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Somebody once commented that the entire career of Jeff Lynne and the Electric Light Orchestra consisted of little more than endless attempts to re-write 'I Am The Walrus'.* Bitchy perhaps, but it contains no small kernel of truth. Yet much of the immediate, post Pepper Magical Mystery world inhabited by The Beatles always seemed to me the sound of a different, lesser band riding on the Sergeant's coattails to produce a pastiche sound of that source material which ticked all the boxes but fell short as a whole. Much like ELO and 'I Am The Walrus' in fact.
It's this studio enhanced jiggery pokery that gives 'Hello, Goodbye' sufficient substance to make it stand upright. And it needed it - it's as if McCartney was out to prove that whatever Lennon couldn't do on 'All You Need Is Love', he couldn't do either; like Lennon's song, 'Hello, Goodbye' is a phantom of a song with a fragment of a lyric that wraps itself limpet tight around it's own catchiness. Unlike Lennon's tune however, 'Hello, Goodbye' has precious little to say for itself beyond showing off its own sparkle.
"You say yes, I say no, you say stop and I say go, go, go" sings McCartney unhelpfully, but it's just an excuse to get to the steaming "I don't know why you say goodbye I say hello. Hello, hello" chorus/middle eight that repeats like a mantra and is kept fresh by some powerhouse key changes, a monster false ending and George Martin's smoke and mirrors production that shovels fake jewels with abandon to hide the base metal beneath. The chug-a-lug "Hela, heba helloa" outro anticipates the arms-liked sing song of 'Hey Jude', but though this party is fun while it lasts, the pleasure doesn't linger long.
* Which despite being the stronger song by a king's ransom, was relegated to a definite B side rather than a double A. Which is why I will say no more about it here.
From the same pen* as the previous 'Baby Now That I've Found You', 'Let The Heartaches Begin' is a volte face from that song's celebration of finding love to...well, the heartache of losing it. In terms of presentation too, the fixed grin glee is swapped for a string swept, minor key ballad as all six foot seven of Mr Baldry pours a gallon jug of tears over the listener.
Baldry has the voice for the blues lord only knows, but I find his performance on this as insular to the point of impenetrability. "And with each glass of wine I feel a glow, and very soon I know I was a fool to let my baby go" - Baldry is the drunk on the stairs at the party, wallowing in his own self pity just waiting to buttonhole the passing unwary to unload his tale of woe until he's sing speak babbling on the final round of the chorus.
Nobody likes a good wallow in self pity more than me, but this is all one way traffic; Baldry ostensibly wants sympathy, but his downtrodden demeanour suggests he's getting some masochistic pleasure from the act of suffering itself until his cry of "So let the heartaches begin" is less the dread of another lonely night than a warm welcome to an old friend. As a song, 'Let The Heartaches Begin' presents scope for a read between the lines subtext, a back story waiting to be told, but Baldry effectively smothers it with his open wound of a vocal. And I say 'effectively' because it IS effective. On the first verse anyway, but by the time the song ends I kind of wish he'd go away and bother somebody else. Lisa Stansfield maybe.
*Tony Macaulay and John MacLeod. We'll meet Macaulay again as the man behind The New Seekers' 'You Won't Find Another Fool Like Me', David Soul's 'Don't Give Up on Us' and Edison Lighthouse's 'Love Grows (Where My Rosemary Goes)'.
You don't see too many home-grown bands imitating Motown. Whilst many sixties acts were happy to plunder American blues and R&B then put the likes of Muddy Waters and Bobby Womack through their own filters and make them more palatable to a white audience, Motown tends not to be so open to the same effect. Why? Well probably because a song and performance like 'It's All Over Now' offers scope enough for the rough edges to be knocked off (watered down even) and replaced by architraves anew that are part imitation, part imitation. But to apply the same process to the more poppy sounds from the motor city will give you......what exactly? In more often than not already offering insanely catchy pop, the main stars of the label never were an acquired taste and we Brits were happy to take them to our hearts exactly as they were; we didn't need a Mick Jagger to re-interpret and sell it back to us as a second hand knock off.
On 'Baby Now That I've Found You', British band The Foundations embraced the Motown sound with such a crushing hug that it comes as no small surprise to find out that they ARE in fact British. From the off, The Foundations pitch up as the missing link between The Four Tops and The Temptations and in going about their business here they are utterly convincing. And I think that's an important point to make; after writing the entry for '(Reach Out) I'll Be There' the other week, I listened again to the first four Four Tops albums back to back and I'm confident in saying that 'Baby Now That I've Found You' is better than at least 50% of the material on them (and as good as 75% of it).
