interesting to me otherwise I wouldn't have mentioned it, but interesting in general I think as it shows the durability of the songs and scope of interpretation that can be applied to them - punky rock (Sex Pistols), hippy acoustic (T Rex) and jerky new wave (The Flying Lizards who, although managing to liposuck every drop of energy out of the song, couldn't disguise its inherent quality). And cartoon rock & roll (no prizes).

With their take on 'Three Steps', Showaddwaddy pulled the same trick they always pulled with their source material - i.e. to accentuate the obvious by stripping it down to the basic melody, marrying it to a dum dum beat then shoving it up-front where it could neither be missed or ignored. Which, to be honest, is what I thought all 'rock & roll' boiled down to when I was growing up - good time party music with the IQ of a tree stump and so it came as a surprise when I finally heard Eddie's original some years later. In relation to Showaddywaddy it contained none of my own self identified rock and roll clichés and sounded as much of a quirky cover as The Flying Lizards.

"The formula for Heaven's very simple" says Eddie, "find a girl to love....she falls in love with you....you kiss and hold her tightly" - the message of 'Three Steps' always makes me smile, especially coming as it does after the run-around Cathy has just given those Everly boys. Eddie's philosophy all looks easy enough on paper, but it's that second step that did for Cathy's clowns and the bitter taste on their tongues makes Eddie's homespun wisdom sound quaint and old fashioned in comparison and in that sense it's a song that a Guy Mitchell or Eddie Fisher would have happily picked up and run the length of the pitch with. But, just like Showaddywaddy, in their haste for a touchdown they'd have doubtless fumbled the ball by missing much of what made the song more than a simple exercise in nostalgia.

Cochran's 'Three Steps' is led by a flamenco-like acoustic riff (which Bowie would purloin for 'Queen Bitch') before falling into a stutter of a rhythm with minimal percussion that's held together by the call and response between Cochran's playful lead vocal and a streetcorner doo wop chorus who are there to just agree with whatever Eddie is saying. And what he's saying is delivered with a delightful whimsy of a vocal that suggests that Cochran himself knows he's selling snake oil but is happy to go along with it ("that sure seems like heaven to me") in the hope that he's speaking the truth.

He's probably not, and in that sense one of his 'three steps' is a step backwards. But the minima of the arrangement and avoidance of the usual clingy backbeat is two steps to the future and deserve applause, despite Showaddywaddy's attempts to drag it back to the predictable status of a museum piece. Which is something that 'Three Steps To Heaven' is most definitely not.

1960 The Everly Brothers: Cathy's Clown

The aesthete in me would like to see 'Cathy's Clown' as the neat end to a continuous thread that started back in 1958 on 'All I Have To Do Is Dream', a move from innocence to experience with the start song detailing the lovesick longing for the unobtainable Cathy of this single who was then wooed and won. And why not - dreams do sometimes come true don't they? But then again, some dreams turn into nightmares too and 'Cathy's Clown' covers both; in my mind Cathy, was the dream that turned sour when her promise of heaven turned into a hell of a handful with a swinging brick where a heart should be. Exactly what she did to cause such grief we are never told, but the rest of the world is in the know to the extent that the former dreamer is now identified purely in terms of his 'relationship' with Cathy - not as her boyfriend or lover, but as her 'clown'.

I've been referring to the protagonist here so far in the singular when in fact 'he' is voiced by the twin vocals of the brothers plural. But that's always been the beauty of the Everly Brothers - twin harmonies that although very different, manage to interplay, interlock and fuse as one. On this, their duality provides an emotional mix of anger at their treatment run through with the self loathing of knowing they're being played for a chump but are too weak in the presence of beauty to do anything about it.

The descending cries of "Don't want your lo-o-o-o-ove anymore. Don't want your ki-i-i-i-isses, that's for sure" are loud and defiantly in Cathy's face in a 'take that you bitch' snarl. But the aggression doesn't last and by the time the verses come round, tails disappear between legs with the "Dontcha think it's kinda sad, that you're treating me so bad, or don't you even care?" appeal (sung by Don in the hangdog mumble of a man who can no longer look at himself in the mirror) to a better nature that you know, just know, is falling on deaf ears. It's a duality that's reflected in the music too; a harsh scrape of guitar and drum-major beats (courtesy of Buddy Harman) colliding with a crash that's way too downbeat for rock & roll but too loud to be anything else.

