1965 Ken Dodd: Tears

Growing up in the seventies and eighties as I did meant that a lot of 'entertainers' came to my attention via second hand means. For example, Jimmy Young I will forever regard as the Radio 2 disc jockey my mother used to listen to in the mornings and not as a double number one recording artist, Des O'Connor will always be a light entertainment, heavy tanned chat show host and not a one time number one recording artist, while Ken Dodd will always be a buck toothed, mop haired comic with a tickling stick and Diddymen. Harsh maybe, but I can't help when I was born and it's no different to Tom Baker being 'my' Doctor Who and Roger Moore being 'my' James Bond, for better or for worse. And of the three above it's Ken who suffers most from my own brand of branding - a quick glance at the figures shows he had no less than twenty top forty hits between 1960 and 1975, which isn't bad going for anyone, though 'Tears' was his sole chart topper.*

So what of it then? Well, dating from 1929, 'Tears' is a classic old school crooner's song from a time when females weren't 'babes' and love was handled with the same formal respect ("Tears have been my only consolation, but tears can't mend a broken heart I must confess") that Dodd shows this. There's no trace of his comedian 'day job' in his treatment - he means it man and though Dodd is a competent singer, his fussy and quite prissy diction ensures the upper lip is kept stiff enough not to let any genuine emotion show either way. It makes 'Tears' a bit like turkey without the cranberry sauce - perfectly edible by itself, but rather dry, tasteless and not something you'd care to have too much of.


*I can't leave it lie there though - nestled in with The Beatles and The Stones, 'Tears' looks and sounds like a song out of time, almost as if it slipped through a wormhole from a much earlier decade by mistake and was frantically looking for a way back. And yet this was the biggest selling single of 1965 (and the third biggest selling of the entire decade), outselling stone cold classics like ''Mr Tambourine Man', '(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction' and 'You've Lost That Loving Feelin'' - it begs - nay, demands - the question 'why'? Why should such an unremarkable song from an unremarkable singer make such an impact in an era of unprecedented musical development and change? Did Scouser Dodd catch a wave via a heavy marketing campaign as the 'original Merseysound'? Was it an orchestrated backlash from the previous generation looking to put the brakes on the social upheavals exploding around them by finding an anchor to the past? And what did those sixties stars think when their studio innovations were trumped by a jobbing singer with a thirty year old tune? I don't know, I don't know, I don't know and I don't know. There are no answers yet 'Tears' remains, a song as out of time now as it was in 1965.