In terms of the complete package that is - Clem Curtis's vocal falls somewhere between the sandpaper intensity of a Levi Stubbs and the sweetness of an Eddie Kendricks, but he's not called on to carry this alone; the finest of Motown recordings would be held together by an iron mesh of space filling harmony vocals, but here Curtis is constantly buoyed by a claphappy white boy stomp that almost pre-empts the bash of glam but not to the point of swamping the soul.
Glam yes - there's a definite seventies aura surrounding The Foundations and 'Baby Now That I've Found You', it's exactly the sort of one shot at the title performance that would appear on and win New Faces or Opportunity Knocks in much the way that other Brit soul bands The Real Thing and Sweet Sensation would in that decade. But whereas the faint whiff of cabaret pegged both of these acts as being from these shores, The Foundations (on this at least) managed to hold a mirror up to their inspirations and play them at their own game.
'Always different, always the same', so commented John Peel on The Fall, but in essence it could be applied equally to The Bee Gees too; over the decades the brothers have dabbled in a cross section of genres, yet as soon as the harmonies kick in then there's no doubt who's behind it. And so it is here; 'Massachusetts' is lush, orchestrated pop that walks a similar line to 'Green Green Grass Of Home', a regret tinged longing for a place the narrator may or may not see again. Unlike the morbid specifics of Tom's song though, 'Massachusetts' comes shrouded in vague mystery that stretches all the way to its title - the Gibbs chose it simply because of the way it sounded in the context of their song; few would be able to point to it on map and when the Gibbs sing "Feel I'm going back to Massachusetts" then they may as well be heading back to a suburb of Mars.
But then why are they heading back? To "do the things I wanna do" and see a girl "I left her standing on her own". Jilted at the altar perhaps? We're never told, and that's the beauty of the song I think; without being pinned down to a strong narrative we're able to replace 'Massachusetts' with our own totemistic time and place 'rosebud' we'd like to revisit or reprise - who isn't egotistical enough to believe that soaring "the lights all went out" when our own mistake was made and will stay out until the wrong is put right? 'Massachusetts' shamefully plays to the human condition of conscience, memory and the search for lost time but offers no respite to it - the repeat to fade at close of "I will remember Massachusetts" suggests that despite best intentions he never will get back there, giving credence to the notion 'you can't go home again'.
This isn't a film blog I know, but it's useful at this point let you know that if pushed on what I think is the worst film I've ever seen, I tend to plump for 'Elizabethtown'. Which might surprise many; after all, there are clearly plenty of objectively 'worse' films out there than Cameron Crowe's 2005 epic, but when you weigh in the balance the big studio production, the acclaimed director, the (then at least) A list stars in their pomp then the sprawling, uninvolving, emotionless, directionless, humourless, cod-philosophical car crash of celluloid waste is one of the most painfully unenjoyable things I have ever sat through. For its entire 123 minute running time, nothing about it works. Absolutely nothing.
And so to 'The Last Waltz'. Again, I'm not going to say that it's the worst number one we're going to come across here because it isn't. Not by a good margin. But like 'Elizabethtown', nothing about it works. Absolutely nothing. Les Reed and Peter Sullivan aim for easy Bacharach pop on the opening verse, but Humperdinck steamrollers his way over it with an eye bulging intent that crushes any subtlety with the grace of an elephant in a field of daisies and it's soon abandoned in favour of balladic carpet bombing that reduces sentiment to cold hard rubble in its wake.
Not that there is much subtlety to be wrung - Hump spies a girl across a dancefloor, they dance, they get it on ("IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII fell in love with you") but he's left heartbroken when the "flame of love" dies. But just as it all gets too much he pulls himself together to go off piste with some bi-polar "la la la la la" - ing that only need him to stick his fingers in his ears child-like to demonstrate he's not actually listening anymore. Which makes two of us I guess. Awkward, stilted, bombastic - 'The Last Waltz' is an empty vessel making a lot of noise, an awful single of boom and bust that's as emotionally empty as the hole in the middle of it. But at least it's two hours shorter than 'Elizabethtown'.