Of course, the Blakean scenario I posit in the first paragraph above is only correct in terms of the song's subject matter; the Everly Brothers had had six further hits in between 'All I Have To Do Is Dream' and this to make the space between them not as easy to bridge as my theory would like and certainly nothing that would form any kind of 'thread'. And perhaps that's fitting enough - 'Cathy's Clown' is a big step forward from the more simplistic country tinge of their earlier songs of love to an altogether more mature, more confident plain where the teenage dream promise of cars and girls had to grow up in the face of broke down engines and broken relationships. Sad, but that's life and on 'Cathy's Clown' the Everly's showed they were man enough to grow up along with them.

1960 Anthony Newley: Do You Mind

Second number one for Newley (and writer Lionel Bart), though unlike the previous 'Why', 'Do You Mind' is more twee than flat out irritating. True to form, Newley treats it like it's his own personal toybox but 'Do You Mind' is too slight to lend itself to too much manipulation and its lack of actual toys means Newley winds up playing with the box like a bored child, distorting the song with his vocal until it loses its simplicity and starts to grate like a sore tooth (though ham-fisted lines like "I want to whisper, whisper sweet nothings in your ear, nothings that are meant for my love alone to hear" don't do much for Bart's reputation either).

To be fair, 'Do You Mind' is a more modern sounding record than 'Why', but only in terms of its immediate environment; its spaced out, fingersnapping twang would soon come to sound old hat too and this, coupled with Newley's refusal/inability to play it straight (listen to that snap of 'luvya' at 1:38) means 'Do You Mind' has not withstood any of the tests of time. Except insofar as its spectre would haunt much of the early output of one David Bowie before he strapped on his spacesuit and left earth behind.

1960 Lonnie Donegan: My Old Man's A Dustman

I commented back on 'Putting On The Style' that Lonnie was prone to wade into some plenty deep water when he put his music hall hat on. Maybe that comment should have been a warning - at a stroke 'My Old Man's A Dustman' demolishes all the good work done in his previous singles to lay down a marker that will forever brand him as an old time comedy turn. Which wouldn't be so bad (though still unfair) if the song was actually funny, but it isn't.

Recorded live at the Gaumont, Doncaster Doengan gets a foot stamping, hand clapping beat of sorts going, but he persists in calling a random halt to crack jokes only a ten year old with learning difficulties would find funny. And yet barbs like "I say I say I say, my dustbin's full of lilies (Well throw 'em away then). I can't Lily's wearing 'em" draws enough shrieks of hilarity to suggest an audience made up of simpletons on day release.

Donegan himself smirks and giggles through the lyric, but it's all too roughly hewn and unsympathetic to its characters to be funny, and in truth both he and his song sound as tired, dust covered and out of time as the 'pale and sad' old man he's singing about. There was always been a sly nudge and humorous wink about much of what Donegan did, but it worked far better in subtle, small doses that bubbled just below the fury of his skiffle.* As a straightforward comedy act, Donegan fell short and this......this is awful.

* Derek and Clive's 'version' is slightly more in your face with its humour - "My old man's a dustman, he wears a dustman's hat, he's got the fucking cancer, now what do you think of that?" At least it's honest in its misanthropy, and by drawing humour from its nastiness (rather than taking the piss out of your old man for looking "a proper nana in his great big bob nailed boots") it's all the funnier for it.

1960 Johnny Preston: Running Bear

The second most famous song to be associated with J. P. Richardson (aka The Big Bopper), if Preston's version was designed as a tribute to the author following his death in the same plane crash that ended Buddy Holly's life a few months previously then it wears no such intentions on its sleeve.

On a literal level, 'Running Bear' is a teen death ballad dressed up in war paint, but unlike contemporaries of the same ilk ('Tell Laura I Love Her', 'The Leader Of The Pack', 'Terry' et al), it doesn't base it's whole rasion d'entre on overblown tragedy - 'Running Bear' is a novelty song pure and simple. The characters aren't people from your High School but some fictitious Indians down on the reservation and just in case anyone was in any doubt, Preston doesn't hold back on the 'a wugga wugga' Indian war cry's and whoops in the background of the verses.

If Preston's vocal is a touch on the dry side, it fits the jerky meter of the lyric ("On the bank, of the river, stood Running Bear, young Indian brave") well enough. All well and good, but it's on the chorus that Preston comes unstuck; the "Running Bear loved Little White Dove, with a love big as the sky" is meant to explode into life with a rocking swing, but if the saxophone honks and swagger are half baked then Preston's vocal doesn't even make it to the oven. Instead of cutting loose, it wears the same formal suit, shirt and tie as he does on the cover and the flailing backing music isn't enough to pump air into this rapidly deflating balloon.

The lack of direction lets the humour silts up completely, leaving it high and dry until the next round of verses start up to bring some relief until we realise that the 'a wugga wugga's are soundtracking the deaths of Running Bear and Little White Dove in the 'raging river', a plot development that's presented with Preston's same shoulder shrugging 'ah well' indifference. Which, to be honest, is exactly how you should regard a song that's too dumb to be offensive yet too gormless to sing along to.

