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.