It's a useful point of contrast - from a song that in spite of its shortcomings has epitomised an idealisation of the sixties by simple virtue of the passing of time to one that sought to celebrate it on the hour it was released; 'San Francisco (Be Sure To Wear Flowers In Your Hair)' was written by 'Papa' John Phillips to help promote the Monterey Pop Festival he had a key role in organising. A self aware counter culture self promoting is always going to wave a red flag of warning with me and so it goes here as McKenzie reels off the virtues of the era in a manner that's now as clichéd as a fancy dress shop 'hippie' costume of flares, kaftan and headband (with flowers, natch).
"If you're going to San Francisco, be sure to wear some flowers in your hair. If you're going to San Francisco, you're going meet some gentle people there" - I don't know how much passing trade the city got from the UK record buying public, but I've always found McKenzie's wide eyed pigeonholing of a generation slightly patronising, and its bland descriptiveness fails to promote the new culture of youth in any way that's truly engaging - at least the shameless 1967 cash-in from the UK's own The Flowerpot Men 'Lets Go To San Francisco' injected an air of yearning aspiration to the notion that made you want to tag along for the ride. McKenzie doesn't. In fact, 'San Francisco' makes it sound all very cliquey - you might "meet" the gentle people, but unless you're part of the in-crowd then you're going to be locked out of the love-in.
Was San Francisco in 1967 one big free love extravaganza staffed by the gentle people? Is that really all there was to the place? I don't know, but the songs and imagery of the time and place that have been filtered through the decades have cemented it in a freeze frame of popular consciousness like the bodies in togas preserved at Pompei. Closer to home, I can compare it with shops of twenty first century London selling picture postcards of 'punks' decked out in green hair and safety pins. In other words, idealised nostalgia as out of time as it was inaccurate in its own. And though I lack first hand knowledge, a comparison with the music coming from the bands on that stage in Monterey (Jefferson Airplane, The Who, Jimi Hendrix, Otis Redding et al, none of whom can be described as 'gentle') means I can't help but feel 'San Francisco (Be Sure To Wear Flowers In Your Hair)' is singing from the same hymn sheet.
For the first live global television link in June 1967 ( 'Our World'), The Beatles were asked to contribute a song on behalf of the United Kingdom. In many ways it's the Eurovision Song Contest redux, albeit on a larger scale and without the contest element - a broadcast to such a mass audience needed something that was going to garb and hold the attention across cultural divides from the off, and in its favour that's the one thing that 'All You Need Is Love' does well - the title itself has become a neat and convenient summation of exactly what the sixties were meant to be 'about' and ironically, provides a legacy rather more lasting than the song itself.
When the surviving Beatles reconvened in 1995 to oversee the Anthology project, there was much ballyhoo beforehand regarding the 'new' song ('Free As A Bird') that was being used to promote it. Initially a low key, lo-fi demo of Lennon at the piano, The Beatles treated the fragment as if he'd just "gone for a cup of tea" and has tasked them with finishing it off. Yet for all the 'novelty' of the undertaking, I see 'All You Need Is Love' as arriving via a similar process some thirty years earlier; here Lennon provides an anthemic chorus and some guide lyric verses as a bridge to get there, but it's left to George Martin and the studio to craft the doggerel into something more substantial.
Doggerel? Did I say that? Well Ok, 'All You Need Is Love' is a trick bag of horns, orchestra, overdubbed drums, a trumpet solo, a snatch of 'In The Mood' and a blast of 'La Marseillaise', all designed to dress up sloganeering as a proper song, a move Lennon himself would revisit on 'Power To The People', 'Give Peace A Chance', 'Merry Christmas (War Is Over)' etc. It works up to a point, but the strain of repetition shows early and it's no surprise that 'All You Need Is Love' is forced to fade out in an arms linked singalong as Martin chucks every kitchen sink he can put his hands on into the mix to try and keep interest levels from waning as a shouted reprise of 'She Loves You' wades against the current to close it.
Yes, 'She Loves You' - a sarcastic piss take, or a longing throwback to an earlier time when simplicity had it's own virtue in letting quality songwriting speak for itself? Because The Beatles would never have been able to record 'All You Need Is Love' in 1963, there's just not enough song to go round four people. And with no song to speak of all that's left is that title, a title that, as I mentioned above, has transformed into a sixties artefact of greater or lesser cultural/iconic importance. It's a pedestalled piece in the museum of common cultural knowledge and part of the pithy soundbite yin of a CND symbol, Woodstock, Carnaby Street and 'flower power' to the pithy soundbite yang of Vietnam, Kent State University, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Prague Spring or Christine Keeler straddling a chair. As a song from The Beatles, it's small change.