1960 Adam Faith: Poor Me

Giving lie to the notion that lightning doesn't strike twice, 'Poor Me' is basically a re-tread of Faith's earlier 'What Do You Want'; another sub two minute zip of bouncing pizzicato strings and zings (again arranged by John Barry) that crams a breathless mini symphony into its brief running time. Rather than do battle with it all, this time round Faith swims with the current to give a far more disciplined vocal that's content to tip its hat to Buddy Holly rather than mimic him outright. Because of its tricksy restlessness, 'Poor Me' is a more satisfying listen than 'What Do You Want', though essentially it can't denied they are two sides of the same double headed coin. Which means, depending on your stomach for Mr Faith, you either can't lose or you can't win.

1960 Anthony Newley: Why

I'm conscious that I use (and will go on to use) the descriptor 'acquired taste' quite frequently in my discussion of certain vocalists (by which I generally mean "well I don't like it much but somebody obviously does"), but I think if I had to cram one foot into this particular glass slipper then it would be Anthony Newley's. Mr Newley was North London born and bred and my lord he didn't try to hide it, so much so that it's tempting to view his cockney singspeaking as a harbinger of the swinging Carnaby Street, London scene to come.

Tempting, but a bit too easy and way too inaccurate - whilst Newley and his singing/acting/writing runs through the sixties like the 'Blackpool' runs through a stick of confectionery from that resort, he always (in his music at least) stood somewhat aloof and apart from whatever was going on around him and in so doing created his own space and played by his own rules to the extent that his version of 'Why' could just as easily have been released in the closing weeks of 1969 as the opening ones of 1960.

Ah yes, 'his version' - 'Why' was originally written for and recorded by Frankie Avalon in 1959. Frankie's cut was stalled back in the mid twenties on this 1960 chart, begging the question as to why (no pun intended) Newley's own take proved so popular while the original got lost in the long grass, especially as the musical arrangements for both are apple crisp and virtual carbon copies of each other.

Obviously, Frankie is American and sounds American, so a preference for home talent could have been no small factor, but I think it goes deeper than that to the actual mode of delivery itself. No matter who's singing, 'Why' (let's be honest) is a fairly drippy statement on the virtues of being in love. "I think you're awfully sweet, Why? Because I love you. You say I'm your special treat, Why? Because you love me"; Avalon sings this straight, no chaser with a mature vocal that brutally exposes the saccharine overload of the lyric while on the other hand, Newley's idiosyncratic twang delivers it in a manner more akin to an adult spouting baby talk to make a grizzling toddler smile.

Whilst this doesn't mine any hidden layer of depth or meaning from it, it's a style that is more fitting for the goo goo lyrics in the same way that it's always better to recite nursery rhymes in a sing song voice than to dryly orate them from a podium like a lecturing professor (it's no coincidence that Newley would go on to record 'Pop Goes The Weasel' in 1961). In so doing, Newley taps into the same vein of sentimental 'ahhhhh' as, say, 'There's No One Quite Like Grandma'. Both songs share similar DNA, but Newley's 'Why' is at least honest about what Avalon's version tries to hide (had Frankie tackled 'Grandma' in the same way then like as not he'd have been met with a level of derision that would make that heaped on St Winifred's School Choir seem like high praise indeed).

Not that this makes everything alright; there remains something slightly uncomfortable and everso 'wrong' about hearing a thirty year old man sounding like an adolescent lovefool, and the backing chorus that repeat his vocal in a patronising 'there there' tone doesn't help supply a backbone either. True, Newley couldn't help the way he sang and his voice was his fortune, but in his mouth 'Why' is the musical equivalent of the proud father pointing out a dog as a 'waggy bow wow' to the delight of his gurgling infant child. Cute as far as him and his family go, but to the more cynical of us standing outside that little sphere of emotional involvement then he just looks a bit of a cock.

1960 Michael Holliday: Starry Eyed

Well here we are at the sixties, but there's no swinging to be done here. In fact, 'Starry Eyed' is an even further throwback to an earlier, pre rock and roll age then Holliday's own 1958 hit 'The Story Of My Life' was. "Why am I so starry eyed, starry eyed and mystified "? croons Michael in a groan more becoming of boredom than mystery. Luckily, his vocal rests on a bed of female "boom boom boom booms" that, although sounding like offcuts from The Chordettes' 'Mr Sandman', do manage to sprinkle a little stardust over the proceedings. Only a little mind, and certainly not enough to raise the interest bar any higher than 'mildly'.