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.