It's common enough observation in the world of film; no sooner does a Hollywood blockbuster start to clean up at the box office then a slew of low budget look-a-likes trading on a similar riff arrive to suck up any spare cash available from punters who mistake it for quality from the same stable. Thus, for every 'Jaws' there's an 'Orca Killer Whale', Tintorera', 'Barracuda', 'Piranha' etc that repeated a main theme to greater and lesser effect (great deal less in some cases) and trade off the good will generated by their source. I get a similar feeling every time I hear 'A Whiter Shade Of Pale', or at least I do whenever I take time to listen to the lyrics.
With an organ motif borrowed from a Bach countermelody and a set of lyrics from the back of someone's neck (but more of that later), quintessential sixties song 'A Whiter Shade Of Pale' has beguiled, bewitched and bloody annoyed from that day to this. Its been asked many times before: 'what's it all about?' But from where I'm standing there's no need to call in the Scooby Gang just yet - Messer's Reid, Fisher and Brooker from the band had evidently been paying close attention to Dylan's vintage 1966 output and, with the man himself in temporary exile, 'A Whiter Shade Of Pale's pile up of random, unconnected imagery plays out as a gap filling shot at a home-grown 'Desolation Row' or 'Sad Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands'.
That it falls short is mainly down to a misapprehension that mysterious and half baked are the same thing: even at his most obtuse, Dylan's talent is to thread together words and phrases within a parameter and on a line from A to C with enough space between to let the listener - and to let the listener want to - fill in their own point B. Take "The ghost of electricity howls in the bones of her face"* - I have no idea what Dylan actually had in mind when he wrote that, and chances are that Dylan didn't either, but the startling imagery is such that it doesn't matter; the words are like play-doh for the mind and I've long since shaped them into my own personal interpretation that does not depend on their literalness.
And I didn't pull out that Dylan quote at random either, the very pay off of 'A Whiter Shade Of Pale's chorus namechecks it quite shamelessly ("That her face at first just ghostly, turned a whiter shade of pale"). Yet whenever I hear the sixth form cleverness of that line or (for example) "We skipped the light fandango" I just shrug my shoulders. Because there's nothing there to care about. And that's because in contrast, 'A Whiter Shade Of Pale's lines each come with a full stop - they describe their own self contained tale on a flat plain with scant scope for a dimension for individual interpretation until the puzzlement only applies to the song as a whole. Ironically, I think that's why 'A Whiter Shade Of Pale' has endured - rather than agonise over what it means, it presents little more than a blank canvas
Of course, outside of some avant garde installation, a blank canvas does not make for particularly good art, but luckily 'A Whiter Shade Of Pale' comes with a nice frame in the shape of Matthew Fisher's woozy organ (which, again, recalls Al Kooper's work on Dylan's 'Blonde On Blonde') and Gary Brooker's vocal of sorrow that gives meaning via its ambience rather than anything literal, with that clever Bach steal giving it a timeless quality. Depending on your mindset, 'A Whiter Shade Of Pale' can be celebratory or elegiac, a song of celebration or a comfort when you're down. An open door for everyman that perhaps unlocks not just why it can be loved and hated, but also why it's endured far better than almost every other number one from this year. Not bad for a Dylan knock-off.
* from 'Visions Of Johanna'.
A cover version of a Bob Gaudio/Four Seasons B side, The Tremeloes streamline the original, take out the harp zings and shimmering guitar runs to go head to head with Frankie Valli and the band by pushing their vocal harmonies upfront 'till they bleed. That they're able to play on the same course as The Four Seasons without falling flat is all to their credit but, as the cliché (almost) goes, re-arranging the deckchairs on the Titanic only makes it neat and tidy; it's not going to stop the ship going down.
Not that I'm claiming 'Silence Is Golden' is a musical disaster on par with the Titanic (it's nowhere near robust enough for that analogy to work anyway), but neither is it totally shipshape. Even on its 1964 maiden voyage, there wasn't much The Four Seasons could do with the self pitying handwring of the lyric - a girl who they've taken a shine to is being treated like rubbish by her boyfriend ("Oh don't it hurt deep inside, to see someone do something to her"), but instead of taking charge they're content to sit back and mouth platitudes ("Silence is golden, but my eyes still see") that seek to portray a coward's inactivity as a noble pursuit.
In short, 'Silence Is Golden' has an inherent wetness that, without the ornamental nuts and bolts of instrumental distraction of the original, sounds all the wetter here - it's Walter the softie and his mates tut tutting at the latest outrage from Dennis the Menace. Granted, the harmonies are well crafted and executed, but they only serve to emphasise the song's milksop heart, and while 'Silence Is Golden' is pleasant and amiable, it's got all the substance and backbone of candyfloss on a string, not least on the closing high note that squeaks the song out with one last petulant, footstamping whine.
There are certain things about the Eurovision Song Contest that I 'get'. I 'get' the fact that it's origins lie in a post war desire to unite Europe in a spirit of music fuelled co-operation, and I 'get' the fact that in this early era of satellite communications the pan European television broadcasts of the show would have been not just appealing but downright irresistible. What I don't really get is the sometime bleedover between the Contest and the national charts proper; I mean, a good song is a good song true, but the whole point of entering the Contest is to try and win it, and the best way to do that is to ensure as broad a cross border appeal as possible with your entry.
So what's needed is something that's going to appeal on a level that doesn't makes an understanding of the language a prerequisite, and to that end the most successful songs have either offered a pumped up Euro beat of velcro level catchiness or else a big ballad of obvious/overwrought emotion that transcends mere words in favour of high notes and gurning. I get that too, but these traits do not necessarily make for something I care to see at number one in the national charts. Yet as far as all that that goes, I have no problem with the 'tick all the Euro boxes' steam driven circus calliope gallop of 'Puppet On A String' (in fact, if I was to be uber charitable I could draw remarkable parallels with 'Being For The Benefit Of Mr Kite' which The Beatles had recorded in March of that year - had Lennon watched Sandie preview the song on the Rolf Harris show I wonder?) - but come on guys, did you have to make it so bloody sexist?
"If you say you love me madly I'll gladly be there, like a puppet on a string" - Sandie hops around to the jerky carnival rhythm with a grin fixed as permanently as a clown's make-up slapped on in gloss and emulsion, but her vocal is a thousand yard stare, the joyless strained garble of one singing for her supper (her career was on the wane at this point). And maybe that's because Shaw herself disliked the song, memorably commenting "I hated it from the very first oompah to the final bang on the big bass drum. I was instinctively repelled by its sexist drivel and cuckoo-clock tune." Which sounds a fair summary to me. 'Puppet On A String' won the Eurovision Song Contest for Britain for the first time (and by a very wide margin) and it gave her a third number one (the first time a female singer had scored a hat trick), but what got the Germans, the French, the Italians etc humming along in 1967 now sounds a very rum do indeed and one that, statistics aside, does nobody any favours really.
Now here's an odd one - 'Somethin' Stupid' was written by Carson Parks and originally recorded as a duet with his wife Gail Foote. With a lyric detailing that uncertain point where a desire to turn a friendship into love comes mixed with the fear of losing everything should the other not reciprocate, there's a hardwired 'irony' in having two voices mirroring each other to show both feel exactly the same way about the other with only a shared paralysis preventing anything developing. All well and good, but there's something creepily incestuous about hearing a father singing it in tandem with his daughter:* "And if we go someplace to dance I know that there's a chance you won't be leaving with me" - in order to avoid any distasteful connotations in the context of the song then the two leads either have to be recognised as singing past each other (rather than to) to their own individual would be lovers, or else one of them has to be relegated to a back-up role only. Which I think is closer to the mark here.
Normally so forthright in her music, it could be that the erstwhile Lightning's Girl thought singing a love duet with her own father was left of centre enough to keep her edge of subversion sharp and so didn't need to do too much else other than turn up. Because that's exactly how she approaches this; Nancy's voice is mixed low in any case, but taken in isolation she sounds totally cowed by her old man's shadow, a rabbit frozen in his juggernaut of legend headlights too frightened to put out a voice of her own. It renders her input more than a bit superfluous and it provides an unnecessary distraction from something that is otherwise a delight - from an on form Frank riding the light bossanova melody with a wistful air to an uncharacteristically light handed production from Lee Hazelwood, everything works just fine and it makes me wish that this was a solo affair. Sorry Nancy.
* 'Somethin' Stupid' is the only father/daughter duet to top the charts, but any unease this lyric generates pales beside 'Lemon Incest', the 1984 song Serge Gainsborough wrote and recorded with his twelve year old daughter Charlotte. Got to number two in France......
Regular readers will know by now that, with cover versions, I tend to find it instructive to compare the present version of the song with what's gone before. And that's no less the case here; 'Release Me' is another much covered song that dates from 1946 and which stated life as a country tune. In his 1954 version, Ray Price and some scratchy fiddles do a passable Hank Williams that reads the song as the pleadings of a weak and broken man reduced to a blubbering wreck by a woman who won't let go. "Please release me let me go, for I don't love you anymore"- it's the reverse of Hank's own 'Your Cheatin' Heart' and though Williams never recorded 'Release Me', I can easily hear his dry bone whine singing both back to back.
A further version from Kitty Wells the same year follows an identical blueprint but tells it from a female viewpoint and it works just as well. What didn't work was a 1962 version by Esther Phillips that took the song into unfamiliar R&B territory and without a map; Phillips is simply too forceful to deliver a lyric of submissiveness and she overcooks it to the point of parody. Put simply, I don't share her pain.
So where does Brit Humperdinck fit into all of this? Well his version takes the straw out of its mouth and stirs it on a lower flame with a thick ballad sauce just ripe to be crooned over. Humperdinck was always a reliable crooner and therein lies my main beef with this - like Phillips, Humperdinck's smooth delivery sounds far too in control of the situation for a man supposedly at the end of his rope. Humperdink's vocal transforms the shirt and tie formality of the lyric into something borderline patronising; where Price sounded down at heel and under the thumb, Humperdinck oozes a confidence that suggests he's going anyway and he only wants the woman's blessing as a sop to ease his conscience.
Humperdinck makes the song easy listening palatable, and as it was the biggest selling single of 1967 then many nerves were struck by it, but I'm afraid while I don't find it totally horrible, I struggle to sympathise, empathise or even believe a word he's saying. When (to take the example of another cover that got a big ballad makeover) Nilsson sings "I can't live, if living is without you" then I believe him, but there's a cosy falseness about 'Release Me' that kind of undermines the whole premise of the song which the intervening years (and artists like Nilsson) have only served to highlight.
And I think that's the chief reason why contemporary eyes are rolled whenever this is mentioned to focus on the Beatles song knocking one step behind at number two. Like Joe Dolce and his 'Shaddap You Face', 'Release Me' is probably now more infamously known for keeping 'Strawberry Fields Forever/Penny Lane' off number one than on anything approaching its own merits. But I'm not going to labour that point here - if The Beatles' double A side came pre-loaded with an expectation that didn't catch fire with the general public then that's hardly the fault of this '.*
Maybe 'Release Me' did strike a genuine chord with a public overloaded and overdosed on the fab four and their ilk and keen for something more straightforward. The subsequent gravitas and weight of importance that has since attached limpet like to 'Strawberry Fields Forever/Penny Lane' has done so to the detriment of 'Release Me's credibility, relegating it to almost a novelty tune on par with that Joe Dolce number. And wherever that's argued as being the case, I'm afraid I can't agree; 'Release Me' is a better recording than that. But then neither do I think it's a more deserving number one than The Beatles. In the final analysis, the passing years have given The Beatles the moral high ground while Humperdinck and 'Release Me', whatever their faults, remains the song recorded for posterity in the record books and statistics. Water has found its own level and I think all parties should be content with that.
* Ironically, lightning would strike twice in that respect too - fast forward to 1995 and a multi-media advertising campaign, weeks of teasers in the press and a five hour television show that still wasn't enough to take The Beatles 'Anthology #1' to the top of the album charts ahead of Robson and Jerome, two jobbing actors with a sideline in singing old standards. I bet the surviving Beatles smiled at that one (I was dearly hoping I could report that the album contained a version of 'Release Me', but alas it doesn't).
For my own part, The Crowd's charity cover of 'You'll Never Walk Alone' had the sixth form me chewing the carpet for keeping Marillion's 'Kayleigh' off number one. But that's another story again.
I tend to feel a bit sorry for Petula Clark. Taken solely on the evidence of her number one singles then a layman could fairly see her sixties persona as some prim, stick in the mud schoolmarm type of singer trying to keep order in a class from St Trinians. I can picture Sandie and Dusty, all miniskirts and mascara, giggling at the back and flicking ink pellets at her while Cilla asks crude sexual questions in an innocent voice designed solely to get her blushing. Her previous 'Sailor' had an old time music hall vibe that swung as gracefully as a leg in callipers and now 'This Is My Song' comes along to compound the image of a singer out of place and time. For me anyway.
Which is a bit unfair on our Pet (and untrue too); 'This Is My Song' is not a song she ever wanted to record and it was written by someone who didn't want her to record it in the first place. Charlie Chaplin (yes, that one) wrote it specifically for his 'A Countess From Hong Kong' film and, more specifically, for Al Jolson to sing (the plan developed a crimp when it was pointed out to Chaplin that Jolson had been dead for over a decade by that time). 'This Is My Song' eventually found its way to Clark who was happy to record French, German and Italian versions but balked at the thought of singing Chaplin's stiff and anachronistic English lyric (which is by itself unfair on Chaplin - he deliberately wrote it as an art deco throwback to bygone days).
The music and melody remain unchanged throughout, but the playful fluidity that Clark brought to the foreign versions to melt the formal iciness is absent here. Instead, she adopts a brittle and curious twang to her diction ('this is my sawng') that buries the lyric further in the deep freeze and wrings no emotion from their clichés; "Why is my heart so light? Why are the stars so bright? Why is the sky so blue, since the hour I met you?" - the distance between artist and song sounds unbridgeable and probably will be forevermore. I've no doubt Jolson would have generated the evocation in Chaplin's head had he recorded it in the same way a plaster bust of Caesar would add evocation to a mock Roman villa, but the effect would be surface only - 'This Is My Song' has a swinging brick where its heart should be and no amount of tender loving care is ever going to change that.
Mention 'The Monkees' to your average rock fan and brows will furrow at the thought of the elephant in the room - 'they're not a 'proper' band', 'they didn't play their instruments', 'manufactured pop' - yes I've heard all the arguments for the prosecution, but I'm not going to pitch in with my own case for the defence. Not yet anyway and besides, I think 'I'm A Believer' should be allowed to speak for itself.
'I'm A Believer' is a Neil Diamond song that, as performed by The Monkees, straddles the line where pop meets rock. Or where underground meets overground; in truth there's not much to 'I'm A Believer' at all - a guitar lick here, an organ flourish there and the constant tambourine rattle to hold it all together. Nothing brash and nothing showy but the spareness mixed with hooks of melody and chorus fuse the counterculture appeal of ? and the Mysterians or The Standells with a commercial British beat sheen that pulls the listener along in it's race to the finish line.
Drummer Mickey Dolenz takes lead vocal duties and, while hardly the most dynamic of vocalists, he nevertheless brings a naturalistic touch to compliment the everyman lyric that uses Paul's road to Damascus conversion as a metaphor for a cynic falling in love. "I thought love was only true in fairy tales, meant for someone else but not for me" - sings Dolenz with sheepish embarrassment at the fool he's been before hardening into certainty on the "And then I saw her face, now I'm a believer" after the scales have fallen. This is love as celebration, not reverence and Dolenz sings like he wants to share his good fortune with the whole world. It's cute, it's charming, it's corn free and it's far more believable than the performance on the number one it displaced.
And as far as that elephant goes, that's my point - The Monkees' 'I'm A Believer' is a song and performance with heart that's blended seamlessly into the sixties canon. There's no hint of the churned out production line that 'real' music fans are wont to poo poo; Bob Rafelson and Bert Schneider may well have been greedy for a hit to promote their knockabout Beatlesy TV show, but the hands that crafted this (from Diamond's pen to Jeff Barry's production) are hands that cared for and respected the medium they were working in. Ah sod them, 'I'm A Believer' is terrific.
Somebody once commented that the entire career of Jeff Lynne and the Electric Light Orchestra consisted of little more than endless attempts to re-write 'I Am The Walrus'.* Bitchy perhaps, but it contains no small kernel of truth. Yet much of the immediate, post Pepper Magical Mystery world inhabited by The Beatles always seemed to me the sound of a different, lesser band riding on the Sergeant's coattails to produce a pastiche sound of that source material which ticked all the boxes but fell short as a whole. Much like ELO and 'I Am The Walrus' in fact.
